Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - What the Election Results Mean for Emerging Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #128

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

In this episode, Peter and Salim discuss the future of tech with a Trump White House and how the new administration should handle disruptive technologies.  Recorded on Nov 6th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 03:47 | The Future of Currency: Bitcoin 47:22 | The Future of Work: UBI & AI 59:57 | Rethinking Democracy in the AI Era Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University, and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Join Salim’s OpenExO Community Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Reverse the age of your skin with OneSkin; 30% off new subscription orders with code PETER at oneskin.co/PETER _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

We've got a Republican administration coming in. What should be their policy on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? I think there's incredible potential here to operate now, create a global store of value. How that juxtaposes with the fiat systems is going to be the big question. There is an AI arms race going on. It's not even between governments, it's between companies. Is AI able to be regulated? Should it be regulated? I don't see any mechanism like at all that you can regulate AI. The

horses left the barn. How long before our democratic experiment here gets revamped for a world of AI sensors, networks? Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else. We've been running democracies at a nation state level for the last few hundred years. The future of the world is not nation states, it's city states. Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to WTF, Just Happening Technology. I'm here with my dear brother and technology aficionado, Salim Ismail, the head of exponential

organizations. Salim, good to see you, pal. Likewise, big day. Big day. Yeah, we're recording this on November the 6th. The Trump White House is imminent. And the impact is going to be profound across all areas of technology. And I think we should talk about that, right?

We see Tesla up 15%, Bitcoin is up at all time highs at $6,000 up to $75,000, $76,000. Significant moves forecasted by a pro-tech, pro-deregulation White House that's coming. I first want to say, listen, when I tell people any questions for me other than sports or politics, I am a libertarian capitalist is how I would sort of describe myself. How about you? Yes, I'm a libertarian capitalist with some level of a social floor, minimum UBI framing type stuff. So very close to you.

In this episode, I really want to cover what we're expecting to see and the impacts on cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, on AI, on humanoid robots, on flying cars, autonomous cars, biotech deregulation, space exploration. I mean, how about you? Oh, absolutely. And I think there's a really important commentary also as to how do you policy formulation when technology is moving so quickly. I think that's a key area. Yeah, it's called like racing headlong into a brick wall. I mean, honestly, I would not want to be in the government for a number of reasons right now, but in particular, because things are moving so fast.

We're trying to match government regulation with the speed of technology change. And it's an impedance mismatch if you're an electrical engineer it's like impossible. Well one of the ways we talk about this is that you know most government policy is defensive and reactive. Yeah. Right and there's only two places in the world that do forward-thinking government policy which is Singapore and Dubai even there, they don't do it that well. I think one of the incredible opportunities for any government around the world, including a new government arriving, is we know passenger drones are coming.

Let's formulate the regulatory early so that we can kind of figure things out. That way, when they arrive, you're not losing decades waiting for policy to catch up. Yeah, without a target, you'll miss it every time. Let's just jump in here. I think the first place I'd love to have a conversation with you is on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You know, we have seen a lot of movement in the markets and we've seen Trump and his team speak about being the Bitcoin president. My fraternity brother and past roommate, Michael Saylor from MicroStrategy, has been tweeting

up a storm. How do you think about this? Obviously, I'm very optimistic as a fellow Bitcoin maximalist. I think there's incredible opportunity now. I think the crypto stuff has been lagging behind, the US has been woefully behind many other regulatory structures and therefore all the crypto developments happening in other places in the world, which is pathetic given the innovation potential of the US. So I think that's a huge opportunity. I think the huge challenge is the challenge that crypto and Bitcoin specifically

present to the US dollar hegemony. And I think that's the tension that's going to have to be played out over the next few years. Agreed. I found it interesting Trump saying that he's going to hold on to all these Bitcoin and sort of create his Bitcoin piggy bank in the government, which I actually think is a very good move. Having seen El Salvador and other countries begin to sort of base policy and economy on Bitcoin as a stabilizing force. Just to echo Michael's earlier, we have 200 fiat currencies, right? It makes no sense to have that many.

We don't really need that many. We need a store value, you need a means of exchange, you need a unit of account. And we can do a lot now with the potential of Bitcoin, which is a global digital technology replacement for stores of value. And there was a great commentary around the fact that money has always been represented by traditionally the hardest thing to make. So seashells we used to use as money because they were hard to make. You could only find a few rare ones like that. Gold was hard to mine. Hard to mine, right? Bitcoin is really hard to mine.

It actually gives it credibility because it's so hard to mine. You can't fake it in that sense. So I think there's incredible potential here to operate now, create a global store of value. How that juxtaposes with the fiat systems is going to be the big question. Yeah, it's interesting, I remember when I was young, people would get a saving certificate at weddings or at birthdays and the last few years, I've been giving out Bitcoin to folks when they're married or on a special occasion. No longer an entire Bitcoin, but some percentage of Bitcoin.

Because I think for the long run, the whole idea of a savings certificate was long-term thinking, a 20-year or 30-year thinking. I think Bitcoin is going to be replacing that. I remember the first time I heard about Bitcoin was from you on the stage at Singularity University. And then I got religion. I went on CNBC and said, sell all your gold and buy Bitcoin, which I did back then. Never enough. And you've been on stages, you've been stages, a number of stages, even more recently, an

X price saying, buy Bitcoin. There was a great cartoon I saw and it said, dad, do you remember when Bitcoin was below $100,000? And I think we're going to be there soon. We will there. I ran across somebody at a conference, a family office conference last weekend, who said to me, hey, Slim, I met you a couple of the early abundance conferences and the abundance summits. And you guys gave us all like a few Bitcoin each and I lost it.

So I find there's two people that I run across from like 10 years ago, 12 years ago. One of them is, my God, you mentioned Bitcoin and I bought a bunch and God bless you. And the other is you talked about Bitcoin, I didn't buy any and God damn it. It was either way, it's really, really kind of a point in time. Yeah, in 2014 at the Abundance Summit, I had a Bitcoin ATM and I gave everybody a hexadecimal hash code for Bitcoin. And I said, here you are, Here's a gift. Don't lose this It's valuable and they did of course

Anyway, not as bad as folks who have lost hard drives worth of thousands of Bitcoin in the end, right? I think the statistic is we've lost about 20% of Bitcoin to lost hard drives, etc, etc You know It's important to note for the folks that are freaking out because they missed the boat, that the first three, four, five years of Bitcoin, it was a huge question mark whether it would make it or not because so many different attempts at digital stores of value have been attempted in the past,

Hashcash, Ecash, digital gold, et cetera. It took a few years before people clicked in that the engagement model, going back to the EXO model, the engagement model and the gamification was so powerful that it was a positive feedback loop and it was here to stay. I think it's really, really powerful. Before we leave this subject, there's something else coming I think is going to be enabled and empowered by this administration, which is digitizing assets.

Yes. The whole realm of like if you own an apartment building in Miami or in Central Park West or you own a valuable piece of artwork that you could digitize it effectively and sell a crypto version or percentage of it. Can you speak to that? Oh my God. I mean, the many you can do that, that's huge. And something big has happened over the last couple of years. Go for folks that are interested,

go check out a company called Materium, led by Vinay Gupta, who was the head of Ethereum, head of community for Ethereum when it launched. He was the launch manager, I think, for Vitalik and team. And what he's been doing over the last seven years is trying to figure out the legal stack between if I have a digital token that represents some rare bottle of wine, do I have the legal standing to be able to collect, connect, collect on a bottle of wine? And he solved that problem. I think it works in like 170 countries already. And so therefore we can now tokenize anything

and represent it with digital tokens and fractionalize any asset. And I think this will unlock the most extraordinary potential since the floating of the dollar off the US gold standard. Yeah, I mean, this is trillions, tens of trillions of dollars. Well, the global economy is close to 600 trillion. About half of that is real estate. So if you just digitized proper land titles, right?

Now you have like you've got half of the world's wealth that can be fractionalized that way and infinitesimally fractionalized. So I could own a tenth of a piece of a room of a New York condo if I want to. And the beautiful thing is it comes along with certain rights where you get a day, a year of being able to sleep in there or being able to assign that right to somebody else. And so, you can own another company focused in this area is Abra and Republic. I'm going to have Bill Barheight at Abundance 360 this year speaking about their efforts on digitizing assets and being able to fund a fraction of a movie.

If there's a movie in production by James Cameron, you can fund a fraction of a movie, like if like there's a movie in production by James Cameron, you can fund a fraction of it and you get certain rights for the opening or for seats or whatever the case might be. As soon as you digitize ownership, you can add secondary rights besides just ownership onto those. I think this is this unlocks so many things. We've been watching this, by the way, in the NFT world as people are innovating very, very every project learns from the last six months of projects and does something new. And that whole ecosystem is moving faster than anything I've ever seen except for maybe AI. So bottom line, Salim, is we've got a Republican administration coming in.

What should be their policy on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Well, I think let's separate Bitcoin from cryptocurrency just for the second. But two things I think are really critical. Right now, every cryptocurrency transaction is taxed as property. So you have a capital gains. If I wanted to buy a cup of coffee with crypto, that's a capital gains tax event, which slows down the adoption radically. I would change that rule so that you could clearly separate between stores of value and means of exchange.

If I'm using payment, doing payment for goods and services using crypto, that should be taxed as if it's a taxable transaction, not as a fricking property tax, right? As an asset tax. I think that's one. I think the second is to much more allow the financial world to accept Bitcoin as a store of value. For example, financial advisors are not allowed to talk about Bitcoin to their own clients. It's crazy. And the clients come to them. I said to my mom, I said, Mom, listen, I would love if you would please diversify and put some of your assets into Bitcoin, or at least into a Bitcoin ETF. And her, whoever, Morgan Stanley, whoever, was like, not allowed to do that.

Sorry. Crazy. So I went and looked into why, and it turns out the risk of Bitcoin is too high for them to accept from a professional perspective. They don't want to take on that risk, which is ridiculous, right? If the client wants it, and this other, hello, how about free market?

So I think that would be an area to change and change the game on. So there's all sorts of areas around the financial regulatory that could be undone. I think that's an area where we could do quite a lot of updating of regulatory structures that are desperately out of date and serving nobody but the legacy environments. There will be some dramatic changes within the SEC very shortly. All right.

Bottom line is, I think you opened up with that point. The US should be leading and not following and most definitely not retarding progress in this. It's a definitive. It is coming. It is moving at accelerating speed. One of the things that people need to realize is that

as we get to AGI and agents and digital super intelligence, the ability for AI systems to be able to transact financially is what is going to unlock yet another super exponential. And the only way you do that is with digital currencies. That's right. And so it's going to happen and it should happen here in the US. Otherwise, that super hyper exponential call is going to occur overseas someplace. That's right. I just want to touch on one piece of this because lots of people don't click into this.

For me, the magic of crypto is not that it is digital. The US dollar has been digital for a long time. It's the fact that I can program a transaction and modify behavior. For example, if I was to buy that nice jacket that you're wearing, right now, I have to kind of hope that I send you the money. I hope you send it to me and we have eBay as middlemen and take extracting a tax for things like that and we pay a lot of money for that incremental tax. In the future I can basically say, hey, I'm going to send you $100. The system keeps it in escrow programmatically. You send the

jacket, the minute I accept delivery, it releases the money to you. And the whole thing is done programmatically with almost zero transaction cost. And that, I think, is important. And I just want to touch on one thing, which is where we're going to get resistance from this is Wall Street. I came across the most ridiculous fact. Over the last 20 years or so, 40% of American corporate profits are the financial sector. 40%. That's a sort of ridiculous number, the tax on the money going through the system. So I'm hoping that the

deregulation starts to help to unwind that, but there's going to be very fierce resistance from the banker types that go, no, every transaction should go through us, etc. Well, guess what? Things change fast. Yeah, and I think that the opportunity for crypto to bridge across into real world applications is now enabled 100x than it was, say, two years ago. You know, I would love to talk about the fact that you put a mortgage on your home to buy Bitcoin a few years back, but I'm not dry shit.

Lily is still smarting over that one. Well, listen, now she's happy because Bitcoin is like flowing through the roof, literally, of the house. Never happy, but yes, happier. Happier, okay. Well, hey, so listen, let's switch from Bitcoin. I also want to just make a point here, because I'll get in trouble otherwise. Lily has been an incredibly supportive partner around all this with the very reasonable caveat

of, look, distribute the risk of it because you just don't know. And that's correct. You and I would throw everything at... We're all in. And so it's really, really powerful and important to have that balancing board. But have we ever been wrong? I don't think so I'll vouch for you you vouch for me on this one Did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did?

Did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent? building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool,

and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and use their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights.

And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viom's recommendations, members reported the following, a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS.

Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount.

You'll find it at viome.com slash Peter. So, you know, we've gotta talk about AI. It's coming strong. You know, last, I was in Saudi and interviewing Elon on stage at the FI8 summit. And then I interviewed Eric Schmidt and Ben Horowitz and the CEO of TikTok and SVP of NVIDIA and Travis from the past founder of Uber.

And it's like literally the entire conversation at this event of 5,000 world leaders and investors is all about AI all the time. And so it is the underlying conversation underpinning everything. And there are lots of implications that we should talk about them. And I want to hit on them top of mind right now is, is AI able to be regulated? Should it be regulated?

Number two, there is an AI arms race going on. It's not even between governments, it's between companies. How do we think about that? Number three, this flows directly into energy. The amount of energy that we have to produce is extraordinary. One of the conversations taking place on stage was, One of the conversations taking place on stage was, listen, we're not gonna meet all of the climate crisis goals because we need to invest every form of energy to drive AI, but AI is gonna help us address the climate crisis. So how do you think about those?

Okay, there's a bunch to unpack here. Let me touch on regulatory first, right? I made this comment with you a few months ago that Elon actually retweeted a two-minute clip of this where I said, I don't see any mechanism at all that you can regulate AI. The horses left the barn. You'd have to regulate every line of code written. And it's put so many interventions in because somebody could create a private open source model and boom you've got all the capabilities that you do in the closed source models. I don't see that. I mean one of the hopeful areas was by the size of the model but because now we're doing training on small models that goes at the

window. So it's one of those where the minute you try and structure a framework for the regulatory, that framework is broken because the technology is advancing so fast. And we can talk a little bit more about how do you do regulatory in general. So I'm on the camp that says I just don't see a mechanism of any kind. I did have a conversation with the Lord Mayor of London, who's a bit of a brain on some of this, who thinks that ISO standards are a path to it. So if I claim I'm ISO certified on whatever AI standard that is approved,

ISO will actually certify whether my AI systems meet the criteria or not. I think what's going to happen here is the private market will navigate this. For example, if I'm using a data set as a bank, I really need to make sure that that data set is AI clean and authentic and not using dodgy data. And therefore, there's also AI auditing systems and companies that audit AI systems that are popping up to help with that. So I think the market will navigate this much faster than the government will be able to Yeah, I I don't think the government can regulate it. It moves at the speed of Conversation versus versus technology. Well, it moves at a legal pace, which is like infinite this

Infantessibly slower. I think one of the places that that's gonna AI is gonna be disruptive is gonna be the legal system, right? Yeah, yeah in the huge One of the places that AI is going to be disruptive is going to be the legal system. There's a big movement popping up in my EXO community of saying, okay, let's figure out the future of legal using these different tools because there's all sorts of areas like contract drafting and discovery, etc. that can be completely automated. It's going to be amazing. One of the most interesting conversations, I had a meeting this morning with my abundance patrons and we're talking about HR. I said, listen, the very best HR support you're going to have as a CEO is going to be an AI

system that's able to listen to, view the conversations on email traffic of your servers, or have a conversation with every employee, understand their grievances, understand their point of views, integrate it all and sort of separate the noise from the high signal, like, yes, this is really, and then give you directly as a CEO. I personally think, you know, a great chief HR officer should be reporting

directly to the CEO. It's your mechanism for tapping into your people, which today is your scarcest, most important resource. So I came across a company over the last couple of weeks that does something amazing. They drop an AI into your backend systems and it sucks up all the Slack and HubSpot and Salesforce data and Slack and HubSpot and Salesforce data and traps at all. It can instantly store all the key information so that if you lose a key employee, you don't lose institutional information,

which is one of the hardest things. And the second thing it does, they can instantly create training modules for every task in the company. And it's like Palantir in a box, it's a SaaS platform. So it's gonna be unbelievably inexpensive. The value creation here is unbelievable and now you never have to, it's just like,

because AIs are so good at maintaining software now, we never have to worry about software maintenance in the future. And I think that'll propagate to all sorts of other areas really quickly. You know, I had on stage last year, Gille Verdon, who heads the effective accelerationist movement. I am vibrating with the level of energy, the speed that things are going to move.

We're really entering into a hyper-exponential period of change where the challenge is going to be the ability of entrepreneurs to or actually, sorry, the ability of existing companies to onboard all these new technologies and get out of their own way. Can I be blunt? I mean, that's what you teach at exponential organizations or what we wrote about in our book. Big time. And I don't see, in fact, you know, look at how difficult it's taken like 20-30 years for companies just to digitize

right the the Metabolism changed to AI is another step function order of magnitude So the opportunity for entrepreneurs is unbelievable the big problem I think is at what what model level do you plant your flag if you're building an AI startup? I'll go back to Kevin Kelly's famous comment from 10 years ago where he said, the next 10,000 business plans will say, take a domain, add AI to it. Just like it did 100 years ago with electricity. So again, what's going to happen on the government level as a result of this? I think one policy change we're going to see is build, build, build on a few levels, energy

production, we should talk about that, and the hyperscalers. I think that there's a perceived sense that we're in a race against China, though I don't know that that's actually true. Because China doesn't have the GPUs. I had another person on stage I interviewed was Kai-Fu Lee. Kai-Fu is amazing, right? He worked at Apple. He was the head of Microsoft China, the head of Apple China. He now has a company called has a company called Bego, which is a new search engine that's based in the US. He has a $3 or $4 billion VC fund called Sinnovations out of China.

And he's saying we had to reinvent our AI systems for efficiency because we only could get 2,000 GPUs. for efficiency because we only could get 2,000 GPUs. For comparison, Elon stood up XAI in 122 days with 100,000 H100s and now he's doubling it again to 200,000, the largest cluster ever. And so there is an arms race, but it's between companies. And also, you know, I had a conversation with Gilbert down at Visioneering two weekends ago, right? X-Prize is your thing. And his proposed prize was doing a training AI models

and chip architectures 10,000 times cheaper than today's architectures. Well, actually 10,000 times less energy consumption. Energy, right. Yeah. But when you can go price performance that much of a difference, remember that means we're using 10,000 times less energy. So I think a combination of decreasing architecture costs, price performance wise or increasing

performance on that side plus today more than 50% of Bitcoin is renewable energy, right? And we forget how much energy availability there is in the world. I was in Kazakhstan earlier in the summer and there's a guy building, there's a gigawatt wind farm that's been created out in the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan, but it's useless because they can't get that energy because the transmission costs are too high to get it anywhere useful. Great, stack a Bitcoin mining farm and an AI data center next to it and it's completely useful. So we're going to tap all of these energy sources all over the world, pockets of them that can't be used for anything else. And I think it will go down this incremental and marginal renewable energy sources that can't be used elsewhere.

And that will completely solve the problem as those two curves intersect of radically new chip architectures that decrease energy usage plus increased marginal cost of or energy demand supply curves. It is crazy. So let's talk about where the energy is going to come from because I think that needs to be part of our conversation. Check out this image here. This is just recent. That red line down there is India went from one terawatt hour production to 2, it's doubled.

You look at that green line, it's China. In 2010, China was producing 4 terawatts. It's doubled and it's doubling again by 2030. They're just unleashing as much energy as possible. And the US has been pretty flat. But what's interesting, and we're at four terawatts and have been, but going back to AI, the projected demand, if we're really building out all these hyperscalers, it could consume 100% of the US energy production by 2030. So the conversation going on in Saudi at the Future Investment Initiative conference was we need as much energy as we can from every possible source, which means wind and solar,

fusion in the future, generation four, nuclear, which by the way, is super safe. And Cam, the CEO of Axiom Space, also is the chairman of EnergyX. They just signed a contract with Amazon for Gen 4 nuclear power production, which is crazy. Right, yeah. These companies are signing contracts for nuclear power supplies for which is crazy. Right. Yeah. Look at these companies are signing contracts for nuclear power supplies for their AI factories.

I'm excited about the private sector stepping up here, right? Gen 4 nuclear has been safe for a long time. I think the best thing governments can do is say go to town because we know it's safe and build, build, build. What I'm hoping is that we start building nuclear fusion wind solar, which is already way cheaper than fossil fuels rather than going backwards and burning more fossil fuels because that would be a bit of a disaster.

And perovskite, perovskite solar, right? Perovskite, if folks haven't heard about perovskite, it's another tech I'll be featuring at Abundance this year. It is 50% more energy per square meter and as much as 50% cheaper. And it's just incredible. Important to note here that perovskite replaces the silicon solar panels where we use all the rare earth elements. So that's double impact there.

It's actually kind of a salt that's very widely abundant and they found it has the properties of trapping solar energy. And as you mentioned, Peter, it's been in the labs for a while and now it's getting to commercial scale and this is incredibly exciting for the future because you'll be able to spray that onto windows and onto roofs and whatever. It can really change the game. Yeah, Paranova is producing a 100 megawatt plant in Texas. They were going to see a lot of progress.

There is so much solar to be captured. It's there as energy. It's not in a usable form yet. But coming back to AI, because people are scared about it, and I think, listen, from my standpoint, I don't know about you, I think I know your position. I am worried about AI over the next three to five years during this period of time

before we have it's progressed sufficiently. You know, last year at the abundance summit, we had this conversation about digital super intelligence. And my conclusion was, are you, you know, the question was, are you worried about a world where digital superintelligence exists or a world where it doesn't exist?

And I think that I'm more worried about us humans in a world where it doesn't exist and doesn't support us from our irrational thoughts and actions. Can I cue up my standard rant here? Please. So, consider a spectrum of intelligence where you have smarts, you have domain intelligence,

you have general intelligence, then you have emotional intelligence, then you go over into kind of consciousness and broader forms of decision-making, right? We've been kind of going across that spectrum with AI, with it doing basic calculations, etc. Marvin Minsky has this wonderful hierarchy of the ideals of AI where you get to self-reflective and then reflective and then conscious, etc. The problem I've got when people worry about computers and AI becoming smarter is that what the hell do you mean by smarter? Because when I make a choice, I'm using my emotional intelligence, I'm using my spiritual presence and the concept of awareness from the Eastern world. I'm using historical memory intelligence,

etc. All sorts of aspects. There's about a dozen facets of intelligence that the IQ test does not measure. And so when you talk about AI's overtaking human beings in that, a calculator is way faster than doing math or a spreadsheet than a human being anyway. It doesn't mean it has intelligence in the same way that a human being does. So I really don't, I really go nuts about this because for me it's tickling the amygdala that you like to talk about.

You're provoking, you're stoking people's fear. I see no mechanism of achieving that. Mostly when you get to, once you're getting to concepts like consciousness, we don't have a definition for it, we don't have a test for it, right? A subset of consciousness is considered self-awareness and you look like you're self-aware so I attribute that to you. I think I'm self-aware but my wife disagrees, right? It's just it's like hard to even start the conversation around some of this stuff but people freak out about the

concept without knowing what they're talking about. So I really love if people would kind of calm down, take a breath, look at what are we talking about with intelligence, and then notice that where we're applying AI and computation and so on is in areas where human beings are not good. Antilock breaking systems, credit card fraud detection, fuzzy logic in your cameras to keep them steady, those are all the areas where we're not good. That's where we're applying brute force calculation and AI, which is where it'll be profoundly things. I think of AI developing intelligences that are orthogonal and complementary to human intelligence, not replicative of it, at least for a very long time to come. I may differ with you there, but coming back to the White House and their AI policies,

the question is, going back to original conversation, I don't think there's anything they're going to be able to do to regulate it. I think that they're going to view it as that they're going to view it as America's most important strategic development. There's a video I've shown, Sam Altman saying, listen, I don't care how much money we spend, 50 million, 500 million, 50 billion, we're building AGI and it's going to be worth it. That's his point of view. And then the question is, what the hell is AGI anyway? We passed the Turing test months ago or years ago, and there's no real, I think we're going to have achieved AGI and not noticed it or not put a line in the sand.

I agree. Can I tell you where I'm incredibly excited? And if I was in this administration, I would think about a lot is government policy. So let's say you want to drop inflation by 1%. Right now you've got a human being as an economist with a few knobs and levers and they have no idea what they're doing. They're mostly guessing at it and hoping that something may happen or not happen. I'm sorry to disillusion everybody who's watching who thinks the economists know what

they're doing when they're moving the... I mean, because you do some stuff and then you hope it is by far an exact science. Let's just put it that way. It's the most polite. Okay? Now, if you have an AI with all the access to economic data and that can track transactions real time all over the world, and you can say figure out how to drop inflation by 1% and give us the negative consequences of any side

effects on other policies and come back to us and it'll figure it out. I think that's where this unbelievable opportunity and a clean slate thought process here would be so powerful to doing some of that type of work, applying it in areas where we're using fuzzy guesses at best. And you know, again, anybody listening who's running a company, same conversation, right? If you're looking to increase your sales, but you're going to have to get the data to enable your AI to know what the hell it's talking about.

Yeah. And as I said, we just came across this company where you drop it in and it handles it all. It's amazing. Yeah. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life

or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or

four going on. It didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the

most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers.

So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list.

Really it's something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. So okay, we talked about that. We're also having an adjacency to AI is humanoid robotics.

I'm putting out a meta trend report on humanoid robotics in about a week's time. And you know, I'm tracking right now 15 of the top companies in humanoid robotics. They are, of course, Tesla with Optimus and they are figure with figure 2. We've got Atlas from Boston Dynamics and a number of companies out of China, right? So China desperately needs humanoid robots. India also? India is starting up as well as we're seeing Japan and South Korea, it's the countries, in particular China,

because it can't survive. Can't survive after it's one child policy. It's low labor rates is what made it the dominant global manufacturing base. But those labor rates are going up and their populations are dwindling. So I think this is incredibly exciting at the commercial level. I think I get nervous when we talk about domestic robots and the house folding clothes. So I look at the my Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. No, no, but I'm still at the point where I'm having to move all the chairs to make way for the

thing and by the time I'm done I might as well just done the vacuuming myself. So we had about a decade of vacuum robots and we've only got marginally better, okay? Now, humanoids may, robots may do very good thing, but I'm wondering at what point a mother is comfortable saying to a humanoid robot, go change the diapers on the kid, because that requires like the, and the liability issues. By the way, can I take a quick segue into the regulatory here for a second? Of course you can. So I've been talking to a few insurance companies and I've come up with an, I've kind of gamed this

out, I don't see how we don't end up in this scenario where insurance companies go to the government and say you cannot regulate humanoid robots or drones or whatever the technology is. We have the liability insurance risk structure plus a capital base that can mitigate it. Why don't you just say if you can get liability insurance for your application, we're good. You let it go. And I think that's what's going to happen because then the insurance companies have the mechanism to manage it at that use case level and say, okay, if the robot is cleaning windows and it's limited to cleaning windows, fine.

You can use whatever you want with a robot during cleaning windows, right? The minute it gets to clipping the hair of a pet, if it makes a mistake, you could have a problem or changing the diaper on the baby, whoa, I can't give you liability insurance for that. I think there's a segue here where I think that's what's going to end up happening and it'll allow us to move the domain much more quickly. But I think we're a long way away from a general humanoid robot. I think specialized use cases like empty the dishwasher and put things there.

One of the things that I got really excited about 10 years ago was Baxter the robot. I remember Baxter, yes. And the powers within those. Rodneyaxter, yes. And the power system. Rodney Brooks, right, was the CEO there. That's right, that's right. And I remember Saul Griffith showing us this and the key thing that was such a huge breakthrough is in industrial robotics,

you always had to program a robot. You had to say, pick up this widget, turn your arm 90 degrees, move over here, turn it back, put it down. You had to explicitly program it. And with Baxter, you could show it what to do, adaptively move its arms, and then it would then figure out the task in that very specific narrow use case and do it from then on. I think that potential with LLMs integrated in makes this like hugely complex.

That's what's going on. The difference now is the robots are visually seeing what you as a human does, and it's learning from that, right? So... It is. I just, like, I wonder how long, you know, would you have a robot cook for you? And what if it, you know, I mean, I don't know.

I think there'd be sort of, let me give you, I thought this through a little bit. Let me give you a little bit. Yeah, please. Okay, so I've got a humanoid robot standing next to me. Okay? And I want to cook an Indian dish which is very complex. A proper Hathor Bhati Biryani which is where I was born takes like six hours to make. Okay, so number one, robot, go get all the ingredients for this recipe and pull them out on the table, right. Number two,

take this stack of ingredients and grind them together and roast them in a frying pan because you need that proper roasting, but it can't smell quite as well as I can so I have to go over there and do the smelling to make sure it hits hit the right level of the raw smell going away. Okay great then I will kind of blend it etc. Okay now go watch it and make sure it's okay until it's ready type thing and stir occasionally. So I can see there being an interplay here and there within certain cases, but or you take it does the whole thing in an automated way. But I just don't see some of the other use cases being as easy. Yeah, I disagree with you on that. We learn to trust robots called medical devices. And there are, you know, I think ultimately these robots are going to

be a lot more reliable than humans who forget, who make mistakes, who, you know, don't show up on time. There's going to be a learning curve, of course. In a medical context, if I'm doing a soldier surgery, right, of course a robot is going to be way better and much more precise. And I've much rather have a robot doing it that has access to every recording of every operation ever done than that.

But if it's doing some adaptive things, this is where it becomes, where it's adaptive where my favorite vase is about to fall over and it's about to vacuum there and it doesn't see that part. Those are the areas where I think the, and there's a lot of those education. This is why autonomous cars have been so hard. And by the way, please know I'm desperately hoping for it.

Right? I know you are. I know you are. We've been talking about this together on stages from around the world for the better part of two decades. So here's my question coming into a new administration. This next four-year period of time is the time during which we're going to see AI and robotics begin to displace jobs.

Not worried about jobs. You're not worried about jobs? No, for all of the reasons we've talked about before. I know we talked about this, but I still believe we're going to see increased efficiencies and we're going to see job displacement. I'll agree with Mark Andreessen here that every major injection of technology has exploded the number of jobs, not reduced it. And you have said on stage many times that countries with the highest robotic penetration, Sweden, South Korea, Germany.

Countries with the lowest unemployment, Sweden, South Korea, Germany. The correlations are very clear. The data is very clear on this one. So I'm not worried about unemployment or job transformation of work. Yes. And I go down to that idea that let's say I'm a financial advisor for a company like Morgan Stanley. I have a set of about 27 tasks that comprise my job function.

And a robot might or AI may automate like eight or 10 of them, but it's not changing the other 17. So I still have the job, but I just make the job easier. This is like using Excel for calculations rather than running it on a spreadsheet or an abacus or a slider or a calculator. And so I think we end up there and it's a long time before we automate a thing. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of other jobs that have been created like AI training agents and so on.

We'll see. I mean, you and I have talked about the need for UBI, universal basic income, on the backside of this. If I could see one thing that this administration should go after, it's UBI. Well, why? If jobs are not a thing, if jobs are not concerning, why should they go after UBI? It just unleashes entrepreneurship. All the UBI studies have shown that when you give people- I agree with that.

And it's really important to note that you've got to find the balance between giving people too much money and they become too fat and they don't work and not having enough to serve. You want to hit the balance where they can survive but not be happy. And we've studied these experiments when you can hit that balance, which an AI could figure out by the way. You then have a hugely productive economy, but everybody's baseline is still covered. And then you can dismantle government services. And this is an area where if the Republicans are interested, this is an area. Here's where it's

really fascinating. I don't know if you've tracked what's been going on in the UBI space, but a large number of cities and states and countries around the world have blocked experiments on UBI. No. They said you are not allowed to experiment with UBI. Why? Because they don't want to be true? Yeah, they're governments. They're scared to not be needed. So they've literally passed legislation saying all the towns in my state are not allowed to experiment with UBI. That's freaky. That's the area where I think a Trump-type administration could go, are you kidding? Get rid of all of that crap and let people experiment with it because you need more experiments. All right. One of the things that's going to be true about this administration is going to be a

massive wave of deregulation. Yes. And that's going to hit a few industries off the top. Biotech is one, space is another. Your choice, which one would go after first? I'd go after biotech first just because it has such immediate obvious consequences. So using stem cell therapy, like right now, we travel overseas to get stem cell treatments for various things, which is ridiculous, right? What was that robotic surgery company in intuitive surgical? Intuitive robotics, yes. So I had a friend that lived next door to the factory in San Jose. And because knee

surgeries were authorized but not shoulder surgeries, he had to fly to Switzerland to get an intuitive surgical robot to do a shoulder because they didn't authorize it in the US. But he lived next door to the factory. Look, the kind of chaos that we're doing around medical tourism is unbelievable. I think the US has an unbelievable opportunity to correct some of that aspect.

Right now the FDA focuses on safety rather than efficacy. If I could wave one wand and say, go after efficacy and not safety, you're in a relationship. The challenge is that you're blamed if there is one problem. You're not blamed for all of the lives lost by you blocking the therapy. And I think this is, for me,

because I'm in the biotech and longevity and regenerative medicine world and so forth It has been there's so much potential. I'm seeing so many incredible companies around the world that are being unlocked because of AI and Gene therapies and CRISPR and such but the process of getting it out the door safely therapies and CRISPR and such, but the process of getting it out the door safely Is has been massively hampered because of the deregulation, you know, I talk about the notion of having a uh a A process by which an individual has a right

To try these therapies. Yeah, you know we We should be we should be able to sign up for stuff like that and not have Totally agree. Yeah, we have the sense that the government has to protect me against myself Which is you know my body my rights give me that give me the chance if if it's fully sufficiently disclosed my rights, give me the chance if it's fully sufficiently disclosed. Where I disagree somewhat is public health, because now if I get a virus and transmit it to lots of other people, I'm damaging a lot of other people. So that is a mitigation there. But for anything at the personal level, I completely 100% agree with you. So excited about deregulation in the biotech world, in particular in regenerative medicine in the stem cell world, exosomes and such, even peptides.

Yeah. Now, there's a lot of cowboys out there. There's a lot of mom and pop shops that are trying things and advertising. I mean, at what point do we say, hey, listen, you know, if you're an idiot enough to go and just take the first injection you get, that, you know, buyer beware. I think caveat emptor applies in many of these cases. You just have to be the one danger side that I see coming in this administration is there's been a movement of anti science. Right so which administration that's coming that there's a huge wave against scientific process and scientific thinking because people put political. because people put political motivations on people for just trying to understand what the hell is going on with something. There's so much data that we have that I think the one thing I

would hope for is that people be as evidentiary as possible. And you can go drive yourself crazy with evidentiary, with conspiracy theories if you wanted wanted to because you can always find data to support. You have massive confirmation bias. The actual data and this is where I think AI can perform a huge service because imagine there's six experiments on psilocybin somewhere. You can analyze the data across those and come up with a meta-analysis that would be very powerful that we can't easily do as human beings but it could go, you know what, that's actually safe for these types of use cases, et cetera, and you could then deregulate that aspect of it. So I think there's huge opportunity.

Somebody has to have the bravery. But I'll go back to the earlier point of we need to reorient from safety where you won't authorize a drug if it kills 10 people even though it saves 10 000 people to efficacy And that's when you really unlock massive opportunity. I know it's even worse than that Do you know what percentage of drugs that are prescribed to an individual? Actually work in an individual No It's like 20 percent

So when you when you get I mean, it's pretty sad when you get a drug prescribed to you The sense is oh that drugs gonna work for me, but on average What goes on in the FDA process is? In phase one we look at safety right and then Phase two is doing what it's supposed to do? And phase three, does it do enough of it? And what does enough mean?

If it doesn't hurt anybody, but it actually supports 20% of the people, why not approve it? And it does get approved, but people don't realize it doesn't necessarily work for them. So it's crazy. But I think where this becomes workable is once you have personalized testing, you can do personalized adaptation of prescriptions and know that that dosage is

right for me etc. and then you're good, right? Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a syndolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time.

If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right. Let's get back to the episode. Let's talk. Let's go. Let's go talk about space. My, my, my pet childhood interest here.

So listen, I have to say we're going to,'re gonna be on the moon in a couple years and on Mars before 2030 And that's exciting, you know The the notion I think we're gonna see another JFK moment where you know JFK said I I challenge you all to get to the moon by end of the decade and bring people back. I think we're going to have a challenge to get to Mars by end of this decade. Yeah, just getting them back part of it will make it a lot easier to get there. The getting back part is going to be hard. I still continue to think that we are bags of water and evolved in a gravitational environment.

Doing interplanetary travel is going to be very, very difficult. I think we'll send robot avatars rather than trying to go out there ourselves. But God bless us, we're explorers and we should do that, right? If you had that mentality, you may have never left Europe to find India type of thing. Well, another use for humanoid robots. Boom. Flying cars, autonomous cars, cyber taxi, drones. I find it amazing.

One of my favorite drone companies, Zipline, that's now a multi-billion dollar company, had to go and begin business in central East Africa because they had a permissive regulatory regime. I think this is the other opportunity for the US to really upgrade its kind of regulatory on a bunch of levels. Emerging markets can make new rules and I remember in Rwanda they created a three-dimensional tube across the country like a highway and said if your drone stays within those parameters

within that three-dimensional aerospace you can do whatever you want. Right and I think things like that need to be done and done much more aggressively. I mean you know when you fly over the US it it's mostly empty, but most of the time, you're not gonna hurt anything. Stay away from urban areas and you're good. Yeah, look out the window when you're flying across the United States. Yeah.

It is all empty space. Yeah, we concentrate. I mean, fly across India, where I'm from, which is about half the size of the continental US, has like five times the pop, three, four times the population, and it's freaking empty you fly across it so it's it's there's huge opportunities to unlock the abundance of terrestrial land which is where I think passenger drones

become incredibly exciting. Let's talk about the future of democracy so you So, you know, in a world in which things are moving this fast and humans are moving very slow, you know, how long before our democratic experiment here gets revamped for a world of AI sensors, networks? So can I lift up a level and then come back down? Yeah. Because I actually have been thinking, my community has been thinking about this a great deal, right? And I've come from India where my family was very involved in the independence movement.

So we've been looking at democracy for a long time. The Indian Constitution, by the way, was the most advanced constitution in the world for several decades because it was the newest. So, it could learn from some of the mistakes in the US and other constitutions. The constitution is like the software that runs the country. You need to be able to update it now. This is where I have a huge beef with the originalists in the US. If you're not updating your software, you're pretty much out of date pretty quickly, which is kind of where we are in certain ways. All right, let me just give you the high level. About 10 years ago, we were looking at this problem, you know, my hobby and metaphysics and philosophy and so on. A fellow called Malcolm Pollock and I came up with an analogy which we

called ice water steam. Okay, so imagine you have ice where the molecules are kind of very cold, they don't move very far or very fast, they hold their shape, right? Very low energy in the system. Then you add heat or energy in the system, then you get to liquid. Now it can expand to the boundaries of the container, it's more active, more agitation of molecules, etc., etc. But still reasonably slow. You add more energy and you get steam, which burns you, is hard to contain, the molecules are highly active, right? And we went through a whole kind whole series of looking at human endeavor in different ways. Take messaging. We used to send smoke signals or the Pony Express or homing pigeons. Very local, very slow. It was the ice state. Nothing moved very far,

very fast. Then you went to postal mail, which was the liquid state. You could send messages around the world. It just took a long time and it went to the boundaries of the container. Then we digitized everything and now we have tweets and we've totally vaporized our messaging structures. Take money. We used to trade camels and goats. There were seashells. Again, very local, very slow.

Then we came up with currencies and letters of credit. And then we floated our currencies currencies even more perfect for the analogy. Then we went to Bitcoin and digital currencies and crypto, and then we vaporized and digitized things. Same thing with human organization. We used to have clans or tribes that didn't move very far, very fast. Then we moved to say nation states and multinational corporations. And now we have Facebook groups and online TikTok communities, right? And we vaporize that. And the challenge is,

but this came up when looking at the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement, lots of hot air, but nothing stable formed out of it. And the challenge is in a vapor state, stable structures don't form. And so as we vaporize and add more and more technology to different domains like money and democracy, etc., how do we get stable structures? And in the lack of that stable structure, we go back to the old way, which is kind of what's happening

in various parts of the world. So that's kind of like just a broad metaphor for what's happening in the world. And I think an intellectual challenge is to think about what's the equivalent of a fridge, right, that can cool things down. And so we actually use the ideal gas law as a metaphor for this, but we don't need to get into that right now. If I apply that pattern to democracy, we've been running democracies at a nation-state level for the last few hundred years. And the problem is nation-states, in my opinion, they're a wrong container, they're too big. For example, nation-states cancel climate change. I agree with you.

The fact that our entire democratic process came down to like four states. Ridiculous. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Or you take India, where I'm from, it's 20 different languages and cultures trying to be one country, It makes no sense, right?

So what you need to do is granularize. And Paul Safar, I remember getting on stage at Singularity University and said, the future of the world is not nation states, it's city states. And actually you look at Trump or Brexit, it's not left versus right, it's urban versus rural. You can see that in the map from last night.

It's very clear to you, right? Brexit was 100% London versus the rest of the country. That's the tension that's playing out in the world. If you have, for example, now in the future, let's say 10 years into the future, a city that has vertical farming, satellite internet, solar energy and small nuclear, water extraction using the water abundance prize winner. You don't need a country. You don't need the infrastructure for a country. And so therefore I think we're going to devolve to small community

self-determining their future and working out their own structures and then operating in a networked environment in a much more powerful way. And so that's how I think we, and in a world of abundance, see, nation states are really great for scarcity. They're terrible for abundance. So there's a whole bunch of things, different dimensions of looking at this. So here's the question, right?

I think the old saying that we've, governments suck except we've got the best version of what's available today. Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else. Yes, got it. Yeah. Thank you. The question becomes, there are better versions.

There are better versions that are easy to describe, right? We have a representative government today versus we don't have a direct democracy. Yes. That whole situation is... But importantly, can I just pause you just for a second? The reason we have a representative government today... Because it started 250 years ago.

Well, at the time, information was scarce. Yes, exactly. If you were in DC... It was moving very slowly. That's right. So if you were in DC, you literally had no idea what was happening in California because the speed of a horse was as fast as you could find out. So we had a representative, hey, let me just finish my point.

We had a representative come across the country and say, here's why people are thinking, this is why we have representatives. But in a world of this digital wave, an abundance of information, a representative government doesn't apply. And so we have to really fundamentally rethink our structures from the bottom up. So the question becomes, is there any way to do this other than a revolution? Other than a starting from a clean sheet of paper? I mean, the reality is governments and there's a few different ways.

They finished, my turn, don't like giving up power. They don't and they have armies and they like them. They do and they put laws in the books to protect themselves and they buy appropriate regulatory leaders to protect themselves and there's better ways. So in the analogy that you and I talk about a lot, which is that, you know, that every company will eventually, unless they disrupt themselves, be disrupted by someone else. The question becomes, where will the disruption come from for the future of democracy? Is it virtual governments? Is it network state? Right. Another topic I want to hit on at abundance this year is what biology is talked about as the network state. Yeah. Where it doesn't matter if physiologic where you live. It's I have you're one of my peep someone of yours. That's right. I think so. I disagree with

the I agree with 80% of what biology talks in the network state. A large global community like abundance or Ted or EXO have as a core set of principles and values with its own cryptocurrency can operate as a country in a very easy way and operate as a network state. But at some point you need the physical thing and the way I disagree is when in the last bit where he says all you have to do is get validation from existing government. All you have to do is get validation from an existing government and recognition from an existing government, which is that, wait a minute, that's just not going to happen in an easy way. We have that already today. We have a lot of digital nomads that arbitrage the Puerto Rico income tax versus the Portugal income tax versus Bali, and they're moving around depending on where the regulatory regime

is the friendliest. I think that's what's going to happen unless you have an authoritarian country that doesn't let you leave. And that will actually solve a lot of the problems in that. So, I do agree with much of what the network state talks about. Where I think things can be easy is a couple of areas that would be so easy to solve in federal government. One is give preference to local laws rather than federal laws. And that's where states' rights actually become really interesting. Down to city rights, right? Miami is a very, very different place than rural Florida. So even state doesn't really cut it. You have to go down to the city and local community level so that people have their own value system and the laws should represent them.

The second is every time you pass a law at the federal level, you should have an end date to that law. And they do this in Germany and they do this in a few places, very powerful. And or take a law off the books. Yeah, every time you have one, you have to take five off the books because we're overregulated so much, right? This may be the most optimistic area I'm thinking about if Elon gets in charge of a government deregulation department.

It's going to be fantastic. He's just going to go because his first principle thinking is going to come to ver and go, why do you have to have a barrel of hay in the back of your London cab because it was there to feed the horse 100 years ago? Are you nuts? Just get rid of that crap. This is going to be the most extraordinary reality TV show ever. Yes. Yeah. I think the Department of Government Efficiency. And then the last point around kind of what we could do now is liquid democracy where

you don't, you're voting not based on a geography or based on ideas. Like you've got so much advanced thinking and say biotech, I'd rather give you my vote from that topic. So you make category votes and say for this, anything to do with this, I'll go with Lawrence Lessig on digital rights. I'll go with Peter on ethics of biotech. I'll go with Hank Greely of Stanford on anything to do with biotech ethics, etc. And so you can just kind of use a proxy. I thought you gave biotech ethics to me. I just double voted.

That is a beautiful thing, right? You know, what right do I have to vote on women's reproductive rights when I'm a guy. Leave it to the women for God's sake, leave it to the women. Sorry. Yeah. It's quite right. So, buddy, listen, I wanna wrap this WTF

just happened in tech session by saying we're in for a lot of technical acceleration, I think. We're in for a lot of technical acceleration, I think. And a lot of that acceleration in AI is going to be independent of the government. It's going to be happening on a corporate level. I do think the idea of AI becoming an infrastructure play, right? One of the things that I took away from meeting a lot of government leaders in Saudi is every single government, every government is like, how do we get us some? How do we get ourselves a national large language model?

How do we get ourselves a compute infrastructure? And how do we provide it to our entrepreneurs, our business owners, our students? And it will fundamentally become a infrastructure play, just like telephony, just like electricity, just like oxygen. Yeah. Can I tell you a crazy segue here? Yeah.

On topic though. You know, it would be the simplest thing in the world to take all of our legal law structures and digitize them and have them AI enabled, okay? It turns out there's certain laws in various states in the US that are not public and you're not allowed to know the law. What? Yeah.

No. So there's been a whole movement. No, that's ridiculous. No, it's true. Because they've been written by... How do you know if you're not allowed to know? Well, because lobbyists have uncovered that lobbyists have written the laws and they've kind of made it so they're somewhat...prob nobody knows about them it's really nuts so it there's a huge effort to be just just to digitize the damn law and get everything into one place would

be just a massive thing yeah all I can say weird right like like this is where I find the overreach of government to be unacceptable where you're blocking UBI experiments explicitly blocking you, that just blows my mind, or things like this where certain legal structures are not allowed to be public because they're so toxic that nobody wants them out there. So that's the kind of stuff where I think we'll shine the light. Are you going to change your investment strategies at all given this administration? Great question.

Probably not much because I'm so pro-Bitcoin, it could be hard to go more within reason them. So I'm way more excited about the future crypto now. Then i would have been all the last six months the harris by the station kind of hobbled the sec anywhere on crypto is a response but i think this will go another step further how about you. I'm just so deep on tech and crypto and Bitcoin specifically that I don't think I can be any deeper. And I'm so overweighted on entrepreneurial startups as well.

I mean, the broad commentary is that technology has been a major driver of progress since the beginning of time for humanity. It might be the only major driver of progress. Right? Now we have a dozen technologies moving exponentially, the potential, upside potential is huge, and therefore betting on that is an obvious thing to do at a macro level. Yeah.

If you just look at the growth of the FAANG stocks, it accounts for the majority of our nation's capital gains. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's insane. I'm curious about what other crypto currencies, are you going to continue to play? I mean, I remember back when crypto peaked in the late 20 teens, everybody was playing in what has euphemistically be called the shitcoins. Is there a rationale for effort?

Just like we have multiple brands of databases, each optimized for various things, I think different brands and different styles of crypto. For example, a crypto or blockchain based thing that was optimized for land titles and property rights would be a different animal and hyper focused on that particular domain would be very, very highly utilitarian for that vertical in that use case. It'd be very, very different.itarian for that vertical in that use case. It'd be very, very different. I was buying candy, we're using crypto. And so I think you'll end up with a spectrum of those. And we see this in the real world, right? You see gold, and then you see deposit accounts

and CDAs and so on, CDs and bonds. And then as you get more and more liquid towards the end in smaller transactions, say credit card transactions, they're very flighty and minor. You can have much easier level of fraud, but the use case is different across that spectrum. And I think the same thing will happen with crypto where something like Bitcoin will be used as the store of value. You'll have something else like based on the Lightning Network or something similar for means of exchange and to stabilize value so that if your Bitcoin goes up and down, you don't kind of go crazy on your value of some micro transaction that you're doing. All the way to the very frivolous little things where using loyalty points for some application.

I think you'll get the broader spectrum. But some of the applications we're seeing are unbelievable. I just came across one where there's a problem in banking called settlements. So if I owe you $800 and you owe Lily $600 and she owes me $400, we can actually settle $400 without moving any money. And so if we can operate that kind of a system, which would operate at a local city level, it turns out you could drop the cost of capital by about 50%, which is huge for businesses and so on.

So stuff like that can be brought online that hasn't been able to be done because the banks always want every transaction going through them because they tax it all. And so now we can kind of unwind some of that several hundred year old architecture that should be updated. All right. One last subject here, buddy. So Bitcoin at this moment is at 76,000. It's an all-time high as we're recording this.

Wish I'd go back to myself and put a mortgage on the house a couple years ago, but no. Here's the question. Quantum computers, there's a lot of buzz coming out of China right now about being able to break all of the encryption codes. I used to believe that, no, that's not going to happen. We're going to have quantum encryption protecting us against quantum computers and I'm hearing maybe not. What are you hearing? When I see Satoshi's $60 billion Bitcoin wallet hacked, then I'll start to worry because

the point is if you can't hack that wallet, you're long ways away. Now, I also do agree with your point, which is that you will have quantum encryption. Hacking is always a... Cyber security is always an arms race. The bad guys find some mechanism and then maybe you kind of solve that problem, right? And we just go through that, just the cycles. Somebody breaks quantum, that would be one thing. But you still have to solve the distributed ledger problem, which is really the Byzantine generals problem, which is hard to break.

And so you might solve the encryption, but it doesn't solve the distributed ledger aspect, which is what makes it powerful. A $60 billion X prize for... Oh, God, you're such a natural hacker. Yeah, amazing. All right, buddy, excited to see you this weekend. Yes, it's going to be fun.

In Miami, it's going to be fun. All right, everybody, thank you for joining us for this month's episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Well, what just happened in tech is a new administration and I'm so curious. Is Elon going to really jump into the Department of Government Efficiency? The guy is running five companies right now and has like 11 kids. Is he going to do that as well? I mean, I'm just, you know, listen, I know we both do a lot.

How the hell does he do all that he does? I keep on asking him, he doesn't give me an answer. I'm just trying to understand. I don't think he knows. I think he's just so driven. This goes back to the MTP, right? He's so driven by his massive transformative purposes, it keeps the engine going.

And God bless, I mean, we've not talked about this, but the side of that rocket landing back and getting caught by the scaffolding was one of the most incredibly amazing things that I think has been seen in humanity. The biggest rocket in history. It's the greatest engineering feat of, if not just this decade, multiple decades. So if he can take that kind of creative energy and focus his teams on government deregulation, lots of interesting things possible. Can teams on government deregulation, lots of interesting

things possible. Can you fire government employees that easily? I don't think so. No, you can't. You can't. They're like unions and stuff. Look, this is the classic problem in all society. Once you get a structure in place, you put a motor on yourself, whether it's a medical

establishment saying you must have a doctor. A few years ago, they passed a law in Texas saying telemedicine was illegal because you had to see your doctor if I had a little wart on my skin. I mean, it's just the most unbelievable protectionism that goes on at all sorts of societal levels. Government is just not, is one of those things that protects itself first because it can.

Vene actually gave me one of the best definitions of government I ever came across. He said government is an entity that can pardon its own crimes. So they steal from you and they call that tax. They put you in jail where they kidnap you, they call that prison. And so it pardons its own crimes. And that is able to do that because of the place that it's in. And I think that's the part that needs to be undone because there's so many structures that stop progress by calcifying old thinking, teachers unions, for example, that we need to find mechanisms to break that up and break up what I call the immune system problem.

Yeah, I know. Okay, so no more C corporations. Next time I'm starting a government or religion. I want to experiment a little bit more than that. Yes. All right, buddy. A pleasure as always. Thank you. I hope.

You would be my prophet anytime, Peter. And you are, I think, the tech prophet for many people. So hats off. Love you, Bill. All right. Talk soon.