What the Election Results Mean for Emerging Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #128

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

  We've got a Republican administration coming in. What should be their policy on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  I think there's incredible potential here to operate now, create a global store of value. How that juxtaposes with the fiat systems is going to be the big question.

• 0:15Peter Diamandis?

  There is an AI arms race going on. It's not even between governments, it's between companies. Is AI able to be regulated? Should it be regulated?

• 0:26Speaker 01

  I don't see any mechanism, like at all, that you can regulate AI. The horse has left the barn.

• 0:33Peter Diamandis?

  How long before our democratic experiment here gets revamped for a world of AI, censors, networks?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else. We've been running democracies at a nation-state level for the last few hundred years. The future of the world is not nation-states, it's city-states.

• 0:56Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to WT App, just happened in technology. I'm here with my dear brother and technology aficionado, Salim Ismail, the head of exponential organizations. Salim, good to see you, pal.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Likewise, big day.

• 1:13Peter Diamandis?

  Big day, yeah. We're recording this on November the 6th. The Trump White House is imminent. And the impact is going to be profound across all areas of technology. And I think we should talk about that, right? We see Tesla up 15%, Bitcoin is up at all-time highs at $6,000, $6,000, up to $75,000, $76,000.

• 1:38Peter Diamandis?

  Significant moves forecasted by a pro-tech, pro deregulation White House that's coming. I first want to say, listen, when I tell people, "Any questions for me other than sports or politics?" I am a libertarian capitalist, is how I would sort of describe myself. How about you?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm a libertarian capitalist with some level of a social floor. Minimum UBI framing type stuff. So, very close to you.

• 2:12Peter Diamandis?

  In this episode, I really want to cover what we're expecting to see and the impacts on cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, on AI, on humanoid robots, on flying cars, autonomous cars, biotech deregulation, space exploration. I mean, how about you?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And I think that there's a really important commentary also as to how do you do policy formulation when technology is moving so quickly? I think that's a key area.

• 2:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's called like racing headlong into a brick wall. I mean, honestly, I would not want to be in the government for a number of reasons right now, but in particular because things are moving so fast, it, you know, we're trying to match government regulation with the speed of technology change. And it is, it's an impedance mismatch if you're an electrical engineer. It's like impossible.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Well, one of the ways we talk about this is that, you know, most government policy is defensive and reactive, right? And there's only two places in the world that do forward thinking government policy, which is Singapore and Dubai. And even there, they don't do it that well. Although I think one of the incredible opportunities for any government around the world, including a new government arriving, is we know passenger drones are coming. Let's formulate the regulatory early so that we can kind of figure things out. That way, when they arrive, you're not losing decades waiting for policy to catch up.

• 3:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, without a target, you'll miss it every time. I want to, let's just jump in here. I think the first place I'd love to have a conversation with you is on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You know, we have seen a lot of movement in the markets and we've seen Trump and his team speak about being the Bitcoin president. My fraternity brother and past roommate, Michael Saylor from Micro Strategies, has been tweeting up a storm. How do you think about this?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Obviously, I'm very optimistic as a fellow Bitcoin maximalist. I think there's incredible opportunity now. I think the crypto stuff has been lagging behind. The US has been woefully behind many other regulatory structures and therefore all the crypto developments happening in other places in the world, which is pathetic, given the innovation potential of the US. So I think that's a huge opportunity. I think the huge challenge is the challenge that crypto and Bitcoin specifically present to the US dollar hegemony. And I think that's the tension that's going to have to be played out over the next few years.

• 4:56Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. I found it interesting Trump saying that he's going to hold on to all seize Bitcoin and and sort of create his Bitcoin piggy bank in the government, which I actually think is a very good, very good move. You know, having seen El Salvador and other countries begin to sort of base policy and economy on Bitcoin as a stabilizing force.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  You know, just to echo Michael's theory, we have 200 fiat currencies, right? It makes no sense to have that many. We don't really need that many. You need to, we need to store value. You need a means of exchange. You need a unit of account. And we can do a lot now with the potential of Bitcoin, which is a global digital technology replacement for stores of value. And there was a great commentary around the fact that money has always been represented by traditionally the hardest thing to make. So seashells, we used to use as money because they were hard to make. You could only find a few rare ones like that.

• 6:01Peter Diamandis?

  Gold was hard to mine.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Hard to mine, right? Bitcoin is really hard to mine. It actually gives it credibility because it's so hard to mine. You can't fake it in that sense. So I think there's incredible potential here to operate now, create a global store of value. How that juxtaposes with the fiat systems is going to be the big, the big question.

• 6:20Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's interesting. I've been, I remember when I was young, people would get a, a, a saving certificate at weddings or at birthdays. And, you know, the last few years, I've been giving out Bitcoin to, to folks when they're, you know, married or on a special occasion. No longer an entire Bitcoin, but some number, some percentage of Bitcoin. Because I think for the long run, the whole idea of a saving certificate was, you know, long-term thinking, a 20-year or 30-year thinking. And I think Bitcoin's going to be replacing that. You know, I remember, the first time I ever heard about Bitcoin was from you, on the stage at Singularity University. And then I got religion. I went

• 7:05Peter Diamandis?

  on CNBC and said, you know, "Sell all your gold and buy Bitcoin," which I did back then, not, never enough. And you've been on stages, you've been stages, you know, a number of stages, even more recently, an expice, saying, you know, "Buy Bitcoin." There was a great cartoon I saw, and it said, "Dad, do you remember when Bitcoin was below $100,000?" And I think we're going to be there soon.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  We will there. I ran across somebody at a conference, a family office conference, last weekend, who said to me, "Hey, Slim, I met you at a couple of the early abundance conferences, and the abundance summits. And you guys gave us all, like, a few Bitcoin each. And I lost it." And so, so I find there's, I find there's two people that I run across from like 10 years ago, 12 years ago. One of them, "My God, you mentioned Bitcoin, and I bought a bunch, and God bless you." And the other is, "You talked about Bitcoin, I didn't buy any, and God damn it." Either way, it's, it's really, really a, kind of a point in time.

• 8:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, in 2014, at the Abundance Summit, I had a Bitcoin ATM. And I gave everybody, you know, a hexadecimal hash code for Bitcoin. And I said, here you are, here's a gift, don't lose this, it's valuable. And they did, of course. Anyway, not as bad as folks who have lost hard drives worth of thousands of Bitcoin.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  That's right. I think the statistic is we've lost about 20% of Bitcoin to lost hard drives, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's important to note for the folks that are freaking out because they missed the boat, that the first three, four, five years of Bitcoin, it was a huge question mark whether it would make it or not, because so many different attempts at digital stores of value have been attempted in the past. Hashcash, eCash, digital gold, et cetera. It was, it took a few years before people clicked in that the engagement model, going back to the EXO model, the engagement model and the gamification was so powerful that it was a positive feedback loop and it was here to stay. I think it's really, really powerful.

• 9:13Peter Diamandis?

  Before we leave this subject, there's something else coming, I think is going to be enabled and empowered by this administration, which is digitizing assets.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:24Peter Diamandis?

  The whole realm of, like, if you own an apartment building in Miami or in Central Park West, or you own a valuable piece of artwork, that you could digitize it effectively and, and sell, you know, a crypto version or a percentage of it. Can you speak to that?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I mean, the minute you can do that, that's huge. And something big has happened over the last couple of years. Go, for folks that are interested, go check out a company called Materium, led by Vinay Gupta, who was the head of Ethereum, when, head of community for Ethereum when it launched. He was the launch manager, I think, for Vitalik and team. And what he's been doing over the last seven years is trying to figure out the legal stack between, if I have a digital token that represents some rare bottle of wine, do I have the legal standing to be able to collect, connect, collect on a bottle of wine? And he solved that problem. And I think it works in like 170 countries already. And so therefore, we can now tokenize anything and represent it with digital tokens and fractionalize any asset.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And I think this will unlock the most extraordinary potential since the floating of the dollar off the US, off the gold standard.

• 10:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, this is... Trillions, tens of trillions of dollars.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Well, the global economy is close to 600 trillion, about half of that is real estate.

• 10:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So if you just digitized property land titles, right?

• 10:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Now you have, like, you've got half of the world's wealth that can be fractionalized that way, and infinitesimally fractionalized. So I could own a tenth of a piece of a room of a New York condo, if I wanted to.

• 11:08Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and the beautiful thing is, it comes along with certain rights, where you get a day, a year of being able to sleep in there, or being able to assign that right to somebody else. And so, you know, you can own, another company focused in this area is Abra and Republic. Right, I'm gonna have Bill Barheit at Abundance 360 this year, speaking about their efforts on digitizing assets. And being able to, um, being able to, like, fund a fraction of a movie, like, if like, there's a movie in production by James Cameron, you can, you can fund a fraction of it, and you get certain rights for the opening, or for seats, or whatever the case might be.

• 11:53Peter Diamandis?

  As soon as you digitize ownership, you can add secondary rights besides just ownership onto those.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I, I think this is, this unlocks so many things. We've been watching this, by the way, in the NFT world. As people are, you know, innovating very, very, every project learns from the last six months of projects and does something new. And that whole ecosystem is moving faster than anything I've ever seen, except for maybe AI.

• 12:18Peter Diamandis?

  So, bottom line, Salim, is we've got a Republican administration coming in. Um, what should be their policy on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think, let, let's separate Bitcoin from cryptocurrency just for the second. But two things I think are really critical. Right now, every cryptocurrency transaction is taxed as property.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  So you have a capital gains, if I wanted to buy a cup of coffee with crypto, that's a capital gains tax event, which slows down the adoption radically. I would change that rule so that you could clearly separate between stores of value and means of exchange. If I'm using a payment, doing payment for goods and services using crypto, that should be taxed as if it's a taxable transaction, not as a frickin' property tax, right? As a, as a asset tax. I think that's one. I think the second is to much more allow the financial world to accept Bitcoin as a store of value. For example, financial advisors are not allowed to talk about Bitcoin to their own clients.

• 13:20Peter Diamandis?

  It's crazy.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And the clients come to them.

• 13:22Peter Diamandis?

  I said to my mom, I said, Mom, listen, you know, I would love if you would please diversify and put some of your assets into, into Bitcoin.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Peter Diamandis?

  Or at least into a Bitcoin ETF. And her, whoever, Morgan Stanley, whoever, it's like, not allowed to do that, sorry. Crazy.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  So I went, looked into why, and it turns out the risk of Bitcoin is too high for them to accept from a professional perspective. They don't want to take on that risk, which is ridiculous, right? If the client wants it, and this other, hello, how about free market? So I think that would be an area to change and change the game on. So there's all sorts of areas around the financial regulatory that could be undone. And I think that's where, an area where we could do quite a lot of updating of regulatory structures that are desperately out of date and serving nobody but the legacy environments.

• 14:17Peter Diamandis?

  There will be some dramatic changes within the SEC very shortly. All right. Bottom line is, I think you opened up with that point, the US should be leading and not following and most definitely not retarding progress in this. It is, it's a definitive, it is coming, it is moving at accelerating speed. One of the things that people need to realize is that as we shoot, as we get to AGI and agents and digital superintelligence.

• 14:54Peter Diamandis?

  The ability for AI systems to be able to transact financially is what is going to unlock yet another super exponential. And the only way you do that is with with digital currencies.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:09Peter Diamandis?

  And and so it's going to happen and and it should happen here in the US. Otherwise, that that super hyper exponential call is going to occur overseas someplace.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  That's right. I just want to touch on one piece of this because lots of people don't click into this. For me, the the magic of crypto is not that it is digital. The US dollar has been digital for a long time. It's the fact that I can program a transaction and and modify behavior. So, for example, if you were if I was to buy that nice jacket that you're wearing.

• 15:40Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Right now, I have to kind of hope that I send you the money. I hope you send it to me. And we have eBay as middlemen and take extracting a tax for things like that. And we pay a lot of money for that incremental tax, right? Though in the future, I can basically say, hey, I'm going to send you a hundred dollars. The system keeps it in escrow programmatically. You send the jacket. The minute I accept delivery, it releases the money to you. And the whole thing is done programmatically with almost zero transaction cost. Okay. And that I think is important. I think there's and I just want to touch on one thing, which is where we're going to get resistance from this is Wall Street. I came across the most ridiculous fact. Over the last 20 years or so, 40% of American corporate profits are the financial sector.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  40%. That's a sort of ridiculous number of the tax on the money going through the system. So I'm hoping that that the deregulation starts to help to unwind that. But there's going to be very fierce resistance from the banker types that go, no, every transaction should go through us, etc.

• 16:44Peter Diamandis?

  Well, guess what? Things change fast.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think the opportunity for crypto to bridge across into real-world applications is now enabled 100x than it was, say, two years ago.

• 16:57Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I would love to talk about the fact that you put a mortgage on your home to buy Bitcoin a few years back, but I'm not sure I should.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Lily is still smarting over that one.

• 17:07Peter Diamandis?

  Well, listen, now she's happy because Bitcoin is like flowing through the roof, literally, of the house.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Never, never happy. But yes, happier.

• 17:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, happier. Okay. Well, hey, so listen, let's, let's switch from, from Bitcoin.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I also want to just make a point here, because I'll get in trouble otherwise. Lily has been an incredibly supportive partner around all this with the very reasonable caveat of, look, distribute the risk of it because you just don't know. And that's correct. You know, you and I would throw everything at.

• 17:38Peter Diamandis?

  We're all in.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  And so, so this is really, really powerful and important to have that balancing.

• 17:44Peter Diamandis?

  But have we ever been wrong? I don't think so.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  No, no, except for those 16 times.

• 17:50Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, I'll, I'll vouch for you. You vouch for me on this one.

• 17:55Peter Diamandis?

  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 and use their AI models to deliver

• 18:37Peter Diamandis?

  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 gut health is one of my highest priorities.

• 19:18Peter Diamandis?

  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. So, you know, we've got to talk about AI. It's coming strong. You know, last week I was in Saudi and interviewing Elon on stage at the FII8 Summit, and then I interviewed Eric Schmidt and Ben Horowitz and the CEO of TikTok and SVP of Nvidia and Travis from, you know,

• 20:03Peter Diamandis?

  the past founder of Uber. And it's like, literally, the entire conversation at, you know, this event of 5,000 world leaders and investors is all about AI all the time. And so it is a, it is the underlying conversation underpinning everything. And there are lots of implications, and we should talk about them. And I want to hit on them. Top of mind right now is, is AI able to be regulated? Should it be regulated? Number two, there is an AI arms race going on. It's not even between governments, it's between companies.

• 20:48Peter Diamandis?

  And how do we think about that? Number three, this flows directly into energy, right? The amount of energy that we have to produce is extraordinary. And one of the conversations taking place on stage was, listen, we're not going to meet all of the, you know, the climate crisis goals because we need to invest every form of energy to drive AI, but AI is going to help us address the climate crisis.

• 21:20Peter Diamandis?

  So how do you think about those?

• 21:22Speaker 01

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

• 22:07Speaker 01

  that framework is broken because the technology is advancing so fast. And we can talk a little bit more about how do you do regulatory in general? So I'm on the camp that says, I just don't see a mechanism of any kind. I did have a conversation with the Lord Mayor of London, who's a bit of a brain on some of this, who thinks that ISO standards are a path to it. So if I claim I'm ISO certified on whatever AI standard that is approved, um, I, they will, ISO will actually certify whether my AI systems meet the, meet the criteria or not. I think what's going to happen here is the private market will, will navigate this. For example, if I'm using a data set as a bank,

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I really need to make sure that that data set is AI clean and authentic and not using dodgy data. And therefore there's all sorts of AI auditing systems and companies that audit AI systems that are popping up to help with that. I mean, so I think the market will navigate this much faster than the government will be able to.

• 23:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I, I don't think the government can regulate it. It moves at the speed of, of conversation versus, versus technology.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Well, it moves at a legal pace, which is like infinites- infinitesimally slower than.

• 23:19Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I mean, one of the places that, that's going to, AI is going to be disruptive is going to be the legal system. Right?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, in the huge, it's, it's every.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  There's a big movement, there's a big movement popping up in my EXO community of saying, okay, let's figure out the future of legal using these different tools. Because there's all sorts of areas like contract drafting and discovery, et cetera, that can be completely automated. It's going to be amazing.

• 23:43Peter Diamandis?

  One of the most interesting conversations, I had a meeting this morning with my Abundance patrons and we're talking about HR and I said, listen, the very best HR support you're going to have as a CEO is going to be an AI system that's able to listen to, view the conversations on email traffic of your servers, or have a conversation with every employee, understand their grievances, understand their point of views, integrate it all and sort of separate the noise from the high signal, like, yes, this is really, and then give you directly as a CEO, because I personally think, you know, a great chief HR officer should be reporting directly to the CEO, it's your mechanism for tapping into your

• 24:27Peter Diamandis?

  people, right, which today is your scariest, most important resource.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  So I came across a company over the last couple of weeks that does something amazing. They drop an AI into your backend systems and it sucks up all the Slack and HubSpot and Salesforce data and traps it all. It can instantly store all the key information so that if you lose a key employee, you don't lose institutional information, which is one of the hardest things. And the second thing it does, they can instantly create training modules for every task in the company. And it's like Palantir in a box, it's a SaaS platform, so it's going to be unbelievably inexpensive. The value equation here is unbelievable and now you never have to, it's just like, because AIs are so good at maintaining software now, we never have to worry about software maintenance in the future. And I think that

• 25:16Speaker 01

  will propagate to all sorts of other areas really quickly.

• 25:18Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I had on stage last year, Gill Verdon, who heads the Effective Accelerationist Movement, you know, and I am like vibrating with the level of energy, the speed that things are going to move. We're really entering into a hyper exponential period of change where the challenge is going to be the ability of entrepreneurs to, or actually, sorry, the ability of existing companies to onboard all these new technologies and get out of their own way.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Can I be blunt?

• 25:57Peter Diamandis?

  That's what you teach at exponential organizations or what we wrote about in our book.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Big time and I don't see, in fact, you know, look at how difficult it's taken like 20, 30 years for companies just to digitize, right? The metabolism change to AI is another step function order of magnitude. So the opportunity for entrepreneurs is unbelievable. The big problem, I think, is at what model level do you plant your flag if you're building an AI startup? Right? I'll go back to Kevin Kelly's famous comment from 10 years ago where he said, "The next 10,000 business plans will say, 'Take a domain, add AI to it.'"

• 26:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, just like it did 100 years ago with electricity.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 26:37Peter Diamandis?

  So again, you know, what's going to happen on the government level as a result of this? I think one policy change we're going to see is build, build, build on a few levels. Energy production, we should talk about that, and the hyperscalers. I think that there's a perceived sense that we're in a race against China, though I don't know that that's actually true.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I don't buy it.

• 27:06Peter Diamandis?

  Because China doesn't have the, you know, the GPUs. I had another person onstage I interviewed was Caifu Lee. Caifu is amazing, right? He worked at Apple. He was the head of Microsoft China, the head of Apple China. He now has a company called BGO, which is a new search engine that's based in the US. He's a three or four billion dollar VC fund called Cinnovations out of China. And he's saying, "We had to reinvent our AI systems for efficiency because we only could get 2,000 GPUs." Right?

• 27:45Peter Diamandis?

  You know, for comparison, you know, Elon stood up XAI in 122 days with 100,000 H100s and now he's doubling it again to 200,000, you know, the largest cluster ever.

• 28:04Peter Diamandis?

  And so there is a, there is an arms race, but it's between companies.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  And also, you know, I had a conversation with Gil Verdon at Visioneering two weekends ago, right? X Prize is your, your thing. And his proposed prize was doing training AI models and chip architectures 10,000 times cheaper than today's architectures.

• 28:27Peter Diamandis?

  Well, actually 10,000 times less energy.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Energy efficient, right?

• 28:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  But when you can go price performance that much of a difference, remember that means we're using 10,000 times less energy. So I think a combination of decreasing architecture costs price performance wise or increasing performance on that side. Plus today, more than 50% of Bitcoin is renewable energy, right? And we forget how much energy availability there is in the world. I was in Kazakhstan earlier in the summer and there's a guy building, there's a gigawatt wind farm that's been created out in the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan. But it's useless because they can't get that energy because the transmission costs are too high to get it anywhere useful. Great, stack a Bitcoin mining farm and an AI data center next to it and it's completely useful.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  So we're going to tap all of these energy sources all over the world, pockets of them that can't be used for anything else. And I think it will go down this incremental and marginal renewable energy sources that can't be used elsewhere. And that will completely solve the problem as those two curves intersect of radically new chip architectures that decrease energy usage. Plus increased marginal cost of or energies, demand, supply curves.

• 29:44Peter Diamandis?

  It is crazy. So let's talk about where the energy is going to come from. Because I think that needs to be part of our, of our conversation. Check out this image here. This is. Just recent, that red line down there is India went from one terawatt hour production to two, it's doubled. You look at that green line, it's China. In 2010, China was producing four terawatts. It's doubled and it's doubling again by 2030. They're just unleashing as much energy as possible. And the US has been pretty

• 30:24Peter Diamandis?

  flat. But what's interesting, and we're at four terawatts and have been, but what, going back to AI, the projected demand, if we're really building out all these hyperscalers, it could consume 100% of the US energy production by 2030. So what the conversation going on in Saudi at the Future Investment Initiative Conference was we need as much energy as we can from every possible source, which means, you know, wind and solar, fusion in the future, generation four, nuclear,

• 31:03Peter Diamandis?

  which by the way is super safe. And Cam, the CEO of Axiom Space, also is the Chairman of Energy X. They just signed a contract with Amazon for Gen 4 nuclear power production, which is crazy.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 31:23Peter Diamandis?

  These companies are signing contracts for nuclear power supplies for their AI factories.

• 31:29Speaker 01

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

• 31:55Peter Diamandis?

  And Profskite, and Profskite solar, right?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:58Peter Diamandis?

  If folks haven't heard about Profskite, it's another tech I'll be featuring at Abundance this year. It is, you know, 50% more energy per square meter and as much as 50% cheaper. And it's just incredible.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Important to note here, the peroxide replaces the silicon solar panels where we use all the rare earth elements. So that's double impact there. It's actually kind of a salt that's very widely abundant. And they found it has the properties of trapping solar energy. And as you mentioned, Peter, it's been in the labs for a while and now it's getting to commercial scale. And this is incredibly exciting for the future because you'll be able to spray that onto windows and on those roofs.

• 32:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Paranova is producing a hundred megawatt plant in Texas. They were going to see a lot of progress. You know, there is so much solar to be captured. It's there as energy. It's not in a usable form yet. But coming back to AI, because people are scared about it. And I think, you know, listen, from my standpoint, I don't know about you. I think I know your position. I am worried about AI over the next three to five years during this period of time. Before we have, it's progressed sufficiently. You know, last year at the abundance summit, we had this conversation about digital superintelligence.

• 33:22Peter Diamandis?

  And my conclusion was, are you, you know, the question was, are you worried about a world where digital superintelligence exists or a world where it doesn't exist? And I think that I'm more worried about us humans in a world where it doesn't exist and doesn't support us from our irrational thoughts and actions.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Can I queue up my, my standard rant here?

• 33:52Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So, you know, consider a spectrum of intelligence where you have smarts. You have domain intelligence. You have general intelligence. Then you have emotional intelligence. Then you go over into kind of consciousness and broader forms of, of decision making, right? We've been kind of going across that spectrum with AI, with doing basic calculations, et cetera. Marvin Minsky has this wonderful hierarchy of the ideals of AI where you get to self reflective and then reflective and then conscious, et cetera. I've got when people worry about computers and AI becoming smarter is that what the hell do you mean by smarter?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Because when I make a choice, I'm using my my emotional intelligence, I'm using my spiritual presence and the concept of awareness from the eastern world. I'm using historical memory, intelligence, etc. All sorts of aspects. There's about a dozen facets of intelligence. That the IQ test does not measure. And and so when you talk about AI's overtaking human beings in that. A calculator is way faster than doing math than a spreadsheet than a human being anyway. It doesn't mean it has intelligence in the same way than a human being does. So I really don't, I really go nuts about this because for me, it's tickling the amygdala that you like to talk about.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  You're provoking, you're stoking people's fear. I see no mechanism of achieving that mostly. When you get to once you're getting to concepts like consciousness, we don't have a definition for it. We don't have a test for it. Right? A subset of consciousness is considered self-awareness and you look like you're self-aware, so I attribute that to you. I think I'm self-aware, but my wife disagrees. Right? It's just, it's like hard to even start the conversation around some of this stuff, but people freak out about the concept. Without knowing what they're talking about. So I'd really love if people would kind of calm down, take a breath. Look at what are we talking about with intelligence? And then notice that that where we're applying AI and computation and so on is in areas where human beings are not good.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Anti-lock breaking systems, credit card fraud detection, fuzzy logic in your cameras to keep them steady. Those are all the areas where we're not good. That's where we're applying brute force calculation and AI, which is where it'll be profoundly. Things I think of AI developing intelligences that are orthogonal and complementary to human intelligence, not replicative of it. At least for a very long time to come.

• 36:18Peter Diamandis?

  I may, I may, I may, I may differ with you there, but coming back to you. The, you know, the White House and their AI policies. The question is, going back to original conversation, I don't think there's anything they're going to be able to do to regulate it.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:39Peter Diamandis?

  I think that they're going to view it as America's most important strategic development.

• 36:48Peter Diamandis?

  You know, there's a video I've shown, you know, of Sam Altman saying, listen, I don't care how much money we spend, fifty million, five hundred million, fifty billion, we're building AGI and it's gonna be worth it.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:00Peter Diamandis?

  Right, that is his point of view. And then the question is, what the hell is AGI anyway? You know, we passed the Turing test months ago, or years ago, and there's no real... I think we're gonna have achieved AGI and not noticed it, or not put a line in the sand.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Agree. Can I tell you where I'm incredibly excited, and if I was in this administration, I would think about a lot, is government policy. Okay? So let's say you wanna drop inflation by one percent. Right now, you've got a human being as an economist with a few knobs and levers, and they have no idea what they're doing. They're mostly guessing at it and hoping that something may happen or not happen.

• 37:42Peter Diamandis?

  I'm sorry to disillusion everybody who's watching, who thinks the economists know what they're doing, when they're moving the...

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I mean, because you do some stuff, and then you hope it's by far an exact science. Let's just put it that way, is the most polite, okay? Now, if you have an AI with all the access to economic data, and that can track transactions real time, all over the world, and you can say, figure out how to drop inflation by one percent, and give us the negative consequences of any side effects on other policies, and come back to us, and it'll figure it out. I think that's where there's unbelievable opportunity, and a clean slate thought process here would be so powerful to doing some of that type of work, applying it in areas where we're using fuzzy guesses at best.

• 38:27Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, again, anybody listening who's running a company, same conversation, right? If you're looking to increase your sales, but you're gonna have to get the data to enable your AI to know what the hell it's talking about.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and as I said, we just keep across this company where you drop it in and it handles it all. It's amazing. So.

• 38:48Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 39:30Peter 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 gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 40:14Peter 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. It's a chance to really add decades on to our

• 40:59Peter Diamandis?

  healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. So, okay, we talked about about that. We're also having an adjacency to to AI is humanoid robotics. You know, I'm putting out a meta trend report on humanoid robotics in about a week's time. And, you know, I'm tracking right now 15 of the top companies in humanoid robotics. They are, of course, Tesla with with Optimus, and they are Figure with Figure 2. We've got Atlas from Boston Dynamics, and a number of companies out of China, right?

• 41:43Peter Diamandis?

  So China desperately needs humanoid robots. India is starting up as well, as we're seeing so, you know, Japan and South Korea. It's the countries, in particular China, because it can't survive, can't survive with its after its one its one child policy. It's low labor rates is what made it the dominant global manufacturing base. But those labor rates are going up and their populations are are dwindling.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  So I think this is incredibly exciting at the commercial level. Okay, I think I get nervous when we talk about domestic robots in the house folding clothes.

• 42:25Peter Diamandis?

  Why?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So I look at the my Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. Okay, and I'm still at the No comparison. No, no, but I'm still at the point where I'm having to move all the chairs to to make way for the thing. And by the time I'm done, I might as well just done the vacuuming myself. Right? So we had about a decade of vacuum robots, and we've only got marginally better. Okay, now, humanoids may robots may do very good thing. But I'm wondering at what point a mother is comfortable saying to a humanoid robot, go change the diapers on the kid. Because that requires like the and the liability issues. By the way, can I take a quick segue into the regulatory here for a second?

• 43:05Peter Diamandis?

  Of course you can.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  So I for I've been talking to a few insurance companies. And I've come up with an I I've kind of gained this out. I don't see how we don't end up in this scenario. Where insurance companies go to the government and say, you cannot regulate human or robots or drones or whatever, whatever the technology is. We have the liability insurance risk structure plus a capital base that can mitigate it. Why why don't you just say if you can get liability insurance for your application? We're good. You you let it go. And and I think that's what's going to happen because then the insurance companies have the mechanism to to manage it at that use case level. And say, OK, if the robot is cleaning windows and it's limited to cleaning windows, fine.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  You can you whatever you want with a robot doing cleaning windows, right? The minute it gets to um um clipping the hair of a pet. If it makes a mistake, you could have a problem. Or changing the diaper on the baby, whoa, I can't give you liability insurance for that. I think there's a segue here where I think that's what's going to end up happening. And it allows us to move the domain much more quickly. But I think we're a long way away from a a general humanoid robot. I think specialized use cases like, you know, empty the dishwasher and put things there. One of the things that I got really excited about about 10 years ago was Baxter, the robot.

• 44:23Peter Diamandis?

  I remember Baxter, yes.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And and the powerful thing there was.

• 44:26Peter Diamandis?

  Rodney Rodney Brooks, right, was the CEO there?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. And and and I remember Saul Griffith showing us this. And the key thing that was such a huge breakthrough is in industrial robotics, you always had to program a robot. You had to say, pick up this widget, turn your arm 90 degrees, move over here, put her back, put it down. You had to explicitly program it. And with Baxter, you could show what to do, adaptively move its arms. And then it would then figure out the task in that very specific narrow use case and do it from then on. I think that potential with L L M's integrated in makes this like hugely.

• 44:56Peter Diamandis?

  But that's what that's what's going on. The difference now is the robots are visually seeing.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:02Peter Diamandis?

  What you as a human does, and it's learning from that, right? So.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  It is. I I just like I wonder how long, you know, would you have a robot cook for you? And what if it, you know, I, I mean, I, I, I don't, I don't know. I think there'd be certainly, let me give you, I thought this through a little bit. Let me give you.

• 45:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm, I've got a humanoid robot standing next to me. Okay. And I want to cook an Indian dish, which is very complex. A proper Hethabadi biryani, which is where I was born, takes like six hours to make. Okay. So number one, robot, go get all the ingredients for this recipe and pull them all on the table. Right? Number two, take this stack of ingredients and grind them together and roast them in a frying pan because you need that proper roasting. But it can't smell quite as well as I can. So I have to go over there and do the smelling to make sure it hits, hit the right level of the raw smell going away. Okay, great. Then I will kind of blend it, et cetera. Okay, now go watch it and make sure it's okay until it's ready type thing and stir occasionally.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  So I, I can see there being an interplay here and there within certain cases, but uh, or you take, it does the whole thing in an automated way. Uh, but I, I just don't see some of the other use cases being as easy.

• 46:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I, I, I'm gonna disagree with you on that. We, we learn to trust robots uh, called medical devices. And, and there are, uh, you know, I think ultimately these robots are gonna be a lot more reliable than humans. Who forget, who make mistakes, who, you know, don't show up on time. Uh, there's gonna be a learning curve, of course.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  In a medical context, if I'm doing a soldier surgery, right? Of course, a robot is gonna be way better and much more precise. I'd much rather have a robot doing it that has access to every recording of every operation ever done than that. But if it's doing some adaptive things, this is where it becomes, with adaptive where um, a, my favorite vase is about to fall over and it's about to vacuum there. And it doesn't see that part. Those, that's, those are the areas where I think the, and there's a lot of those edge cases. This is why, this is why autonomous cars have been so hard. And by the way, please know I'm desperately hoping for it. Right?

• 47:14Peter Diamandis?

  I, I know you are. I know you are. We've been talking about this together on stages from around the world for, for the better part of two decades. But, so here's my question, coming into a, a new uh, administration.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:27Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, this next four year period of time is the time during which we're gonna see AI and robotics begin to displace jobs.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Not worried about jobs.

• 47:39Peter Diamandis?

  You're not worried about jobs?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  No, for all of the reasons we've talked about before.

• 47:43Peter Diamandis?

  I know we talked about this, but I still believe we're gonna see increased efficiencies and we're gonna see job displacement.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  I'll agree with Marc Andreessen here that every major injection of technology has exploded the number of jobs, not reduced it. And you, you have said on stage many times that countries with the highest robotic penetration, Sweden, South Korea, Germany. Countries with the lowest unemployment, Sweden, South Korea, Germany. It's, it's, it's, the correlations are very clear. The data is very clear on this one, so I'm not worried about unemployment or job transformation of work, yes. And I go down to the, hang on, one last point here. I go down to that idea that, let's say I'm a financial advisor for a company like Morgan Stanley, okay? I, I have a set of about 27 tasks that comprise my job function.

• 48:37Speaker 01

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

• 49:02Peter Diamandis?

  We'll see. I mean, you and I have talked about the need for UBI, universal basic income, on the back side of this.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  If I could see one thing that this administration should go after is UBI.

• 49:15Peter Diamandis?

  Well, why? If, if jobs are not a thing, if jobs are not concerning, why should they go after UBI?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  It just unleashes entrepreneurship. All the UBI studies have shown that when you give people...

• 49:23Peter Diamandis?

  I agree with that.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  And it's really important to note that you've got to find the balance between giving people too much money and they've become too fat and they don't work and, and not having enough to sort of, you want to hit the balance where they can survive but not be happy. Right, and we've studied these these experiments when you can hit that balance, which an AI could figure out, by the way. You then have a hugely productive economy, but everybody's baseline is still covered. And then you can dismantle government services. And this is an area where if the Republicans are interested, this is an area. Here's where it's really fascinating. I don't know if you've tracked what's been going on in the UBI space, but a large numbers of cities and states and countries around the world have blocked experiments on UBI.

• 50:07Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  They've said you are not allowed to experiment with UBI.

• 50:10Peter Diamandis?

  Why? Because they don't want it to be true?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're governments. They're scared to not be needed. So they've literally passed legislation saying all the towns in my state are not allowed to experiment with UBI. That's freaky. That's the area where I think a Trump-type administration could go, are you kidding? Get rid of all of that crap and let people experiment with it, because you need more experiments.

• 50:34Peter Diamandis?

  All right. One other thing that's going to be true about this administration is going to be a massive wave of deregulation.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:42Peter Diamandis?

  And that's going to hit a few industries off the top. Biotech is one, space is another. Your choice, which one do you go after first?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  I'd go after biotech first, just because it has such immediate, obvious consequences. Using stem cell therapy, like right now, we travel overseas to get stem cell treatments for various things, which is ridiculous, right? What was that robotic surgery company in Intuitive Surgical?

• 51:12Peter Diamandis?

  Intuitive Robotics, yes.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  So I had a friend that lived next door to the factory in San Jose. And because knee surgeries were authorized, but not shoulder surgeries, he had to fly to Switzerland to get an Intuitive Surgical robot to do a shoulder, because they didn't authorize it in the US. And he lived next door to the factory. Like, the kind of chaos that we're doing around medical tourism is unbelievable. I think the US has an unbelievable opportunity to correct some of that aspect. Right now, the FDA focuses on safety rather than efficacy.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  If I could wave one wand and say, go after efficacy and not safety.

• 51:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the challenge is that you're blamed if there is one problem. You're not blamed for all of the lives lost by you blocking the therapy. And I, I think this is, for me, you know, because I'm in the biotech and longevity and regenerative medicine world and so forth. It has been, there's so much potential. I'm seeing so many incredible companies around the world that are being unlocked because of AI and gene therapies and CRISPR and such. But the process of getting it out the door safely is, has been massively hampered because of the deregulation.

• 52:33Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I, I talk about the notion of having a, a, a process by which an individual has a right to try these therapies.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:47Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we, we have.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  We should be able to sign up for stuff like that and not have, totally agree.

• 52:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we have the sense that the government has to protect me against myself, which is, you know, my body, my rights, give me the, give me the chance if, if it's fully sufficiently disclosed.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Where I disagree somewhat is public health, because now if I get a virus and transmitted to lots of other people, I'm damaging a lot of other people. So that is a mitigation there. But for anything at the personal level, I completely 100% agree with you.

• 53:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so excited about deregulation in the biotech world, in particular in regenerative medicine, in the stem cell world, exosomes and such, even peptides.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:34Peter Diamandis?

  Now, now, there's a lot of cowboys out there. There's a lot of mom and pop shops that are, are trying things and advertising. I mean, at what point? Do we say, hey, listen, you know, if you're an idiot enough to go and and just take the first injection you get, that, you know, buyer beware?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  I think caveat emptor applies in many of these cases. You just have to be, the one danger side that I see coming in this administration is there's been a movement of anti-science, right?

• 54:13Peter Diamandis?

  Which administration?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  That's coming, that there's a huge wave against scientific process and scientific thinking, because people put political motivations on people for just trying to understand what the hell's going on with something. There's so much data that we have that I think the one thing I would hope for is that people be as evidentiary as possible. And you can go drive yourself crazy with with evidentiary with conspiracy theories if you wanted to, because you can always find data to support. You have massive confirmation bias, the the actual data, and this is where I think AI can perform a huge service. Because imagine there's six experiments on psilocybin somewhere. You can analyze the data across those and come up with a meta-analysis that would be

• 55:00Speaker 01

  very powerful, that we can't easily do as human beings, but could go, you know what? That's actually safe for these types of use cases, etc. And you could then deregulate that aspect of it. So I think there's huge opportunity. Somebody has to have the bravery to go. But I'll go back to the earlier point of, we need to reorient from safety where you won't authorize a drug if it kills 10 people, even though it saves 10,000 people, to efficacy. And that's when you really unlock massive opportunity.

• 55:29Peter Diamandis?

  I know, it's even worse than that. Do you know what percentage of drugs that are prescribed to an individual actually work in an individual?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 55:40Peter Diamandis?

  It's like 20%. When you, when you get, I mean, it's pretty sad. When you get a drug prescribed to you, the sense is, oh, that drug's going to work for me. But on average, what goes on in the FDA process is, in phase one, we look at safety, right? And then, phase two, is it doing what it's supposed to do? And phase three, does it do enough of it? And what does enough mean? If it doesn't hurt anybody, but it actually supports 20% of the people, why not, why not approve it? And it does get approved. But people don't realize, it doesn't necessarily work for them. So, it's, it's crazy.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  But I think this is where this becomes workable, is once you have personalized testing, you can do personalized adaptation of prescriptions, and know that that dosage is right for me, etc. And then you're good, right?

• 56:42Peter 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. Alright, let's get back to the episode. Let's talk, let's go, let's go to talk about space, my, my, my pet childhood interest here. So, listen, I have to say, we're going to, we're going to be on the moon in a couple

• 57:27Peter Diamandis?

  years, and on Mars before 2030. And that's exciting. You know, the, the notion, I think we're going to see another JFK moment, where, you know, JFK said, I, I challenge you all to get to the moon by the end of the decade, and bring people back. I think we're going to have a challenge to get to Mars by the end of this decade.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, just the getting them back part of it, it'll make it a lot easier to get there.

• 57:52Peter Diamandis?

  I think my language is a little bit better.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  The getting back part is gonna be hard. I, I still continue to think that uh we are bags of water and evolved in a gravitational environment. Uh doing uh interplanetary travel is going to be very, very difficult. I think we'll send robot avatars um rather than trying to go out there ourselves. Uh but God bless us, we're explorers and we should do that, right? If you had that mentality, you may have never left Europe to find uh India type of thing.

• 58:27Peter Diamandis?

  Well, another use for our humanoid robots.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 58:30Peter Diamandis?

  You know, flying cars, autonomous cars, right? Uh cyber taxi, drones. Yeah, I find it amazing, one of my favorite drone companies, ZipLine.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 58:43Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, uh, that's now a multi-billion dollar company, had to go and begin business in, you know, central east Africa.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:52Peter Diamandis?

  In order, because they had a permissive regulatory regime.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I think this is the other opportunity for the US is to really upgrade its uh kind of regulatory on a bunch of levels. Um emerging markets can make new rules and I remember in Rwanda, they created a three-dimensional tube across the country like a highway. And said if your drone stays within those parameters, within that three-dimensional airspace, you can do whatever you want. Right? And I think things like that need to be done and done much more aggressively. I mean, you know, when you fly over the US, it's mostly empty, but most of the time that you're not gonna hurt anything. Um uh stay away from urban areas and you're good.

• 59:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, look out the window when you're flying across the United States.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:34Peter Diamandis?

  It is all empty space.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  I mean, fly across India, where I'm from, which is about half the size of the continental US, has like five times the pop, three, four times the population and it's freaking empty. You fly across it. So it's, it's, there's huge opportunities to unlock the abundance of terrestrial land, which is where I think passenger drones become incredibly exciting.

• 59:56Peter Diamandis?

  Um, let's talk about the future of democracy. So, you know, in a world in which um.

• 1:00:06Peter Diamandis?

  Things are moving this fast and humans are moving very slow. All right, you know, how long before our democratic experiment here gets revamped for a world of AI, sensors, networks?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Um, so can I lift up a level? And then

• 1:00:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Because I actually have been thinking, my community has been thinking about this a great deal, right? And I've come from India where my family was very involved in the independence movement. So we've been looking at democracy for a long time. The Indian constitution, by the way, was the most advanced constitution in the world for several decades because it was the newest. Right? And so it could learn from some of the mistakes in the US and other constitutions. It's the constitution is like the software that runs a country. You need to be able to update it now. This is where I have a huge beef with the originalists in the US. If you're not updating your software, you're pretty much out of date pretty quickly, which is kind of where we are in certain ways. All right, let me just give you the the high level. About 10 years ago, we were looking at this problem. You know my hobby in metaphysics and philosophy and so on.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  A fellow called Malcolm Pollock and I came up with an analogy which we called ice, water, steam. Okay, so imagine you have ice where the molecules are are kind of very cold. They don't move very far or very fast. They hold their shape, right? Very low energy in the system. Then you add heat or energy in the system. Then you get to liquid. Now it can expand to the boundaries of the container. It's more active, more agitation of molecules, et cetera, et cetera. But still reasonably slow. You add more energy and you get steam, which burns you, is hard to contain. The molecules are highly active, right? Uh, and I, we went through a whole kind of series of looking at human endeavor in different ways. Take messaging. We used to send smoke signals or the Pony Express or homing pigeons.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Very local, very slow, very, it was the ice state. No, nothing moved very far, very fast. Then you went to postal mail, which was the liquid state. You could send messages around the world. It just took a long time and it went to the boundaries of the container. Then we digitized everything and now we have tweets. And you and we've totally vaporized our messaging structures, right? Take money, we used to trade camels and goats, there were seashells, again, very local, very slow. Then we came up with currencies and letters of credit. And then we floated our currencies, even more perfect for the analogy. Then we went to Bitcoin and digital currencies and crypto, and now we vaporized and digitized thing. Same thing with human organization, we used to have clans or tribes that didn't move very far, very fast.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Then we moved to, say, nation-states and multinational corporations. And now we have Facebook groups and online TikTok communities, right? And we vaporized that. And the challenge is, and this came up when looking at the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement, lots of hot air, but nothing stable formed out of it. And the challenge is, in a vapor state, stable structures don't form. And so as we vaporize and add more and more technology to different domains like money and democracy, etc., how do we get stable structures? And in the lack of that stable structure, we go back to the old way, which is kind of what's happening in various parts of the world. So that's kind of like just a broad metaphor for what's happening in the world.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  And I think an intellectual challenge is to think about what's the equivalent of a fridge, right? That can cool things down. And so we actually use the ideal gas law as a metaphor for this, but we don't need to get into that right now. Though if I apply that pattern to democracy, we've been running democracies at a nation-state level for the last few hundred years. And the problem is, nation-states, in my opinion, they're wrong container, they're too big. For example, nation-states can't solve climate change.

• 1:03:50Peter Diamandis?

  I agree with you. The fact that that our entire democratic process came down to like four states.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Ridiculous.

• 1:03:58Peter Diamandis?

  Right?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Or you take India, where I'm from, it's 20 different languages and cultures trying to be one country. It makes no sense, right? So you, so what you need to do is granularize. And Paul Safar, I remember, getting on stage at Singularity University and said, "The future of the world is not nation-states, it's city-states."

• 1:04:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  And actually, you look at Trump or Brexit, it's not left versus right, it's urban versus rural. You can see that in the in the map from last night.

• 1:04:24Peter Diamandis?

  The data.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Clearly, right? Brexit was 100% London versus the rest of the country. That's the tension that's playing out in the world. If you have, for example, now in the future, let's say 10 years into the future, a city that has vertical farming, satellite internet, um, uh, solar energy and small nuclear, um, water extraction using the Water Abundance Prize winner. You don't need a country. You don't need the infrastructure for a country. And so therefore, I think we're going to devolve to small communities self determining their future and working out their own structures and then operating in a networked environment uh, in a much more powerful way. And so that's how I think we, in a world of abundance, see, nation states are really great for scarcity. They're terrible for abundance.

• 1:05:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  So there's a whole bunch of things, different dimensions of looking at this.

• 1:05:14Peter Diamandis?

  So here's the question, right?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Peter Diamandis?

  There, I, I think, you know, the old saying that we've, you know, governments, you know, suck, except, you know, we've got the best version of what's available today.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else.

• 1:05:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, got it.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. The question becomes, there are better versions. There are better versions that are uh, easy to describe, right? We have a representative government today versus, we don't have a direct democracy.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:44Peter Diamandis?

  That, that whole situation is.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  But importantly, can I just pause you just for a second? The reason we have a representative government today.

• 1:05:51Peter Diamandis?

  Because it started 250 years ago.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Well, at the time, information was scarce.

• 1:05:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  If you were in DC.

• 1:05:57Peter Diamandis?

  It moved very slowly and very slowly.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  So if you were in DC, you literally had no idea what was happening in California because the speed of a horse was as fast as you could find out. So we had a representative, hey, let me just finish my point. You had a representative come across the country and say, here's what people are thinking. This is why we have representative. But in a world of this digital world, an abundance of information, a representative government doesn't apply. And so we have to really fundamentally rethink our structures from the bottom up.

• 1:06:23Peter Diamandis?

  So the question becomes, is there any way to do this other than a revolution? Um, other than a, a, starting from a clean sheet of paper. I mean, the reality is governments and

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  There, there's a few different ways.

• 1:06:39Peter Diamandis?

  Finish, my turn, don't like giving up power.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  They don't, and they have armies and they like them.

• 1:06:45Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, they, they do and, and they put laws in the books to protect themselves and they buy appropriate, you know, regulatory leaders to protect themselves. And there's better ways, but so in the analogy that you and I talk about a lot, which is that, you know, that every company will eventually, unless they disrupt themselves, be disrupted by someone else. The question becomes where will the disruption come from uh for the future of democracy? Is it virtual governments? Is it network state? Right? Another topic I want to hit on at abundance this year is what Balaji has talked about as the network state.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Peter Diamandis?

  Where it doesn't matter physiologically where you live. It's I have, you're one of my peeps, someone of yours.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  That's right. I think, so I disagree with the, I agree with 80% of what Balaji talks in the network state. A large global community like abundance or Ted or EXO have, has a core set of principles and values with its own cryptocurrency can operate as a country in, in a very easy way and operate as a network state. But at some point you need the physical thing. And where I disagree is when in the last bit where he says, um, all you have to do is get, uh, get validation from an existing government, uh, and your recognition from an existing government, which is, is, is that, wait a minute, that's just not going to happen in an easy way. And, and we have that already today.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  We have a lot of digital nomads that arbitrage the Puerto Rico income tax versus the Portugal income tax versus Bali, and they're moving around depending on where the regulatory regime is the friendliest. I think that's what's going to happen if, unless you have an authoritarian. country that doesn't let you leave and that will actually solve a lot of the problems in that. So I do agree with much of what the network state talks about. Where I think things can be easy is a couple of areas that would be so easy to solve in in federal government. One is uh uh give give preference to local laws rather than federal laws. And that's where states' rights actually become really interesting, down to city rights, right? Miami is a very, very different place than rural Florida.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  So even state doesn't really cut it. You have to go down down to the city and local community level so that people have their own value system that can that can represent and the laws should represent them. The second is every time you pass a law at the federal level, you should have an end date to that law. And say that law, and they do this in Germany and they do this in a few places very powerful.

• 1:09:20Peter Diamandis?

  Or or and or take a law off the books.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Or take, yeah, every time you have one, you have to take five off the books because we're overregulated so much, right? This may be the most optimistic area I'm thinking about. If Elon gets in charge of a government deregulation department, it's gonna be fantastic. He's just gonna go, because his first

• 1:09:38Peter Diamandis?

  I I mean, I have to

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  his first principles thinking is gonna come to burn and go, why do you have to have a barrel of hay in the back of your London cab? Because it was there to feed the horse a hundred years ago. Are you nuts? Just get rid of that crap.

• 1:09:50Peter Diamandis?

  This is gonna be the most extraordinary reality TV show ever.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I I I think the Department of of Government Efficiency.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  And then the last, the the last point around kind of what we could do now is liquid democracy where you don't you're voting not based on a geography, you're based on ideas. Like, you've got so much advanced thinking and say, biotech, I'd rather give you my vote from that topic. So you make category votes and say for this, anything to do with this, I'll go with Lawrence Lessig on digital rights. I'll go with Peter on ethics of biotech. I'll go with Hank Greeley of Stanford on anything to do with biotech ethics, et cetera. And so you can just kind of use

• 1:10:29Peter Diamandis?

  I thought you gave biotech ethics to me.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  I I was just gonna tell.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  I double voted.

• 1:10:35Peter Diamandis?

  That is a beautiful thing, right? You know, what right do I have to vote on women's reproductive rights when I'm a guy?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Leave it to the women, for God's sakes, leave it to the women.

• 1:10:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Sorry. Yeah.

• 1:10:49Peter Diamandis?

  It's quite right. So, buddy, listen, I, you know, I want to wrap this WTF just happened in tech session by saying we're in for a lot of technical acceleration.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:05Peter Diamandis?

  I think. We're, and a lot of that acceleration in AI is going to be independent of the government. It's going to be happening on a, on a sort of a corporate, a corporate level. I do think the idea of AI becoming an infrastructure play, right? One of the things, one of the things that I took away from the, you know, meeting a lot of government leaders in Saudi is every single government, every government is like, how do we get us some? How do we get, how do we get ourselves a national large language model? How do we get ourselves a compute infrastructure?

• 1:11:50Peter Diamandis?

  And how do we provide it to our entrepreneurs, our, our business owners, our students? And it will fundamentally become a infrastructure play, just like telephony, just like electricity, just like oxygen.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can I tell you a crazy segue here?

• 1:12:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:28Peter Diamandis?

  What?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  So, so there's been a whole movement. No, it's true. Because they've been written by-

• 1:12:36Peter Diamandis?

  How do you know if you're not allowed to know?

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Well, because lobbyists have uncovered, lobbyists have written the laws and they've kind of made it so they're, they're somewhat, probably, nobody knows about them. It's really nuts. So, it, there's a huge effort to be just, just to digitize the damn law and get everything into one place would be just a massive thing.

• 1:12:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  The world is very weird, right? Like, this is where I find the overreach of government to be unacceptable. Where you're blocking UBI experiments? Explicitly blocking, that just blows my mind. Or things like this where certain legal structures are not allowed to be public because they're too, too, they're so toxic that, that nobody wants them out there. So that's the kind of stuff where I think we'll, we'll shine the light.

• 1:13:19Peter Diamandis?

  Are you going to change your investment strategies at all, given this administration?

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Great question. Probably not much, because I'm so pro Bitcoin, it could be hard to go more within reason. So I'm, I'm way more excited about the future of crypto now than I would have been. Although in the last six months, the Harris Biden administration kind of hobbled the SEC anywhere around crypto because of this response. But I think this will go another step further. How about you?

• 1:14:00Peter Diamandis?

  I'm just so deep on tech and crypto and Bitcoin specifically, that I don't think I can be any deeper. And I'm so overweighted on entrepreneurial startups as well.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, if you just look at the growth of, of the FAANG stocks, you know, it accounts for the majority of, of our, our nation's capital gains, it's crazy.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it's insane. I, I'm curious about what other cryptocurrencies, are you going to continue to play? I mean, I remember back when, when crypto peaked in the late 20 teens, everybody was playing in what has euphemistically been called the shitcoins. You know, is it?

• 1:15:11Peter Diamandis?

  Is there a rationale, I mean, for, for, you know,

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  There, yeah, I believe, I believe.

• 1:15:17Peter Diamandis?

  To.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  I just came across one where the, you know, there's a problem in banking called settlements. So if I owe you $800 and you owe Lily $600 and she owes me $400. We can actually settle $400 without moving any money. And so if we can operate that kind of a system, which would operate at a local city level, you, it turns out you could drop the cost of capital by about 50%. Which is huge for businesses and so on. So stuff like that can be brought online that hasn't been able to do because the banks always want every transaction going through them because they tax it all. And so now we can kind of unwind some of that, that several hundred year old architecture that should be updated.

• 1:17:27Peter Diamandis?

  All right, one last subject here, buddy. So Bitcoin at this moment is at 76,000. It's an all time high as we're recording this. Wish I can go back to myself and mortgage, if I put a mortgage on the house a couple of years ago, but no. Here's the question. Quantum computers, there's a lot of buzz coming out of China right now about being able to break all of the, all of the encryption codes. I used to believe that no, that's not going to happen. We're going to have quantum encryption protecting us against, against quantum computers. And I'm hearing maybe not. What are you hearing?

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  When I see Satoshi's $60 billion Bitcoin wallet hacked, then I'll start to worry.

• 1:18:18Peter Diamandis?

  Well, then it's all over.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  The point is, if you can't hack that wallet, you're a long ways away. Now, I do also, I also do agree with your point, which is that you will have quantum encryption. You know, hacking is always a cybersecurity is always an arms race. The bad guys find some mechanism and then we kind of solve that problem, right? And we just go through that, just the cycles. Somebody breaks quantum, that would be one thing, but you still have to solve the distributed ledger problem, which is, which is really the Byzantine generals problem, which is hard to break. And so you might solve the encryption, but it doesn't solve the distributed ledger aspect, which is what makes it powerful.

• 1:18:57Peter Diamandis?

  A $60 billion X Prize for?

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Oh God, you're such a natural hacker.

• 1:19:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, amazing. All right, buddy. Excited to see you this weekend.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:11Peter Diamandis?

  In Miami, it's gonna be fun. All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us for this month's episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Well, what just happened in tech is a new administration. And I'm so curious, is Elon going to really jump into the Department of Government Efficiency? The guy is running five companies right now and has like 11 kids. He's gonna do that as well? I mean, I'm just, you know, listen, I know we both do a lot. How the hell does he do all that he does? I keep on asking him. He doesn't give me an answer. I'm just trying to understand.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  I don't think he knows. I think he's just so driven. This goes back to the MTP, right? He's so driven by his massive transformative purposes that keeps the engine going. And God bless. I mean, we've not talked about this, but the sight of that rocket landing back and getting caught by the scaffolding was one of the most incredibly amazing things that I think has been seen in humanity. The biggest rocket.

• 1:20:12Peter Diamandis?

  It's the greatest engineering feat of, if not just this decade, multiple decades.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  So if he can take that kind of creative energy and focus his teams on government deregulation, lots of interesting things possible.

• 1:20:26Peter Diamandis?

  Can you fire government employees that easily? I don't think so.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  No, you can't. You can't. They're like unions and stuff. Like, this is the classic problem in all society. Once you get a structure in place, you put a motor on yourself, whether it's a medical establishment saying you must have a doctor. A few years ago, they passed a law in Texas saying telemedicine was illegal because you had to see your doctor if I had a little wart on my skin. I mean, it's just the most unbelievable protectionism that goes on at all sorts of societal levels. Government is just not, is one of those things that protects itself first because it can. Vene actually gave me one of the best definitions of government I ever came across. He said, "Government is an entity that can pardon its own crimes."

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  So they steal from you and they call that tax. They put you in jail where they kidnap you, they call that prison. And so it pardons its own crimes. And that is able to do that because of the place that it's in. And I think that's the part that needs to be undone. Because there's so many structures that stop progress by calcifying old thinking. Teachers' unions, for example. That we need to find mechanisms to break that up and break up what I call the immune system problem.

• 1:21:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I know. Okay, so no more C corporations. Next time I'm starting a government or a religion, I want to experiment a little bit more than that.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:51Peter Diamandis?

  All right, buddy. A pleasure as always.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  You would be my prophet anytime, Peter. And you are, I think, the tech prophet for many people, so hats off.

• 1:22:00Peter Diamandis?

  Love you, Bill.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  All right, talk soon.