The Trillion Dollar AI Reset: Advertising & Gaming is Next w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #170

In this episode, Salim, Peter, and Dave dive into another segment of “WTF Just Happened In Tech,” discussing the new era of AI advertising, how AI is underhyped, bitcoin updates, and more. Recorded on May 6th, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. ​Dave Blundin is a distinguished serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and AI innovator with a career spanning over three decades. As the Founder and General Partner at Exponential Ventures (XPV) and Managing Partner at Link Ventures, he has co-founded 23 companies, with at least five achieving valuations exceeding $100 million, and has served on 21 private and public boards. Notably, he pioneered the quantization of neural networks in 1992, significantly enhancing their efficiency and scalability. ​ 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. Learn about Dave’s fund: https://www.linkventures.com/xpv-fund Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail Learn more about Exponential Mastery: https://bit.ly/exponentialmastery ____________ 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/ 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: Newsletter _____________ 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?

  What's the world going to look like in 50 years? There's no way. There's just absolutely no way to make that prediction. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, "Salim, I really love that shirt." And it knows I need a shirt, so it just asks your AI where you got that shirt, and then it just delivers to me magically the next day.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Advertising will get crushed. You're exactly right. The future belongs to chatting with your trusted agent, and your trusted agent making good suggestions for you, and then saying, "Yeah, just go out and buy that," or "Just go out and sign up for that."

• 0:30Speaker 02

  You'll be able to use AI to not just do legal lawmaking, legislation, but actually formulate policy.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  There's a new innovation coming from AI every single week, and you need some kind of a regulatory framework. The only way those laws are going to be written is with AI, because nothing can keep up with AI other than AI.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 0:53Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, welcome to WTF, Just Happening in Tech This Week, a special episode of Moonshots with two extraordinary friends, brilliant thinkers in the field of exponential tech and AI. Salim Ismail, the CEO of OpenEXO, and Dave London, the CEO of Link Exponential Ventures. Both are my partners, and both are definitely smarter than I am. So, welcome, guys. Good to see you.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, Peter.

• 1:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Well, I want to jump in. This has been, you know, the speed at which we're seeing breakthroughs and activities across the board in all technologies is accelerating, and it feels faster. Does it feel that way for you?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Does it ever? I was in California at Stanford pretty much all of last week. Came back, and the amount of change in just one week. You know, the new Gemini model came out, their update. The code it can generate is, like, noticeably better than it was two weeks ago. I can tell you some stories when we get into it.

• 1:57Peter Diamandis?

  I want to hear them. How about you, Salim? Salim, you're a probability function. You're like orbiting the planet without a rocket ship. Where'd you come back from?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I just came, I was like a few days in India and then a day and a half in Sao Paulo and I just landed back. And I'm trying to figure out where my time zone is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.

• 2:17Peter Diamandis?

  You truly are orbiting the planet. And so, thanks for joining this conversation. You know, I hate missing a week of this conversation because stuff is moving.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  The way I frame it is we've hit a singularity in AI development. Like, the pace of change is faster than our ability to process it.

• 2:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, when we talk about a singularity, there are multiple singularities on the way to what Ray calls a singularity. So a singularity is like, if you can't predict what's gonna happen next week, that's a singularity in this area. I want to jump into one of my favorite stories in AI, because I've been beating this drum for a while now. And here it is. It's not the Trump drum, but the AI in classroom drum. So, you know, we heard earlier, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that Beijing has basically made a ruling that all secondary schools, I think primary and secondary schools are gonna require AI training throughout China.

• 3:24Peter Diamandis?

  We've seen that as well as in Estonia. And I've been like just tweeting this out. Finally, we see an executive order here that is requiring schools to incorporate AI in the classroom. About time. What are your thoughts, gentlemen? Dave?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Peter, you've been saying disruption is coming to education. You've been saying it, like you said, beating the drum for a long time. The schools have underreacted. I think, you know, we're all associated with either MIT or other schools. We don't want to get in the middle of a political battle, for sure. But there is a lot of good stuff coming out of the government now, in the Doge wake and in this, and then a bunch of other things that are absolutely urgent and necessary. But I tell you, more of what you've been predicting, Peter, for a long time. The AI is already far better than any TA in any college class. If I think about my grade school and high school teachers, I had some really good high school teachers, but AI is gonna bypass them as a way to learn.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  It probably already has. And then, you know, the professors are next. But you know, remember when the internet came along and there was a lot of concern in the schools that if they put all the courseware out there online, is anyone going to keep coming to school? It's all out there and freely available. And people did keep coming either for the social aspects or for the credentials. But now it's another level with the interactive AI being able to explain things to you better than you can learn them in a lecture.

• 4:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  And so we'll see. We'll see what that does.

• 4:58Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, Salim, you and I both have boys the same age in middle school. Is your school teaching them AI? What's the philosophy there?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  They're using AI. They're not supposed to use it for writing essays, but they do it anyway.

• 5:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  And the good news is at that age, it's pretty easy to spot when a sophisticated AI has written the thing way better than the kids do it. So that for now, it's kind of workable. But I think the key point in referencing what Dave said was it's pretty clear that when you're using an AI to learn, you learn at least twice as fast. I'm estimating, I'm hearing, between 2X and 4X faster.

• 5:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Right? That just is like, you've immediately made the need for formal schooling redundant. And so there's a huge gap now between the regulatory, we want to put kids through schools, go through grade 12, and what's possible with AI. And that's going to stretch very quickly.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, MIT and Northeastern went the complete opposite direction of your kid's school, where they said, use AI anywhere and everywhere that it helps you. And if that messes up the professor, they got to fix it. They better figure it out in a hurry. And I've got one kid left in high school, and he's ripshit mad that their school went the other direction, saying, don't use it. We'll catch you if you try. Which, you know, is just crazy. It's incredibly short-sighted to take that position.

• 6:20Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I can get the idea that middle schoolers shouldn't be using AI to do middle school homework. But middle schoolers should be using AI to do extraordinary projects that they could not normally do otherwise. Yeah, there's a second article related to this here, which is over 250 CEOs urge states to make AI and computer science graduation requirement, graduation requirement. So here's their stats. Just one computer science class can increase wages by 8% for students. The US is lagging across, again, China, South Korea, and open letter advocates for computer

• 6:59Peter Diamandis?

  science and AI as core to K through 12. I could not agree more. This genie is out of the bottle and kids are going to hit smack into a brick wall if they're not prepared.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  The good news is those kids that don't take computer science will be much more ready for all the manufacturing jobs that are coming back.

• 7:19Peter Diamandis?

  Ouch. Love it. Let's screw those iPhone screws back in. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. And that's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you, and it's available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at dmantis.com/subscribe. That's dmantis.com/subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode.

• 8:01Peter Diamandis?

  All right, here's another one. You know, UAE, let's give them credit for so many different ways. They were the first country to have a minister of AI, who I've known now for the better part of 15 years before he became minister. But UAE is the first nation to use AI to write their laws. And here's the, here's the stats. Official project will reduce government costs by 50% and speed up lawmaking by 70%. Saleem, you're, you're meeting with heads of nations on all of your trips. What are you seeing here?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Um. So they are very far ahead. Most other countries are nowhere near even looking at this. They're still trying to spell AI. Um, uh, this is a huge opportunity, and I think they've actually underestimated it. I think it'll speed up lawmaking by like five X for that seventy percent. Um, and I think the drop in cost is pretty is much bigger than they think. Uh, because you'll be able to use AI uh to not just do legal lawmaking legislation, but actually formulate policy, right? I've said this before, that if you want to drop inflation by one percent, um, asking a human being to gauge what knobs and levers to pull is a stupid idea.

• 9:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Let it to go to an AI and the AI can go, well, if you want to do that, looking at all the financial transactions and the access to all that data in real time. Let's go, here's what you need to do. And then a human being go, yep, that looks good, go for it. And so there's all sorts of things that could that could happen here. Um, there's a crazy story I have, but we we don't need to get into this right now. A few years ago, I was asked to give a talk at the uh Republican National Leadership Convention on this, on on some of this. And the title of my talk was going to be, how would you drop the cost of government ten X within ten years?

• 9:52Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Which you could do. Um, uh, but you'd have to embrace technology, and that's where we got a new bit of a a a mess there. Uh, but the the I think these of these predictions are are kind of nice, but they're conservative. I think you'll end up doing a lot more. And I think that's incredibly powerful because you could use AI at the policy formulation, legislation, writing, and then also on the enforcement side. So this really changes the game on how government operates going forward.

• 10:17Peter Diamandis?

  And you could save a lot of money with government employees. Dave, what are you thinking here?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  So, uh, as I mentioned, I was in in Stanford all last week with Eric Brynjolfsson, our our good friend. Uh, and also Sandy Pentland, who moved out there recently. And then, um, Mark Hornberg, the chairman of MIT, was also there the whole week, so. Uh, but, you know, Eric, very forward thinking on on these topics. But his point in his lectures uh on bullet two is that these cost-saving areas are the tip of the iceberg. It's a great way to get started, but the real gain here is greenfield. It's what can you do that's incremental and beyond just reducing the cost of something that already exists? And this area, we desperately need the pace of lawmaking to keep up with the pace of AI innovation. And so that's, I think, you know, there's a great way to get started and UAE is very forward thinking on it.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  But you're going to need this same capability when there's a new innovation coming from AI every single week and you need some kind of a regulatory framework. Otherwise it will run wild. The only way those laws are going to be written is with AI because nothing can keep up with AI other than AI.

• 11:21Peter Diamandis?

  You know, if you're, whatever industry you're in and you're being regulated, like if you're a hairdressing salon or you're a health care facility. If you do an analysis of all the laws that regulate you.

• 11:38Peter Diamandis?

  You're going to find conflicting laws on the books.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:41Peter Diamandis?

  And I think what would be fascinating is actually running all the laws and say, I'd like you to disentangle these, de-conflict these and actually set, you know, find the set of laws, which are the minimum laws that allow us, like the tax code, for example, oh my God, could you imagine running a reinvented tax code? It's like simplify it and, and maintain the US revenues from taxes. I mean, Celine, you've been off on this in a while.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is something that we're pretty clear as to what the sequence is. Sequence step one will be use AI to navigate the existing complexity in the tax code or legal structures, et cetera. You know, in Europe, no matter what you do, you're always violating a few laws, right? It's just so much.

• 12:25Peter Diamandis?

  That's how, that's how they keep you in check.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  That's one way, but then they don't have the people to really enforce anything. So everybody just goes out and does what they want. And because they generally follow common sense, it works out. So they're lucky over there. But the step one will be using AI to help navigate this. This is already a company that's helping nuclear projects try and navigate what's the fastest path to getting the regulatory approval? And what forms do you have to fill out, et cetera, et cetera? That's already happening there. Step two will be, how would you optimize the regulatory and stop the conflicts? And rewrite it. And I think step three would be, is there a way of making this much more elegant? And cutting through with using first principles, rewrite the legislative, a foundation of the legislative structure. That's when I think we'll get real benefits.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  But, but it certainly will get huge benefits in the first couple already. And we can do the first one already. And I think we'll see a lot of that going forward.

• 13:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Amazing. I've never been excited about. You know, rewriting laws, but I do think there needs to be some way and some requirement that every time you put a longer books, you should take one of the old ones off orally simplified. All right, let's move on here. This is a big one. This came is a bit of a surprise. OpenAI scraps plans to convert to a for-profit structure. So OpenAI abandons plans to shift after facing opposition from Elon and state authorities. And they're going to maintain what they call their nonprofit controlled capped profit structure. So what does that mean? There's a nonprofit board that oversees OpenAI.

• 14:03Peter Diamandis?

  All of the nonprofit board members have no equity incentives, meaning they're there to help maintain AI's, to maintain OpenAI's mission in the world and not to maximize profits. The capped structure means that if you put a dollar in, your return on your investment is capped at a hundred dollars. So I find that fascinating. We reported last time that OpenAI raised capital at a $300 billion valuation. So thoughts on this one?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Well, there are a lot of reports that, hey, this is no big deal for Sam. You know, it's going to actually, if anything, reinforce his control. I didn't kind of read it that way. I was like, no, this is a win for Elon in trying to to slow, slow down the creative investment, you know, and and give him a better chance to catch up with, you know, his kind of unconstrained version of this. I also think that, you know, the number one use case for AI is companionship. The voices and the sympathetic AIs got really good in the last couple of weeks. And, you know, I think they'll be out in the world in the next couple of months where you have a very, very intelligent AI model, like a two trillion, five trillion parameter model, married to these super engaging sympathetic voices.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And that's going to create all kinds of tough decisions for social media companies on, like, am I just selling as many ad impressions as possible and trying to reel everybody into like being on this platform 24 by 7? Or am I actually worried about the psychological effect of that? And I think that having a nonprofit board on top of OpenAI, they're obligated to think in terms of the, you know, being the social good version of this, which may not be the biggest revenue driver.

• 15:46Peter Diamandis?

  Salim, what are your thoughts here?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  It's it seems pretty clear that there was gonna be legal, huge legal exposure if they push through with the full for profit. And so this made it more elegant. He's gonna control the nonprofit board, so that kind of minimizes any risk. And then you can always find other ways, you do other spinouts, et cetera, et cetera, to harvest some of the upside that may come from this. So I think it's, it'll force them to change their route. I don't think it'll change the game that much, as Dave said.

• 16:15Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the things, Dave, you mentioned in in passing was the sort of emotional engagement of the AI. So OpenAI's ChatGPT, they actually rolled back that level of emotional engagement. They they were saying that it was just way too complimentary to the user. And I don't know if the term obsequious is the right term for that, but they rolled it back to an earlier state. You don't want your OpenAI saying, oh, you're so amazing all the time.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  There's a soul definition of diplomacy, which says, you say nice doggy until you can find a rock. So this is the AIs being really nice to us until they figure out what to do with it.

• 16:59Peter Diamandis?

  Ouch. All right. Not a surprise here. Microsoft CEO says up to thirty percent of companies' AI code was written by AI, and predicts that ninety-five percent of code will be AI-generated by 2030. Dave, you're overseeing how many companies right now inside of the Link portfolio and the Link Studios?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Twenty twenty-four right now?

• 17:25Peter Diamandis?

  Twenty-four. And so what's it like there? I mean, so take a second and give people a little bit of overview. So Link Studios is incubating companies mostly out of MIT, some out of Harvard. Average age of those teams?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Oh, well, median age is probably twenty-four, twenty-five year olds, and the companies are about one to two years old.

• 17:49Peter Diamandis?

  And so what's going on in terms of vibe coding for them, in terms of AI-based coding?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Well, they're all AI native. They generate almost all their code with some degree of AI assistance. Blitzy in particular is, when I left town last week, they had a two or three million revenue run rate. I came back, they've signed eight million of new deals. And so they're basically signing up customers as quickly as they can meet them. You know, Blitzy, as a reminder, is a company can write three million lines of code in a single night, uses massive amounts of inference time compute under the covers. And then now the trick is, okay, how do you debug three million lines of code that you've written in a single night? But you know, the the algorithms are getting so good at writing good code now that that problem is going away in a hurry. But you know, there's, there's no way any company in this building wouldn't be using

• 18:39Speaker 01

  AI generated code for almost everything that they do. Also, you know, it, it makes a lot of sense to write your business plan around areas where it works well. And then, this is coming up a lot, don't fight any battles, wait a few weeks. Because the, the things it'll be able to do in a few weeks will be expanding at this ridiculous rate. So while you were fighting some silly battle, it got ahead of you. So, so you just, you know, do what comes naturally and easily this week and then wait, you know, for the next week's innovations.

• 19:11Peter Diamandis?

  David, I have a question for you. It used to be that if you're starting a company, especially in the AI space, you need to find a great technical co-founder if you're someone in the business or finance world. How important is that now versus being able to use, you know, AI as your technical co-founder?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's in a sense more important than ever, but it's a different skill set. You know, it is very much, you know, the visionary that can decide what should we be doing has become incredibly important. And then the technical co-founder who would just grind out, you know, Steve Wozniak would be the quintessential example, like Steve Jobs is like, we need to build the Apple two, this is what it needs to be like for the user. That skill set's more important than ever. Hey, Woz, can you get the chip count down? Can you wire this all together, you know, grind it out all night? That skill set becomes much less relevant because, you know, AI will do all the chip routing for you. But that first skill set has really grown in value and it's very similar. You know, it's a very technical. You got to choose components. You got to decide this will work, this won't work.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  It's a very technical skill set, but it's more of a visionary skill set.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I think there's one other skill set that's coming to the fore here, which is find hidden gems of data sets and figure out how to monetize them. And I think that's going to become a very big deal over the next few years because we'll have horizontal platforms able to do all sorts of things. The question is, where is the revenue? Where can you mine for little nuggets of revenue and go grab them and leverage AI to do it? I think that's going to add to the to the business focus and the application focus.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  So two more things on this on this topic that I think are really important. First, Mark Zuckerberg last week did a couple of interviews where he made it clear that the backlog of AI research projects is only compute bound. It's not idea bound. So between the researchers and the AI-generated ideas, they have a huge backlog of things that will just work. And there isn't enough compute, even in Microsoft's hundreds of thousands of GPUs, there isn't enough compute to try the ideas. So we've tipped from idea bound to compute bound, and that'll be true forever hereafter. And then on the second bullet, you know, 95% of code AI-generated by 2030. I think that timeline to 2030, he would have said, Satya would have said 2040, 2050, just a few months ago.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And so that, you know, that's consistent with Demis Hassabis also. You know, he was more conservative about the timeline to AGI, and he's pulled in his forecast now, too. So what you're seeing is even the conservative, you know, let's be cautious people are really pulling in their date. And that, you know, that's that's telling.

• 21:49Peter Diamandis?

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• 22:30Peter Diamandis?

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• 23:56Peter 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. It's the, it's the AI singularity as, as Selim and I spoke about earlier. So, speaking of which, our AIs are for the US. David Sacks has come forward with a statement that AI will be a millionfold.

• 24:27Peter Diamandis?

  More capable in the next four years. Let's play a video and then talk about it because you know, this was the same point that Elon made when he was on stage at the Abundance Summit. Let's hear the numbers that David puts forward.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  I would say the rate of progress is exponential right now on at least three key dimensions. So number one is the algorithms themselves. The models are improving at a rate of, I don't know, three to four times a year. Then you've got the chips, depending on how you measure it. Each generation of chips is probably three or four times better than the last at a level. And that would be the third area where you're seeing basically exponential progress. Just look at the number of GPUs are being deployed in data centers. AI's data centers, Stargate, and within a couple of years, they'll be at, I don't know, five million GPUs, 10 million GPUs. The algorithms, the chips and the data centers are all improving or scaling at a rate of, I don't know, three to four X a year. That's 10 X every two years. If you're getting better at 10 X every two years, that doesn't mean you'll be at 20 X in four years. It means you'll be at 100 X.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  So you multiply those things together, the algorithms, the chips, and then the raw compute that's available. You're talking about a million X increase.

• 25:33Peter Diamandis?

  So Salim, how does that feel?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  It sounds about right. I mean, look, this is the fastest moving technology we've ever seen. And you'd expect to see it. I think he framed it very kind of wonderfully, clearly in that. But we've seen the same thing where in, say, solar energy, where it's not just the efficiency of the solar panel, it's the actuators and it's the system controls. They're all accelerating at their own rate, not quite at this level of madness. But we've seen this before where the convergence of multiple exponentials gives you crazy outcomes.

• 26:07Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the things that we've talked about in the past is getting to where the puck's going to be. Right? If, I remember meeting the founders of Siri before they were bought by Apple. And they were predicting what was going to be possible in like two to four years. And they were building Siri to intercept those capabilities. Because if you build for what's possible today, then by the time your product gets to market, it's out of date. So Dave, I mean, you're seeing multitude of, you know, hundreds of startups that are coming across your desk.

• 26:46Peter Diamandis?

  How do you think about this?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, the million X is is just raw parameter count in the biggest neural nets. It's it's really hard to predict the capabilities that are and aren't possible with the million X. And so it's, yeah, you you're a great, all time great visionary, looking five years into the future. It used to be very possible for you. I don't know, what do you think your view into the future is now?

• 27:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it literally has to be a discontinuous vision. Okay, all I I have a hard, I remember I was brought on stage at the first world government summit in in Dubai. Yeah, and my my request was, what's the world going to look like in 50 years? And I was like, there's no way. There's just absolutely no way to make that prediction. 10 years, you know, back then it was 10, 15 years at the utmost. Today, I would say five years is difficult, three years is possible. And there's so many parameters, including policy, human reaction to this.

• 27:52Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the capital markets, all of these things are intertwined. What's going on in China and Taiwan?

• 28:00Speaker 02

  I think for me, the for me, the hard part is when something's a million times, you know, assume it's 100 X or 100,000 X, right? I mean, you end up with a failure of imagination where you can't conceive of the types of things you might be able to do, right? And our immediate thing is to automate what we're doing now, and that's not the right answer. Because you end up with the problem of when they first put TV out, you took radio announcers and put them on TV, reading the same scripts. And you're not leveraging the capability in a real way. It takes time to kind of get to grips with with the imagination that's possible. So you kind of have to wait till we get there and then go, now what do we do?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I know one thing, you know, Peter, when you were out here two weeks ago, I guess, you know, spending time with Alex Wissner Gross, there's just a handful of people that you can find that have got their head wrapped around this. You know, if you if you talk to people at random, 99.9% of them are are underreacting. More than that, nine nine nine point nine nine nine percent are underreacting. And and you find a few people like Alex that are thinking it through. And if you can surround yourself with as many of those as you can find, it really, really helps a lot.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Just just to pick on the the framework here that David Sacks put together. It's exact same three dimensions that that I use to think about scale. I think, you know, a million X in four years, four to five years is the right answer. But I I also think that the algorithm dimension, nobody really knows. And if anything, it's understated. But we are all surprised in the last few months about inference time, compute or test time, chain of thought reasoning. Being far more powerful as a scaling factor and and trying to build new scaling laws around. How do we even think about inference time? Because when you know when David talks about the chips getting faster, he's thinking about the the GPUs, you know, and just the standard three to four X year over year. But the inference time chips are actually improving far, far faster. It's a much easier problem.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  But that's turning out to be a key factor in the intelligence of the overall system. So I think that the chips will outperform what he just said, and the algorithms will way outperform what he just said because of those innovations.

• 30:07Peter Diamandis?

  When I when I look at the factors driving this, it is compute, it's total, it's data sets. And we haven't talked about synthetic data hitting this. Algorithms, money coming in. And then, you know, the number of actual human meat bodies getting into the game here is increasing. More and more people are getting into the AI game. You know, something funny that happened, I was having a conversation, I think it was with ChatGPT, it might have been Gemini two point five. And I would say, OK, let's look into the future. I was trying to use it as a conversational partner to predict where things are going. And I said, make some predictions. And I said, listen, if we're going to see a centuries worth of progress in the next 10 years.

• 30:50Peter Diamandis?

  What you just predicted is extraordinarily linear. And he goes, you're right, let me go a little bit bolder. So you've got to actually push the.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  So I think this is where the answer will lie. When we see these types of predictions, we'll use an AI to go, you write out that curve and tell me what it's going to look like.

• 31:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Uh, cause it'll do partly a better job than us because we're limited in some other ways. We have all our cognitive biases that limit our our ability to imagine. Where an AI in theory should suffer from much less of that.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, I think, that's a really important topic because I think right now AI as a brainstorming partner is hobbled. Because the models that you love brainstorming with, the, you know, the, the Fros and the Gemini two point fives. They have about a thirty second lag. And that kind of takes the buzz out of it. And then the models that are really fun to interact with, like the sesame demo and all of that. Are super engaging, but they're only like a seven B or thirty B kind of caliber model. And so they're not a really good brainstorming partner. All of that will be stitched together within the next three months. So when you're, when you have an idea in the morning, Peter, you're going to immediately go to that super engaging. Two trillion to ten trillion parameter caliber model. And there's no going back from there. Once you start down that path, you're going to love it.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  I mean, three months. Did you say three months?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Three months, yeah.

• 32:06Peter Diamandis?

  Well, ChatGPT, the sort of the on the phone app does a pretty damn good job. And I have conversations with it. So I do like twenty minutes of red light in the morning and. My, you know, conversations during that red light time with my ChatGPT bot is are extraordinary. All right, let's go to Eric Schmidt here. Um, who was giving a presentation and said, AI is underhyped. Let's take a listen.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  I'm here to tell you that I honestly believe that the AI revolution is underhyped. And here's why. The arrival of this new intelligence will profoundly change our country and the world in ways we cannot fully understand. Many people think that the demand in of energy part that our industry takes. Will go from three percent to ninety nine percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely. Is that data centers will require an additional twenty nine gigawatts of power by twenty twenty seven. And sixty seven more gigawatts by twenty thirty. Gives you a sense of the scale that we're talking. These things are industrial at a scale I have never seen in my life.

• 33:12Peter Diamandis?

  So first off, underhyped. Uh, versus spot on. How do you guys feel about that? And then we should talk about the whole energy of it all. Uh, Dave.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  You know, one of my most cherished lifetime memories, actually, Peter, is you sitting down with Eric Schmidt, I think it was at A360, you know, just a few years ago. You guys must have riffed for maybe two hours straight, just in armchairs, side by side. One night, yeah. Oh, my God. You know, Eric is, not only is he absolutely brilliant, but he has access to all this information. So, you know, when is he ever going to be wrong? When has he ever been wrong before? Yeah, of course, he's absolutely right. What's amazing to me about what Eric is saying there, he's on some kind of, you know, congressional testimony or whatever, he's always pointing to the energy, because he knows that's the one thing that'll get through everybody's thick head. But there's so many other more important and urgent, like, what about the fabs, you know? Like, we gotta get these fabs up and running onshore like

• 34:06Speaker 01

  yesterday. That's the more urgent, bigger topic than just the raw energy. But he knows that they won't get, they won't understand that. So when he has to say, you know, hey, we need 29 gigawatts of new power, because at least it'll, everyone will be able to grok it and it'll make progress. Yeah. Salim?

• 34:24Speaker 02

  I don't have anything to add to this. I think that's, those are two great insights. I think this will be a really great push for renewables and low-cost energy in all sorts of ways.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  But at the same time-

• 34:38Speaker 02

  And it will force us to expand our energy footprint.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  I mean, at the same time, you've got the White House basically taking all the constraints off of coal and oil and natural gas and drilling. Because when I look, I mean, I kind of understand why in terms of AI, because when I look at how long it's going to take to get Gen 4 nuclear and fusion online, we're talking decades. It's like Amazon signed a contract with X Energy for a Gen 4, I think it was a Gen 4 plant, it's a fission plant. And I'm like, oh, is it going to be on, you know, in the next two or three years? Like, 2040?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so but I think the the you have to remember the cost of fossil fuels is way high these days compared to solar, right? We like so all this extra usage will be coming from renewables in some way. I go back to my example of the guy building a gigawatt wind farm in the outskirts of Kazakhstan because the wind howls down a particular valley in a ridiculously consistent basis and they just plonk an AI data center there. So you can do that kind of leveraging of low cost, far away capability that you'd never get in.

• 35:53Peter Diamandis?

  Or to Iceland, right? You you can put the data center anywhere you want.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I think when I remember talking to Ramaz about the energy stuff, he said, we will never go back to oil and gas as fondly as people want because the cost curve is just too high. Can I just drill into that just a little bit?

• 36:12Peter Diamandis?

  You can drill into the oil and gas, yes.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  In in the it's 2016, it became cheaper to create a fossil, a solar generation facility than fossil fuels. And since then, almost all our energy generation has been solar. In 2019, a more important inflection point was it, which is it became cheaper to build and run a solar facility than to just run.

• 36:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  The oil and gas.

• 36:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Right? So the so the cap OpEx and CapEx of solar is now less than the OpEx of fossil fuels. So we don't need government policy. We don't need any of this stuff. The the pure market will now drive it to just going fully down a renewables route. The problem is that the the amount of that we need is just so huge that we need to get much more quickly to the the SMRs and other.

• 37:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's also regular. We need to, you know, get rid of the delays due to regulations and permitting. I mean,

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:10Peter Diamandis?

  This is what's going to slay us like. If we can, if we can make permitting like super, super fast and this is where AI can support it.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  But, but if I go back to my earlier point, right? If we put SMR in, in far off distant, remote areas of the US or Alaska or God knows where, you'll end up with a capability to generate energy because then you can just plug an AI data center next to it.

• 37:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  And you're in great shape. So I think we'll see a ton of that. I don't think the regulatory is that much of a big deal right now. I think it's just the sheer, uh, sheer amount that we need, that we have to figure out.

• 37:46Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com. All right. So Mastercard unveils agent pay, agentic payment technology to power commerce in the age of AI. So it's not just Mastercard, it's going to be all the credit cards.

• 38:32Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I think there's a very near future where I speak and stuff shows up on my doorstep. I don't think about it, it just magically happens. In fact, I'll take it a step further. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, you know, Salim, I really love that shirt. And it knows I need a shirt, so it just, you know, asks your AI where you got that shirt. And then it just delivers to me magically the next day.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  I'm trying to see how you got there from this, but okay.

• 39:06Peter Diamandis?

  We crush advertising and I think we crush the ability to select payment methods. I think your AI is just, is just doing all this stuff automatically for you.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Bill Gross and I were talking earlier today, Parata AI, your, your good friend about this exact topic of.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Advertising will get crushed. What do you mean exactly there? Because Google has $300 billion of advertising revenue. You're saying that that's going to get crushed? I mean, it's but that's exactly actually Richard Socher, our mutual friend was saying that in their in their tests, the revenue per session of an AI dialogue versus a Google search is about 1/10 to 100. And so where does that put Google if they start? You know, when you do a Google search now, the top thing is the AI answer and then the ads start below that. So that's already got to be cannibalizing the revenue. So it puts Google in a really tough spot trying to, you know, figure out, do we cannibalize their own ad revenue? But you're exactly right. The future belongs to chatting with your trusted agent and your trusted agent making

• 40:08Speaker 01

  good suggestions for you and then saying, yeah, just go out and buy that or just go ahead and sign up for that.

• 40:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Well, we've mentioned this before, but I think the holy grail here is your your Jarvis equivalent, right? Where your agent will kind of act on your behalf and is bound to you with your preferences, habits, etc. Then you can put a lot of trust in it and just let it go to town and see what happens and have a feedback loop. So it just tweaks it. That seems a no brainer to me. I just spent the most unbelievable amount of time dealing with flight tickets and logistics and seat changes. I mean, it was just it was just bullshit. Eric, I was on this panel of the future of AI working thing with Eric Brynjolfsson and a few others, and they called it white collar drudgery. Right? There's a ton of that that's going on, and I think this is where we'll be able to have huge impact with AI.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should keep tracking this thread because trust, you know, when do you trust AI? When do you not trust it? This is just a subset, but it's a good it's important one. Hey, my credit card is a pretty important thing. Do I trust it? Self driving, obviously, is even more trust.

• 41:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Then you've got life decisions, you know? What do I leave to my kids? Do I buy that house? Do I get a new roof? Like, those decisions are also definitely trust decisions. So we should track, you know, a lot changes week to week. We should track what what people trust, what people don't trust, because God knows the AI is going to be incredibly convincing and persuasive.

• 41:29Peter Diamandis?

  I think one of the superpowers AI will have is its ability and command over language. Right? So like an amazing politician who's able to take you from wherever you were and sway your point of view. So Mastercard wants to use agent pay to become my default.

• 41:48Peter Diamandis?

  Payment system. Salim, you were talking about Bitcoin in this earlier today. You want to share some thoughts?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Well, I think here where the, you know, the, we've been talking about cryptos, payment mechanisms, right? And you've got this, you've got this spectrum of stuff that's really hard to mine and like Bitcoin is not that easy to do payments on. And then you get, or gold, say, if you want to use the old analogy, then you have like bank vaults and jewelry, that's not that easy to transact. And then you get to bank accounts, and then you get to credit card, and you have the spectrum of the smaller the transaction, the less security you need, and therefore you can make the usability much easier, etc. What's happened with crypto is along with things like the Lightning Network on the Bitcoin protocols, now the payments are really, really easy.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  And I think we're going to see crypto type payments scale very, very fast, especially with the digital

• 42:48Speaker 02

  the fiat currencies moving over to the crypto world. We're going to see incredible things happen there. And I, and I think that'll be the biggest trigger for usage of blockchains and so on, for handling all of that stuff. There's a, there's a startup and I'm on the advisory board of that, that is trying to figure this out because one of the biggest problems with trade globally, separate from all the tariff stuff, is that big countries don't like big chunks of foreign reserves leaving their shores. So they make it really difficult, capital controls in place, and they make it really hard. Yeah. There's this famous story of GE selling 100 million worth of jet engines to China,

• 43:31Speaker 02

  and they took in receipt 150 million worth of frozen chickens as payment.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  And the 50 million, because I have to deal with all these chickens, that's hence the margin. But it turns out that type of transaction is rampant in big companies because China is like, we don't want 100 million dollars leaving our shores. Right? And so this is going to a combination of crypto plus the, some of these payment rails is going to change the game with some of these big transactions. And on the smaller side, AI plus some of these will make things really radically much easier.

• 44:04Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. Digital chickens.

• 44:08Peter Diamandis?

  So here's another one. Dave, I think you added this one. Nvidia acquires Gretel to power next-gen AI. Tell us about the story.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is important because, you know, we talked last time about the Core Weave IPO, which is holding up just fine. Is that the bellwether to the markets opening? M&A has been very quiet. Now you're starting to see some deal flow, and that all ties back to the IPO markets opening up. You know, the last three years have been the most dead in the history of the country in terms of IPOs. So if that comes roaring back, that'll unlock a lot. So this is a good one to track here. But what you're seeing here is Nvidia recognizing that synthetic data is incredibly strategic. And, you know, we talked about Richard Sochers got these 10 areas of AI, some of which run unbounded, and others are throttled or hobbled by some constraint. But math is unbounded, coding is unbounded.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Why? Because you can generate a near-infinite amount of synthetic data, which means the AI can continue to learn, and then you can build really easy evals, like, did the AI do something useful, or is it buggy? Does it not work? And so the math is provable, the code is debuggable automatically. And those areas require synthetic data. But you look across the other areas, like biotech and everything else, the synthetic data is the constraint, you know, because the AI can run wild to the extent that it can generate synthetic data. So I think Nvidia, being in the middle of the hot seat, realizes, oh my God, what a great opportunity to create some kind of a moat. Let's pick up Gretel, and let's build out a synthetic data competency as part of our overall, like, while we're

• 45:45Speaker 01

  top of the world, we need to think about how to defend our position on top of the world. So that's why they picked up Gretel.

• 45:51Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is a really great strategic thing. You saw Zoom doing the same thing when its market cap went soaring high. They started buying up a whole bunch of stuff, leveraging the currency while it was high.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, as an investment theme, you know, synthetic data is very different in each domain. Obviously, the full cell simulator synthetic data there in biotech is going to be very different than in math. So it's a great repeatable investment theme if you can find really, really smart teams because I think Nvidia could easily acquire 10 more companies doing different types of

• 46:20Peter Diamandis?

  Are you investing at Link XPV in synthetic data?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have DataSebo, which is a co-invest with Mark Goranberg, the chairman at MIT. They do column-wise, you know, sort of numerical column-wise synthetic data. So things like actuarial or whatever. But again, you know, if you had, you know, physical world synthetic data, like simulators for, for physical objects, driving data, those are all investable. We'll do any synthetic data company we can find if it has a great team.

• 46:51Peter Diamandis?

  Fantastic.

• 46:54Peter Diamandis?

  All right, here's one I added. Kleiner Perkins leads $130 million round in Coinbase founders anti-aging startup Ulimit. Let me break this down. So Brian Armstrong and Blake Byers, both are friends. Can have Brian on this Moonshots podcast sometime next month. They're both passionate about, about longevity. And what we've seen is a number of billionaires investing in something called epigenetic reprogramming. So what is that? So as I like to remind people, you get 3.2 billion letters from your mom, 3.2 billion letters from your dad. That's your genome, about 22,000 genes.

• 47:38Peter Diamandis?

  And you have that same software when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100. And so the question is, if you're running the same software, why do you look different? Why don't you have a six-pack at, you know, age 100 that you had when you were 18? And it turns out it's not the genes you have, it's your epigenome. Epi from the Greek word for above. It's which genes, it's your control system. It's which genes are on and which genes are off. And as you get older, the genes that should be on get silenced, get turned off, the genes that should be off get turned on. And there's a whole bunch of issues. Folks like George Church, David Sinclair have been pioneering this.

• 48:22Peter Diamandis?

  Epigenetic reprogramming is can we turn back the clock and set your epigenome to an earlier state? And the data appears to be not only yes, but hell yes. And it's probably one of the hottest areas of age reversal work and longevity. So I just find it fascinating that Brian is investing here. We've seen Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner invest in Altos Labs. Sam Altman invested in Retro with Joe Betz-Lacroix, same areas, epigenetic reprogramming. So, yeah, very exciting.

• 49:05Peter Diamandis?

  And it should be noted that a lot of this is now made possible because of AI.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Oh, how so?

• 49:13Peter Diamandis?

  Because the ability to actually process all the data from the experiments and decide what transcription factors to use. You know, we are 40 trillion human cells, running about two to five billion chemical reactions per second. And just trying to understand the amount of data is really hard. And so when I visited both Brian and Blake at New Limit, and they're very proud, the majority of their team are all AI-first technologists. You know, they're not lab geeks. So Lee, any thoughts here?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  I think just, you know, as these, as our AI models get more sophisticated, the ability to apply them, that number blows, I never stop shaking my head when you say that number of two and a half billion things per, chemical processes per second. And that may be, like, that's across the body, but there's some incredible number just within a cell, isn't it?

• 50:14Peter Diamandis?

  Per cell.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  That's per cell, right? That's just unbelievable.

• 50:17Peter Diamandis?

  Times 40 trillion cells, right?

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just, it's just mind-boggling. How, how the complexity of what goes on in there. So it's gonna be amazing to see what's possible going forward.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Well, definitely not my area of expertise, but I remember clearly, I took AP Bio in high school and then I got to MIT, I said, yeah, not, not doing that anymore, because all we're doing is memorizing random, you know, Krebs cycles. And like, there's no way this is actually gonna, gonna work. There must be billions of times more things going on than what we're memorizing here.

• 50:47Peter Diamandis?

  So true.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  So true.

• 50:50Peter Diamandis?

  All right, here's one, you know, I have two thirteen, soon to be fourteen year old boys. Salim, you have one, and Roblox is part of their, you know, if not daily diet, weekly diet, and I found this amazing. So, Roblox averaging up to forty-three percent of Netflix users with ninety-seven point eight million average daily active users, seven point two billion hours. It's just exploded onto, you know, we can see this rapid, rapid growth of the gaming world. Dave, did your boys all sort of go deep into the, into the gaming world?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting. They, I wouldn't say they were, you know, big time gamers, but if you look at the amount of time they spent on interactive media, including Fortnite and some video games, much, much higher than passive media like movies and, you know, Star Trek or whatever. So, you know, that's just the trend line. But yeah, AI on top of video games, and it's so incredibly engaging. There's no way people are going to go back and watch passive media again.

• 51:57Peter Diamandis?

  And I think it's about, I mean, it still really hasn't hit, right? So, if you're in, if you're in Minecraft or in Roblox, the amount of AI-generated, you know, reality and the amount of AI interaction with you, it's, we're going to see a lot of, a lot of advancement in the gaming world in the next few years.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the other thing is, gaming is dominated by young boys.

• 52:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  And largely misses the girls for whatever reason, but it definitely misses older people. The new super engaging AI voices actually tend to cover everybody. And so, it's going to be a lot broader appeal. So, any numbers you see in this world are, are going to go up, you know, tremendously just by covering the rest of, of humanity. Also, you know, a lot of, you know, Mr. Beast now, I think, is the most recognized person on the planet.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Which is, you know, shocking. That might be among stars or some other qualifier there, but it's an incredible stat. But one of the secrets to Mr. Beast's incredible success is internationalization of all content. You know, when you see Mr. Beast in any jurisdiction, any country, any language, his voice is that language and his lips move perfectly or well for that language. So you wouldn't even know that it wasn't shot for you in, you know, in the Congo. And so he mastered that using AI and that got him a lot of the, a lot of the footprint. Same thing applies here to internationalizing the language, but also the content and the media, making it a cultural fit for every jurisdiction.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  What struck me about this was the, almost all of that increment is mobile stuff. So they're doing it everywhere. That's crazy.

• 53:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, amazing. All right, let's move on here. Let's talk about what's going on in the space world. The first news is that Amazon, this is Jeff Bezos, launches the first launch of Project Kuiper, its first batch of internet satellites. So, you know, we've seen head to head Elon and Bezos sort of like marching up the curve in space. So Amazon launched 27 satellites of their global internet. This ultimately will be thousands of satellites in orbit. I find it interesting, they used an Atlas V. So of course, Jeff

• 54:20Peter Diamandis?

  has something called Blue Origin, which is building rockets. Today it's launching suborbital flights, but it did get one of its first new Glenn vehicles to orbit. But I think he's feeling pressure to get Kuiper up and running at the same time that Starlink is now probably close to 8,000, 9,000 satellites. So they're buying launches from ULA instead of using his own launch vehicle. It's going to be interesting to have these two, these two internet constellations in orbit operating.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Here's a question I have. Have you seen, Peter, any kind of estimate as to, once you've got high-functioning internet over space, which we kind of just what are there now, how much will move to that versus terrestrial internet?

• 55:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's a good question. You still have, you still have time delays, but one of our next articles coming up, which we'll talk about, which is quantum teleportation, would get rid of time delays. And so if you add quantum teleportation on satellite constellations, yeah, it's instantaneous and global. I mean, it starts to get pretty freaky. You know, we're gonna start, you know, we'll have, I think, probably 30, 40,000 comms satellites in orbit. We'll have a constellation around the moon. We'll have a constellation around Mars. All of those will be cross-linked by laser, and so you'll have an interplanetary

• 55:52Peter Diamandis?

  internet up and operating very shortly.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Vin Surf has been talking about that for a while. In fact, he's designed the communication protocols for that.

• 56:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he has indeed, and it's all playing out. Here's the second space article that SpaceX has asked to increase their rate of Starship launches. So Starship, of course, is the fully reusable version. It will replace Falcon 9, the most successful launch vehicle in all of human history. And Elon has said, as soon as Starship is operational, he will shut down the Falcon 9 factory. And we've seen, you know, permission for five launches a year. They're asking for 25 launches per year out of Boca Chica, which is Starbase.

• 56:42Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, he's gotten a lot of criticism for the failures of Starship. You know, it still has not had a fully successful mission. But, oh my God, what he's been able to pull off is nothing short of extraordinary. And I hate it when he has this amazing launch, you know, the Mechzilla captures the booster, which is like the engineering feat of the decade, if not the century.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Century, yeah.

• 57:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And then, and Starship doesn't make it to a landing, and of course, the front-page articles are SpaceX fails again.

• 57:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, crazy.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  We focus on bad news, but the one thing bugged me, really bugged me about this particular articles, Peter, was that if the FAA had them allowing five and then now they're allowing 25, why do they care? Why do you have to get approval for the number of launches? This makes no sense.

• 57:40Peter Diamandis?

  It's environmental impact. They're incrementally trying to make sure that, and I hate to say this, you know, that they're not killing the number of turtles or that the impact of...

• 57:52Speaker 01

  What are you kidding?

• 57:53Speaker 02

  But once you've done a few, which he has, you know the environmental impact. There should be no, they should have nothing to say about you do 10 more, 20 more, 50 more.

• 58:04Peter Diamandis?

  They don't want unbridled unrestricted operations.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  That's hilarious, because that's, all right, you know, you know the math as well as I do, it's hilarious.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you did your 11-year penance there, Peter, on Zero G.

• 58:17Peter Diamandis?

  I did my 11-year penance on, you know, it's like the FAA is not happy until you're not happy.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  I do wonder a lot whenever you see a Starship blows up or whatever, that a lot of the backlash is actually political, you know, people are pissed off and, you know, and actually a lot of Elon's support base was, you know, very green energy Tesla oriented. And so now they're all pissed off. But I think, I think he's doing, he's doing what he thinks is absolutely best for the world, regardless of the cost.

• 58:48Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, this, Starship will get us back to the moon. It's the only vehicle to get us there. The NASA government projects, I don't think will, will end up getting to the moon. I think they're just too expensive and too risky. Starship will get us to the moon, Starship will set orbital fuel depots, Starship will get us to Mars. It's an incredibly well-designed vehicle, and he just needs to continually iterate it. People don't realize that when airplanes begin test flights, every test flight is a small iteration, and airplanes may have hundreds of test flights in their test flight program

• 59:30Peter Diamandis?

  before they get certified as safe for use. So we need to expect that Starship will have hundreds of test flights, each one of them getting more data and demonstrating increasing margins and safety until it's like, yep. Uh, this is gonna be great to operate, just like autonomous cars. But unfortunately, these these incremental test flights are very visible. And when they go wrong, you know, New York Times is here to talk about it.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  I mean, it's explicit that they run dozens and dozens of experiments uh per flight because that that gives them the maximum rate of learning, right?

• 1:00:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, of of course, and and they're exactly, they're changing the margins on and the material type, they're they're changing, you know, how they stage, they're changing, uh, you know, their their reentry characteristics. 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. Uh, if you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below.

• 1:00:52Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, let's get to uh this fun article here. I'll read it from the BBC. Quantum teleportation is here. Quantum teleportation is the instant transfer of quantum information, not matter, between two points. It uses quantum entanglement where two particles stay connected even miles apart. So the first real world test worked over 30 kilometers of standard fiber optic cable carrying internet traffic. So uh, this is the idea that if, you know, I I remember years ago, all of the quant traders uh moved their uh their fiber optic nodes

• 1:01:35Peter Diamandis?

  very close to the financial centers, right? Because because mil, you know, nanoseconds matter to them.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:01:44Peter Diamandis?

  So I think they're gonna be using quantum teleportation here for instant communication capability.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  If we end up using it for stock prices, I'll be very disappointed, but you know, your point's right.

• 1:01:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Look, the amazing thing is that this is happening. I think the reality check is this will take quite a while to commercialize and get reliable and for kind of real-world applications, but the fact that they're able to do is mind-boggling.

• 1:02:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's fun to think about.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Well, why do we think it'll take a while to become real at scale, other than everything takes a while?

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  I spent some time at the Perimeter Institute at Waterloo, where the BlackBerry founders have given a huge chunk of money, and they'd broken up quantum kind of research into three chunks. One was the pure computation, the second was communication, and the third was networking. And you have to rebuild the entire stack of how you do it for each of those. So there's a whole bunch of innovation that has to happen, and engineering that has to happen for all of those three segments to have reliable communications and teleportations, certainly at scale. So it'll take a while to get there. They've been going at this for, I think, like, close to 30 years,

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  and they're now getting to this point. So I think it'll be a little while longer, but when it happens, holy moly.

• 1:03:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the nice thing is it's over standard fiber optics, right? It's not new equipment. We're not needing to build out a new network. Right, here's another fun article in the realm of sort of future-forward space. Electron Dance Breakthrough: Scientists Uncover Clues to Practical Superconductors. Researchers discovered superconductivity varies at the atomic scale within individual-unit cells of iron-based materials. I won't read the rest, but, you know, we've been talking about one of the major benefits that AI will give us is major breakthroughs in material sciences.

• 1:03:50Peter Diamandis?

  And and super conductivity would be a huge deal because we can generate, I mean, at the extreme, you can put, you know, solar cells around the planet. And if it's nighttime here in the US, you could have solar being generated in Europe and having a super conductive, you know, cable back to the US. And you basically get no loss.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  No transmission, no transmission loss, right? Which is about 30% or something.

• 1:04:21Peter Diamandis?

  It depends on the distance, of course.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Right. But it's a huge amount.

• 1:04:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  And so this is, this would be very huge. I remember Shai Machina is one of our GSP Singularity students in 2010 or 2011, saying, he figures we're about a decade away from understanding superconductivity and getting to room temperature, superconductivity at the lab level. And so this sounds like we're coming close to that.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Well, if it's a decade out, you know, we're going to have Gen 3 fission and fusion. You know, and those are very small reactors, so they can be sprinkled around.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  So it may not matter.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  There's a big race between this and distributed energy systems that makes it less relevant.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:05:03Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's talk one of our favorite subjects. At least it's a favorite subject for Salim and I. Actually, Dave, I don't know. Are you like a big Bitcoin believer? I know our, our third fraternity brother is.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I was on the board of MicroStrategy back in the day. So I've been a shareholder for many, many years. So I, I wouldn't say I was ever, you know, a Bitcoin direct, you know, early adopter, but Mike Saylor has dragged me along.

• 1:05:28Peter Diamandis?

  Let me ask, let me ask the question, you know, do you own Bitcoin?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, MicroStrategy, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:34Peter Diamandis?

  You own MicroStrategy, but not Bitcoin directly?

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  No, not directly.

• 1:05:37Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Mostly because I'd lose the keys and, you know.

• 1:05:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, fair enough. I can make, I can make some introductions. So here is Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaking about the US holding Bitcoin. Let's take a listen.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  But I think it's clear at this point that Bitcoin is a better form of money than gold. It is provably scarce, just like gold, but it's more portable and divisible. So you can actually use, it has higher utility, I would say. And it was the best performing asset of the last 10 years. And so for store of value, I think it's going to be important for governments to hold this over time. It may not, it might start with being 1% of their reserves, but I think over time it'll, it'll come to be equal to or greater than gold reserves.

• 1:06:24Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. So, Celine, I want you to weigh in here.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  I think this is, this is mind boggling to me. You know, I spoke at, so let me kind of give my reaction in a couple of ways. I spoke at a conference of 100 of the top partners of one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. And when I asked them, how many of you understand the Byzantine generals problem? One put up their hand, right? And you're like, this thing is going to eat your lunch in terms of trust and liability, which is essentially what you sell. And you don't understand the core innovation that's taken place in it, which really is unbelievable to me.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  When MicroStrategy's put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, every CFO in the goddamn world should be looking at that and saying, I need to put something in there. It's unbelievably responsible if you're the Treasury Secretary of some country not to put Bitcoin as a reserve thing. This should be happening in every country in the world. And one of the things we've noticed before, where I've commented before, it's fascinating seeing the amount of my investment portfolio growing because of Bitcoin, not because I'm getting more Bitcoin, because it's just getting more valuable. And so this is like irresponsible, financially irresponsible to the extreme level.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  I'll just give one other piece of this, which was I was talking to a, a major Money management firm in one of the G7 countries. And they're like, yeah, we don't, we don't allow our wealth manager, wealth advisors to transact in Bitcoin at all. They're not allowed to advise it to their clients because it's, they deem it too uncertain and too risky. And they're like, look at the goddamn value over time.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  I've got, I've got a better.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  They're scared of the legal liability if they end thing in, and I'm looking, saying to them, do you realize the liability if you don't recommend it?

• 1:08:26Peter Diamandis?

  During the course of our conversation here, Bitcoin is now at ninety six thousand four fifty. It's gone up fifteen hundred bucks during the course of our podcast conversation.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Well, let's try and drive it up by talking about it more. No, I'll give you another case study. I'm the chairman and majority or controlling shareholder of two companies, about a thousand employees. One of them has about fifty million in cash, just sitting there in cash. The other has a hundred and twenty five million in cash, ever quote, public company, a hundred and twenty five million in cash and making, you know, a lot of cash every quarter. I gave both CEOs green light, put any amount of that you want into Bitcoin and they, and borrow and do what Mike Saylor did. Neither reacted or acted on it. And I don't want to interfere, otherwise I'll be, you know, I'll be involved. But it's amazing, like, like, well, I mean, you know. They're, they're both great, great leadership teams. I don't want to get.

• 1:09:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, we did the same thing. Salim at X Prize, we, we were holding a large amount of capital and it was like.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:28Peter Diamandis?

  You know.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  It's like pulling teeth.

• 1:09:31Peter Diamandis?

  Both on my board, I need you to help convince the other old tier, I always say old fogey board members. Excuse me if you're listening, guys, you're brilliant and I love you, but can we please put our treasury into Bitcoin?

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  And, and easy thing to do there would be to take a small fraction of it, you know, and, and just let it do one cycle around.

• 1:09:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, small fraction, like eighty percent.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it makes Mike Saylor all the more impressive that he, you know, without any role, you know, now you have a role model, but without any role model.

• 1:10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  The amount of inertia.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  But this is the part that drives me nuts. Now that we have a role model, right? If you're a CFO of a public company, what the hell are you doing?

• 1:10:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You're, you're. It is. You're doing what you've always done because that's the least risky and you can't get blamed for doing that. And the only, so listen, this is the same thing in all technology companies. It is the founder-led, you know, exponential tech, AI-first companies that are going to slay everybody else. And so when, when Michael Saylor, you know, again, by way of background, Michael was a fraternity brother with Dave Blundin and myself.

• 1:10:48Peter Diamandis?

  At MIT, at Theta Delta Chi, our fraternity.

• 1:10:53Peter Diamandis?

  And when you're, when you're Saylor, you could say, we are doing this. And he has a very small board and he basically sat them down, gave them homework and got them to back him. And he's just been at it. So the first week of May, he actually sells equity and buys another 180 million of Bitcoin. So today, very impressive, Microstrategies owns, you know, basically a half a million Bitcoin, which is about 2.8% of all the Bitcoin in circulation worth $52.8 billion.

• 1:11:35Peter Diamandis?

  Michael owns about 17,000 more Bitcoin than I do.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Oh, you're doing well. You know, Mike, not only did he have to do exactly what you said, but he had to go over to Mike Willens of Fidelity, you know, another MIT alum and say, hey, I need to custody this somewhere. Can Fidelity build out an entire business unit? To custody Bitcoin and Mike, you know, to his credit, Mike Willens built it out at Fidelity. That's a lot of difficult work that's now been done for you.

• 1:12:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Uh, but you know, pioneering, it was very hard, uh, for a lot of reasons, including that one. You can't, you can't just keep the keys in your, you know, your shoebox at the office headquarters. You know, you gotta have some kind of custody insurance.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Multi SIG protocols and all sorts of stuff.

• 1:12:23Peter Diamandis?

  So I just checked, you know, the market cap of MicroStrategy that closed today was a hundred and five point four billion, while holding fifty two point eight billion of coins. And, you know, the value it's being given for his mindset and what he does is extraordinary.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  It is. Funny, I, uh, I was sitting down with my mom who's in her eighties going through her estate and she had this spreadsheet she put together and there's this line item with this huge number in it. I was like, what the hell is that? She said, oh, you know, remember when you worked at MicroStrategy when you were like in your twenties? I was like, yeah. She said, I bought some MicroStrategy back then. I was like, wait, you're still holding that? And she said, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know how to sell it, so I didn't.

• 1:13:11Peter Diamandis?

  Go mom.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  That is so great. That is, that is fantastic.

• 1:13:17Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, well, I think that's our last story, uh, for today, but, um, you know, it's, it's so much fun. Are you guys having as much of a blast as I am?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Uh, God, I look forward to this all week.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  It's really a great checkpoint where we can kind of go, okay, what happened? Uh, bring some, uh, slides into play and just take a checkpoint. It, I find it, it's a really great cadence to, plus all the viewers. I hear that, by the way, from a few of the folks watching, they were like, it's really great because we can kind of every week or two stop in and see what's going on. We feel like we're caught up.

• 1:13:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the goal here. And so, you know, in the, if you're on YouTube in the comments below, uh, tell us what else you'd like us to cover. Uh, you know, you can happily tell me how much more brilliant Dave is and Salim is than I am. That's fine. But, uh, so, uh, it's, it's fun. So, uh, when we say WTF just happened in tech? Well, there you get a slice of it. We'll see you guys in a week or two when enough stuff starts mounting when we say, okay, we gotta get the, the bad back together again.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:14:25Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Salim, where are you?

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Great conversation, guys.

• 1:14:28Peter Diamandis?

  Where are you now? Are you back in New York?

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  I'm back in New York for like three days and then I go to Italy for three days.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  What is going on?

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  It's just, it's just, it's just a busy time right now.

• 1:14:39Peter Diamandis?

  You're insane. I love you for it. And Dave, you're back in Cambridge at headquarters?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  I'm in Cambridge. And I'll tell you one thing, Peter, I love, every time I talk to Daniela Rus over at Seasail, or Alex Wiesner Gross, or Alexander Amini over at Liquid AI, I can say, hey, we've got this WTF podcast coming up. What's on your mind? And they're like, yes. It's just, it's such a good way to keep the dialogue.

• 1:15:03Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. So I want you guys like piling in your best stories, those secret stories. You've got, you've got Alex Wiesner Gross as a super weapon there. And Saleem, you've got an entire EXO community. So bring them in and see you guys very soon. Thanks for your time. Always a pleasure.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Great conversation, guys.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Thanks, Peter.

• 1:15:22Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmantis.com/subscribe. That's dmantis.com/subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots.

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