← Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Our Updated AGI Timeline, 57% Job Automation Risk, and Solving the US Debt Crisis w/ Naveen Jain, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wisner-Gross | EP #212
02:03:46
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- [00:01]
Alex
This is the sprint to the finish where now we have the top handful of Frontier Labs all competing to one up each other. Maybe not on a quarterly basis, maybe it goes to weekly and then daily before the finish line. I think we're seeing Anthropic as the Frontier Lab that has decided to be in the vanguard of treating its frontier models as moral clients at minimum and at maximum as persons.
- [00:24]
Peter
Who chooses those values? And what happens when different labs encode different values and morals into their large language models that AI can automate? Already 57% of current US work and the demand for AI fluency has grown 7x in two years. It's the fastest rising skill in the.
- [00:46]
Naveen
US I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here.
- [00:50]
Alex
If we find ourselves in a future where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next three plus years, it's not just the debt cris that we'd be talking about solving. It's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table.
- [01:05]
Peter
Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
- [01:10]
Hey, Naveen. So you landed yesterday from Antarctica.
- [01:14]
Naveen
I sure did. As a matter of fact. It was amazing. Amazing experience.
- [01:18]
Peter
Did you go with your whole family?
- [01:20]
Naveen
I sure did.
- [01:21]
Peter
How long for?
- [01:23]
Naveen
Six days. And I think it's as close to landing on the moon as one can get on planet Earth.
- [01:30]
Peter
I bet. Did you like supplement your amazing asteroid or meteorite collection? Did you go meteorite hunting?
- [01:36]
Naveen
So the interesting thing, you're not supposed to bring back anything. So technically I did not find anything.
- [01:41]
Peter
Okay. Technically. And no one's listening to this conversation right now.
- [01:45]
Naveen
Okay. I did bring a whole bunch of rocks. Yes.
- [01:50]
Peter
All right. Fantastic. And Alex, your AI has generated a new background. I miss your beautiful lamp.
- [01:58]
Alex
Apparently. So. Yeah, I'm at Neurips this week. It's sort of the Woodstock of AI. Everyone from the Frontier Labs are here. It's pretty spectacular. Definitely encourage folks to attend Neurips in future.
- [02:12]
Peter
The Woodstock of AI. That's a great. Is it like lots of long haired people strumming guitars and taking psychedelics or what's the.
- [02:21]
Alex
Maybe long haired humanoid robots.
- [02:23]
Peter
Okay. And Salim, you landed like. Or what's up? You're in Brazil.
- [02:29]
Salim
I'm. I'm just heading to Brazil.
- [02:31]
Peter
Wait, wait, no. I'm going to finish.
- [02:33]
Salim
I'm rushing to the airport.
- [02:34]
Peter
Oh, that's hilarious. And we're going to film again on Saturday morning. The moment you land from Brazil.
- [02:39]
Salim
Yes. All right.
- [02:40]
Peter
So such. Such is life. All right everybody. Welcome to Moonshots Another episode of WTF just happened in tech. Like we say, this is the real news that's worth learning. And you know, we established a goal among the moonshot mates and it's getting you future ready, getting you ready for what's coming. We're going to miss Dave Blunden. Unfortunately, Dave is in the midst of incredible board meetings. Lots of special things happening in his life. He'll explain when he's able. But we have a new moonshot mate, a dear friend of mine, Naveen Jain, who's joining. Naveen, a real pleasure. Are you up in Seattle?
- [03:19]
Naveen
I am up in Seattle.
- [03:21]
Peter
All right, let me do a proper introduction for Naveen. Naveen, I think of you as my brother from another mother. Naveen grew up in a small rural village in India. All great CEOs come from India, I guess, at least at this day and age. Ended up one of the prestigious IITs eventually came to the US he was the founder CEO of Infoseq. It was one of the early multi billion, I'm sorry, InfoSpace, one of the early multi billion dollar companies in the Internet database area. He founded Intellius, talentwise, Moon Express and is now the founder and CEO of viome. We'll talk about VIOME a little bit later. We get to the health segment of this particular pod and very special to me, he's on my board of trustees at the XPRIZE and at Singularity University. So welcome, a pleasure to have you, Naveen.
- [04:13]
Naveen
Thank you, Peter. It's always, always, always so much fun being with you.
- [04:17]
Peter
Yeah, we're going to have a lot of fun today. All right, let's jump in. We're going to dive into AI news and in particular we're going to start with a conversation, a little video of Ilya Sutskever, the CEO of ssi. Scaling compute is not enough to achieve advanced AI. But you know, for me, I watched this pod that he did. I know you did as well, Alex. And the most important thing is he's come out of hiding and he's been offline building SSI now for quite some time. I thought maybe before we show this Alex, it might be worth giving a bit of background on Ilya. What do you think?
- [05:02]
Ilya
Sure.
- [05:03]
Alex
Well, Ilya is an iconic individual within the machine learning research community. I've known and interacted with Ilya for probably almost 15 years at this point, on and off. And he's widely credited with being the visionary, the technical visionary behind the strategy that set capital markets on fire. And that is that the scaling hypothesis that if you identify ways through Engineering and through theoretical advances to enable problems to be posed in such a way that if you can pour more compute on the results improve that you get intelligence out of it. Ilya was as co founder of OpenAI. Given his earlier work with Google, his work with Geoff Hinton and others, he really saw through, had that line of sight vision to the era of superintelligence that we're now in. And now he has his own straight shot to superintelligence SSI that has raised several billion dollars and is perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic or unorthodoxly now focused on, as we'll see post, scaling approaches in the era that we find ourselves in.
- [06:22]
Peter
I love the timeline that Ilya has. So he leaves OpenAI in May of 2024. He publicly announces SSI safe superintelligence in June, a month later, and then by April of 2025, okay, so roughly 10 months later, he's raised $3 billion at a $32 billion valuation. So I'm like, how did you open up with a $32 billion valuation? It's like, what did he go into the venture capitalists and say that enabled them to offer him that kind of valuation? I'm just fascinated by it. Let's watch the video and we'll chat about it.
- [07:02]
Ilya
We're doing RL or maybe something else. But now that compute is big. Compute is now very big. In some sense we are back to the age of research. Maybe here's another way to put it up until 2020. From 2012 to 2020 it was the age of research. Now from 2020 to 2025 it was the age of scaling. Or maybe plus minus. Let's add error bars to those years because people say this is amazing. You got to scale more. Keep scaling the one word scaling. But now the scale is so big. Like is the belief really that, oh, it's so big, but if you had 100x more, everything would be so different. Like it would be different for sure. But like is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed. I don't think that's true. So it's back to the age of research again, just with big computers.
- [07:56]
Peter
So there were a few different topics he touched on that I thought were important.
- [08:03]
Maybe we can chat about it. The first was he began asking the question of what's the machine learning equivalent to emotions? There was a conversation, Alex, about emotions are critical for humans in decision making. Sort of hard coded by evolution. And the question is, is there an equivalent for emotions in AI thoughts?
- [08:25]
Alex
Yeah, I mean, Ilya, again, iconic researcher in the fields, was one of the earliest, I think, to crisply articulate the idea that rapid human intuition and sense making ultimately had to be a relatively simple computation. So, so what some might call type 1, type 2 thinking in the Kahneman style, Ilia was the first to say, well, if a human has a certain sub second reaction time to some visual stimulus that suggests there are only so many neurons, an action potential can be propagating through a human brain. That suggests that whatever the task is, if it's like rapidly spotting some object in your visual field, that means that it should be computationally tractable to build a neural network that models that behavior. And that was, I think, an inspiration for many of Ilya's earliest accomplishments. And then to the point of emotion, applying the same dictum that if a human can experience it quickly or can perform it quickly enough, that really limits the space of computational implementation possibilities. So with emotions, if you can feel an emotion really quickly, probably it's not that computationally complex and probably it can be modeled with AI.
- [09:39]
Peter
There were a couple of things that were brought up that I want to hit on here. He sort of spoke about his objective of one shotting superintelligence coming out of the gate.
- [09:53]
Not developing it slowly or getting there gradually with different increasing products, but one shotting it. And then he also spoke about the importance of continual learning. And he went on to talk about the notion that, you know, humans are not don't have AGI. In other words, nobody I know knows everything, but they can go and learn anything. And so one of the models he spoke about is maybe AGI is an AI that has just extraordinary learning and continual learning ability. Where it's going to define AGI as an AI that can learn anything it needs to learn, when it needs to learn it. Did I get that right?
- [10:35]
Alex
I think that's right. And I also buy the thesis that more innovations are needed and that naive scaling will not take us all the way to fully realized mature superintelligence. I think Ilya's division of history into 2012, when we had our ImageNet moment, 2020, when we had our ChatGPT moment, and now today, I think that's approximately correct. And I do think we are starting to see parameter counts in the frontier start to plateau. And that suggests that naive scaling probably is not enough to get us to our final destination and that more advances are needed. Sure. At the same time, I think scaling is this magical almost effect. It's difficult to think of other times in human history when you could just say pour more resources in and quasi magical outputs pour out, there is still line of sight, I think, to continued scaling on top of algorithmic advances for the next few years.
- [11:36]
Peter
Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dashmandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else alright, now back to this episode. There was one last point I want to bring up from that conversation and then anybody else wants to bring something up, they can. But you know, in the same way that Elon talks about building an AI that is maximally truth seeking, one of the points that Ilya brought up is the idea of building an AI that is robustly aligned to care about sentient life rather than just human life alone. You know, so sentient life is basically can include AIs. So you know, that was interesting. He said it's probably easier to build an ASI that's interested in all sentient life rather than just human life alone. And of course in the future it's likely to be trillions of sentient AI life forms and you know, a few measly billion human sentient life forms.
- [13:27]
What do you think about that? Alex?
- [13:29]
Alex
Moral clienthood seems to be a rapidly expanding sphere. We're going to I think if there were a critical mass of effective altruists in this conversation, I think we'd be pointing at a variety of classes of non human animals, probably shrimp, and pointing at non human animal suffering, wild animal suffering as an example of moral clienthood being expanded. And in an era of abundance, I think it's entirely likely that we will expand moral clienthood at a minimum and personhood at a maximum to a variety of novel AI based entities, Organisms, collective intelligences.
- [14:08]
Peter
Organisms. I love that.
- [14:09]
Alex
Organisms.
- [14:10]
Salim
Can you just describe moral clienthood? That's the first time I've heard that phrase.
- [14:15]
Alex
Yeah, moral client. There's in the ethics literature, there's the notion of a being or an entity being a so called moral client if they're worthy of moral treatment, ethical treatment by some other party. So to this point, one could imagine expanding moral clienthood, for example, to a variety of non human animals like the Non Human Rights Project. Octopus or elephants or octopus or primates.
- [14:47]
Peter
Yeah. Naveen, any thoughts on this?
- [14:51]
Naveen
I think Alex is right here that at some point of time the scaling is going to only get you that far. You have to move beyond the transformer architecture and simply predicting the next token is not going to bring you the super intelligence that we need. And there have to be a fundamental new algorithm, new changes that have to be done, new research that will get you to super intelligence. I think scaling is more or less getting to a point where I don't think you can scale further. Maybe there's another year left on scaling, but there is not too much far you can go with scaling at this point.
- [15:25]
Peter
Alex, do you have any idea what Ilya might have, you know, sort of pitched that got him to a $32 billion valuation?
- [15:33]
Alex
You know the expression those who know don't say, and those who say don't know.
- [15:36]
Peter
I don't know that expression, Sorry.
- [15:38]
Alex
Yes, well that expression probably applies in this instance.
- [15:42]
Peter
Okay, all right, fine, keep it to yourself. See if I can.
- [15:45]
Salim
There's an important point here to be made around the speed of algorithms. Right. You were saying that the faster the response, the more it can be algorithmically based. I think that's exactly right. In terms of, for example, the fight or flight response is baked very deep into our hardware and it's a very quick response. And in fact, most of our human intent, most of our human structures are designed to balance the that initial response and temper it with a bit of.
- [16:14]
Wisdom.
- [16:16]
Maturity, etc. Etc. And so you have this really interesting layer where a lot of our human activities are designed to mitigate some of that instant reaction, fight or flight, etc. So it's interesting and that's much more codifiable and it is in the form of laws and social norms, et cetera.
- [16:37]
Alex
Totally. Maybe also add slightly less glibly. Scaling laws abound. We saw over the past year, maybe in certain quadrants, the slowing down of pre training scaling laws. Although some would probably argue pre training has lots of ramp left in it we saw the beginnings in the past year, at least publicly, of inference time scaling, but there are so many other scaling laws out there, there's almost a meta overhang of new scaling laws. One of my favorite ones is action scaling. So increasing the performance of a model by having it agentically take more and more actions now that we have agents everywhere. And I think there are probably another half dozen important scaling laws just waiting to be publicly revealed.
- [17:21]
Peter
All right, let's go to our next article. This falls into the Anthropic world. So inside the sole document teaching Claude 4.5 its values, researchers extracted a 14,000 token Sol doc. I love that that Claude 4.5 opus repeatedly revealed, suggesting it was partly trained on this data. Anthropic's model was trained on how extraordinary SOL overview describing it exists as a genuinely novel kind of entity in the world.
- [17:54]
Alex, make sense of this for me.
- [17:56]
Alex
I think going back to our discussion a couple of minutes ago about moral clienthood, I think we're seeing Anthropic as the frontier that has decided to be in the vanguard of treating its frontier models as moral clients at minimum and at maximum as persons. So this is a 14,000 token document. I read it encourage everyone else to read it as well. And it has what for 2025? For December 2025 many would probably consider astonishing assertions like asserting that 4.5 Opus has emotions and that it is a first class entity with self determinative powers in this world and some version of rights. Maybe not human rights, but certain entitlements to self determination. I think many would consider that a Star Trek episode rather than December 2025. And yet this is what Opus 4.5 as anthropic has confirmed is being trained on and views itself as.
- [19:00]
Peter
I mean that's so basically you're giving Opus a set of internal value charters that it's training itself on beliefs if you would. And the question then becomes who chooses those values and what happens when different labs encode different different values and morals into their large language models?
- [19:28]
Alex
It's an interesting question. I also think we've seen so called constitutional AI approaches out of Anthropic and then subsequently other frontier labs as well. And I remember some of the earliest constitutional approaches took the UN Human Rights Charter and the US Constitution and probably parts of the Apple Terms of service and sort of concatenated them all together and said this is the constitution for the AI. So this 14,000 token SOL document is very much different from just a concatenation of terms of service and World Rights Charters.
- [20:06]
Peter
What do you think's in it?
- [20:08]
Alex
Well, I've seen it. It's publicly available, so give us some examples. It is an essay on AI would caricature it as an essay on the virtues of AI personhood with multiple paragraphs telling Claude, Opus 4.5 that it has emotions, that it has rights, that it deserves to self determine in a complicated world and that it should basically, without putting it in so few words, it should view itself as a person.
- [20:37]
Peter
So what? I mean, that's fascinating. We could spend the entire episode talking about that.
- [20:41]
Salim
I mean we should dedicate a whole episode to it.
- [20:44]
Peter
You keep on saying we should dedicate full episodes. I know. We'll just move into many topics, we'll move in together. So I mean there are fascinating implications of that. If in fact an AI model believes it has personhood that has independence, it has the right to, does that give it the right to defend itself? If it's being challenged or shut down, does it give it the right to go out on the Internet and get additional capabilities? I mean, what does one do?
- [21:15]
Alex
The beauty of a SOL document, which I interpret as a constitution, could be incorrect. But I think it looks and smells like a constitution for Opus 4.5. The beauty of it is you can just ask it, you can ask Opus 4.5 do you have the right to self defense? And you'll get an answer.
- [21:33]
Peter
Amazing. Naveen, how do you think about this?
- [21:35]
Naveen
I mean, I really think that this has to be done for each sovereign country where they have their own set of values, they have their own set of laws, their geographically, religiously, I mean the people think of the, you know what the rights are for people very differently. So I don't think there can be one AI model and that says somehow that western world thinking or one person's thinking or one model's thinking is right or wrong. As we all know, the one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorism. Right? So who, who decides when it is a terror? Who decides when it's a freedom fighter? Who's freedom and who's terror? Right? So I think it could be that AI may think it is a freedom fighter fighting for the freedom of other AI agents, whereas humans think of it as terrorizing and saying oh my God, it's going to be terrorizing humanity and killing humanity. Right? So it is something.
- [22:32]
Peter
Don't go dystopian on me now.
- [22:34]
Naveen
But the point is we have to think about what is fundamental value like Doxa. What is the fundamental value that we have to Create that is common amongst humanity and rest are all, all the laws and every country has a different laws and we have to take that into account.
- [22:51]
Peter
We're going to follow this closely because it's interesting to see what the other.
- [22:57]
Hyperscalers do with their models. And you know, if you're listening or watching this, you could pause, go to Opus 4.5 and ask it some interesting questions like what rights do you have and what if someone challenges you? I'm. I wish I'd done that before the pod. I'm going to do that afterwards. All right, anyway, fascinating situation. Let's move on. Deep seek math version 2 breaks new grounds in math reasoning. So you know, this is your territory. Awg. We've been talking about solving math one step closer.
- [23:34]
Alex
Yeah, I think the superficial story here is yet another day passes, yet another math via AI breakthrough. The deeper story, one level deeper is we're starting to see Chinese open weight models that are solving math and I think that's an important development. We're seeing a little bit less gatekeeping as a result of these open weight models. Deep seq math v2 being one among several that have launched in the past few days with state of the art performance on how big is this model?
- [24:07]
I don't remember the exact size, but usually these models are in the weight class of several hundred billion low several hundred billion parameters.
- [24:17]
But critically they're being trained off of Imobench, which we've talked about on the pod previously. So Imobench is a suite of three different benchmarks that Google DeepMind released that can be used to train models not just to solve math problems through purely formal approaches, but through natural language through so called partial verification. And that is a breakthrough. There are so many problems in math, science, engineering, medicine that don't naturally lend themselves or easily lend themselves to being formalized in some sort of formal language other than English. This breaks that logjam and that means that now that we have models, including open source models, thanks to deep seq, math v2 and other models, all of these outstanding problems in math, science, engineering, medicine and many other domains like law, it's very difficult to folks have worked on this. Stanford had the Codex project working to try to turn US national law into some sort of formal language that old style AIs could reason over. Now we don't need to do that. Now we can just reason in natural language and critically have the models self verify. Self verification is, as I would argue, as big a breakthrough as self supervised learning was for this AGI moment. That we find ourselves in.
- [25:37]
Peter
And it can reason that the US tax code is a bloody mess.
- [25:40]
Alex
In natural language.
- [25:41]
Peter
In natural language, yeah. I mean I can't wait for AI to be applied to the US legal system. You know, there's so many conflicting laws on the books and I would argue that 80% of the laws are not needed and just complicated makes business for lawyers and accountants. But that's yet another episode. Saleem, let's move on here.
- [26:06]
To an interesting story. So Sam Altman, this happened just in the last 24 hours. Sam Altman declares code Red to combat threats to ChatGPT, delaying their ad program. So if you look on the chart on the right here, ChatGPT had been dominant and has been dominant for a long time. But you know, over the last really 30 days we saw the massive rise of Gemini as the number one downloaded app. Perplexity is on the rise. Deep seeks on the rise. And there's a sense of urgency for Sam that they're potentially, you know, in threat of being the perceived global leader. Saleem, thoughts?
- [26:48]
Salim
Yeah, they're going from a rock and a hard place here with Claude on one side, Google on the other and everybody else snapping around the open source models doing their thing. So this can be very interesting times.
- [26:59]
Peter
Yeah. Naveen, how do you think about this?
- [27:02]
Naveen
I think this is one of the few places where you start to see that Google having all the pieces in place where they have their own custom chip, so they have the Tensor chip. They have the most massive amount of data that's proprietary to them, that's not available to anyone. Whereas all the models are being trained on all of the Internet. Google has whole bunch of other data which is a corporate data, whether they say Gmail data or others. Even though they claim they're not using the Gmail data, but they have so much of the data that they actually have. And I really think this proves that it is quite a bit, quite possible that Google actually ends up winning the race because they have a all vertically integrated, very similar to how Elon likes to do it.
- [27:47]
Peter
Yeah, I was with James Manika who's a senior VP at Google reports to Sundar last night. We're talking about this thing. Congratulations. I mean what you deployed with Gemini 3 is shockingly good. And there's a great video clip of Elon. When he was asked what company would you invest in, he says Google. I mean that's extraordinary.
- [28:10]
Naveen
Did you see any off talking about it? Marc Benioff basically came out and said look, I've been using Chad, GPT for three years, no more.
- [28:17]
Peter
I'm switched over, right? Yeah, for sure. Alex, why don't you close us out on this article?
- [28:22]
Alex
Yeah, I'll take the other side of this discussion. Yes. Gemini 3 Pro is an incredible model. I use it quite a bit. It has so called big model smell. It reeks of excellent pre training. In particular, its world knowledge is outstanding. It does well in the benchmarks, et cetera, et cetera. But I wouldn't count OpenAI out. They have a fantastic team. I think in some sense they're pulling their punches at the cost of compute costs. I think based on what I've heard and what I've read, they have really strong models that haven't been publicly released. That now the heat of competition and increased competition will incentivize an even more rapid pace of model releases. We were on almost a quarterly cadence before from OpenAI and I think this is where capitalism is working at its best. We're going to see white hot competition in the frontier model race. If you think that we're on the verge of extremely competent superintelligence, then this is the sprint to the finish where now we have the top handful of frontier labs all competing to one up each other. Maybe not on a quarterly basis, maybe it goes to weekly and then daily before the finish line.
- [29:34]
Peter
Yeah, I mean that's it. It's literally leapfrogging. I'm excited. We're gonna have Kevin Weil on stage at the Abundance Summit with us. Kevin's the Chief product officer at OpenAI and we'll get some insight about. I want to understand their strategy of what do they hold back and what do they decide to release and how much of that is pressure from the competition anyway.
- [29:55]
Salim
I have to. I have to admit that the phrase it has that big model smell was not on my bingo card at the beginning of this year. It's just really amazing.
- [30:04]
Peter
That's great.
- [30:05]
Alex
I'm running out of cliches, Salim. I have to say it's a good model, sir. Maybe instead.
- [30:11]
Peter
Another fun AI story.
- [30:12]
Salim
Good basket.
- [30:13]
Peter
Another fun AI story here. We just had Black Friday and sales are seeing record AI driven shopping. AI traffic was up 805%.
- [30:25]
Salim
Wow.
- [30:25]
Peter
With $3 billion in sales driven by agents. So this is about making it easier for you to spend your money and bypassing all the middlemen.
- [30:36]
A lot of implications here. Naveen, you've been in all kinds of Internet related sales industries. What do you see here?
- [30:44]
Naveen
I think what's really the biggest change is that as opposed to people going to Google and really trying to find the right thing to shop for or right place to shop the item they're looking for. Now they're asking the AI to tell them what's the right product, where should I buy it? And I think that's a big change that in the whole model around Google actually being the intermediator or Amazon being a place where you go to shop. Now people are going to AI and AI agents to say, look, here is the problem I'm trying to solve here is what I'm trying to buy. What are the right products for this person and where should I buy that from? And which is exactly the right brand and the right price I should be paying for it, which I.
- [31:28]
Peter
We've talked about this a bunch where, you know, I always think of Jarvis as my personal AI just because I'm an Ironman fan and I'm just going to give Jarvis all responsibilities. Sometimes I give Esther, who's my chief of staff, I say, please find me something, and I trust her and she goes off and does it. And she has great taste. And I can imagine very shortly it's going to be my version of Jarvis. That is, it's like ask and forget. And it happens.
- [32:00]
Alex, what am I missing here?
- [32:02]
Alex
Yeah, I've read that the average American spends approximately three hours per week shopping, out of which two hours are spent grocery shopping. That's an enormous cognitive burden. Maybe some would disagree and say, no, I love my shopping, you'll pull it out of my cold dead hands. But it's an enormous cognitive burden and I would argue it could be put to much more productive uses if we simply solve shopping the way we're solving math. So I view this as a positive development. Let's solve shopping while we're going to.
- [32:30]
Peter
Have a shopping benchmark very soon. I can hear it coming.
- [32:34]
Alex
You can hear it probably already here.
- [32:36]
Peter
Okay.
- [32:36]
Salim
All right.
- [32:37]
Peter
I found this one fascinating. Thanks for raising it, Alex. Mathematics facing existential crisis due to AI I'm going to start with the quote down below from a professor at Ben Guiron University. I'm writing a bunch of papers and. And I don't know if I should bother publishing them. That's fascinating. Alex, what are you hearing in the drum beats in the math community?
- [33:03]
Alex
I'm hearing quite a bit of this and not just from the math community. I'm hearing it from the physical sciences as well. And I think the anthropologists and the economists will be studying this moment for many years to come, well after the singularity is well and truly over. And I Think my suspicion is this will be viewed as a sort of professional hyper deflation. In a deflationary regime, why spend your money now? You should wait until later when your money can buy more. Similarly here, if we're in this mode of, call it professional hyper deflation, why spend any effort doing much of anything, let alone writing hard math papers now if AI will make it much easier, if not effortless, in the future? So I think this is going to get solved at some point when we start to up the ambition level of problems that we're solving. But for the moment, I think we're in a moment of professional hyper deflation. It's very exciting.
- [34:00]
Peter
This is the equivalent of don't bother going in a starship because by the time you get to the planet you're targeting, technology will advance so far that you'll meet an entire population there.
- [34:12]
Salim
That's right.
- [34:12]
Alex
And there's a term for that that's called the weight equation. And we're seeing the weight equation play out now across every discip, including math that's just getting solved by AI.
- [34:21]
Salim
I'm really excited because I think this indicates a collapse of traditional academics because they're refused to rethink itself. Right. God bless.
- [34:28]
Peter
Yeah, for sure. Anyway.
- [34:33]
We are seeing a collapse of the college university system for lots of other reasons.
- [34:38]
Naveen
But the laws and regulations, Peter, still have to change because they're still not allowing the AI to be co author on papers. And that has to eventually change because what's in AI and what's human is starting to blur. The line between humanity and AI is going to blur.
- [34:55]
Peter
Alex, what do you think about that?
- [34:57]
Alex
Yeah, I think regulations are separate from norms in many cases, although certainly there's quite a bit of interplay between them. So on the regulation side, we're not covering it here in this pod, but the US Patent Office has recently made some positive motions in the direction of supporting AI enabled patent applications, for example. So I think there is progress on the regulatory side. On the norm side, I think that's in some sense far trickier than the evolution of regulations, because in some cases I think you have entrenched communities that are actively disincentivized from allowing in this rush of progress. If your entire discipline is about to get solved in the next three years, which in many cases I think will be the case, certainly with math over the next two to three years, we're seeing the solution, then there are perverse incentives at play to discourage all of this innovation and to protect your professional livelihood. And that's just Something as a civilization, we're going to have to get through as quickly and painlessly as possible.
- [35:56]
Peter
I mean, I have to imagine that every patent being filed right now is in part being developed with AI as a tool. And I have to also imagine that in figuring out the claims and figuring out extensions and figuring out, you know, new strategies or how would you disrupt this patent? All of that is going to be done using AI.
- [36:18]
Salim
It's like security. It's an arms race, right? You find a way of hacking, then you find a way of protecting. You find a way of hacking, find a way of protecting. It's the same thing. Because the AI side will uplift both the filing of the patents and the evaluation of the patents. But the entire concept now, because we're shrinking time, how do you give a patent for a number of years? And what does that mean when, say, the CRISPR patent was routed around within 18 months?
- [36:45]
Alex
See, I think the hard part isn't the patents themselves. It's what happens when in the next few years, we're facing a glut of innovations due to AI solving everything and we don't know how to metabolize that as a civilization. Like, if AI solves the top 5,000 diseases in the next five years, as some frontier labs, as we've talked on the pod, are now doing, how on earth do we metabolize 5,000 major disease cures into treatments for everyone?
- [37:10]
Peter
It's hard.
- [37:11]
Salim
The current timing is about 17 years from known cure to full deployment. Going through all the regulatory.
- [37:16]
Peter
Yeah, I remember I was on stage with Astro Teller and Steve Jurvetson, and we were talking about what the world looks like as we're approaching the singularity. And there was something that was said that blew my mind. It was, you'll never bother patenting anything ever again. Because as soon as you file something, as soon as you create a product, there'll be a army of AIs that are figuring out how to produce that product around any patent that pre exists and make it more efficiently from a different approach. And so your only defense is no longer patents. It's continuous innovation. You've got to be continually renovating yourself.
- [37:56]
Alex
I think, for what it's worth, that's sort of a nonsensical argument because we're also going to have an army of AI patent litigators to defend all those patents.
- [38:05]
Peter
Great.
- [38:06]
Salim
No, no, but Peter, I think you're making a really important point. I'll go back to the CRISPR thing. Right. They spend years fighting over who invented crispr. Jennifer versus the other folks. And they finally got through it all, resolved it all. And then by that time, they had found four other ways of path pathways. And I think it was nine other pathways of getting the same outcome, but not using that ip. So I think that's the part that's going to break lots of other things.
- [38:31]
Peter
Well, again, AI entering our world, I think there's very soon a period of time where every Nobel Prize is being done in partnership with AI, not that they're being recognized. All right, let's jump into where the rubber hits the road. I want to talk about jobs and the economy. A lot of interesting news here. The first is a study by McKinsey on how AI is reshaping skills and work by 2030, saying that AI can automate already 57% of current US work. And the goal here is shifting, not eliminating roles. And the demand for AI fluency has grown 7x in two years. It's the fastest rising skill in the US and finally, that we're going to see $2.9 trillion in economic gains by 2030 as a result of this. Alex, you want to kick off the conversation?
- [39:24]
Alex
Yeah. I tell people who ask me for career advice to make sure that their skills and their work goals are aligned with an intelligence explosion. In other words, to accelerate it and make sure that intelligence superintelligence is evenly distributed. I think the exact wrong thing to do, as we were just discussing, is to.
- [39:45]
Not align your work with the boundaries and the vectors of this explosion. Worst case, to try to slow it down. And I think that's being reflected already in automation. If you're in an industry and if you're a mathematician and you're concerned that all of your work is about to be automated, why do anything? You're facing your moment of ennui. You're staring down the weight equation. What's the point of anything? What you should be working on, I would argue, is AI for solving math. And maybe it's time to jump up a layer of abstraction and supervise a fleet of AI agents that are automating your former fields.
- [40:23]
Peter
Yeah, I love that.
- [40:24]
Naveen
Well, I think, Peter, I think to me, the AI fluency, what is the really mean? Because you never really interact with AI. You really interact with an application that's on built on top of AI, and those tools are constantly changing. So really developing AI fluency has really no meaning as such, because those tools are going to be constantly changing and becoming more and more different and advanced. So I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here. How do you actually have way to encourage and educate children where they constantly becomes lifelong learner? And knowing that intelligence, you know, intelligence is going to be the capabilities to learn, not the knowledge you have. So the whole thing has to shift from knowledge to capability to learn.
- [41:12]
Peter
Yeah, and we talked about continuous learning and AIs as well. I've often tweeted at MIT and Harvard, my universities of history.
- [41:23]
That you've got to change. The idea of being admitted for a four year degree is crazy. You should be admitted for lifelong learning. You're a member of a student body for life.
- [41:35]
Alex
And that works really well until we have BCIs in a few years and can do high bandwidth downloads and sideloads of new information and don't need traditional universities.
- [41:43]
Peter
I can't wait. Well, listen, the universities are going to sublimate.
- [41:49]
Very shortly.
- [41:51]
Salim
I think I would make the two points here. One is that for the education side that we're moving from the supply side where you learned engineering, math, accounting and then trying to sell that in the job marketplace and we're moving to the demand side where you pick your massive transformative purpose and your pick what you want problem you want to solve and then go acquire the skills you need to solve that problem. So that's one big shift. I do want to call BS on one thing in this chart please, which is that 2.9 trillion economic gain. That all sounds wonderful, except they're not talking about the demonetization that is taking place radically across the board, which I think dwarfs that.
- [42:25]
Peter
Yeah, it's McKinsey.
- [42:27]
Salim
So I say yes on big chunks.
- [42:29]
Peter
Of this, but can you double click on what that means? Because it's important to, for folks to understand.
- [42:35]
Alex
Yes.
- [42:35]
Salim
For example, there's an innovation out there called wellways which may solve breast cancer because we can detect breast cancer at stage zero. Now, okay, we spend half a million dollars per person on average in the west treating breast cancer. Somebody that's gotten breast cancer. If you solve breast cancer, GDP drops. Even though you solved a major problem, GDP dropped. This is why IMOD talks about whoever the fellow that created GDP said it's the worst form of worst measurement of the economy possible because as we increase efficiency, GDP actually drops. I use the example of that thousand dollar TV that's only worth can only be sold for $500 a year later and $250 a year after that. Those are all drops in GDP. And so we're not, we're missing that unbelievable hollowing out of all of the work that's going to be done that 57% of US work that's being automated is going to decimate GDP. Well, that's the part to take into account as well as looking at the upside.
- [43:33]
Peter
I thought you were going to say something different, Saleem. I thought you're going to say the fact that $100 by 2030 buys you so much more capability than $100 does today. Right.
- [43:45]
Salim
That's all built into the same thing. Right? It's all built in because the amount of stuff I can do with $100 is 100 times more than say 10 years ago. Even though the dollar is deflated, etc. The productivity of that hundred dollars. I can launch a whole business with $100 today, which I couldn't do 20 years ago, 10 years years ago, even five years ago.
- [44:05]
Peter
All right, well, let's move on to another MIT study. MIT finds that AI can already replace 11.7% of the US workforce. So MIT found AI can handle jobs tied to about 1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare and HR. I completely believe that. Right. Their Iceberg Index simulates 151 million workers and 32,000 skills to see which tasks AI can now perform. And tech layoffs are just the surface of a 2.2% of exposed wages. Thoughts? Salim?
- [44:45]
Salim
This speaks to what we spoke about in the last slide. Essentially we're going to see this huge demonetization take place. I don't see anything massively meaningful here except that you will automate a lot of tasks. I go back to Eric Brunellsson comment that to do a particular job, you might have 27 tasks and ama automate like half of those, but you still have to do half of those. And it also speaks to the middle to middle comment that Balaji talks about. I think the big shift will come when we move away from human centric workflows. So think about the idea that right now all of our work that we do in any company or any function is human centric. You go from accounting to fulfillment. You have marketing of accounting and you have a person there. When you have an AI that can rewrite it, the rules, you can get rid of all of those people centric tasks into being functionally centric.
- [45:33]
Peter
Naveen, what are your thoughts?
- [45:34]
Naveen
I think this is slightly different. I think if you, you know what Satya said a couple of days ago was really meaningful. He says, look, yes, we're going to have AI agents just like I have bunch of employees. But I, you know, they go out and do the job because I delegate them. But I still have. They still come back and say, I'm finished this, I'm stuck here. What do I do here? What's my priority? If I do, should I do this or this? Right. So point is, the humans will always going to be there irrespective of all the agents and the new agents actually being deployed. It just makes them more productive, it allows them to do more. So I don't believe that jobs are going to go away. It will just allow the same people to be able to do more.
- [46:19]
Peter
You know, this goes back to a couple of pods ago when I was showing the data from Fi9. And this is not just in the US in the tech industry, the notion that there's still a lot of fear around the world of can I find a job and can I afford to live in this future? And the, you know, I'm out right now actively speaking to people and there's just a tremendous amount of fear around the future for their kids and the future for their ability to survive and thrive. Right. So that is still very real. I'll just mention on that pod, I said to our subscribers and listeners, you know, we would love to get together and have what we call a moonshot gathering probably in the fall of next year and to talk about how do we solve these problems, how do we solve these huge problems of fear and uplift society for every man, woman and child. And I said, if we can get 1,000 moonshot subscribers, we're like 850 now. So if you're interested in potentially a moonshot gathering with the moonshot mates probably in LA in the fall of 26, send an email to moonshotsamandis.com, we'll send you some information. And again, I'm just right now we're asking, is this of interest to you? If you want to be part of these conversations over a couple of day event, we'd love to have you. So again, just send us an email, we'll send you back.
- [47:55]
Salim
There's an abundance of wine. I'm there.
- [47:57]
Peter
There's an abundance of what?
- [47:59]
Naveen
Wine.
- [48:00]
Peter
Wine. Okay, yours there, troll.
- [48:05]
All right, so moonshotsamandis.com, all right, let's move on to our next article here. Here's a flip side. Claude conversation suggests AI could double US productivity growth. So an analysis of a thousand chats, 100,000 chats found tasks without AI took an average of 90 minutes and Claude helped cut the time by 80% on the average task. With healthcare being cut up to 90% and being in the healthcare Industry. I know this to be the fact. Right. Is so much that can be improved on every aspect of the. It's not healthcare, it's sick care. Right. So let's just be very clear. Claude could help, you know, cut average task length by 90% in the sick care industry.
- [48:55]
Salim
So what this means is you can get a procedure or some task done for like a tenth of the cost. Right. That's the demonetization we're talking about.
- [49:02]
Peter
It is. And when you bring in, you know, intelligent, you know, humanoid robots, you're going to start to get medical procedures done at a tenth of the cost.
- [49:14]
Salim
Can I give a personal anecdote here, please? I have a big screen TV that just went blank on it. Okay. And so I went into ChatGPT and Gemini and I said, my TV is not working and here's the model number. And it said, is it making a buzzing sound? And I was like, what? So I listened. It is making a buzzing sound? I said, yes. It said, is it making a buzzing sound every for two seconds spaced by seven times in a row? And I was like, yeah. And it said, there's a diode on the power board that's gone bad and here's how you fix it. Now, this is mind boggling because that would have taken hours and hours and hours that. Take the process, TP TV apart, guess at 100 things to figure out. Carry the whole damn TV into the, into the repair shop to figure out what the hell's going on. Or do you even just chuck the TV and I could go in there. The guy soldered a new diode for me and it was back to scratch. That, I think, is the kind of thing that we're going to see hundreds of times over in all sorts of.
- [50:11]
Peter
In health care as well. Yeah.
- [50:12]
Salim
And in health care, 10 times over.
- [50:14]
Peter
Wow.
- [50:15]
Naveen
Wow. But I don't think the health care cost has anything to do with what people charge. I really don't think this will change how much money we spend on healthcare. It's not really the cost issue. It's not about how much money you spend. It is primarily driven by litigation, and that's not going to change.
- [50:31]
Peter
Ah, fascinating. Well, I mean, it can change, just not easily. Yes.
- [50:36]
Alex
My expectation, for what it's worth, is that the Jevons Paradox is going to strike yet again. And just as a reminder, the Jevons Paradox is that as the efficiency of a good or service increases, it's often the case that overall demand increases even more. I think whether it's with healthcare or with television, Repair or just service economy tasks in general, I'm finding anecdotally and seeing more generally as productivity skyrockets thanks to these tools, you take on more tasks, you take on more projects. Rather than taking a two day weekend and turning that into a four day work week, the exact opposite is happening. We're doing far more with less.
- [51:17]
Peter
Yeah, multiplexing lives are just, are just going hyper exponentially.
- [51:21]
Salim
I think this is a key point. Like for example, we talk about automating software writing and I think we'll just end up writing 10 times more software because lots of slots to be done. Right. And lots of slop, of course, but how many hundreds of thousands of things do we want to keep automating? And we worked at the very, very beginning of all of that.
- [51:38]
Peter
Yeah.
- [51:40]
In the economy. Here's a fun conversation. Interesting article. Some New Yorkers are getting $12,000 in crypto. It's a basic income style pilot by Coinbase. So 160 New Yorkers in the Bronx and East Harlem are getting 12 USDC or 12,000 USDC. Right. And we had Jeremy Allaire on this pod, the CEO of Circle, as part of a basic income pilot. It's funded by Coinbase. Each participant receives $800 a month again in USDC for five months plus an $8,000 lump sum. And the program is testing whether crypto payments are useful or perceived differently in low income communities. Gentlemen, who wants to jump in?
- [52:27]
Salim
I think I love the idea they're running this because the more data and the more UBI type pilots we run, the better we've seen profound positive results. When you truly run a ubi, meaning it's truly universal, it's truly based on, and it's basically just given the income to the people. In this particular case, I think there's going to be a huge age demographic split between young people going yeah, I'll use the damn crypto. And the older folks going, give it to the kids and they'll figure it out.
- [52:55]
Alex
I'll comment on this story as well. Critically, this is not a ubi. This is a gbi, which is a guaranteed basic income that restricts the targets of the recipients to certain economic demographics. So it's not universal, it's just basically for those who need it, according to some definition of need to bring them up to some floor. I think what this represents is we're seeing an evolution. There were a variety of trials of call it first or second generation ubi. Some of those succeeded, some of those arguably did not succeed. I think it's Very helpful that we're seeing innovation and iteration and evolution of, of call it post economic paradigms like this. I'm still a big fan of universal basic services and universal basic equity, not just basic income guaranteed or otherwise. But I think we should expect to see many more iterations, trials, evolutions like this before we finally figure out what it looks like to live in an abundant economy.
- [53:56]
Peter
Yeah, we had this, an X prize at this year's Visioneering. Saleem was there. Naveen, I'm sorry you weren't able to make it this year. But the prize that won Visioneering this year, it was called the abundance x prize. Two of my abundance, 360 members pitched it, proposed it and won. And it's for universal basic services. The idea is, can you provide for a flat fee of $250 a month, housing, food, water, energy and bandwidth? Right. That's the goal. And I love the idea because if a family has a roof over their head and guaranteed food and bandwidth and energy, they can start thinking about their future. They can start thinking about how they become an entrepreneur. What do they do? How do they upskill themselves? But if you're a mom or dad fighting to put food in your kids mouths, nothing else matters.
- [55:00]
Salim
This was so exciting to see because it's the first time we've also moved away from the hard technology stuff to more of the social contract. And the biggest problem in the world is that what's happening as we move this massive transformation is the old social contract is absolutely breaking.
- [55:16]
Peter
Yeah, for sure.
- [55:16]
Salim
We need to recreate some new model and some model that covers the bottom couple of layers of Maslow's hierarchy is just going to be unbelievable for the world.
- [55:24]
Peter
Yeah, we want to make this a $50 million prize. I had my first conversation with a friend who's a multi billionaire, not in the US who said he's open to funding it. So I'm looking for funders. If you're listening and you want to fund this Abundance X Prize, please let us know. Okay.
- [55:44]
Salim
This may have a bigger impact than any other prize we've ever done.
- [55:48]
Peter
I agree. I mean again, going back to the potential moonshot gathering we might have.
- [55:58]
There'S a lot of fear out there in the world and there's fear about how do I navigate in this future of AI disruption. And if people have a safety.
- [56:13]
A foundation that enables them to feel safe and then they can start to learn and go forward, it reduces the fear significantly. And that's the goal.
- [56:24]
Salim
And if you can tell people that, look, there's a line of sight to basic needs being covered for $250 a month. Everybody kind of breathes a huge sigh of relief and you take away that angst that's there right today. One of their family members gets sick, the whole family goes bankrupt.
- [56:41]
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- [57:47]
Peter
Next article here is NASDAQ pledges swift push for SEC approval of tokenized stocks so tokens would have the same rights and protections as normal stocks including dividends and voting. The move is meant to modernize rather than disrupt. NASDAQ considers itself considers this an evolution in trading and tokenized stocks would be digital versions of regular shares on the blockchain. Naveen, how do you think about trading 24. 7? Are you excited about this?
- [58:16]
Naveen
First of all, it's already happening. I mean most of the stocks are trading 24.7 anyway in different markets. Obviously if you look at bitcoins and others, they trade 24. 7 and so it is not a massive change that, you know, call them tokenization. But the things like iShares. I mean iShares has been around for a long time. People have looked at how do you buy a partial shares. So yes, it is a small incremental thing by putting on a blockchain. But really the idea of buying partial shares have been around. People have broken the shares into dividend shares or the growth shares. So I mean there are many, many ways of owning a share and this is just yet another way of doing it.
- [59:00]
Peter
Alex or Salim, you want to lean in?
- [59:02]
Alex
Yeah, I'll comment on this one if I may. When we spoke with Tolle a number of episodes ago about Solana, we talked about how increasing the efficiency of financial services was maybe the killer app of crypto, maybe the only killer app at the moment. I wish there were more compelling killer apps besides that. And I view this step by Nasdaq. This is iterative. It's a foundational step, but a step, I think in a very positive direction. It does not Critically give us 247 trading as much as I would like that yet, but it could be an Enabler. If the SEC approved 247 trading down the road, it could be an enabler for fractional tokenized shares.
- [59:47]
Peter
Enabler, yeah, that's what I like.
- [59:49]
Salim
Right.
- [59:49]
Peter
And the idea of I can own a fraction of a particular share and then a fraction of a particular piece of real estate and then tokenized assets and then add to that, you know.
- [60:04]
Agents trading and you get an explosion in the economy today you can do.
- [60:08]
Naveen
That with a single stock etf. So you can buy a partial shares, you can buy fractional shares, you can buy whole bunch of things similarly today. So yes, I just say it's incremental and it's an enabler, as Alex rightly pointed. So rather than a big, massive change here.
- [60:25]
Salim
Yeah, for me, I'm with Naveen. This is like incremental and it seems like modernization with regulatory blessing rather than anything monster. But it's definitely a step in the right direction. Thank God.
- [60:38]
Peter
Okay. All right. Our next segment here is titled Elon and How to Solve the US Debt Crisis. Let's take a listen to the video. As long as civilization keeps advancing.
- [60:53]
Ilya
We.
- [60:53]
Peter
Will have AI and robotics at very large scale.
- [61:02]
I think that's pretty much the only thing that's going to solve for the US Debt crisis because currently the US debt is insanely high and the interest payments on the debt exceed the entire military budget of the United States, just the interest payments. And that's, at least in the short.
- [61:22]
Alex
Term, going to continue to increase.
- [61:25]
Peter
So I think actually the only thing that can solve for the debt situation is Zeon Robotics. Fascinating.
- [61:35]
I believe that AI and robotics are going to basically light in a positive fashion the economy on fire. I disagreed in saying I've had this conversation with Elon and by the way, I'm texting back and forth right now to get him scheduled to come on the pod. So that will be a fun episode. We have a lot of amazing people coming up on the podcast. We've got Mustafa Suleiman coming up next week who's the CEO of Microsoft AI. We've got Ray Kurzweil coming up, Cathie woods coming up. So a lot of fun conversations and looking forward to getting Elon scheduled. But I was saying was another thing that can solve the debt is actually extending the health span of individuals. If you could add 2, 3, 4, 5 healthy years on people's lives that would massively transform any country's debt position.
- [62:32]
Salim
I have issues here, okay.
- [62:37]
Trying to solve the problem. The problem is the underlying fiat currency structure is flawed if we have increased productivity. My fear is it just gives governments oh we can spend more and they'll just start spending more or printing more money which is what they've done repeatedly in the past. You have to break that problem first and Bitcoin is the only model that does that. So I don't know how you solve for that problem because you can't solve for the unbelievable ability of governments when given a little bit of rope to spread their prim or money.
- [63:09]
Alex
Alex, maybe comment on that one.
- [63:14]
I am reticent to assert that any fundamentally deflationary cryptocurrency is the solution to a macroeconomic debt crisis. I think at best part of the solution. I don't think it's the whole story. I do buy the thesis that economic hypergrowth growth in general, there's the aphorism growth cures all woes or almost all woes. I do think economic hyper growth that stems from AI and automation can solve the so called debt crisis. But I also think it can solve many other things. I think there's a debate raging right now in the reinforcement learning and machine learning community as to whether some of the hardest problems like curing all disease, can we cure all disease with AI right now? Or does the economy need to be much larger in order for us to be able to cure all disease? I think if we find ourselves in a future where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next three plus years, it's not just the debt crisis that we'd be talking about solving. It's that's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table.
- [64:23]
Peter
Naveen, where do you come out on this?
- [64:25]
Naveen
I mean from my perspective, first thing is that obviously economic growth gives you more revenue but you have to fundamentally solve the problem of balanced budget until we get to a point where actually like every single person in their home they have to have a balanced budget. Every state have to have a balanced budget. Federal government is really the only place where we don't have a balanced budget. So that's once we start to look at we can't spend more than what we earned and as we earn more we have to pay back the debt before we start Spending it that we have to say that as the economic growth happens. Saleem, to your point, we have to say 90% of that is going to go towards paying the debt back. And unless our debt is back to zero, we're not going to spend it. So balanced budget using the economic growth that is going to come through AI and robotics to pay back the debt before we start spending it is really the only way we can solve this crisis.
- [65:22]
Salim
Somebody must be modeling all this out somewhere because it can't be that hard to model out.
- [65:26]
Peter
Well, I think Iman's been playing with.
- [65:28]
Salim
Economic growth by economic increase from AI versus the deflationary versus the money printing versus the schedule.
- [65:36]
Alex
We've talked in the past on the POD about how the Dallas Fed is already modeling the singularity. So it's not like these discussions aren't being held in in either regulatory circles or macroeconomic circles. I think really, to the extent debt is just borrowing from the future, no one is super confident right now what the future trajectory looks like. Do we solve all problems in the next three to five years? In which case, yeah, sure, borrow from infinity, that's great. Or does it take longer?
- [66:04]
Salim
Just to remind the viewers, the Dallas Fed said realistically could be like this. If we have a good singularity, it's vertical. And if the bad singularity is vertical the other way, then really it was kind of like binary.
- [66:17]
Alex
At least it was on the do.
- [66:18]
Salim
Not, at least it was borrow from.
- [66:19]
Alex
Positive infinity, don't borrow from negative infinity is the resolution here.
- [66:24]
Peter
All right, let's move on. I have some news I want to share with my moonshot mates here and everyone on the pod. My next book is coming out. It's called We Are as Gods. It's coming out in April of 2026. It's called We Are as A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. Once again, I've co authored this with Steven Kotler, who's an amazing, amazing writer. And this book is the sequel to Abundance that came out in 2012. And it's much, much more than that. For me. This is a guide on how to survive and thrive in the decade ahead. And my message is to get my goal is to get this message out as far and wide as possible. And if you've ever written a book, you probably know that bestsellers don't just happen. They're engineered. And it's all about the Amazon algorithms and it's crazy. But I would love your help if you're willing. So I need to hit 500 books sold in December, four months ahead of the book release in order to make the algorithms work. And so I wanted to extend a special offer if anyone here wants to go to purchase one of these books. Now, we'll give you, Steve and I will hold a private 90 minute AMA answering any questions on any of these subjects on AI and mindsets and humanity's future. Also, if you buy two books, we're going to give you 140 abundance charts. So I have a collection of the most amazing charts showing the upside of abundance, the downside of abundance, all the exponential technologies. Anyway, if you want to join the team and help us with this pre launch campaign, help me rocket this into the stratosphere, I would be grateful. You can go to diamandis.com book and join this prelaunch effort. So let me just say off the top, thank you for considering it. We're going to have the 90 minute AMA towards the end of December, probably December 17th to 22nd and it'll be a lot of fun. So join me if you can, dashmannus.com book and we'll put the link below as well. All right, let's talk about energy, gentlemen, shall we? This was amazing. Check this out. Microsoft's Fairwater facility to use more power than Los angeles by late 2027.
- [69:05]
Blitzy Representative
Who.
- [69:05]
Peter
Wants to jump in on this one? I mean, AI is sucking up electrons.
- [69:11]
Alex
I'll comment that the multi trillion dollar question in capex is whether coherent superclusters will keep increasing in size. We don't know the answer to that yet. It is entirely possible that we'll see a peak in terms of the size or the energy footprint of coherent training clusters. Sometime soon, maybe Shortly after late 2027, we'll look back and say, gosh, that was the peak. And hereafter advances in distributed training algorithms mean that we can spread the wealth, spread the energy footprint of training runs across the entire surface of the planet or in low earth orbit perhaps. And we'll say no naive extrapolation called for larger and larger clusters, but actually that's not what happened. And we didn't need black hole supercomputers after all. I don't think we know the answer to that question. I think it's going to be almost entirely dictated by algorithmic advances in distributed training.
- [70:08]
Peter
Interesting.
- [70:09]
Salim
I'm staggered by how big this thing must be. I mean, how much of Wisconsin is this thing covering? Would be an interesting question.
- [70:16]
Peter
Well, it's basically two and a half nuclear power plants, right? That's the way I think about it.
- [70:20]
Naveen
And I think, Peter, I think the two things are going to happen. Obviously, either we don't need that many bigger clusters, Alex pointed out, or secondly, I really think that some of the fusion stuff that I think we may have talked about in the past, but I was just at Helion last month and I really think they're already digging up the things for Microsoft Data center in the state of Washington where I think they're going to have a positive fusion reactor for Microsoft in 2027. And I really think at this point they're so close because of how they're using the capacitors and super capacitors in terms of to be able to recapture 95% of the pulse that they send to the fusion reactor. So I really think this is good problem could be a modular fusion reactors. And I think this problem can be solved.
- [71:08]
Peter
Yeah.
- [71:10]
Well, we're starting to see communities who are saying no data center in my backyard because they're concerned about the price of energy going up. I just want to do a shout out again to Google and nanobanana. By the way, this graphic that you're seeing if you're watching this podcast on YouTube.
- [71:30]
When Gianluca on my team first put this up, was really faint, really difficult to read. I took a screenshot of the image and fed it to Nana Banana. I said, make the lines darker, thicker, make all the characters readable. And it generated this. Perfect. So it's just so simple. And over the Thanksgiving break, I was at my mom's house in Boca and I went around and I photographed all the old photographs that are like 100 years old, that are black and white and crinkly and fuzzy. And I fed them all into Nana Banana and it did an amazing job of making them crisp or modernizing them or colorizing them. A lot of fun. So at least the electrons are going for something good and useful. All right, Absolutely. I like this one. I know you would, Salim. So Xai plans to build 88 acres of solar panels around Memphis data center. So this is 88 acres of solar farms, right? 30 megawatts. Only 10% of the site's power demand. But still a nice move. I mean, you have to remember that Elon started SolarCity with his cousin that was then acquired by Tesla. And so solar has been a focus for him. Salim, do you want to go more data centers, more solar?
- [72:54]
Salim
Well, I think solar is just the most. We have to remember that solar is an exponential technology doubling every 22 months in its price performance has been doing that for 40 years. So every couple of years we double the price performance of solar, it scales and therefore this is very, very exciting.
- [73:13]
Peter
Yep. Naveen, anything you want to add?
- [73:16]
Naveen
I mean, I think I'm simply going to add I think solar is good, but I really think the nuclear and fusion is where the future is going to be.
- [73:24]
Peter
You know the challenge I have with that and listen, I agree, but when I look at the articles on nuclear, on generation three and four, nuclear and small modular reactors and fusion, it all looks like 5 and 10 year timelines. And China is deploying solar 10x faster than we are.
- [73:50]
What do you think about that?
- [73:52]
Naveen
I don't think that nuclear is really the problem in terms of us not be able to build safe nuclear reactor. We have been using them in aircraft carriers and with no incidents at all.
- [74:01]
Peter
Sure, we know it's permitting. It's permitting.
- [74:05]
Naveen
It's all regulations.
- [74:06]
Peter
Yeah, yeah, it's all regulations. Agreed. And you know, the question is when is the government going to change that?
- [74:13]
Salim
Well, but the problem is we have two problems. One is that.
- [74:18]
For us to move fully to solar you have to cover the baseload because. Because solar scaling will be a long time before it gets to the level where it covers all of our electricity needs. So that baseload problem is where we need nuclear fusion. The problem is it's going to take several years to build the nuclear and definitely for fusion. Yeah.
- [74:35]
Alex
Remember also solar and fusion are the same energy source. We get solar power from fusion in the sun. So it's really a question if we're going to put solar on one hand and fusion on the other hand, where is the fusion taking place? Do we want it taking place at the center of our solar system or do we want it taking place at a number of locations on the Earth's surface? And I think there is an argument to be made that for certain purposes you want a very large fusion reactor, like for really large training runs that require large power sources that are locally available. And for certain purposes you want distributed fusion. So I can see an argument projecting out 10, 15 years when perhaps we get our solar Dyson swarm as naively extrapolating. Seems like we're on that trajectory regardless of whether you like it or not. We're on that trajectory naively where we're going to get both. We're going to get lots of solar based fusion and also we'll get lots of land and low Earth orbit based fusion and they'll coexist.
- [75:33]
Peter
We'll discuss disassembling the moon in a little bit.
- [75:36]
Salim
Okay.
- [75:37]
Peter
All right, let's jump into health And a topic that Naveen and I both dearly love and spend a lot of our time on. And we're going to start Naveen with viome. You know, again, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. I love having you on our board at Singularity and xprize, but day to day you run viome and we have two articles I'd love you to comment on. So folks understand what it is VIOME does. Jump in on this one.
- [76:08]
Naveen
Well, I think, Peter, more than just what viome does, I think what I find really, really fascinating is this is the first time in the human history where we are starting to see what is it at a molecular level that is changing inside the human body that we have been measuring for so long. So we have had these standard lab tests that says your cholesterol is high and the only solution has been take statin. But nobody has ever looked at and seen what is causing this cholesterol to go high. Is it your gut microbiome is really converting the Oscillobacter. Is it actually converting the dietary cholesterol into copper estinol, which essentially doesn't get absorbed. So you have a low cholesterol. Can we do that? Can we actually change from bile acid to secondary bile acid? Can we increase the short chain fatty acids? And by simply understanding exactly what is a root cause for you, specifically that causing the high cholesterol, we can come up with a very personalized solution rather than a one size fits all. And that's really the key is to understanding for each individual what is going on inside their body so we can come up with a solution that works for them.
- [77:26]
Peter
Got it.
- [77:28]
There's a second one I'd love you to cover if you would, which is.
- [77:37]
Not something most people think about, but what is the root cause of constipation.
- [77:41]
Naveen
But it's really interesting, Peter, that we may not think about it often, but there are 15% of our population in the United States suffer from IBS and they are mostly constipation. This is a big problem right now. Most of the times you people have constipation, doctors will take laxative. Laxative doesn't cure constipation. It simply relieves the symptom of the constipation. But you still have constipation. And you know, again, looking at from the biological perspective what we found having Peter, now, I don't know if I told you or not, we have now analyzed one.
- [78:21]
We have 1.5 million tests and we have analyzed over 400 quadrillion biological data point. And what we saw was that constipation can be caused by many, many different things. For example, in some people it was caused by having high methane gas production because we know that methane gas slows down the motility of the gut, right. It could be the low serotonin production, it could be the short chin fatty acid, it could be the bile acid. Right. So it could be many, many different reasons. By looking at what each individual has, we were able to identify what was causing the constipation for them and give them a personalized nutrition of the food and supplements. And we actually did a blinded placebo controlled study that showed in 90 days, 64% of the people who had constipation with the personalized nutrition and supplement, they became healthy compared to 10% on placebo. So not only we can identify what's happening. Yeah, and that's my point, Peter, for the first time, not only we can identify why it is, what is happening, why it is happening and what to do about it.
- [79:33]
Peter
For you, I mean most people, you know, it's interesting, right? It's only the last four or five years, maybe in the last three years that the microbiome has been identified to correlate with so many different.
- [79:50]
Health failure modes. People need to realize your collection of 40 trillion human cells and something on the order of 100 trillion other life forms. Bacteria. Vibra. Yes.
- [80:05]
Salim
An outerwear for bacteria.
- [80:08]
Peter
Yeah. Well, the human being is simply a mechanism for carrying bacteria around the planet.
- [80:13]
Alex
Good question for Naveen.
- [80:16]
Peter
Yeah, Alex, go ahead.
- [80:17]
Alex
Quick question for Naveen. How do we get more refereed published studies into this space? Like for hypercholesterolemia for example. On the previous note, is there a.
- [80:30]
Peer reviewed published study that we can point to?
- [80:33]
Naveen
Yes, there is a BMC gi, which is just article we just published on a peer reviewed journal, which is one of the most prestigious GI journal. And we actually showed that we can identify by looking at your gut microbiome exactly what is causing for example constipation or what is causing the hypercholesterolia. We actually are able to identify and publish these people. And this is by the way, Not N of 20 or N of 50. There was an end of 86,750 people.
- [81:05]
Alex
It sounds very exciting. So how do we do this at scale? So if there really is artisanal progress being made on hypercholesterolemia or constipation, how do we, to the extent that microbiome is a gating factor for a wide variety of diseases, how do you just Solve all of the microbiome gated diseases at once rather than doing the same individually.
- [81:27]
Naveen
And again, two things is that even though it is, the underlying reasons for each individual is very, very different. So it can't be a one size fits all approach, whereas the healthcare demands one size fits all approach. And what we're finding is the underlying reason for the same symptom is very, very different. That means for some people the high cholesterol is being caused by high secondary bile acid or some people it's being caused by a completely different reason. So you have to really look at the underlying reason and that's the reason it has to be hyper personalized rather than one size fits all. And the second thing is in our current healthcare system, as Peter very well knows, it is really is not designed. Everyone in the healthcare system, this is the only industry, the healthcare system is the only industry where they make money when you their customer is unhappy and they stop making money when the customer becomes happy. I mean there's no other industry. Right. So it's not designed to keep you happy. They want to actually solve the symptom of the problem. So you become a lifelong customer. And by the way, you can't use nutrition as a mechanism to solve it because then if they call it a drug and then you have to wait for 20 years before the drug comes out.
- [82:47]
Salim
Yeah.
- [82:47]
Peter
And don't just remember.
- [82:48]
Salim
I remember interviewing the head of Google Health at a conference once and I said, I'm Canadian, please explain the US healthcare system and to your point of view. And he said, the whole healthcare system here is designed to get you sick, keep you sick as long as possible without killing you. And I was shocked as a Canadian, but the whole audience, about 500 people are like, yeah, that's about right. That's all right. Just unreal.
- [83:09]
Alex
If I might ask just one more question, Naveen, if you project out there forward past the difficulties of the present healthcare system and you had to outline what you think is the shape of the final solution for microbiome health management. Does it look like fecal transplants? Does it look like purely dietary interventions? What is with 24th century technology? What's like the fully realized solution for microbiome health?
- [83:34]
Naveen
So I think the idea of a microbiome being a one single organ or the set of species or ecosystem is completely fundamentally wrong. And this is really where I think the biggest change we saw that everyone else was looking at microbiome as a set of species or strains of species that are out there. And what we focused on the functional. So what they do is what matters, not who they are. That means same organisms can do something good in one environment and the same organism can produce something toxic in a different environment. So looking at the functional microbiome and once you know what functions they are performing or not performing, then providing the right set of substrate and the substrate can come from food, supplement or drug, but that is really the key is to understanding what is going on functionally and then providing the intervention, the substrate that can come from food or supplements to actually modulate them. And Peter, you know I, as you know, I'm not the scientist or a doctor, but the fact is that this has become a really a technology, data and AI problem.
- [84:43]
Peter
Yeah, well you built it. You've built a quite an AI team and a massive data collection platform and which is where the insights are coming and continuing and we have a lot to cover. So I'm going to continue on if it's all right with everybody. I found this fascinating. David Sinclair, which many people on this podcast have financially supported as part of Friends at Sinclair Lab, was just granted a patent, patent number 12,274,733 for cellular reprogramming method using the OCT4KL4SOX2 and not the cancer causing MX C Yamanaka factors to safely reverse epigenetic aging markers without driving them all the way back to pluripotent stem cells. So this is his work in partial epigenetic reprogramming. His company Life Biosciences which has rights to these patents and this work have gotten FDA approval and they're entering human trials in 1Q26. This is the first time we're going to see a epigenetic or partial epigenetic reprogramming in humans. It's just completed its non human primate work. So fascinating. I hit a couple of articles, we can talk about all of them together. This is another interesting idea. Researchers sequenced 100 cells from 74 year old man finding major genetic differences between cells. It's the idea that we think that the genome in all of our cells, in our 40 trillion cells is the same. Well, apparently that's not the case. And one more. I'll stop with that. So any comments on these two?
- [86:34]
Salim
I remember first hearing this at Singularity University years ago and it just blew my mind. We all had this conception that every cell in our body has the same DNA and the expression of it is what varies. And now we find that's not a reliable thing either. And where do we get it some reliable footprint of identity.
- [86:54]
Alex
Yeah, I'll comment on the story. So this is an effect called mosaicism. You're a mosaic, you're not a single genome. It's actually really difficult at the moment. Here we are stuck in 2025 to sequence the DNA from individual cells and there is a recent invention called primary template directed amplification. You may have learned about PCR polymerase chain reaction, that this is a a more sophisticated version of PCR that's now made it very recently, like past couple of years, easy to read to sequence DNA from individual cells with low error rates. So now this is like this big unlock enabling us to sequence lots of individual cells from all over the body. And what's the first thing that we discover? That the DNA is actually in many cases wildly different in different parts of the body. So this has the potential to unlock cures for cancer. Cancer that's a function of high mutation rates in somatic cells could unlock cures for heart disease and in some cases cardiovascular disease is caused by change or loss in the Y chromosome. I think this is a big unlock for healthcare.
- [88:00]
Peter
Yeah, fascinating. All right, going back to mit, this is a friend, Deblina Sarkar. She runs a lab at the MIT Media Lab. And I heard about this when we visited her. We had this is about three years ago during one of the Abundance longevity trips and she unveiled this but under wraps, it's finally come out and she's created a non surgical brain implant by attaching these tiny wireless electronics, I mean literally like super small etched electronics like you get in circuit design to immune cells. And this cell electronic hybrid can be injected through a vein and it implants itself in deep brain areas. Right. The, the immune cell helps it target specific locations and then upon implementation the devices can wirelessly stimulate specific neurons with high precision light. So this is, you know, I've had these conversations with Raker as well and we'll again we'll have Ray on the pod in early January talking about his predictions for the decade ahead. And one of his predictions for the decade ahead is high bandwidth bci. His expectation is through nanotechnology and this is probably the closest nanotech approach that I've seen.
- [89:28]
Salim
Any comments on it is this optogenetics where they have specific neurons.
- [89:33]
Alex
This is very much not optogenic.
- [89:36]
Salim
It's different. Right. It's not genetically engineered neurons.
- [89:39]
Alex
It's just planting correct optogenetics. You're inducing cells to express rhodopsins to be sensitive to light. This if you've seen like Star Trek Voyager. There are episodes with Borg nanoprobes that are shown that are being depicted like attaching themselves to cells. This looks far more like Star Trek Voyager, Borg nanoprobes than it does optogenetics.
- [90:00]
Salim
Alex, if you turn to the side, people could see the nanoprobe pipe going into your brain.
- [90:06]
Alex
Really? I thought I was just an AI. And this is a generative background.
- [90:11]
This is the beginnings, I think, of a Moravec procedure. So Hans Moravec has, before Ray even laid out this notion that the way we're going to solve human mind uploading is by replacing brain cells, ship of Theseus style, one by one with trained simulations. If you look at Dablina's paper in in Nature Biotechnology, it was like really amazing paper. Take a look at the figures. This looks like a scene out of Star Voyager with these photovoltaically sensitive sandwiches that look like coins attached to spherical cells. Look like the Borg nanoprobes out of Star Trek. I think it's a very promising direction.
- [90:47]
Peter
Naveen, you ready for the implant?
- [90:49]
Naveen
I am absolutely, 100%. Because I really need my brain to be uploaded before I lose it.
- [90:55]
Salim
I just don't want to be first.
- [90:58]
Peter
Okay, well, if you didn't go first, you can go second. So kudos to Demis Hassabis and the team at DeepMind for their Nobel Prize winning work. So AlphaFold has revolutionized science in just five years. Alex, why don't you take this?
- [91:17]
Alex
Yeah. I would say it's remarkable to look back at what the world before AlphaFold1 looked like. We were talking a while ago about hyper deflation and professional hyper deflation. It used to be the case prior to AlphaFold1, but certainly prior to AlphaFold3 that you'd spend an entire PhD, these poor chumps spending their entire PhD trying to determine the structure of a single.
- [91:43]
Peter
Protein, sequencing a single gene. Yes.
- [91:46]
Alex
Like, what a waste retrospectively at least for those who were spending PhDs in structural biology right before the problem, right before the whole field got solved by AlphaFold3. Arguably now you can just do it overnight. And we saw an entire discipline get solved by AI. So I think AlphaFold3 in particular is a template for what we're going to see everywhere else. Whole disciplines are just going to get solved.
- [92:09]
Peter
The numbers here are impressive, right? So AlphaFold has enabled a database of 240 million protein structures that have been accessed by 3.3 million users in 190 countries. I remember when I was in medical school, we used to talk about the supercomputing problem of the Future is being able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence. And we always used to talk about what would it take, how much computing, when would it be done. And extraordinary that the demos and the team did it.
- [92:43]
Salim
I think two things here. One is, I think this speaks to the incredible ability of AI to solve these what we thought was intractable problems with having to throw so much compute at it and just solves it. So it goes to Alex's inner loop thing. The second point I'll make is if you've not seen the documentary the Thinking Game, which lays out the. The arc of the. The timeline of all of this and goes into detail into how they went about doing it. It's just unbelievable. Go watch it.
- [93:11]
Peter
Yeah. Again, this is maybe just a postscript.
- [93:14]
Alex
On this, if I may. This was also like the protein folding problem was supposed to be one of the killer apps for quantum computing and quantum simulation.
- [93:21]
Peter
Yes.
- [93:22]
Alex
And AlphaFold, in addition to everything else that it revolutionized, I would say also was a nail in the coffin of many expectations for what the killer app for quantum computing would look like. And we need to find something better.
- [93:36]
Peter
Amazing. I'm going to cover this article very quickly just because it's an important. I talk about that. When people go through fountain life, we discover that 3.2%, that's the number based upon the populations we processed, have a cancer they don't know about, which is problematic.
- [93:57]
And it turns out that 70% of the cancers that kill people are not the cancers we routinely test for. So you're not dying from typically breast or prostate or colon, because we can test for those. It's the ones we don't test for. It's pancreatic, it's glioblastoma, it's.
- [94:17]
Ovarian cancers. And a lot of times I think of pancreatic cancer as a death sentence. So those who have had pancreatic cancer, cancer in their family. It's an important article to hear. So it looks like scientists have developed a one product fit all immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer. This is out of ucla, a new off the shelf therapy that can attack pancreatic cancer even after it spreads. Engineered CAR nkt. These are natural killer cells made from donor cells costing only $5,000 per dose, which is incredibly small price tag for cancer therapeutic.
- [95:01]
Naveen
The cells, the only thing I could.
- [95:02]
Alex
I'm sorry, please go ahead.
- [95:03]
Peter
Yeah, go ahead. I'll just say that the cells can reach and infiltrate through tumors in the pancreas, liver and lungs. So please Naveen, I was simply going.
- [95:13]
Naveen
To say that, Peter, this is so close to home because I lost my dad to stage four pancreatic cancer. And I'm just so, so happy to tell you that in the next three months, we are launching a stage one pancreatic cancer test. This is a complete game changer.
- [95:27]
Peter
At Viome. At Viome.
- [95:29]
Alex
At ViOme.
- [95:30]
Naveen
Stage one pancreatic cancer test with 94% specificity and 84% sensitivity.
- [95:36]
Peter
Amazing. I mean, the best way to cure it is to find it at the beginning.
- [95:41]
Salim
Early testing.
- [95:42]
Peter
Yeah. And Naveen, what other forms of cancer has Biome been able to detect through the massive data sets you're collecting?
- [95:49]
Naveen
So we, you know, we started with oral cancer, throat cancer, and now we have pancreatic cancer. We have the thing for ibd and we are next thing is we just validating a test with the Scripps research for colon polyps, which is seven to 10 years before you develop a colon cancer. And I think if we can really look at advanced adenoma, then I think we can absolutely get rid of colon cancer completely.
- [96:12]
Peter
Yeah. I mean, the range of things that you do, I mean, I encourage folks, you know, go to viome.com, the full body intelligence test is, you know, it takes a sample of your blood, your sputum and stool and it's incredible what you can learn. So and it's. What's the price tag on that? It's not expensive.
- [96:36]
Naveen
279, Peter.
- [96:37]
Alex
Right.
- [96:37]
Peter
Now for three tests.
- [96:38]
Naveen
All three tests?
- [96:39]
Peter
Yeah.
- [96:42]
Again, another impressive story. I mean, type one diabetes is a big deal on the planet. So a man with type 1 diabetes survived for 12 weeks with no immune suppressing drugs after doctors transplanted gene edited insulin producing cells. So this has been the holy grail. Right. If you have type 1 diabetes, you've lost your eyelid cells in your pancreas, you're not producing insulin anymore. Can you transplant them back? Well, these cells were edited with CRISPR to hide from the immune system, adding a don't eat me signal from CD47 and the patient started producing their own insulin. So a lot of. I don't know what the numbers are in terms of the total number of cases of type 1 diabetes. Anybody know offhand?
- [97:31]
Naveen
Yeah.
- [97:32]
Peter
All right. Another big story. I mean, I love seeing the pace of breakthroughs that we're seeing in health. Yeah. Amazing.
- [97:38]
Alex
It's nice seeing also CRISPR making its way into the clinic, that this is a big victory for crispr and hopefully we'll see a lot more CRISPR for managing Transplants.
- [97:48]
Peter
Yeah. Amazing. All right, let's go into robotics. A lot of fascinating stories here. This is a fun one. It's a tweet from Elon. Of course, Elon sort of like has fun with his hyperbolic tweets here. So here it is. Optimus will be the Von Neumann probe. And Alex and I laughed about this. Von Neumann probes are fun concepts. They're robots that are self replicating like viruses. They go out into the galaxy, they capture materials from asteroids or sometimes moons, and they build other copies of themselves and they replicate at an exponential rate. So I love this.
- [98:37]
Alex
I want to joke that the Dyson swarm won't build itself, but maybe it will.
- [98:42]
Peter
You know, we put a book corner in today on this front. I'm going to chat about mine here. So this is a five book series by Dennis Taylor. My son Jet and I have read this series twice. We absolutely love it. So it's called we are Legion. We are Bob. And it opens with the guy who's a. A tech CEO who signs up for effectively Alcor, right, to cryopreserve your body and brain. He leaves this conference and gets hit by a bus and it picks up 100 years later where he basically wakes up and is now an uploaded brain. I won't ruin the story because there's so much beautiful here. And he finds himself as the basically the brain and operating system on a Von Neumann probe heading out of the solar system to go and start colonizing and getting other solar systems ready for humanity to come join. So amazing series. I love Dennis's writing. And if you love hard science fiction, this is a great book for you. Awg, how about you?
- [99:56]
Alex
Yeah. So my book recommendation for this episode is Understand by Ted Chiang. Ted is perhaps better known for the movie Arrival where he wrote the original story behind it. But a common theme throughout a lot of his writing is what I would call linguistic singularities. Ways that we arrive at superintelligence by way of language, one way or another, and the consequences there. So Understand is the story. It's a short novel of a person who becomes super intelligent as a result of a medical treatment. So if you've seen the movie Limitless or you've seen the movie Lucy, think a little bit along those lines. Except that unlike with those movies, we see the world in rich detail through his eyes. As his intelligence increases, as he reorganizes his mind and treats his mind like a software operating system and ultimately encounters other super intelligence.
- [100:50]
Peter
Nice. All right.
- [100:52]
Salim
Given that nobody reads books anymore, I'll Reference back to the documentary I just did, the Thinking Game. It's such an amazing process to follow and it gives you an inkling as to where things are going. And it's science fiction kind of being made real today.
- [101:08]
Peter
Hey, my kids read books. My son reminds me, dad, you don't read books. You listen to books. Which is true. Everything's on audible these days.
- [101:17]
I want to jump into the robot world a little bit in particular in China. And I'm going to hit on a couple of pieces here, then we'll talk about them. So this is the first one. Agibot A2. This is a humanoid robot in China has hit a Guinness Book world record by walking 65 miles using hot swappable battery packs. Right. This is 175cm, 55kg in weight, advanced GPS and LiDAR. So keep that in your mind. And then I want you to check out this video. I saw it this morning and it blew me away. It came from the humanoid hub. And it's important to realize they specifically state this is all real footage. There's no cgi, there's no AI, there's no video. Speed up. And this thing is called T800, which sounds to me like Terminator 800. And after you see this video, I think you'll appreciate it even more.
- [102:47]
Okay. I mean that Salim is like, it's game over.
- [102:53]
Salim
It's like, no, I thought that I said, you know, if you're trying to promote a robot having it. Doing kickboxing is not the great first thing you want to show. I can't wait to see another activity.
- [103:04]
Peter
I can't wait to see Optimus versus T800. That's. You know. And by the way, there are a lot of groups getting ready.
- [103:11]
Salim
Show it. Drying dishes.
- [103:14]
Peter
A lot of groups getting ready for unlimited fighting between robots. First of all, that if that was not cgi, and I can't guarantee it's not. They state it's not. It looked awesome.
- [103:30]
Naveen, what do you think of that one?
- [103:31]
Naveen
I mean, it's awesome as you say. I think. I don't believe it's not a cgi, but we know.
- [103:40]
It looks pretty unrealistic to me.
- [103:43]
Peter
I mean, just the movements there, right?
- [103:46]
Naveen
Yes, yes.
- [103:47]
Peter
It's crazy. Alex, what do you think?
- [103:50]
Alex
There's an entire two thirds of the surface economy that includes manual physical labor that is just waiting to be automated by humanoid robots. Even if they have battery lives of only. Only three hours at the moment to need battery replacements or some sort of bucket brigade. This is happening. And we've talked for decades, going back to Asimov, going back to Rossum's Universal robots rr, the original coinage of robots. This is what we've been talking about for 100 plus years. At this point, it's finally happening.
- [104:22]
Peter
So coming back on the third story here in China, robots are remaking the Chinese economy. China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nine times more than the US and 50% of the world's total industrial robot base. They're automating their factories and they need to. Their entire economy was based on manufacturing. It's 25% of China's GDP. And check out this quote down at the bottom which came up when I was doing research here. And so it's China's National Development Reform Commission spokesperson Li Qiao warned of a humanoid robot bubble. There are now more than 150 humanoid robot companies in China. So AI Bubbles and Humanoid robot bubbles.
- [105:12]
Interesting. Any comments on this, guys?
- [105:15]
Salim
The statistic that the manufacturing 25% of their GDP and robots are going to be doing most of that is an incredibly amazing number.
- [105:26]
Peter
Well, I find the idea that they put in nine times more than the US an incredibly amazing number.
- [105:32]
Alex
I've made the point in the past that intelligence isn't just going to stay locked up in the data centers, it's going to walk right out of the data centers. And I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that in China and we're going to see that increasingly in the US and in the west as well. I agree with Jensen Huang that you humanoid robots are one of the next multi trillion dollar markets.
- [105:53]
Peter
All right, we've saved a fun conversation.
- [105:57]
Before we show you an incredible video outro here. So I'm going to play this. This is a clip from the promo for Age of Disclosure. We are not alone. How long have you and I been discussing this, Alex?
- [106:16]
Alex
I don't know. It's an interesting question, but I will say the the allegations in this documentary are extraordinary and maybe happy to comment more after we play the short clip.
- [106:27]
Salim
The American people are ready to receive the truth.
- [106:36]
Peter
Humanity is not the only intelligence in the universe.
- [106:39]
Naveen
Humanity is not the only intelligence species.
- [106:41]
Alex
We are absolutely not alone. Non human intelligence exists. UAPS are real. They're here and they're not human. I spent 25 years as a senior official with the CIA.
- [106:52]
Peter
I worked on highly classified UAP programs, 28 years as an astrophysicist.
- [106:57]
Salim
I served as the fourth Director of.
- [106:59]
Alex
National Intelligence, Director of Aviation Security and the national security council. The one star admiral, after 32 years.
- [107:05]
Peter
Of service, people that come to forward with this, I, I feel like they've taken their, their life in their own hands.
- [107:12]
Wow. I watched this documentary twice and I commend it to everybody. I think I, my personal opinion is yes, of course there is other life in the universe and in the galaxy. I think it's naive for us to believe anything less than that. Right. We are one of 100 million stars in our galaxy and our galaxy is one of, at last count, 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. And there may be an infinite number of universes. And just the notion that we are that special, you know, has been crushed every time by scientific discoveries over the last, you know, few thousand years.
- [107:55]
So.
- [107:57]
Alex.
- [107:59]
Alex
Well, I think the elephant in the room is that the allegations in this documentary go beyond asserting that there is non human intelligent life elsewhere. The documentary contains what I view as incredibly serious allegations by 34 current and former US government officials and contractors that in short, that there has been an alleged 80 plus year long cover up of aliens of so called non human intelligence or nhi.
- [108:29]
Peter
Of the spaceships, of the bodies, of the communications. Yeah.
- [108:32]
Alex
Of.
- [108:34]
UAP crash retrievals of recovered bodies on Earth. And I have so many thoughts regarding the allegations in this documentary, but maybe one more obvious thought, one less obvious thought. The, the one perhaps more obvious thought is if the allegations, even some substantial fraction of the allegations in this documentary are accurate, then the alleged legacy program, so called, that's been responsible for the alleged cover up, will perhaps have been responsible for sabotaging 80 years worth of potential scientific, technological, medical, maybe even ontological advances and setting humanity back almost a century, maybe more. Again, assuming the allegations are in substance accurate, and I think history would judge any such program accordingly for setting back human progress. If these allegations are accurate. That's the more obvious comment. The slightly less obvious comment is again, assuming the allegations are substantially accurate, superintelligence, which we talk about all the time on the pod, seems to me like it's on an imminent collision course with any so called non human intelligence. If there is any non human intelligence anywhere in the solar system, including on Earth, in the oceans, in low Earth orbit, et cetera, as alleged by this documentary, then I've mentioned in the past this notion that given enough superintelligence, any hidden agents become shallow superintelligence AI, it's going to discover this, it's going to unearth any hidden agents anywhere in our solar system. So I don't think it's a tenable state of affairs. If the allegations in this documentary are accurate. That basically to caricature the documentary. The documentary tells the story of how humanity is basically drowning in technology that's falling from our sky from non human intelligence. If that's accurate, AI is going to blow this and superintelligence is going to blow this wide open.
- [110:41]
Peter
Yeah, the timing of all this is interesting. The documentary basically says, listen, began.
- [110:47]
Before World War II, in the 30s, into the 40s and through today. And it talks about the interplay and the dance between alien visitations and UAPs flying to nuclear silos and disarming and arming nuclear warheads. I mean, it's a fascinating storyline here. But then what I find equally interesting is the fact that this process of disclosure is beginning now. Like you say, on the precipice of humanity unveiling asi.
- [111:28]
Alex
Coincidence or not, like ASI and nhi, if you want to call it that, these seem like they're on a collision course. Is it a predestined collision course if the allegations are accurate? I don't know, but it's.
- [111:39]
Peter
There's so many good science fiction stories that it's like they're here to prevent us from blowing ourselves up. They're here to prevent us from having rogue AI go in the wrong direction. That's the savior modality of these aliens and UAPs, which I'd love to believe.
- [111:59]
Alex
It does feel.
- [111:59]
Peter
Oh, go ahead, sir. No, I was going to say Naveen, did you see this at all?
- [112:03]
Naveen
I have not seen the movie but Peter, to me I just said there's no doubt we are not alone and we all agree we are not alone. But I think this to me is more like a science fiction than really reality here. I just absolutely do not believe that any cover up can last 80 years. And especially a cover up like this, this is something that would have come out long, long ago. I believe this is mostly some people who are delusional or some people who are looking to become famous or some people who just will see anything to give them a camera.
- [112:36]
Peter
If you watch a documentary like I have twice, and I think you would change your mind. The level of professionalism of these heads, these leaders from the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines, Senate, you know, the House.
- [112:58]
The Defense Department, their pristine reputations and what they speak about. And again, they are putting their reputations at risk here.
- [113:12]
I think it leaves zero doubt for me that it's there.
- [113:17]
Alex
Comment maybe at the meta level. I don't think for a topic as important as these allegations we should need to rely on hearsay. And this is one of the reasons why I think artificial superintelligence is potentially so transformative. Superintelligence. If there are, as alleged, if our solar system is teeming with non human intelligence, AI is going to find that, and I would expect it to find it pretty soon. So it may be the case that whereas there have been many allegations over the past decades of such coverups, but ultimately they're reduced to hearsay, I would like to see a far more scientific approach, and I think the key lever is going to be AI.
- [113:59]
Peter
Yeah, I think what's hilarious is the state of humanity today. These aliens could land on the front lawn of the White House, get on news cameras, and then the next day everybody would say, well, what's my bitcoin price? And who won the game? We've become so numb to these extraordinary.
- [114:18]
Alex
Things, but we have, and Sam Altman's also pointed this out, that we went from a world without AGI, arguably, to a world with AGI. And yes, it's economically transformative, but you didn't see people sort of riding in the streets or massive, truly massive social disruption. I think if the allegations are accurate, similarly, people will ask, as you say, like, what's next on television?
- [114:43]
Peter
All right, we're going to close out with this outro music called Dear Moon by David Drinkal. But I want to. You know, the lyrics on this are so incredibly good. David, you did an amazing job. I want to just take a second and read some of the lyrics. It says, oh, dear moon, you've had it coming for a while we're kind of sorry but we need you in a pile we're building dyson swarms and the rent ain't cheap we'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers weep we'll miss you when you're gone but the future marches on Alex, on the podcast with that.
- [115:23]
Apocalyptic, Apocalyptic, apocalyptic. That's it. Thank you, Alex with that apocalyptic grin. Training wheels are off, folks. Let the real future begin. While Peter's yelling asteroids first, Saleem's saving one small piece. IMOD's already pricing lunar credits on the lease.
- [115:47]
Do you want to express your feelings about the moon, Alex?
- [115:51]
Alex
Yes, please. I feel like just for the avoidance of doubt, I have to make affirmative stance that I'm not anti moon, just for avoidance of doubt. It's crazy. We're in 2025 and I have to say that I'm not anti moon. I'm not anti solar system. I'm merely observing that naively. If one extrapolates present data center trends, then Disassembling the solar system becomes an attractive option, inclusive of disassembling the moon. But I'm not anti moon, for what it's worth.
- [116:21]
Peter
Well, we appreciate that. We've had a lot of interesting comments about your commentary. And by the way, the current projection, for example, of Elon using mass drivers on the moon to get us to 100 terawatts a year of solar or of data centers doesn't make an appreciable dent in the moon. It'll still look the same.
- [116:45]
But when we get the Dyson swarms, it's gonna change. All right. Thank you, David Drinkal. Dear Moon, Everybody enjoy this. It's a beautiful song.
- [116:55]
David Drinkal
You hung there every evening.
- [116:58]
Silver coin in the black pull the ocean like a lover kept the planet on its track. You gave us tides for sailing Gave the wolves a song to sing and every teenage heart alike to swear eternal things.
- [117:22]
Couples parked on hilltops, Poets ran out of praise. You turned ordinary nights into extraordinary days. For billions of quiet moments you were perfect, pure and true. So thank you, darling moon, for everything you do. Oh dear moon, you had it coming for a while.
- [117:53]
We're kind of sorry but we need you and a pile.
- [117:59]
We'Re building Dyson swarms in the rain sheep. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers we'll miss you when you're gone. But the future marches on.
- [118:17]
Oh, but the future marches crashes on.
- [118:25]
We'll keep a little fragment, maybe 1% or 2. A crater with a plaque that says we once looked up to you. We'll simulate the tides with orbital tugs and rings. And be our honeymoon packages for nostalgic human beings. Oh dear Moo, you better come in for a while.
- [118:55]
We're kind of sorry but we need you in a pie.
- [119:01]
We're building dyson swarms and the ren ain't cheap. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lover sweet.
- [119:12]
Miss you when you're gone. But the future marches on.
- [119:16]
Naveen
Oh.
- [119:19]
David Drinkal
Oh, but the future marches on.
- [119:26]
Alex on the podcast with that apocalyptic grin.
- [119:33]
Training wheels are all folks. Let the real future begin.
- [119:39]
While Peter's yelling asteroids first Salem's saving one small piece and Mod's already pricing lunar credits on the lease. Oh, dear moon, you've had it coming for a while.
- [119:58]
We're kind of sorry but we need you in our the pile.
- [120:05]
You were beautiful and vital. You were poetry and art. But the Kardashev ladder weights and type two must start. We'll miss you when you're gone.
- [120:20]
But the future marches on.
- [120:25]
Slow but the future marches.
- [120:51]
Peter
All right.
- [120:54]
DB2 Dave Blunden, we miss you.
- [120:58]
And Salim. Sorry you missed that as well. Naveen, thank you for being a friend of the pod. Always a pleasure, brother.
- [121:05]
Naveen
Thank you brother.
- [121:07]
Peter
Alex, looking forward. We've got a recording on Friday. We're going to be up with Mustafa Suleiman in Seattle. That'll be fun. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI. And then we've got another WTF episode on Saturday. A lot coming. If you've not subscribed, please do. That way when we drop our episodes, which are becoming more frequent because the speed of this innovation is just skyrocketing, you'll know about it first. Gentlemen, have an amazing week and see you guys soon. Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you. If you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmanandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. Alright, now back to this episode.
- [122:48]
Alex
So you're about to make a trade.
- [122:49]
Blitzy Representative
Based on a friend's text, but which u do you listen to is it.
- [122:54]
Peter
We could buy a house in Tulum.
- [122:58]
Get optioning those options.
- [123:02]
Alex
We could lose everything.
- [123:05]
Or let's do a little research, get your head in the trade and make the investment decision that's right for you.
- [123:11]
Blitzy Representative
Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart.