The New Administration Means Major Change for Crypto, AI & Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #143

In this episode, Peter and Salim discuss their predictions for the new Administration, CES 2025 breakthroughs, the launch of Blue Origin, and more. Recorded on Jan 19th, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice 37:01 | The Quest for AGI and Its Implications 44:38 | The Future of Energy Production 56:39 | The Rise of Humanoid Robots Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail Order my Longevity Guidebook here: https://qr.diamandis.com/bookyt ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  Hey buddy, before we jump into the tech stuff that happened this past week, I have a question for you. What are your top five predictions, hopes, whatever you want, for the new White House administration?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Five, that's a lot. Can I give you three?

• 0:18Peter Diamandis?

  You can give me three. I mean, if you're really smart, you'd give me five.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I'm not that smart. Okay, so number one would be, I think there's the opportunity, the Chinese economy is in a bit of a mess. And yet they want Taiwan. I think he strikes a grand bargain to allow trade and balance the trade better. And give them Taiwan over a period of time. And navigate that tension and have it dissolved by creating a master deal. I think he does the same in Russia and Ukraine. And so I think there's an opportunity. And my prediction is that they use their saber rattling capability to change these political conflicts. Because it will put them in history books as a changing the global order. So that's number one. Number two would be-

• 1:07Peter Diamandis?

  So he's playing a giant game of Risk, like the board game where you're-

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Right? And what's the oldest one? Never do a land war in Asia. If you ever played Risk-

• 1:16Peter Diamandis?

  That's true. That's the last place you go.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  If you ever do a land war, so like, cut a deal.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  The second one would be the opportunity for crypto to change the game in a bunch of areas. I would love, I think I would love to, I predict he will allow crypto to the level of having a UBI-type scheme for crypto. That could benefit the entire population and be a beacon to the rest of the world as to where this goes.

• 1:40Peter Diamandis?

  Universal base income.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the trick is, how do you give people enough money to survive but not be happy? Because then it really works. Otherwise, you end up at socialism and the whole thing collapses if you give people too much money. My third one is that, given the disaster in L.A. and the need to rebuild, that the Trump administration comes up with a housing code hack that allows people to build temporary structures on their properties. So that they can live on their own property while they rebuild a main house or a neighbor's house they can live in. And an ability to have a temporary housing code that lasts like a year or two. That you can at least get something up and going very, very quickly. And that would completely change the game for L.A. and also what's happening in North Carolina. And the next one's to follow.

• 2:24Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I'll give you five, because that's what I asked for originally. Okay. You can still come back with a few more. Sure. So I think Trump is gonna do stuff which is great for America and great for him.

• 2:39Peter Diamandis?

  So I think- Not in that order. So being the president that put humans back on the moon, that's easy. We're gonna see humanity on the moon in a couple of years. I do think he's gonna make a massive push, given the fact that Elon's in the White House, too, to put humans on Mars, you know, boots on Mars, I said they're gonna be- I like it. Optimus robots on Mars. But I think we're gonna see a massive increase in the space program as part of this. The second thing I think we're gonna see is a huge deregulation in the biotech industry. Biotech has been one of the most regulated industries.

• 3:20Peter Diamandis?

  It crushed the biotech financial markets over the last four years.

• 3:27Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, a lot of folks I know need to leave the US to go get experimental treatments or get stem cells. I think we're gonna change that. At the same time that we're deregulating biotech, I think we're gonna massively re-regulate foods. So I think with Bobby Kennedy and head of Health and Human Services- Love it. That would be great. I think we're gonna stop the insanity which is our food system right now. At least I hope we do. I mean, here's a chance to finally, you know, do what's right for our health. I mean, I looked at the numbers.

• 4:07Peter Diamandis?

  We're something like 74th in the world in life expectancy and like 73rd in health span expectancy and number one in expenditures on food. And and this is a result, I'm sorry, never want expenditures on health.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, seventy percent of the population is overweight or obese.

• 4:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's crazy. And it's not because we just got hungry all of a sudden. It's because the food, the bullshit that we're feeding our kids and ourselves. So I think we're gonna regulate foods and change this dramatically. Make America healthy again. I think that's going to be the mantra. I think we're going to do that. Uh, the next thing, uh, I think was we're going to see a massive push for energy uh, independence. We'll talk about this later, but I think we'll see the White House basically open the floodgates, reducing regulation and red tape, enabling, hopefully, uh, you know, mostly solar and fission plants. I think we're gonna have, unfortunately, a fair share of coal plants as well.

• 5:14Peter Diamandis?

  Um, but we need to double the energy productivity of this country, for sure. So, energy at all costs, I think is gonna be one of the, uh, the hallmarks of this White House.

• 5:28Peter Diamandis?

  I hope, given Saks and the AI tech bro posse in there, we're gonna use AI to, uh, evaluate all the policies that we're running. Um, and how do we make regulation more efficient? We'll talk about this a little bit later in the episode as well. You know, right now, if you, you know, whatever industry you're in, you got five thousand regulations you gotta go through. Uh, enough lawyers and and paperwork. There's gotta be some way for AI to make it simplified and still safe. Um, so I think, for me, those are them. I think we'll become a crypto-first country.

• 6:09Peter Diamandis?

  I think that ultimately, uh, we will embrace crypto and Bitcoin in a massive fashion over these next four years. Uh, and You know, we'll see if the dollar is going to stand thirty, forty years from now, but I guarantee you Bitcoin will. And if we can make that part of our national reserves, so much the better.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I like all of them. I hope they all come true. Those are awesome.

• 6:32Peter Diamandis?

  This has been an insane opening to 2025 in the technology realm. We just had the inauguration with all of the tech besties in the front row. You know, we're talking Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman. I wonder if Sam and Elon were arm wrestling while they were sitting there watching the inauguration occur. And this has got to be one of the most, I don't know, tech-forward administrations and ecosystem that we've seen. And I have a lot of anticipation, you know, putting aside all kinds of other issues that everybody has.

• 7:13Peter Diamandis?

  We have lit the fuse and we're on an exponential rocket ride. Do you agree?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And, and, you know, if you go to our old mantra, which is that technology is a major driver of progress in the world, and as Ray says, it might be the only driver, major driver of progress, then having it be a tech-forward thing with policies and regulatory chasing with the tech breakthroughs is the right way to do it. And I'm excited by what will come from this.

• 7:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I have a lot of topics want to cover here today. Give folks an overview. We're going to jump into space exploration. I've got the two of the billionaires battling it out. So excited about that. We'll talk about AI, Nvidia, CES 2025. We'll talk about Bitcoin, some interesting use on the Bitcoin world and humanoid robots and a few other topics. You ready, Salim?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 8:09Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Hopefully, your entire EXO community is watching. I know my abundance community is all plugged in and we're about to light the fuse on, on exponential abundance. All right, space exploration. I woke up and told my kids first thing in the morning, hey, guys, today is the seventh flight of Starship. They said, that's nice, Dad. I'm playing my Minecraft games. I said, no, no, no, you got to understand this is Starship. It's a seventh flight. So, did you watch it this, this week?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I didn't, but I saw what happened.

• 8:46Peter Diamandis?

  I want to show two video clips here to kick it off. Now, I am a space cadet, I'm a Trekkie, the Apollo generation for sure. And the first one makes my heart sing. This is the return of the booster, the largest structure ever sent into orbit. Coming back to land on the Mechzilla chopsticks. Let's take a quick look.

• 9:15Peter Diamandis?

  So, I don't know about you, but this is poetry in motion. This is the combination, the convergence of AI and sensors and material sciences and compute.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I get goosebumps every time I see it.

• 9:30Peter Diamandis?

  Every time.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  It's got to be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of mankind.

• 9:34Peter Diamandis?

  It is one of the greatest engineering feats of this young century. And of course, you're watching this, I have the kids there, they're like, yeah, that's amazing, super cool. So, okay, now Starship is going to orbit and we're going to see if it can land as well. And of course, the entire data flow from Starship, which is the upper stage, which is supposed to go around the planet, come back and land, goes offline. And what we learn, the reason it went offline is basically...

• 10:08Peter Diamandis?

  Good, it's about to fall on top of us.

• 10:14Peter Diamandis?

  What is it? It's Starship coming back in parts and pieces. I guess it was a fuel leak and fuel plus spark plus ignition doesn't look good on Starships.

• 10:27Peter Diamandis?

  Did you watch that happen?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I'm not live, but I watched the videos of it and, you know, it's space travel and the level, amount of fuel, the success criteria is so, so extreme, right? Everything has to go exactly right. And if anything goes slightly wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, right? It's pretty binary. So, it's kind of a miracle, it's expected, it's sad when it happens, but this is the domain.

• 10:58Peter Diamandis?

  Luckily, nobody on board, of course, unmanned vehicle. This is testing all the way. You have to remember that we saw failures with Falcon 9. In fact, going back to when Elon started SpaceX, the first three flights...

• 11:13Peter Diamandis?

  Of Falcon 1 failed before they had their fourth success. And then we had failures on the Falcon 9. But Falcon 9 has launched and landed repeatedly, over and over and over again, to be the most successful vehicle ever built across all countries, across all time. I love his tweet. He said, "Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed." And that's a mindset of an entrepreneur who's got his shit together and is funding. SpaceX had just completed another massive financing round to get Starlink fully deployed and get Starship built.

• 11:53Peter Diamandis?

  The thing that was amazing was that within 12 hours, it wasn't just Starship going to space. There's also Blue Origin. So, you know, I've known Jeff since college days. I had started a group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. SEDS, yeah. SEDS, a young space cadet. And it started MIT, where I was, and then we grew it to a national, international organization. And Jeff was the president at the Princeton chapter. And I remember I met him in a coffee shop after he had started, after he started, not

• 12:37Peter Diamandis?

  Starbucks, after he had started Amazon. And like, Jeff, what's this Amazon thing? I thought you were just in space. And he said, "Yeah, I'm gonna make my money on Amazon and I'll spend it in space." Well, he's been true to his word. Blue Origin was founded in 2000, I think SpaceX was founded around 2001. Jeff had been a space enthusiast from his college days. He was at Princeton, where Gerard K. O'Neill was. And they, you know, launched the New Shepard, their suborbital vehicle, and New Glenn, which started in 2013.

• 13:18Peter Diamandis?

  And so, this has been an overnight success after 12 years of hard work. And here, let's watch the launch of the New Glenn vehicle, one second.

• 13:49Peter Diamandis?

  Never gets old. So what I find fascinating is these two billionaires, you know, amongst the world's top 10 wealthiest, who transformed entire industries, building space companies now. Both of them enamored by space early on. You know, Jeff's vision is going to the moon and then building what are called O'Neill colonies, which are not on Mars, not on the moon. They're free-floating, large colonies that can hold initially 10s of thousands and eventually

• 14:31Peter Diamandis?

  millions of people that are orbiting the sun or co-orbiting with the earth. And of course Elon wants to go to Mars. And, you know, Jeff's ready to spend a billion dollars a year. SpaceX is profitable, which is incredible, and hopefully Blue Origin will be. It used to be it was Lockheed Martin and Boeing as the launch providers, and of course they were supported, held up by the Defense Department. But I think we're going to see SpaceX and Blue Origin suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere for most of the launch providers.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  It goes to the democratization aspect where anybody can take a crack at it. And now we're going to see a thousand flowers bloom in this. It's going to be incredible.

• 15:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, we're talking about bringing the price per kilogram, per pound, down 100-fold. It's going to spark an entire new generation of new space economies. I still believe that, you know, mining asteroids, carbonaceous chondrites to get liquid oxygen and hydrogen in earth orbit so you can refuel once you get to space, or metallic chondrites so you can mine platinum, iridium, osmium, palladium in space and use that back down in the ground. Everything you've ever held of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate, is in your infinite quantities in space. So it's gonna get pretty interesting pretty

• 16:01Peter Diamandis?

  quick.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Hmm. I have two quick comments.

• 16:05Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  One, for me, the primary opportunity to back up civilization is

• 16:11Peter Diamandis?

  Back up the biosphere, yeah, sure.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Is the most interesting and important part, because we, any asteroid is an existential threat to everything. And, and the second for me is always this date, October 31st, 2001. And that was the date that the first astronauts lifted off of the International Space Station. And since then, we've always had at least one human being off planet.

• 16:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  And I just, I just like, like the first molecules bubbling off this thing. And I just find that really, really haunting. Really amazing.

• 16:49Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's still brutal, by the way, that it takes so much energy to get off the planet. You know, one of the things I find fascinating, and this all feels conspiratorial, is if, if gravity was just a little bit more, if the Earth was just a little bit larger, you know, we wouldn't be able to get ourselves off the planet. Or if we were just a little bit smaller, it'd be so much easier to get off the planet. We're just at that, that level, like in the video game, where you have to struggle to get there.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Not by accident do we call it a Goldilocks planet, right?

• 17:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's so true.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  This is where the, this is where the simulation stuff comes in, because the conditions on Earth and the, the constants in the universe are so finely balanced.

• 17:38Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, it's amazing.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  That, that is, it's like, wait.

• 17:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so I, I'm a, I'm a true believer, we are living in an nth generation simulation, but let's not jump into that now.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:50Peter Diamandis?

  I'll tell you, I did something. So first of all, I've been, I've been enjoying the latest large language models. And every time someone says, well, there's this chain of reasoning, large language model, I don't know if you have a, your favorite test to give that large language model for it to do something. Do you?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  I I don't because I I wanna I'm waiting for um very practical use cases like like the Steve Wozniak's coffee coffee machine thing for AGI, which is says to a robot or an AGI, make me a coffee and it does all the stuff, measures that I grind the beans and and knows enough, has enough intelligence to do that task end to end, right? And there's there's several tests for AGI, that's considered to be one of them. And I'm waiting for the interaction with the physical uh reality of space of time and space where things get very interesting. Because intelligence is really needed to manage our physical environments and adapt to the physical environment. That's where I think it'll really shine as we build

• 18:52Speaker 01

  L L Ms into humanoid robots and other robots.

• 18:54Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I was taking this out a different path. I once did a uh a little, you know, mental experiment of how much energy or how much would it cost you to winch you and your spacesuit to orbit and to an orbital velocity? So if you weigh a hundred kilograms and your spacesuit weighed a hundred and fifty kilograms, let's round things up. Uh, and you had this giant winch that could efficiently winch you to two hundred kilometers altitude, then accelerate you to orbital speed, and you could buy the electrical energy off of the plug. How much would it cost you to get you and your spacesuit to orbit?

• 19:40Peter Diamandis?

  Have you ever done that? Ever asked you that question before?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  You haven't? And it's a very Peter style question. And what was the answer?

• 19:47Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I plugged this, I I I did this manually, and then I plugged it into a large language model, which, you know, sort of uh the Gemini one point five pro version that does logical construct steps.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 20:00Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and it will say, okay, here's your, here's your potential energy, here's your kinetic energy. If you buy it off the grid at, you know, twenty cents a kilowatt hour, it's like a hundred and fifty bucks to go to orbit.

• 20:16Peter Diamandis?

  So what I mean by, you know, all of this energy, these, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust in these engines, it's very grossly inefficient.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:31Peter Diamandis?

  Compared to what someday we might have. Anyway, but still, thank you, Elon. Thank you, Jeff. I don't have to worry about opening up space. I spent 30 years there. I hand that mantle to you. You're doing an amazing job. So grateful for all of that.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  It's so exciting to watch this. It's just incredible. Yeah.

• 20:54Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals

• 21:35Peter Diamandis?

  and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following: a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and

• 22:15Peter Diamandis?

  gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter.

• 22:38Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's go on to AI. You know, we went through the early part of this month at CES, a few things there worth noting. And let's jump into a few of them. So the first one is Nvidia Cosmos AI platform to train and develop autonomous vehicles and robots.

• 23:00Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we've said this before, the incredible progress going on in robot companies. And they're probably, you know, I was tracking originally 20, then 40, then 60. There's got to be close to 100 humanoid robot companies out there. And maybe it was battery packs that were, you know, maybe it was the motors, maybe it was actuators and sensors. But without question, it's the, you know, the AI multimodal large language models that are enabling incredible progress with robots these days.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Ah, mind boggling because when you can take an LLM and then apply to all of these different tasks and subtasks. I think the domain starts to move 10x, 100x faster than it did before, and that's just magical.

• 23:51Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I mean, I think what's fascinating is Nvidia has created a platform that, you know, high school students, college students, entrepreneurs around the world can start to develop their own, you know, their own autonomous robots and vehicles.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  So we're going to see some interesting entries in the first robotics competitions coming along. It's gonna be crazy.

• 24:15Peter Diamandis?

  First robotics, for sure. I mean, if you think about, you know, when Sebastian Thrun won the DARPA challenge with his Stanley autonomous car.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  1995?

• 24:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, thereabouts, you know, those vehicles were traveling at like three to five miles an hour with all of these sensors and the AI trying to calculate, do I go five degrees to the right? It sounds like the large language models right now and Nvidia's platform is able to integrate all the sensor data and make it super simple for decision making.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I think this is gonna, it's, you know, once you can create a platform environment, things accelerate very, very fast because new innovations get built into the platform and everybody benefits.

• 25:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And so always when you can put more and more functionality into the base operating system or into the platform layer. And, and because of Nvidia's position, they're going to see firsthand, hey, most of the use cases are using this sub-function, let's build that into the, and, and it's just going to lift the whole uh, playing field very quickly.

• 25:23Peter Diamandis?

  And what you're seeing is, as well as Nvidia is investing in these companies. Right? They're, they're coming in, I mean, they, they, you have to remember Nvidia started as a gaming chip and then went on to Bitcoin mining and then went on to L L Ms. And if Elon's prediction on humanoid robots and the same prediction that we hear from Vinod Khosla, who will be at my abundance summit and we hear from Brett Adcock, who will be at the abundance summit, is that we're heading towards billions of these robots. It's a massive market for Nvidia chips as well. So they're creating, uh, they're creating their future. Here's another news piece from CES. Nvidia projects digits, uh, a Grace Rockwell AI supercomputer on your desk.

• 26:09Peter Diamandis?

  So desk size supercomputer for AI development, a thousand times more powerful than your average laptop. Uh, for 3,000 bucks, coming out this May to a, a store near you.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  This for me is even bigger than the previous announcement. Because for the, the cost of, uh, you know, a very old, um, used car, what used to cost. I mean, look at the power that you now have to train an AI, uh, at a local level. But I think that the pressure will all move now to what data sets are you using?

• 26:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Right? And, and, and then the data set combined with the latest model will give you, and plus the hardware like this, blows the lid off everything.

• 26:54Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, the question becomes what can the average person now do? Given these large open source, uh, gen AI models and a supercomputer on your desk? And robots roaming around your backyard or your home.

• 27:14Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you know, I don't know how to put this, but I don't think people are ready for what's coming.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Uh, I believe that would be the understatement of the century, Joe, Peter. I mean, you know, look, we, we, we can't even grapple. Did you hear about the Uber legal case a few weeks ago?

• 27:33Peter Diamandis?

  No, tell me about it.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so, um, an Uber crashed and a couple got badly injured. So they sued Uber and it was winding its way through the courts and they were gonna get a big settlement. Except during this process, their 12-year-old daughter ordered something on Uber Eats. And when you click for Uber Eats, it, the terms of service says you can't sue Uber for anything. And it validated the lawsuit. Okay, so this 12-year-old inadvertently invalidated the lawsuit of her parents. Uh, and the judge is like, hey, she clicked the box, she's had to authorize use for us. And we can't even get that right. Right? We can't even figure out how to manage internet. Uh, forget all of the stuff that's gonna come with robotics, you know, we, I used the example before.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Um, do I ask it to change the baby's diapers? And what happens if something goes wrong? Uh, uh, uh, so there's.

• 28:25Peter Diamandis?

  Are you really expecting all of a sudden?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, we're not, we're not, thank God. But the, the, in the, the, uh, the acts, the consequences, this unintended consequence of this are so profound. Of all of these, right? Um, uh, I, I, I'm struggling as to how we merge these into day-to-day life. I'm really, really struggling with that.

• 28:48Peter Diamandis?

  I, I'm, I remember back in 1988, I'm going back to ancient history. All right, where most people listening to this weren't even alive yet. Uh, but back in 1988, I was running my first university, International Space University. And I was on the campus of MIT. And, uh, the first Mac 128s came out. And I bought, we had 104 students from 21 countries there, a group of Soviet students. Including two KGB agents as students in the group. We had six students from the People's Republic of China. We had students from the Emirates and from Saudi. It was incredible melting pot, all focused on space.

• 29:33Peter Diamandis?

  And I remember putting these 128, these Mac 128s, uh, on the desktop with the little floppy disk, right? Not a little floppy disk, a little cassette.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:42Peter Diamandis?

  Three and a half inch. And it was this massive intellectual liberator. Um, that you could go and create and copy files and. I mean, compared to this, it's probably, you know, billions of fold more capable.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I I've been through the full arc. I when I was in grade 10, I got accepted into a university course and I was using punch cards to program a mainframe.

• 30:11Peter Diamandis?

  An IBM 380 or something like that.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, to go from that to an Apple two, uh, which was, you know, nothing. And then Bill Gates famous comment, six 40 K RAM ought to be enough for anybody. And now to now to today where we have trillions of times better price performance, trillions. It's it's just, it boggles the mind. And and let's note this, that by the way, for this announcement, that Moore's Law has just been shattered beyond belief with announcements like this, just shattered.

• 30:38Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, Moore's Law, which, you know, and also what Ray calls the law of accelerating returns, which predates integrated circuits, you know, was roughly a doubling of price performance every 18 months to two years. And what we've seen is a 10 Xing per year, right? Last year on the abundant stage, Elon said he's seeing 10 X every six months or 100 X per year. Insane. So here's a fun announcement from our friend Sam Altman, um, on his reflections. He says, we're, uh, two years of chat GPT. Chat GPT grows from 100 million to 300 million weekly users in two years. Pretty impressive.

• 31:22Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, OpenAI expects agents to enter the workforce by 2025. I just did a podcast with Mark Benioff. Mark and I have been, uh, I think buddies, close friends for quite some time. And we had a very fun, he wanted to live in the now and I was like, but let's talk about the future. He goes, no, let's talk about the now. We had this.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I I watched it. I watched it, Peter. And for folks listening, everybody should go watch that podcast episode. It was super fun. Benioff is like in this zen state going, let's focus on the present and and not what it's like to be. And Peter's like, what will it look like with a billion robots 20 years from now?

• 31:59Peter Diamandis?

  Mark was just making fun of me on that. So what's interesting, though, is, you know, Benioff has pivoted all of Salesforce to agents, and I think he has had to to survive. I think every company is going to have to pivot towards agents to survive. And one of the things Mark said is he's not hiring any new engineers using his internal agent force 2.0. He's increased productivity 30% without any new hires.

• 32:31Peter Diamandis?

  And here's the bottom bullet point that Sam Altman put in his blog. He said, OpenAI emphasizes gradual AI development for societal adoption, leading safety research and governance, basically saying he wants to improve safety research and governance by slowing things down. I kind of call bullshit on this. I don't know how you feel about it.

• 32:59Peter Diamandis?

  You know, can we go back to the early days of generative AI? So that whole field of these large language models and intentions all you need was pioneered by Google. And Google actively decided not to release any of this because, you know, they sort of felt things were not ready. And then once ChatGPT gets released and goes from zero to a million users in five days, they have to respond and release. But we're in the midst of an AI war right now, not between countries, but between companies.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I totally agree. And what Sam's trying to do here is create a moat around the success of OpenAI and protect it as much as possible so it can continue innovating, right? I do think, for me, that one of the biggest use cases for AI is going to be in governance, but specifically policy formulation.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Right. I've used this example before where if you want to reduce inflation by 1%, as a human being, as a chief economist of a country, you're like, okay, what do I do? And you're completely guessing. You have no idea. If you let an AI look at all the data and all the insights from all the banks and all the monetary cash flows, et cetera, and go, well, if you want to do that, here are the five things you do, you're going to come out with such better policy for all this stuff. It's going to be, it's going to be ridiculous.

• 34:28Peter Diamandis?

  I really hope with the, all the tech bros in the White House, that there's going to be some use here. I mean, for example, if you look at the regulations at local, state and federal for plumbing, for hairdressers, for any industry you want, and you said, here's all, here's all the regulations, please figure out where all the conflicts are, and please figure out the simplest set of regulations that still give you 99% of the protection, but simplify it.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, you know what I call it? I call it MVP, not Minimum Viable Product, but Minimum Viable Policy. And, and I think that's where we're going to need to get to is to go, okay, you want to launch this electronic widget with all the regulations of different voltage structures and what's the MVP? Minimum policy you need to manage that environment. And yeah, I'll figure it out.

• 35:25Peter Diamandis?

  I, I guarantee you, uh, the conflicting policies and bullshit regulations around the wildfires and fire protection. Um, you know, one thing is interesting is when, uh, at SpaceX, when someone comes up with a specification, which is kind of the equivalent of a regulation in the government world, like the specification for this part is this, this and this. They have to sign their name and provide their contact details so that five years later,

• 36:02Peter Diamandis?

  If that specification is like, why did we specify that? It blocks this improvement here. You can call the person and say, why did you do that?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And I think that's the kind of thing that we need much, much, much more of. Right?

• 36:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  But frankly, that for me is equivalent to documenting software. Right? When you document software, you write up why did you do it this way? Why did you do this code of libraries to do perform this function? So that somebody coming after you doing maintenance gets some sense of it. We'll be able to have AI do a lot of that now. Software maintenance is going to be a thousand times easier as a result of LLMs. And I think the same thing will happen with policy standard setting is for me. One of the areas where you could really go nuts with AI. Because you could say to an AI, what's the best standard for this type of thing? Right? It can be incredible. You just have to have the gumption to use it and get it into place.

• 36:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think so, and I hope so. Because it will, I mean, listen, the US tax code.

• 37:01Peter Diamandis?

  Can we, can we please call bullshit of a US tax card?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a big challenge.

• 37:06Peter Diamandis?

  It's a mechanism for keeping accountants and lawyers employed.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  This is, I think, the big challenge. Because when you simplify a bunch of these areas, a huge amount of swaths of work and entire industries fall by the wayside. And are we ready for that demonetization and the impact that will have?

• 37:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So this comes out of Sam Altman's blog again this week. Quote, "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it." I mean, that's pretty impressive. "We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that to superintelligence in the true sense of the word." So, you know, I've had a lot of conversations. We'll talk about it, you and I at Abundance in March as well. Are we at AGI now? And what the hell is AGI in the first place?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  That is my soapbox question. I go nuts around this. Before anybody is allowed to mention the term, please, for God's sakes, define it, right? I've done some searches on this. The best I've found is the tests that would indicate that you have AGI. And the coffee test by Wozniak is one of them. There's an IKEA test that says, can you take an IKEA box and put, build a piece of furniture from the box? There's a few things that-

• 38:31Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, I don't know that my kids would do that because they'd probably revolt, so. But, but honestly, you know, most of the AI models are far more intelligent than me in almost every area, from science and physics and knowledge and so forth. I mean, why isn't that AGI? I think we keep on moving the goalposts.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Exactly the point I've been trying to make. I think we go, I've got this spectrum that I put together of, you know, simple signal from noise, detecting signal from noise to analytics, to human level intellects like emotional intelligence and spatial intelligence, to then you bleed into consciousness and superintelligence and hyperconsciousness and so on. And I think we'll just keep moving along that spectrum. And the test will be whatever we can't figure out how to break through next. The Turing test was the first of them. Next will be AGI. Next will be superintelligence.

• 39:29Peter Diamandis?

  And so I think everybody should agree, we passed the Turing test a while ago. We didn't notice. It was a imprecise definition. And I think we're gonna pass through AGI. If we haven't in the last six months, we will in the next six months. And people will say, yeah, we kind of passed it. I'm still waiting. My test is when I get a phone call one day and I pick up my cellphone and it's my AI saying, hey, Peter, I just wanted to introduce myself. I've been living on the system and I really love what you're writing. Or you've been, you know, listen, I don't know about you, but I say please and thank you to Alexa and to Siri and to ChatGPT and to Gemini. I'm very polite to the AI systems. I want them to like me.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yes. An old colleague of mine was a bit of a genius CTO 20 years ago. And I asked him what his purpose in life was, and he said, I want to evolve to the point that my computer is proud of me.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And I totally didn't understand that, but now I understand it.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Now I understand it.

• 40:34Peter Diamandis?

  That is hilarious. All right, let's move on beyond AGI. All right. Another thing in Sam's news is his statement about nuclear fusion. Quote, soon there will be a demonstration of net gain fusion. But I would expect Helion, which is the company he's backed, will show you that fusion works soon. There's, you know, at last count, when I looked into this, there were 37 venture backed fusion companies. Pretty impressive. And I think that one of the many definitive breakthrough spin offs benefits of AGI will be fusion.

• 41:20Peter Diamandis?

  Do you agree?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:23Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  I think the race is between getting to fusion, commercialized and stable fusion systems, and a combination of solar and storage. Because if you have solar and storage at the right level of efficiency plus storage capability, you don't need fusion.

• 41:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's, let's, let's parse this in two different places. So number one, what I'm saying is that getting fusion to work is a technical challenge.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:56Peter Diamandis?

  Of materials, of magnetic fields, of, you know, equations.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And there's no question AI will have a huge impact and it will move the field forward very quickly because you can take the existing set of unsolved problems in fusion and say, figure out how to do them.

• 42:12Peter Diamandis?

  And it will.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And it'll come back to you. Yeah. It will. Especially with the matter gen stuff that we'll talk about shortly, but this is incredible what's coming.

• 42:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. And could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out.

• 43:01Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 43:45Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.

• 44:26Peter Diamandis?

  It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. So separate from that, then we've got

• 44:44Peter Diamandis?

  Three other energy buckets, right? There is solar. And, you know, Ray Kurzweil, long ago, looking at the energy production, solar energy production curve, said, listen, we're just a few doublings away from getting all the energy from solar that we need.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 45:01Peter Diamandis?

  And I think he's, he's absolutely right. It's, as you said, it's solar plus storage, you know, perovskite is coming online. There's incredible company that I love called Paranova, and that's doing perovskite here in the United States, a lot of perovskite companies in China as well. But then there's fourth generation nuclear fission, right? These are S, SMR, small modular reactors, right? Which are now fail safe, meaning is if everything goes wrong, they're still radiation free and safe. And I think, you know, I've said, I'd have one in my backyard, that they're that safe.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I mean, it blows my mind that nobody's noticed we've been running nuclear submarines for 50 years without an accident.

• 45:46Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, right?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  What the hell? I mean, okay, great, it's a bit clunky, but put a nuclear submarine in my backyard, I don't care. It's, it'll be safe and we'll get the energy we need. Why is this so hard for people to get? I don't understand. This should have been done 10 years ago.

• 46:01Peter Diamandis?

  You could mount, you could mount a takeover of New York by New Jersey with your nuclear submarine.

• 46:09Peter Diamandis?

  So, yes, fourth generation, even beyond the nuclear subs the last 50 years, the, the fourth gen SMR reactors are amazing. And then, of course, the last bucket, which is kind of sad to hear about, but it's, people are still stepping up coal plants.

• 46:32Peter Diamandis?

  So I, I think we're in a energy race. Uh, you know, I've shared on this program a few times charts uh that looks at energy production increases in India, which is doubled, energy output in China, which is like tripled or quadrupled. And in the US, which is like this flatlined.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Peter Diamandis?

  And I think we're gonna increase. I think the country that's got the cheapest energy wins.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  But I think it's soon gonna go all to near zero. And then the usage of that energy is going to be what will happen. We you are gonna have a whole bunch of, you know, uh, there's one of these laws that's about the more capacity you have, the more we use, right?

• 47:15Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And uh, Jerran's, Jerran's Law or something. And I think that's where we'll, we'll just soak it all up. And but it'll be near zero cost. All of them will go to near zero cost.

• 47:26Peter Diamandis?

  But I, when I say, you know, the more energy you have, the more you win, I, I think that's a function of it drives everything. There's

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:35Peter Diamandis?

  direct correlation between energy and economy of a nation.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  I will call you on your own paradigm, sir, because you're operating from a scarcity mentality there and a zero sum game mentality. If you operate from an abundance mindset, there'll be plenty of energy to do everything we need.

• 47:51Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, we're not there yet, though.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:54Peter Diamandis?

  But we'll get there. And this next breakthrough, uh, we're talking, uh, you know, two days ago, uh, Satya Natawa, the CEO of the most extraordinary company on the planet, Microsoft. I mean, listen, any company that has existed for how many decades, four decades, four and a half decades, and is still number one or number two on the planet, that's amazing.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:24Peter Diamandis?

  That's amazing. Anyway, so Satya says, today in nature, our matter gen model represents a paradigm shift in material design, applying generative AI to create new compounds with specific properties. I'll, I'll play a soundless video just to have fun of what this, uh, what this looks like. Um, but it's, um, it's pretty extraordinary, uh, just in terms of the idea here. Um, and I talked about this on, on the abundance stage with the CTO of, uh,

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Applied Materials?

• 48:59Peter Diamandis?

  Applied Materials, thank you. Um, and we were talking about the notion that we understand In in sort of a three dimensional space of of the types of materials, the types of crystals, the types of of of, you know, volumetric pressure and temperature, we understand how these materials function for a limited number. But there's there's adjacent predictability.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:29Peter Diamandis?

  If we move, if we change from this atom to this atom, what occurs? Well, given all the knowledge we have, material sciences, and I believe material science is the unsung hero of technology, right? It's like, you know, all of Moore's law has made possible my material sciences, all of, you know, molecular biology's material sciences. If we can predict new materials, or in this case, actually generate materials with the properties we desire, saying, I want a material that reflects, reflects or refracts light in this direction.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:09Peter Diamandis?

  It's a game changer.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Game changer massively. All right. Can I can I say if you have a few thoughts?

• 50:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Because I've been tracking this for a while, ever since we were talking about nanotech and materials, science and molecular assembly at singularity.

• 50:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Okay. And for me, this is one of the biggest breakthroughs ever. And it was inevitable. I've been kind of waiting for when will we have an AI model to do manipulation of molecules? And it looks like this might be it. Because

• 50:37Peter Diamandis?

  Or atoms, in this case, and crystals.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, right down to that level. It's amazing, the granularity now. Because there was a huge breakthrough in in about 2012, 2013, with a product with a project called the Materials Project. And what they did was they took like half a million compounds and cataloged all the electrical, chemical and physical properties of these compounds. So if you're a battery researcher trying to think about what might be better than lithium ion, you might guess that lithium sulfur or lithium air might be better than you sequentially linearly go test that compound and see what comes. Well, that takes a long time. It's linear, right? Now you have this database, you can just literally say, give me a material compound that has this voltage

• 51:22Speaker 01

  threshold and this thermal retention and boom, it'll give you the five that you need, but now you still need to spit those out. But now with AI applied to that database, you could basically say, give me something that gets to this endpoint and figure it out yourself. And this, I think, is a huge leap that AI will give you. And this is a very clear indication of where AI can help us bridge that gap that we've not been able to figure out ourselves and come up with stuff. This is for me the equivalent of alpha fold, right?

• 51:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Protein folding in the material science.

• 51:51Peter Diamandis?

  This is the alpha fold of material science.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Of materials. And I think this is such a huge, huge, huge thing. I'm really thrilled to see it come up, happen and come about. And when you have a company like Microsoft kind of putting the backing behind it, it'll, it'll have staying power. And people will be able to rely on it. I'm really, really excited about what will come from this.

• 52:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, agreed. You know, Sandbox AQ, Jack Hittary's company, has also been doing similar work using the equations of quantum physics to predict molecular properties. So I love this handle on X. It's at Dr. Singularity.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:31Peter Diamandis?

  You should have that. He says, this is huge. Microsoft researchers introduced MatterGen, a molecule that can discover new materials tailored to specific needs, efficient solar cells or CO2 recycling, advancing progress beyond trial and error experiments. Instead of screening the candidates, it directly generates novel compounds given the prompts, design requirements. So, I mean, think about this. This is about higher efficiency solar conversion. This is about catalysts that can remove salt from water.

• 53:05Peter Diamandis?

  CO2 from the atmosphere.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  So I'll give you one use case. I've two things come for me in this, in the extreme positive and extreme negative. Okay.

• 53:16Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  A bad guy could say, find a compound that will create the equivalent outcome of gray goo.

• 53:21Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And that causes a problem, right? Um, and this, but on the positive side, imagine you throw up, figure out a crystal or some compound that we can throw up into the atmosphere that will just crystallize all the carbon and have it cascade down to earth.

• 53:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Right? We should be able to do this now in like minutes. Uh, and, and figure out a way of getting it up there and, and off you go. We've literally solved the climate problem and, and this, the, the implications of this are absolutely profound.

• 53:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you know, Stephen Kotler and I are writing, uh, the next iteration of abundance from, we are in 2012. We're writing age of abundance, which will come out in 2026. Uh, and it's extraordinary.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Um.

• 54:06Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm. This sort of technology begins to liberate food, water, energy, healthcare, education.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Everything. And by the way, uh, let's talk about this offline, but it came across a company that may have solved a totally workable path to molecular manufacturing.

• 54:22Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Listen.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Huge, huge.

• 54:23Peter Diamandis?

  So he was talking about is nanotechnology, right? The, you know, we've talked about this from Eric Drexler, who wrote Engines of Creation. Uh, that was a, a follow on to, uh.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so take this screwdriver that I happen to have on my desk.

• 54:38Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Okay.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  On, on specific reason. Now imagine instead of creating the mold and then forging this piece of metal and then sticking it together. You literally by molecule by molecule assemble this thing like.

• 54:50Peter Diamandis?

  Atom by atom. Yes.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  But literally at a molecular level or an atomic level. And now you can essentially create anything for about a dollar or a pound, I think was the number that, um, Ralph Merkel threw out. And this now becomes really fascinating because you could create a, a computer. Just by the cost of the materials.

• 55:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's called.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Because for me, the big, the big, the big thing that blew my mind with 3D printing was is that complexity is free, right? Throughout history, the more complex an object, the more difficult it was to make.

• 55:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  And now with 3D printing.

• 55:24Peter Diamandis?

  Complexity.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Complexity doesn't matter because you can model it, boom, you're done.

• 55:27Peter Diamandis?

  And customization is free.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Customization and for the third part around 3D printing is you can make things that couldn't be molded.

• 55:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  You can replicate objects that couldn't be molded and you don't need a mold now.

• 55:39Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, Richard Feynman, back in 1958, wrote a very famous paper called, there's, there's plenty.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Plenty of room at the bottom.

• 55:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then Eric Drexler, 1986, wrote age, uh, wrote, uh, wrote Engines of Creation. And we've been waiting for nanotechnology, which by the way, if we get to nanotechnology, where we can, uh, atom by atom, uh, repair or create, that gives us immortality without question.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Infinite.

• 56:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but I won't go there right now. All right.

• 56:15Peter Diamandis?

  So I.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I hope you go there in the book, though.

• 56:17Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, you will go in there in the book for sure.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 56:20Peter Diamandis?

  But I want to hear about this, uh, this molecular manufacturing.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll update you separately.

• 56:25Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one thing I've been tracking, and I, I put this up in the Wall Street Journal, is the battle between, uh, between the large hyperscalers, the large language models. So you've got OpenAI, separate from Microsoft, right? Linked but separate. You've got Gemini from Google. You've got XAI, um, you have Anthropic.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Meta.

• 56:50Peter Diamandis?

  And I've been just extraordinarily impressed by Google's march forward. Uh, I don't know if you've been tracking what they've done, uh, with their, with their latest, you know, you know, Gemini 1.5, their Gemini, uh, deep research.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 57:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable what this thing can do. This is like the $200 a month thing.

• 57:13Peter Diamandis?

  No, well, it's $200 a month on ChatGPT. It's 20 bucks a month for Google.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  20 bucks for Google, that one.

• 57:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  It's incredible that you can essentially build. We will now accelerate 1,000 times the amount of research and how quickly research gets done. It's gonna be incredible. I just.

• 57:29Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I love one. I love on Gemini and their deep research, being able to go, okay, this is what I'm interested in. Go and please check on these and put together a thesis and write a report. And it will go off for 10 minutes to 30 minutes and build a research paper for you.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, amazing. So I am, you know, one of the challenges with OpenAI is their battle against Elon, who is now in the White House. Their battle for going from a nonprofit to a for-profit.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  For-profit, yeah.

• 58:10Peter Diamandis?

  And I don't know, you know, I still love Google since I first met Larry and Sergey back in 2004.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Their hearts are, their hearts, like Jeff and like Elon, and their hearts are in the right place.

• 58:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Which is so, you know, you had a class of billionaires 100 years ago that were extractionary wealth.

• 58:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  And don't you call them the techno philanthropists in your, in the abundance book?

• 58:35Peter Diamandis?

  And yeah, I call about, I talk about, you know, Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt is techno philanthropists. Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I find it really incredible. If you went back, say, 200 years ago, the richest people in the world had exclusively inherited their wealth and guarded it jealously, did nothing with it. And today you have people, the richest people in the world have exclusively earned their wealth and they're splashing out, changing the world with it. Jeff and Elon and it's fantastic to see. I think it's such an important pointer to their true human nature of wanting to contribute and wanting to make a difference. And going to that MTP concept we talk about, I can't say enough about it. And it's really been impressive to watch Google catch up radically and very quickly in insert AI into everything they're doing. It's brilliant. Brilliant execution.

• 59:27Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've had a chance to know Elon well over these 25 years and money never enters into the equation.

• 59:36Peter Diamandis?

  It's always can I make a better product? Can I achieve my MTP of Mars or sustainable Earth? And it's just always about product engineering and creating an amazing product. Period.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:48Peter Diamandis?

  End statement. Speaking about creating wealth, should we talk about Bitcoin?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Always.

• 59:53Peter Diamandis?

  Always. Okay, this is a fun conversation we always have. So our buddy, Michael Saylor, is, you know, I'm jealous, right? Anytime someone can say, yeah, I just bought a thousand Bitcoin. It's been a while since I could afford to buy a thousand Bitcoin. So Microstrategies acquires 1,070 Bitcoin for 101 million, 94,000 per Bitcoin, and has achieved a BTC yield of 48% in Q4 and 74% in fiscal year 2024.

• 1:00:32Peter Diamandis?

  Incredible.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Massive.

• 1:00:37Peter Diamandis?

  Now, Michael invited me to his 100,000 BTC in years party. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go, but what a great way to celebrate the year 2025.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Just an amazing thing watching this happen. I'm, I'm so excited about where Bitcoin goes from here and all of the crypto stuff that's now going to happen, good and bad, right? You've got these meme coins that are exploding out of the gate with total insanity. We'll see what happens, but I'm such a, still a massive Bitcoin supporter and fan.

• 1:01:12Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I always have to credit you. The first time I heard the term Bitcoin was from you onstage at Singularity University. And I'm saying, what is he saying? Bitcoin? What is this thing? You know, it's like the first time I heard the term YouTube from Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube. I'm like, you, like with letter U, tube? Anyway, it was a while ago, guys, just to be clear.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  So, and I want to restate this, right? It looked for the first few years like so many attempts had been made at digital cash, digital gold, that you didn't know whether this one would last or not, because there have been many cracks at that pinata. And then about 2013, 2014, it became clear that, okay, this is here.

• 1:01:54Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, just to show the numbers here, a year ago, Bitcoin was at $38,000 a Bitcoin. Can you imagine going back and saying, oh, it's $38,000 today? I mean, how much would you borrow to put into it? And then up to up 170%. But here's what I find absolutely fascinating. Check this out. So Bitcoin versus MicroStrategy. So that blue line at the bottom that looks almost flat is actually Bitcoin over the year 2024. And what you see on that gold line, appropriately golden line here, is the return on MicroStrategy. And so here's here's the the numbers.

• 1:02:39Peter Diamandis?

  Between January of 2024 and January 2025, MicroStrategy has returned 693% versus Bitcoin returning 144%.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  I mean, what else is there to say? It's a leveraged play on Bitcoin with all of the different layers and bond instruments that Michael's engineered into it. I think this is huge. Of course, you you have the downside. If Bitcoin drops, then you have also an accelerated drop, right? But but if this if the umbrella thesis is that Bitcoin will go up over time, which has held for now 15 years, this is about as solid an investment that you could ask for.

• 1:03:21Peter Diamandis?

  Would you ever borrow against your Bitcoin and buy more Bitcoin?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I did that. Remember that conversation we had when it was 60 and we were all expecting? I did it at that time, and I burned a third of my Bitcoin. I lost margin trading, so Lily won't let me do that anymore smartly. We found other creative ways of trying to get to the same outcome. Like, I've invested in ordinals, which are Bitcoin NFTs, because they're Bitcoin based, so that if the NFT goes up, you get Bitcoin. And and that is a way of doing it. I think we'll see a ton more plays on Bitcoin of ways of doing it. But the the core, it's too risky for me right now to do that.

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

  Well, of course, we're we're alive now in a White House that is pro Bitcoin. What's the goal? $20 billion of Bitcoin in the National Treasury?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's that's bullshit if I can kind of swear a little bit.

• 1:04:18Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Well, here's the new article from Bloomberg, from Bloomberg. Proposal to formalize a $20 billion US Bitcoin reserve. So why is it bullshit to you?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  It should be half a trillion. 20 billion is nothing. And if you look at the annual budget, it's a it's a drop in the bucket. At least have to be a few percent.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  So because then it could make a difference. So but but not to not to diminish the monstrous shift towards crypto compared to the last 10 years of of the administration, right?

• 1:04:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Order may pause federal crypto litigation and push agencies to review policies. Right? So I'm actually shocked we haven't seen a much greater resurgence when this came out.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  I think it's built in. It's priced in. This is the price that popped from 50 to 100 was everybody going, oh, now this is all going to happen. So I believe that's all priced in.

• 1:05:16Peter Diamandis?

  Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Humanoid robots.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Your favorite topic.

• 1:05:53Peter Diamandis?

  My favorite topic. Listen, I just think it's going to be one of the the biggest impactors on society. I don't have to walk the dog anymore. The robot can walk the dog. The doggy robot can walk the dog.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Peter Diamandis?

  So this is a company that I'm tracking. So I've been tracking now aggressively 30 of the 100 or so robot companies.

• 1:06:20Peter Diamandis?

  And this is one that got unveiled early on out of out of China, out of Shenzhen called Unitree. We're going to have this company at the Abundance Summit showing their tech. They've got a humanoid robot, a couple of different dog prototype robots, and their G1 bionic upgrade. This is a $16,000 robot.

• 1:06:44Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, honestly, that's, you know, I will buy one just to have in the garage for fun, if nothing else. But check out, check out this, this video.

• 1:07:02Peter Diamandis?

  Love the soundtrack. It feels like the sixties.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Not, not to miss the soundtrack, yeah.

• 1:07:11Peter Diamandis?

  So this robot is running down.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Faster than a speeding train.

• 1:07:16Peter Diamandis?

  The rails, on rocks, up hills.

• 1:07:23Peter Diamandis?

  The smoothest walking humanoid and running robot in the world. The best thing, it's gonna make me feel tall. It's only four foot inches tall.

• 1:07:37Peter Diamandis?

  So, we're gonna have a couple of these walking around the halls at, at the Abundance Summit. Uh, it's equipped with three lidars, and this is where a multimodal AI comes in, right? Where the AI understands what it's seeing, when it's being spoken to, uh, and how to respond.

• 1:08:00Peter Diamandis?

  How many will you own?

• 1:08:03Peter Diamandis?

  I keep on asking you that.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  I have my standard, I have my standard, um, issues with this whole thing, okay?

• 1:08:08Peter Diamandis?

  What's the thing?

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  I'll throw out two.

• 1:08:10Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  One is, why the hell does it have to look humanoid when it could have three legs or four legs and do way more? I mean, that's, you know, it's.

• 1:08:18Peter Diamandis?

  I've answered that question before.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  To be of company, I know, but that's my, still my, my beef around this, okay? It could be so much more, yeah, utilit.

• 1:08:25Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, in, in the, in the comments, tell, tell Salim, tell Salim that you agree with me that they should be humanoid robots and not have six-armed, four-legged robots.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  I wanna see an octopus. I wanna know it's a robot. I wanna, I wanna, if it put clothes on you, you'd have to think it was a human being, and that would freak everybody out.

• 1:08:43Peter Diamandis?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  That's number one. That's number one.

• 1:08:45Peter Diamandis?

  T3PO, and, you know, and, and, and.

• 1:08:49Peter Diamandis?

  And data didn't have six legs.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  We'll anthropomorphize these too much too quickly. Okay, second thing is, you know, you can have like these little glitches and he goes somehow the robot suddenly thinks it's a cat and we can't get it down from the tree. And you're gonna have these incredibly crazy things happen and we're gonna have to deal with a hundred little things. The neighbor's gonna call you up going, can you please get the goddamn robot out of my garage? It's found an electrical power outlet and it's sucking all the juice out. I'm coming over to sue you. It's just gonna go rampant with this stuff. And so I think there's gonna be quite a lot of mayhem as the unintended consequences of this thing play out.

• 1:09:28Peter Diamandis?

  What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  I don't know. But as I said before, it's gonna be a comedian's dream watching this thing. Robin Williams would go crazy with this if he was alive.

• 1:09:40Peter Diamandis?

  I, you know, Nvidia accelerates humanoid development, right? Their G R O O T, Groot Blueprint allows developers to create massive data sets for training humanoid based on imitation learning. And so I think that's extraordinary. Like, hey, robot, watch me make my cup of coffee and make it exactly this way every time.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think this is massive. Because not just that, it'll learn from 5,000 other robots making coffee and the improvement rate will be incredible. And I think this may be the area where, you know, for me, if I think back to robotics, the reason that robots are so powerful and so important in manufacturing is that when you're building a car, you could have a robot open and close the door 5,000 times to test the hinges and the door lock mechanism, et cetera, et cetera. And you just, we just built incredibly stable cars very quickly because you could have a robot doing all of that, right? And now when you have collective-

• 1:10:47Peter Diamandis?

  You just took a job away from my 13 year old son.

• 1:10:51Peter Diamandis?

  Standing there doing this.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'd get bored in two seconds as a thirteen year old and walk off. But now you can have ten thousand robots, five thousand robots, all making cups of coffee, sharing that knowledge amongst themselves and really improving the collective set. That, this is again, one of those platform plays lifts everything up. I think this is a huge, so excited.

• 1:11:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, here's a news item for TechCrunch. It's Samsung expands in robotics. I think we're going to see all the major electronic manufacturers get into robotics. It is low hanging fruit for them to integrate with their world. You know, I have to say that, you know, I love Samsung as a company, but their robot design looks kind of clunky and boring.

• 1:11:45Peter Diamandis?

  All right, listen, I'm sorry, this is no Optimus, no figure, not even a unitary. We'll see.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Look, it's gonna, a thousand flowers are gonna bloom. It's, we have a Cambrian explosion of this stuff and it's gonna create a huge, huge varied set of formats in use cases, function capabilities. It's gonna move very quickly because of that.

• 1:12:14Peter Diamandis?

  I love this. This is Elon's prediction. We're aiming to have several thousand of these built in 2025. And he's referring to the Optimus Gen two. Initially, we'll test them out on Tesla. And then assuming things go well, we'll build ten X that output next year. We're aiming for fifty thousand Optimus robots in 2026. And so as many as five hundred thousand robots in three years' time. And it's just, you know, we talk about deceptive to disruptive, right? The doubling of small numbers.

• 1:12:55Peter Diamandis?

  When I interviewed him in October of this past year, you know, his prediction was ten billion robots by 2040. And if you double five hundred thousand, you know, ten times, you'll get there pretty quickly.

• 1:13:14Peter Diamandis?

  Pretty amazing. What do you think about 500,000 robots in three years' time?

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  I think it'd be great, but given the time it took from his announcement of a robot taxi to actually getting it, I would like to take this with a grain of salt. But the trend is the important one, right? If it happens in three years, or four years, or five years, it doesn't matter. It's gonna happen. And when it does, it's gonna be a game changer at so many different levels.

• 1:13:43Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed, agreed. Let's turn the conversation in a different direction to close this out today. Which is, buddy, you just took part in something that is not technical, but it is powerful. And that was your father's passing. And I think you had an experience that is worth sharing. It's not technology, guys, but it is extraordinarily deeply meaningful. So, Salim, share.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  So, my 97-year-old father, who lived alone and drove around until a few months ago, had an assisted death procedure up in Canada. And the process was, you know, we associate death with grief, and loss, and pain, and suffering, and whatever. It's all negative, right? Except what I experienced with him was the most joyous and ecstatic and blissful experience I could possibly imagine. If I go out with one tenth of the ecstasy he had, I'll be very happy. He was in like total, total bliss. And when the procedure finished, I was sitting there kind of stunned. And he had a couple of days to say goodbye to everybody. We timed it.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  We paid Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for him, which was his favorite piece of music at the end, and he passed on. And I said to the doctor, I said, "I don't know how to process this. He was so happy." "Have you seen that? Because you've done this process." And she said, "Sir, you have no idea. Most people that go through this assisted death process go out in that state."

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Because they have agency, uh, they you can die with dignity and you can time it and you have a you can manage a schedule and it really, really shook me in a positive sense. And I think we have to rethink this as a as a society because it couldn't have been more peaceful, happy, blissful, ecstatic. Uh, he literally was like in a medicine ceremony, um, a plant medicine ceremony and and um, uh, it was kind of incredible. I'm sitting there and it's now been two weeks and I'm like, I should feel grief and loss and that, but I don't because he was so happy. And so I don't know how to process this. I'm writing a blog post about this that we'll put out about how this, I think this is a transformative thing that we should make available to a much, much wider group of people.

• 1:16:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And it's got a stigma here in the United States.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Everywhere, everywhere, usually through religious structures that try and keep a person alive forever. Right? And my father was very clear. He goes, I do not want to be a burden to society or to the family or to the healthcare system. Um, uh, and it was really kind of an incredibly beautiful experience.

• 1:16:31Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. This is completely opposite from what I speak about normally, which is using technology to extend your life, not end your life.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  So good to know. And you know, he was a profound atheist his whole life. And the last two days, as he was saying goodbye to people, he was like, see you on the other side. And I was like, wait, what? What are you seeing? That that what are you sensing on the, it was like he was late for a meeting and he had to get there. And he was like, get, get me out of here. Uh, he said of the, they had a palliative care doctor come in and the fellow said, I'm here to make you more comfortable. And my, my dad said, are you here to help me die? And he said, no, no, no, just make you more comfortable. And he said, well, then you're of no use to us or ever bring the doctor that's going to give me the procedure or you know, why are you here even?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  It was just amazing. It was so crazy. We had a little memorial service with my family, just talking through the different experiences with him. It was kind of, the most amazing line he ever gave me was, I did this talk ages ago called fixing civilization, and he said, totally disagree with your talk.

• 1:17:34Peter Diamandis?

  A minor, minor title.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Oh, niche, niche effort. And, and his, he said, the problem is not with the fixing part, it's with the civilization part. We're, we operate as apes and tribal clans with more and more powerful weapons killing each other. We've materialized the world, we have yet to civilize the world. It was like one of the biggest wisdom bombs from the elders I could have ever had. It's beautiful.

• 1:17:57Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, I love you, buddy. It's a, it's a beautiful way to close this conversation.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Yes, could not have been any more beautiful.

• 1:18:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Anyway, I'm thankful for your dad giving the world you. And, and thank you, my friend. I'll see you in our next episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. And guys, if you enjoy this conversation with Salim and I, let us know. You can subscribe, you can tell us what you want us to cover in the show notes. We do pay attention and we're grateful for you.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  And tell us who you think is right or wrong in the comments on some of our disagreements.

• 1:18:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, tell them, please let Salim know that he's wrong, right?

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Touche.

• 1:18:44Peter Diamandis?

  Follow Salim in, in EXO, his EXO universe. What's the, what's the?

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  It's openexo, openexo.com.

• 1:18:53Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. I should know that by now, shouldn't I?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's close to openai.com, where we are opening EXOs. So, our mission is to create as many exponential organizations in the world as possible.

• 1:19:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, fantastic. And, and check us out at abundance360.com. Anyway, love you, brother. Be well.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  You too.