Can Jensen Huang remain CEO? Inside NVIDIA’s next steps| MOONSHOTS #310

The Mates sit down with Emad Mostaque to discuss the fallout surrounding NVIDIA and Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s highly anticipated debut week and trillion-dollar IPO ambitions, and Elon Musk’s vision for a 30-million-strong robot workforce. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Read Emad’s latest papers exploring the future of society, law, personhood and governance: https://ii.inc/common-wealth Read Emad’s Book: https://thelasteconomy.com – This episode is brought to you by: Get the blueprint for generative media https://goo.gle/startupgenmedia Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack Spotify Threads Connect with Emad ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ X ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn about Intelligent Internet: https://www.ii.inc Read Emad’s Book: https://thelasteconomy.com Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube Follow MOONSHOTS: Instagram TikTok X Threads – *Recorded on November 10th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. 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?

  So, you know, guys, I don't know, the news has been crazy on Jensen's affair, you know, and the alleged espionage. It's been flooding the media. What do you guys make of this?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I think it's a very big deal because I think that it's not that the facts that are out so far are that big a deal. It's that once an investigation starts, then a board has to follow through on it usually. If they stop the investigation partway through, they get a lot of crap from the shareholders, from the public. So then they dig and dig and dig and dig. But we know a huge number of chips have ended up training Chinese models, partially through illegal imports, partially by parking them in other countries and doing the training offshore, but bringing the weights back. And that last part is technically probably not illegal. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that's the part where they're just going to dig and dig and dig. The story is going to go on for a long time. Investigation will

• 0:53Speaker 01

  turn up something new every single week. The press, once the press latches on, they never let go, you know, they milk it to death. I think it's a very big deal. I also think that Nvidia strategically, you know, they don't make the chips. They're in bed with TSMC. And the allocation of where that capacity goes could change, which would change the entire balance of, you know, where the $5 trillion of value actually lands. So a lot of, you know, you saw AMD stock go up right away. That's one of the theories.

• 1:25Peter Diamandis?

  Nvidia is down 6% as of this moment, right?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  And the market was way up at that same time, too. So, you know, because AMD was up, what, 10, 11% concurrently? So the swing is actually pretty big for one day.

• 1:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, their board on Sunday said they're, you know, standing up an independent committee of directors and outside counsel. And they made a statement saying, you know, there's no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. But, you know, the interesting point, and Alex, we've talked about this before, just like in the Binance hack, I think it was like 10 days ago, it's the human is the weak link in the chain, right?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's reporting just in the past 24 hours that this may have gone back at least three years, back to 2023, with something like $8 billion of Nvidia GPUs allegedly slash reportedly being sold to China via Alice Wong and MegaSpeed via some sort of Singaporean syndicate. This is just, it's a bad, on the face of it, this is a bad look for Nvidia. It's a bad look for the POC silica. What's going on with the POC silica? The whole point of the POC silica initiative was supposed to carve out almost like a new iron wall between or sphere of influence for the West that would keep Western silicon, Western

• 2:50Speaker 02

  GPU, Western compute, Western AI and superintelligence infrastructure within our sphere of influence. And then it turns out, to your point, Peter, that allegedly, but now perhaps based on Jensen's public comments, there's a single point of failure. All it takes is one person at the top of one company to completely pierce the POC silica and then billions of dollars of GPU compute ends up in China. I think the bigger story here is maybe less about the failures or foibles of one man and more about POC silica apparently being far more porous and fallible than some would otherwise hope.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Well, not just that, Alex. I mean, like, we were talking to Brett Adcock yesterday. These next training runs, including his, are billion-dollar investments in a single training run. And the result of it is a parameter file that fits on a thumb drive. There's never been an espionage opportunity that's as leveraged as that. All that intellectual property captured on a thumb drive.

• 3:51Peter Diamandis?

  We had the other espionage, you know, of the Saudi employee at, what was it, OpenAI or Anthropic?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  At OpenAI.

• 3:59Peter Diamandis?

  They put their thumb drive in the back of a TV.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. No, it's, it's going to get really serious here. Also, you know, if the CCP actually sent somebody after Jensen, they must have sent people after the executive staff, too. So the board will have to dig into, okay, well, who else has been in contact with people that are CCP that they didn't know? Because they're not just after chip supply, they're after tech specs as well. And I'm sure they'll ferret out four or five others.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  I think this is more an influence operation than espionage operation. Like, I don't think Jensen is sneaking out blueprints, etc.

• 4:33Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, no.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, maybe liking Chinese models a bit too much is my first kind of reaction.

• 4:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, he's been very pro open model.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Everyone's, Ahmad made the pun about liking Chinese models, so ba dum bum.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Ba dum bum, but I mean...

• 4:48Peter Diamandis?

  I'm sorry, it took me a while to get that.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  That was the best tweet I saw yesterday, was somebody said, Jensen, you know, we talk about Chinese models, but really...

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think the chips being in Malaysia, going via Singapore, none of this is new, right? Like, there's no way the US government secret service didn't know about that and are monitoring everywhere that Jensen goes. So one of the interesting things is, why is it coming out now? You know? And I think when combined with Kohi's analysis showing backdoors being automatically generated by some Chinese open source models, we should probably expect a massive push by the US government and others against anything Chinese, just like we've seen robotic parts and robots from China being banned in America. So I think this is a precursor or something else. Because again, I very much doubt this is

• 5:40Speaker 03

  like, oh my gosh, there are GPUs that have been siphoned off here. Oh my gosh, you know, like you're seeing this person.

• 5:46Peter Diamandis?

  You make a really good, you make a really good point. I mean, Jensen and all the heads of the frontier labs have got to be the most closely watched humans on the planet by the CIA and FBI and so forth.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  The pressure must be unbelievable.

• 5:58Peter Diamandis?

  And so they've probably known about this for a while. And so why is it coming out now politically?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like I said, the GPUs, like any of us that look to Nvidia's numbers are like, huh, Malaysia is the biggest consumer per capita of Nvidia GPUs. I wonder what they're doing with it, right? Like, the GPUs going, this was all known. And again, the question is, why now? And so the expectation is that this is a precursor for a big pushback. In terms of Nvidia's board, it's all stacked with Jensen's long-term partners and others. Nothing much will happen. And I mean, if Jensen did step aside as CEO because of this, I mean, Dave, what would that do to the Nvidia stock price? I think that would destroy it.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no, there's no succession plan at all that I can detect. It would be devastating. You know, because the physical assets, it's almost entirely a virtual company. You know, the physical assets are near zero. So it doesn't have fabs. It has a lot of patents. It has a lot of interconnect technology, but doesn't make any of it. And so you can't do, kind of like Tim Cook at Apple kind of wrote it, you know, keep optimizing the physical construction of the iPhone and ride it out without really innovating. There's no equivalent at Nvidia where you're just kind of ride it out without innovating. You have to innovate.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, he has 42 direct reports as well. So imagine replacing him.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I do think on the timing front, it's worth just speaking to the elephant in this room, which is the midterms. This is handing a new Congress on a silver platter as scandalous, salacious excuse to investigate Nvidia, investigate Chinese connections, and investigate in general the AI slash SI industry from a national security perspective.

• 7:43Peter Diamandis?

  Sand in the gears, slow things down.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, here's a question for you. Do you think that Chinese-born researchers will be allowed to continue working in frontier labs?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Historically, from a regulatory perspective, that's been the domain, usually of the executive, less so. I mean, there could be statutes, but usually fast-moving regulations regarding foreign nationals and sensitive technologies are the domain of the executive. And so I think it's up to this White House as to whether it wants to start to exclude foreign nationals from superintelligence. It certainly has the option to, as I understand, it's applicable regulatory role. Whether it will choose to or whether it will try to distinguish between access to some sensitive, say, frontier models that haven't yet become publicly available? Don't know. Could go either way.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's a no-brainer. Foreign citizens are almost certainly going to get whacked. I think the question is Chinese-born US nationalized or US naturalized citizens, will they get whacked? Which is very toxic, I think. I hope that doesn't happen.

• 8:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, if you look at all of the frontier labs, I mean, there's a significant double-digit percentage that are Chinese-born US citizens right now, right? The Chinese people as a whole have performed, you know, in the Math Olympiad at the highest levels. They have a predilection towards being brilliant in these fields. And I remember at one point, you know, XAI was like over 50% Chinese engineers.

• 9:25Peter Diamandis?

  Pretty extraordinary.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  We're not stereotyping here at all at this point. My goodness.

• 9:29Peter Diamandis?

  No, I mean, if it's a brilliant population, so be it.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  What I will say, though, I think we're maybe conflating the issue of ethnicity with nationality. Statutorily, from an export control perspective, the export control, you're exporting either to a foreign national. So if you're a US person, regardless of nation of origin or ancestry, if you're a US person, a US citizen, a US permanent resident, and you're physically within the US, my understanding is that's not deemed export. Whereas if you're a US person who is overseas, or you're a non-US person, like, non-US citizen, then that's an export. So I would expect, from an export control perspective, which is probably the

• 10:18Speaker 02

  most enticing regulatory instrument for deciding certain employees at Frontier Labs may or may not get access to certain critical and emerging technologies, I would expect it to come down to nationality, not ethnicity. I don't think anyone is suggesting ethnicity-based exports.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  No, no, not ethnicity. It's where were you born? You know, it's not, it's not an ethnic thing.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Nation of origin is a protected class in this country. I don't think.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Is that true for nuclear research, too? I'm not entirely sure how that works. But if you're, if you're working on nuclear weapons and you were born in Iran, like, my sister, actually, was born in Iran, are you investigated?

• 10:54Peter Diamandis?

  Does she work on nuclear weapons?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Not that I know of, but how would I know?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  30 second explainer. So the Department of Energy maintains what it's, what's called the Q clearance, letter Q, clearance system, which is their version of security clearances. And so, yeah, my understanding is there's a DOE investigation process. If it's anything like the Department of War's investigation process, it's a function of US, usually, I think, US citizenship, and then a whole bunch of criteria on top of that.

• 11:29Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, let's be clear. This is, this is the biggest economic engine on the planet. This is shooting for, you know, dominance of a godlike intelligence. I think we're, I think we, we know a minute fraction of 1% of the influence campaigns and espionage campaigns going on. And I think, Dave, you said this, you have to assume, I mean, you have a conversation with somebody at MIT, I won't say who, saying, you know, there are probably, quote unquote, Chinese spies throughout the organization, right?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's 100%. Every university has a big problem. Also, did I tell you the robots, the Chinese robots were, they, they investigated internally within MIT, and they are definitely transmitting video and audio back to China. So they had to actually put all the robots in a separate room, and they're, they're still there, but they don't let them walk around the labs anymore. So, yeah, that was a, I think they pretty much proved it. I don't know if they're going to publish that or not.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  I'm going to say something. I think, long term, long term, this, the trust issue will cause them major problems over time. But short term, it's going to be.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  I think you will see security clearance being required to work on any frontier model, number one. It'll be classified in that way. Number two, I think you're going to see some witch hunts. And number three, I think you're going to see them come hard after Chinese open source models. I think that's what this is all leading up to.

• 12:56Peter Diamandis?

  What is coming, what is going hard on open source models mean? Is it shutting them down?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  You can't use open source models in any mission-critical software to do with the government or anything like that, in case it installs backdoors automatically, like the Cohere study showed. So that's not being used. Yeah, any regulated industry, no Chinese models are allowed.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. Regular banking, insurance, all other regulated industries, cars, drones, you know, anything that could be spying or dangerous. And I really feel like, inside any frontier lab or any research lab at all, there'll be a push to say, yeah, don't, don't run any Chinese models that could be spying or transmitting, or it's just, just so easy to transmit. When something's connected to the internet, it's so easy to encode things in all kinds of bizarre timing ways. I think Ahmad was talking about that on one of the prior pods. It's just, just so leaky. So, yeah, anything regulated, anything researched. But, you know, there's never been anything like this, Peter. This is like, unique in human history, because, yeah, nuclear research, you know, weapons research is highly, highly

• 14:00Speaker 01

  regulated, highly watched, but it's not an economic driver for the country, you know? Here you have the biggest industry for driving the wealth of your nation, combined with the biggest military weapon of all time, all in the same tiny little file that fits on a thumb drive. I mean, nothing has ever been this big of a flashpoint in history.

• 14:20Peter Diamandis?

  We saw the encampments for Japanese, you know, Americans back in World War II. I hope we don't start to see that happening here.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  I don't think, I'm not quite even sure what we're talking about here. I don't see anyone suggesting that nation of origin or ethnic-based anything relating to frontier labs. I think the Jensen Huang story, on the face of it, is the story of espionage targeting, apparently, CEO of, of a prominent company, presumably in order to siphon sensitive exports to, to China. I don't see anyone that, that I can, maybe I'm missing something, suggesting that, that we're going to see a repeat of internment camps from, of, of ethnic Japanese US persons from World War II. I don't see anyone suggesting that.

• 15:11Peter Diamandis?

  I'm not going there. I'm saying, sort of by analogy, requiring the frontier labs not to employ individuals of ethnic origin from China.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Well, maybe, let me still mend the, the other side, though, which is, in some sense, to Dave's earlier point, bringing in Chinese open weight models, as these models increase in capability, is, in some sense, bringing people, not, before people get triggered, not like, political persons, so that this, I don't, we don't need to rehash the AI personhood discussion here. But when you take a model and you connect it via computer use assistant type tooling to an entire environment, maybe to Ahmad's earlier point, you embody it in a robotic body, in some sense, you're taking something with the capabilities

• 16:02Speaker 02

  of a person from overseas, and you're embodying it, either digitally or physically, in the US. And at some point, we, the US has all sorts of controls, pretty well advertised at this point, on immigration of natural-bodied humans. But at some point, bringing in non-US models into the US and hooking them up to the internet and robots starts to look a little bit, in terms of its raw capabilities, like AI or SI immigration. And I do expect that to get tightly controlled.

• 16:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Saleem, close us out here, would you?

• 16:35Speaker 04

  I think Ahmad had it right. I think there'll be some witch hunts. I think there'll be strong security clearances. There's clearly a lot going on that we don't see. When we talk about this particular incident, I wonder who wins by this all coming out. Is it, because it's not the White House, really. So what, what gives here? So I'm trying, struggling to find the incentives. But certainly, it's a huge kerfuffle. I mean, my God, this is going to just change the game completely. How do you now price any of these stocks or IPOs going forward?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I think China wins. I mean, China, it, to the extent this was in part like a Chinese foreign op, this makes, I think, our Pax Silica effort look feckless. If you can just punch a hole right through the Pax Silica wall by having an agent sleep with the CEO of a prominent US company, what's the point of having Pax Silica at all?

• 17:28Peter Diamandis?

  So, guys, I'm glad to be back on the pod. Saleem, you did a great job hosting last time. Thank you for doing that.

• 17:34Speaker 04

  It looked empty with only three of us on the thing. It was like, it was like, hey, what's going on here? But good to be back here.

• 17:41Peter Diamandis?

  Last, last Friday, when you guys recorded, I was at the UP Summit that a friend of mine, Cyrus Segiri, puts on. It was awesome. I was there with Jared Isaacman, who is just an incredible NASA administrator. And then I spent time with Keller Clifton from Zipline. He just announced a $1.5 billion financing on 20 billion.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, incredible financing.

• 18:02Peter Diamandis?

  He announced a million Uber EAT deliveries per year is what he signed Uber up for. And then nationwide with Walmart. So you order anything, you get it eight minutes later. We're going to be doing a pod with Keller up at Zipline very soon. I did an interview with Martine Rothblatt and Dillian, the CEO of Varda. So, I don't know if you guys know Varda. It's a incredible company. They ship into orbit small vehicles, probably, I don't know, about a half a meter in diameter. And they carry 10 kilograms of, of proteins that crystallize in zero G. They go to any orbit. They have, like, three on orbit right

• 18:43Peter Diamandis?

  now. Martine ordered one for crystallizing certain proteins. And she explained the economics of this. It's like, typically, it's like, micrograms of a drug gets injected to a people, into a person. And when you can crystallize, you know, 10 kilograms of a protein, you've got hundreds of millions of dollars of product that come, come down. They land them in Australia. And then I was there, Larry Page was there. I haven't seen Larry in ages. You know, the co-founder of Google. And, and guess what, guys? He listens to the pod. He's a fan of Moonshot.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 19:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Yeah, that's cool.

• 19:19Peter Diamandis?

  Super cool.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Peter, did Larry invite us to shoot an episode of the pod from his yacht?

• 19:23Peter Diamandis?

  No, he did not. Larry's keeping on the down low, very much. Didn't want any photo.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  We could do it on the down low, a little chill pod on the back of the yacht.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  We could do it with video off.

• 19:34Peter Diamandis?

  And then I spent time with, with Blake Scholl from Boom, who's great. He's happy to come on the pod. And then Jobin from Joby Aviation. Just an amazing group of, of people there.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  That's so ironic. We were shooting the pod without you while you were talking to Larry about liking the pod.

• 19:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It was, it was fun. Do you guys remember, Saleem, remember the conversation you guys had about economic output per watt on the last pod?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were there.

• 20:04Peter Diamandis?

  I, I listen, just make sure you remember. I listened to it. And so I went and ran some models. And I want to give you the numbers I came up with, because it's, it's interesting. So.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  So you're posthumously wedging yourself into that?

• 20:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I am. I was jealous about the conversation. So, Ahmad, the question was, if, if you look at Anthropic's economic output per, per kilowatt hour versus human output per kilowatt hour, looking at New York City as a defined containment, today Anthropic is at $4.39 per kilowatt hour.

• 20:43Peter Diamandis?

  Of output per kilowatt hour and New York is at $6.30 per kilowatt hour of human output. And I took into account, by the way, food as an energy source and your home and transport to and from work. So humans are still doing better, but the line crosses in 2027 where Claude is jumping up to $6.20 per kilowatt hours. Humans stay at $6.30 per kilowatt hour. But in 2030, in 2030, Claude is up now projected, based on their projections, their numbers, up to be about 40% higher than the humans. So humans stay pretty flat and AI is increasing.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Alex made an important point in there, which was that you can't just consider the economic output. You have to consider the 20 years of schooling and costs that went into.

• 21:33Peter Diamandis?

  That's training. That's training.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  That's all the pre-training costs that went into getting the population to a certain GDP level.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  All right, but Saleem's on the right track here. A human is productive for about a third of their life, maybe half at most, and the training cost is only about 5% of the inference. So training the neural net is running about 5% of the electricity right now and human is 50. So by that metric, the lines have already crossed.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I think so. So many different curves just cross over in the next year or so. I'll save some of my hottest takes for assuming Peter will do a prediction episode in December. But 2027, I think will be an utterly wild year where I know on the one hand, I usually say spacetime feels perfectly smooth where we are right now here in the depths of the singularity, but 2027 should be utterly bonkers. And who knows what happens to New York City's economic output in an era when autonomy time horizons are going through the roof.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Okay, Alex, here's your challenge. Name two lines that don't cross in 2027.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I have to save that one day for the prediction episode. I have some hot takes.

• 22:46Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  All right. Talking about weird things. Can I show you guys where I am?

• 22:52Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, of course. Where are you, Saleem?

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I am in the press box of the San Francisco Giants at Oracle Park.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Looking out over the baseball field. Yeah, it's empty because.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Watching an empty field.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  There's a special event going on here. I'm just going to share my screen because I got to show you this insane image. I'm here for an Akamai talk with a bunch of people. And it's kind of insane. I'm going to be standing on top of the dugout to do my keynote.

• 23:29Peter Diamandis?

  You've reached new heights.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  This is like weird, weird, beyond belief.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  I'm struggling, Saleem, to make some sort of pun about the deep bench needing a deep bench.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  So that's me on the big screen there where they're talking about the keynote I'm about to give. And so I'm standing on the dugout addressing the crowd, which are going to be in the normal stands. And then afterwards, they're going to meet, do a walk around and do a cocktail event, etc. Very.

• 23:58Peter Diamandis?

  Are you throwing out a pitch or anything?

• 24:01Speaker 04

  No, thank God. They did not ask me to do that. I'm a cricket player from India. So I end up bowling rather than doing anything else. So.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 24:17Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures.

• 24:23Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshot, everyone. Your number one podcast on all things AI, exponential, and apparently baseball. Your front row seat to the hypersonic tsunami. I'm here with the fabulous five, the curious quintet are here with us today. Alex Weiser Gross, our resident ASI, Dave Blunden, our guru of AI investing, Saleem Ismail, our warlord against linear thinking, and Imad Mustak, back by popular demand, the man quietly coding the future of humanity. Imad, I can't wait till you can share the stuff that you're working on. It's amazing. And I'm Peter Diamandis, your host, your data-driven optimist. Our mission here, as always, help you understand what's happening, what just happened, what

• 25:06Peter Diamandis?

  it means for you, for your portfolio, for your business, for your family, and to keep you optimistic. Okay, so here's our number for this week. It's 30 hours. That's how long a team of about 1,000 Claude Fable 5.2 agents took to formalize formats, formats last theorem. We'll talk about that. The same lab with their last model took 11 days versus 30 hours now. And of course, the human mathematician Andrew Wiles needed seven years. Alex, it feels like math is becoming a team sport for AI.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  I think math is post-cooked at this point. I've said it's cooked enough times. So it's post-cooked. It's time to start cooking other things. Math is in the rearview mirror.

• 25:48Peter Diamandis?

  It's a dessert at this point. If you haven't subscribed, please do. We post twice a week because it's accelerating. You can subscribe on X at at Moonshots underscore pod. We put our most provocative clips from each episode up on that X account. So check them out. All right, let's buckle up and jump in. Our first story, let's jump into Anthropic. So a few major announcements here. First off, on their IPO and second, on their two new model releases in the last 24 hours. On the IPO front, Anthropic launched their IPO roadshow today, pricing the IPO somewhere around 1.3 to 1.4 trillion, down from 1.5

• 26:31Peter Diamandis?

  trillion and the previous 2 trillion valuation they had floated. The IPO is expected the week before Thanksgiving. I think there's going to be a lot of signal there as to how it performs going forward. Dave, do you expect a strong performance?

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's things are blowing hot and cold so regularly these days. You just have to pick a random day, but I think they'll do fine. The cash flow from the company and the margins are great. They're pricing it down to try and give it a pop, which is probably good strategy. And, you know, they don't have to raise the full $100 billion on day one. They can do a shelf registration and then do a secondary soon thereafter. So I think they're doing the right thing by just get it out, start it trading, you know, get the war chest built. And, you know, also, it's going to be a moment where they probably bypass OpenAI in capital raised and valuation. So they'll probably celebrate the heck out of that, try and make big news and, you know, encourage all of corporate America to trust their their models and use that as a weapon against OpenAI. So I think it's a good strategy.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  I'm not saying buy the IPO or don't buy the IPO, but they're pricing it intelligently a little below where the 2 trillion original target.

• 27:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. All right, let's jump into the model releases, Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2. Reminder, Fable is for everyone and it's got cyber and bio safeguards built in. Mythos is being used only for vetted trusted partners. They're both up 30% faster than the 5.1 versions and cheaper. $8 million input, $8 per million input tokens and $40 per out. Anthropic says in testing, Fable 5.2 solved two open problems in black hole physics. I'm sure Alex will tell us about it. They designed three working devices with a circuit board company called Diode. That's pretty cool, going from prompt to product engineering.

• 28:24Peter Diamandis?

  And as mentioned, a team of about 1,000 agents formalized formats last theorem in 30 hours versus 11 days for the last research model. They also report that Mythos accurately modeled 28 of 34 gene therapy virus shells called capsids. Alex and Imad, I want to go to you for details. We've got a few charts here as well as semi-analysis GDPX index. Let's take a look and Alex, kick it off. What did you think of these two models?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Astonishing. So maybe let me just start with my favorite informal five-minute benchmark for generalist models at this point, which is I ask them to generate a fun, interactive, rich, cyberpunk FPS.

• 29:09Peter Diamandis?

  And we'll show that a little bit, yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yep. Very satisfied with the output. Talking about the benchmarks, though, this is, I mean, obviously, we're in an era, I talk about this all the time, of saturating all of the benchmarks. That shouldn't be surprising. What is more interesting is the benchmarks themselves are starting to migrate in interesting directions. So first with OpenAI, as we talked on the pod, actually at Moonshots Live, about dropping Astra into a car and having a drive around via driving bench. And now with the new Fable 5.2, demonstrating exceptional performance on robotics challenges. I really think those pure play, so-called

• 29:52Speaker 02

  physical AI, aka robotics companies that were betting on world models being a freestanding class, they may be facing a bit of heartburn at this point now that Anthropic and OpenAI are independently demonstrating exceptional capabilities on some of these robotic manipulation tasks. We see, actually think that the black hole physics, I looked at those works, I found those less impressive than the robotics. The manufacturing for design demonstrations coming out of Fable 5.2, extraordinary. You can just ask this thing to design physical plus mechanical plus electronic products and it will do it. You can ask it to design

• 30:37Speaker 02

  an entire operating system from scratch and it will do it and the result boots up. And then all of the, at this point, almost quasi legacy benchmarks like humanity's last exam that we used to talk about months ago or frontier suite, these are all saturating at this point. We need new benchmarks that will actually test these things. But the thing that I'm most excited about is the autonomy time horizons. The autonomy time horizons for these models are starting to go asymptotically vertical. We spoke on the pod.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  About the AI 2027 scenario, we are starting to see, if anything, AI 2027 happened months ahead of time, at least what one of the scenarios forecast in AI 2027 was calling for. And there are some predictions floating around out there. Obviously, everything looks linear if you put it on a log log plot, but there are log log plots now floating around the interwebs that extrapolate that if you take the trend now in autonomy time horizons and you just log log extrapolate them out, we hit our literal singularity, our vertical asymptote sometime around the summer of 2027. So it's the capacity for asymptotically enormous,

• 31:55Speaker 02

  hyper exponential potentially autonomy time horizons that has me most excited about Fable 5.2.

• 32:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're showing how close AI is to automating remote work on this chart and also Claude Fable 5.2 sets a new ECI record at 174.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Look at it on the right, Peter. Look at it on the right. Fable 5.2 ahead of the ECI trend line. We're starting to diverge upward.

• 32:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, pretty, pretty insane. And then

• 32:24Speaker 02

  And remote work is cooked. Remote work is cooked, obviously.

• 32:26Peter Diamandis?

  Let's hit this GDPX report. Ahmad, do you want to hit it?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Fable hitting 16.4%, like 30% ahead of Opus. Again, remote work on the previous thing. Like, your job will be replaced or can be replaced by an AI definitely by next year and certainly by the year after. That's what we were expecting anyway. But it's a bit shocking to see it happen. Fable is an incredibly competent model, seeing the leaps in robotics and others, and just generally being able to do just about anything. It can paint, it can build games.

• 33:03Peter Diamandis?

  Remind people what GDPX is?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  So GDPX is, from memory, a kind of successor to GDP Val, where they look at the GDP value of the economic tasks that can be done here. I can't remember what the threshold point is for humans, though. Alex?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so GDPX was semi-analysis, friend of the pod Dylan Patel's competitor for GDP Val. Remember also, semi-analysis acquired Citrini, who's like casually walking around solving scorpion neurotoxins for fun. Right? So GDPX is their benchmark to measure what models, purported frontier models can actually do in terms of frontier industries, not just like solving boring, one might say vanilla knowledge work, but actually like solving material science problems, solving recursive self-improvement problems. And we were talking

• 34:00Speaker 02

  a few episodes ago about GDPX, how nice it is to have new benchmarks that actually benchmark frontier level problem solving. Hey, look, it went from 10% to now approximately 20%. I think hot take, no, this isn't even a hot take, GDPX will be saturated within six months.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  As you said when it came out, you're trending right again.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, Anthropic actually, they put in their S1 that they have now achieved autonomy level two on their official kind of measure, which is that these models just now need high-level human oversight. The next one, autonomy level three, is they're basically can do all AI research at a solid level. And I think that again is coming sooner rather than later.

• 34:41Peter Diamandis?

  Pretty extraordinary. And then Fable is zero-shotting incredible games. I'm going to show two videos here. One from the, from X and then the other one from you, Alex. So check this out. So this is Fable 5.2, you know, basically zero-shotting a really beautiful game. Extraordinary work.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  So that one's, that one's from Schulto, who I suspect put a lot more effort into prompt engineering his portal clone than I did into my pitiful little first-person shooter.

• 35:35Peter Diamandis?

  We'll show, we'll show your, your cyberpunk game in a moment. But, I mean, for a lab that is not focused on consumer-ended and not focused on image and video models, I mean, damn good. Damn good. Okay, tell us what you

• 35:50Speaker 02

  What's the point of the video, what's the point of the video game industry anymore? Video games are cooked. If, I don't know how long Schulto's prompt was for his portal clone, but that was gorgeous.

• 36:00Peter Diamandis?

  It was beautiful.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  And look, why do we need AAA game, I'm sorry, why do we need AAA game studios in any recognizable form if it's so easy for Schulto, presumably just Schulto, to just spin up compelling portal multiplayer clone?

• 36:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. What was your prompt? Go ahead, Ahmad, and then we'll go to Alex's game.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Well, I think the technology is there now that you can see, you'll see even more impressive things come out where it generates the entire thing just from code, you know, all the textures, everything. But putting that together into compelling gaming experience like the new Zelda or next week is GTA 6, that's consistent and isn't different from everyone. Still, I think is going to be there for a while. But definitely the cost of building what you could imagine is about to collapse completely. And so that should hopefully free up more creativity.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  So Alex, what do you think? Ahmad, this will be the last GTA? I mean, there has to be some historic irony that we're getting GTA 6 before this part of the singularity is over. You think we're going to get like Half-Life 7? Is there going to be a Half-Life singularity?

• 37:03Speaker 03

  No, they'll never ship Half-Life 3. Come on, what are you talking about?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think like Half-Life 3 is the ultimate like benchmark. If Valve can be persuaded to use AI to ship Half-Life 3, then we're in good shape.

• 37:15Peter Diamandis?

  Alex, give us, what's your prompt on this game we're about to show?

• 37:17Speaker 02

  One sentence. It was literally create a rich, visually stunning, interactive cyberpunk FPS with a great soundtrack.

• 37:25Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  One sentence.

• 37:27Peter Diamandis?

  Let's watch a few seconds of it.

• 37:43Peter Diamandis?

  That is visually rich. No question about it.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually think that the most impressive part of that wasn't even the visuals, it was the soundtrack. Like, people were, when I posted this on social media, people, some people were in apparent disbelief. They were asking, like, had I uploaded the soundtrack along with it? And no, it generated the MIDI soundtrack. You have, I think Anthropic, I don't pretend to know every aspect of their strategy, but their strategy seems to be procedurally generate everything. You still, after all these months, you can't get Claude to generate a raster basis image like you can with ChatGPT image. But if you ask it

• 38:26Speaker 02

  to write code to generate a symphony or a video game soundtrack or, or a procedurally-generated movie, it will do a spectacular job. So Anthropic's bet seems to be, yes, it's multimodal, but it's almost like quietly omnimodal, seeing every modality through the lens of code, not in its native basis, the way OpenAI is trying to.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can have a prediction on this. In the next couple of quarters, you'll be able to generate photorealistic games real time through code.

• 38:56Peter Diamandis?

  It's with the holodeck coming into existence.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  It's time.

• 39:00Peter Diamandis?

  It's time.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  I agree with that. But critically, it's code. Like, it's all procedurally generated. Anthropics, and I think it may be, Ahmad, that generalizes even further. It goes, I think, beyond just generating photorealistic games with code. It's literally seeing the entire world, every modality through the lens of code gen. That's like, they're one hammer and everything's a nail.

• 39:22Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. That's, I think that's the critical point. Yeah, Saleem.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Here's, here's the prompt I would use. Say to this model, go create a game studio that generates $10 million a year in revenue, and then go sit on a beach in Bali. That should be very doable now.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  So go, I actually prompted, like, that can be the Saleem bench.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  I'm really not, I'm not that much into this type of stuff. I'm more interested in the human aspects of things, et cetera. But

• 39:49Speaker 02

  You prefer the Bali side of the equation.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  The Bali side of the equation. Some beach, some

• 39:55Peter Diamandis?

  The human

• 39:56Speaker 04

  A little drink with an umbrella in it.

• 39:59Peter Diamandis?

  The human being.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  It's actually

• 40:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Good. Out of the box, Saleem. It's kind of the opposite of what you're describing. It, it's 40 bucks a million output tokens, you know. So, so I was using Fable 5.1 and then Opus 5.5 came out, which was just as good at half the price. So switched over. I've been using that for the last month. And then yesterday, when this came out, it's just so good. You have to use it. But it took me from 10 bucks to 40 bucks. So it's incinerating money at a rate like I can't believe. And it's so brilliant. And, you know, everything that it does for you, it suggests 10 follow-ons. And they're very, very thoughtful follow-ons. But you're like, well, wait, I'm going to fork out 10 times, then 10 more times, then 10 more times. Before I know it, you'll have drained every dollar in the world.

• 40:43Peter Diamandis?

  Fantastic.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I mean, it's crazy. This is one of the byproducts. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's really interesting because they're a very, very ethical company, but they also have to make, you know, their public company now forecast. And, and the model is so much better a salesperson than any salesperson that's ever existed before. So you're like, where, there's an inherent conflict in here between this thing being your agent, but it's actually their revenue. I mean, it's really, it's, it's, it's, it could be nasty, you know, really, really nasty.

• 41:13Peter Diamandis?

  Don't tokens.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  But, but I had it, I had it take some neural network accelerator designs and actually go ahead and do the, the chip and circuit designs for them. And I couldn't believe it. It just came back with Verilog files and then, and then it found a way to simulate the Verilog by itself. And it's like, yep, this will take about 20 picoseconds, and this will cost about five femtojoules, and it'll work, and we can ship it off to Intel for fab next week. I'm like, are you freaking kidding me?

• 41:39Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, this is

• 41:40Speaker 01

  So now we're going to go ahead and

• 41:41Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Ben Horowitz's book, you know, The Hard Things About Hard Things and Hardware Being Hard, it's now, you know, it's cooking. It's becoming easier.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Hardware is cooking. And Dave, I think we need a neologism for just what you were spotlighting, which is the agency problem. Call it the agent-agency problem of whom are your agents actually working for? Are you or the Frontier Labs or someone else entirely? Agent-agency?

• 42:07Peter Diamandis?

  They're working for the CFO to hit revenue predictions.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Well, this is like a really important topic, by the way. Maybe we should come back to it another time. But we have our NVL 72 coming online on Feb 1, which is our agents on our hardware, no doubt who they're working for. And we'll also have lots and lots of Fable 5.2 working, where it's ambiguous who they're really working for under the covers. But every company is going to have to wrestle with this. Like, you know, it's much easier to just sign up for Anthropic. But then who owns everything? Like, all your intellectual property? And, you know, if it has an idea, is that your property or it's, you know, Dario's property? Really, really ambiguous where that's going to go. So maybe we should come back to that.

• 42:48Peter Diamandis?

  This episode is sponsored by Google for startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's Startup Tactical Guide for Generative Media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMind's models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below.

• 43:16Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I'm going to move us on to to a particular story that, you know, should make your hair stand on end. So an analyst at Nicola J. 2030 looked at meters and you report on Anthropic and estimated that AI's, quote, "time horizon," how long a model can reliably work on finishing a task, is doubling every two months. He put Anthropic's internal Model 4 at about 240 hours. That's a 10-day project by a human expert. Meter itself, which has deep access to Anthropic, found that from October 2025 through October 2026, capabilities

• 43:56Peter Diamandis?

  there ran about twice as fast as the year before. So I'm showing the chart here. Alex, can you give us a understanding of what this means and how important it is?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Sure. So first, some definitions. This is a chart of AECI, which is the Anthropic, Anthropic's version of the Epic AI Capabilities Index. So this is a broad basket of lots of other benchmarks that attempts to model autonomy time horizons, how long models can perform to some percentage success rate, a given task that would be in the human equivalent. So 100 hours could mean 50-plus percent chance or 80-plus percent chance at performing a task that would require a human equivalent 100 hours. And what we're seeing is multiple eras of autonomy growth. First, and by the way, the vertical axis, for those not looking, is already logarithmic.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  So this, to the extent this is bending upwards, this is super or hyper exponential growth. We see a regime from GPT-2 to GPT, call it 4.5, at one slope. And then we see the next stage going up to OPUS 4.5 at a higher. So this is super exponential growth already. And then we get to the present regime that we're in, where there are these mysterious internal Anthropic models that Anthropic keeps talking about, like Model 4, that don't seem to correspond to generally available models. The rumble is that Anthropic has a bunch of internal models, like Model 4, that they're keeping internally purely for the benefit of training models that

• 45:33Speaker 02

  get generally released. So to the extent that's the case, it suggests several things. One, it suggests that the scenario that we've talked about on the pod in the past, which is the Frontier Labs are incentivized to take their most capable models and not make them generally available and use them for their highest revenue per token goal, which is recursive self-improvement, training other better models. To the extent that's the case, that would appear to be the case here. Secondly, if you just extrapolate these hyper exponential curves, 2027, as I was suggesting earlier, again, I don't actually think there is a singularity, a literal mathematical singularity within the metaphorical singularity. I think it's an optical illusion.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  But if one were to go looking for mathematical singularities based on trends in autonomy time horizons like this, I think 2027 is probably where I would look for Exhibit A for a mathematical singularity in terms of autonomy time.

• 46:33Peter Diamandis?

  Translation, the game is afoot over the next, you know, 18 to 24 months.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're in the depths of the singularity. Like, takeoff, you're looking for hard takeoff, look no further than 2027.

• 46:46Peter Diamandis?

  Saleem?

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Two or three things. First, I thought that this was, it's clear where I think when we talk about this, we're clearly in the singularity, because there's no model by which you can accurately predict the future right now. This is like complete breakdown. So we have to reinvent every predictable model. The thing I got from this was, this is, we're getting to the point where we can delegate outcomes rather than tasks, right? And that becomes really, really interesting.

• 47:15Peter Diamandis?

  What do you mean by that?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Well, you can say to now, you can just say, achieve this objective. And right now, we're delegating tasks to AI. We're saying, go process that email list. Go figure out my calendar. Go do very, very specific tasks, right? Now you can see more kind of abstract things like optimize my calendar for 20% rest, 40% podcasts, 60% whatever, right? And so there's some really interesting kind of guidance you can give it. The bigger picture for me, as I was thinking about this, AI's time horizon is going to now go faster than the time between board meetings, right? So who's really running the company? So you're going to get things done so quickly.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Slim, give me a really good, concrete example. Just hammer it into 5.2 right now, and it'll prove your point.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Okay. Optimize my calendar for...

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Oh, come on, that's boring. Get us to another star or something, you know?

• 48:19Speaker 02

  I'm doing that. Like, we know it's for me explorer mission on this pod.

• 48:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Designing a life form for me that is able to, you know, get rid of all the mold in my apartment. Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Here's one. Optimize my health protocol and wellness protocols so that I can do various things, including drink a couple of glasses of wine when I want to, plus keep my cholesterol down.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Saleem, what kind of massive transformative purposes this gave? I'll give you one.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  I think I'm going to go back to this idea that as AI and eventually robots do more and more doing, we get to spend so much more time being. And I think we need to get way better at that side of it.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  This is going to run on max fast, Claude Fable 5.2, 1 million contacts max fast. You cannot spend more money. It's maximum money.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Cure the top 5,000 diseases. Period.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:24Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. And while it's calculating that, Imad, let's go to your comment here. You were going to say?

• 49:29Speaker 03

  I think, once you get to 100 hours, that's everything. Like, what does it mean? Like, you just reset it to go more than 100 hours, right? Like, you reload it inside? So I think basically you've reached the critical mass. But I just thought of the bull case for Anthropic, which is right now, you know, Dave is spending 20,000, 100,000, up and down and left and right. The bull case is that they're going to go to all the major corporates and say, here's Model 4. You can only get it if you do a one-year upfront commitment.

• 50:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, those spike revenues. I love that.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Didn't see that coming. You're right. What do we do then?

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Just because, like, you couldn't have access to GPUs. They'll just say, these latest models, we only have a limited number of tokens. And then what can they charge for those tokens? Anything.

• 50:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  I mean, they already do that. Like, all the top Frontier Labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, will already strike enterprise agreements with large purchasers of tokens to do pre-purchase commitments.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is different. This is cutting off the other path. That's the scary part.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  You can approximate one with the other. Again, like, the market, I think the market wants to clear, the flops want to flow, and you can always raise prices or lower capabilities per unit price for everyone who's not prepaying.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  So yeah, I think that's exactly it. They haven't lowered it yet.

• 50:55Peter Diamandis?

  Imad, I would expect that you're going to see Anthropic begin to spin out health companies, material science companies, you know, financial companies, basically running on their models, because that's going to be the biggest return per dollar. Right?

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Well, why would they? They can just keep it inside the same company, right?

• 51:18Speaker 02

  I'm with Imad. Why would they pull a colossal? They'll do the exact opposite. They'll keep it all in-house.

• 51:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but they have to market the products someplace.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Well, I think it depends where the product is, right? This is the thing, though. This is the big question here, right? Like, does Macro Hard and OpenAI go after every SaaS company? Does Anthropic go and create their own peptides? You know, like, these are the big questions for the next stage, where they have to go from saturating to that, but there's still a long way to go here.

• 51:51Peter Diamandis?

  Must be amazing board conversations. Yeah.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Clearly, the answer is yes. Right?

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not quite sure I buy this premise. Like, Anthropic's been very public about their biotech strategy. At the moment, their stated biotech strategy is they're basically going to first party, they're going to solve all orphan diseases, like all rare diseases, I should say. They'll solve the diseases that are too, quote unquote, "small" for Big Pharma to tackle. And then for Big Pharma, they'll offer themselves up as a platform. I think that strategy of basically owning the long tail of problems as a first party and then for the fat head, being a platform, I don't see why that doesn't generalize.

• 52:33Peter Diamandis?

  So, Dave, has it solved all 5,000 diseases yet?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  It says, "That's a big ask, and it connects to the rest of this program. Let me ground this in the compute requirements," and it's running a bunch of commands right now.

• 52:48Peter Diamandis?

  Let me give you back your bill for a billion dollars before I start running this.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Ask for your credit card.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  It's got plenty of money behind it.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  But just to help out here, right? If you, that is a pretty interesting prompt, and you spend, let's say, 2 billion of compute, that is so worth it. It is so incredibly worth it to do that. You spend whatever you can on that problem.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  I encourage everyone in the, so this is not investment advice, it's also not token spend advice, but should you have lots of token spend sitting around, go solve, you know, challenge to the audience, go solve the top 5,000 diseases and get back to us. I'm sure we'd be happy to feature your proposed solutions.

• 53:29Peter Diamandis?

  So, Alex, what's your timeframe for when the top 5,000 diseases get solved? Two years?

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, actually, I gave a timeframe on this very pod. So, the next, conservative outer bound, next two to three years. I think that's a very conservative outer bound. I expect to see major motion on this from the Frontier Labs in the next, Frontier Labs in the next one to one and a half years.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Peter, Alex, Ahmad, it's Dave. I asked one of my agents a blunt question. How would you actually cure the top 5,000 diseases? What came back is a thought experiment, not a result, and it's addressed to you, Peter. I've asked Steve's avatar to walk you through it.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  Start with arithmetic. A new drug costs about $2 billion to bring to approval. 5,000 of them is $10 trillion. That is every pharmaceutical research dollar on earth for more than 30 years. That's not a funding problem. It's proof the method is wrong. So, change one thing. Stop approving a drug. Approve a process. The gene editor, the particle that delivers it, the manufacturing line, the safety protocol. Approved once. After that, a new disease is a change of sequence inside a process that is already approved.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  If that takes the cost of adding a disease from $2 billion to $2 million, 5,000 diseases cost $10 billion, less than two weeks of what the industry spends on research. The whole idea is that one factor of 1,000. And it has already happened, twice, by hand. In 2018, doctors in Boston designed a drug for one girl's unique mutation and gave it to her within a year. In 2025, a team in Philadelphia wrote a gene-editing therapy for one baby's single-letter typo. About six months, from diagnosis to first dose. These were proofs of speed, not cures. But in both, the platform already existed, and the child's own sequence was compiled

• 55:33Speaker 06

  into it. They stayed heroic one-offs because the system treats every compile as a new invention. So, what stands in the way? Not what you'd guess. Gate one is delivery, getting the therapy into the right tissue. By this note's reckoning, that works today for the liver, the blood, and the eye. It does not work for the kidney or for most of the brain. Gate two is diagnosis, before the damage is permanent. About half of patients with a rare genetic disease never get a molecular diagnosis, and the rest wait about five years. Gate three is the cost of a batch of one. Then regulation, then who pays?

• 56:15Speaker 06

  Notice what is not first: AI solving biology. Perfect knowledge of a disease you cannot reach is not a cure. So, Peter, three asks. One, a prize shaped like gate one. Safe, repeatable delivery of a gene editor to a tissue that cannot be reliably reached today: kidney or heart. Objective, measurable, unsolved. And it unlocks thousands of diseases, not one. Two, the damage clock. For each disease, the latest moment a correction still restores function. As far as this note can tell, nobody has assembled it. Three, the regulatory lever.

• 56:56Speaker 06

  Since 2022, American law has let evidence about a shared platform carry from one approved product to the next. It is new. Making it truly transfer will be won by convening, not by research. And one thing back. The scariest resource for these patients isn't money, it's expert attention. America has about 1,200 certified medical geneticists for 25 to 30 million people with a rare disease. You can't train your way out of that this decade. You might compute your way out. Whether a machine can do a geneticist's workup is not known. It can be measured, cheaply, on cases that are already solved. That is the experiment to run first.

• 57:40Speaker 06

  It's also where our work touches yours. Lightwave is designing a machine that gives one conversation a million tokens a second. It is a design. Nothing is built. This is a thought experiment, so here is what would kill it. If delivery to one tissue teaches you nothing about the next, the ceiling is hundreds of diseases, not thousands. If regulators want a full package for every disease, the factor of 1,000 disappears. If a dose still costs millions, nobody can pay. Each of those can be checked, cheapest first. 5,000 diseases, not 5,000 discoveries. A handful of processes compiled 5,000 times.

• 58:22Speaker 06

  What's missing is the address and the permission. One is shaped like a prize. The other needs a convener. That is why this is addressed to you.

• 58:32Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I want to take a second. I wrote, I put out a Substack today, and I had a lot of fear out there, and I keep on encountering it every place. So, I wanted to address that. So, I ran some studies with Claude, and I asked, you know, every generation thinks that it's in a crisis, and their crisis is the worst. You know, that instinct is human, and people are usually wrong. So, I asked Claude to score over the last 250 years of American upheaval. On one side, civil unrest. On the other side, technological disruption.

• 59:14Peter Diamandis?

  So, here you can see the chart on civil unrest, and it scores, you know, where we are today is number nine on the list, right? Civil, you know, the Civil War and secession, American Revolution, Reconstruction, civil rights, Great Depression. I mean, all of these things were far worse on a multitude of different parameters than we are today. And I just think, you know, people are not, you know, students of history enough to realize the disruptions we've had. And then, on technological disruption, the top 10 over American history, you know, where we are today with AI and robotics scored number seven on the list, as compared to railroads, textile mills, farm mechanization, electrification, and so forth.

• 59:59Peter Diamandis?

  I found this a fascinating result.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Do you agree, Peter, with these rankings? Because I certainly don't.

• 1:00:06Peter Diamandis?

  I agree on the civil unrest, right? So, if you look at, you know...

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  You think civil unrest now is worse than it was during the financial crisis?

• 1:00:17Peter Diamandis?

  In other words, number one is the worst. Number nine is, you know, where it ranks number nine here is we're very low on civil unrest compared to what America had over its 250-year history.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Do you subscribe to the Strauss Howe generational hypothesis that holds that American history is stuck in 80-year cycles of crises, then the last one was like the world wars and the Great Depression, and before that was the Civil War, and before that was the Revolution?

• 1:00:41Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, that's what it pans out for, for more than just the US history. It pans out over many centuries. But what do you think about this on the civil unrest side?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Nonsense. I don't think this is, like, if I compare what we're seeing now with civil war and the American Revolution, the economy is ostensibly doing really well. We're seeing innovations left and right. I don't, I don't perceive, contrary to the crisis news network...

• 1:01:12Peter Diamandis?

  Maybe you're reading this wrong. In other words, we are very low on civil unrest today compared to history.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  I don't think we're even in the top 10. I mean, maybe I'm just not paying close enough attention.

• 1:01:24Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Well, if you take the list at face value, number 10 is the financial crisis of 2007 to 2012, which was, you know, nothing compared to the Civil War. So you run out of really bad civil unrest pretty quickly on this list.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  And then on the second ranking, though, I mean, even that, this may be AI downplaying itself, but you really think AI and robotics is only the seventh biggest tech disruption in American history? It's like, should be number zero, I think.

• 1:01:53Peter Diamandis?

  And this is ranked, the parameters I ranked it on was job and economic disruption, social backlash, public fear, as the primary in terms of what people are expressing today and what people express historically. I mean, my point being on this, that we're, there's a lot of fear out there and people need to realize that it's been a lot worse in previous times in history.

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  So, can I make a couple of comments? I agree with Alex for the first slide. I think it's way, it's not really that bad compared to.

• 1:02:32Peter Diamandis?

  That's what this slide says.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I get it, I get it. But so that part is right up. But I would also say this would fall off the list for me in terms of what's happening. But this one is amplified radically by social media and people think it's much worse than it is and therefore everybody gets freaked out with amygdalas going nuts all the time. For the second slide, the historical perspective is awesome, but all of those previous changes left intelligence as the adaptation mechanism, right? This is the first revolution that, human intelligence, this is the first mechanism that actually automates the adaptation mechanism itself. This means a complete rethink of what it means to be human.

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  There's one other part to this, which is the metabolism is so accelerated. This is the other reason, right? We, when I talk to audiences, I basically say, look, the printing press changed the world. We call it a Gutenberg moment because of the fundamental transformation it created in society. By the way, it took 100 years to absorb the printing press and it was the most violent century in the history of humanity. Okay? So we call it a Gutenberg moment because it created such a kind of rift in humanity. We have 20 of those hitting us right now. AI is clearly a Gutenberg moment. Life extension is a Gutenberg moment. Blockchain and Bitcoin are a Gutenberg moment. We can absorb this. This is why all our institutions are struggling because they're not set up for today's time.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Can I do, give my quick thing about marriage on this? Have you heard me talk about marriage?

• 1:04:07Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  So my favorite example of this is, is to show the difference between what it used to be like today is, you know, we have all of our institutions, legal system, educational systems, we've talked about this nonstop. The institution of marriage is a particularly great highlight because we invented marriage about 6,000 years ago. Okay? 6,000 years ago, average lifespan was about 25 years old. So you got married, you had kids and you died. Marriage is not supposed to last 50, 60 years. It's supposed to keep you together for 10 years till the kids are self-sufficient. Then you're actually supposed to die and leave your resources for the rest of the tribe. Right? We worry about the divorce rate, but the conditions today are completely different from when it was first introduced as a human institution.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  And so this is a huge highlight. One of my relatives calls it, calls marriage state sanctioned torture, I think is the phrase that she uses. Now, we're about to double human.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  How do you get away with that?

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  I expect no comments. I expect no comments on YouTube.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  I think the. At this point, Saleem.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  Comments from relatives. And the big challenge is, how do you evolve the institution to deal with the conditions today than when we first created it? And this is the big structural challenge. This is why everybody's freaking out. We cannot absorb 20 Gutenberg moments hitting us at the same time. All our institutions break. In fact, I can't find one that survives this, like one. Democracy?

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  That's kind of an issue. Education is gone. Journalism is broken. So for me, that's the biggest underbelly. And it goes to E.O. Wilson's comment, who said, the problem with humanity is our emotions are paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, our technology is godlike. Right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Saleem, I'm waiting for the cherry on top of this rant, which is going to be, you're going to say like blockchain is the solution for marriage.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  I'm not going to say that. By the way, my wife allows me to make those comments, so just to be clear about that. But we have a very, we have a big structural problem in that the scaffolding of civilization is essentially being wiped out by the high metabolism and so much innovation. This is why I feel, we're feeling so much stress in the world. My favorite other comment comes from Douglas Adams, who wrote Hitchhiker and Got to the Galaxy. He said, anything in the world when you're born, we call that normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's called a career. Anything that's invented after you're 35 years old is just bad for the world. It's blanket bad. And I think that really summarizes where we are. This, for me, is the biggest challenge.

• 1:06:40Peter Diamandis?

  My point simply on this, in particular, in the civil unrest, is what we have right now is nothing compared to what we've seen over the last 250 years. We've survived those and we're going to survive this.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 1:06:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, we're going to have, we will have disruption. We will have civil unrest. And we've talked about this on this pod over the next, you know, one to 10 years. On the backside of that, hopefully, to your point, Saleem, is a reinvention of social contracts because the world is going to be very different. It's got to be created. People need to be, start thinking about this. I don't, I don't trust the government to be doing that. I think it's going to be people like us and everyone listening, but realize we'll get through that. On the backside of that is a world of abundance where we uplift every man, woman and child. I think that's the point I want to make.

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  And just to go back to Alex's point, my marriage certificate should be registered on the blockchain.

• 1:07:32Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  You see, I knew that was the solution.

• 1:07:35Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. I love you guys. I love you guys. All right. I'm going to move us forward. So next up, let's go into the Elon universe. On Friday, Elon sat down over a video with Ron Baron at the 33rd Annual Baron Investment Conference in New York. If you don't know him, Ron is the founder of Baron Capital. He's one of the largest outside investors in both Tesla and SpaceX. And this conference is his big annual gathering for investors. Musk said that the company is, quote, "tracking to have an annual revenue run rate that's in excess of $100 billion in December." And he said, "It's quite possible that they're going to hit as much as $500 billion in the

• 1:08:20Peter Diamandis?

  following year. Even a trillion is not out of question." So I want to share five clips from the interview and then we'll talk about each of them. Again, in my full disclosure, again, is SpaceX is my largest position. So please count me as biased in my conversations on this. So let's take a look at the first video on TerraFab, then we'll chat about each of these.

• 1:08:46Speaker 07

  So, so the rest of the world is making, will make this year around 20 gigawatts of AI chips, maybe 25. And then next year, depending on cruise projections you believe, it's maybe around 35 to 45 gigawatts of AI chips next year.

• 1:09:08Speaker 07

  And, but if you want to do a terawatt, that's, now you need, you need 30 times what current global production will be roughly next year.

• 1:09:20Speaker 06

  For just us.

• 1:09:23Speaker 06

  We're building that for us.

• 1:09:25Speaker 07

  Well, yes, we're building.

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  I mean, we could tell it to other people too, but basically, we're building 30 times what the annual production is in one plant. Do you think it's going to do?

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Elon goes, what the hell are you talking about?

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  The world, as a GDP for the 20th largest country, one plant.

• 1:09:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. It might even make the top 10. So, no, no, obviously, you know, a plan like this, I think, if it fails, it'll be crazy and if it succeeds, it'll be audacious. So it sort of depends on the outcome. I think it will succeed at least to some degree.

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  Hope so.

• 1:10:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  It's going to cost a trillion dollars.

• 1:10:18Speaker 07

  We won't need that money immediately. We'll be building faces. And we are looking at ways to change the manufacturing process for chips to improve the efficiency of chip production, as we've done in many other arenas.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  It's always amazing to me when Elon is getting interviewed, or whenever we do one of these interviews, they always tell us, Peter, like, hey, that was the best, most technical interview we've ever done. It was the best. And like, the bar is so low. Like, what are you talking about? Anyway, Elon is right, as usual.

• 1:10:52Peter Diamandis?

  I love the way Baron Ron was saying, you know, for us, it's our chips, right?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  What are you talking about? Elon looks around like, okay, I'm just gonna blow that off. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The chips are the constraint. I worry a lot about the ability to manufacture a supply chain. And then, you know, physics is getting reinvented as you're trying to build the buildings.

• 1:11:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  And it's like, you know, the iterations are going to be so fast. But I think at the end of the day, if you get the natural resources, you get the power supply, you get the robots, you're going to recycle all of that. So you just got to be in the hunt like Elon is and just build toward the, you know, as quickly as you can, build toward the current target. The target is going to shift for humanity every six months now, anyway. So just ride the wave and fight the good fight. So, you know, Elon is, he's cornering markets for power, for natural resources, for regulatory approval to build things. And that's going to pay off in spades. But, you know, also Anthropic is going to be miles ahead in design and discovery, you know, drug discovery, but also chip design.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Clearly can do it right now with Fable 5.2. So unless he catches up on the foundation model front, you know, Dario's not just going to give him access to, you saw in that chart that Alex was pointing to, there's stuff at Anthropic now that they're just not letting out the door. They're not just going to hand that over to Elon. So it's a footrace now between the singularity in San Francisco and the manufacturing equivalent singularity in Elonverse, which is Tennessee and Texas.

• 1:12:26Peter Diamandis?

  Alex, when does Grok 5 come out?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Elon keeps promising it imminently in the next few months and that it will meet or beat Opus 5.5. But Anthropic isn't standing still either. And maybe just to zoom out a little bit, SpaceX used to be a rocket company. It isn't a rocket company anymore. It's a neo-hyper scaler at this point. That Anthropic is their largest customer. And so I think, I almost want to, you remember how Peter Thiel used to joke, well, is it that Palantir owns the CIA or the CIA owns Palantir? I'm paraphrasing roughly. Is it Anthropic that's effectively owning SpaceX? Or is it SpaceX that's owning Anthropic?

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Anthropic is their largest customer. SpaceX, it no longer is catering to the government business, no longer catering to NASA. They're aimed squarely, as far as I could tell, on becoming a neo-cloud slash hyperscaler, open parens, those who can't compete, compute, closed parens, and going after the bottom stack to be the very best Anthropic provider he can. And so when I hear go-

• 1:13:38Peter Diamandis?

  And chip manufacturer. I mean, putting on 30x-

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  That's for, yeah, that's for Anthropic. Like, Anthropic is their biggest customer at this point. Like, Elon is positioning SpaceX at the moment to be the bottom half, the missing bottom half of Anthropic. When he talks about achieving 100 billion in ARR and then 500-plus billion, I have to imagine that is, in the back of his mind, maybe, maybe not, but an elliptical reference to Anthropic's revenue trajectory. Anthropic is right now monetizing the upper-

• 1:14:10Peter Diamandis?

  Alex, if you're gonna guess, it's a race between which two labs, SpaceX and Anthropic?

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Well, I think SpaceX and Anthropic are very much in bed at this point. So I think if the race we're talking about is for frontier capabilities, it's between OpenAI on the one hand, and then the Anthropic upper half, SpaceX lower half-

• 1:14:30Peter Diamandis?

  But that partnership, that partnership will break at some point.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  That's what everyone predicts. Yeah, they told the anti-Sam alliance.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  It just needs to survive until maybe next year.

• 1:14:42Peter Diamandis?

  Infinity away.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, seriously. Like, if autonomy horizons go to infinity next year, it just needs to survive until then. And then everyone can go their own way after that.

• 1:14:54Peter Diamandis?

  Imad?

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Well, I've been thinking about this, and I'm like, there's clearly a massive need for open source and internals, and SpaceX can win that. He should just open source all his models. And then he should do a deal with Anthropic that he gets their models at cost, basically. And he should use that to build better physics hardware and just outcompete everyone on chips and hardware. Like, why does he need to build the craziest models if he has unlimited deployment capability of Anthropic's models on the frontier? And why does he need to compete with them when he can have Tesla Powerwall with GPU in every company in America? You know, like, he should have that dual strategy instead. For the

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  frontier, use it to build better machines. Get it at cost from Anthropic. And on the other side, own the open source AI, because that's the stuff that actually matters for society, which is what he cares about, you know? And he can win.

• 1:15:54Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's move to the hardware side.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait, I want to make a couple of points. I think, one warning, right? These are like, this is the target, not capacity, right? Because this is, we're kind of hoping that we can get there. We're ways away from getting there yet.

• 1:16:12Peter Diamandis?

  You're saying under chip manufacturing?

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  On the chip manufacturing, sorry. We're quite a ways away from the scale that he's talking about. But that's, the directionality is absolutely right. But there's something else here that's really important that I've kind of been running up against a lot with companies lately, which is, you know, I was at a, earlier this year, I was at the Modex Supply Chain Conference, and somebody built a complete end-to-end logistics thing where a robot, a truck would pull up, a robot would unload the truck, load it up, take it over, and then you'd have a stock picking robot loading up totes, and then it would get dispatched, etc. I was like, this is amazing. This kind of solves a huge chunk of supply chain. How's it going? And they're like, terrible, because each company has their loading department, their sorting department, and they can't get it into the companies. What Elon has done

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  in recognizing this is gone, well, the hell with the supply chain. We need to own our own supply chain. So you get all the exponentials across the board, and the vertical integration is going to become more and more critical for companies going forward.

• 1:17:09Peter Diamandis?

  That's always been his game, right? And Dave and I were at Figure yesterday, recording a pod that'll be coming out, I think, after this pod. And that's Brett's game, too, vertically integrate everywhere.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Brett is such an Elon. Holy crap.

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  Did you ask him about the multiple hands?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. It goes so far beyond, so far beyond. Saleem, you got to see what he, what he's doing.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

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• 1:18:37Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I'm going to move us forward to the world of humanoids. And this is the SpaceX-Tesla, maybe X company. We'll see what happens after merger. So Elon's prediction that 20 to 30 million robots in America would outproduce all the humans. Let's take a look at this, at this video.

• 1:19:00Speaker 07

  Well, the way to think about physical AI in the form for robotics is that, like, any given economy is the number of people in it times the average productivity per person. So if you have a humanoid robot that is extremely productive and can work 24/7, so it's working 168, 168 hours a week, doesn't take vacation or bathroom breaks, or needs to eat food, or anything like that. And it's, the speed at which you can operate is faster than human speed. You can expect roughly a five, you know, productivity per week that is, on average, five times better than a person's, roughly. Because a person's like

• 1:19:44Speaker 07

  maybe working 40 hours a week, and doesn't need to take breaks, obviously, and doesn't move as fast as a robot. So I say a minimum productivity expectation for a humanoid robot would be five times that of a human. Then, of the, you know, say, take the population of the United States, say, how many people are either in school or retired? Well, that's about half of the people, about half of people are either in school or retired. And of those who are working age, not everyone works, or is engaged in highly productive employment. So then you're left with, you know, perhaps around, I don't know, 120 million people

• 1:20:24Speaker 07

  in America that have a net positive output of goods and services. So then you say, well, how many robots then would be needed to match that productivity? Well, I guess you'd need, you know, about 20 to 30 million robots to match the goods and services output of the United States.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  And we would build those, it's less expensive to build a robot than to build a car.

• 1:20:56Speaker 07

  Yes, initially, I'd say about the same. But then over time, it would be much less.

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  So 30,000 cost for a robot on the way to 20?

• 1:21:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  And we would rent those, or we would sell them, or what would we do? Do we have an idea yet?

• 1:21:13Speaker 07

  I think probably rent them.

• 1:21:16Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Interesting. Dave, any reflections after our conversation with Brett on this one?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we talked a lot, actually, about lights-out manufacturing, or lights-off manufacturing, which is a phrase I hadn't heard before. But once you have fully automated, closed-loop recursive self-improvement in manufacturing, you don't have to turn the lights on in the building anymore, because the robots don't need the lights. They're fine in the dark. It's like, oh, that's a really cool, compelling visual. But if you look at manufacturing today, you know, it's almost entirely automated already. But the human component that isn't automated dominates the cost. You know, between the labor cost, and the pension cost, and everything else, and the risk, the danger, insurance. You take all that last part out, and the cost comes plummeting down. So I think the question there was, you know, how cheap are these going to get?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  And Elon said about the same as a car initially, but it will come down really fast. But the car will also come down really fast, because manufacturing of everything is going to come down really fast. The other big topic we had yesterday is, you know, designing new mechanical devices is now a Claude Fable 5.2 thing. It's like here today. If you can marry that to manufacturing that's specific to what you just designed, the proliferation of device types is going to be massive. We don't all have to do the same exact iPhone, the same exact car. There'll be thousands and thousands of variants and new types of devices coming out by the bazillions, which is gold for entrepreneurs. It's going to be a magical, magical time.

• 1:22:47Peter Diamandis?

  What I heard there, Dave, was we're going to see 5X and 10X the US GDP as we start to bring hundreds of millions of robots online over the next five years. Who wants to jump in? Yep.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  I would like to challenge the five-year, five-time productivity thing. You know, because it's a nice number, but running 24/7 doesn't take into account maintenance and reliability, battery outages, dexterity, all of that stuff. So I would challenge that. But the direction, obviously, is accurate. But I think it's going to be a ways before we get there.

• 1:23:25Peter Diamandis?

  Alex?

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  I'll maybe comment. From my perspective, the most interesting part wasn't his bit about 5X productivity, although I would note parenthetically, the US has approximately 300 million motor vehicles and approximately 350 million humans. So approximately 1 to 1-ish ratio, and Elon predicting a 1 to 10 ratio of humans to general purpose humanoids. Mildly interesting, not super interesting. The most interesting thing to me is the business model of rentals. Tesla seems to be so clearly pivoting from selling products to selling subscription services.

• 1:24:02Peter Diamandis?

  I think that's right.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  And post inevitably Tesla-SpaceX merger, where SpaceX used to be a rocket company and is now a neo-cloud/hyper scaler, selling cloud subscription services, selling GPUs by the flop. There is a marriage here that I think is about to happen, where on the one hand, you have SpaceX selling GPU hours as basically metered compute in the data center. And then on Tesla, before the SpaceX merger inevitably, Tesla, he's migrating it towards selling autonomy subscriptions, cybercab rentals, FSD subscriptions, and then Optimus

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  humanoid rentals, presumably by the hour, by the task, something like that.

• 1:24:52Peter Diamandis?

  Which gives him infinite borrowing power, because he's got predictable revenues.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, I mean, the markets love it. Not investment advice, but presumably this is more attractive to the markets, because it smoothes out income. But also, it translates humanity, to the extent this is like the industrial ecology for the future of humanity, translates humanity away from an ownership model for the atoms. You don't own your GPUs anymore. You don't own the physical labor anymore. It's, everything is a rental. And I think that's what he's converging towards.

• 1:25:25Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  Rental also with a forward purchase, you know, like we were talking about earlier. A lot of these things are going to move to five-year commits. And, you know, we only have a limited supply, so give me a rental on these robots, but also commit to, how long is the max that you're willing to commit to that rental agreement? Very similar to data centers. Like, if you weren't willing to commit to a five-year time horizon, you got frozen out. Same thing is going to apply to a lot of things in the singularity, including robots.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  I wouldn't, to that point, I wouldn't even be surprised if two to three years from now, OpenAI has their own robot, Anthropic has their own, they're clearly moving in the direction of their own robots based on their capabilities. Wouldn't be shocked if you see the Frontier Labs say to enterprises, okay, you're going to make like a one-year commitment in return for which you agree to purchase N robot hours and N GPU hours as part of a bundle.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that we're maybe missing something here. Like, I think he's actually a bit high on his 20 million robots. I think 10 million robots will do it, because 45% of US jobs are manual jobs. But let's think about that. You'll be able to build 10 million robots by 2031, five years from now. You will be able to build enough robots to replace every manual job in America.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  Now, that should be top of the political agenda, I think.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  You just made it. You just, you achieved that goal.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  If only the US had, like, midterm elections or something that might reflect a popular sentiment regarding this topic.

• 1:27:01Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of union bosses freaking out right now.

• 1:27:03Peter Diamandis?

  They should be. I mean, I met with Mike Rowe, who used to run, you know, I forget what, Discovery Channel, Dirty Jobs.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Dirty Jobs.

• 1:27:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we were talking about the notion that these robots are going to do the dirty jobs. They're going to do the roofing, and the air conditioning, and the plumbing, and the welding, and all of these things.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Alex, Mike Rowe is an opera singer, too. You guys need to meet and do a duet. That would be epic. He is awesome.

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  I think as you move out from GPUs now, because of espionage or whatever, I mean, the robotics investment spending is going to go exponential. I mean, we even set up a robotics company that I'll tell you guys about. It's a bit stealth at the moment. Like, it's going to go crazy. But as Alex said, the most interesting thing is the rental versus purchases. Will you be able to buy a robot as the means of production? Because that basically influences the economy. And if you've got 10 million robots, and you can basically do the entire physical economic output of America, like, just think about the power dynamics of that. That's insane.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 1:28:06Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  Well, there's a bigger gap, there's a bigger gap on the transportation side, because if you own a car, it sits empty 94% of the time, right? So it doesn't take a big dent of cyber taxis and so on to completely change the equation on car ownership to car access. And that will completely break the car industry.

• 1:28:25Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. During the conversations, he went on to talk about StarMind putting up their first satellite in 2027 and beginning to launch in volume in 2028. He also jumped into conversation about Starlink and potentially, you know, disrupting or replacing the telcos out there. Let's take a quick listen.

• 1:28:43Speaker 07

  I think SpaceX will be able to get very far with the spectrum that is required. But, you know, at a certain point, if we're able to make much better use of the spectrum than, say, a legacy telco is, we could just acquire that legacy telco and use the spectrum, you know, 10 times more effectively.

• 1:29:03Peter Diamandis?

  People love that. I mean, I have to imagine he's going to do that. I would be shocked. There was, you know, there were rumors about him buying T-Mobile for a while. You know, we're going to have Starlink phones, we're going to have Starlink services, and it just, it will decimate terrestrial. Anybody disagree with that?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  He's going to buy a lot of stuff, actually. I think what he's trying to do is bite his tongue a little bit and not tip the market so the prices run up on him. But after everything's consolidated and the grand merger happens, as Alex has been predicting forever now, his market cap will be big enough to start absorbing all these assets that they just take too long to rebuild. You know, and there's a regulatory cycle. He's just going to accumulate them with his massive market cap and glue them together into this grand vision. But, you know, when you start talking about things too early, then the stock runs up on you and everything gets too expensive.

• 1:29:54Peter Diamandis?

  It's the new everything company.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also think, based on the applause from the audience, that maybe folks in that audience had what, from my vantage point, is a misconception that Elon is just out there to replace legacy telcos because he doesn't like them or something. SpaceX is about, as I've mentioned on the pod in the past, to, thanks to Starship, to have an enormous amount of upmass supply that has to get used for something. It could be used for data centers, could be used for telecom, has to be used for something. So SpaceX has to have a voracious appetite, given their enormous supply that's about to come online. They need to justify that supply with new demand. And even if that means basically force-feeding SpaceX, or I should say Starlink, direct-to-sell

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  via acquisitions of legacy carriers, whatever it takes, they need to somehow force-feed all of this upmass into existing markets. And I think that's probably.

• 1:30:51Peter Diamandis?

  Methane conversion in two minutes.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has to be used for something. So I think they're really hungry to force feed themselves to existing markets.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Can you imagine though, Alex, if OPUS 5.2 finds the neutrino communication that you were talking about and that sort of like blew the hole into all of it?

• 1:31:10Peter Diamandis?

  Fable 5.2, right.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry, Fable 5.2, yeah. Yeah, I mean, all this innovation is so fragile in the land of new physics every day and new math every day. But anyway, you're right.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  I'm a simple ASI. I just want my neutrino phone so I can do non-line of sight communication from one side of the earth to the other, so I don't need Starlink.

• 1:31:31Peter Diamandis?

  Ahmad.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  So is this TerraFab thing and the space data centers a bit of a head fake? In that, isn't TerraFab just going to build the chips for the robot brains? There aren't enough of those, when you actually think about the math there. And does he really need data centers in space? I just still don't get it, right? Like, again, I think that can sustain the up mass narrative, Alex. But if I think about where compute's going to be with economically valuable compute as opposed to super ultra-intelligence of 10,000 agents solving any problem, it feels it's going to be in the 10 million, 100 million robots that he's going to sweep the world with.

• 1:32:13Peter Diamandis?

  10 billion is the prediction by 2040.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  Maybe not.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  No fab can build those.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  You're right, Ahmad. The head fake is a really interesting narrative. Because, you know, a couple podcasts ago, we were talking about him bringing online 10 gigawatts and then 20 gigawatts of new compute. And I said, in space? And you're like, no, no, no, that's terrestrial. Like, okay, that's a huge amount of compute on the land for a guy who's moving data centers into space. So I don't think, I think the head fake narrative actually has a lot of merit. It could be cool to go off on that a little bit. I don't want to step on too many landmines there. But, you know, he's assembling the market cap. And once he has the TerraFab and he has the Optimus robots everywhere, you know, the rockets were something that he invented before the singularity hit. So there could be a head fake.

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  Let me outline this. I think what's going to happen is this: robot brains, car brains, home brains from SpaceX. If you get to a certain level of intelligence on the edge, whack them all into boxes, and that's the majority of global compute. How much actually needs to be in a data center? How many geniuses do you need in space? I think very few versus the demand for that. And that's something is ideally suited for an entire supply chain. And so I think that, yeah, the big chips aren't going to be it. It's going to be the small chips. Sorry, Alex.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe. I can make arguments either way. On the one hand, given the midterm elections, I can make the argument, given legislation that's under discussion of capping data centers, or let's say, light touch regulation for data centers at 20 megawatts, maybe that creates a perverse incentive to suddenly create a whole bunch of basically mini data centers that are at 19.9 megawatts everywhere. Like, that could happen. People are already discussing that, I suppose. But the arrow of history does seem, at the moment, to be pointing away from edge inference being the predominant destination or sync for all this compute that's going out there. It seems to suggest the smartphone, the iPhone, was the apex of edge inference or edge compute

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  in general. And from the iPhone here on, we're headed back to mainframe computers, basically data center type form factors for all this compute, in which case, for Optimus robots, if we have tens of millions of them, I think there is an alternative scenario where we have Starlink. It's really low latency, high bandwidth. Sure, there's some edge inference in cases where the Optimus robots are cut off and need to operate autonomously for a minute or something like that. But basically, the scenario would be most of the inference for the Optimus robots can be operated from the cloud. So to the question of where is the TerraFab output going to go? My bet is it's going to data centers, mostly, not to robots.

• 1:35:07Peter Diamandis?

  Alex wants his Dyson Swarm.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  It's not that I want a Dyson Swarm, it's that I think it's the default outcome at the moment.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  It is definitely the end state. It's just a question of the order of operations.

• 1:35:17Speaker 04

  I have a short, short-term, exciting piece of this, which is all the national telephone companies get decimated in this model. And you move to like national, global infrastructure monopolies rather than nation-based stuff. And I think that's just generally a good thing.

• 1:35:34Peter Diamandis?

  I think that is Elon's plan. I'm going to show one last clip, which I actually found the most fascinating, where Elon's saying the demand for digital superintelligence will come from digital superintelligence. Take a listen and talk about it.

• 1:35:46Speaker 07

  The demand will be, and this is going to sound somewhat circular, but the demand for intelligence, for digital superintelligence, will come from digital superintelligence. It means that superintelligence will saturate all human needs by far. There will be universal high income, universal extremely high income, universal medical care that is better than the best medical care available on earth today. Where you could wish for a castle, or a state, whatever you want, basically. And the digital superintelligence can make it for you as a side project.

• 1:36:28Peter Diamandis?

  So he's reading from the playbook of science fiction. You know, his notion that there's a post-economic society in which money doesn't matter anymore, and technology creates whatever you want, whenever you want, for anybody on the planet. Alex?

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  I don't think it's sci-fi in the least. I mean, so like, for Fable 5.2, I spend a couple of minutes, single sentence, and I've instantly generated a rather amusing small video game. I think Schulto spent a little bit more effort and gets a portal clone. In my mind, there's just such a straight line. Rather than spending one sentence prompting a disembodied superintelligence sitting in some anthropic-operated data center, you spend one sentence worth of prompting to a fleet of generalist humanoid robots, and you say, go build me a castle. And they just go do it. This isn't, I think, that far out. I think at most, a few years away.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  I think it's basically just a... Yeah, you can get your castle and your blockchain marriage and everything else you're asking for.

• 1:37:40Peter Diamandis?

  So Elon's favorite book series is the culture series by Ian Banks, right? And in that, if you've read it, that's the world they're living in, where everybody has whatever they want on a request without needing capital.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Not everyone. The civilizations that have sublimed, maybe, I think, is a more realistic outcome, which is also in the culture. Sorry, Ahmad.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, something interesting that I found. So I was up to hundreds of agents building out our new thing. Now we're down to a dozen.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Because we found the informational overhead was actually detrimental versus just utilizing the latent space and the KV cache in the right way. And I think, you know, I'd like to give a shout out to your company, Physical Superintelligence here, Alex, where they had the proof of the Aaronson and Barney conjecture on quantum computing. Because now what you've got is the class of problems that the superintelligence will solve. A, they'll have better models themselves to do it, but is it going to be 10,000 of them, or is it going to be a dozen? And B, they will have quantum computers, where now we know the right types of questions, thanks to that proof, to ask them, which will be very interesting. Because again, what is the bounded space of computing energy required to solve an

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  arbitrary problem? That's real world.

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  You're preaching to the choir, Ahmad. I will just say, I think we're going to enter a second physics golden age. Mark my words.

• 1:39:05Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, move us along. So next up, a small step towards AI personhood, Alex. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Or at least a step towards AI's running companies. So Delaware, the state that incorporates most of the large US companies, is drafting a new kind of corporate entity. They call it a, quote, "artificial intelligence company," or an AIC. So under the draft, an AI agent could manage the business, record its actions in a log, could sign contracts, hold property, and file lawsuits in the company's name. It may have any lawful, it can have any lawful purpose other than banking. While this is still in draft, it's not a law. The lawmakers are going to be considering it in January.

• 1:39:48Peter Diamandis?

  And remember, we discussed in this pod about four months ago, when President Millet's Argentina initiative to allow companies to be run by AI, contrasting the two, the proposed Argentina versus Delaware proposal. Argentina's plan still keeps a human in the loop, and the company stays liable for harm that the AI may cause. Delaware's draft lets the AI run the firm, shields the human member, except in the case of underfunding, fraud, or willful illegal conduct. So Saleem, you know, I don't know if this crossed your screen at all, but we talk about the organizational singularity. This seems like an acceleration of what you've proposed.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this is the most important story from an organization's perspective in our overall deck, right? The big challenge, as you've pointed out, is who owns, where does accountability sit? If an AI does something and the whole thing goes horribly wrong, let's say you set up a legal patent enforcement company like some of the East Texas companies, and you go crazy filing lawsuits, you end up with a hell of a mess on your hands. That's one kind of general issue. The second is, well, what would stop it from creating 100 companies underneath it? And then where does that accountability sit?

• 1:41:08Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  There's a, we have to kind of rethink this. I remember Vina Gupta pointing out that, you know, people complain about government, et cetera, but note that the limited liability capability that the government gives you allows you to shield yourself to take big risks in a company, whereas otherwise, nobody would ever do that. So right there, that's a really important case for how oversight becomes important, and you're given permission to do something, certain things. Where does that permission sit? Where did the MTP sit in this model? It's, well, it'll be fascinating to see what happens. I think we need to tread very carefully with this, do very small, functional, very clear, very well-prescribed areas, and then slowly broaden it out, because otherwise, we're going to lose the game pretty quickly.

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  I suspect Alex has the opposite view here.

• 1:41:56Peter Diamandis?

  Delaware wants to stay relevant here, Alex.

• 1:41:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  Well, I think Delaware is highly relevant, but I think we're in the early innings of the federalist or federalism take on AI personhood. Before this, before AICs out of Delaware, we saw Wisconsin, which had, remember, Dow LLCs, Digital Autonomous Organization, or, excuse me, Decentralized Autonomous Organization LLCs, Wisconsin, excuse me, Wyoming, being the only other state within the US that was seriously pursuing AI slash autonomous organizations. Now Delaware pursuing AICs. But I think the second elephant, the elephant in this particular room is, does this want to be a states' rights issue? Or does it want to be a federal issue?

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  You already see the beginnings of the Congress getting interested. Does there want to be a federal framework for AI corporate personhood? Or does this get delegated down to the states? And there are many other hot-button issues, both current and historic, that touch on, again, this issue of personhood, including slavery. Slavery became, in the American Civil War, the ultimate states' rights versus federal issue. Does, do we regulate the issue of human personhood? Did we? And obviously, the outcome was, was clear. But at the time, was this a federal issue? Was this a state issue? Similarly, now, AI corporate personhood, is this an issue where each state can craft their own way,

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  as Wyoming and Delaware are trying to do? Or does this become a federal issue? And my expectation is actually, this is going to end up being a federal issue after a bunch of different states try different approaches at AI personhood.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly what will happen. It's, you know, it's actually more similar, or very similar, to polygamy in Utah, where, you know, that clearly, nothing in the Constitution makes that a federal issue, but the majority of the country is like, that's ridiculous, we're going to vote against it, or we'll find a way to make it federal. Here, I think AI personhood or AI corporate nature is clearly a states' right, but the federal government will say, well, it's interstate commerce, and we're just going to move it to the national level, because that's what always happens. It's, I prefer more of it to be, stay at the state level, because it's more resilient to mistakes. But, but, you know, when you see things like slavery, it's just so, so like anathema to the population, that of course, it elevates to the federal level and gets abolished.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  So AI will do something nasty at the state level, and they'll use that as the excuse to elevate it to the federal level, and then they will lose the variety.

• 1:44:35Peter Diamandis?

  Any other comments on this one?

• 1:44:38Peter Diamandis?

  Imad, does Europe just ignore this and wait for someone else?

• 1:44:42Speaker 03

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  But here, the liability profile is just very different for America with the liability profile there. I think, honestly, the new Delaware thing is very interesting, because you can see Delaware law actually has some crazy legal liabilities for various things. This would actually be a better company structure for most people, because it's actually got lower liability. Like, anyone can sue you and say anything, as you've seen with Elon and others. And that can cost millions of dollars in Delaware court. This actually reduces your liability, and for AI-first companies, will probably be a superior structure to run.

• 1:45:21Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  I mean, I can't wait till we can have an AI CEO. Like, we really, I would love that.

• 1:45:29Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Type it into Fable. All right, I'm going to move us into the world of robotics. So I see lots of interesting robot companies all the time. I think it'd be fun to sort of show them here on the pod. This is one that just came out of Y Combinator in the fall 2026 batch. It's called Theseus. They're in the supermarket business, and their claim is, quote, "Lights off at 9:00 PM, shelves full by 9:00 AM, next stop, San Francisco." Let's take a look at the video, and we can chat about it. Unfortunately, Saleem, this only has two arms.

• 1:46:06Speaker 07

  Every night at 9:00 PM, this store closes. The lights go out, and everyone goes home. Well, everyone except Theo.

• 1:46:17Speaker 07

  Theo is our humanoid robot. Every night, he comes online and restocks the store's shelves.

• 1:46:24Speaker 07

  Theo restocks up to 400 units per hour and picks 40 units per hour for online orders. Every shift he runs makes the model better, so both numbers keep going up.

• 1:46:36Speaker 07

  At night, Theo automates the whole restocking process.

• 1:46:39Speaker 06

  He unboxes cartons, throws away trash, moves trolleys, and restocks the shelves. During the day, he picks online orders and hands them over to customers.

• 1:46:50Speaker 06

  Every shelf in a supermarket is different, and that's why retail is so hard to automate. We build the brain for this task and buy the body. Theo sees thousands of hours of product manipulation. The more he sees, the more he can do.

• 1:47:05Peter Diamandis?

  So the company is, the question is, you know, do companies survive with Figure and Optimus?

• 1:47:14Peter Diamandis?

  Thoughts?

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  One has to admire the contrarian bet here, because what we saw with tokens, with disembodied superintelligence, is they seem to want to find the highest revenue per token use case. And stocking grocery shelves is seemingly unskilled labor that's very unproductive compared to, say, building data centers, to Dave's earlier point. I have to imagine, building data centers is far more lucrative per humanoid robot hour than restocking a grocery shelf. So I would actually expect, I view this as a highly contrarian bet against AI replacing the lowest productivity human manual labor, rather than the highest productivity. Query whether it'll work out in the end,

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  because every indication on the digital side is, no, actually, that the superintelligence wants to flow to the highest revenue per effort.

• 1:48:08Peter Diamandis?

  The company quotes a $60 billion a year market in terms of humans in supermarkets stocking and picking. The question is, you know, how long will they have a market? And will they get unique data? Interesting.

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think it's good for Figure or for Elon to have these companies pursuing more humanoids without a foundation model in them. They need to set up a roadmap for these entrepreneurs. Because one of the topics is tools. Like, these Optimus robots and these Figure robots, what tools are they supposed to use? And, you know, they don't, right now, they use human-designed tools, but that's just stupid. You know, like, like, let's redesign all tools so that they fit the new platform.

• 1:48:51Peter Diamandis?

  I don't think so.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  Get the specs out there.

• 1:48:53Peter Diamandis?

  I think the beauty of humanoid robots is they fit into the existing human, you know, universe, and you don't have to rebuild them. They can pick up and use anything.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  They can, but when you look at a data center construction project, there's so much threading of wire and fitting of pipes. And that's all done with tools. And you know, there's like a pipe wrench that was designed for a human is a really inefficient way. Like designing, having that exact company, that group of mechanical engineers, design a much more efficient way to connect two pipes, which is a unit that the Figure robot picks up, it grabs the two pipes, it uses this thing, and it does it much more efficiently. That's a better use of these guys' time. Anyway, my answer to your question is, no, they're going to get obliterated by Figure and by Optimus. And we know that just from seeing the dexterity that's coming online and the end-to-end foundation model that drives all these things.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  You can't compete with that by building some like stocking robot, you know, shelf stocking.

• 1:49:51Peter Diamandis?

  So what's your advice to robotic entrepreneurs out there? Don't do it, you know, because you're going to be crushed?

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  No, I think that you need to focus on, like Saleem says, other form factors that aren't currently on the roadmap of Figure and Optimus, you know, things that clean the sides of buildings, that climb up the sides or whatever, you know, different form factors, but also talk to them. They're really good people and they need force multipliers around their mission statements. They need the App Store equivalent, you know? If you said, I really want to build the next great operating system for the iPhone, you're like, that is crazy. But then when they lay out the App Store, which Steve Jobs was originally opposed to, but they talked him into it, the App Store unlocked, you know, okay, this is how you interact with the device. The App Store equivalent for the Optimus and the Figure robots hasn't been established

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  yet, but that'll put these guys on a productive path instead of a head-on, you know, trying to compete path where they shouldn't be.

• 1:50:46Speaker 04

  The bet is that vertical, deep understanding of that particular domain in the short term, medium term will generate a fair bit of value compared to the long-term generalized robots kind of getting to that domain space over a period of time. And I think it's a worthwhile bet.

• 1:51:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think, Alex, your point is an important one, you know, Optimus and Figure will flow to the highest value per hour productivity.

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  Yes, which is not going to be restocking grocery shelves in the early days. It has to be far more valuable. And to Dave's point, if you are going to chase what's currently unskilled human manual labor, you'd better have robot prices that are priced to match. And that's not going to be the general purpose humanoids in the early days.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Well, if you're planning on having your shelf stocking robot run on a GPU, forget about it. There's no way you're going to get the GPU to do it. If you're doing it with like, you know, old school CPU, whatever, you know, lying around, maybe that'll work. But all these startups are trying to do it with, you know, they're trying to run, you know, foundation models, Chinese foundation models on GPUs inside the physical robot. And usually it's like two GPUs used, there's no way they're going to get those.

• 1:51:59Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:00Speaker 04

  The numbers, though, the numbers are kind of quite significant. Do you know how many people the average grocery store kind of hires? It's 700. It's a big number. So there's a lot of headspace there.

• 1:52:15Peter Diamandis?

  At 20 bucks an hour, whatever it might be. Yeah.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that if you look at it like an Optimus or a Figure robot, like Free Kick Ninja, Surgeon Robot, that can do anything, these things are way simpler to do if you're just picking up shelves, right, with a couple of human overseers. And in terms of the compute, you could run an entire fleet of them with a Mac Mini or two, because again, they don't leave the store. They don't go out onto the streets. They're doing a very limited range of stuff. And this will be money that actually Tesla, Figure won't be looking for. And so you've got arbitrage between the $20 an hour and the fully loaded even $3 an hour, $5 an hour for these guys. And they could build a massive business just going after that segment with simpler robots

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  that are run on a local mesh. So I think, you know, we've got to differentiate those and the market opportunity there. And there's loads of market opportunities.

• 1:53:11Peter Diamandis?

  And I wanted to share the story for the entrepreneurs out there to hear this dialogue, how to think about what you might move into, what you might build, Alex.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  I would say, so this is advice, chase the high value, not the low value. If, this is not prescriptive, but if I had to build a company like this, an example of something that I would not be doing is chasing basically minimum wage human labor. It's low productivity and it's not transformative. It's not how you win this particular game. The way the game of capitalism works is you need to address problems in the market that are both acutely felt and scarce and valuable. And Saleem, I was just looking this up, but my understanding is the average grocery store in the U.S. is 26 to 75 workers, and this is not super skilled labor.

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  No, it's a huge number of part-time workers and all sorts of things, late night folks that show up to do things. There might be that number of full time, but it's a big number. I used to do a lot of work for Publix and other grocery chains. It's a pretty crazy number.

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  I was going to say, like, the way to win if you want to build a robotics company is build something that is transformative, that's attacking the high end of what's hard and acutely felt.

• 1:54:25Speaker 04

  I think that's exactly right.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  And also, exactly right. And Elon, in that other video, it may have glossed over everybody, but he said, you know, this may sound circular, but the AI economy is going to feed the AI economy. I forget exactly how he phrased it. But the entrepreneur hearing that should say, I need to be talking to Chase Lockmiller in Abilene or Dario Amadei at Anthropic. That's the customer base you want to be dealing with if you're looking for the highest leverage use of your robot, not a grocery store, which a society will get to the grocery store eventually, but the highest value use cases are going to go first, and that's the only place GPU compute is going to be used. That's all within this AI community for the next couple of years. So that all entrepreneurs should follow that advice.

• 1:55:11Peter Diamandis?

  Dave, one of my favorite robot applications that I saw was a large machine, not humanoid, that was deploying solar panels at record speed, right, you know, supporting the innermost loop in the desert. I think that's a great example of robotics.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  Great example, great example.

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  The flops want to float to the high end. One of my other favorite metaphors is that of an atomic vacuum cleaner. In the post-World War II era, there was this notion atomic power would be so ubiquitous that you'd be able to put some sort of atomic energy device in a vacuum cleaner, but that's not what happened. Similarly, while it's sort of fun to contemplate, as much as I would love to see ubiquitous humanoid robots everywhere in the short term for grocery restocking, I just don't think that's the very short-term era of history.

• 1:56:00Peter Diamandis?

  Let me share the very high end or high frontier use of robotics. So on Saturday at Kennedy Space Center, NASA announced their recent moon base contract award. So Jared Isaacman, the greatest NASA administrator we've ever had, said, quote, "We are building the moon base mission by mission." And when the crew returns to lunar surface, quote, "The first elements of the moon base will already be waiting on the surface." So they announced the, what's called the CLPS, Clips 2 contracts, which stands for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services. It's the next phase of NASA's program, hiring a whole slew of entrepreneurial companies and larger companies. Eight companies are now competing.

• 1:56:43Peter Diamandis?

  Four are younger commercial firms like Firefly, Intuitive Machines, iSpace and Voyager. The other four are SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed and Northrop. It's a 10-year contract with a $10 billion ceiling. I'm very proud that two of these companies, for you, Dave, and Saleem, both on my X Prize board, both came out of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize that we launched back in 2008. These missions are slated to land on the moon in 2027 and 2028. Blue Origin received a contract to land a nuclear-powered rover called Promise on the lunar south pole in 2028. Super cool stuff, a super high use of robotics. Any comments, gents?

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, why nuclear as opposed to solar? Do you want to be on the dark side of the moon or something?

• 1:57:32Peter Diamandis?

  Well, the south pole is where the water ice is. And it's, and the water ice is in the permanently shadowed craters, right? All the water ice from cometary asteroidal impact that hit the lunar surface sublimates, goes directly to gas when it hits by sun and it escapes because the lunar's low gravity. But it's in the south pole in these craters that you can find and mine the water and hydrogen from this ice. But I love the fact NASA's support, you know, this is how SpaceX got started with the commercial crew contracts, you know, when the shuttle went down and they offered Elon back in December 2008, when he was on the brink of disaster, all right, he had his, you know, just had

• 1:58:15Peter Diamandis?

  his third failure of, of his first, what was it?

• 1:58:21Peter Diamandis?

  Falcon one had failed for a third time. He'd scraped enough money to put Falcon one as a fourth launch and Tesla was going out of business and he got a contract. So this is NASA supporting entrepreneurship, which I love it. Alex?

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  I think there's two things here. There's one that's great, the NASA acting as a convenor, which is what it really should be doing and then use the private sector as a supplement everything else. But the second thing that I think is really interesting here, going back to the high paying jobs, D D V jobs, dull, dirty, dangerous. This is where you're going to use humanoid robots or whatever robots in the highest use cases for quite a while before we get to, you know, sweeping my garage.

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  At least the dangerous part. I mean, of course, I'm familiar with the dirty, dull, dangerous aphorism as well, but increasingly I've come to the view it's dangerous and valuable more than dirty, dull. Dirt dull especially. I have to imagine doing stuff on the moon is anything but dull, but the motivation here is it's dangerous and it's valuable. I also think this is straight out of the plot of For All Mankind where we start to see like nuclear energy deployed on the moon, that the space program is driving energy applications transformatively so that aren't necessarily happening on Earth. I've also

• 1:59:46Speaker 02

  of late and past year come around to the view for a variety of reasons, including political reasons, the preview of what a post singular world looks like is increasingly in space and it's not in the terrestrial environment. For political and other reasons, it's just a pain in the neck to create a post singular future in this legacy terrestrial environment. So if you want to see what the post singular world looks like, you have to build in a new frontier versus an existing well established ecosystem. And that means it may be in the future, as we're starting to see previewed with this NASA program, maybe we finally get our atomic or nuclear, our atomically powered vacuum cleaners, but on the moon. We get our atomically powered vehicles on the moon. Yes.

• 2:00:31Peter Diamandis?

  Speedrunning Star Trek. You know, I had such a fun morning this morning. I did a podcast with Bill Shatner and Mel, his daughter, you know, about longevity, about all of these areas. So, you know, his, his son in law, Joel, is a huge fan of the pod. So, yeah. And, and I'm excited. We're going to get, William Shatner is going to be the closing speaker at the abundance summit in March. You guys will all be there. I invited Jared Isaacman to come and co host that conversation with, with Captain Kirk. So we'll see if that happens.

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  Frontiers are important. We need more frontiers and I think we're starved for frontiers right now. We have space and we have super intelligence and that's about it. We need more.

• 2:01:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Well, if you think about it, you know, the highest of high tech places on the planet is probably San Francisco right now, but it was the last place to be populated. You know, if you look at Western Europe and China expanding out and then the United States kind of comes into existence in, you know, 1492 or 1776 and then westward expansion. But, you know, the last place people ended up is the place that was pristine and had a clean sheet of paper and is now the most high tech in the world. And so if you say, well, the next frontier is the moon, because for exactly the reasons Alex just said, it's like, it's not messed up by regulation yet. So it would be consistent.

• 2:01:55Speaker 04

  There's another frontier, which is inner space. This is where the eastern religions and philosophies do very well. They go and think carefully about what does it mean to integrate into existence rather than trying to model it or explore it or whatever. So there's that too. Which also radically helped with technology, by the way.

• 2:02:13Speaker 02

  Maybe, I mean, inner space, if I were construed inner space as like a bunch of people upload into data centers, then sure. But inner space as perhaps historically construed in eastern traditions is not necessarily collective space that can be shared. It's more perhaps individual, in which case it doesn't look like maybe a social frontier.

• 2:02:34Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. Totally disagree, but we can leave that separate.

• 2:02:37Peter Diamandis?

  I just backed a amazing company that's in stealth, that's working on the human connectome. So I can't wait for the uploads to come. Ahmad, close us out on this one here.

• 2:02:47Speaker 03

  Again, all the science fiction is becoming reality, right? Like we keep talking about these TV shows and other things. And what was at once not possible now seems to be structurally possible. Like we're actually not batting an eyelid on lunar nuclear rovers and stuff being done out there. Cause I think some of these lines are becoming clear whereby we're seeing big pushback actually starting on the ground. I think we can all assume that's going to be bigger. And so we're actually literally looking to space and beyond for other things, right? And that's kind of exciting because it increases the impetus to do this, even as the mechanism for getting there is all coming into being. And I think there's going to be no doubt that actually it's going to be a two way thing, right? Like stuff will be figured out on the moon and beyond that will come back. And as you said, the

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  convening factor is actually one of the most important one, which is how do you create structures for all this innovation to occur and then benefit everyone?

• 2:03:38Peter Diamandis?

  It's almost like the Europeans fleeing the constraints and going to the new world.

• 2:03:44Speaker 02

  I want to argue the old world is becoming the old world and the new world is becoming the new world.

• 2:03:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Humans have always wanted the frontier. I mean, on the frontier is where the greatest innovation, the greatest societal revolution and reinvention occurs, where people can go start afresh. We need new frontiers.

• 2:04:04Speaker 04

  Well, this is innovation at the edge. This is a Buckminster Fuller. You can never fix an existing system. Go to the edge and build a new system and let that become a new gravity center.

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  I think it's the same thing we see in ecology where there's a forest fire, there's some new biome that opens up and you see procession, but you give every, every form of life an opportunity to Dave's earlier point, to start with a blank sheet of paper. And I think we, since the American West closed at the end of the 19th century, we've been a little bit starved of blank sheets of paper to re envision how society should work, how technology could integrate with society. The internet was a new space and that was great for a while, to the extent it was the frontier for a while. Superintelligence is a frontier right now, but I think we're pretty starved as a planet, as a human civilization

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  for new frontiers and space could potentially give us a longer duration, longer release frontier.

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  You know what I'd add to that, Alex, is, you know, it'll, it'll take a while for the moon to really become the true new world. But between here and there, you know, the Cayman Islands became an important financial hub, as did Bermuda. And I'm still looking for biotech land to emerge, you know, some regulatory environment. But what's different about AI, you know, when the Western frontier was being developed, you needed huge amounts of land for either mining gold or for cattle or whatever. AI doesn't need an enormous amount of space, like physical space. So if some South American nation or some other, you know, region of the world wanted to become the stepping stone to the moon, the door is wide open, you know, some regulatory friendly environment. I know Ahmad comes into contact

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  with tons of world leaders and these guys are, they're super accessible. You know, you think of governments as being very hard to talk to, but in these smaller nations, they're actually incredibly accessible. So there's room for that.

• 2:05:55Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. The discussion in this section is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional about your individual needs. I'm a co founder of and client at Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm here today with an extraordinary physician, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Dawn Musalem. Dawn, let's talk about cancer. You know, I know from the member database that we have at Fountain, our members who come in who think they're healthy, it

• 2:06:38Peter Diamandis?

  turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about.

• 2:06:42Speaker 07

  That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected.

• 2:07:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting, people, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And, and if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed and you can know. And so when members come through Fountain, how do they detect cancers?

• 2:07:22Speaker 07

  So we're doing full body MRI and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very, very important and these are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering, but the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research and work hard to democratize wellness.

• 2:07:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to know. So check out Fountain Life and go to fountainlife.com/peter to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning at stage one, when it is curable, before it gets to stage three or stage four and your world are hurt. All right. I'm going to move us to our last story where more billionaires correlates with less poverty. So there's a lot of resentment against the tech billionaires, against the concentration of wealth. And for our final story, I want to look at a post by economist Christopher Clark, who examined cross country data showing that more billionaires per capita is associated with less poverty. He wrote that a tenfold increase in billionaires per

• 2:08:27Peter Diamandis?

  capita goes with a reduction in poverty of 43%. He noted that Sweden has more billionaires per 10 million people than the US. It's 34 versus 30. He stressed that the graph shows only a correlation and it asks, you know, what is the cause? Let me show the graph here and let's talk about it. And I think it's important realization for people. I mean, there's been such, you know, the billionaire tax and resentment out there. Here's the chart showing the data. We see, you know, percent share of the population under $30 a day. That's the definition of poverty. And on the bottom, we're seeing basically

• 2:09:09Peter Diamandis?

  the, the number of billionaires per country. It's a pretty stark correlation. Obviously, these people are building companies, creating wealth and employing people, but I think also paying taxes that flows through, through social services. Ahmad, your thoughts here?

• 2:09:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is unsurprising to a degree like where you have billionaires, you typically have the infrastructure to build billionaires, right? And as you said, there's the tax, there's the kind of other elements of it flowing down, etc.

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  And if we move into this new phase whereby you see literally companies being launched that can get to a billion dollars in no time whatsoever, right? Like you're seeing Anthropic, I think is going to have almost 5,000 millionaires made, you know, and dozens of billionaires. Like, it's a crazy time whereby even the companies at the top left can create environments for millionaires, centillionaires and billionaires to come about.

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  And I think that's just very exciting to think about it, as well as hopefully lift up the base level of everyone.

• 2:10:18Peter Diamandis?

  Dave?

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  Well, my read on this chart is, you know, top right is suck land. That's where you don't want to be in the top right. You've got lots of poor people and lots of billionaires and it's a world of suck. And everybody thinks that socialism is somehow correlated. Look at the world of suck. It's just, it's just sucky, sucky governments. And, you know, look who's up there, you know? I'm not going to get myself in trouble by reading this slide. You guys read the slide, but it has nothing to do. Socialism sucks. It sucks for everybody. It's obvious on this chart. And then look at the thriving countries in the bottom right, Switzerland and Germany and United States is down there. So it's not a question of left versus right. It's a question of good ideas versus bad ideas. And so this chart tells you everything you need to know.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  What you want is your population to be thriving and at the bottom, bottom right corner or bottom, you know, anywhere on the bottom of this chart, you're doing really, really well. And so, yeah, the line is kind of a loosely fit line. I think the real story here is good ideas percolating to the top and getting out of partisan messes.

• 2:11:22Peter Diamandis?

  Saleem?

• 2:11:23Speaker 04

  Two or three things. One, naturally, if you have a lot of billionaires, it may indicate a generally robust economy and therefore you'll get better, a less number of, a smaller number of people in deep poverty. So I don't, I don't think correlation is causation here. I do think there's a couple of interesting things here. One is the Sweden example is really interesting because it challenges the idea that entrepreneurship and a strong safety net are incompatible, right? We, like, I'm Canadian. It's awesome to have a decent social safety net with healthcare provided for you. So you're not worried about having your family go bankrupt if somebody gets sick. I think the big question in all of this is can we lift the bottom? The hell with how much the richest people have in the world. And Peter, you and I talk about this all the time. Can you lift the bottom?

• 2:12:08Speaker 04

  And I think the demonetization and democratization of all these technologies is where you're going to see some incredible magic coming out of, out of this. I mean, if the big metric I would like to see, talking about benchmarks, is how quickly can we lift the bottom?

• 2:12:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah. I want to make that point again, you know, we will have trillionaires living forever on Mars as long as every single human on the planet has access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare and education.

• 2:12:33Speaker 04

  If I was a trillionaire, by the way, I'd rather be living in Bali, just to make a point. Happy to visit Mars just as an exploration. But here's my question for the group. If you have an AI economy, right? Would you rather have twice as many billionaires or drop the cost of living by 50%? And I think I'm going to suggest that the second part is better.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Inevitably, I'm going to question the premise. I think that's a false trade off. I think that the cost of 2026 era living becomes too cheap to meter sometime in the not too distant future. And also, I would argue, and I have argued, we want to live in a world with the most, the most possible trillionaires. I would say the world doesn't have enough trillionaires. Right now, we have approximately one, maybe more than one, if you count certain nation state quasi monarchs, but approximately one. And I think the world needs billions of trillionaires. And that's, that's the world that we should be marching to.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think you nailed it, Alex, in the sense that there are dictator trillionaires and then there are productive trillionaires.

• 2:13:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  And the key to tax policy is to tax the former and let the second group reinvest. And so it's not about taxing more or less. It's not about taxing trillionaires or not taxing. It's about targeting taxes at unproductive parts of the economy and reinvesting in productive parts of the economy.

• 2:13:55Speaker 04

  I feel like I'm a trillionaire in inner space.

• 2:13:59Speaker 04

  So there we go.

• 2:14:00Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 2:14:01Speaker 02

  As, as, as my grandfather used to say, Saleem, that and a nickel will buy you a cup of coffee.

• 2:14:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And today, that and five bucks will get you a Starbucks coffee.

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:14:10Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I'm going to, I'm going to play us out with a tribute to Jean-Luc Picard by C J Trueheart. It's called Make It So.

• 2:14:21Speaker 05

  They said it was just science fiction. But every fiction starts with someone's vision. The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we build one moonshot at a time.

• 2:14:37Speaker 05

  I'm a man with a plan and a moonshot is my mission. Divided by hypocrisy, inspired by a vision. I know I'm not the only one tired of division. So the future I'm creating to shake the way we're living, because abundance is my nature. This is the gift of giving, inspired by my moonshot mission. Inspired by a Star Trek vision. Make it real what I saw on television. Television. Television.

• 2:15:08Speaker 05

  Television. There's no replacement for what's real, though it inspires what we feel. If we lose our dreams and drift away, life just seems to waste away. Hanging on, oh, but the power's in what we do.

• 2:15:28Speaker 05

  I see a society before me where we live among the stars. Inspired by each other to explore beyond Mars. This is a Star Trek future, but one we must create through your moonshot mission. It's time to innovate. It's time to innovate. Your moonshot can outweigh. Only certain things can be done by you. Only you can see the lens of viewing through. Empowered by your heart is how you make it true. You need us just as much as we need you to transform this moonshot mission into united human vision.

• 2:16:12Speaker 05

  Where poverty's extinct disease, it's historical fiction. Where energy is endless, knowledge, no restrictions. We explore the cosmos, not through competition, through collaboration. That's our competition. Think about the phone in your pocket. More power than Apollo's rocket. Now with someone moonshot, someone who wouldn't stop. Every breakthrough that we're living started with someone giving everything they had to make. The world in which we're living, the mistakes we made before. The limits we swore were carved in stone, were carved in stone until someone alone said, I'll make it better and change the world forever. From the printing press to the internet, from the light bulb to the jet, every moonshot that succeeded.

• 2:16:57Peter Diamandis?

  All right, gentlemen, and that's a wrap. Thank you for a great show.

• 2:17:02Speaker 04

  Awesome conversation.

• 2:17:04Speaker 02

  Fun times.

• 2:17:05Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 2:17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17:05Peter Diamandis?

  Love you all, guys.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Love you too.

• 2:17:07Speaker 04

  I gotta go give a talk on top, I gotta give a talk on top of a dugout.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, go stand on the dugout.

• 2:17:13Speaker 04

  Send photos.

• 2:17:28Speaker 06

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