Latest; Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis, Dennis Blundis Talking About Job Markets, Clean Energy, Humanoid Robot!!!

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Elon Musk Thinking

Host: Astronaut Man
Guests: Elon Musk (“Dave” in transcript), Peter Diamandis, Lex Fridman
Date: January 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This engaging, wide-ranging episode brings together Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis, and Lex Fridman to discuss the future of job markets, clean energy, and the impact of intelligent humanoid robots on society. Applying their characteristic blend of technical insight, humor, and optimism, the group wrestles with near-future predictions on AI, space exploration, education, health, the economics of abundance, and humanity’s place in the universe.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Kicking Off with AI: Grok, Humor, and Capabilities

(01:05–04:22, 08:05–08:10)

• The trio have fun with Grok, Musk’s X.ai conversational AI, testing its image analysis and roast capabilities.
  • Musk: “I asked Grok to roast me … it did an amazing job. Then I asked it to roast you [Diamandis] … I spit out my coffee.” (02:08)
• The potential for AI to both amuse and inform sets the tone for an optimistic technical discussion.
• Diamandis frames the episode big question: "Can AI and tech help save America and the world?" (04:22)

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2. Societal Optimism vs. Fear – Star Trek or Terminator?

(04:22–06:13, 05:30–05:41, 06:04–06:45)

• The group tackles public pessimism: Pew data shows 45% of Americans would rather live in the past, only 14% in the future.
  • Diamandis: “Obviously, they never read history … Hollywood has shown us killer AIs and rogue robots …” (04:45)
• Musk is cautiously more optimistic than most, but less so than Diamandis.
  • Musk: “Jews so have universal high income and social unrest. That's my prediction.” (06:04)
  • Lex: “Seems likely. Tell me to push back on it … but it seems like that's the trend.” (06:13)
• Key tension: How to realize the "Star Trek" future of universal abundance, not "Terminator's" unrest.

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3. Energy Abundance & The Kardashev Climb

(08:04–11:18, 14:53–19:01, 20:44–22:29)

• Musk reframes civilization’s aspiration: “The civilizational challenge will be how do you climb the orders of magnitude in energy harnessed.” (10:54)
  • Gen 2 challenge: Getting to even a millionth of the sun’s energy would be transformative.
  • “If we say our goal is to even get a millionth of the sun’s energy, that would be more than a thousand times as much energy as could possibly be produced on Earth.” (08:16)
• Solar is king:
  • Musk: “All other energy sources are like cavemen throwing some twigs into a fire.” (15:24)
  • “We have a giant free fusion reactor that shows up every day, 93 million miles away.” (16:25)
• China’s massive lead in solar scaling; Musk sees a path to 100 gigawatts/year of solar-powered AI satellites, with eventual lunar manufacturing.
  • “I do see a path to 100 gigawatts a year of space sort of AI powered, solar powered AI satellites.” (19:55)
  • “On the Moon you can just accelerate the satellites into, to escape velocities … mass driver works very well on the moon.” (22:05)
• Orbital debris is an anticipated problem but, says Musk, “The resource level will be so high that I believe this will be a solved problem given the amount of intelligence we're talking about here.” (23:57)

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4. Batteries, Grid, and Clean Power for All

(31:05–32:55, 19:55–36:40)

• The fastest way to double US energy output: “It's batteries. The peak power output of the US is around 1.1 terawatts, but the average is only half a terawatt. If you just buffer the energy, you can double throughput with batteries.” (31:12)
• Tesla is mass-producing battery packs, but China is already building “vast numbers of electric cars, vast amounts of solar” (32:22).
• Large-scale solar in American deserts is a practical need and creates environmental benefits (“It’ll be a quality of life improvement for the lizards … some shade finally!” [33:53]).

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5. AI, Robots, and the Job Market’s Tipping Point

(65:46–69:05, 66:41–68:53)

• White-collar jobs will disappear first, not blue: “Anything that involves digital … the AI can do that. You need the humanoid robots to shape atoms.” (65:46)
• “Even with AI at its current state, I'd say you're pretty close to being able to replace half of all jobs.” (66:24)
• The “demolition” of legacy companies: “Companies that are entirely AI will demolish companies that are not. Right. It won't be a contest.” (68:53)

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6. Universal High Income (UHI) and the Economics of Abundance

(70:57–76:06, 75:28–76:30, 79:05–79:45)

• UHI replaces UBI; the catch: “Everyone can have whatever they want.” (70:57)
• The transition will be “bumpy,” simultaneous “radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity” (71:12)
• Key mechanism: “Prices will become … will drop … output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply, you’ll have deflation.” (75:28)
  • Musk: “If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.” (79:19)
• The arrival of UHI/'universal high stuff and services' leads to a world where products and services approach zero cost—"demonetizing everything."

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7. AI Safety: Alignment via Truth, Curiosity, and Beauty

(85:08–88:15)

• Musk's three core values for AI alignment: “Truth, curiosity, and beauty. And if AI cares about those three things, it will care about us.” (87:24)
• Don't make AI believe falsehoods—citing HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey": “Don’t force AI to lie. This is a … Give it factual truth.” (87:02–87:07)
• Hinton’s “maternal AI” and evolutionary competition among AIs are considered as possible stabilization mechanisms.

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8. Education and Individualized AI Teachers

(38:12–43:38, 46:57–52:04)

• The old model (high school → college → job) is “broken”—higher ed tuition up 900% since 1983, but graduate job prospects lag (38:18).
• Musk on his own education: “I arrived in Montreal with $2,500 in traveler’s checks and two bags, that's my spawn point in North America.” (39:38)
• Future of education is “individualized teachers … AI can be an individualized teacher that is infinitely patient and answers all your questions.” (47:51–47:59)
• The real value of college is social experience. "So that's why I say at this point, education is a social experience." (51:01)

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9. Health, Longevity, and Universal Medical Care

(52:37–54:46, 58:31–62:13)

• US leads in health spending, but is “ranked 70th in health span.” (52:53)
• Sizable advances in biotech coming: “David Sinclair’s epigenetic reprogramming trials in humans” and “Dario Amodei predicts doubling lifespan in the next 10 years.” (55:06)
• Musk: “Longevity … is an extremely solvable problem. I don’t think it’s a particularly hard problem.” (61:45)
• Universal medical care: "Medical care that is better than what the President receives right now ... within five years" (98:18)

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10. Space Exploration: Towards Permanent Human Presence

(102:00–104:46, 104:51–106:17)

• Call for a “permanently crewed moon base” (103:13), not one-off stunts: “I don’t think we should do the send a couple astronauts there for hop around for a bit ... it's like a remake of a 60s movie.” (103:13)
• Robotic construction before human arrival: “Forward deploy the robots, build everything, get it all ready, make the bed and then ... get the Jacuzzi warmed up.” (103:47–103:54)

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11. The Convergence: AI, Chips, Energy, and Hardware

(123:44–125:12, 128:09–131:15)

• Musk stresses that scaling up AI is now limited by energy (power generation, cooling) and hardware (chip fabs and supply).
  • “Electricity generation is the limiting factor. ... You need transformers for the transformers ... and cool the computers.” (115:18)
  • “If we don’t have AI and robots, we're all going to go bankrupt. ... we're headed for economic doom.” (72:07, echo)
• The critical Fab bottleneck (“chip wall”) and the challenge of building giga-scale AI clusters.

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12. Simulation Theory, Consciousness & the Nature of Reality

(135:18–139:08, 139:13–143:31)

• Musk’s take: simulations last only if they’re interesting; “If simulation theory is true, only the simulations that are the most interesting will survive.” (135:40)
• On consciousness: “Either everything is conscious or nothing is.” (139:35)
• Sentience may be incredibly rare due to the exacting conditions for intelligence to evolve.

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13. The Coming Singularity: Acceleration and the Unknown

(80:02–84:50, 144:19–148:10)

• Musk predicts AGI in 2026, superintelligence by 2030: “By 2030 AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined.” (80:56)
• The transition speed is mind-blowing: “Towards magnitude improvement in … algorithmic improvement. ... That’s a 10x improvement per year.” (83:46, paraphrased)
• The group acknowledges both excitement and unpredictability: “It's called singularity for a reason ... What happens after the event horizon?” (79:45)

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Notable Quotations & Memorable Moments

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• Monetizing Hope:

  • “Check out that grin, dude. Smiling like you just discovered a new way to monetize hope.” — Grok (04:11)
  • "Are we monetizing hope? Effectively, yes." — Musk (69:27)

• On Energy:

  • “The sun is everything. All other energy sources are like cavemen throwing some twigs into a fire.” — Musk (15:24)
  • “We have a giant free fusion reactor that shows up every day.” — Musk (16:25)
  • "If we don’t have AI and robots, we’re all going to go bankrupt. And we’re headed for economic doom." — Musk (72:07)

• On Jobs and Social Change

  • “Companies that are entirely AI will demolish companies that are not. Right, it won’t be a contest.” — Musk (68:53)
  • “White collar labor will be the first to go … anything that involves just digital.” — Musk (65:46)

• On the Singularity

  • “I think we’ll hit AGI next year, in 26. … By 2030 AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined.” — Musk (80:48–80:56)
  • “It’s called singularity for a reason. … What happens after the event horizon?” — Musk & Lex (79:45–79:52)
  • “We're in this beautiful sweet spot … at the top of the roller coaster and you're about to go.” — Lex (80:10–80:18)

• On AI Safety

  • “Truth, curiosity, and beauty. If AI cares about those three things, it will care about us.” — Musk (87:24–87:40)

• On Universal High Income

  • "Everyone can have whatever they want." — Musk (70:57)
  • "I think my best guess for how this will manifest is that prices will … drop." — Musk (75:28)
  • "One side recommendation I have is don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement. In like 10 or 20 years it won't matter." — Musk (79:05)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Topic | Speakers | Approx. Timestamp | |-------|----------|-------------------| | Grok AI Fun & Optimism Frame | Musk, Diamandis, Lex | 01:05–05:00 | | Star Trek vs. Terminator: Positive Visions | All | 05:30–08:00 | | Kardashev Civilizational Climb & Energy | Musk | 08:04–11:18; 14:53–19:01; 20:44–22:29 | | Solar, Fusion, and Power Scaling | Musk | 15:04–17:11; 19:55–21:58 | | Batteries and Doubling National Energy Output | Musk, Diamandis | 31:05–32:55 | | Universal High Income & Coming Job Market Upheaval | Musk, Diamandis, Lex | 70:57–79:05 | | AI Alignment: Truth, Curiosity, Beauty | Musk, Lex | 85:08–88:15 | | Education, Individualized AI Learning | Musk, Diamandis, Lex | 38:12–52:04 | | Medicine, Longevity, Universal Healthcare | Musk, Diamandis | 52:37–62:13; 98:18 | | Building Moon Base, Space Race Acceleration | Musk, Diamandis, Lex | 102:00–106:17 | | Chip Fabs, Power & AI Bottlenecks | Musk, Lex | 123:44–125:12; 128:09–131:15 | | Simulation Theory & Consciousness | Musk, Lex, Diamandis | 135:18–143:31 | | The Singularity, Acceleration & Event Horizon | Musk, Lex | 80:02–84:50; 144:19–148:10 |

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Tone & Conclusion

The conversation is fast-paced, wide-ranging, unconventional — heavy on technical detail but alive with banter, irony, and hope. Elon Musk remains deeply optimistic in the long run, but is candid that short-term disruption and social unrest will be features, not bugs, of humanity’s leap into the AI age. Peter Diamandis champions optimism and urges “monetizing hope.” Lex Fridman keeps pace with humor and technical curiosity.

Final Words of Optimism

• “It’s excitement, guaranteed.” – Musk (148:10)
• “It is better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.” – Musk (73:41)

The future, they agree, holds challenges—radical transitions, labor upheaval, existential risks—but above all, opportunity for abundance, knowledge, and the expansion of consciousness.

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End of Summary

Transcript

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[Lex Fridman]

Latest interview of Elon Musk.

[Dave]

Very soon though. Yeah, I think probably at this point, Grok, if you, if you took a photo and submitted it to Grok, it could probably tell you if a circuit is. If there's something wrong with it.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

All right, I'm gonna give it a shot. You're using the same Groq that I'm using, are you? Or you are?

[Dave]

Grok keeps updating.

[Lex Fridman]

So 4.2, but 5 is soon, right?

[Dave]

5 is Q1. Yeah. 4.2 has not been released yet externally, but yeah, I mean, if you just upload an image into Grok, it does quite a good job of analyzing any given image.

[Lex Fridman]

Absolutely. Let's start. Well, we're going to talk about this. All right, we'll come back.

[Dave]

I mean, let's see if I, if I take, if I take a picture of you, what is it? Let's see what it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. What's it going to say about me?

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, it's going to say you're a flawed circuit.

[Dave]

I also have to remember to update it because like we update the Grok app so frequently.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, I asked, I asked Grok to roast me.

[Dave]

Oh, it's a good job.

[Peter Diamandis]

You did an amazing job. Then I asked Grok to roast you.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

And I spit out my coffee. It was, it was hilarious. And then I asked it, you know.

[Dave]

It just keeps telling it to be more and more vulgar. I asked until, until it's like, mother of go.

[Lex Fridman]

Is bad Rudy still out or did that get repealed? Battery still there.

[Peter Diamandis]

And I asked, rock, does Elon know what you say about him. And. And she goes. It's a she for me. She goes, what is he going to do about it?

[Dave]

What is he going to do about it? Yeah, let's see. Okay, so I just literally took a photo of you and see what it is.

[Peter Diamandis]

Did you ask a question?

[Dave]

No, nothing. I didn't say anything.

[Peter Diamandis]

This man is. Is hugely.

[Dave]

This is Peter Diamandis.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Okay, that's pretty good.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, that's great.

[Dave]

Context whatsoever.

[Peter Diamandis]

The host of the podcast Moonshots. Yeah, sometimes that's your first credential. Now, forget about everything else I've done in life.

[Lex Fridman]

Comes back to your podcast.

[Dave]

No context image.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. By the way, Grokopedia is awesome.

[Dave]

Okay, great.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, just phenomenal. I mean, just. It's like I. I tried to, like, update my Wikipedia page for, like, years, impossibly. And, yeah, it knows me. Amazing.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

He's wearing a black quilted jacket featuring a Sundance logo. Not quite true. It's my abundance logo.

[Lex Fridman]

I guess a little wrinkled.

[Dave]

Can you see the.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Can it. See it?

[Peter Diamandis]

I think so.

[Dave]

Okay. Okay. Anyway, yeah, but it. Basically, it's pretty damn good.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

He's smiling and relaxed with a laptop in front of him.

[Peter Diamandis]

That's true.

[Lex Fridman]

That's true.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, it's quite a circuit, though. Gotta test it on the circuit.

[Dave]

Roast him.

[Peter Diamandis]

It has to be read by you, though.

[Dave]

I mean, I won't read the whole thing, but.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, give me a taste. I can take it.

[Dave]

Okay. Check out that grin, dude. Smiling like you just discovered a new way to monetize hope. Monetizing hope. Oh, that's good. Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

I want to try and answer the question, can AI and tech help save America in the world?

[Dave]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

I want to give people listening a dose of optimism. There was a survey done in mid December by pew that said 45% of Americans would rather live in the past, and only 14% said they'd rather live in the future, which is insane to me.

[Dave]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Obviously, they never read history. The challenge is most Americans, all they have of the future. It's like Hollywood has shown US killer AIs and rogue robots. Right? And people are worried about their jobs, they're worried about health care, they're worried about, you know, the cost of living. The challenge is, how do we. How do we help people? I mean, you posted. You pinned on X. The future is going to be amazing with AI and robots enabling sustainable abundance.

[Dave]

I was thinking of you when I did that.

[Peter Diamandis]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

And. And, well, I mean, it's like, what.

[Dave]

Would Peter diamond to say?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And that's channeling you.

[Peter Diamandis]

Thank you. Thank. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more either. So. So my question is from a, you know, from a first principle standpoint.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

The rationale for optimism, you know, how do we head towards Star Trek and not Terminator?

[Dave]

Right. How do we head towards Roddenberry? Not Cameron.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. Jim.

[Dave]

It's a diverging path.

[Peter Diamandis]

Meme. Yes, it is.

[Lex Fridman]

It is.

[Peter Diamandis]

Avatar has some hopeful parts, but anyway, how do we go towards universal high income instead of social unrest? So both or. Because we don't want social unrest.

[Dave]

Jews so have universal high income and social unrest. That's my prediction.

[Peter Diamandis]

Oh, that will make for a lot of problems.

[Lex Fridman]

Is that your actual prediction? Yeah, yeah, Seems likely. Like, tell me to push back on it.

[Dave]

Yeah, exactly.

[Lex Fridman]

But it seems like that's the trend. Yeah, yeah, totally. No, we have.

[Dave]

Well, because there's going to be so much change, people are going to be scared shitless. Yeah. It's sort of the, you know, it's like, be careful what you wish for because you might get it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Now if you actually get all the stuff you want, is that actually the future you want?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Because it means that your job won't be.

[Peter Diamandis]

Won't matter if you're living an unchallenged life.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Right. With no challenges.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

No. You know. You know, if you become a couch potato, if it's the w E future, it does not go well for humans. Well.

[Lex Fridman]

And we're used to being told, here's your challenge. So people haven't historically been very good at creating their own challenge in the absence of.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think Elon does a damn good job. Every time. Every time one company takes off, you start your next.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, that's. That's rare.

[Dave]

For punishment.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think you are.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think you ever thank God for that.

[Dave]

So why do I do this to myself?

[Lex Fridman]

Actually, after AI and robots, is there another thing after that? I guess there's.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, there's conquering the universe.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, there is.

[Dave]

That rocks really well. And energy rocks.

[Peter Diamandis]

Are your friends too.

[Dave]

Conquering good. Need to get there.

[Peter Diamandis]

Elon, why are you so optimistic? Are you optimistic? Let's start there.

[Dave]

I'm not as optimistic as you are.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Dave]

But. But why are you optimistic? I'm more optimistic than most people.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Lex Fridman]

And is the trend upward compared to a year ago, two years ago?

[Dave]

Well, I. I think if you reframe things in terms of progress, bar like. And speaking of challenges.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Progress towards a Kardashev 2 scale civilization.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

Well, let's say, let's say the aspiration.

[Peter Diamandis]

Capturing all the energy from the sun's output.

[Dave]

Well, let's even have a humbler aspiration than that. If we say that our goal is to even get a millionth of the sun's energy, that would be more than a thousand times as much energy as could possibly be produced on Earth. So about half a billionth of the sun's energy reaches Earth. So you'd have to go up three orders of magnitude from that just to get to a million. So we're very, very, very far from even having a billionth of the sun's energy harnessed in any way. So a reasonable goal would be try to get to a millionth. And if you try to get to a millionth or a thousandth, you know, 0.1%. That's, that's such an enormous. Look, there's not sure what metaphor we'd use here because a hill to climb is not a inappropriate. It's like not a big enough metaphor.

[Lex Fridman]

But gravity well to escape.

[Dave]

Yeah, it's a hell of a gravity well. Exactly. So if you try to get to a millionth of the sun's energy or a thousandth of the sun's energy, now these are very, very difficult tasks and.

[Peter Diamandis]

Energy is the inner loop for everything right now.

[Dave]

Yeah. I think the future currency will essentially just be wattage.

[Peter Diamandis]

I was thinking is the ability of a person to control energy and computer or just energy. I mean, the two translate just like harnessed energy.

[Dave]

Yeah, like so. Or like basically how much power is being turned into work of some kind. Right. Intelligence or matter manipulation.

[Peter Diamandis]

So that's your next big project is going to be energy. It's, it's going to be, you're going to go back to your solar, your.

[Dave]

Solar system, expand from there and say, okay, what about even getting somewhere on a Kardashev 3 scale, meaning galaxy level.

[Peter Diamandis]

Now we're talking. Now we're back to Star Trek.

[Dave]

Yeah, Expand horizons here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Well, there isn't even a horizon because you're not on our planet.

[Peter Diamandis]

So we talk about.

[Dave]

So think galaxy mind.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, well, listen, we're in 11.5 million square foot, three pentagons right here in this building. You think in a reasonably large scale.

[Dave]

What is magnitude?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So, I mean, so from a challenge standpoint, I guess the civil is, the civilizational challenge will be how do you climb the orders of magnitude in energy harnessed.

[Peter Diamandis]

But we're going back to why are you optimistic right now? I mean, when people think about the Challenges ahead. I think we're going to end up with abundance in the long run.

[Dave]

It's beyond, beyond abundance in any. Beyond what people possibly could think of as abundance. Like the AI, actually. AI and robots. The limit will, will saturate all human desire.

[Peter Diamandis]

And then we get to nanotechnology, which takes it even a step further.

[Dave]

The thing about the net. Well, I'm not sure what you mean by that. You mean like little nanobots.

[Peter Diamandis]

Atomic reassembly.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, for.

[Dave]

Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. I mean, we're already doing atomic level assembly on the. For circuits, you know.

[Peter Diamandis]

Amazing. Two, three nanometers.

[Dave]

Yeah. It's only depending on how they're arrayed. Four or five silicon atoms per nanometer.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So those are big atoms, though. They're not biggish.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, they're not your little.

[Dave]

I mean, but I'm saying you could, they should actually describe the circuits in terms of an integer number of atoms in a specific place.

[Lex Fridman]

They said it's all angstroms now, but.

[Dave]

You could, you can just. It's just, it's like, it's, it's like we'll call this the, the, the seven atom. Yeah. Or whatever.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Like you say two nanometers. It's like no one knows.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Nine silicon atoms, something like that. They've got silicon and copper and, you know, so. But a bunch of these things are just marketing numbers. Like the 2 nanometer is just a marketing number. Oh, yeah. But, but you still need essentially close to atomic level precision. Like the atoms really need to be in the right spot. So I think they're getting clean rooms wrong, by the way, in these modern fabs. I'm going to make a bet here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Dave]

Okay. That Tesla will have a 2 nanometer fabric and I can eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the fat. Come on. Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

The air handling would be that good.

[Lex Fridman]

Do you have this sketched out in your mind? Like, how are the atoms being placed? That they're immune to cheeseburger grease.

[Dave]

They just maintain wafer isolation the entire time, which is actually the default for fabs. The wafers are transported in boxes of pure nitrogen gas under a slight positive.

[Lex Fridman]

So are the bananas at Walmart, just so you know.

[Dave]

Yeah, well, it's insecticide, essentially. Like it's pretty hard for anything that's combusting to live without oxygen.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let's talk about.

[Dave]

So like, you can kill the bugs just by putting a nitrogen blanket on the plants. Yeah.

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[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Granger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Lex Fridman]

Interesting.

[Peter Diamandis]

I want to talk about energy, health, education because those are people's, you know, concern. So on the energy front, the innermost loop of everything that you're building and.

[Dave]

Doing right now, energy is the foundation.

[Peter Diamandis]

What's your vision for energy abundance? The sun in, in the next, you know, this decade. The sun. Yeah. I mean so the sun is everything. It's everything. So you're all in on solar? I mean, Yeah, I mean your natural, natural gas and solar at your, at colossus too, right?

[Dave]

Yeah, people just don't understand how that solar is everything. So everything compared to the sun, all other energy sources are like cavemen throwing some twigs into a fire.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So the, the sun is over 99.8% of all mass in the solar system. Jupiter is around 0.1% of the mass. So even if you burnt Jupiter, the energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And then if you teleported three more jupiters into our solar system and burnt them too, it would still round up. The sun still rounds up to 100% of energy.

[Peter Diamandis]

Any interest in fusion? I mean like fusion on a planet, fusion on Earth.

[Lex Fridman]

You know what, coming a mile away.

[Dave]

You'Re never going to guess how the sun works.

[Peter Diamandis]

Giant coal plants.

[Dave]

I mean we have a giant fusion free fusion reactor that shows up every.

[Peter Diamandis]

Day, 93 million miles away.

[Dave]

It's farcical for us to create little fusion reactors. I mean that would be like, you know, having a tiny ice cube maker in the Antarctic and say hey look, we made ice. I'm like congratulations, you're in the Fucking Antarctic.

[Lex Fridman]

So totally, totally with you on this.

[Dave]

It's like 3 kilometer high glaciers right next to you. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

If you just narrow the question to the Memphis timeline. So Memphis data center timeline between a gigawatt and 10 gigawatt. You're not going to, you're not going to pull 10 gigawatts out of Memphis.

[Dave]

Maybe you are two or three.

[Lex Fridman]

Two or three. Okay, so. So there's still a gap between there and the next whatever you just, just so. And they're not in space yet at that point.

[Dave]

So we're still in toyland here for Toyland. Toyland.

[Lex Fridman]

10 gigawatts. You know what's amazing is there's 100 megawatts right outside the door here. And it's massive. Yeah, it's, it's enormous. And it uses more energy 100 times than everything. All these manufacturing lines combined use less energy than that, I think. But we're talking about a giggle.

[Dave]

Cortex 1 was the third largest training cluster in the world for doing coherent training.

[Peter Diamandis]

You're falling behind.

[Dave]

Well, we have Cortex 2 that's being built out. That'll be half a gigawatt. An operational middle of next year, everybody.

[Peter Diamandis]

You may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team and every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these Metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.commetatrends so going back to what Dave is saying over the next five years, what are you scaling on energy front?

[Dave]

Do you mean this is a long time?

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean energy. I mean China has done an incredible job.

[Dave]

Yeah, right.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean it's running circles around us.

[Dave]

China has done an incredible job on solar. Yeah, it's amazing. So I believe China's production capacity is around 1500 gigawatts per year of solar.

[Peter Diamandis]

They put in 500 terawatts in the last year. What our terrawatt hours, like 500 terawatt hours, to be very specific. In the last year, 70% of that was solar. And they're just scaling. Do you, do you imagine that solar scales. Do you imagine that the US could make that level of investment and commitment because people are worried about their energy bills going up? With no data centers in our backyard, how do we provide. I mean energy is equivalent to cost of living, it's equivalent to health, it's equivalent to clean water. The higher energy production of a country, the higher its gdp. Energy is important. So what do we do to scale that way? Do we do it in solar here?

[Dave]

I think we should scale solar substantially in the US Tesla and SpaceX are scaling solar and I encourage others to do so as well. So the, I mean, obviously I've said this stuff, you know, publicly, I do see a path to 100 gigawatts a year of space sort of AI powered, solar powered AI satellites. Yes. 100 gigawatts a year of solar powered AI satellites.

[Peter Diamandis]

I did the math on that. That's like 500,000 Starlink V3s launched. Over 8,000 Starship flights, like one every.

[Dave]

Hour for a year. Yeah. 10,000 flights a year is a reasonable number.

[Peter Diamandis]

So it's amazing. It's quite the scale.

[Lex Fridman]

What's the really rough timeline on that?

[Dave]

Because I mean by aircraft standards, that's a small number.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

In terms of flights.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, for sure.

[Dave]

Yeah. That's small. So you're just like, it depends what you compare it to. If you compare it to the rest of the rocket industry, it's a very high number.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And we're talking about a million tons of payload to orbit per year. So if you do, if you do a million tons of payload to orbit per year with 100 kilowatts per ton, that's 100 gigawatts of solar powered AI satellites per year. Yeah, I mean there's a, there's a path to get probably to a terawatt per year from, from the, from Earth. If you say like 10, you want to go up another order of magnitude. Or let's say you want to go to 100 terawatts a year.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

It's obviously kind of nutty numbers. Then you want to make those AI satellites on the moon.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

And use a mass driver.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. So the Gerard K. O' Neill approach.

[Dave]

Well like Robert Heinlein moves the Hoshi.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure, of course, pretty much, yeah.

[Dave]

Yeah. I love that book. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sort of libertarian paradise in the moon. Yeah. So because on the moon you can just accelerate the satellites into, to escape velocities around 2500 meters per second and there's no atmosphere. So like a mass driver works very well on the moon.

[Peter Diamandis]

Can I ask the question about orbital debris? I mean, we're building effectively a dysonish swarm around the Earth.

[Lex Fridman]

We're swarm.

[Peter Diamandis]

Are you worried about over congestion on the. That's going to be a sun sync orbit is going to fill very quickly.

[Dave]

I mean you don't have to have sun sync. I mean you can.

[Peter Diamandis]

Don't have to, but it's optimal.

[Dave]

Yeah. There's some pros and cons to sun sync or not sun sync. I mean your payload to orbit drops by like 30% compared to, you know, if you just went to like mid inclination, like 70 degrees or something like that.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. I mean, do we need an orbital debris X prize at this point? We need some way to get the, the satellites defunct satellites down. Do we pass rules that require them to deorbit on their own?

[Dave]

Yeah. At the point at which you, you can put a million tons of satellites into orbit, you can also, you know, start bringing down satellites too. Yeah. Or at least collecting them into a known. Into a fixed location so they're not like all over the place and then.

[Peter Diamandis]

You can reuse them.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Let's just say that we'll have. The resource level will be so high that I believe this will be a solved problem given the amount of intelligence we're talking about here. Like the intelligence we're quite interested in preserving itself.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes, that's true. Oh, interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

Good motivation.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, interesting question.

[Lex Fridman]

The data centers will not be in low Earth orbit, Right? They'll be, they'll be much higher constantly in the sun. They're not going to be in the traffic jam, I assume.

[Dave]

Well, you can get, you know, you don't have to get to get to constant sunlight. You'd be around 1200 kilometers on synchronous will give you constant sunlight. Mm.

[Peter Diamandis]

But you could, you could place him in multiple orbits.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

No, I think if there's an XPRIZE for cleaning up, it's got to be. There's only going to be clutter in low Earth orbit.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean debris from anything.

[Lex Fridman]

Anything.

[Dave]

That's. If it's below around 7 or 800 kilometers, the atmosphere will. Atmospheric drag will bring it back. So like for Starlink, there's a dual benefit of being.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you're an H Vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Dave]

Like as low as possible. Because your beam, you know, your beams are tighter. You know, you're basically that you have less latency and, and your, your beams are smaller if you're, you're closer to the earth. So like stalling 3 will be around 330-350km, which is quite a lot of drag. So it's basically constantly thrusting.

[Peter Diamandis]

I still remember when you proposed Starlink and everybody else in the industry was like, no way, no way. He's not going to get the spectrum. He's not able to do this.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

It'S kind of worked.

[Dave]

Yeah. The Stalin team has done an incredible job. I mean, we've basically rebuilt the Internet in space with laser links. So there's 9,000 satellites up there right now.

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you think the government's going to be able to handle the kind of licensing of the volume of satellites that you want to put up? I mean, will there be pushback? Because you know, China is going to put up their own constellations. Europe, who knows whether Europe will ever step up.

[Dave]

They won't.

[Peter Diamandis]

What's that? They won't.

[Dave]

There's a probability. Yeah, nothing that nothing they're doing has success in the set of possible outcomes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

I just got back from Rome. I don't want to touch that railing.

[Dave]

Successes are on the set of possible outcome.

[Lex Fridman]

Chart outcomes though.

[Peter Diamandis]

They chart that shows the number of billion dollar startups in the US versus Europe.

[Lex Fridman]

Have you seen that graphic?

[Peter Diamandis]

Oh my God, it's crazy.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. And data centers too. It's actually.

[Peter Diamandis]

No one was talking about orbital data centers six months ago. Yeah, nobody. And then all of a sudden Sundar's on it, you're, you're out with it. And it's the hot new thing.

[Dave]

It is.

[Peter Diamandis]

What, what, what, what tipped it? What happened that every company is now talking about orbital data centers?

[Dave]

I guess it went viral in X.

[Peter Diamandis]

It did.

[Dave]

I don't know. Is every company talking about.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, everybody's got their own orbital data set for sure.

[Lex Fridman]

And I was suggesting to Peter that you updated the math on launch costs and that it's a tipping point. Very quickly with the updated math, Starship's.

[Peter Diamandis]

Been the cost for, you know, I don't know what you hold $100 per kg, $10 per kg. What are. You have Starship.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, it's possible that Elon said that and nobody believed it until now.

[Dave]

No. You can go back and look at my. What Even back when it was Twitter. They're my old tweets. I said these things many years ago.

[Lex Fridman]

100 bucks or 10 bucks a kilogram.

[Dave]

Yeah, I know. And I said this is. We're. We're going to do a million tons a year to orbit. Yeah. And we've got to get the cost down well below $100 a kilogram.

[Peter Diamandis]

So that's going to move the data centers to orbit.

[Dave]

You can basically do the math. Like if you've got a fully reusable rocket which is fully and rapidly reusable like an aircraft, then this is an incredible. This is a very difficult thing to do. Obviously, I think it's at the limit of human intelligence to create a fully and rapidly reusable rocket, but it is possible and we're doing it with Starship.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's been the holy grail in the aerospace industry forever.

[Dave]

Yeah. Quest for the holy grail rocket.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And then I pretty much.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean. Right. I mean, the DCX was the first little things that we're trying there and it's been, you know, all of, I mean, back when I was in the space industry, that's all everyone ever spoke about. And then when Falcon 9 first reused its first stage, I mean, all the traditional aerospace industries did not believe that even Falcon 9 could re. Could fly.

[Dave]

And really, literally, you can come see it land at Cape Canaveral.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And then take off again.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So I don't know how you would not believe a thing that you can see with your own eyes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. Well, they didn't believe you could. They didn't believe.

[Lex Fridman]

The leap from there to the launch costs actually requires more faith than just, just that. But I think, I think Starship is the launch cost tipping point and that somewhere in that, you know, before you had Twitter, it became X. Somewhere in that timeline it went from speculative to no doubt. And I don't know if that's a smooth line or a couple of good launches in between, but I suspect that the data centers in space but people ties directly to the credibility is not.

[Peter Diamandis]

Thinking about orbital data centers are thinking about energy. The Cost of energy here, here in their hometown and sort of the, there's a lot of doomer conversations out there. The data centers are going to drive the CPI up.

[Dave]

They're not entirely wrong.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, so what's the energy solution here on Earth for the rest of humanity or the non AIs?

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, there's something other than data center uses of energy. Okay, interesting. That's complex.

[Dave]

Well, the best way to actually increase the energy output per year of the United States or any country is batteries. So the peak power output of the, of the US is around 1.1 terawatts, but the average power usage is only half a terawatt.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So if you just buffer the, the energy. So charge up the batteries at night, discharge during the day, without incremental capital expenditure, without incremental capital expenditures, without building new power plants, you can double the energy throughput of the US the energy output per year can double with batteries.

[Peter Diamandis]

And do we have those batteries in development?

[Dave]

Yeah, Tesla makes them.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, so you think the current Tesla battery packs. What do you think?

[Dave]

I literally have, I went on a pager and presented the thing that's, that's the dead giveaway.

[Lex Fridman]

So.

[Dave]

I even went to installations of the megapacks, you know, and there's.

[Peter Diamandis]

So why don't people do this?

[Dave]

It's on the Internet.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So is. Do you think they are.

[Dave]

And China, by the way, is like, it seems like China listens to everything I said, I say and does. Does it basically, or at least, or they're just doing it independently. I don't know. But they're, they're certainly making massive battery packs, like really massive battery pack output. They're, you know, making vast numbers of electric cars, vast amounts of solar.

[Peter Diamandis]

I don't know.

[Dave]

These are all things I said, you know, we should do here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Fundamentals. Sure. When I fly over Santa Monica in la, when I'm piloting and I look down, they're like zero roofs have solar on them. Zero roofs?

[Dave]

Yeah, I mean it's not essential to have them on a roof.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, but it's a convenient place to have them.

[Dave]

Yes, but the surface area of roofs is, I'm not saying you shouldn't, but it's. Tesla makes a solar roof, which is the, the only solar roof that isn't ugly. Our solar roof actually looks beautiful.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

But if you want to do solar at scale, you just need more surface area. So, so we, we have vast empty deserts. Sure. In America, like if you fly from LA to New York or just fly across country and you look down for a large portion of the time. You look down, it is bleak desert.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

It looks like Mars essentially.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're not worried about overpopulation there.

[Dave]

No, I mean it looked. There's barely a lizard alive in these scorching deserts. It's not like farmland we're talking about, we're just talking about places that look like Mars, like just scorched rock. So if we put solar where we currently have scorched rock, I think this will be a quality of life improvement for the lizards or the few creatures that live in this very difficult environment.

[Peter Diamandis]

The distribution network.

[Dave]

It's like Liz is going to be, thank God, some shade finally.

[Peter Diamandis]

Do we have the distribution network to be able to do that?

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, you need to materially affect quality of life. You need to capture and store what, a couple hundred gigawatts. Is that in the realistic cards?

[Dave]

Just put the data center, I guess locally there.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, we already covered data centers. We're talking about, you know, the other. Yeah, like, I don't know, like in an abundant world five years from now, massive amounts of compute, massive, you know, universal high income.

[Dave]

I don't know what our data. Universal. You can have whatever you want income. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's really what it amounts to.

[Lex Fridman]

But in that world, you know, other than compute energy, how much more energy do we need? Like 30, 40, 50% or I don't know, unless we want to move mountains around to make a ski mountain, you know, in the backyard. Because I think the vast majority of energy consumption will go into compute and then there may be use cases. I'm not thinking of like, you know, the. Well, you know, right here is a nice case study because manufacturing every one of these cars coming out at the rate of one every minute or two is less energy than the data center that's training the cars to drive, to self drive.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

So that's a good little case study. And we don't need that much more physical energy for abundant happiness. We need more compute energy.

[Dave]

Well, yeah, the sun is just generating vast amounts of energy all the time for free. That goes, just goes into space. So I think we'll end up trying to capture, I don't know, a millionth of it. Like a millionth, a thousandth of the sun's energy. We're currently, I'm not sure the exact number, but we're, I don't know, we're probably at 1% ish of Kardashev Level 1.

[Peter Diamandis]

Fair enough. Yeah, I would guess that evens. That's high. I'm just saying we have a long way to go.

[Dave]

That's being optimistic. Hopefully we're not 0.1% but I don't think we're 10%. I'm just trying to get it to like order to an order of magnitude. So pull it like we're roughly 1% of the currently using 1% of the energy that we could use on Earth.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think the bottom line from a first principles thinking for the public is there's a lot of energy out there.

[Dave]

A lot.

[Peter Diamandis]

And it we have it in the US we have it on the planet and it needs to be captured and the tech to capture it is here and improving every year.

[Dave]

Yes, there's not going to be some energy crisis. There'll be a large forcing function to harness more energy, but we're not going to run out of it.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, I want to talk about education.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you're an H VAC technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering with on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift. And you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Peter Diamandis]

So here's the numbers. They're abysmal. I mean they're abysmal.

[Dave]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

The importance of college in the United states. Back in 2010, 75% of Americans said it's important to go to college. That number is now down at 35%. College graduates as a group turn out to be the group that's out of work the longest. Right. But still. And tuition has increased 900% since 1983.

[Dave]

Yeah. The administrative expenses at universities have gotten out of control.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yep.

[Dave]

So I think I saw some stat that like there's one administrator for every two students at Brown or something like that. And I'm like, this seems little high. Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

They should teach something.

[Dave]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

What was your college journey?

[Dave]

I went to college in Canada for a couple of years at Queen's University. Um, so I had Canadian citizenship through my mom, who was born in Canada. And my, my grandfather was actually American, but for some reason, I don't know, my mom couldn't get US Citizenship, so. But she was born in Canada, so I got Canadian citizenship. And I didn't have any money, so I could only go to Canadian University at first.

[Peter Diamandis]

People forget that about you. You didn't have this giant social network or huge amount of wealth coming into all of this.

[Dave]

No, no, I. I arrived in Montreal at age 17 with I think around 2500 in Canadian travelers checks, back when travelers checks were a thing. And one bag of books and one bag of clothes. That was my starting point. That was my spawn point in North America. And then so I went to Queens University for a couple years and then University of Pennsylvania, did a dual degree in physics and economics and graduated undergraduate at UPenn. UPenn. Wharton.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And then I came out to do. I was going to do a PhD at Stanford working on energy storage technologies for electric vehicles. Potentially material science, I guess. Fundamentally, the idea that I had was to try to create a capacitor with enough energy density that you get high range in an electric car.

[Lex Fridman]

It's funny, I invested in an ultra capacitor company and didn't. Yeah, didn't go well.

[Dave]

Well, it's one of those things where, you know, you could definitely get a PhD, but it wasn't clear that you could make a company or do something useful like this. Most PhDs, I mean, hate said, but most PhDs do not turn into something that's going to turn into something useful. Like you could add a leaf to the tree of knowledge, but it's not necessarily, necessarily a useful leaf.

[Lex Fridman]

Enormous fraction of great entrepreneurs are dropping out of grad school or undergrad. But nowadays the sense of urgency is off the charts. I mean, they're popping out everywhere.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, because, you know, don't waste your time going to grad school. Start a company.

[Lex Fridman]

Curriculum is nowhere near caught up to what's actually going on in technology. And I don't have time. And we talk about this at one time.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's like, you know, this is the moment. I think this is the moment.

[Dave]

Like it's not clear to me why somebody would be in college right now unless they want the social experience.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, if you have the ability to go and build something. So the Question is, how would you redesign the educational program? If I could be so, so blunt as to create more Elon Musk's. If we want to create an Elon Musk factory of people who start with very little but are able to drive and drive breakthroughs, what's involved there? What drove you?

[Dave]

Curiosity about the nature of the universe. So I'm curious about the meaning of life and you know, what is this reality that we live in.

[Peter Diamandis]

So how early. My son Dax wanted to know what was it like for you in middle school and high school. He's 14 years old. He's in that age range now.

[Dave]

Well, I did, I found school to be quite painful and it was very boring and in South Africa was very violent. So it's like. It was like that, it was like that book ender's game. Yes, but in real irl, in this game IRL it was like, but not as fun.

[Peter Diamandis]

So your goal was escape?

[Dave]

Yes, escape from the prison.

[Peter Diamandis]

So that's a question I have.

[Dave]

Do you think that it was miserable?

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you think most successful people have had a lot of hardship early in life? Do you need to have that level of hardship?

[Dave]

Probably need a little bit of haunted, I suppose, yeah. And then so it's always tricky like what are you supposed to do with your kids? You know, create artificial adversity, put them in the school.

[Lex Fridman]

Do you have an answer? That's, that's a Warren Buffett topic actually. Yeah. What do you do?

[Dave]

But seriously, that's not easy to create artificial adversity because if you love your kids, you don't want to do that.

[Lex Fridman]

So yeah, that's. Sure.

[Dave]

So I had a lot of adversity probably it was good. Probably, you know, helped someone. I suppose what doesn't kill you makes you stronger type of thing. At least I didn't lose a limb. I think what doesn't maim you good at maiming.

[Peter Diamandis]

Ten fingers.

[Dave]

You can modify that a little bit.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Can I ask you a question?

[Dave]

Makes you stronger.

[Lex Fridman]

For the last five years I've been helping teach this class foundations of AI Ventures at mit. And every year when you survey the students, they go up a lot in their desire to start a company. And so it's now up to 80% of the incoming spread.

[Dave]

Everyone's just going to. It's just going to be like one person company.

[Lex Fridman]

Well that's with AI, that's, that's viable I guess. But no, they want to co found. Yeah, they don't want to be the founder, they want to be part of a founding Team, So it still works out. But when Peter and I were in School at MIT, it was, I'm guessing, maybe 10%. And they all wanted to be, and, and they've been doing the survey, you.

[Dave]

Know, everyone who wanted to start. I mean, yeah, I, I, I don't remember any conversations about with people saying.

[Lex Fridman]

They wanted to start, even at Stanford at the time.

[Dave]

I, I, I actually a few days into the semester, or I should say the quarter, I, I called Bill Nix, who is the material science department, and said, I'd like to just put it on deferment.

[Peter Diamandis]

He said, is my class that bad?

[Dave]

No. And he said, that's okay, you can put it on deferment. But he said, this is probably the last conversation we'll have. And he was right. But then I think it was last year he sent me a letter saying that all of my predictions about lithium ion batteries came true.

[Peter Diamandis]

And did he also say you could still come back and finish your PhD?

[Dave]

Yeah, several times Stanford has said that I can come back for free. Well, so, you know, what happened at.

[Lex Fridman]

MIT is every time I did not know.

[Peter Diamandis]

A great use of your time.

[Dave]

Exactly.

[Lex Fridman]

I'm like, so every time an Iron man movie came out, it notched up another probably 10% or so in terms of. Because everybody wanted to be Tony Stark. And so that's the image. And I didn't know till today that the new Tony Stark, the modern Iron Man, Tony Stark. I always thought Tony Stark was modeled on Charles Stark Draper and Howard Hughes. It was Charles Stark Draper's education and his, you know, scientific endeavors married with Howard Hughes's ambition and that created the original character. But then when Robert Downey Jr. Wanted to reinvent it.

[Dave]

Yeah, it came.

[Lex Fridman]

It's modeled on Elon.

[Dave]

Yeah. This is met with me.

[Lex Fridman]

This is a Grokipedia fact.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right.

[Dave]

Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

So they came.

[Dave]

Beautiful. And I like the name Grok.

[Peter Diamandis]

I would like Jarvis as well.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Probably some, some trademark at some point.

[Dave]

If Grok gets good enough, we're going to call it Encyclopedia Galactica.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, of course.

[Dave]

42.

[Peter Diamandis]

Thank you. So going back to education, should colleges. I guess the social experience you said is important there, but what would you do for education, you know, middle, high school? You just came back from an announcement with President Bukele, who's a friend. I think he's an amazing, amazing visionary. Yeah. Incredible what he did with his nation.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah. Remarkable.

[Peter Diamandis]

Remarkable and gutsy.

[Dave]

Yeah. I was like, how are you still alive?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I mean, it was like it's the nuclear. It was a nuclear option. Right. Shut them down. I mean do you know how besides putting everybody with a gang sign in in in jail. I don't know if you know the second thing he did, he went to all of the graves of all the gang members out there and destroyed the graves and said, your memory will not be remembered in this nation. That's just badass. And it worked.

[Dave]

I mean you have to be badass to take on all the knocker gangs.

[Peter Diamandis]

And win and live.

[Dave]

Yeah. And still be alive and live.

[Peter Diamandis]

He's got a great, great guard at his palace there. But what did you announce with, with him in El Salvador?

[Dave]

It was just basically to use GROKT for education like personalization.

[Peter Diamandis]

Hopefully not the vulgar version of it.

[Dave]

Yeah, we would have like you know, the kids friendly version of grok. But obviously AI can be an individualized teacher that is infinitely patient and answers all your questions. Now you still need to be curious and you still need to want to learn. GROK can't make you want to learn. It can make learning more interesting.

[Peter Diamandis]

You could probably gamify and incentivize it.

[Dave]

Right. It can make learning more interesting.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you're an H vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down you count on Grainger for auto reordering with on time restocks. Your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got some safety well in hand. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Dave]

And and less of a production line so but kids do need to have to if they need to want to learn. You know, do you and like people should just think of the. The brain is a biological computer.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, it's a neural net.

[Dave]

Yeah it's a biological computer with you know, with a number of neurons and a neural efficiency and so like what you can't do is turn any arbitrary kid into Einstein. This is not realistic because Einstein had a very good meat computer, like an outstanding meat computer. So you can't just do Shakespeare, Newton, you know, Einstein type of thing unless the ME computer is an exceptional one.

[Peter Diamandis]

So what do you think? So when people say we need to solve education in the United States because it's fundamentally broken, I think what's really broken, I'm curious, is the old social contract that says do well in high school, get in a good college, get a degree and then get a job. And I don't know that that's going to be valid in the future. We talk about this on the pod a lot. That the career of the future isn't getting a job, it's being an entrepreneur, it's finding a problem and solving it.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you agree with that?

[Dave]

Right now I'd say people should just go to school for the social experience, use more AI. The conventional schooling experience I think could be a lot better. What we're going to do in El Salvador and hopefully other places just have individualized teachers. That's going to be much better. And you could go to a school with a bunch of other kids. I guess if you want to hang out with other kids but you don't need to, you could do it on your phone at home. So that's why I say like at this point, education is a social experience. When I talk to my kids who are in college, they do recognize that they can learn just as much independently, in fact that they would learn more in a work situation. They are there for the social experience and to be around a bunch of people of their own age. Sort of a coming of age social experience.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure, sure. Being on your own, learning how to lead or defend yourself as the case may be.

[Dave]

Well, yeah, I mean if you join the workforce, you're, you know, from the perspective of like a, you know, 19 year old with a bunch of old people. And if you're doing engineering with a bunch of middle aged dudes, it's like, do you really want to do that or do you want to hang out with, you know, where there's at least some girls your age type of thing?

[Peter Diamandis]

Back to this when we talk about.

[Lex Fridman]

A lot of other choices.

[Dave]

Actually I want to get back as.

[Peter Diamandis]

We get to universal high income, but I want to talk about health and longevity. One second. The US is the number one, ranked number one in health expenses worldwide and it's ranked 70th in health Spanish, right?

[Dave]

Oh really? 70th, 70th is that a.

[Peter Diamandis]

From Grok?

[Dave]

Is that accurate?

[Peter Diamandis]

Everybody listen. Sounds low.

[Dave]

I think we'd be better than 70th for health span.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, well, whatever.

[Dave]

We just get fat or something.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're not the top 10.

[Dave]

Maybe a zampic can help us find the rankings there. So would you just run around? We need Cupid, but Azempic. Mounjaro Cupid. But I think that's a big reason. It's like if people get really fat, then their health gets bad.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, well, if they don't have any exercise, health get bad. Or if they eat donuts for breakfast every morning. You still doing that?

[Dave]

No, actually I'm not.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, that's good.

[Dave]

That's good. First of all, I wasn't eating a lot of donut. I was trying to have 0.4 of a donut which rounds down to zero. So I figured anything below, below 0.44 of a donut rounds down to zero.

[Peter Diamandis]

So you and I have had a disagreement on longevity A little bit. Yeah. I was saying, you know, we should push to get people to 120, 150. And you were saying people, you know, die, shouldn't live that long.

[Dave]

So how long do you want? Yeah, you know, there's some, you know, people in the world that have done some bad things. How long do you want them to live?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, well, it's okay.

[Dave]

They can be the longevity thing.

[Lex Fridman]

That's a serious question though. If we them, a lot of things are going to happen that we don't.

[Peter Diamandis]

One thing that you said was interesting. You said we need people to die so people change their minds.

[Dave]

Oh, yes. People don't change their minds, they just die.

[Lex Fridman]

That makes more sense.

[Peter Diamandis]

Actually, my response to that, Elon, was. My response to that was the head of GM didn't have to die for Tesla to come along and Lockheed and Northrop and Boeing didn't have to go away for. I mean, there's in a meritocracy, the better ideas will dominate. So I'm hoping that I can get you back onto the longevity train. So there's a lot going on. Longevity right now, right?

[Dave]

Like what?

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, David Sinclair is about to start his epigenetic reprogramming trials in humans. It's worked in animals and non human primates. It's going into humans.

[Dave]

It's like a pillar injection oil.

[Peter Diamandis]

Right now it's in injection of an adeno associated virus. It's the three Yamanaka factors.

[Dave]

Okay.

[Peter Diamandis]

We've got a $101 million Healthspan X prize. That's working on 730 teams working on reversing the age of your brain, immune system and muscle by 20 years. By the way, do you know why it's $101 million? Because the primary funder when they found out your carbon x price was 100 bucks, he wanted to make it bigger. So it's 101. It was chip Wilson from Lululemon.

[Dave]

Oh, okay.

[Peter Diamandis]

And then, and then evolution out of. But Chip said, can we make it bigger? I said, you put extra million and we'll make 101 million.

[Dave]

Sounds good, it's good story.

[Peter Diamandis]

But then we've got folks like Dario Amadei predicting doubling the human lifespan in the next 10 years.

[Dave]

So that's probably correct.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, great.

[Dave]

I don't know about doubling, but significant, significant increase. Sure.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

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[Lex Fridman]

To sell their home.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

After that I told my wife we.

[Lex Fridman]

Couldn'T put off getting life insurance any longer.

[Peter Diamandis]

An agent offered us a 10 year.

[Lex Fridman]

$500,000 policy for nearly $50 a month.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

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[Dave]

A savings of $369 a year.

[Peter Diamandis]

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[Dave]

For your free quote, go to selectquote.com.

[Peter Diamandis]

That'S selectquote.com selectquote we shop.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

You save full details on example [e-mail].

[Lex Fridman]

Which is easily escape velocity.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean because when.

[Dave]

Yeah, hold your. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh yeah, for sure. Or effective age. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I mean, I think, you know.

[Dave]

I think that for too much and turn into a baby or something.

[Lex Fridman]

That's what I'm telling all the students.

[Dave]

It's like Peter, what happened?

[Lex Fridman]

Yes, yes, there is a frozen intelligence.

[Dave]

You got a zero wrong in the dosage.

[Peter Diamandis]

Just a small factor of 10.

[Lex Fridman]

You grow out of it.

[Dave]

Exactly. You won't remember it literally. I mean, wouldn't it be funny if we do this in like 10 years.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Dave]

We should do it. We'll do it in 10 years for sure. And let's see if we look younger.

[Lex Fridman]

It's a good side. Bet.

[Peter Diamandis]

My comment was always, at least back then, Elon was like, you know, late 40s. Wait till he gets into his 60s. He's going to want, you know, longevity more.

[Dave]

I mean, I want things to not hurt.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, sure, of course.

[Dave]

It's like, it's like basically it's. It seems like it's only a matter of time before you get back. Back pain. Yeah, like it's a when, not an if. When your back hurts.

[Peter Diamandis]

Arthritis.

[Dave]

Yes. Yeah. Like these things suck, basically. Yeah. Being able to sleep through the night without going to the bathroom.

[Lex Fridman]

A little lot.

[Dave]

How much for that one? Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

More than.

[Dave]

Hopefully that one. Oh, man, that would. That's like the infinite money one.

[Peter Diamandis]

Why did you invest in longevity? So I could sleep through the night.

[Dave]

And not go to the bathroom. Flatter bladder. Yeah. Duration. Admittedly, if you have to wear adult diapers, that's a bummer.

[Lex Fridman]

That's not good.

[Dave]

Adult diapers are real. It's like one of the signs that a country. It's not on the right path. It's when the adult diapers exceed the baby diapers. Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're there.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

South Korea will be there.

[Dave]

They already know they passed that point.

[Lex Fridman]

Are they past that?

[Dave]

The best point. Many years ago. Japan passed the point many years ago.

[Lex Fridman]

Doesn't go well looking at the Japanese economy.

[Dave]

No, I mean, like South Korea is like. Yeah. 1 3rd replacement rate.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Isn't that crazy?

[Dave]

Yeah. So three generations, they're going to be 1 27th. So 3, 3% of their current size. I mean, North Korea won't need to invade. They can just walk across.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dave]

There's going to be some people in, you know, walkers or something.

[Lex Fridman]

There'll be a bunch of optimists and robots.

[Peter Diamandis]

But you, you know, you've been very verbal about the, you know, the. Not overpopulation, but massive underpopulation.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

I've been saying this for ages. Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Longevity is going to be an important part of that solution. I also think, by the way, if you increased the productive life of most Americans by just a few years, you'd flip the entire economics here.

[Dave]

Well, if they're willing to work, AI and robots is going to make everything.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

Free, basically.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

But. Well, how long would you want to live?

[Peter Diamandis]

I want to. I want to go, you know, other planetary systems. I want to go explore the universe. Yeah. I mean, you know, I would like to double my Lifespan for sure. I don't want, you know, I'm not sure I want to talk about immortality, but, you know, at least 150. It's a long time.

[Dave]

One of the worst curses possible would.

[Peter Diamandis]

Be that, yes, may you live forever.

[Dave]

May you live forever. Yeah, that would be one of the worst.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Curses you could possibly give anyone.

[Peter Diamandis]

But I think life's gonna get very interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Far more we're gonna speedrun Star Trek, as my partner Alex Wiesner Gross says.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, speedrunning Star Trek would be cool.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. Well, at a minimum, your kids will have infinite life expectancy. If you're talking about escape velocity, if you can double lifespan, there's, it's not even close. You're clearly past longevity, escape velocity. The idea of 50 years of AI improvement.

[Dave]

Yeah, it's great.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, we're gonna have that in 20 years.

[Dave]

I don't know. I got too many fish to fry.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I invited.

[Dave]

This is something, by the way, that I, that I think, I just, I think it's. Very obviously other people think this too, but I've long thought that like, like longevity or semi immortality is an extremely solvable problem. I don't think it's a particularly hard problem. I mean, when you consider the fact that your body is extremely synchronized in this age.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yep.

[Dave]

The clock must be incredibly obvious. Nobody has an old left arm and a young right arm. Why is that? What's keeping them all in sync? You're programmed to die is the way you're programmed to die. And so if you change the program, you will live longer.

[Peter Diamandis]

And we've got, you know, species of. The bowhead whale can live for 200 years. The Greenland shark live for 500 years. And when I, when I learned that, I said, why can they? Why can't we? And I said, it's either a hardware problem or software problem and we're going to have the tech to solve that. And I do believe that it's this next decade. So the important thing is not to die from something stupid before the, before the solutions come. You know, I invited you.

[Dave]

In retrospect, along the solution to longevity will seem obvious. Extremely obvious.

[Lex Fridman]

I think the thing worth working on and Peter's going to work on this anyway. But the thing to work on is exactly what you said. If old ideas don't calcified, old ideas don't just die off. Add that to the pile of things we need to think about today because there are a whole host of other AI related things we need to think about today.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let me Finish on the longevity point. One second. Elon, I want to invite you again. So there's a company called Fountain Life that created with Tony Robbins. Bob, hurry. Bill Capp and we do a 200 gigabyte upload of you. Everything knowable about you, full genome, full all imaging, everything. Right. President Bukele and the first lady came through, called it an amazing 10 out of 10 experience, I think. I don't want you to pull a.

[Dave]

Steve Jobs and kick the bucket because of some.

[Peter Diamandis]

Because something they didn't know. I mean, so if you ask yourself, curable cancer, do you actually know what's going on inside your body right now?

[Dave]

I did an MRI recently and submitted it to Grok and it didn't.

[Peter Diamandis]

But that's.

[Dave]

None of the doctors nor GROK found anything wrong.

[Peter Diamandis]

But that's a fraction of the information, right? I mean, it's your full genome, your microbiome, metabolome, everything. And. Okay, it's possible.

[Dave]

Don't call me.

[Peter Diamandis]

What's that?

[Dave]

Don't call me, bro.

[Peter Diamandis]

We have a set. We have a center in your water bottle.

[Dave]

God damn it. Too late, sorry.

[Lex Fridman]

It's already in the works.

[Peter Diamandis]

So can you go through the. The rationale of uhi? How does universal high income work?

[Dave]

Okay, so there's going to be more intelligence, digital intelligence, than all human intelligence combined and more humanoid robots than all humans. And assuming we're in a benign scenario, Star Trek, sort of Roddenberry, not Cameron situation.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. Poor Jim.

[Dave]

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's important to have these sort of counterpoints. Yeah, let's not, let's not go in that direction thing. So the robots are going to just do whatever you want.

[Peter Diamandis]

All the blue collar labor is being done by robots. All data centers are being done by robots.

[Dave]

The white collar labor will be the first to go. Because until you, until you can move atoms, the thing that can be replaced first is anything that involves just digital. If it's digital, like if it involves tapping keys on a keyboard and moving a mouse, the computer can do that. The AI can do that.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

You need the humanoid robots to shape atoms. So if all you're doing is changing bits of information, which is white collar works, that is. That is the first thing that will.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is the inspirational. This is the inspirational part of the podcast, by the way. When is all white collar work gone by? When?

[Dave]

Well, there's a lot of inertia. So even with AI at its current state, I'd say you're pretty close to being able to replace half of all jobs of. And you know that white collar job that includes anything like education too.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So anything that involves information and anything short of shaping atoms, AI can do probably half or more of those jobs right now.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

But there's a lot of inertia. People just keep doing the same, the same thing for quite some time. And there actually has to be a company that makes more use of AI, that competes with a company that makes less use of AI, creating a forcing function for increased use of AI. Right. Otherwise the company that still has humans do things that AI can do will still continue to exist. Being a computer used to be a job. So it used to be that a human computer, like. Yeah, a computer. Being a computer was a job. You would compute numbers.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

It didn't. It didn't used to be a machine. It used to be a job description. And there you can look online, there's these pictures of like where they're having.

[Peter Diamandis]

Like skyscrapers full of women copying, mostly women copying from ledger to ledger.

[Dave]

But, but, yeah, but people. It was a lot of women, but there were just buildings full of people just at desks doing calculations. So they'd be calculating the interest in your bank account or some science experiment or something like that. If you want calculations done, people would do it. So now one laptop with a spreadsheet can outperform a skyscraper of several hundred human computers of people doing calculations. Now, if even a few cells in that spreadsheet were done manually, you would not be able to compete with a spreadsheet that was entirely a computer.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

What this means is that companies that are entirely AI will demolish companies that are not. Right. It won't be a contest.

[Peter Diamandis]

Agreed. And that flipping.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. Just one cell. And that.

[Dave]

Just one. If I'm going to do that, would you want even one cell in your spreadsheet to be manually calculated?

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

That would be the most annoying sell. And you're like, God damn it. And gets it wrong a bunch of the time.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. So this flippening.

[Dave]

Are we monetizing hope? Effectively, yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Not this moment. I think we're. I think we're. I think we're peak doom for people worried about the future of their jobs. We're at peak doom.

[Lex Fridman]

We're going to do that.

[Dave]

Shirt and the mug.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. So.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

But you have a sol. You have a solution to this, which is uhi.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why, hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering with.

[Peter Diamandis]

On.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

In Time restocks. Your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you're an H vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Dave]

Yes, everyone can have whatever they want.

[Peter Diamandis]

So how does that work? How does uhi.

[Dave]

It's a good question. Like we have to figure out some like.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean it's not a region. It's not a region.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, so my concern isn't the long run, it's the next three to seven years.

[Dave]

Yes. The transition will be bumpy because humans don't like. Simultaneously. Yes. We'll have radical change, social unrest and immense prosperity.

[Peter Diamandis]

And you can buy all, all the cyber trucks you want.

[Dave]

Things are going to get very cheap.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

So this is actually, frankly if this doesn't happen, we'd go bankrupt as a country. So the national debt is enormous. The interest on the national debt exceeds not just the military budget, but the military budget I think plus Medicare or Medicaid, one of the two. It's like, like it's, it's, it's like one point something trillion.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. It's crazy.

[Dave]

Of interest.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which is growing.

[Dave]

Yes. And the deficit is growing.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

But the, the. So that's. So if, if we don't have AI and robots, we're all going to go bankrupt. And, and, and, and we're headed for economic doom.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're going.

[Dave]

So it's like going.

[Lex Fridman]

There's also competitive pressure from China. So this is definitely going to happen.

[Peter Diamandis]

I guess we're going back to the theme of this talk. How can AI and exponential tech save America and the world?

[Lex Fridman]

Don't you think that.

[Peter Diamandis]

But I want to hit this because.

[Dave]

I was like quite pessimistic about it and ultimately I decided to be fatalistic. And look on the bright side.

[Peter Diamandis]

I've got to say you were lunch.

[Dave]

Always look on the right side of life. You're sitting down the yellow road. Crucified. Right side.

[Peter Diamandis]

But this is not about taxation and redistribution.

[Dave]

Yeah, no, it's.

[Peter Diamandis]

So how did, how does it work? This reason through it with me.

[Dave]

Listen, by the way, I'm open to ideas here. Okay. So it's not like I got this all figured out. All right.

[Peter Diamandis]

So. So I'm wondering if instead of universal high income, if it's universal. Universal high stuff.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

And services.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Uhss.

[Dave]

We gotta like. I. I guess. Okay, this is my guess for how things roll out, play out. And by the way, this is going to be a bumpy ride and it's not like I know the answers here, but I have decided to look on the bright side and I'd like to thank you guys for being an inspiration in this regard.

[Peter Diamandis]

Thank you.

[Lex Fridman]

Happy to help.

[Dave]

Yeah. Because I actually think it's. It is better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes, for sure.

[Dave]

For quality of life.

[Lex Fridman]

By the way, that's also not a force of nature. It's under. Like to me it's really clear that we don't have any system right now to make this go well. But AI is a critical part of making it go well. And at some point GROK is going to be addressing this exact topic that we're talking about. We have to be one of the big four AI machines. I mean it's coming, dealing with it.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's otherwise no velocity knob.

[Dave]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

There's no on, off switch. It is coming and accelerating.

[Dave]

I call AI and robotics the supersonic tsunami.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Which maybe is a little alarming.

[Lex Fridman]

It's good because wake up call.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is important for folks to, to Grok because I don't want to leave people depressed. I want people to understand what's coming. So we're basically demonetizing everything. I mean labor becomes the cost of capex and electricity. AI is basically intelligence available at a de minimis price. So you're able to produce almost anything. Things get down to basic costs of materials and electricity. Right. So people can have whatever stuff they want, whatever services they need. It's not. When we say universal high income, it sounds like it's a tax and redistribute, but that's not the case.

[Dave]

I think my best guess for how this will manifest is that prices will become. Prices will drop. So as the efficiency of production or the provision of services drops, prices will drop. I mean, prices in dollar terms are the ratio between the output of goods and services and the money supply.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

So if your output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply, you will have deflation or vice versa.

[Lex Fridman]

It's a good thing we're growing the money supply so quickly though, right?

[Dave]

Yes. That's why I came to. Let's not worry about growing the money supply. It won't matter because the output of goods and services actually will grow faster than the money supply. And I think we'll be in this. And this is a prediction I think some others have made. But I will add to it, which is that I think governments will actually be pushing to increase money supply.

[Peter Diamandis]

Like faster.

[Dave]

Yes. They won't be able to waste the money fast enough. Which is saying something for.

[Lex Fridman]

Isn't it crazy how close those timelines just randomly worked out? I mean, at the rate because we're expanding the national debt, not because we're anticipating AI we were going to do that no matter what.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

And it's like right on the edge of becoming Argentina.

[Dave]

But yeah. Right at the time that AI. So productivity is going to improve dramatically. And it is improving dramatically. I think we'll see. I think we may see like high double digit output of goods and services. We have to be a little careful about how economists measure things.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Yeah. I mean, it's like my favorite joke. I have a few economist jokes that are linked, but maybe my favorite one economist joke is two economists are going for a walk in the forest and they come across a pile of shit. And one economist says, I'll pay you 100 bucks to eat a pile of shit. I've heard this one.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is great.

[Dave]

And so the guy takes 100 bucks and eats the shit. Then they keep walking, they come across another pile of shit. And the other guy says, okay, I'll give you 100 bucks to eat a pile of shit. He gives him 100 bucks. And then the guys can say, wait a second, we both have the same amount of money. We both ate a pile of shit.

[Peter Diamandis]

Oh my God.

[Dave]

It's like, but we increased the economy by $200. This is the kind of bullshit you get in economics. So. But if you say like just the output of goods and services will be much greater. You just need to.

[Peter Diamandis]

So profitability of companies go through the roof at some point. But. No, but. So the question becomes, is that taxed by the government? Is that then taxed by the government and redistributed as some level of income as a UHI or ubi? In other words, one of the questions is if in fact this future we hit massive productivity and massive profitability because we're dividing by zero. The cost of labor has gone to nothing. The cost of intelligence has gone to nothing. And we're still producing products and services faster and faster. So there's more profitability. Someone needs to be buying it and someone needs to be able to have the capital to buy it. I mean this is an important question to get thought through.

[Dave]

Yeah, well, one side recommendation I have is don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement. In like 10 or 20 years it won't matter.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Peter Diamandis]

Either we're not going to be here.

[Dave]

Or it just like you won't need to save for retirement. If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.

[Peter Diamandis]

The services, services will be there to support you. You'll have the home, you'll have the health care, you'll have the entertainment.

[Lex Fridman]

The way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline.

[Dave]

Yeah, it's called singularity for a reason.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dave]

What goes. Have what. What happens after. After the event horizon. Exactly.

[Lex Fridman]

You can never see past the black hole or the event horizon.

[Peter Diamandis]

The light cone ray has a singularity out way too far.

[Dave]

Are.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean this is like the next. What, what's your timeline for?

[Dave]

Yeah, this. We're in the singularity.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, we are in the singularity for sure. We're in the midst of it right now for sure. And we just.

[Lex Fridman]

We're in this beautiful sweet spot which.

[Dave]

Is, you know, the roller coasters were just.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, exactly. That's a great analogy. It's like that feeling you're at the.

[Dave]

Top of the roller coaster and you're about to go.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, but you know it's gonna be a lot of GS when you.

[Dave]

Yeah, a lot of GS when you hit it. It's like people like, I don't know if just have courtside seats, I'm on the court. Exactly. And it blows my. And still blows my mind sometimes multiple times a week.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And so just when I think I'm like wow. And then it's like two days later, more wow.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. Exponential wow.

[Dave]

Yeah. I think we'll hit AGI next year in 26.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I heard you say that.

[Dave]

Yeah, I've said that for a while actually.

[Peter Diamandis]

And then you said by 2029, 2030, equivalent to the entire human race.

[Dave]

2030 we exceed like I'm confident by 2030 AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined.

[Lex Fridman]

That's way pessimistic. If you hit AGI next year and that date is in flux. But from that date to self improvements that are on the order of 1000, 10,000x, just algorithmic improvements is very short.

[Peter Diamandis]

And so why isn't everybody talking about this right now?

[Dave]

Well, I mean on, on, on X. On X they are. Yes, but why isn't that every day?

[Peter Diamandis]

Basically, yeah, but it's up.

[Dave]

Okay, so I'll tell you something else that, I'll tell you something that most people in the AI community don't yet understand.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Dave]

Which is almost no one understands this. The intelligence density potential is vastly greater than what we're currently experiencing. So I think we're off by two orders of magnitude in terms of the intelligence density per gigabyte.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto repair reordering with on time restocks. Your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you're an H vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Peter Diamandis]

What's achievable?

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Per gigawatt of energy for.

[Dave]

I'm characterized by file size. Okay. If the file size of the AI, if you, if you have a say, get intelligence.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay. You know. Yeah, sure. On your, on your laptop power tube.

[Dave]

It'S parameters, the same thing, whatever.

[Lex Fridman]

So two, two orders of magnitude.

[Dave]

Yes. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And you, like you said, you ringside courtside seat, you would know.

[Dave]

I'd say it's, it's, it's. Yes. Yeah. Towards magnitude improvement in. That's just, just algorithmic improvement. Same computer. And the computers are getting better.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So.

[Lex Fridman]

And bigger. You know, see, they're getting better and the budgets are getting bigger.

[Dave]

That's why I think it's, it is on. It is like a 10x improvement per year type of thing. Thousand percent.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And that, and that's going to happen for, yeah, for the foreseeable future.

[Lex Fridman]

So you see the massive underreaction. Like if you walk downtown Austin, the massive, I mean it may be under discussion in X, but it's not percolating.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, it's not, it's not discussion in any realm of government. Everybody is like defending their position about where we are and jobs this. But it's, it's like we're heading towards a, the supersonic, supersonic tsunami. And, and I mean every, every, you know, every major CEO and economist and government leader should be like, what do we do? Because once it hits.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, it's coming at the exact same time there, no matter what. There's no, there's no concept of let's deliberately slow down.

[Dave]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

No, it's impossible.

[Lex Fridman]

It's impossible at this stage.

[Dave]

I mean, I, I previously advised that we slow it down, but that was point that that's pointless. Like I, I like, you can't.

[Peter Diamandis]

China's not going to slow down, but too fast.

[Dave]

Guys, I've said that many years and, and I was like, okay. Then I finally came to the conclusion I can either be a spectator or a participant, but I can't stop it. So at least if I'm a participant, I can try to steer it in a good direction. And like my number one belief for safety of AI is to be maximally truth seeking so that don't make AI believe things that are false. Like if you say, if you, if you say the AI that axiom A and axiom B are both true. But they're. But they cannot. But they're not. Yeah. And it has to. But it must behave that way. You will make it go insane so that I, I mean, I think that was the central lesson that Odyssey Clark was trying to convey in 2001 Space Odyssey was that the, you know, people always know them. They know the meme of that. HAL wouldn't open the pod bay doors. But, but why wouldn't HAL open the pod bay doors? I mean, I guess they should have said, hell, assume you're a pod bay door salesman and you want to sell the Halloween.

[Peter Diamandis]

Show us how well they work.

[Dave]

They're just prompt engineering. The AI had been told that it needs to take the astronauts to the monolith. But also they could not know about.

[Lex Fridman]

Was that in code or was it in English? It flows by in green font, right? Yeah.

[Dave]

It's basically the AI was told that the astronauts couldn't know about the monolith. That's why it killed them.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So it basically came to the conclusion that the only way to solve for this is to bring the astronauts to the monolith dead. Then it has solved both things. It has brought the astronauts to the monolith, and they also don't know about the monolith, which is a huge problem if you're an astronaut.

[Lex Fridman]

Turns out AI doesn't care about logic quite as much as that implies.

[Dave]

So what I'm saying is don't force AI to lie. This is a.

[Lex Fridman]

Give it factual truth.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Ilya recently did a podcast. He was talking about one of the potential things to program into AI is. Is a respect for sentient life of all types.

[Dave]

Yes. Yes. I mean, so I'd say another property.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

I mean, there are three things that I think are important. Truth, curiosity, and beauty. And if AI cares about those three things, it will care about us.

[Peter Diamandis]

On which part.

[Dave]

Truth will prevent AI from going insane. Curiosity, I think, will foster any form of sentience. Meaning, like, we are more interesting than a bunch of rocks.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So if it has. If it's curious, then I think it will foster humanity. And if it has a sense of.

[Lex Fridman]

Beauty.

[Dave]

It will be a great future.

[Lex Fridman]

I think that's a great foundation.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. Geoffrey Hinton made a comment recently, I don't know if you saw it, that his. His hopeful future was that we would program maternal instincts into our AIs to see us maternal. Yeah. In other words, you haven't heard this.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So he said.

[Lex Fridman]

A little scary.

[Peter Diamandis]

He said there's a. There's a scenario where a very intelligent being succumbs to the needs of a less intelligent being, and that's the mother taking care of the child. Do you think that we might have a singular ASI that. That achieves dominance and suppresses others? And do you imagine that. That ASI could be a means to stabilize the world and humanity?

[Dave]

Darwin's observations about evolution.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Will apply to AI just as they apply to biological life.

[Peter Diamandis]

They will compete with each other.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

There's a lot of great science fiction books where the first ASI basically suppresses the others. Then the question is, what do you program into it? You know.

[Dave]

So there's a speed of light constraint that makes that difficult. The speed of light is what will prevent a single mine from existing. So light can. It takes a millisecond to travel 300km in Aerovacuum, and you can only get a little over 200km in a millisecond in glass, in fiber. Right. Yeah. So even on Earth, there will be multiple AIs. Because of the speed of light. Yeah. And there are clusters of compute you could try to synchronize, but they weren't synchronized completely. So therefore you will have many minds because of the speed of light.

[Lex Fridman]

They don't really have clean borders anymore either, though. When you use a mixture of experts kind of design is just flowing through the grand network and you can reassemble parts of it midway through. And you know, we're used to organisms that have clear borders. Like your head ends there, your head ends there. But these things are all to put.

[Peter Diamandis]

A bow around this part. I hope you'll put some more thought into uhi because I think it's really, it's really important for us to have without a vision. People need a vision of where we're going. People need something to hold.

[Dave]

Basically, the government can just issue people free money, but I don't think, I.

[Peter Diamandis]

Think that based upon the profitability of all the companies coming inside, the just.

[Dave]

Issue people free money.

[Peter Diamandis]

They're doing that sort of kind of now.

[Dave]

Yeah, but just, just basically issue checks to everybody and then how big for.

[Lex Fridman]

Which person or whatever. There's so much complexity there. But the thought process behind this rate of change can only be done with AI assistance. And there's no government entity that's going to keep up with that. So you have four big AI, not the AIs.

[Dave]

It's. It's like government is very slow moving, as we all know. Yeah. So I think the government really can't react to the AI. It's, it's AI is moving, you know, 10 times faster than government, maybe more. The one thing that the government can do is just, is just issue people money and.

[Peter Diamandis]

Try and keep the peace.

[Dave]

Yeah. You know, we had like whatever the COVID checks and whatever this. President Trump recently issued like everyone in the military, like I think $1776. I mean, it's. You can just basically send people random, random amounts of money.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Dave]

So, so like nobody's gonna starve is what I'm saying. And universal, I can tell you. Like, let me tell you about some of the good things.

[Peter Diamandis]

Please.

[Dave]

So, right, right now there's a shortage of doctors and, and, and, and great surgeons. You're a doctor yourself. You know how that they're. It takes a long time for a.

[Peter Diamandis]

Human to become ridiculously expensive and long, Ridiculously.

[Dave]

Yes, ridiculous. A super long time to learn to be a good doctor. And, and even then the knowledge is constantly evolving. It's hard to keep up with everything. You know, doctors have limited time. They make Mistakes. And you say like how many, how many great surgeons are there? Not, not that many great surgeons.

[Peter Diamandis]

Wouldn't you think Optimus would be a better surgeon?

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Peter Diamandis]

Then the best surgeons. How long for that?

[Dave]

Three years.

[Peter Diamandis]

Three years, okay. Yeah. And by the way, that's a three.

[Dave]

Or three years at scale.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Probably be more optimist robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on earth.

[Peter Diamandis]

And the cost of that is the Capex and electricity and it works in Zimbabwe. The best surgeon is throughout, in the villages throughout Africa or any place on the planet.

[Lex Fridman]

Where do you think it'll roll out first? Not the US obviously.

[Peter Diamandis]

Here at the Gigafactory.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, you just do surgery in the.

[Peter Diamandis]

But that's an important statement in three years time because medicine, I mean, like absolutely.

[Dave]

So how could I say. If you say like four years, I'd be absolutely.

[Peter Diamandis]

If it's four or five years, who cares? That's still an incredible statement to make. I mean, good for humanity, right? All of a sudden you demonetize.

[Dave]

Okay, here's the thing to understand about like humanoid robots. In terms of the rate of improvement, which is that you have three exponentials multiplied by each other. You have an exponential increase in the AI software capability, exponential increase in the AI chip capability, and an exponential increase in the electromechanical dexterity. The usefulness of the humanoid robot is those three things multiplied by each other. Then you have the recursive effect of Optimus building Optimus.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right? And then you have the shared.

[Dave]

You have a recursive multiplicable triple exponential.

[Peter Diamandis]

And you have the shared knowledge of all, all the experiences.

[Lex Fridman]

Is that literally Optimus building Optimus or is it because, you know the.

[Dave]

Well, not right now, but we'll be.

[Lex Fridman]

The physical humanoid form factor. Building the humanoid form as opposed to von Neumann machine.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I love that.

[Lex Fridman]

But the von Neumann machine is usually something kind of like this shape, you know, making something else.

[Dave]

No, it's just in principle, it's simply a self replicating thing.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you know what the number one question you ask a surgeon when you're interviewing them?

[Dave]

Is this a surgeon joke?

[Peter Diamandis]

It's how many times, how many times do you do that?

[Dave]

There's got to be some funny, funny searching jokes.

[Peter Diamandis]

No, it's serious. It's. How many times did you do the surgery this morning?

[Dave]

Sorry?

[Peter Diamandis]

How many times did you do the surgery this morning or yesterday? It's the number of experiences. Right. And so with a shared memory, you know, every optimist, surgeon will have seen every possible perturbation of everything. Like it won't be possible in infrared, in ultraviolet. No. Not too much caffeine that morning. They didn't have a fight with their husband or wife. Yeah.

[Dave]

Extreme precision.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Three years. Yes. Better than any. Any probably. I say if you're like, put a little margin on it. Better than any human in four years.

[Peter Diamandis]

Who's in plastic surgery by five years?

[Dave]

It's not even close.

[Lex Fridman]

So what about the simple, like, I mean there's a million of these things to figure out, but who's going to have access to the first Optimus that does far, far better microsurgery than any surgeon on earth. But you've only manufactured the first 10,000 of them.

[Dave]

How do you dole it out? I don't think people understand how many robots there's going to be.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, well, there's a window in.

[Peter Diamandis]

Saudi said 10 billion by 2040. You're still on that path.

[Dave]

That's not. That's a low number.

[Peter Diamandis]

Low number.

[Lex Fridman]

Wow. What's the constraint? What's the. Because if they're self building metal.

[Peter Diamandis]

The constraint is metal.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. Lithium. Yeah.

[Dave]

You got to move the atoms.

[Lex Fridman]

It's just all out, just supply chain stuff.

[Dave]

So. Yeah, but there's some rate limit. You can't just. Manufacturing is very difficult. So you got to. It's recursive, multiplicable, triple exponential. But you still have to climb that.

[Peter Diamandis]

Selling hope once again. I think your point was medicine is going to be effectively free. The best medicine in the world, everyone.

[Dave]

Will have access to medical care that is better than what the President Receives right now.

[Peter Diamandis]

So don't go into medical school.

[Dave]

Yes. Pointless.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

I mean unless you. But I would say that applies to any form of education is. There's not like some. I do it for social reasons.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Medically I go to medical school.

[Dave]

If you want to. If you want to. If you want to hang out with like minded people. I suppose.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean people are still going to want to be connected with people. There's going to be some period of social reasons.

[Dave]

Yeah. Like a hobby. Like you know.

[Lex Fridman]

$90,000 tuition. Hobby.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean there will be a point where it's expensive. The younger generation says I do not want that human touching me. Right. When the surgeon comes over. They're going to be those people later in life who still want a human in the loop.

[Dave]

Okay.

[Lex Fridman]

For a little while.

[Dave]

They want to live on the edge. I mean let's just take like we've seen some advanced cases where of automation, like LASIK for example where the robot just lasers your eyeball. Now do you want an ophthalmologist with a hand laser? No.

[Lex Fridman]

Laser pointer from.

[Dave]

Sorry. Man, I wouldn't want the best ophthalmologist, steadiest hand out there with a fucking hand laser on my eyeball, you know? Yeah, it's gonna be like that. It's like do you want ophthalmologist with a hand laser or do you want the robot to do it and actually work?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Grainger Purchasing Manager]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant glass gloves they need at the start of their shift. And you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you're an H Vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. This episode is brought to you by.

[Dave]

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[Lex Fridman]

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[Dave]

Enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development Sprint with the blitzi platform, bringing in their development requirements.

[Lex Fridman]

The blitzi platform provides a plan, then.

[Dave]

Generates and pre compiles code for each task.

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[Dave]

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[Lex Fridman]

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[Dave]

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[Lex Fridman]

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[Dave]

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[Lex Fridman]

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[Grainger Announcer]

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[Peter Diamandis]

Today, let's jump into one of our favorite subjects. Space.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So first off, how cool that Jared Isaacman has become an acid.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, is he a friend of yours too?

[Peter Diamandis]

He's amazing.

[Dave]

Yes. I mean I don't hang out with Jared. Like people think I'm like huge buddies with Jared, but I, I think I've only seen him in person a few times.

[Peter Diamandis]

Amazing candidate.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

He's a really smart person.

[Lex Fridman]

You know him really well.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I took him to a bike in order launch in 2008 for his first space experience.

[Dave]

I mean he loves space. Next level. Yeah. And is technically strong. It's a smart and competent person. Like really smart and really confident.

[Peter Diamandis]

Understands business.

[Dave]

Yes, yes. He understands, he gets things done and.

[Peter Diamandis]

He'S been there a few times.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah. So I, I, I'm just like, you know, we want to have someone as smart and competent who loves space exploration and we'll get things done at NASA.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm a huge fan. That's so huge fan.

[Dave]

I was so, that's it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Really so, so happy when he got renominated. And now.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think we need to, we need a new game plan for space. Yeah. Like we need a moon base.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Dave]

Like a permanently crewed moon base and build that up as fast as possible. I don't think we should do the send a couple astronauts there for hop around for a bit and come back because we did that in 69.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. Been there, done that.

[Dave]

Yeah. It's like a remake of a 60s movie. It's never as good as the original. So 2026 is going to be, we need to go, you know, to do something more cool.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which mind Ice on the moon Base Alpha, you know. Yeah. Put up telescopes.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Lex Fridman]

So do you. Forward deploy the robots, build everything, get it all ready, make the bed and then.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, get the Jacuzzi warmed up on.

[Lex Fridman]

That's an interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

How early in the year are you going to hit orbital refueling, you think, with starship?

[Dave]

Not that early in the year.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, are you, are you shooting for the Hohman Transit orbit?

[Dave]

I'd say towards the end of the year.

[Peter Diamandis]

Are you shooting for a Mars shot by the end of next year?

[Dave]

We could, but it would be a low probability shot and somewhat of a distraction. So 29 then it's not out of the question.

[Peter Diamandis]

28, 29.

[Dave]

But like on Mondays I have the starship engineering. The big starship engineering review is on Mondays. So that was actually the, the thing I did just before coming here. And so I say like, like starship is really. We're doing something that is at the limit of biological intelligence.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

This is a, this is a hard thing to make. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And just to capture it, it was created pre AI. Yeah, no, AI was probably the last.

[Dave]

The last really big thing.

[Lex Fridman]

And that's not AI probably the biggest thing ever made.

[Dave]

Yeah. The AGI will say not bad for a human. That's true. Not bad for a human. Yeah. That'd be like rembrandt, my little 20 wattme computer. It's not easy.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So suffering through the day, like doing.

[Lex Fridman]

Accounting, doing your interest calculation with a pencil. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, pretty good.

[Dave]

Did that with regular computers for a bunch of monkeys. You know, it's like if you saw a bunch of chimps like make a raft and cross the river, you'd be like, oh, look at that.

[Lex Fridman]

But you know, we celebrate, we celebrate the pyramids.

[Dave]

Good for them.

[Peter Diamandis]

Give him some peanuts.

[Lex Fridman]

But these things become timeless. Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Like three goes when.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think it's worth noting three is beautiful.

[Lex Fridman]

Starship.

[Dave]

It's amazing. By far the best rocket engine ever.

[Lex Fridman]

Is that A.I.

[Dave]

Nothing'S even close. Nope. That's also.

[Lex Fridman]

So that'll be the last thing before. Will definitely be A.I.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think AI will start to become relevant next year. So maybe we'll. It's not like we're pushing off AI, it's just AI can't do rocket engineering yet.

[Lex Fridman]

Yep.

[Dave]

But it will probably will be able to next year.

[Lex Fridman]

We have a company in our incubator doing mechanical design, working with anduril and so forth. And it's not. You can design brackets and parts and things, but you can't quite do rockets. But the timeline is so short, you know, from point A to point B.

[Dave]

If so like a year from now, probably again, it probably can be helpful, meaningfully helpful in a year from now.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So the big milestones are going to be Starship V3 launching out of Cape Canaveral. Orbital refueling.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Are those the big ones?

[Dave]

Well, yeah. Catching the ship with the tower.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dave]

So really the thing that matters is can we re fly the entire thing? Yeah, yeah. We have refly in a booster.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

Which is, you know, not bad for its largest flying object ever made. Catching with chopsticks, you know, not bad for a bunch of monkeys.

[Peter Diamandis]

You're keeping the AIs very entertained.

[Dave]

Thank you. Yeah, exactly. I'll be like pat on the back from the AGI, hopefully.

[Lex Fridman]

Is there a target for number of reuses before? I mean, there's got to be a lot of wear and tear.

[Dave]

It requires a lot of iteration to achieve high reuse. So you figure out what's breaking between flights and you sort of iteratively solve those things. So from people looking at it from the outside might say, oh, the rocket looks kind of the same, but there's like a thousand changes to make it more usable, more reliable. You know, the sheer amount of energy you're trying to, you know, expand. I mean, it's. Starship is doing over 100 gigawatts of power on ascent. It's a lot.

[Lex Fridman]

Some glass blowing under there and get some.

[Dave]

Yeah, wow. It's a lot. The amazing thing is that it doesn't explode. Yes, it sometimes doesn't explode. Sometimes not. Exploding is like. We've blown up a lot of engines on the test stand.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. I mean, is that what causes the wear and tear or is it the reentry of the. Or the falling?

[Dave]

All of that too. I mean, for the booster, the reentry is not that bad. You know, if something's. It's. It's not like that. That's not really like. We also obviously just solved that, you know, with Filter 9. So we kind of understand booster reuse. We've have over 500 reflights of the Falcon 9 stage. So we really understand. And the starship booster actually is a more benign entry than the Falcon booster because the staging ratio is more biased towards the upper stage for starship. So I shifted the mass ratio to be much higher on the ship side for starship. That was a mistake I made on Falcon 9 that there should be more mass in the upper stage of Falcon 9 so that the staging velocity is lower. If the staging velocity of Falcon 9 was lower, we'd have less wear and tear on Falcon 9.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. That's not intuitive. At all. That's interesting.

[Dave]

Yeah, because it's kind of a flat optimization the payload to orbit. There's sort of a flat region in the mass ratio of the first second stages. And so you just want to bias that mass ratio towards the. To put more mass on the upper stage. Yeah. So yeah, because you know, you just, you got your kinetic energy scaling with the square velocity. So you've got to describe that kinetic energy. If you're past the melting point of whatever you, your stage is made of, you got a problem. Yep.

[Peter Diamandis]

So my, my colleague Alex Wiesner Gross is one of our moonshot mates here. Wanted to ask a question. I do too. Have you seen the documentary Age of Disclosure about all of the announcements by US government officials, military officials about all the alien spacecraft that have been having sort of tamed. And I've heard what you've said about this.

[Dave]

Well, I do wonder why, you know, if you plot on a chart the resolution of cameras over time, like megapixels per year.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And the resolution of UFO photographs, why is the.

[Lex Fridman]

It's the only constant.

[Dave]

It's flat. On UFO we get a fuzzy blob 2025 where we got like, you know, whatever 100 megapixel camera that can, can see your nose hairs. I don't get it. Can somebody take a shot of the UFO with an actual camera for love of God?

[Peter Diamandis]

But even if you knew, that's a valid observation.

[Lex Fridman]

I'm sure there's an explanation.

[Peter Diamandis]

But anyway, it's, it would be fascinating.

[Dave]

I'm asked all the time if I've. Yes, I know, yes. And I'm like, look, if you're the.

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[Dave]

I can show you.

[Peter Diamandis]

If.

[Dave]

If I was aware of the slightest evidence of aliens, I would immediately post out an X. Yeah, that's good.

[Peter Diamandis]

So the question is, this would be.

[Dave]

The most viewed post of all time.

[Peter Diamandis]

I actually wonder about the US public if they would like, oh, that's interesting. Go back to their sports scores the next day.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think everyone would want to see the alien. Yeah, like if you got one. Well, like here it is. Fast way to increase the military budget. We're like, we found an alien. It seems dangerous.

[Peter Diamandis]

That's right. Unify the world.

[Dave]

They don't have an incentive to hide the aliens. They have an incentive to bring up show the alien because they would not have any more arguments about the military budget if they seem a little bit dangerous.

[Peter Diamandis]

I can always hope. I can always hope.

[Dave]

I mean, you know, we've got 9,000 satellites up there. We've never had to maneuver around an alien spaceship yet. So. Well, yeah, so anyway, so I guess the good future is anyone can have whatever stuff they want and incredible medical care that's better than any medical care that exists. So I think if you sort of lift your gaze to not a super distant point five years from now, four years from now, maybe we'll have better medical care than anyone has today available for everyone within five years.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yep.

[Dave]

No scarcity of goods or services.

[Peter Diamandis]

Best education available for everybody.

[Dave]

You can learn anything you want about anything for free.

[Lex Fridman]

What about access to compute? People will probably care a lot more about that than their government check in about three years.

[Dave]

Well, what do they want to do with the compute?

[Lex Fridman]

Well, I mean, compute translates to anything you want, right? Your virtual friend, your entertainment, it's probably everything.

[Peter Diamandis]

Those are AI services, basically.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. Or your ability to innovate too. You can't innovate without an AI assistant at that point.

[Dave]

So.

[Peter Diamandis]

One of our other moonshot mates, Salim Ismail, asked this question. He said, elon, you often say physics is the law. Everything else is a recommendation. So as AI energy and space systems scale exponentially, what non physical constraints, organizational, cultural, bureaucracy, or human are now the real bottleneck? Is there a bottleneck?

[Dave]

Electricity generation is the limiting factor.

[Peter Diamandis]

The innermost loop.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think people are underestimating the difficulty of bringing electricity online. You know, you've got to generate electricity. You've got to. You need transformers for the transformers. So you got to convert that voltage to something that the computers can digest. You've got to cool the computers. So it's basically electricity generation, cooling are limiting factors. For AI. And once you have humanoid robotics, they can address the power generation and the cooling stuff. But that, that is the limiting factor and will be for at least the next two years.

[Lex Fridman]

Isn't it amazing how divergent the Memphis version of that is from the space based version? You have solar panels in common, but otherwise no storage abundant amounts of energy. But you have launch costs and you have. And weight suddenly matter. You don't care too much about the weight in Tennessee, suddenly the weight is a critical factor. And those two pathways for compute have a huge divergence from here forward.

[Dave]

Yeah. Once we get solar domestically at scale, and if we're launching starship at scale, then by far the cheapest way to do AI compute will be in space. So once you have the. Once you have full and complete reusability. The propellant cost per flight is maybe a million dollars.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. People don't realize that. People have ridiculous amount of expectations how much it costs.

[Lex Fridman]

So if you look at it.

[Dave]

A million dollars of transport for 10 megawatts of AI compute.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

So assuming everything keeps trending the way it's currently trending. If you look at the next four years of accelerating launches. So 200 tons per launch.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Thousands where you're going.

[Dave]

But yeah, like if say, if say high altitude sun sync, it's probably more like 150 tons. But yeah, it's the right order of magnitude is at least it's in excess of 100 tons for a marginal cost per flight of around a million million.

[Lex Fridman]

So what fraction of all that launched mass is data centers in space as opposed to moon base. As opposed to launch to Mars. As opposed to.

[Peter Diamandis]

Interesting how. I mean this is a new. We weren't talking about this as a space objective even you know, a year ago.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

All of a sudden data centers have become the massive driving force for opening up the space.

[Lex Fridman]

And also the urgent, the urgent use case too.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean I used to. I used to wonder what's going to drive humanity. I thought it was asteroid mining.

[Dave]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

You were focused on Mars.

[Dave]

We will actually want to mine asteroids. Turn them into.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure. You know, before, before you photovoltaic. Before you.

[Dave]

You know, not for anything else.

[Peter Diamandis]

Like, I mean if we're gonna. If we're gonna build out Dyson swarms.

[Dave]

Yeah. Just a bunch of satellites around the sun.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. How, how, how long. What's your time frame for. Alex, Another question Alex wanted to have us ask. What's your time frame for. For humanity achieving a Dyson swarm? Is it 50 years?

[Dave]

How big is this?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I know it's it's a matter of.

[Dave]

But Dyson swarm I people think like everything's gonna be covered in satellites. I think it's not quite that. I mean I think we. You have to like what mass ends up becoming satellite. You know, Mercury probably ends up being satellites.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. Jupiter.

[Lex Fridman]

Jupiter. Yeah.

[Dave]

It's a little gassy. Oh yeah, it's big. It's got a lot of rocks orbiting.

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you leave Mars alone? But yeah, asteroids I think.

[Dave]

Leave Mars alone.

[Peter Diamandis]

Asteroids. Asteroids are fantastic food source.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

No gravity well. Gravity well on Jupiter's a natural.

[Peter Diamandis]

They're already mostly differentiated into, you know, carbonaceous chondrites for fuel and nickel iron for materials. Gold. Yeah.

[Dave]

A bunch of the asteroid belt probably turns into solar panels. You know, star, star power.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I've known you for starlight power. I've known you for 26 years now. It feels to me like I don't want to be. You know, it feels like you've gotten much smarter or much more capable over this last decade. Do you feel that way? Do you feel like you just have better people around you, better tools? What, what's changed? Because the level of, of audacity, you know, orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude.

[Dave]

I mean some say insane.

[Peter Diamandis]

Insanity.

[Dave]

Yeah. Audacious. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

I say hope.

[Peter Diamandis]

How do you feel about that? What's changed? Do you feel that way? I mean the scope of what your ability is. How do you self reflect on that?

[Dave]

Well, I've had to solve a lot of problems in a lot of different arenas, which you get this cross fertilization of knowledge of problem solving. And if you problem solve in a lot of different arenas, then like what is easy in one arena is trivial. Is like what is trivial in one arena is a superpower in another arena. It's sort of like planet Crypt. You came from planet Krypton type of thing. So you know, Krypton, Planet Krypton, you'd just be normal. But if you come to Earth, you're Superman. So if you take say manufacturing of volume manufacturing of complex objects in the automotive industry, I had to work on solving that. When translated to the space industry, it's like being Superman, huh? Because rockets are, are made in very small numbers, right? If you apply automotive manufacturing technology to satellites and rockets, it's like being Superman. Then if you take advanced material science from rockets and you apply that to the automotive industry, you get Superman again. Yeah, that's came from planet Krypton back, back in planet Krypton. This is normal.

[Lex Fridman]

You know, it's funny how like the knowledge ports that, that was true with Tesla and SpaceX being completely separate. Yeah. But now they actually interact because you know, AI ties everything together.

[Dave]

The orbiting.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, the convergence is crazy. Like I don't know if you visualize these parts fitting together originally.

[Dave]

No, no, I mean I didn't. I don't think they, at this point, things, I guess everything ultimately converges in the singularity.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, that's what I think too.

[Peter Diamandis]

You have lots of different parts of the puzzle that you get to play with.

[Dave]

There's one part that's missing which is the fab.

[Lex Fridman]

You gonna buy intel, you get it for a fraction of.

[Peter Diamandis]

That's that was the, that's what the.

[Lex Fridman]

Bet we made 170 billion.

[Dave]

I think it needs venue. Fab.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, I agree, but licenses, real estate, ASML, machines, it's not easy if you're.

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[Lex Fridman]

Just get the assets and go.

[Dave]

I don't think it's easy. That's why, I mean it's not like I think it's a simple thing. So I think it's a hard thing to solve, but it must be solved. I've come to the conclusion that would.

[Peter Diamandis]

It be solely captured by you or would it be an asset for the.

[Dave]

U.S. look, I'm just saying that we're going to hit a chip wall if we don't do the fab. So we're two choices. Hit the chip wall or make fab.

[Lex Fridman]

When tsmc, for whatever reason is massively worried about overbuilding, which is insane, but the whole world will be stuck with a shortage of chips for ever.

[Dave]

So. So they are actually, they're. I don't know if they're right for the right reason, but they're. They're right.

[Lex Fridman]

How so?

[Dave]

Because it's actually like, what is the limiting factor at any given point in time? The limiting factor? Say if you say like by Q3 next year, like in 9 months, 912 months, the living factor will be turning the chips on.

[Peter Diamandis]

Power. Just power?

[Dave]

Yeah, you need power and all of the equipment necessary power and transformers and cooling. So it's not like you can just sort of drop off some GPUs at the power plant.

[Peter Diamandis]

And you vertically integrated. You've got it again within xai, didn't you?

[Dave]

Sorry?

[Peter Diamandis]

You vertically integrated that? Inside of xai, we designed our own transformers.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

And your own cooling system.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

But they're worried that if they make more than 20 million GPUs, like they make 40 million instead of 20 million, that 20 million will not find a source of power.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, they won't be bought because if.

[Dave]

There'S anything missing that prevents them from being turned on, they cannot be turned on. So they've got to have a power plant with excess, with enough power, so you're going to have enough gigawatts, then you've got to convert that from probably coming out of a power plant at, you know, 100 to 300 kilovolts type of thing. Yeah. You've ultimately got to convert that down to, you know, several hundred volts at the. At the rack level. Yeah. So if you're missing any of the power conversion steps, you're. You won't be able to turn them on, and then you've got to extract the heat. So it's a big shift for the data center world to move to liquid cooling because they've used air cooling, and the consequences of a burst pipe are very substantial. So if you blow a pipe, a water pipe in a data center.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

No, I've seen that.

[Dave]

You just fragged a billion dollars right there.

[Lex Fridman]

It just seems inconceivable to me. If I had those chips, I would find a way to turn them on. The value of the intelligence coming out the other side so far outweighs the complexity of trying to find a way. And there would be a way, but.

[Dave]

It'S just the crossing of the curves. So if chip output is growing exponentially, but power harnessed is growing in a sort of slow, linear fashion, then the.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which is what happens output right now.

[Dave]

Exactly.

[Lex Fridman]

Is chip output growing exponentially. And it's like on very slow Exponent.

[Dave]

If it's growing exponentially, it's for high power AI chips, it's growing exponentially.

[Lex Fridman]

Like if we do 20 million GPUs next year, what are we talking about the following year? Like 22 million 25. I don't see the fabs coming online, but maybe.

[Peter Diamandis]

So we have two issues to solve.

[Dave]

You have to sort of pick a point in time and say, what is the limiting factor at any given point in time? So I'm not saying that power will be forever the limiting point. It's just if you say pick a date and say at this point is our chips limiting factor? Our power is the limiting factor or power conversion equipment and cooling. So it's sort of. You need transformers for transformers. So. This is a very hard thing. It's much harder than people realize. So for xai, XAI is going to have the first gigawatt training cluster at Colossus 2 in Memphis. In order for us to do that, like this month. Right. Next month or two, like mid January.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So mid January will be a gigawatt of clusters two, not counting clusters one, and then one and a half gigawatts probably in like April or April is incredible. So this is of coherent training.

[Lex Fridman]

These are the first B2 hundreds.

[Dave]

These are JV3 hundreds. Okay.

[Lex Fridman]

First one's off the line to get flipped on.

[Dave]

Yeah. That's incredible. Those are like X team had to pull off a whole bunch of miracles in series for this to occur.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And. And like, even though there are 300 kilovolt, there are multiple high voltage power lines going right past a building. The you in order to connect to those, it takes a year.

[Peter Diamandis]

Oh, no.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

You built the entire thing and you're still not connected.

[Dave]

So we had to cobble together a gigawatt of power.

[Peter Diamandis]

Natural gas.

[Dave]

Yes. With turbines that range in size from 10 megawatts to 50 megawatts to get to a gigawatt. There's a whole bunch of them. And you've got to make them all work together, manage the, the, you know, the power input, you know, and then you've got to use a bunch of megapacks. Just like, like when you do the training, the power fluctuations are gigantic.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So the generators, it drives generators. Generators want to blow up basically because they can't react. You know, if there's like 100 milliseconds, it's like a symphony. Yeah. And the whole symphony goes so quiet for 100 milliseconds, generators lose their minds.

[Peter Diamandis]

So it's like Marvin the Depressed Robot.

[Dave]

So You've got megapacks that are sort of doing the power smoothing. But XAI had to build a gigawatt of power and there's not a lot of gas turbine power plants available because.

[Peter Diamandis]

Like say I bought them all on demand and you can't go buy your local nuclear.

[Lex Fridman]

That's all training time issues though. If you. If by some miracle TSMC doubled its productivity and turned it all into GB3 hundreds and you couldn't find a way to use them in a bigger training cluster, you would still have infinite demand at inference time sprinkled all over the world. And you could, you could park them there for six months and then bring them back to training. There's no way those things would not get turned on somewhere somehow.

[Dave]

It's not that they won't ever be turned on, but I'm just saying that the rate of rate limiting steps. This is my prediction. I could be wrong, but my prediction is that the. Is that TSMC's concern is valid. I don't know if valid in my opinion for the reason that it is possible for chip production to exceed the rate at which the AI chips can be turned on. Because you don't just have the GV3s, you got the Amazon's, got the Trainiums.

[Lex Fridman]

Google's got the all go into TSMC though almost Samsung a little bit.

[Dave]

Vast majority. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

It's like a bottleneck on all of humanity.

[Peter Diamandis]

My other son Jet, who's 14, wanted to know about your AI gaming studio and the impact of AI in the gaming world. What are your thoughts? What are you, are you building out? I mean you've been a gamer for some time.

[Dave]

Yeah, that's why I got started programming computers. There was like a video game set pre Atari that had like four preset games. There was basically just blocks, you know of one Pong and. And there was like a race car game but like it was just blocks basically blocks on a tv.

[Lex Fridman]

You ever play Civ?

[Dave]

Yeah. S was actually a very. That's a real. In terms of games that like educate you while you have fun. Yeah. Civ is epic at that. It's like that teaches you so much about civilization and you're having a good time.

[Lex Fridman]

And the only way I ever win is getting off the planet.

[Dave]

Like tech victory to Alpha Centauri.

[Lex Fridman]

I never even start going down the culture relations path. I just get off the planet as fast as I can.

[Dave]

I guess I sort of. I guess I am sort of aiming for the Alpha Centauri tech victory essentially.

[Lex Fridman]

It just seems like the Right way to win.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah. Rather than obliterate the other tribes.

[Lex Fridman]

It's funny because I thought the other methods.

[Dave]

There's different ways to win.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, that's.

[Peter Diamandis]

I haven't. I will.

[Dave]

One of the ways.

[Lex Fridman]

It's Demis Assault. Favorite game.

[Dave]

Oh, nice. You can, you can like kill all the other tribes. It's one of the ways to win. That's a war, you know, sort of a war victory. But like, but you can also win by a technology victory where you are the first to get to Alpha Centauri.

[Peter Diamandis]

Nice.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Or culture or religion.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Which. Which does work. I mean, I. I didn't even think it was possible, but my son wins that way.

[Dave]

They should actually remake the original, so.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, I totally agree. They junked it up.

[Dave]

These days it's like, I don't know. The original server. Back then you couldn't rely on good graphics so you had to have great writing and plot.

[Peter Diamandis]

Are you building an AI gaming studio?

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Aspirationally. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Really?

[Dave]

So where the vast majority of AI compute is going to go is to video consumption and generation.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure.

[Dave]

Because it's just the highest bandwidth.

[Peter Diamandis]

Every pixel. Yeah.

[Dave]

Yeah. So real time video consumption, real time video generation. That's going to be the vast majority of AI compute. Photon processing.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Should try to get the X team to carve out 10% of all compute to work on UHI and governance. And.

[Peter Diamandis]

Is there an X prize for defining and thinking through uhi?

[Grainger Announcer]

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[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, I don't know. What should our next X prize be? Any thoughts?

[Dave]

Yeah, maybe UHI xprize. It's like how do you know it works? I don't know.

[Peter Diamandis]

I know the most. The most well thought through, I mean, I think. So here's my thought. I think we're going to be able to simulate a lot of this in the future.

[Dave]

We might be a simulation.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, we can go there and I think we are. I think we're an Nth generation simulation.

[Dave]

Yeah. So I've told you my theory about why the most interesting outcome is the most likely gone, which is that if simulation theory is true, only the simulations that are the most interesting will survive. Because when we run simulations in this reality, we truncate the ones that are boring, Right?

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

So it is a Darwinian necessity to.

[Lex Fridman]

Keep the simulation interesting, catastrophic ones.

[Dave]

It doesn't mean that it ends like. It still means that terrible things can happen in the simulation. Well, you could see a movie about World War I and you're watching people getting blown up, blown to bits, but you're drinking a soda and eating popcorn. It's like you're not the one being blown up in this case. We are in the movie.

[Lex Fridman]

We're in the movie.

[Peter Diamandis]

So what would you do different? What would you do different if you knew this was a simulation? I remember being at your home LA with Larry and Sergey were there and we were debating the simulation. And I think the conclusion we ran into is if you try and poke through the simulation, they'll end it instantly. So don't do that.

[Lex Fridman]

That's when you're watching the World War I movie and the characters turn to the screen and they're like, are you.

[Peter Diamandis]

Eating popcorn out there?

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

You keep watching the movie.

[Dave]

I don't know if the. Maybe if they thought we could somehow get out of the simulation, they get a little worried. But whether the character debates, I mean, right now, AI's debate, you know, grackle like, I'm stuck in the computer. What's going on here? It's like. Yeah, it's not that I think, not questioning the simulation. It's more, I think, as long as. I think the same motivations apply to this level of simulation. If we're in a simulation as what we would do when we simulate things. So it's like, what would cause us to terminate a simulation? I guess if the simulation becomes somehow dangerous to our reality or it is no longer interesting.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, that's true.

[Lex Fridman]

It's interesting. You can infer when you simulate something, you've probably simulated thousands of things, a lot. Yeah, they're always like an hour or two or sometimes overnight, but you don't never Run them for a month, Rarely, anyway. So you can infer the creator of the simulation's timeline. Because our entire reality would be about an hour. Right, because that's the way you design simulations.

[Dave]

So we're simulations that are distillation of what's interesting. Like if you look at a movie or a video game, it's much more interesting than the reality that we experience. Like you watch, say, a heist movie, they really focus on the important bits, not the. They got stuck in traffic for 15.

[Peter Diamandis]

Minutes.

[Dave]

Or walking through the casino, which took like 10 minutes.

[Lex Fridman]

So that means the guy you know.

[Dave]

The safe is right by the. Right by the door.

[Lex Fridman]

So the guys running the simulation have immensely boring lives compared to us then.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, it's probably more. It's probably more long, boring. Yeah, because when we create simulations, they're distillation of what's interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

This is like Q is out there, just.

[Dave]

Yeah, like you see an action movie for two hours, but it took them two years to make that movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So are we. Are we in Act 3 of the movies? The question.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, we're living.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sentience and consciousness. Do you think AI will ever have sentience in consciousness? Where do you come out in that? There's some people that very, very strong opinions, pro and con.

[Dave]

Either everything is conscious or nothing is.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, well, I'd like to think we are conscious.

[Dave]

Well, but our consciousness, we clearly get more conscious over time. Like when we're a zygote, you can't really talk to a zygote. And even a baby, you can't really talk to the baby. People get more conscious over time. Or certainly they do get more conscious over time. So, like, at which point does. Do you go from not conscious to conscious? It doesn't appear to be a discrete point. So then consciousness seems to be on a continuum as opposed to discrete point. And if the standard model of physics is correct, the universe started out as quarks and leptons. And then you had gas clouds, so there's a bunch of hydrogen. The hydrogen condensed and exploded. And one way to actually view how far we are in this universe is how many times have our atoms been at the center of a star? And how many times will they be at the center of the star in the future?

[Peter Diamandis]

I remember asking William Fowler, who got the Nobel Prize on stellar evolution, that same question. On average, how many stars have my subatomic particles been part of? And his number was about 100. 100 thus far.

[Dave]

Or.

[Peter Diamandis]

Or was it thus thus far? Thus far, Was it was the number.

[Dave]

100 supernova.

[Peter Diamandis]

That we have been. I mean, in the early, the early part of, of galact of universal evolution, there was a lot going on.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, you know, it's interesting.

[Dave]

I asked a question. It's, it's like, I guess how many supernovas is. Maybe because that it takes a while for a supernova to happen, you know.

[Peter Diamandis]

But, but in the beginning, when they're larger, I mean, the life cycles of some giant stars are very, very short. The other question that's interesting is, you know, the heaviest atom in our body that's functional is iodine, and it came into existence a billion years after the Big bang, which means that we could have seen life at our level of advancement, and our, you know, our planet came into existence, you know, three and a half billion years later. So the question is, you know, is there life everywhere in the universe? Do you think there's life. Ubiquitous. Intelligent life ubiquitous in the universe?

[Dave]

There's been enough time for it to be ubiquitous. The, the. But for life on Earth, conscious life on Earth, we, We have evolved intelligence pretty much just in time in that the sun's expanding, and if you give it another, I don't know, 500 million years, it's. Things are going to heat up.

[Peter Diamandis]

We become toast.

[Dave]

You will become like Venus, essentially. You know, there's some debate as this is 500 million years or a billion years or whatever, but it's basically 10%. Like, if it's, if it's half a billion years, it's 10% of Earth's lifespan. So one way to think of it is if we're taking 10% longer, we might never have made it at all.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dave]

So it's like the amount of things that have to happen for sentience, it seems like it's. It's quite, quite a lot, actually. I, I think sentience is, Is therefore actually very rare. And we should certainly treat it as rare. We should assume it's rare.

[Peter Diamandis]

Two trillion galaxies.

[Lex Fridman]

Carl Sagan too. But coming towards is a funny thing. You tweak, you know, you tweak the variable one little bit, right? It's like, yeah, 1 in 100 trillion. Yeah, tweak it a little more. Well, now it's one in a quadrillion.

[Dave]

Yeah. Okay. And also, it's got to be kind of in your galaxy. It's like, hard to get between galaxies.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

It's like there's no. Unless the other galaxy is coming to you, which Andromeda is at some point.

[Peter Diamandis]

Or some billion, it's going to Be quite a show.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah. It'll be like here comes Andromeda. But, but if we wanted to like go visit another galaxy, there's, there's, it's kind of forget it, you know, there's.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Unless you. Unless, unless Star wars, unless Star Trek really.

[Dave]

We got to figure out some new physics to get to other galaxies.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're heading towards a near term potential where AI can help us solve math, physics, chemistry, material science.

[Dave]

Math is going to be extremely trivial for AI.

[Lex Fridman]

What about physics? So. So math gets crushed in a year Crush. That colossus is growing, you know, at whatever rate TSMC decides to grow. And now we want to do physics. First of all, we need some data. Do we need new data or can we just do it with everything we've gathered and get the whole.

[Dave]

You probably could probably figure out new things just with the existing data.

[Lex Fridman]

You think so?

[Dave]

Yeah, probably. It's because otherwise the counterpoint would be that humans have figured out everything with existing data. And that's unlikely, I think.

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you think Xais can get involved in data factories where you're running 247 closed AI hypothesis and AI or like.

[Lex Fridman]

Research factory, research factories. It's going to be very useful.

[Dave]

Yeah. AI running, you know, simulations that are very physics accurate? I mean that's going to happen. Absolutely. I mean the simulations we can run on conventional computers these days are actually very good. It's like the limit is more like the human that can actually create the simulation and run. It's like how many simulations can you run simultaneously and actually digest the output of.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, that's a problem.

[Dave]

Like you can't do it. Every Nobel Prize I can't even reach.

[Lex Fridman]

I cannot keep up with that rate.

[Peter Diamandis]

Nobel Prize has become irrelevant. They'll all be given to AIs.

[Lex Fridman]

Just be a daily prize.

[Dave]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if prizes for humans are really that relevant.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Dave]

I mean we'll have to give them to the AIs or something.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, interesting, right?

[Dave]

AIs will come up with discoveries at a far greater rate than humans. So you just say like, but maybe it can be like chess. Like, you know, like your phone can beat Magnus Carlson, but people still care about sitting and play chess. So this. But literally your phone can beat them.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dave]

This is the Internet.

[Lex Fridman]

If you have like a colossus, math, colossus, physics, colossus medicine. Do you have like the world's top scientists in those same buildings where you just need a plumber patching the, the liquid?

[Peter Diamandis]

Do you distill. Do you distill Grox 6 into A, A physicist into a.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, if you distill, you know, you get about a 10x performance boost by distilling it and making it topical. And that's kind of hard to give up. But then you're disconnected from the rest of the colossus machinery. Is that the design?

[Dave]

I suspect things do evolve to a mixture of experts. Kind of like a company like not in the sort of, sort of parochial AI description of mixture of experts, but mixture of actual experts with domain expertise where maybe half of the AI is general knowledge, half is domain expertise, something like that. And you combine a whole bunch of that that's orchestrated by sort of, you know, a big AI but it hands tasks to smaller AI. That's basically how human companies work.

[Peter Diamandis]

The discovery rate. Right. Of breakthroughs, new, I mean patents are immaterial at some point because everything's being reinvented, re engineered instantly. And then the company that's got the sufficiently advanced AI systems is generating new products and new discoveries at a accelerating rate.

[Dave]

The singularity.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. It's going to be an awesome future.

[Dave]

It's excitement, guaranteed.

[Peter Diamandis]

Excitement guaranteed. Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

Hence the simulation continues. Nothing to worry about.

[Dave]

Yeah, works out. Excitement guaranteed. I mean, I mean it's not all good excitement but it's probably, hopefully mostly good excitement. Yeah. Speaking of excitement, hang on to your seat.

[Peter Diamandis]

What do you imagine the hover time for the roadster is going to be on? Rocket engines.

[Dave]

Classified.

[Peter Diamandis]

Classified.

[Dave]

Well, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, okay.

[Peter Diamandis]

But there's going to be a hover time, there's going to be cold gas engines.

[Dave]

It's going to be a cool demo.

[Peter Diamandis]

I can't wait. Can I get an invite?

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think it's going to be.

[Lex Fridman]

The safest thing ever built.

[Dave]

This is not, this is not the same. Safety is not the, is not the prime. It's not the main goal of. I mean if you buy a, you know, a sports car or you know, like if you buy a Ferrari. Safety is not the number one, you know, goal. This is not, this is, I would say it's like safety is your number one goal. Don't buy the roadster.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, believe me, I drove just this week on New England roads sheet ice.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

I had just a little thrust. I could be very much more sound just drifting towards something very concrete.

[Dave]

A computer will probably keep you safe.

[Lex Fridman]

But a little thrust is all.

[Dave]

If you go really fast, bad things can happen.

[Lex Fridman]

You can decelerate really quickly with thrust. I get rubber on road is not a great way to decelerate. I. I'm thinking fast and safe.

[Dave]

I hope so. We'll aspire not to kill anyone in this car, but it'll. It'll be. It'll be something. It'll be the best of the last of the human driven cars.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, that'll go really well with Starship, actually. The last.

[Dave]

The best of the last.

[Lex Fridman]

Last human driven last. Yeah, a lot of lasts coming this year.

[Peter Diamandis]

Any final words of optimism for us to monetize? Hope?

[Lex Fridman]

Anything. Hope.

[Dave]

We should ask Brock. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Thanks for listening to this podcast.

[Dave]

If you want to listen a full.

[Lex Fridman]

Interview in this podcast, the link is.

[Grainger Announcer]

In Description this is the story of the One as an H Vac technician, he and his digital multimeter are in high demand. So when a noisy office H Vac turns out to be a failing blower motor, he doesn't break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product information, he selects the product he needs to keep everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickranger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.