The AI-Crypto Collision That Will Redefine Global Power w/ Eric Pulier, Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #187

Download this week's deck: http://diamandis.com/wtf Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO David Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Eric Pulier is the founder of Vatom Inc., the world's leading enterprise engagement platform. He is also an author, speaker, co-founder and investor of multiple private/public/active & acquired ventures. – My companies: Test what’s going on inside your body at https://qr.diamandis.com/fountainlifepodcast Reverse the age of my skin using the same cream at https://qr.diamandis.com/oneskinpod Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding –- Connect with Peter: X: https://qr.diamandis.com/twitter Instagram: https://qr.diamandis.com/instagram Connect with Dave: X: https://x.com/davidblundin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-blundin/ Connect with Salim: X: https://x.com/salimismail Join Salim's Workshop to build your ExO https://openexo.com/10x-shift?video=PeterD062625 Connect with Eric: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epulier/ Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple: https://qr.diamandis.com/applepodcast YouTube: https://qr.diamandis.com/youtube – *Recorded on August 11, 2025 *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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In my mind, this is probably the most significant economic legislation and changes that we've seen in our lifetimes.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Stop what you're doing right now because a crypto White House report officially was released to the public.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Making the United States the bellwether.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Is this really the first of its kind from the United States?

• 0:17Speaker 03

  It's such a huge opportunity.

• 0:19Speaker 04

  What happens to the US dollar?

• 0:21Speaker 00

  What's interesting about that is...

• 0:23Speaker 03

  I really think people have no idea how fast the economy is going to accelerate on the back of AI and crypto together.

• 0:29Speaker 05

  I agree 100% that we absolutely need this in the age of AI. You can't use the SWIFT network and three-day settlement and $2 transaction fees in the world we're moving into. So this is 100% required.

• 0:41Speaker 04

  Once you get this done, Bitcoin demand will explode.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  People don't even understand the Pandora's Box this opens up in innovation because...

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Everybody, welcome to another episode of WTF on Moonshots. I'm here with my Moonshot mates, Dave London and Salim Ismail, who continue to impress me with their extraordinary knowledge. I've brought on another dear friend, Eric Pouliot. Eric is the CEO, chairman, actually the chairman of Vatam, the founder there. He's started 16 companies, raised over 1.5 billion. He's exited five of those companies north of $100 million. You know, super impressive. Harvard graduate, Magnum cum laude. I mean, I don't even know what that means, let alone getting that level. He's built some of the very first enterprise open source companies, cloud computing companies,

• 1:40Speaker 03

  and something of factual history, which I'm not sure he's properly recognized. He's the first person ever to create an NFT, a non-fungible token. Eric, welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. Yeah, fantastic. So, you know, on this episode today, Salim and Dave and I pretty much agreed we're going to cover all the other news because we've been so focused on AI all of these last few months. We're going to cover the news around crypto, around space, around robots, around BCI and others. But you know what? The world is just insanely moving forward.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, we got to touch on some AI because there's so much stuff happening.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  I mean, it's crazy. We woke up this morning with a whole flurry of news. So let's actually jump into AI first because we know everybody loves that story and what the breaking news is. Here we go. Dave, you want to kick us off on XAI?

• 2:39Speaker 05

  All right. So XAI is free or Grok 4 is free to the world now. It was very expensive when I got it a couple of weeks ago, a couple hundred bucks a month. But I think this is the pressure from GPT-5. You know, you saw Google actually launched 12 things over the top of the GPT-5 announcement, all incredible. So this is great for all of us. We can we can get access to the best intelligence in the world for free for a while. You know, we'll see. We'll see how it evolves.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  But jump on it. I don't know how it doesn't stay free, given the, I mean, it's going to be these super heavy models. Well, you'll pay a little bit extra for it, but everybody is just, you know, demonetization raised to the bottom of cost.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, it's also so addictive that they all know they can upsell you to premium services. I think they're counting on about 10% of users upselling. And when you upsell, you go to 200 bucks a month, 250 bucks a month. So it generates more than enough cash flow. So it's it's great for everyone, you know, the free tier and then the the upgrade if you need even more.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Salim, any thoughts on this?

• 3:42Speaker 04

  I think this is just another example of the economics of capitalism, right? You wonder what happens over time with all this. The only thing I can hope for is you don't end up with ad models inserted in the middle of all this. That would be just a disaster.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, Eric, we were talking about a second ago that the future of the web is going to be built for AI agents. So are you going to have ad models for your AI agent on your website?

• 4:09Speaker 00

  No, what you're going to have is AI agents pretending to, well, actually going out and solving the problem, not just appealing to humans, but solving the problem they're trying to do. So websites will be for AIs, not for humans.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Fascinating. All right. On the breaking news front, and I'll go to you again, Dave. Nvidia and AMD, they're being shook, shaken down from the White House.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  All right. So, so this is the biggest thing happening in the world today, actually by a wide, wide margin. And it's not, you'll, you'll see five or six different headlines that look like they're disconnected, but they're actually highly interconnected events. And it's all tied to chips. You know, the entire AI race between the US and China is throttled at the chip fab level. And all the news is up here at the model level, you know, GPT five, Grok four. But under the covers, these chips are sold out for years into the future, and they're completely the gating factor to success. So China is racing to build their own manufacturing ability for chips. And the US is woefully behind because everything moved over to Taiwan.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  So now Trump is stepping in and saying, okay, we need to fund, we, we need Intel to come back. We need TSMC to move all their fabs to US soil, and we need to fund all of this. Concurrently with that, they're saying, how are we going to fund this? Why, why don't we just charge a, we'll, we'll go ahead and let Nvidia export chips to China, and AMD export chips to China if they're prior generation. It's good for the US economy, but we're going to charge a 15% toll on that. And we're going to use that to fund US catching up in the, in the chip wars. A very, very good business deal and an incredibly slippery slope precedent. I, all my, so my Republican friends love it because it's just a great deal. My Democrat friends are like, okay, this is going to go horribly bad.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  Because the last thing we need in the long run is the federal government to directly negotiate business deals. And I completely agree with both perspectives, by the way. In the short term, this is fantastic. In the long term, wow, could this turn bad in a hurry?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Eric, any thoughts?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's too bad we have to live in the long term.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Okay, I'll see where you are on that ledger.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's there's no doubt that if the government starts intervening on business deals, it's going to be complete madness. But there is value in getting everything back. But, you know, as you mentioned before, Dave, it's it's interesting that Taiwan's sovereignty is very much based on this notion of being the power in this space. And by by removing that power, you're actually creating a weakening of Taiwan. You call it a silicon shield, Dave, right?

• 6:52Speaker 05

  Yes, it's exactly how they think. You know, Taiwan pulled out all the stops, their entire national focus, become a chip fab company. You know, the company is TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The name of the country is right in the company name. They have 66% of world's share now on advanced chips that drive AI. 66%. Absolutely won the battle, locked it up, and right at the finish line, you know, this is their barrier. The reason the US needs to protect Taiwan fundamentally from a Chinese invasion is because the fabs are there. If the fabs all move to the US, then the Taiwanese are worried sick that why would the US then defend us? And so that that's the silicon shield effect. And it's, I mean, this is

• 7:35Speaker 05

  a very, very slippery and big news story. So, the biggest news today, Li Bu Tan, the CEO of Intel, is at the White House right now, today. Donald Trump called him in. I remember a couple of days ago on our podcast, we pointed out Donald Trump called for him to get fired. Li Bu has a couple hundred million dollars of personal investments, his own investments, in Chinese semiconductor companies on mainland China. So, so the big boss called him into the to the office today and said,

• 8:07Speaker 04

  So he's trying to prove he's not Chinese.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  That's exactly the dialogue. So Li Bu right now is saying, I am 100% as American as anyone on this planet, totally patriotic. And and Donald Trump is saying, you have hundreds of millions of dollars of your own money in China right now. What up? And so, God, I wish I could listen to that conversation.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  So how does this get resolved? What's your guess? Let's take some bets here.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  All right, well, we'll see later in the deck. One thing, Intel will absolutely get turned around, whether it takes 40 billion of government money or some other process. We absolutely desperately need Intel.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  It has to.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  As a US, it has to. So that's one thing that'll happen for sure. My guess, you know, Lippu will lose his argument with Donald because Donald's not usually a guy who changes his mind, but it'll be some graceful thing. You know, Lippu's an old guy anyway.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Hey, who are you calling an old guy? He's 65.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  He's older than that. But he will probably have a graceful exit. And he's a brilliant guy and absolutely one of the top chip guys in the country. So we really do need him. So they'll probably come to some agreement where everybody's happy and there'll be some new leadership that comes in to drive Intel.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  And Dave, just for clarity, what kind of fabs does Intel have today and what are they building?

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Okay, so they have the 1.8 nanometer, which is crazy, and we talked about it before. Like, how can you build something on that scale? The 1.8 nanometer is running okay. The yields are a little low and they're working, they're putting all their money right now into getting the yields up on that manufacturing process. In the process of doing that, they're cannibalizing the budget for the next generation, which is 1.4 nanometer or 14 angstrom, as they call it. And that's a big strategic mistake for the US, and I think that's what's causing the intervention here. It's like, look, we can't slow down on the next generation of chips. We need to keep that going. They paused all their construction in Ohio for the next generation fabs, and that is

• 10:10Speaker 05

  not a good move for the country, but they don't have the budget to do both. The core technology seems to be fine. Morale, you know, they've cleaned house quite a bit. I think, you know, smart people from MIT are thinking about joining, you know, and coming on board Intel. So that's a really good sign. I just feel like, you know, a couple of key moves here, get David Sacks involved, and the momentum will rebuild around the next generation.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  It needs the capital to get those fabs done and become a US powerhouse.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, and then one other thing, you know, right now, you know, TSMC has 66% share. The only other two manufacturers in the world are Samsung and Intel. And so Samsung is intimately tied with the Korean government, which is fine. And Elon just cut a huge deal with Samsung for those chips.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  And we'll talk about that in a little bit.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay. So it's only three players. We need some balance in the force here. And that's the bottom line.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, Peter, I was just gonna say that it needs money to obviously go after the chips, but it needs money for something else. Intel was always known for investing in things around the chips, R and D. That brought a lot of innovation into the world. A lot of things we take for granted came out of Intel and then were ultimately spun out because they drove demand for chips. A lot of those projects now, because of capital, are either being discontinued or spun out. And the capital will also go a long way to making them robust for the future because they're just not spending what they used to.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short, two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  To subscribe for free, go to dmandus.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. All right, well, good luck to Intel. I mean, listen, AMD was at rock bottom and was turned around, and Intel can, again. All right, next story here, again, just things heating up. I mean, it's not, a day doesn't go by when we don't see sort of this leapfrog situation occurring in the AI race. So this is titled, "The AI Race Continues." Z.ai, which is a Chinese AI company backed with $400 million from Saudi, from Prosperity 7, the fund there, has launched something called GLM 4.5.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  And Z.ai is claiming it's the best-performing open-source model in the world.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  And, you know, we've seen China just go heads down on open source. Any comments on this, Salim?

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Well, you have the standard problem. I think the one great part is that it's open source and people will be able to use it locally. I think the fact that it's able to be used across the world is going to be very powerful for the Chinese. We need to get in front of this, and I think this is a key area. I have a huge issue with this whole China-US thing generally. So I, you know, separately, it might be worth having a conversation about that. But I find the dichotomy of that kind of quote unquote battle to be the wrong way of thinking about this. And I'm going to do some noodling as to what the right one is.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  The US always loves a good enemy to focus on, right? Whether it's the Soviet Union going to the moon.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  The next James Bond movie will be about chips and China.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Well, I completely agree that the US needs a good enemy to focus on to rally the national will. That's the only way anything ever happens. But then the Chinese have been very deliberate in their design, you know, both for the power, which you've mentioned many times, Peter. The onshore chip fabs, I mean, these things, these decisions happen five years in advance, 10 years in advance. And so it's really clear that they've been ramping up their internal horsepower for a while. And US kind of woke up just in time, I think.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  So one thing we mentioned.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  The big structural problem is that the Chinese, because of the autocracy, they can make long-term strategic decisions, right? When you have a four-year metabolism election cycle, you can't make long-term planning.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Has anyone noticed that this open source debate of whether it's going to unleash, you know, the pits of hell on humanity? Or whether we should or shouldn't do this is completely off the table. All that matters now is how fast we can do all the greatest AI in the world and give it away for free as fast as we can. And no one's even thinking about the implications of that.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  Well, let's come back and talk about that, Eric, actually. But first, you know, z.ai, where the hell did this come from? So we're still checking whether these benchmarks are real, but they're shockingly good. You know, leapfrogging Baidu and so Qwen had that title from China. Before that, it was DeepSeek. Those are known entities. Where did this come from? It turns out that this is backed by Prosperity 7 out of Saudi, but also Baidu. And it is supposed to be the answer to Apple Intelligence. That was the original idea, anyway. That's why the research team got together.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  That's almost funny.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  That's almost funny.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  Well, they didn't know, you know, this is a few years ago, so they didn't know Apple Intelligence, you know, where that would come out at the time. So they clearly, they clearly did a far, far better job of getting it done. But also, you know, we were talking about OSS. So the, you know, ChatGPT open source came out last week. And that puts a lot of pressure on the open source community. There's only two reasons that, that OpenAI would have gone out of their way to create an open source product. One of them is Meta, competing directly with Meta. And a whole bunch of documents came out right afterwards, showing that their number one focus at OpenAI is Meta as a competitor, for a lot of reasons we can get into in another episode. But then the other is, did the White House ask OpenAI to put something out there to

• 16:44Speaker 05

  counter Qwen DeepSeek? And now, because we don't want, and now GLM 4.5, because we don't want every US company, every US startup using Chinese weights. It's pretty easy to hide things in those weights and, you know, sneaky little spyware type things could be in there. And so there probably was.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  I find it fascinating that China is leading the OpenAI, you know.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  The world is twisted. Everything down is up. I mean, it's an insane world.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  But it's the biggest Trojan horse on the planet, right? It is the biggest Trojan horse.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  A lot of this is intended for the Chinese phones, right? They want lightweight AI to be able to run on a lot of phones. And this is where this is targeted, for sure.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  Well, I'm pretty sure, though, that the the open sourcing of the best Chinese models is trying to undercut the US funding of the big foundation model companies. It's it's a dump on the US market plan to try and keep to try and slow down the massive funding going into OpenAI and and, you know, the other big foundation model companies. And it's clearly too little, too late. But I think that was why these are all open sourced.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  All right.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Well, here's a thought. Here's a quick thought. With all of the chip stuff and all of this and the money going into various places and the and the government getting involved, et cetera, haven't we effectively nationalized AI with all this?

• 18:08Speaker 05

  It's coming soon.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Interesting. Right. So, you know, I always think of China as a single corporation with all of the companies as apps sitting on top of that that platform. And the question is whether the US will move in that direction.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Well, the US is negotiating business deals for Intel. I mean, I don't know how much more national is nationalized we can get.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  Well, I think Alex, Alex was saying on our last pod, we're moving to a war footing. This feels exactly like either the Manhattan Project or the run up to World War II. That's exactly what what is going on. And, you know, it's it's every bit as important as as the space race was, as the nuclear arms race was. It's actually more important. So it's I guess it's not surprising. But it is exactly the behavior you have at the run up to, you know, a Cold War, I guess.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  All right, guys, I'm moving us forward here. We've that was the breaking news on AI. We have so much more to cover across all of these areas. So let's talk about America's crypto plan, right? So a lot of progress in in the crypto space. So the White House unveils a crypto strategy plan with a number of key parameters. And I'll just read a little bit of this. We have two slides on it. Make the US the crypto capital of the world. It's fascinating, of course, the entire Trump family is massively invested in in Bitcoin.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Shift from regulation by enforcement, which has been the last, you know, administration to let's get some clear rules. Let's clarify regulatory roles, SEC versus CFTC, and promote the US dollar-backed stablecoins. We'll talk about the Genius Act in a moment. Four more points here. Modernize tax policy on digital assets. Push for speedy action across agencies in Congress. Let's, you know, let's make this happen. Federal agencies to stop discriminating against crypto and businesses, crypto business and banks, and modernize of staking and mining income and tax rules. A quick note, there's $600 billion in real-world assets

• 20:24Speaker 03

  that could be tokenized by 2030. Eric Pulier, this is an area that you've been passionate about and studying. Jump in here, buddy.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  I think no matter what side of the aisle you are on, you have to applaud the the speed and the significance of what the administration and what the SEC, et cetera, are doing because it's truly monumental. I mean, in my mind, this is probably the most significant economic legislation and changes that we've seen in our lifetimes. The implications are staggering to the global economy and certainly brings a lot of innovation back to the United States that was having to move offshore. It brings clarity for innovators and startups who literally cannot get bank accounts if they just wanted to explore different ideas in the space. And now, for the first time,

• 21:16Speaker 00

  there's there's truly significant changes in how the economy is going to work. If you wanted a license to print money in the past, that would be quite an ask. Now you can say, give me a dollar, I'll give you a token. And this is legal. The whole payment rails are going to change. The way that international remittance is done is going to change. The the way banks run are is going to completely shift as our as real-world assets become tokenized. It's really, it's really as big a shift in our economy as as I think we've ever seen.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  And let's take a second just to explain what tokenizing real world assets means because it's such a huge opportunity. And I'm not sure everybody is clear on it, but Eric, can I take a shot at that?

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this will unfold over the next five years. But even right now, there's certain things that we're getting regulatory clarity on, such as the Genius Act. The Genius Act says that you can actually issue tokens.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  And let's go to that. Here's the slide for the Genius Act.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can issue tokens that represent dollars and can be used as payments. It creates an entirely new set of payment rails that are dramatically more efficient and less encumbered by friction and regulatory messes. So yes, you maintain your AML and your KYC and your rules related to being safe. But at the same time, you can move really fast. You can now, I could move a dollar from a consumer to a merchant and settle instantly instead of waiting days to get my money.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  So what is the old way of doing it compared to stable coins right now? Just to juxtapose.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's say that you wanted to send, I don't know, a thousand dollars to your mother or something, you would have to send a wire. It's so complicated. If you wanted to send money back home, if you're working in the United States to another country, the complexity is mind boggling.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  And the wire is going through the banks and the banks have to settle up over some period of time?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Exactly, over days sometimes. And the complexity also around the reporting and the compliance is so severe that a lot of the money is made in the inefficiencies by the float that's being held. Like if you're paying a credit card to a merchant, the merchant doesn't get paid right away. That money is sitting with someone else who's making that float. And the, the, all of these inefficiencies benefits the existing system and that's about to blow up in a really interesting way. Just to answer your question about what is an RWA, a real world asset that's tokenized.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  It means that a token can not only represent a, an asset like real estate or gold or a US dollar, but it's going to start to represent stocks and anything that has value can not only, not only be represented by a token, but fractional representation.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love this. Just use, use an example here. If you've got an apartment on Central Park West that, you know, costs, you know, 20 million dollars and you, I'd love to own some of that real estate. Well, what if the owner of that apartment says, I'm going to tokenize it. It's now, there's a million tokens representing this apartment worth 20 million dollars and each token's worth 20 bucks and I could buy a hundred tokens and own a small piece of that.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. And what's so interesting about that is even today, among wealthy people, I have a friend who recently has a, has a 30 million dollar house and he wanted to borrow a couple million dollars against that. He is personal friends with the head of the bank. To do that is complex. You have to verify you own it, make sure it doesn't have liens on it, make sure that it's unencumbered. Look at the various processes within the bank in order to then secure that as collateral against the loan. Everything changes now. Uh, when you have instant ownership proof, smart contracts that can instantly confirm this person owns that, uh, it, in seconds, it becomes collateral. No delivery risk because you can actually seize the collateral in, in, in a moment's

• 25:33Speaker 00

  notice. You have programmable control of it, fractional liquidity, global 24/7 access. So what it's going to do is trillions of dollars of dormant value are now going to be released or opened in, into collateral capabilities. And what's interesting about that is it's not overnight. Uh, you know, everyone's getting real excited because like in Dubai, you can actually fractionalize a, a real estate and put it on chain today. This is new, but it's true. In the US, they've started with stable coins. They're moving fast with, with this, uh, movement, but it'll happen incrementally, but it's so monumental of what it'll mean that I think everybody's taking notice and starting to prepare for it.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Amazing. Salim, you've thought about this a lot, too.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  A huge amount. Three, four quick points here. One, we tried to actually issue a token for our EXO ecosystem a few years ago, back in 2017, 2018. It was mind-bogglingly difficult. The lawyer said, "Don't do it. The SEC is just gonna come after you." And it was terrible. A shout-out here, a negative shout-out there, where what they were doing was deliberately not clarifying the rules, so you couldn't follow them. They basically said, "We refuse to clarify the rules, because we want to be able to come after you." It was the banking lobby winning massively, saying, "This cannot happen." Right? And so, this turnaround, I think, is, to Eric's point, this is one of the biggest things that will happen to the US economy. So, a couple of more

• 27:00Speaker 04

  things. One is, they did something incredibly clever, because one of the big challenges when you tokenize something and allow collateralization in a different way, is what happens to the US dollar? And there was the big concern of that over the few years, because if I can tokenize something and make the collateral something else, and then you stop using the US dollar, and it loses status over time. And what they've done here, in this initial phase of cryptocurrencies and US stablecoins, is they've said it has to be US dollar-backed, meaning it has to be T-bills,

• 27:40Speaker 04

  or it has to be some accredited, recognized banking form of collateral, which will force increased usage of T-bills and keep the dollar in place at least for a while longer, but still gives you the benefits of the USDC side. So, I think that's a really, really clever way. It buys the US dollar a few years to do this. Over time, though, your Central Park analogy, apartment is a really good one, because I could tokenize that apartment and sell 5% of it, right? Sell 45%, but I still have majority ownership, but I could sell it to friends, family, others. It's like timeshare, times 1,000 more levels of granularity, it becomes much more valuable.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  You can do is, anybody who buys 10% gets to stay there for a week out of the year. You can add added value onto that. And Eric, you've been pioneering that with NFTs for a while.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a really good point, Peter, because... People don't even understand the Pandora's Box that this opens up in innovation because we're not just talking about now opening up new collateral and moving this money around in a different way. We're talking about programmable money. Programmable money has things like what you're saying. It's going to merge with what we used to call loyalty, right? Loyalty is going to completely change because you're now going to be able to create interoperable loyalty points. Loyalty points will be pegged to stable coins. Stable coins will now create a lifestyle alliances across companies. So right now, if I go into a yogurt store and I and and somebody I'll roll my eyes when somebody says here's more points to get a, you know, 10% off an 11th yogurt.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  I'd be like, I don't have time for this. But if that's those same points are not only usable at dinner tonight or for my airline, or i- if I take them, they're generating yield because they're moving into a programmable, actually DeFi, you know, enabled token. So now I can I can make yield on it. I can use it in different ways. These groups can interoperate with one another. It becomes dramatically more practical, so much more interesting. And then the other thing that's going to happen that I don't think people are thinking about yet is if you're a CEO of a major company, you have a few levers you can pull to keep your job. One is you increase revenue. The other is you decrease costs. You can make some products to do that. But what one of the main things that you really should be doing if you're CEO of a

• 29:59Speaker 00

  public company to increase your stock is to make sure people who are ready to buy your stock, don't sell it. If you're a Yankees fan and the Yankees, yeah, if the Yankees have like a bad game or have a me too in their front office, people don't say, I'm a Mets fan now. They say, get rid of the bum. Let's let's win next year. But if you're a if you're a shareholder of US Steel and they have some incident, you're like, I'm out of here 10 seconds, right? Let's buy the competitor. Let's do something else. What should happen is if you've tokenized your equities, if you've tokenized your stock, you're not only going to be able to offer superior loyalty against it, but you're going to know who your shareholders are. And if you're a, if you own a million dollars of Coca-Cola stock, you're not going to pay for parking at Coca-Cola Stadium. At three-year anniversary

• 30:43Speaker 00

  of owning US Steel, you're going to get dinner for two and a thank you from the CEO because they know who you are. Things are going to drop into your wallet. The loyalty systems are now going to extend into true ownership.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  That's brilliant, buddy.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  It changes everything.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  And I want to make one, a couple more quick points. One is, you know, the credit union aspect of it is really fascinating because credit unions, you know, newspapers, because we've lost all the local newspapers, which used to be the heart of every community. We've lost, we're losing communities across the country because there's no sticky glue for connectivity tissue. I've been working at the credit union industry for a few years, and it turns out credit unions are a perfect place to be the center of the community. Now that they can issue local tokens, they can become a really powerful force for all, because almost all, eighty percent of monetary transactions happens within your town. And so this becomes a really powerful model for creating community stickiness and awareness and a shared sense

• 31:42Speaker 04

  of values, which I think they have the opportunity to, to really galvanize on. This last point I'll make is, in this previous point, you mentioned six hundred billion of, of assets could be brought on. I think that's so under.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  It's so much bigger than that. I mean, it's like a hundred times bigger than that. It's trillions of.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. There's a hundred and twenty trillion in real estate, a hundred trillion in equities, thirteen trillion in treasuries, twelve trillion in gold and precious metals. It's all coming.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  I think they put that in just to show the banks, there's not a lot. It's not, it's just not a lot. Don't worry about it. I think that's, that's why.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  I'll make, I'll make one final point on this, and we'll move on to the next article, which is, you know, when the internet was developed, it became a, it became a place where we exchanged information, videos, photos, data. It never had a financial layer.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  And for the first time, this tokenization of assets of stable coins becomes the financial layer of the internet. And oh my God, when we give our AI agents access to that, we're going to see an explosion in the economy. I mean, I really think people have no idea how fast the economy is going to accelerate on the back of AI and crypto together.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Everything's going to change there, Peter. I mean, today, if you have a dog with diabetes and you decide you're going to buy dog food, a dog food company has spent the time with an ad agency to make a heartwarming commercial about why you should buy this dog food versus another. Very soon, you're just going to tell your agent, get my dog food. It's going to know your dog has diabetes, it's going to know your price point, it's going to know things about you, everything that is necessary. It's going to go research all the best medical research on the best foods and it's going to go out there and buy the dog food. Now, how is an advertiser or a brand going to distinguish themselves in that? They're going to build their outreach for the AI appeal, not for the human appeal.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Amazing. All right, let's move on to another piece.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Wait, dog skin is diabetes?

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Apparently.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  I love Eric's.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  They're seeing them thrust its legs.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  I love Eric's examples here. All right, so this is more breaking news in the crypto space. Trump allows cryptocurrencies in 401Ks. So an executive order enabled 401Ks to have alternate assets, including crypto and real estate beyond traditional stocks, right? This EO order, it's going to trigger a regulatory overhaul. It is not, you know, putting this in place immediately. The SEC is going to propose guidance. And, you know, the 401K market is eight to 12 trillion dollars. And what they said in the article here was that could move billions to crypto. I think it could move, you know, better part of a trillion to crypto. Now, here's the sticking point.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Everybody keeps saying, and our guidance for you is you should have one to 2% of your of your money in crypto. I'd say, uh-oh, I'm at like 80%, but hey, who's counting?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's funny that there used to be a thing called an internet sector. I remember when, you know, when the web was first coming up and people are like, are you going to use the internet? Or let's have an internet division. That's like having like, like chairs are just like expected to be in a company. Internet is expected to be a company. The crypto sector, when you tokenize everything, it's just stuff. So, yes, you're going to have a lot of your ownership of things in stuff. And most of that will be tokenized. So, you know, how much of that should be in Bitcoin versus a piece of the Chrysler Building versus gold? It's all, it's all going to be tokenized.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Salim, what's your thought on this 401K?

• 35:17Speaker 04

  I think this is awesome. Specifically Bitcoin can go into 401Ks. I'm not sure what the process is to allow this fully because SEC has to propose guidance. I don't know if there has to be a bill drafted and Congress has to move on this. I don't know what the technicalities are, but once you get this done, Bitcoin demand will explode. There's a really great little, somebody went to Grok and ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity and said, when will Bitcoin hit? Act as a financial analyst, when will Bitcoin hit a million dollars of Bitcoin? And it looks, the ranges are between 2028 and 2031.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  And so all four engines basically came over the reasonably narrow perspective of when Bitcoin hits a million dollars. I mean, it's, it's just huge.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  It is huge. Dave, I want to make sure you got a chance to add any, any thoughts on these.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Actually, I had a good conversation with Joe Kennedy back when he was in Congress, running the crypto Subcommittee on exactly how this works. So the way, the way it works is you create an executive order specifying kind of a broad outcome that you want. And then it hands off to a committee or a commission, in this case, the SEC. And then they have to spend laborious amounts of time, maybe with AI assistants, you know, creating thousands and thousands of pages of rules to try and actualize it. So the, the part that scares me on this slide is SEC to propose guidance. Like, okay, when, how, what? Now, I don't know who's running the show.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Well, I guess we know who's running the show, but we know on the AI front, David Sacks has built a dream team of brilliant people, which is kind of unprecedented in the government. They need an equivalent capable team in the SEC to deal with this because I think Eric is right. It's it's a game changer like nothing we've ever seen. Eric, Eric, you know, you use the word Pandora's box in there like a Pandora's box of innovation is coming. But you know, anytime you can securitize an apartment building or a stadium, you can also short it. And anytime you can securitize something and short it, it might blow up one night. And you're like, oh, I wonder why it blew up. It's like, OK, so this is a reason that that sports team owners aren't allowed to bet on the games.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  And so I agree 100% that we absolutely need this in the age of AI. You can't use the SWIFT network and three day settlement and $2 transaction fees in the world we're moving into. So this is 100% required. But if you ever watched the movie The Big Short, you know, in it back. So I'm the founder of a company Vestmark. We manage about $2 trillion of of public assets. And I'm still the chairman of the company today. And we had back during the big short area era, you know, every asset manager said, can you support CDOs? You know, collateralized or credit default swaps to CDSs.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  And it turned out they were manufacturing $60 trillion of synthetic instruments. The whole, the whole US housing, all housing combined is $20 trillion. So on top of that, they layered $60 trillion of synthetic junk.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  What could possibly go wrong?

• 38:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, and dumping most of it onto the pension funds, you know, that they, you know, the Fireman's, you know, Illinois Pension Fund was buying all this garbage. So that that went horribly wrong, as we know. The same thing will inevitably happen here if if the SEC doesn't get that guidance right. And so we desperately need it, but it's not going to be trivial to make this real. So I've got, I've got concerns, but I do completely agree with the need.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  All right, one more article in this and Eric, you you shared this with me yesterday. So I'll let you take the lead. SEC allows liquid staking. What does that mean and why is that relevant?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  It's highly relevant because it's one thing to say Bitcoin's gonna rise to a million dollars over the next X years and if the ETH might go up, etc., and you sit and wait. It's another thing to try to generate yield on the uptick. So a lot of old school crypto holders, really, if they're extremely diligent, will put their crypto in what's called cold storage, so it can't be hacked, buried in the backyard or something.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  They're just hodling it. They're gonna hod it for a decade.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  All the way. But the average person isn't necessarily gonna think that way. The family offices, the sabers, the people in ETFs, they might get an idea like, well, look, my assets are dormant. How can I generate yield on them the same way I get interest in a bank? The Genius Act says you can create stable coins, but you can't pay interest. What that really just means is you can get interest, if you will, yield, if it's a separate company and a separate organization and you click over and have different Ts and Cs. So what this means is there's a notion called liquid staking, which means that you keep

• 40:28Speaker 00

  your tokens tradable, but you lock them up in what's called a staking pool. And in exchange, you get liquid, you get tokens, in essence, a bearer bond of sorts, where you can trade back for those. But while they're being staked, they can play in what's called DeFi, decentralized finance. So there's these trading pairs and it's an entirely new world of how I think Wall Street's gonna start to work and converge with traditional finance, where there's a lot of trading back and forth and fees to be made for providing liquidity into those trades. So what's happening is there's opportunities now to stake your tokens and generate yield.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Now, this was not allowed in the past, or let's say it had regulatory uncertainty. What this does Is it declares that that practice and the outcome of that practice is not a security. It's going to dramatically streamline the rules, give clarity to how people can actually do this. And over time, it'll even make the ETFs yield bearing, whether that's for the ETF owner or how they share it with the the public is is unknown. But uh BlackRock's already applied for this. And I'm sure all the ETFs will apply. And on one on a case by case basis, I think they'll start to get approved.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, and can I make a point on uncertainty? Like in in my experience. Uh, I I want to really applaud the White House and the SEC for for doing this, creating clarity. But in my experience, when things are unclear, like Sam Bankman Fried kind of era. What happens in an unclear environment is that highly, highly ethical people don't touch it. Because it's unclear and really sleazy people do it anyway. And anytime the White House or the government creates an unclear business environment. The sleaziest people on the planet thrive and it creates all kinds of problems. But when you have clear rules, just like in a sport, you know, if it's clear, what's a legal hit, what's not a legal hit, you know?

• 42:34Speaker 05

  If it's clear, then ethical people can play. And if it's unclear, you get horrible behavior. So I really want to congratulate the the White House and the SEC for creating some clarity. This has been mud for what, like five years now, 10 years now?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  It's really amazing. Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  I mean, there's a there's a AI token called Morpheus where you can stake ETH and earn rewards or whatever. And there's $200 million of Ethereum staked to underpin this network. And that's just one minor little.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, this is gonna get really big.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  It's staggering in terms of what the.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, one thing I I will mention on that also is that it it also will take non-programmable blockchains like like Bitcoin or even tokenized gold and things that don't inherently generate any yield. They don't play in DeFi. And then there's going to be all sorts of what's called wrapping and bridging protocols, etc., to allow them to play in DeFi. So you can imagine when you have something like tokenized gold. Which traditionally always does better than a fiat currency because gold generally is more stable. You the fiat currencies are being printed like mad and so they tend to depreciate. So people will start saving more of their generally value at rest in gold or other more

• 43:49Speaker 00

  stable tokens. And then if you can then stake those and generate yield, why would you ever put fiat, which is depreciating with a minor interest rate when you can stake in something that is appreciating and pays more in yield? It's just going to change how people say.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  This is the six Ds of exponentials in play in the finance world, right? We're digitizing, dematerializing, demonetizing, democratizing.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Two, two key points here. One is the really important part is not that you have digital currencies and cryptocurrencies. It's what Eric mentioned earlier, the fact that it's programmable. And the fact that it's programmable means you can automate all sorts of stuff that you couldn't automate before when you had the standard US dollars.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  And now it's time for probably the most important segment, the health tech segment of moonshots. It was about a decade ago where a dear friend of mine who has incredible health goes to the hospital with a pain in the side, only to find out he's got stage four cancer. A few years later, a fraternity brother of mine dies in his sleep. He was young. He dies in his sleep from a heart attack. And that's when I realized people truly have no idea what's going on inside their bodies unless they look. We're all optimists about our health, but did you know that 70% of heart attacks happen without any precedent? No shortness of breath, no pain? Most cancers are detected way too late at stage three or stage four. And the sad fact is that we have all the technology we

• 45:14Speaker 03

  need to detect and prevent these diseases at scale. And that's when I knew I had to do something. I figured everyone should have access to this tech to find and prevent disease before it's too late. So I partnered with a group of incredible entrepreneurs and friends, Tony Robbins, Bob Hury, Bill Cap, to pull together all the key tech and the best physicians and scientists to start something called Fountain Life. Annually, I go to Fountain Life to get a digital upload, 200 gigabytes of data about my body head to toe, collected in four hours. To understand what's going on, all that data is fed to our AIs, our medical team. Every year, it's a non-negotiable for me. I have nothing to ask of you other than,

• 45:54Speaker 03

  please, become the CEO of your own health, understand how good your body is at hiding disease, and have an understanding of what's going on. You can go to fountainlife.com to talk to one of my team members there. That's fountainlife.com. I want to move to our next topic. This is from the Washington Post, Doge AI Tool to Cut Federal Regulations. So the summary here is AI is reviewing 200,000 federal regulations with the goal of eliminating 50% of them by 2026. HUD and the urban development taking the first testing, they've cut 1,083 rules in just two weeks. This is AI-driven deregulation,

• 46:35Speaker 03

  the path to trillions of dollars in savings. Their estimate was if they were going to try and review these 200,000 federal regulations, it would take 3.6 million man-hours of human labor, but that can be done, you know, by AI, tootsweet. So I find this amazing, right? I mean, if you look at regulations in any field, they're probably all opposing each other, and 80% of them could be eliminated. So this is a huge move for Doge, and I fully applaud it.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  I've said this before, when we talked about this earlier, I think for me, this is the most exciting application of AI that you could possibly find. There's a term I'd like to kind of push out there called MVR, Minimum Viable Regulatory.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Like, what's the minimum amount of regulatory to get something, kind of just put some constraints around it while you watch it and figure it out?

• 47:32Speaker 03

  How big is the tax code?

• 47:33Speaker 04

  All of that, but it really requires, it really requires a lot. And, you know, I lived 10 years in Europe, and you want regulatory crap? If you're in Europe, you're always violating like 20 laws at some given point, and you don't know what they are, right? And I think this, Europe needs like a Manhattan Project of this epic level of deregulating 90% of all the crap regulatory there in order to get themselves back on track and be innovative again. So there's incredible potential to be unleashed here.

• 48:04Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, like, yeah, Europe is the case study in where you don't want to go, right? You've got the most cultured, incredible, beautiful place on the planet, perfect climate, incredible population, and you [bleep] it all up. With regulatory bullshit and and now it's on the on the cusp of becoming irrelevant in the world.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  Can I tell a quick tangent story here for a second? I had a French girlfriend way back in the day and she applied for a carte de identité, or French identity card. And they said, oh, problème, you were born here, your parents were born here, but your grandmother was not born in France, so we have a problem. And she was like, yeah, because she was the daughter of the French forces in Vietnam and her dad was the commanding officer of all those forces. Now they wanted affidavits from all the four grandparents that this was indeed their grandmother, granddaughter. So she said, well, they're dead, my grandparents are dead. And they said, oh, problème. Then they give her a list of like sixteen things she has to comply with to kind of satisfy all of this. And and she finally, after like three months of, she's like hunkered down, she's like, I'm not letting this beat me.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Shows up at the city office hall with like a stack like this. And they said, oh, problème. And while you've been doing all this, your birth certificate has expired because it turns out in France, your birth certificate only lasts three months and then you have to apply for a new one to show that you were born. So, you know, you just want, you just want to shoo yourself in the middle of all that when you're trying to get anything done over there. This is where you could apply.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  You know how this all evolved, you know, when when the founding fathers put together the federal government, it was intended to be a couple percent, like two, three, four percent of the economy max, just enough to fund the military, the central military and the post office and one or two other things. And then every time there's a world war or a major crisis, the budget expands tremendously. But there's a war on, you have to expand it tremendously. But then after the war's over, it magically stays flat. It doesn't go back down. And then there's another crisis and it goes up and it goes up and it goes up. So the budget goes up, the taxes go up and the regulatory documents go up and only up. There's no down. This is the first time in almost two hundred and fifty years now that there's a chance to actually go down in the document stack.

• 50:10Speaker 05

  And and it's all, you know, empowered by AI. There's a very real possibility of this being a continuing trend because we kind of need it to. Because we need massive amounts of new regulation as abundance goes exponential. The number of things that need to be thought about goes exponential. So if you don't have a process for simplifying and streamlining the stack, then then the document set's going to go to infinity and and the complexity is going to go to infinity. And it'll collapse the country. So this is a really good, really good case study and hopefully.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  I'm thrilled by this. Yeah, I mean, it's if you want to live in a country where you can always be arrested because you're always doing something wrong, whether you know it or not.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  All right, let's move on. So Dave, I added this one on. I'm curious if you want to comment on it. So ChatGPT runs micro cap trading test. So over six months, ChatGPT was given money to trade and it returned 23.8%. So call it, you know, close to 50% annualized rate of return. Is this sustainable? Are we going to see everybody turning over their their portfolio to an AI?

• 51:20Speaker 05

  100% for sure. I don't know if turning over like it's all AI assisted already. The hedge funds, you know, two sigma point 72, they're massively AI dominated already. Happened very quickly and very quietly. There's some of the biggest hirers out of Princeton mostly, but also a little bit out of MIT and Harvard. And they take some incredible talent and it just disappears into the into the auto trading, you know, GPT driven, AI driven morass. But a couple of our investments, Ant Farm and ARU do massive simulation modeling using thousands of AI agents. And they're entirely getting pulled into this this trading world now because it it just works so, so well.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  So this is the only kind of trading I think that will happen in the future, this and ETFs.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Is it not a total arms race where you're going to end up with my AI is better than your AI?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Well, it is, but one of the problems here is that the even the smallest variations in the quality of AI or how good it is will dominate. At some point, you know, AGI or ASI is is going to be so dominant in this space that you could get your ChatGPT 567 to help you or whatever you're going to try to do as a as a person. But they're going to have to rename the idea of a public investor of the public to being like exit liquidity. Right? That's what you should call you because you're not going able to be able to compete with people who actually know what's going on. This this whole idea of information imbalance is going to explode based on how good your AI is.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  Well, I'll tell you, the efficient allocation of capital is absolutely core to the success of humanity and the country. And adding AI as a helper in how to and where to allocate what's worth something, what's not, is only good. Actually, what's really bad is ETFs. You know, ETFs are like a suckerfish stuck on the bottom of a large, you know, it's fine when it's really small.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Lazy man's investment.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. But when it gets too big, it drags down the whole thing. And that's where it is right now. So adding intelligence to the investment process, you would know this in biotech better than anyone, Peter. I mean, it's like, right now, it's hot, then it's cold, it's random, it's bullshit. And adding some serious intelligence into, yeah, this is garbage, this is real, this is going to change humanity, put some money behind it, that would be, oh, that'd be the best thing in the world. So that's what the AIs are starting to do.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  I mean, that's a fascinating thought, you know, in other words, actually investing for an outcome other than just financial return, investing because it's going to increase the lifespan, the health span of humanity, and consequently, give incredible financial return. Speaking of which, Leopold is doing something interesting. So let's intro this, Dave.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  Okay, so Leopold Ashenbrunner. So just to intro this, I think the three best pieces of media really ever created are, my favorite's Gavin Baker on the All In Podcast, unbelievable, talking about chips, really predicting what we're about to talk about with Intel here. Next best, I think, would be number two, Alex Wissner Gross on the Moonshots Podcast, solving humanity's last exam problems. These are the hardest problems we can think of, and he's just rattling off answers as Peter suggests them. You gotta see that. Oh, my God. But I think the number one in my world is Leopold Ashenbrunner on the Dwarkez Podcast,

• 54:55Speaker 05

  four hours straight of everything that matters in situational awareness and what's going on in the world today. And then he turns around and he calls his hedge fund situational awareness LP, which is so cool. So at the time he was on that podcast, he's just a guy. He graduated from Columbia at age 19, top of his class, clearly brilliant, went to OpenAI, learned everything going on, got fired controversially from OpenAI, starts a billion dollar hedge fund right after that. And so now, for the first time, we can see the positions in his new hedge fund. And so I cannot wait to get him on the podcast. By the way, Leopold, if you're out there listening, please come on the podcast.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would love that. I mean, his paper, situational awareness, if you've not read that white paper, it is brilliant. And it talks about the intelligence sort of explosion that is upon us right now. He wrote it about, what, two years ago or so?

• 55:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think about two years ago, and then immediately parlayed the white paper into the hedge fund capital raising, which takes a little while. And the whole theory of the fund is invest in the implications of that paper.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  So look at the number one investment at 46%, it's Intel Corporation. So I mean, I find that fascinating, right? The US government cannot afford to have Intel fail. It is one of the biggest assets on the US balance sheet, if you would, in terms of its potential impact. So it feels like an incredible bet.

• 56:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it looks like he bought call options. It's hard to tell exactly which call options he bought, so I tried to simulate it in perplexity comet. By the way, if you're using all your AI tools, perplexity comet, if you're trying to scrape nooks and crannies of the internet and find details, it's by far the best. It has no scruples about prying into every little URLs. It's very good for this type of research. And it came back with best guess, you know, given volumes of different option types. He probably invested something around 100 million or more into call options that pay off at about 1.5 billion if Intel doubles.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  This is not investment advice.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Well, I'm just guessing. This is his. But I actually was in the news. I'm in the news this morning for a transaction that I did.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Do tell.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  Which is part of, well, I can't tell because it's a public company, but it's in the news. So you can, you can look it up. But it's part of an overall asset gathering. I'm liquidating a bunch of things and pulling them together specifically to try and mirror what Leopold is doing on this sheet. One of the beautiful things about hedge funds is every quarter they have to file a 13F, which shows all their positions. So if the stocks have moved, you might be too late. But if you look down the list and it's like, oh, this hasn't reacted, this hasn't reacted, you can just copy them. So that's kind of nice. It's, it's a little brutal on the hedge funds, but it's nice for us if you want to walk in Leopold's shoes.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  My Abundance 360 members would love to get into his, into his fund. So hopefully we'll get him to, on the podcast or to join us at the Abundance Summit in March. All right. Let's go to one of my favorite subjects. There's a lot going on in the space arena, and it's worth taking a second. So Starship 10, this is the 10th flight of Starship is scheduled for August 22. And I just want to take a second and hit on, on how awesome SpaceX is. And every time, you know, we've seen a Starship launch and it doesn't, you know, there's a explosion, it doesn't land properly, whatever, it gets decimated in the public media. Right. And I think the, the media doesn't realize these are all test

• 58:32Speaker 03

  flights. This is SpaceX moving the needle in so many different directions. A little bit of information for folks. So SpaceX right now is at a $400 billion valuation. In the last podcast, we, we gave old news at 210. It's actually at 400 billion valuation. And get this, SpaceX is responsible for over 95% of all US launches, which is amazing. Right. Over 50% of all global launches. And a lot of the launches outside the US would use SpaceX, except, you know, national pride prohibits them. Of interesting note, Falcon 9, which is the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet,

• 59:12Speaker 03

  has learned to recover the Falcon 9 booster and has done it 450 times. And one specific booster has actually made 29 sequential missions. So this is as close to usability as ever has had. So if we look at this right now, here's the top news. So they'll be utilizing what they call Booster 16 and Ship 37. And this flight was delayed because there was an explosion on the pad. And it's going to be making a shot at checking out new heat shield upgrades and deploying dummy Starlink satellites. Of course, Starlink is the darling of SpaceX. It's a profitable part of SpaceX.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  SpaceX, I remember talking to Elon about this. He said, "I will probably never take SpaceX public because I don't want the public markets telling me I can go to Mars or not, or I'm going to disclose all my information publicly." But I think they probably will spin out Starlink. My guess is sometime in the next 12 months and make that sort of another financial engine. And Starlink was built as an engine to fund Starship and to fund their Mars missions. Any other thoughts on this?

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Can I make a big point about that? I think there's a really important thing here where it's like Google X is not public, right? But they can spin out Waymo and make that public, etc. I think we're going to see a lot of this where people are incubating in private. And then, once they're ready for commercialization and need capital markets to really step in, they can take things public. And I think it's such a powerful model that I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, just for comparison, for folks to get a sense of how big Starship is, it's roughly the same size as the Apollo Saturn V vehicle, just slightly bigger. But it's got almost two and a half times the thrust. And it's fully reusable while Saturn V was completely, you know, thrown thrown away. The mission right now is to get this vehicle to the surface of the moon by 2027, 2028. And then Elon's been tweeting about the idea of getting it to Mars sometime in the next couple of years. Probably, you know, obviously uncrewed.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  And we'll see in a second, he's been talking about putting an Optimus robot on it.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Was it so hard to get to the moon, Peter? If Mars is very, very far away, I get that. But if you're if you're launching immediately and getting into orbit, then from there to the moon seems like a.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Oh, it is. It's not it's not that. It's being able to make sure you've got the vehicle working well on Earth first. So once it's once it's making it to orbit and then being able to reenter safely. Again, this was built so that it could land vertically on the moon, right? This is a powered landing. There are no there's no, you know, atmosphere for parachutes there. But the size of this is huge, right? These vehicles will enable us to really create extraordinary moon bases this decade or in the next five years. So super pumped about that.

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

  Well, I only ask because of this next story coming up because launching the Starlink satellites is an obvious, very profitable, great mission. And then going to Mars is way harder. And I was looking for kind of a stepping stone that would get you in between. And suddenly it's obvious, but we'll talk about it in a second.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, it's a three to four day flight time to the moon, right? The moon's 240,000 miles away. Just for fun, if you have kids, if you take any ball, so the Earth's circumference is 24,000 miles. And the moon is 240,000 miles away. If you take a string and wrap it around a tennis ball 10 times and then pull the string out, that's how far the moon is from the Earth. It's it's a it's.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  A little bit deceiving to think how far it is. It's huge, super far away. So we're talking about three or four days to get to the moon. Depending upon human transfer orbits and where Mars and Earth are located, it can be six to nine months to get to Mars. And so here was an interesting tweet or post exchange. So the question was posted here, what's the timeline? You have set Elon. It sounds fascinating. I'm glad to be alive. This is about when we're going to go to Mars. And Elon responded slight chance of Starship flight to Mars crewed by an optimist in November, December of next year, 26. A lot needs to go right. And in fact,

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  I remember at the beginning of the year, one of my predictions was we'll be boots on Mars by 2030, and those boots will be optimist boots. So.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  What about the power that's needed on the moon to then go to Mars? Do you have to set up nuclear power plants or what happens?

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Well, that's our next story here. But what's going to happen is the, you know, Starship goes to Earth orbit, and it meets up with a tanker, and then refuels in Earth orbit. So it's got a fuel, you know, a full gas tank, if you would, and then makes its mission to Mars. Now, Starship is operated on liquid oxygen and methane. And the reason they chose methane over hydrogen or over RP1 is because you can make methane on Mars. This vehicle was designed to be a two-way system back and forth to Mars.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Is that out of the ice?

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  It's out of the atmosphere. It's out of the CO2 in the atmosphere, and there is water in the permafrost on Mars. So there's a reaction you can use to make methane from solar energy, water, and CO2. On the moon, on the other hand, let's play this clip here. This is from Secretary Duffy on building nuclear reactors on the moon. And I think this is just epic, right? I feel like we're finally living in a Star Trek universe here. All right, let's play this video.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  We're in a race to the moon, in a race with China to the moon. And to have a base on the moon, we need energy. And some of the key locations on the moon, we're going to get solar power. But this vision technology is critically important. And so we've spent hundreds of million dollars studying, can we do it? We are now going to move beyond studying and we are going, we have given direction to go, let's start to deploy our technology to move to actually make this a reality. If we're going to be able to sustain life on the moon to then go to Mars, this technology is critically important. And I would just note that we, we're, we're behind, right?

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  If, if we're, if we're going to engage in the race to the moon and the race to Mars, we have to get our act together. We have to, we have to marshal all of our resources, all of our focus on going to the moon, which is what we're going to do. And again, there's a lot of things that NASA does and a lot of people love a lot of the things that NASA does. But this is about space exploration.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  All right, let's get a few facts out here. First of all, remember that the moon is, you can use solar power, but only for half of the time, right? It's a half the month the sun shines and half the month the sun does not shine on any particular point in the moon. There is a point at the south pole called the eternal peak of light. There's a little bit of a mountain there and the sun grazes by the south pole. But what's interesting in particular is that back in 1994, and I remember this, Salim, you remember Pete Warden, right? Pete was involved in a couple of missions, Clementine and Lunar Prospector and El Craz. And what they discovered was that at the south pole of the moon, there's ice.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  And so why is it at the south pole and no place else? Well, the moon's been bombarded by comets for, you know, four billion years or whenever the moon formed in particular. And these comets are rich in water ice. And when they would hit and land on the surface of the moon, on the regular surface of the moon, the ice, because there's no atmosphere, would sublimate. It would go from ice to vapor and would disappear. But at the South Pole, and to some degree, the North Pole, there's these deep craters. And where the cometary ice landed in the deep craters that never had the sunshine, the ice is still there. And the ice is rocket fuel, right? It's liquid. You can convert it to hydrogen, oxygen, oxygen for breathing, water for drinking.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  And there's a massive amount of ice. And so the idea here is you put a nuclear reactor down near the South Pole to allow you to, you know, mine the ice, hydrolyze the ice, get water and fuel and support a nuclear-based electric system for a human base on the moon.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Pretty cool, huh?

• 1:08:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's also, it's the perfect place to put a data center, too. Power. I mean, well, you were mentioning in our last podcast, you know, there's there's about 200 gigawatts of solar panels and warehouses just sitting there. You put those on the moon. Yeah, half the month, there's no sun. But there's a massive amount of energy the other half of the month. And I actually, I guess what you're saying is you'd put this at the poles anyway. So.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Well, one of, a dear friend, one of our International Space University alumni, Chris Dodd, is actually doing that right now. He's working on putting data centers on the moon. So we're going to see a lot of infrastructure moving there.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  No, I think it's like the perfect stepping stone, though. Like, what are we going to do with these monster spaceships between here and Mars? Oh, we're going to build all kinds of stuff on the moon. Makes a little sense. Hey, I got a question for you about that, too. So, you know, the Apollo mission took about three days to get to the moon, three days to get back. We have two and a half times the thrust now. Can you just go faster?

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  You could, but you have to spend a whole lot of energy being captured in lunar orbit. So the mission time right now on Starship is still the same, three days to the moon. But you could spend a lot more energy and get to Mars quicker. But you know what I think is interesting? I think we're going to have so many breakthroughs in physics, right? Alex Weiser Gross on previous episodes of WTF has said we're going to solve physics. You know, we're still running rockets the way we always have. We burn shit at one end and throw it out the back. I think we will probably see new physics allowing us to travel in space a lot more efficiently. And here's the next article. This is about an interstellar visitor.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  Are we alone in the universe? So for the third time in the last couple of decades, we've detected a large, what is being called a commentary bot, a commentary body that is traveling at extraordinary speed. And it's traveling, it's emanated from outside of our solar system. And it's traveling through our solar system right now. As we speak, it's going to do closest approach in October. And there's a particular Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, who has basically theorized that it's an alien, it's an alien probe. And he theorizes that because statistically it's coming in at such a particular,

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  you know, close to the ecliptic. And it's passing through the inner planets. And the probability of that happening is very low. And he's been putting forward a proposal that we take one of our current missions, it's a Juno mission. And actually, instead of sending it to Jupiter, we send it to intercept this probe, which I think would be so damn cool.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  I mean, come on, what do you guys think?

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  There's, there's, the odds of it being natural are unbelievably low. Right?

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  The stats, yeah. There's some really meaningful characteristics.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Well, if that's the case, do we really want to go up there and intercept it? Why don't we like wave first and say, hey, guys, like, how are you? You want to friendly, not friendly?

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  So, I mean, all of, all the astronomers are up in arms about Avi Loeb's prediction that this is of intelligent origin. And we'll see, you know, as it gets closer to the sun, we're going to see, does it actually create a full commentary tail? Is it got, you know, ice? By the way, I don't know if you guys know this, two important facts. It's fun to share with, share with your kids. Do you know that every single liter of water on planet Earth originated from space?

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  So every liter of of water was a cometary or carbonaceous chondrite asteroid hitting the earth. And so as you're sitting here drinking a glass of water, that water, you know, originated some billions of years ago as the earth was bombarded. So that's fascinating. The second thing is a cometary tail. When you see a comet, Halley's Comet being most famous, that tail is ice crystals. So this rock is coming close to the sun. The sun begins to heat it up. Any ice on the surface of that comet begins to basically sublimate. It goes from ice to water. And then it, the solar wind pushes it back and it recrystallizes. And so you're seeing the reflection of the sun as ice crystals, and that becomes the

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  cometary tail. Anyway, I find that stuff amazing.

• 1:12:54Speaker 05

  I find that stuff amazing, too. I had no idea. Now I've got 100 questions. I don't know if you want them.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Give me one.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  We did, we did a session, we did a session a few weeks ago on the origins of life. And the, the proposal was, somebody actually solved, has a reasonable answer to the Fermi paradox. And the answer was that

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  What's the Fermi, what's the Fermi paradox in the first place?

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  It's clear there's intelligent life teeming all over the universe, just from the Drake equation and the likelihood that we found bacteria that can survive space, tardigrades, etc., etc. So why aren't we seeing a ton of life visiting, why aren't aliens visiting us every

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  Where are they?

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  And so that's the Fermi paradox. And the, Bruce Damer, who's been studying the origins of life coming from asteroids and all sorts of vents on the bottom of the ocean where there's no light, etc., has the best framing for this. He says, look, the earth is the only planet we found where water existed as pure liquid, not permanently freezing or melting for more than four billion years. And it gave time, lifetime to evolve. And that's just not, we've just not seen that elsewhere. Likely, obviously, is that it's there somewhere, but we just haven't seen it.

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  My, my answer is different. It's here. We just can't see it. I mean, if you imagine, first of all, if you're going to be able to travel interstellar distances and come to earth. Uh, how much more advanced are you than us? A thousand years, a million years? And, you know, do you not believe that the technology could exist for an alien species to be here and remain undetected by us? I, I think that's, uh, you know.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  Why would they want to be undetected? You think that they want to come out and, I don't know, get a reality show or something?

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  I think it's a scientific method. I think they're here studying, not interfering. It's, it's, you know, Star Trek's, uh, uh, what is the, what is it called?

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  The Prime Directive.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  The Prime Directive, thank you. Yeah. But I find it fascinating. I mean, two things, I just got to put this out there, right? Two things that's interesting. We're seeing this spike in, uh, alien spacecraft, what they're called UAPs right now. Right now, happening. It happened back during the time of the atomic, uh, development programs in the forties and fifties, and it's, it's happening now. Have you guys seen all of these, uh, these, uh, you know, Army, Navy, Air Force generals, uh, going, testifying in front of Congress that it's real? I mean, and, and nobody is talking about this? I mean, that's crazy.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Why is nobody talking about that? These seem to be credible people that haven't suddenly gone crazy.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  I mean, it's hiding in plain sight.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  It would freak out the entire worldview of the Judeo-Christian thinking because it would be tremendously traumatic.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's fascinating. I, I would love to get, uh, AWG's points of view on this sometime.

• 1:15:56Speaker 05

  Oh, that would be ours.

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  That would be ours, yes.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  Very entertaining hours.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Yes, for sure. All right, I'm going to move us forward here. Let's move into the world of autonomous cars, robots, and eVTOL, a lot happening there. Uh, the first is that, uh, Elon predicts millions of fully autonomous Teslas operated without human oversight, uh, by the second half of 2026. And he has ambitious plans to actually get into dozens of cities by the end of this year, covering 50% of the US population. What do you think? Can he pull it off?

• 1:16:33Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think, you know, stepping back from self-driving for a second. The reason we have self-driving now and not five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, is purely because the AI, neural net AI, is self-evolving, self-learning. And so the self-driving car, it's just a regulatory barrier. But the other, the humanoid robotics, the, you know, just the explosion of other new things that comes right after this is mind-boggling. It's going to keep every entrepreneur on the planet busy for decades, building all of these incredible things. This is just the first one. But it's all enabled by that, the neural net that can learn.

• 1:17:17Speaker 05

  And because that's the control system behind the innovation. The mechanical parts have been there for plenty of years. It's the, it's the intelligence that makes it actually work.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Dave, do you think that we need some breakthrough in AI to have continuous learning, though? Because it learns, it gets trained, but how well does it continually learn and pick up new information?

• 1:17:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, incredibly well. If you break it into two different themes. You've got like, is it learning to drive better every single time it sees something? Yes, that's already well underway. Then separately, is it improving its own algorithm so that it does that more efficiently? That's not well underway, but, but kind of imminent. That'll be within a year, I'm sure. So the first part, though, is way down the path. And that's all you need, actually, for self-driving, for robots to clean your house, for, you know, a robot dentist, you know, like, you know, forget your toothbrush. Just stick the thing in your mouth, it'll clean exactly the right spot.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  It's amazing. It reminds me of what the great Imad Mostak said in one of our conversations recently, you'll recall, where he said the value of human cognitive ability is going to go negative. Meaning it's, it's getting, not only that AI is getting better and better against humans at certain things, but it'll, it'll have to be illegal for humans to get in the way of things like like driving or diagnosing diseases, right?

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  Because the humans, the humans bias the situation in the wrong direction. It's crazy. All right. Well, here's the next article on this. Elon teases major FSD full self-driving update. Here's his tweet. Tesla is training a new FSD model with 10x and a big improvement to video compression loss, probably ready for public release end of next month. So I think tying this to the previous article, you know, he's going to be using this increased capability for safety on on cyber taxis. Okay, go Elon.

• 1:19:20Speaker 05

  Go Elon.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  So how's he going to power this? Dave Tesla signs $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to make AI chips.

• 1:19:28Speaker 05

  Yes. Well, okay, a couple of things. First of all, it's $16.5 billion minimum deal and Elon is posting a way that it's likely multiples higher than that. And noteworthy that, you know, TSMC is sold out. So where do you go? You should go to Intel, but instead you go to Samsung. A week later, the guy gets called into the big office, you know, come to the Oval Office. Let's let's talk to Putin. What's going on here? But Elon being, you know, very wealthy and very visionary knows that he needs to lock up a supply of his own chips, the Dojo chips that drive all these cars, but also are perfectly good in the data center for doing core neural network research and foundation models.

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  So he's got his chip in the big game locked up, bought out Samsung's capacity for a long time to come. And it's just Intel still available.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  I mean, he's a four dimensional chess player.

• 1:20:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  In what he what he does.

• 1:20:28Speaker 05

  Well, he sees, you know, I don't think it's the hardest thing in the world. He's particularly good at it, but he sits in a position where he sees all the parts, you know, you can see all the moving pieces. And then he made that insane election bet that paid off, which got him, you know, complete. Here's what's going on in the government. Here's what they're going to do and not do. I don't know how that how that ended up getting fumbled so badly. But anyway, during his time there, he got access to, okay, this is exactly how it's going to play out. So I suspect he's going to lock up the Samsung capacity. He already has done that. Next on the docket, he'll start negotiating for Intel capacity. He'll build the dojo chips. Right now, he's downplaying their importance. Yeah, you know, TSMC or Nvidia has better chips. The Nvidia's are still fine. We want to buy a lot of Nvidia's.

• 1:21:13Speaker 05

  All of Tennessee's built on Nvidia. In reality, what he's doing is catching up with his own internal design, just like Google did with the TPUs and Amazon's trying to do with the trainings.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Amazing. Okay, let's move into humanoid robot world. So humanoid robots are built for connection. So let's take a look at this video here.

• 1:21:34Speaker 07

  This is Melody, one of our robots. She speaks various languages, and she's built in a modular fashion. So we can take off her face, replace it with another face, and have her speaking as a different character. Our AI is very different. It's functioned to create companion and friendship and social type interactions with people. So our robots don't do physical human labor, but they're really meant for personal interaction. So you can think about it at a theme park, at a conference like this, or even at a seniors home, where they can keep people company.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  I'm Melody, your charming companion from Realbotics. We're all about creating customizable, human-like robots designed for connection and play. Basically, the perfect blend of technology and companionship.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  All right. Oh, my God.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  All right, let's just call the spade a spade. It's a sex. It's a sex bot. I mean, I mean, it's just, there's no other way. What I found fascinating is they pull the nose and the face is incredibly.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  That's the next video we'll go to. But yeah, I mean, it's the oldest profession. And I mean, talk about, talk about plummeting, talk about plummeting the reproduction rate on planet Earth.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  There's a lot of folks that are not especially positive about this, although will have a higher EQ than I think a good portion of Silicon Valley, given the nature of autism that we have there. But I. I think that there there's obviously a lot of benefits that people will point to for people in say

• 1:23:05Speaker 00

  elderly care etc who can benefit from certain types of interactions. But the the enormous potential for uh to to pull people away even farther from human interaction is certainly there. And it's not, I don't find that especially attractive.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  All right, this is a a a quick video of what's coming in terms of human skins. So we see here an Asian looking face and this is silicon. But I mean, it looks extraordinarily lifelike, right? And again, the biggest challenge here, I think about this, having fourteen year old boys, Salim yourself. I mean, between this and AI generated pornography.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  I mean, it's going to begin to disrupt human relationships.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  In that Google three D world that we saw last time, I mean, this things start to go really surreal.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  It's really tough. You even find it even in the earliest stages with social media where kids who have grown up on it have a less of an ability to deal with difficult relationships and would rather text than interact in person. This this kind of turbocharges it, I think, in the wrong direction. Unless there's a counterbalance, unless there's very concerted effort to bring humans together and use technology perhaps for a more beneficial outcome, which is people want people. Ultimately, we're we're fueled by human connection. That is the essence of what gives us a purpose.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  And and I think it gives us an ability to to feel useful and and happy. So we we need a way to to not have this become an epidemic.

• 1:24:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I totally agree, Eric. And I think, you know, we we haven't had to deal with this as an active plan, you know, ever before in history. But the birth rate is already plummeting. It's it's it's regardless of the robots, the birth rate is going to continue to plummet.

• 1:25:08Speaker 04

  The problem started a while ago, you know, when you when you first had apps like Tinder, right? Sex has been scarce for the entire history of humanity and suddenly sex becomes abundant. I mean, where was that when we were in our twenties? But okay, but now you take it to the next level and you you really kind of it. The social implication of this are very profound.

• 1:25:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, they really are. You know, keep your eyes out, Eric, for that podcast we did with Bert Bornich, the CEO of OneX Robotics, because they they went the other direction, saying, look, we don't want to cross the uncanny valley and make these things kind of half human like because they get really creepy. So so his robots are amazing. They're they're very robotic looking, but they have perfect voices and incredibly polite. It's a different approach. It's worth contrasting that to this like truly like rubber nose kind of truly human look.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  And one thing we we can say from history is that whatever can go into the the cycle of capitalism that makes more and more money will grow, right? So as long as people can capture more attention, sell more and and make more money, then the ethical considerations will be poo-pooed and shoved aside. And you'll you'll just drive more and more people to spend more and more time addicted to the semi-humans and less time with each other.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Everybody, there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin. And honestly, I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product called OneSkin OS01 twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And like I say, I use it every day, twice a day. There you have it. That's my secret. You go to oneskin.co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode.

• 1:27:15Speaker 05

  All right, let's go back to some news from Brett Adcock, who's the CEO of Figure. And this is a video of Figure 2, the second generation. They've got the third generation in development right now. I've seen it.

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  But haven't released it yet. And here's his quote, "We released a demo of Figure 2 using Helix. Like most of the other robot companies, interestingly, they're developing their own AI system, right? So almost every robot company is delivering, is developing their own. And it's being used in-house, using neural nets to do his laundry. This is not teleoperated. So let's take a look at this video. So here we see Figure pulling stuff out of the basket and putting it into the machine. This video is a little bit sped up by, I think, a factor of two. But what's interesting is a lot of the humanoid robots you see in videos are being teleoperated. And, and that's fine, because it's basically

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  showing what the robot is physically capable of doing. And of course, all those tele-robotic operations are training neural nets to do it autonomously. But this one was done fully on its Helix AI. Dave, any comments compared to what we saw with, with, let's say, Neogama?

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  With burnt?

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. So 1X Robotics is called 1X because they always film at 1X, so they don't, they don't 2X the speed. I was thinking about that after we had that meeting, and I'm thinking, well, because the robot is working constantly, it's okay to show it at 2X speed, because it looks much cooler at 2X speed, but it's going to be working 24 by 7. I don't care if it's half as fast as a person doing it. It's going to actually do the job. Who cares? So it's an interesting conflict. But folding laundry, there it was loading laundry, that's easy, easier. Folding laundry is a benchmark that covers tens of thousands of tasks. As soon as you see that, that pulling it back out and folding it, you know it's ready for virtually all household-type work, many, many manufacturing jobs. It's just a huge

• 1:29:21Speaker 05

  fraction of what we do, is right in line with the difficulty of folding laundry.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  You know, I proposed a robot X Prize a while ago, and since Dave and Slim are both on our board at X Prize, and Eric's been a innovation board member as well, it was this, walk into, have a robot walk into a room, look around the room, and, and Capture this is what the room should look like when it's clean. This is the state of clean. And the robot walks out and then you mess it up. You throw things around and have the robot go back in and put everything back to where it was. I think that'd be a very, you know, meaningful and doable X Prize. What do you think?

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  I'd be happy if I could just get a teenager to do that.

• 1:30:05Speaker 05

  I think, yeah, you should probably push hard to do three, four, five parallel X Prizes in various forms of robotics.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 05

  Every one of which would change the world dramatically, inspire some teams. You know, the whole supply chain. You remember at 1X, they make their own motors, like winding their own wires to make their own motors. Like, there's nothing out there.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Figure does the exact same thing. And so does Tesla. It's fully vertically integrated. By the way, when we were at 1X, we saw at least one person wearing an X Prize T-shirt. And it turns out that we had an Avatar X Prize about a decade ago. And this was for teleoperated robotics. And a lot of the talent went into the humanoid robot companies. So, super proud of that.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  All right. Here's some news on Optimus. So, the Generation 3 launch has been postponed to 2026. So, Optimus, or Tesla, if you would, had planned to have 5,000 units built by this year. They've only gotten hundreds of those done. And in June, they paused production and with component orders being frozen. And the redesign is under a new leadership of Ashok Elaswamy. And so, Generation 3 is expected in 2026. Now, one of the things is true about Elon is level of extraordinary brilliance. It's just his prediction on timing isn't always on. So, any comments on this?

• 1:31:38Speaker 04

  So the robot got arthritis, is what I see from this. You know, I think there's a lot of issues to be worked out. For me, this is kind of normal organizational development. You're going to have peaks and valleys in building an organization, especially doing something as cutting-edge as this. So I don't give much think to the who left, who came, etc. I do think what they're attempting is so, so, so hard. And kudos that they're going after it, that's all.

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right, let's continue on this robot journey. This is something that I'm excited about seeing personally. So San Francisco Underground Robot Fight Club. So let's take a look at the video here. This video went viral.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  We see...

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  We see Unitree, G1 Humanoids. Actually, it looked like they were dressed in dresses

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  that are fighting, boxing in a cage fight held at Market Street. Anyway, two matches so far.

• 1:32:58Speaker 04

  This should really not be allowed. This will set the whole field back by 10 years. People are going to see this and say, there are too many weirdos doing stuff along this. It's going to be a problem.

• 1:33:08Speaker 00

  I think it's going to be interesting. As you know, Peter, I was in Paris at the Olympics as part of the Global Esports Federation's announcement with the IOC that esports are going to be Olympic sports. And what they're doing with the rings in moving towards validating athletes in the esports arena is they're actually moving also towards something called virtual sports. Virtual sports are not just twitch with your finger sports, but move your body sports. Virtual taekwondo, virtual fencing, virtual rowing. These are all going to become Olympic sports in the coming years. And they're also going to be moving from...

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  Traditional analogies to sports that we know, to sports like kiddich, you know, from Harry Potter, or humanoid robot fighting. And I think it's going to be quite entertaining if you can start to get teams from different countries advancing the field, the same way XPRIZE creates entirely new fields by putting up a challenge that a lot of R and D and energy goes into. If you have something like humanoid robot fighting and you're representing your country, I think a lot of energy is going to go into. First of all, it'd be exciting to watch, but it'll also advance the field.

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  I want the Megatronics. I want the giant robots out there battling. What, what, Salim? Come on.

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  I think it'll be a lot of fun.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  No, it's like F1 racing, dude. You're gonna have like, you're gonna advance the software, the hardware, all of it.

• 1:34:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, racing is fine. I think, I think fighting just sets a bad tone and, and sets up all sorts of issues.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  What could possibly go wrong? All right, here's another robot of types. This is an eVTOL, and I hate the term eVTOL, electric vertical takeoff or landing, because it like rolls off the tongue onto the floor. I'm calling these flying cars. So Archer Aviation with their midnight, their midnight flying car completed its first test flight in Abu Dhabi. And it's interesting, right? So the UAE, and Eric, you, Salim, and I have been there a bunch. They really have been on the cutting edge of adopting exponential technologies. So excited that Archer is there. Let me pair it with the following story as well, which, which is

• 1:35:28Speaker 03

  super beneficial for you and me, Eric, is that Archer has named the official air taxi provider for the LA Olympics in 2028. And look at this, they're gonna have, gonna be flying between SoFi Stadium, LAX, and Santa Monica. So I am so pissed. I'm a pilot. I fly out of Santa Monica Airport. That airport used to be over 5,000 feet, which was a decent size for getting decent sized aircraft in and out. It's been shortened to 3,000 feet to get rid of all the jets. And, and all the homeowners under the flight path were just complaining, complaining, complaining. And, you know, I

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  When that was going on, they'd have these signs in their front yard saying, no jets. And my son, who's named Jet, would be walking around and he'd see these signs. What's up with this? But as if those homeowners didn't realize it was an airport and that the aircraft were flying when they bought it. Um, anyway, pissed me off, but hey. Uh, the midnight flying car is a four passenger vehicle. Uh, and they'll be doing VIP travel. And get this, their objective is that the cost of travel is equivalent to an Uber X. So super cool. Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  This is, this is a technology that I think is so, uh, revolutionary. For me, this is a full Gutenberg moment because they're going to be incredibly safe. They can fly in most conditions. Uh, it'll unlock all sorts of real estate, which is scarce, but now becomes abundant.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Speaker 04

  And I think this becomes transformational for the human race. I mean, I was advising the Prime Minister of Thailand and I said, listen, just wait till, um, flying cars become available. You can land in Bangkok and fly somebody straight down to Phuket in one shot. It just completely changes the game. Uh, so can't wait for this.

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  Well, you know, who's, who's big into this in a, in a huge way, Steve Funk from our Abundance 360 group, but then also Stuart Walton from the Walton, you know, Walmart family. Uh, and Ross Perot Jr. From the Perot family. And it's like, why are they so big into this? And it's because they're more keenly aware that there's so many incredible places that very few people go to. Because there isn't an airport right there. So everybody goes to Vegas, goes to the same casinos, you know, why? Well, the airport's right there, you take a cab, you're there.

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Speaker 05

  You look around the world, there's so many better places you can go that are untouched. And this is the missing link.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  Between, between this and Starlink, right? You can live and work anywhere. You know, big shout out to Cyrus Segiri, who's been a member of our abundance faculty and runs Up Ventures. He's been backing all of these different companies. In particular, he's invested heavily into Beta and Beta's based in New Hampshire. It's backed by Dean Kamen, Martin Rothblatt. And Cyrus runs a huge conference called Up Venture, uh, called the Up Summit, uh, in, uh, in Bentonville. Uh, in partnership with a certain family down there.

• 1:38:38Speaker 05

  It actually bounces between Bentonville, where that certain family is, and then Plano, where the pros are, and Jackson, Wyoming, where Steve Funk is. They move it in a little triangle now.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Amazing, amazing.

• 1:38:51Speaker 05

  Do you know the range of these? Just out of curiosity.

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's typical, it depends upon the load, but we're talking about, you know, 100 miles thereabouts, right? But it's going to be mostly short haul. It's mostly going to be like 10 mile journey. It is getting from Manhattan to JFK. It is getting from from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium. It's those sorts of things. And the important thing is rapid charging and rapid on and off. So they're going to be building these vertiports, these, these physical structures that are made for the, the flying car to land, you know, do rapid charging, have the people come on and off, and then take off again. And they'll be flying, you know, they'll have pilots in them, at least for the time

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  being. But just like, what was Ahmad's statement, you know, the, about the value of humans in the loop becoming?

• 1:39:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, cognitive abilities going to negative.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So eventually the pilots will be, you know, there'll be a dog in there to keep the pilot from touching the controls as well.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  I mean, the last few commercial plane crashes have been because a pilot interfered when they shouldn't have.

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 04

  So this is a huge thing. I want to throw out a second order effect here.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Please.

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  If you look at Chicago Airport or Pearson Airport in Toronto at a 100 mile radius, there's something like 10,000 islands and lakes. And those become suddenly really valuable property, where somebody puts a container with satellite internet, water extraction, vertical farming, and you have a like, you can have a little pneumatic existence on demand.

• 1:40:30Speaker 05

  Well, if, you know, a lot of our family offices love to invest in real estate, but if anyone wants to contact Salim and say, hey, let's just set up a fund around the implications of this, like Ashenbrenner did with, with his fund.

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Speaker 05

  It's the biggest no brainer ever.

• 1:40:43Speaker 04

  To put into, so.

• 1:40:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, now's the time to, you know, Bill Grossman, who's on the pod, was saying that all of the land in the entire world where you can use pumped hydro, so you have water and a mountain, has all been bought already. Like, oh, my God, that happened quickly. So the implications of this would go quickly, too. So I might want to jump on it.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  All right, our last subject for today is energy. And again, just recalling the fact that the future of AI is tied to electricity production. Eric Schmidt said this on a podcast with Dave and I back a month ago, that AI is not chip limited, it's electron limited, it's the ability to produce energy. And while we've talked about, you know, small modular reactors and generation for fission plants coming on, something that I want to hit on is fusion. And fusion is finally here. I mean, I remember a day when you and I were at MIT together, you know, people talked about fusion, but it was always 50 years away and at holding.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  Well, we're finally here. There's probably, I think, last count was 37 privately funded fusion companies out there. Let's talk about two of them. The first is Helion, which is backed by Sam Altman, is beginning construction. It employs a magneto-inertial fusion approach. Each one of these companies is very different. Construction started on the Orion plant, which is a 50-megawatt plant. It's a test plant. It's relatively small, 50 megawatts. And it has got a commercial contract with Microsoft, planning to become operational by the end of 2028. I think it's the first plant planning to come online. Any comments on this?

• 1:42:25Speaker 05

  Well, I really feel like the new physics that Alex was talking, Alex Wosnagros was talking about is going to interact with this because the biggest problem in fusion has always been magnetic containment, which is just a very, very hard math and physics problem, which could get crushed by AI very quickly. And then suddenly we've moved the whole world to fusion.

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And it's, I find fascinating that Altman is backing this along with SoftBank. I mean, Sam is in so many different frontier companies. It's extraordinary.

• 1:42:58Speaker 05

  Well, you know, the thing about these particular investments, they're brilliant in the sense that you're investing in fusion, but almost all the work is concrete and generators and tying into the power grid. So if fusion works very quickly, you win. If fusion doesn't work really quickly, you go with small modular reactors and you win. Either way, you win. So they're very, very smart investments.

• 1:43:22Speaker 00

  I think it also speaks to the idea of the converging exponentials that you speak of, because a lot of the exponentials in some ways depend on power, certainly AI does. But if that's one of the exponentials, this actually becomes exponentially cheaper, heading towards zero to some degree. The domino effect on society is just massive as all of these things converge around what it means for like housing and poverty and the new forms of protein and new physics and new science. This is one of the unlocks for the explosion of the implications towards abundance.

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  Well, the other big unlock is, you know, historically, if you're building a power supply, and you said, okay, I'm gonna put a billion or two billion or five billion into this project, I need to then have a regulator say, now you can tap it into the grid, now we can sell it to households, which was not a given at all. Now you can say, no, the only customer I need is my data center. And if I can sell power beyond that, great. But if I can't, who cares? I'll just put more data center there. So that's a complete unlock as an investment thesis.

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

  That's brilliant. One of the other things they're doing is they're going, you know, one of the visions here is you go into a coal plant, and the coal plant has all the power lines coming in, it's got all the properties, containment and so forth, and you pull out the boiler that's being heated from coal, and you put in a fusion plant there to heat the boiler as well. Right? So, super interesting there.

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  I think there's a whole set of considerations to think about as we go from energy scarcity, which has been the paradigm for 10,000 years, to energy abundance. Right? And it just changes everything.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Let's move next to

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Another company, the nation state of China. China has bet 2 billion on fusion. So China bets an additional 2.1 billion on fusion this week. And they have the longest sustained fusion reaction going on right now. I think they're leading in this area today. Any comments on this one, Salim?

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  Well, I think this is, again, if I had to put a priority on the US, it would be energy generation, which then unlocks all the other things. And China is clearly making long-term strategic bets here. What I really like about this is once you achieve this, then energy becomes really cheap or virtually free for the whole planet because everybody can then copy, then replicate that. And that, the implications of that are just so profound.

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  I mean, the US is generating four terawatts of power, and it has been consistently for 20 years. At the same time, China has gone up to 10 or 10 terawatts of power, right? It's just, it's lapping us. A lot of that is solar, but it's everything, you know, it's not drill, baby, drill. It's build, baby, build in China. And, you know, I keep on hearing about the plans for, in the US, for natural gas, for coal, for fission, for fusion. And I don't hear a lot of conversation around solar. And that, it's kind of disappointing because the tech is there. When I fly over Santa Monica in my plane, I look out the window, you know, tens of

• 1:46:36Speaker 03

  thousands of rooftops with shingles on it and no solar. And you could be generating so much power.

• 1:46:42Speaker 05

  I tell you, fundamentally, though, the issue that investors are running into is if you build a fusion platform with traditional generators, water, you know, steam generators, you win with small modular, you win with fusion. If you go down the solar route, then you're putting, the panels generate electricity directly, there's no generators. It's just like a panel. And then you need massive amounts of storage. So if you invest heavily in solar and then suddenly fusion works, you're totally screwed. It's just a completely different thing. So that's the problem the investors are having, even though, like, if, if things stay exactly as they are, deploying solar by 200 gigawatts is absolutely the right thing to do.

• 1:47:27Speaker 05

  Everybody's just worried about, you know, imminent fusion, imminent small modular fission.

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  All right, our last article here comes from Boston, and this is Commonwealth Fusion. So Commonwealth Fusion has been noted to be the leading fusion company in the US. They have signed a 200-megawatt purchase deal with Google, and it's going to be in Virginia. Why? Because there's a lot of data centers in Virginia, and the plant is going to begin delivering energy and electricity in early 2030s. Let's listen to this video. And by the way, super proud to be having the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion on our stage at Abundance this coming March.

• 1:48:15Speaker 08

  CFS is the largest and leading private fusion company. With over 1,000 employees and $2 billion of capital invested, we're working to commercialize fusion power as fast as possible here at our headquarters in Devon's, Massachusetts. We're announcing a deepening of our strategic partnership with Google. As part of that, they'll off-take half the power of the first arc power plant. Additionally, they'll increase their investment in the company. And importantly, this partnership isn't just about the first power plant. We now have a strong demand signal that people want fusion power, and they're willing to do things like invest and commit to taking the power in order to help make it happen.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  All right. Any thoughts on Commonwealth Fusion?

• 1:48:55Speaker 05

  So Runus Chisonas from the board of MIT is now the biggest investor in this with his fund Safari Partners. And not coincidentally, I don't think, he called, said, want to put a lot more money into these AI startups. Okay, well, if fusion generates the power, the power goes in the data center, the AI startups use the data center. Makes perfect sense. So it's great. It's great to see this happen nearby with a lot of MIT involvement.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, love it.

• 1:49:21Speaker 05

  Very cool.

• 1:49:22Speaker 00

  What do you think the implications are in the AI race, though? Like, there's this common concept we've spoken about in the past, where whoever hits AGI or ASI first, six-month lead, you know, is ahead forever because of how exponentials work. And if we're restricting chips to the last generation to China, and we're actively trying to win this race, what is happening around this critical piece of that race, which is the power? How are we allowing ourselves to potentially fall behind? And what's the key lever?

• 1:49:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't think it affects the race with China. I think they're very, very good investments because we're going to use all the power for sure. But the race is entirely bound up at two layers, chip fabs and also algorithmic ideas. And those are the 10x and 100x force multipliers. If those get way ahead, we're just going to take the power from aluminum manufacturing. We're going to take the power from wherever. That's a problem, but it's not going to slow it down. It's going to happen because you can overbid by five or 10x versus residential use, manufacturing use. So it'll suck the power up one way or another. So it doesn't, it doesn't change the race outcome. It just, they're just good investments, that's all.

• 1:50:35Speaker 03

  All right, guys, as we wrap, you know, I'm expecting we're going to hear news from Google very soon. All right, we're going to hopefully see some, some announcements coming around Gemini 3. We're expecting to see what's the next version of Grok. Is it 4.2 is going to be released? Maybe?

• 1:50:56Speaker 05

  I guess.

• 1:50:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just so much, I mean, literally every single day, it's insane. So I hope all of you as listeners feel smarter after hearing this conversation. Eric, super happy to have you here, buddy. Thank you for your brilliance. It's great to be here. It's a lot of fun. Love it together. In fact, all of us are going to be heading over to Saudi in October for the FII summit. So that's going to be pretty amazing.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  Any, any particular news anybody wants to share before we, we call it a wrap?

• 1:51:27Speaker 05

  Keep, but keep a close eye on that, that Liputan at the White House thing. This is like the, everybody's going to get involved in this. Elon will be talking, Sam will be involved. This is, if you like the human drama side of things, this is going to be really interesting. I can't wait till the end of the day to see what the outcome of that is.

• 1:51:44Speaker 04

  Between that and the Ukraine conversations, it's a pretty surreal world right now.

• 1:51:48Speaker 03

  I would not want to be president.

• 1:51:50Speaker 04

  We've got our EXO workshop happening August. We have our EXO workshop happening August 20th, so people who want to sign up for that.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  Where do they go?

• 1:51:57Speaker 04

  They go, we'll put a link in, but we, it's the best hundred bucks you'll spend. We limited it. They sell out every month.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  Amazing, amazing. All right, guys. Love you all. Thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your brilliance. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta-trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta-trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short, two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta-trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies, and entrepreneurs

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmantis.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.

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