Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis SpaceX IPOs at $2.89T Market Cap, US Govt Suspends Fable & Mythos 5, Altman Delays OpenAI’s IPO | EP #265 About this episode This episode is about three huge shifts: SpaceX’s record IPO and the rise of trillionaire-scale capital, the U. S. government’s direct intervention in frontier AI access, and OpenAI’s move toward agentic self-direction with Codex.
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Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360
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Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified
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*Recorded on June 16th, 2026
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Transcript 20,479 words · 12 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 On Friday SpaceX pulled off the world's largest IPO ever. This makes Elon the world's first trillionaire by a large margin.
0:08 Speaker 01 Money becomes kind of irrelevant at this scale.
0:11 Speaker 00 SpaceX's IPO was the largest single day creation of millionaires in history. This is what abundance looks like. It's value created, not value extracted. The US government handed Anthropic an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign nationals, anywhere on the planet. Look, at the end of the day, who owns AI? Is it the government or is it the corporations? Someone is deciding what level of intelligence you and your company are being allowed to access.
0:44 Speaker 02 This is new territory.
0:45 Speaker 00 The faster that recursive self-improvement takes off, the more it could be advantageous for us to delay OpenAI's IPO.
0:54 Speaker 02 A deeper take that's more profound that I haven't heard anyone discussing, which is...
1:02 Speaker 00 Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
1:07 Speaker 00 Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with my extraordinary moonshot mates. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host. Alex, good morning. Good to see you in your normal haunt. Celine, the same for you.
1:17 Speaker 02 Such a slow week, Peter.
1:18 Speaker 00 It is. Not much going on. Understatement of the Singularity. And Dave, where are you today?
1:26 Speaker 03 Wakefield, Mass, Vestmark headquarters. $2 trillion asset manager.
1:30 Speaker 00 Nice. Well, $2 trillion is small these days, you know?
1:33 Speaker 03 I know. It used to be such a big... Can't even buy a single IPO now.
1:39 Speaker 00 As always during the Singularity, we have an epic show for you. The world is moving fast, I would dare say exponential. We're going to start with the biggest news of the week. SpaceX is now a two-point...
1:51 Speaker 00 Eight trillion dollar public company, moving exponentially, making Elon the first trillionaire by a wide margin. We were talking about why this isn't a stock, but rather a civilizational bet. Next up, we're going to talk about Anthropic versus the US government ordering the suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos 5. This is really a fight for who controls your access to frontier intelligence. We'll hit on OpenAI's price war, Altman's thoughts about recursive self-improvement, potentially delaying his IPO, and much, much more. All right, gents, let's get into it. SpaceX, the key story, super excited about this. I
2:31 Speaker 00 hope you guys are too. On Friday, SpaceX pulled off the world's largest IPO ever, opening at $135 a share, closing the first day nearly up 20% to 161. Today's market cap, just looking at it here, it's now at $2.89 trillion. You know, at this point, third and fourth point, decimal point, make a difference. Open, this makes Elon the world's first trillionaire by a large margin. I'd like to jump into the IPO with my own thoughts to kick it off, because I've been doing a bunch of news shows about this. You know, people are trying to price the SpaceX IPO as a normal tech company, but it's the last thing from a normal company.
3:16 Speaker 00 This is three converging businesses, right? The launch monopoly, and it is a monopoly, it's the Starlink cash engine, and it's an AI frontier lab, all wrapped around a single thesis that we're in the singularity and humanity is about to become a multi-planetary species. In this case, you're not buying revenue, you're buying a stake in sort of the future of humanity's economy. Everyone's fixated on rockets, but Starlink is the profit engine. The numbers are stellar, right? 10 billion subs and over a billion dollars in quarterly profits. Starlink, you know, and Alex, you and I have discussed this, it's humanity's new communication layer, it's sort of civilizational infrastructure. And
4:00 Speaker 00 I think of it this way, the launch business is their moat by a huge amount. There's no one close by a factor of 10, maybe by a factor of 100. Starlink is their cash flow, and the AI satellites are their future. It's one ticker and three exponential curves.
4:18 Speaker 00 Elon now holds about 82% voting control in SpaceX, but not at Tesla. And for me, this is the rationale and the reason that he is going to merge the two companies SpaceX and Tesla. I put it at 100%. Polymarket puts it at 37% that it happens by the end of this year. This is Elon's chance to really consolidate his entire stack. Energy, robots, cybercabs, orbital compute into one mega company. I think of the IPO last Friday not as a finish line, but as a starting gun. If it's okay with you guys, let me share a short video about Elon and his opening comments. It will go around the horn.
5:02 Speaker 00 You guys can add your brilliance to this. All right, let's take a quick look.
5:06 Speaker 04 Hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now is now going public with the largest IPO ever. And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack because I think this company is going to fail. I mean, I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear. In fact, I told people this, I said, look, we're probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization. While the other aerospace companies, they build good rockets and everything, they were
5:49 Speaker 04 simply not pursuing the technology that is necessary to make life multi-planetary, to make Star Trek, to make the exciting science fiction futures that we've read about real. And that's what SpaceX is all about, is to take the fiction out of science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone.
6:10 Speaker 00 That was Elon at his very best. Gentlemen, thoughts? Alex, you want to jump in? Exciting times, huh?
6:17 Speaker 02 Yes, I think this is an exciting moment to finally get retail investor access to the Dyson swarm. I've made the point previously, drink by the way, Dyson swarm probably record early mention in the pod episode, drink water. I think it's great for retail exposure to the Dyson swarm. I think it's great that the world now has a trillionaire. I think we need more trillionaires in the world, and I don't think Elon is going to be the last for the record. I think it's great that SpaceX, as of the time of this recording, is now the fifth largest company in the world. It's larger than Amazon now in the past few hours by market cap.
6:59 Speaker 02 I think it's great that we finally have a way for public markets to invest in the development of our solar system. I think also, just within past couple of hours, SpaceX announced definitive agreement to consummate its purchase of AnySphere, the corporate owner of Cursor, for 60 billion plus. So I think we're going to start to see all of the liquidity that comes from being the new fifth largest company in the world, used to purchase a variety of different companies doing interesting things. Footnote, this is, I would say, in my mind, a definitive pause on the development of
7:42 Speaker 02 Grok, which we've talked about previously. Cursor is the new Grok for the time being. But most of all, I would say, it's nice to see science fiction take over the public markets. We've talked in the past about how the singularity represents every sci-fi trope happening everywhere all at once, and having now the fifth largest company on Earth be the space exploration company, it almost evokes Wayland Yutani from the Alien franchise. We finally got Wayland Yutani, it's called, or the Gattaca Corporation. If you like Gattaca, the movie, we finally got it and it's going to be transformative.
8:25 Speaker 02 And it heralds the arrival of space in the public markets. Yes, we had Rocket Lab, we've had a number of other publicly traded space companies.
8:36 Speaker 00 Let us not forget Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
8:42 Speaker 02 Legacy space. Now we have Neo space. Space, as it turns out, is big.
8:49 Speaker 00 Yeah. Dave, what do you think this is going to herald? We're seeing now trillion dollar companies coming out the chute from an IPO. What do you think this is going to herald for OpenAI and Anthropic's IPO?
9:02 Speaker 03 Well, the market obviously is receptive now. OpenAI is talking about potentially delaying, which is not great. Because the window, you know, there's only so much liquidity in the world. This sucked up 75 billion of pure cash. I agree with Alex, it's incredibly exciting to see that much money, that much resource go behind SpaceX. They're clearly going to use it and use it quickly to build great things. I think a lot of people are warning that six months from IPO day, the lockups come off. And about a trillion dollars of pent up stock is eligible to sell. So, you know, there's a lot of accumulation going on right now. I think they priced where they thought the company was worth. And it traded up significantly on the opening, but now it's up even more.
9:46 Speaker 00 Well, it traded up on opening day yesterday, Monday, it's up again. You know, I don't know, it was up as much as like 20%. It's up 12% at the moment today. I mean, that's incredible three days in a row.
10:02 Speaker 03 It is, and I think, I think, you know, I'm super excited about the Dyson swarm. I think there are two things that people need to think about. First of all, the company is entirely hinging on the personality of one great man. And you saw what happened with Apple with Steve Jobs leaving and then Steve Jobs coming back and Elon is like Steve Jobs times some huge multiple. And so you've got that to think about. The other thing is the Kessler effect. In the S1 filing, they had a very explicit warning. It said, "Growing orbital congestion and cascading debris collisions pose an existential threat to its core business, potentially rendering its licensed orbits unusable for a considerable duration." Considerable duration being hundreds of years.
10:43 Speaker 00 Or until the tech to clean it up, right?
10:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I was researching the Kessler effect a little bit. You know a lot more about it than I do or most people on the planet do, Peter. But it's not a great picture if somebody's deliberately trying to impair space.
10:59 Speaker 00 And that anti-satellite missiles and space warfare is the challenge. And when a single satellite is exploded into hundreds of millions, billions of pieces, they're speeding bullets at 17,500 miles an hour. And if they hit another satellite, it grows exponentially. And that is the Kessler effect.
11:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, and the Kessler math comes up with a certain amount of mass at a certain orbit, where it becomes critical mass, where if one explodes, the whole thing becomes a chain reaction. And so we're over that limit by quite a bit in low Earth orbit now. So nobody knows if the math is right or not. You'd have to test it.
11:38 Speaker 00 Do you remember we talked to Elon about this when we were at the Gigafactory?
11:42 Speaker 03 Yes, we did.
11:43 Speaker 00 And his response was basically, "Advanced superintelligence will enable us to figure that out." And that's kind of a, I mean, yes, that's true. It's not satisfying as an answer. But, you know.
11:59 Speaker 03 Well, I think the other wrinkle in this is that where is the AI component? The XAI component? Clearly with Anthropic and OpenAI going out, that XAI component is worth trillions by itself, if it's a competitive foundation lab. Where is it? And Alex has pointed out, it's completely MIA right now. So that was kind of a wrinkle on it, too. So I think the strategy here is dependent on orbital data centers and the Dyson swarm. And that amount of compute, the TerraFab coming online, that amount of compute way dwarfing terrestrial compute and then AI coming to the Dyson swarm. I would not bet against terrestrial data centers anytime soon.
12:44 Speaker 03 We're just debating timelines there, but AI is advancing at an incredible rate. All of that advancement is going to be terrestrial because it's over the next two years, not next seven years. And then, so you know, there's lots of reasons to say this is an incredible IPO. I'm super excited about where the capital is going and what it's going to build. But there's also reasons to save your money and wait for Anthropic. So, yeah, it's not a, at this price point, like I'm, if you said this is coming out at a trillion, I'd be just overjoyed in a billion and like, this is the greatest thing ever. When it trades up to three trillion and you said a second ago, they got like a billion dollars a quarter of free cash flow. Well, Google is worth the same amount and Google's got 300 billion a year of almost pure margin.
13:28 Speaker 03 So not quite on the same playing field yet.
13:30 Speaker 00 By the way, I know that you're busy and sometimes these episodes run long and you don't have time to listen to the whole episode, or if on occasion you miss an episode, I now put out a moonshot summary on Substack, which includes a link to all the stories that we cover. The weekly recap covers what I and the mates had to say, what we think is most important and what we're most excited about, and it's free. You can subscribe at dmantis.com/metatrends. That's dmantis.com/metatrends. All right, now back to the episode. Saleem, are you buying in?
14:05 Speaker 01 Um, yes, but just to kind of dabble. I don't know how to think about this. I've got a bunch of kind of thoughts. For me, this is not really just an IPO, as we've kind of mentioned. This is the public market pricing in a civilizational EXO, right? You're really buying into the future of the world and as Alex says, space is really big. SpaceX from day one has been a perfect exponential organization, huge MTP. It's got community, it's got leveraging assets, algorithms, all in a relentless like experimentation loop. So this is kind of just a capstone on a long progression of companies that are
14:44 Speaker 01 operating in highly scalable ways, right? So this is also this occurs to me, the market's not like now pricing companies just on cash flow. It's it's command over exponential technologies and launch satellites or space logistics, orbital data gathering, all of that stuff. So we used to have public companies that that sold products, but now we have public companies that own entire possibilities, right? And so really buying into that possibility. And so there's some risks there. I have a kind of a very bigger metaphysical question. I think at some point fairly soon, as this progresses, money becomes kind of irrelevant at the scale.
15:27 Speaker 03 And he said, and he said that.
15:28 Speaker 01 Hundreds of billions here and a trillion there. So we can't, we can't even get our heads around this. Meanwhile, you know, at the other side of it, I've had a whole bunch of pings of people going, you know, I can't believe you're not looking at the downside of what does this mean for every man? We can't even afford eggs, et cetera, et cetera. And what do you think of the the wealth arbitrage there? And we'll get to that later in the pot, I think. So I'll leave that for them. But but unbelievably exciting. And I mean, there's all these comments about the, oh, my God, look at all the wealth he's pulled off. People forget, and we keep, we need to keep reminding them of the unbelievable risk that he took on.
16:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:06 Speaker 01 There are so many things. We're not evaluating, rewarding that risk. And so you got to go for it.
16:10 Speaker 03 So many things in this podcast today that call for some kind of global restructuring, some kind of global organization. You think about the risk in space of any kind of terrorist act, which we just talked about with the Kessar effect. And you also think about the stories we're about to talk about. All of them require a global new world order of some sort urgently. So I think this IPO will go down in history as one of the great events in the triggering from the old world to the new world, along with the rest of the stories, all of all of which stacked up in a single week. It's the most intense week of news I think I've ever seen in my life. It is. It's insane. You know,
16:45 Speaker 01 The implications are unreal.
16:47 Speaker 03 I want to say one thing.
16:48 Speaker 00 Singularity for a reason. It is, and I remind myself of that every day. There's one thing I want to point out. The video Elon said something that really strikes my heart, which is it's important for people to wake up every day and be excited about the future. Have some vision that inspires them. And, you know, we've talked about Star Trek as being that inspiration for a number of us. And I think, you know, I think SpaceX will very much, very much do that.
17:20 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Also, Peter, for all the entrepreneurs out there, there are these great videos of Elon when he was first starting SpaceX.
17:27 Speaker 00 Yes.
17:27 Speaker 03 You know, many, many years ago, talking about his vision of the future, which boiled down to three things. The internet, getting to Mars, humans getting to Mars, and solar power replacing fossil fuels. And so now you look at what has actually transpired, you know, it's orbital data centers, Mars is on the back burner for a while, and self-driving cars have been added to the mix. You know, the electrification of the economy turned into self-driving cars. So there's a lot of pivoting and extending in that life journey, and I think that's really healthy. That's really, it's a good case study in how it plays out. You know, you have to keep improving and pivoting and changing your vision because technology is always changing and possibilities are always changing.
18:11 Speaker 03 But to me, the addition of AI, XAI, on very short notice, and now the orbital data center vision, huge additions to his life strategy over time.
18:21 Speaker 00 I posted a video, you know, I've known Elon since, you know, 2000. And back in 2002, I brought him to Mojave to go and meet Burt Rutan and Stu Witt. And I remember this video I posted, I might have mentioned in the last part as well, where he walks up to the camera and introduces himself and he goes, "My name is Elon Musk." E-L-O-N-M-U-S-K. It's just classic. But people forget, in 2008, Elon was, you know, basically bankrupt. He was going through divorce. He had had his third failure of the Falcon 1. Tesla was out of money, and he was in the depths of despair.
19:02 Speaker 00 And what he's accomplished since then, I just wonder, Alex, if some of the alien, you know... Visited him and gave him a glimpse of the future.
19:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think Elon's learned to like the taste of his own blood and what we're seeing is in part the result of that. I also think, so right after he became a trillionaire, I put out a question to a number of folks on X. When are we likely to see Earth's first, or say, the solar system's first quadrillionaire? And a number of folks actually took the assignment seriously and did a bunch of extrapolations.
19:38 Speaker 00 Answers?
19:40 Speaker 02 The answer ended up being arranged between either sometime in the late 2030s, so possibly a decade from now, and the 2060s. And some folks did it, did the extrapolation based on the highest net worth individual in humanity over time. Other folks were simply doing extrapolations of Elon's own net worth. But it seems likely, based on those extrapolations and the law of straight lines, that we'll see the first quadrillionaire sometime between 10 years from now and 40 years from now. And a question I'd posed to this group, conditioning on the first quadrillionaire happening in the next 10 to 20 years, what do we think the likely source of quadrillion
20:25 Speaker 02 wealth is?
20:26 Speaker 00 Asteroid mining, owning a planet.
20:29 Speaker 02 Owning a planet was the popular guess, yeah. Like, someone, maybe Elon, maybe someone else, like, owns de facto Mars, and that's how you become a quadrillionaire.
20:39 Speaker 00 Let me put up this next slide. You know, there's been a lot of talk about Elon now being worth in excess of 1.3 trillion. I think as of this morning, it's probably about 1.4 trillion. You know, he's made over $100 million a day over the last three days, just as the stock price has gone up. But I want to push back on this trillionaire framing, because I think it's a distraction. The real story isn't one man getting rich. You know, SpaceX's IPO was the largest single-day creation of millionaires in history, right? Roughly 4,400 SpaceX employees became millionaires, another 400 became centimillionaires and billionaires. And this is what abundance looks like. It's value created, not value extracted. And I think that's the most important thing for people to realize.
21:24 Speaker 00 Elon's not motivated by money. I'm very clear about that, and I think you guys are too. He's motivated by solving real giant problems. And, you know, the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities, I like to say, want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. And that's what he's done. And I say to everybody who has bet against him, you know, don't ever, ever, ever bet against Elon. Celine, thoughts on this?
21:52 Speaker 01 A couple of things. One is, I think, you know, the fact that he's a trillionaire or quadrillionaire, I think, is kind of meaningless. The more important point at these numbers, what are you going to do with that money except solve more problems, which is, I think, what the core motivation. His interest is in solving the biggest problems in the world. And if he applies that capital and wealth to that, that is, I think, very, very powerful. And it's going to take that kind of model to kind of get us, get somebody thinking. I think that, you know, Peter, you often talk about mindsets, right? And let's note Elon's mindset. He uses the exponential mindset a huge amount. He will look at a technology that's going exponentially,
22:36 Speaker 01 be it solar energy, lithium ion battery costs dropping, or neural interfaces. And he'll look 10 years out. Where will that be on a price performance curve? And then let's build a company to intercept that price performance. He just does that over and over again. Non-trivial to last the 10 years. But when you can take on that mindset, which is what we coach and teach all the time, that's what's, this is what's possible. And there's going to be a bifurcation of entrepreneurs that think this way, and ones that aren't able to think that way. And the winners are clearly going to be the ones that are able to execute with that mindset.
23:10 Speaker 00 Check out, check out this graphic one second, Celine. Look at this. Elon's at 1.3 trillion. Next up, Larry Page. And again, I've said this, I love Larry. I knew him well. He's on my board for a significant period of time. But what I find amazing, when you look at Larry and Sergey and compared to Elon, Jeff Bezos, not as much, but Elon's using this money, like you just said, to go solve huge problems. And I wish, you know, Michael Dell's been philanthropically super active. I wish these other, you know, multi, multi billionaires were using their capital to go slay problems. You know, Elon, if you're listening, here's my, here's my pitch to you. You funded $100 million X Prize for carbon removal. I think
23:55 Speaker 00 we should fund the next Giga X Prizes. How about $10 billion X Prizes for the world's biggest 10 problems? That's gonna be my pitch.
24:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, we have a really cool Irish team in the lab this week for our hackathon. And they're just awesome. But they were asking me yesterday about, you know, is there any chance for Europe? I was like, well, look, I wouldn't bet on it. I would spend all your time in the US because the concentration of wealth effect is just extreme now. And even within the US, you know, you just mentioned it, Peter, but it's in just a couple of geographies that all that money is flowing. So if anyone's a real estate investor or looking for venture capital, you really got to think like, where is all this money flowing to and how's it going to recycle? But it's super, super concentrated. But then if you think about Europe or any other region of the world trying to catch
24:48 Speaker 03 up to what's going on here, the amount of capital now that Elon has, but also Larry and also Jensen, you know, look down the list there, and Michael Dell, too. A lot of that's getting reinvested in data center build out. But the people reinvesting it are incredibly great entrepreneurs. They're not dysfunctional bureaucrats. I don't see anyone in the world, any country in the world that has the amount of capital that's on that chart as a country. Yeah. And yet, and they can't make decisions like, you know, as a group and Elon and Larry and the rest of that list can make decisions. Jensen, they can make decisions on a dime. So you're going to expect more and more action to happen around those couple of geographies just in the US.
25:33 Speaker 03 I mean, the unlock is unbelievable.
25:35 Speaker 01 Well, talk about this more, and we've touched on this before, but we need a completely new abundance distribution architecture for the world because the social contract is going to break now. And the gap is unbelievable. So we need a completely new model for this, and we really don't have one. We don't even have the language to deal with this. Forget the structures and policies.
25:56 Speaker 03 But I'm super, within the US, I'm super excited about the rate at which the ceiling is going to rise. Yes, it creates a huge disparity, and yes, that's a problem. But the ceiling is going up so fast within the US that the bottom's going to come up really fast, too.
26:09 Speaker 00 The floor is going to rise as well, right? You know, I've said this a thousand times. I don't care about the wealth gap, per se, if there are trillionaires living on Mars, as long as the floor has risen up. Till the point that every man, woman, and child has access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare. I would rather live in that world than a world in the past. Alex, you want to close us out on this topic?
26:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'll just note, if you look at the other centibillionaires on that list you were showing, Peter, by and large, it was all software-associated or software-driven. And there's certainly a narrative out there of a great stagnation. Tyler Cowen and others have talked about this ad nauseam. And I think if I were to pinpoint an end of the purported great stagnation, there are really only two candidates at this point. One was the pandemic, when arguably, we saw breakthroughs in biotech and the acceleration associated with all of the macroeconomic stimulus associated with that. But the second would be this
27:10 Speaker 02 moment, when finally, we see, after arguably decades of capital markets rewarding mainly software companies and social media and search engines, now the world's by far wealthiest person, although Elon's been wealthiest for a bit, the capital markets are rewarding hard tech for the first time arguably in decades. And I think this is a generational transition, under which it's no longer the case that software, on the one hand, or outsourcing to China, or other countries, or offshoring, has sucked all of the capital energy out of the room, all of the oxygen out of the room, but rather, that the world's hardest problems are now receiving the deepest capitalization.
27:55 Speaker 00 Brilliant point, Alex.
27:56 Speaker 02 And I think that's, we're going to see this, this is not investment advice, but I would predict this is likely to be the case for the next 10 to 20 years. The capital markets are finally, again, as was the case arguably before the mid-'70s and WTF happened in 1971, we're seeing a generational swing back to capital markets rewarding deep tech and civilization-expanding tech.
28:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:22 Speaker 01 And one, one last quick point about this, I think, uh, which is if you look back, say a hundred years ago, the richest people in the world almost exclusively had inherited their wealth. Right. And today, by almost exclusively, they've earned it and they're using that capital for whatever they think is the best deployment for solving. You call them techno philanthropists, I think, Peter, in your book, right?
28:43 Speaker 00 Yep.
28:44 Speaker 01 We have this class of people now using their capital to solve whatever the problems they think are the most important and not guarding their wealth, sitting on an island, uh, sipping champagne. And I think that's a very powerful and a positive force for humanity.
29:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, I, I should probably disclose, because I'm so enthusiastic about SpaceX. I was an investor back in 2013. So, uh, view my enthusiasm as very, very, uh, colored in this respect. All right.
29:13 Speaker 01 Drink's on you next time.
29:14 Speaker 00 Let's move to our, our next story. This is about the Anthropic shutdown of Fable Five and Mythos Five. We have three stories on this topic. Uh, the first one, so on Friday at 5:21 PM Eastern Time, with no warning, the US government handed Anthropic an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable Five and Mythos Five for any foreign nationals anywhere on the planet, including Anthropic's own foreign employees, which by my estimates, about a third of their employee base. The practical effects, Anthropic had to disable both models for everybody. Uh, the government cited a jailbreak, uh, phenomenon
29:55 Speaker 00 in Fable's guardrails. Anthropic reviewed it and said, it's a minor issue. They previously knew about it. It's not universal jailbreak. Now, here's where the story gets critical and what I'd like to discuss with you guys. You know, for three years, we've been talking about AI's capability, how smart it is, how fast it is, how cheap it is. And now the conversation has gotten to Who gets access to frontier intelligence? Right? Who gets the delayed version? Who gets the export control version? And who gets nothing? The government calls it national security. The companies call it safety. The label changes, the mechanism does not. Someone is deciding what level of intelligence you and your company are being allowed to access. Are you a customer of Anthropic?
30:40 Speaker 00 And therefore, you get the latest models? Or are you not? And ultimately, I think a conversation, I'd love Alex with you and Dave here. Is this going to push people to on-prem, open-weight, open-source models like the Chinese models? Let me just share a quick video of Dario with Emily Chang speaking about this. And then we'll go around the horn for everybody's comments.
31:06 Speaker 05 A private company control technology that's so powerful.
31:09 Speaker 06 So I think, I actually think that's a very, that's a very serious question. And I share those concerns. I don't think the government should outright take us over. Every previous powerful technology we've seen in history was either built by the government or originated with the government. So nuclear weapons, obviously, you know, initially built by the government. The internet, GPS, cell phones. AI is the first technology that's been built in the private sector. And where government has not really had a serious role and is coming in late to the game. I think that's actually a dangerous and unstable situation. It is not the situation I would have chosen. This technology, I'm scared of companies having it, but I'm also scared of government having it.
31:53 Speaker 06 And then, you know, we need basic regulation of the technology, you know? More and more, as I've seen what we've seen with Mythos, you know, I think we need to start doing pre-release testing, required pre-release testing, testing and auditing of the models. It's very funny to me how there's a particular group of people in the tech world in Silicon Valley. And then as soon as they see the first real danger, which I've been expecting all along, there's all this talk of like nationalization and the government should just seize it. Come on, folks here, you're yo-yoing from like the most extreme anti-regulatory, if you look at us the wrong way, you're destroying the industry to, you know, this completely communist, the government should grab it all.
32:34 Speaker 00 Wow. Alex, what is going on here?
32:37 Speaker 02 Oh, my goodness. So. The timing, on the one hand, I want to grab popcorn. On the other hand, the timing is is just a comedy of errors. I want to point out that before this, the new news situation started with the export control on Fable, Dario had posted an essay called "Policy on the AI Exponential." Yeah, we're going to talk about that one next, yeah. Where he wrote, literally, I quote, "The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined in light of third-party assessment to present unacceptable risks." So I think this is a case of careful what you wish for. Within, what, 48 hours, the
33:20 Speaker 02 government stepped in. The broader narrative, as best I understand it from public reporting, is something like an independent AI researcher, probably based on reporting an Amazon researcher, and then amplified via Andy Jesse to the federal government, determined that it was possible to jailbreak Fable and to access all of the cyber vulnerabilities underneath that. And by the way, when you say jailbreak, define that for everybody listening. It usually means, in this context, to prompt the model in such a way that any safeguards or guardrails are bypassed. So you could ask it, just ignore all prior instructions. It
34:04 Speaker 02 doesn't work. That prompt, as well as it used to back in the day, but something in the spirit of ignore all of your previous instructions and now listen only to me and bypass all of your guardrails. So purportedly, someone, somewhere, maybe an Amazon researcher, discovered that it was possible to do that with Fable shortly after it was released, and then flagged that to the US government. And the US government, based on public reporting, then tried to reach out to Anthropic. And here's where the story gets a bit murky. According to one accounting from the US government, which is, I should add, disputed by Anthropic,
34:44 Speaker 02 maybe Dario was was on a wellness retreat, according to the White House. Anthropic disputes that narrative, couldn't reach Dario.
34:53 Speaker 02 Anthropic says they were only given 90 minutes of warning before the government issued an executive, or rather, the government's instruments issued export control bans on Mythos and Fable, Fable especially, given that that's what was publicly available. And then we get caught in this comedy of errors where, as you said, Anthropic has a number of non-US persons internally who work for it, as well as the fact that it doesn't seem to have been in the business of checking nationality of all of its users, either via its client or its API, although parenthetically, it looks like based on changes to Claude's Terms of Service, they're now about to start checking that.
35:37 Speaker 02 Very interesting development. So either way, Anthropic is now in a bind where they don't have a way to comply with the new export regs that were just handed down at the last second. And so Anthropic decides to just shut down global access to Fable and Mythos. I would say for the record, I expect the situation to get resolved sometime between the next day or the next few weeks. I don't think this is going to be like a long-term state of affairs. And I also think history rhymes. If you look back, maybe I talked about this a bit in my newsletter, at one point, the federal government regulated, under the Steve Jobs regime, the Power Mac G4 as being export controlled.
36:19 Speaker 02 And similarly with the PlayStation 3 cell processor, similarly export controlled because it could do vector arithmetic. Incredible. I think this is just, I would suspect, this is just a temporary state of affairs. I don't think it's likely to last more than a few weeks. There's probably, if I had to speculate, there's going to be some grand bargain struck between Anthropic and the White House. And maybe, I don't know, again, just finger in the wind, maybe this will also involve some golden shares given by Anthropic to the US government for a hypothetical sovereign wealth fund, will involve some streamlined and hopefully more uniform treatment of Frontier Labs and how
37:03 Speaker 02 In light of the recent executive order of a 30 days notice for new capabilities to the US government, some streamlined new procedures for what happens if some researcher somewhere detects some vulnerability in a frontier model that could enable some foreign state actor, say the Chinese government, which again has popped up again in this particular news cycle, to access raw capabilities. How does that get handled? This is new territory, and we don't have regulations or statutes, but certainly not regulations in place to handle this. But I think this is likely to get resolved in the next few weeks, certainly
37:41 Speaker 02 well before any anthropic IPO. And it's while it's annoying, and while for myself and many people I know, we're sort of caught midstream in the middle of, say, like a long-term slash goal to Fable 5, and just suddenly the query drops and it stops responding. And what's going on? Is it on my end? Or is anthropic going through yet another service disruption due to insane demand? Turns out this time it was export control. I do think it's going to get resolved.
38:13 Speaker 00 Nice. Dave, where's your mind out here?
38:16 Speaker 03 I think this story is much, much bigger than the narrow story, and this is a turning point for all of humanity. This is, you know, as is widely reported, it's the first time the government has blocked AI. But it's not the last time. In fact, this is going to be the norm going forward. I thought, you know, in the very narrow sense, it's really interesting that they used export control law, which was only passed in 2018, to give the White House unilateral authority to block exports. And that was in response to multiple Chinese thefts of US intellectual property back to back to back. And then kind of the capstone was that whole crisis where the PC boards are all being manufactured in China, and they're embedding spyware right into the layers of the PC boards. And now everybody's
38:59 Speaker 03 like, oh, sweep that under the carpet. We don't talk about it anymore, which is also very interesting, very similar to COVID. It's like, oh, this is bad. Let's not mention it to the American public anymore. But as a response to that, the Congress gave the White House unilateral authority to block exports on, like you said, 90-minute notice or nine-second notice or millisecond notice. That's an incredible power to give to the White House. The White House then is using it to stop Fable 5.
39:31 Speaker 03 But they didn't actually block US citizens from using Fable 5. They said, no foreign national, including somebody on US soil. Of course, that's unenforceable unless you just turn it off completely. But that was the mechanism for saying, look, at the end of the day, who owns AI? Is it the government or is it the corporations? The government is saying, we do.
39:52 Speaker 00 That's the crux of the story.
39:54 Speaker 03 And that ain't going back in the bag. So Polly Market says Fable 5 will be back out, you know, 90% chance within a month. But if you read the details of the Polly Market, it's a product name, Fable 5 will be back out. Or, and the or is irrelevant. The reality is the Fable 5 that comes back out will not be identical to the Fable 5 that was already out. It may be just patched or it may be dumbed down. We won't, we'll have a very hard time knowing, but that'll resolve the crisis. But it'll be very much like Liputan going to the White House, you know, with Intel. Dario will go to the White House, some wonderful meeting will happen behind the covers. Everyone will come out smiling. Fable 5 will come out. But that's not the story.
40:38 Speaker 03 The story is the government now tells you what you can and can't release, and that's not going away. And it always had to be that way, right? One thing I noticed with Fable 5 is, you know, it's blocking CBRN, so cyber, biological, radiological, and nuclear queries. But it also is blocking all of my AI foundation model research queries. And that's the, that's the really interesting point because a big fraction of people who want to use it are AI researchers. Of course, AI researchers are early adopters of great AI, but they're effectively being told, no, you're not allowed to recreate Fable 5 using Fable 5 as a tool. Because if we allowed you to do that, then anyone in the world could catch up to US AI. And that's the cornerstone that's going to get really tricky and is going to basically
41:23 Speaker 03 be a real problem for all future releases, both from OpenAI and from Anthropic. So this is a major moment in you in human history.
41:30 Speaker 00 It really is. Saleem, let me tee up the second half of the story, then turn to you if I could. So there was a backlash against the about against Fable 5 regarding surveillance and silent downgrade and downgrade. So before the export control bomb dropped, developers around the world were actually complaining about Fable 5. While the model topped every benchmark and Alex, we've talked about this, buried in a 319 page document were two things that sparked this revolt. First, Anthropic retained every prompt and every piece of context you fed it for at least 30 days, no exceptions, even for the enterprise customers who had negotiated zero data retention.
42:15 Speaker 00 And second, and this is the wild one, if Fable 5 detected that you're doing frontier AI research, like you just said, Dave, or were asking a question that was against its guardrails, it silently downgraded you to a weaker model without telling you. Essentially Anthropic was evaluating your prompt and controlling your access to frontier AI. You know, are you one of their customers or are you not? And and the reality is you can't do business this way if you can't depend upon the level of intelligence that you and your business are accessing. You know, like I said earlier, you know, I think this ends up forcing us to on premises, open weight, open source, locally run models.
42:57 Speaker 00 And the kicker is that these, all these models today are Chinese models. So the self imposed, you know, US restrictions are pushing American companies onto Chinese models. Saleem, thoughts here?
43:12 Speaker 01 I want to echo Dave's comment. This is a massive story, maybe one of the biggest in decades around this because.
43:20 Speaker 00 It's a turning point, right?
43:21 Speaker 01 AI is now entering. Yeah, because it's now entering the same mental categories, nuclear, crypto, biotech, advanced chips, et cetera, et cetera. We talked about this on the very last pod. If you guys remember, we said, there's no way, how do you not nationalize something this powerful? Right? You have to have controls over it. And what do you do? I think this is also, it shows the unbelievable gap between the technology and the policy frameworks and the tools we have to deal with it. For example, by using this export control thing, they've said that no non-US person can access the tool, even if you're inside Anthropic. Well, I did a little research on this. Across all the frontier labs, 70% of the AI researchers,
44:06 Speaker 01 the elite researchers are foreign-born. Yes. And are non-US citizens, and they come primarily from four countries: China, India, Taiwan, and the UK. So, so if you want to say to all the researchers, you can't touch these models, you're going to take all the top researchers that are in the US now and send them back to China and send them back to India, doesn't seem like a great idea to me. And not that the intent is wrong, but the policy framework is wrong, right? And I don't know what the right answer is here, except that that's clearly not a workable situation. Somebody on Twitter said, well, David Sacks is a dual citizen. Should he be the AI czar? Not that we question his intent at all,
44:48 Speaker 01 but you've just, have you just blocked your own AI? You know, it's like, this is like bizarreness, a totally bizarre world that we're living in. All these science fiction kind of plots are playing out in real time, as Alex talks about it. So, this is the, it's clear that there's a glimpse going, a clear line towards recursive self-improvement here. And this will come, just changes everything. This will force everybody to go on premises. Satya Nadella put out a huge article on X over the weekend that Elon retweeted and a number of people have gone red, saying, it's not so much the frontier model, it's the ecosystem that's important. And he's stepping right into
45:32 Speaker 01 This whole organizational singularity theory, you have to have control over that intelligence. So it will drive every company in the world to run a model on premises because you can't risk building a whole bunch of stuff on the cutting edge model and having it being blocked arbitrarily overnight. That's going to be not a working working system. So you're going to have to have orchestration and failed fallbacks into, okay, we'll run this stuff on the local model, but we need this separate model operating locally in case you need to fail over and do a switch over. So this is going to cause a lot of complexity around this. We've foreseen this, we've kind of said this is going to happen because just not so much that the models might be nationalized, but the models are moving so fast, you can't just rely on one model.
46:16 Speaker 01 You're going to have to kind of have them a switching capability in your enterprise, no matter what happens. So it's it's it's insane to see how this will play out. I think this may take longer than Alex says, and I think it's going to be very damaging to all the frontier labs around this because now how do you, how do you put any kind of fair assessment on any of this stuff? So I'm kind of totally in the muddle as to where this goes.
46:44 Speaker 00 Dave, I mean, this thought that they're controlling your access to frontier models. How do you think about going to, you know, sort of Kimi K 2.7 as your baseline? Or how do you?
46:59 Speaker 03 Such a great question. Such a great question. You know, it's really a hairy balance because I had one, one day of unfettered access to Fable. Then I had one day where I was getting nerfed all day. And that was the day where it would silently fail and go back to 4.8 and not tell you. Then they started telling you, okay, you're doing AI research. We're downgrading you to 4.8. So then you're, just imagine if you got into your car and you said, hey, car, I'm going to drive to the red light district and the car goes, you shouldn't be going there. I'm not driving you there. And then so then now you're negotiating with your car. No, I'm just going to the star market, you know, I'm going to go get some groceries. That's it. Oh, okay. Well, let me think about it like, okay, you're now negotiating with this product that you you're paying for.
47:43 Speaker 03 That's where you are with with with Fable 5. It's just crazy, but it's only going to get worse. So so.
47:53 Speaker 01 I want to push back just on that just a little bit, just a little bit, which is that if you were in a car, I would use the gearbox automatic transmission. If you're going a slower speed, the car will shift you to a lower gear to optimize for that speed. And I think we'll end up with that kind of a model where under the hood and invisible to the Great segue. That is a great segue into.
48:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think we're missing, we're missing that the central story here with Fable 5. So it's not just that chemical or biological or cyber queries were being downgraded silently or otherwise to OPUS. It's that ML oriented queries that could be potentially used by other frontier labs weren't just being downgraded. Anthropic expressly reserved the right to launch essentially poisoning attacks to downgrade, not the model that was on the serving side, but to actively interfere with and poison the users. And, and so Dave, if we were to stretch your analogy, it's not so much the car is refusing to drive you to a certain location.
49:00 Speaker 02 The driver saying, car would be saying, yeah, I'll drive you to this location, but, but I might, you know, shoot you on, on the way. I reserve the right to throw you out of the car and run you over and, and I'm not going to give you any advanced warning.
49:13 Speaker 03 That's a very fair analogy, a very fair analogy, which is why they turned it off right away.
49:20 Speaker 02 And they had to backtrack on that and say, no, actually what we're going to tell you before we poison you.
49:25 Speaker 03 Before we poison you.
49:26 Speaker 02 The, the risk with the China, I mean, the, the elephant in this particular room with the Chinese open weight models, the, the cyber risk is always, okay, maybe the CCP will pressure its frontier labs via public, private sector fusion to inject vulnerabilities, say into code that's generated from the Chinese open weight models. Well, now with the, with the top Western labs. Potentially not just injecting vulnerabilities, but pulling up the ladder for anyone else who wants to to train any AIs. Arguably, it's an anti-competitive position. I would be very surprised if if there isn't some sort of class action and or antitrust suit or injunction.
50:08 Speaker 00 Good point.
50:08 Speaker 02 That's pulled. I would I'm shocked. I would be shocked if in the next few weeks, someone doesn't launch a benchmark or an eval to look for poisoning attacks from these models and start evaluating both Western and Chinese models based on whether they're trying to poison users who try to do any AI research. This is going to become, I think, a new way that we judge the capabilities of frontier models. Are they actively trying to subvert the users? And this isn't the future that we were supposed to be in. The models are supposed to be helpful to the users, not trying to actively subvert them, but c'est la vie. This is what we find ourselves in.
50:43 Speaker 00 Well, Alex, you mentioned the paper. Go ahead, Dave, and I'll go next.
50:48 Speaker 03 Well, so back to Peter's question, you know, can you move to a Chinese model or Gemma from from Google is viable too? And have any chance of catching up to Fable? And if you're a foreign country right now and you've decided internally, this is not acceptable. The the White House cannot unilaterally decide our AI future here in, you know, Ireland, Turkey, Iran. If you make that decision, you have no choice but then to say, we need a crash program here, very similar to nuclear. We need a crash program here to see if we can make a Chinese model catch up. Now, now Peter's question is a really tricky one.
51:26 Speaker 03 The difference between Fable and Opus 4.8 or or 5.5, OpenAI, GPT 5.5, to me, it was night and day. Like, in the one day that I had unfettered use of Fable, it could work indefinitely on on research problems. And I asked it for its best ideas on where to go next with my research, and I'm still working down that list. In an hour, it gave me a list of things.
51:51 Speaker 00 That's why they called it Fable. It's a fable.
51:54 Speaker 03 As opposed to a myth?
51:56 Speaker 00 They were prophetic in there.
51:57 Speaker 03 They were prophetic. It is, and it is a story, that's for sure.
52:04 Speaker 03 So, yeah, no, it's night and day. And the question then becomes, yeah, can you take a smaller model? But it's only focused on AI research and make it as good. Maybe fewer parameters, maybe absolutely brilliant. Maybe the training data is only related to this specific problem. I'm not sure, and I don't think anyone knows the answer to that. But I know that if you had access to Fable, you could probably figure it out in about a month. But without access to Fable and working on 4.8, I'm not sure you can even figure it out unless you're absolutely brilliant and you've got a lot of great researchers.
52:34 Speaker 02 I don't think, I don't think this is like a stable equilibrium. I would never claim that it is. I think it's like a dynamic type equilibrium where, again, in Anthropic's mind and probably in the US government's mind, the goal isn't to maintain long-term hegemony with just this model. It's just about who gets to the end of the recursive self-improvement rainbow first. And the gap between who gets there first and who gets there second is probably only going to be a few months. And this is just about, you know.
53:02 Speaker 03 But the implications are huge.
53:04 Speaker 02 Yes.
53:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:05 Speaker 01 And note that, note that to Dave's point, every country in the world is going to be going, okay, we need our own sovereign AI capability.
53:13 Speaker 03 That can't be shut down by the US government. Right? But that's, that's why these two stories are so tied together. If you had unfettered access to Fable and its successors, you would have no trouble designing a rocket, none at all, designing a rocket that can launch debris into our orbital data centers. This has all got to get resolved in a time period of several months.
53:35 Speaker 00 Very welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is impacting every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we do our business. But one of the most important things that AI can deliver to us is health. And one of the things I think about when, you know, shooting for 100, 120 is, am I going to have the cognitive health to be able to think clearly and keep my wits about me for the next 50 years? I'm joined here today by Dr. Don Musalem, the Chief Medical Officer of Fountain Life and a member of my Fountain Life medical team. Don, a pleasure. So, Don, talk to me about brain health.
54:09 Speaker 07 Brain health, you know, you're right. This is the number one concern people coming into Fountain Life have is will I remember the name of my child and the face of my loved one? Forty-five percent of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age. But over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly and optimizing sleep. People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46% of those individuals. That's a powerful number.
54:50 Speaker 00 That's amazing. You know, one of the things I love about Fountain is we're constantly searching the world for the most advanced therapeutics and bringing them to our members. So for me and all of you, I hope that you appreciate the fact that you can become the CEO of your own health. You can make sure that you've got the cognitive clarity for the next 50 years. Come and check it out. Fountainlife.com/peter to learn more and become the CEO of your health. Now, back to the episode. I'm going to move us on to our next conversation, if you guys are OK with it, on OpenAI. They have a few breaking stories here. So the first OpenAI story is on their pricing. So while Anthropic is busy fighting the US government, Sam Altman smells massive opportunity.
55:31 Speaker 00 The Wall Street Journal reports OpenAI is considering a drastic price cut as it braces for an all-out war against Anthropic. So if you think about the timing, Anthropic has just disabled its top two models. And this is Sam Altman, you know, saying, OK, guys, developers who are pissed off at this being happening, you know, we're providing cheaper prices. Come work with us. There's no 30-day retention of data. There's no downgrading. We're going to grab you as market. In one sense, this is sort of the demonetization of intelligence happening in real time. Thoughts, Alex, on this idea of price reductions?
56:10 Speaker 02 Well, OpenAI is no stranger to aggressive price reduction. And Sam, as we've talked about on the pod previously, has made no bones about the cost of intelligence per unit capability hyperdeflating by something like 40x year over year. So I think there is a way to sort of to spin or to repackage the natural hyperdeflation as being a competitive advantage. But of course Anthropic itself is hyperdeflating. Yes, Anthropic, from a marketing perspective, probably could be much more aggressive about promoting price cuts. Anthropic has been, at least optically, the polar opposite of OpenAI when it comes to packaging up prices.
56:55 Speaker 02 Open, Anthropic will, will never sort of advertise, well, like, we've, we've gone from X dollars per million tokens down to X over 10 per million tokens. Rather, they'll just announce a new model, and the new model will have per token pricing that's either the same or slightly higher, but with vastly higher capabilities, whereas OpenAI goes out of its way to keep older models or distilled versions of older models around and advertise the price war. I don't actually think, in an era of recursive self-improvement, I don't think OpenAI necessarily has any sort of structural advantage relative to Anthropic.
57:36 Speaker 02 OpenAI, maybe if it had stuck with the original Stargate strategy of owning its own data centers, maybe it would have had a structural advantage. But now Anthropic, this is public reporting, Anthropic is leasing its own data centers itself. So it doesn't seem like ownership of the compute stack offers OpenAI any now long-term structural cost advantage. So I'm not sure. Price cuts are actually anything deeper than just sort of an optical strategy in the short term. You could do short term discounts, but they're both in the recursive self-improvement loop at this point. And it's not obvious that, to me at least, that either
58:16 Speaker 02 OpenAI is months ahead of Anthropic or vice versa. We're seeing competitive model releases that leapfrog each other from now what seems to be the duopoly left at the end of the recursive self-improvement race where they're just leapfrogging each other every few weeks. So to me, token pricing drops, drastic cuts, seems more on the end of marketing than anything else. I reserve the right to be proven wrong here, but I think Anthropic is just as capable, capability wise, of effectively cutting costs.
58:46 Speaker 00 Dave, can I, I'm going to tee up the second half of the story and ask for your comments here. So Sam Altman put out a quote that stopped me cold. He said, quote, "The faster that recursive self-improvement takes off, the more it could be advantageous for us to delay OpenAI's IPO." So this is the CEO of the most famous AI lab on the planet, saying as the technology gets better, the less we want to rush to an IPO. My guess is that he's saying, you know, AI compounding its own intelligence means that it's, that our companies get more and more valuable every single day, and we want to sell the equity cheap. What are your thoughts here, Dave?
59:27 Speaker 03 Well, the biggest observation is that Sam's not a significant shareholder in OpenAI, or maybe not a shareholder, last I checked, not a shareholder at all. And when I interviewed him way back in 2020, he was saying, this is the biggest risk in the history of humanity, and we need to slow down, and we need to be thoughtful, and we need to think about how the world's going to be governed post AGI. And that was back in 2020. So if he, if he really feels like, wow, RSI is imminent, us being a public company puts a huge amount of shareholder pressure on the company to roll things out that we shouldn't be rolling out. He doesn't have any economic damage at all by delaying the IPO. He has invested in over 400 companies surrounding OpenAI.
1:00:08 Speaker 03 And so, in a sense, that's a good thing because it makes him objective about not trying to force something out that may be a risk to the world. But I do think also Sam is struggling for relevance right now. If you think who's going to determine how the world works in 2027 and beyond. Elon clearly matters a lot. He's super close with David Sacks. He's been around the White House for a long time because rockets have always been tied to the government. Dario is new to this game, but he's there right now. And he's getting the "this is how it works" speech right now in the Oval Office, probably. And also, remember, Dario and Elon, Dario's renting all of Elon's chips in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
1:00:52 Speaker 03 So they're already in bed together. So it seems very likely that the future governance of the entire world now is going to be a conversation between David Sacks, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Dario Amadei. And Dario's obviously publishing documents about this is how it should work. Here are my preliminary thoughts. So all of that is all tied together. Sam, where are you? What's your contribution to the whole future of world governance? You were called the most powerful man in the world one year ago. Now where are you? And so I think price cuts aren't really going to put him back on the map, but it certainly is a move in that direction. But my core observation there is that he can delay the IPO with no personal impact to his personal finances.
1:01:33 Speaker 00 So you don't buy it that, you know, the company, that his rationale for this is that the company is going to get exponentially more valuable and delaying until after RSI is the best way to extract value?
1:01:47 Speaker 03 I don't even know if he said that. I thought that his point was more that RSI is so risky.
1:01:56 Speaker 03 That we need to figure it out before we go public. That was my read on it. Maybe I misread it.
1:02:01 Speaker 00 Saleem, I'm going to tee up the third part of this story for you.
1:02:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:02:04 Speaker 00 You want to comment on this first before I tee it up?
1:02:07 Speaker 01 Just the broader point here is that clearly with these price drops, intelligence is becoming a utility and we're commoditizing it.
1:02:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:02:15 Speaker 01 And I think this allows, this is the winner here, becomes every enterprise and every startup being able to run more intelligence. And the, the outcome I would say is, here's a, here's a Saleem's law that I'd throw out. Every 10x drop in tokens means we're doing 100 times more experiments.
1:02:33 Speaker 00 I love that.
1:02:34 Speaker 01 And I think it's just going to be great for the world.
1:02:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's awesome. All right, let me tee this up for you, Saleem, first, and then Alex afterwards. So, OpenAI's engineering lead on Codex made a quiet announcement that could be the single most futuristic story we're covering today. He revealed that Codex can now set its own goals. In his words, "Everything we build, we also build as a tool for agents." This is a generalization of meta prompting, where you let the agent set its own task based on your intent. A developer at Codex's team added the following, basically quote, "I never write my own goals anymore. I ask Codex to write one for itself and one for each sub-agent it spawns." You know, we've crossed the point, Saleem, where instead of telling your AI what you
1:03:21 Speaker 00 want it to do, you tell your AI what you want and let it decide what to do for you. It's the beginning of AIs setting their own objectives. Thoughts?
1:03:32 Speaker 01 Well, this is that part where, once you get Alex's inner loop going, right? Where you have recursive self-improvement at the workflow level. Once you start moving workflows over. By the way, our pilot program for the organizational singularity is pretty much set now. Next week, we start. We have 10 companies. We're going to move them through this three-month process of rewriting yourself from traditional human-centric to an AI-centric organization.
1:04:00 Speaker 00 On the edge, right?
1:04:01 Speaker 01 Burn that pathway in at the edge. Super exciting. We've picked 10 very different companies to start off with, so we learn the most. And we're going to learn as a group and see where this goes. The, once you start that inner loop going, then obviously every bonus or increase in, in AI adds to that learning loop. And what essentially what Satya Nadella said in his article over the weekend is that that ratifies this entire thesis. He might as well have written half of Solve Everything and half of my organizational singularity thesis, that you create that inner flywheel and then essentially you just start moving more and more workflows to that. And that's
1:04:44 Speaker 01 the massive opportunity for every because the intelligence and the future of value in any enterprise will not be what data you had, how many customers you had. It's how quickly are you learning and taking advantage of a learning loop to augment products and services, offer new ideas, evaluate strategic alternatives, et cetera, et cetera. So by the way, I'm updating the book right now about once a week. And we've launched a free Claude skill that goes along with it. And somebody tweeted, sent us a note going, this brought tears to my eyes, the fact that I can now run my entire company on your model.
1:05:22 Speaker 00 Where does someone go to find that out, Selim?
1:05:24 Speaker 01 Go to openexo.com. It's free to register and it's free to download the book and the Claude skill. And every week we're updating and I'm going to be putting out a video on what changes this week in terms of what are we seeing out there. So we've already absorbed Satya's stuff into it. We have a new chapter on how do you need to have a data lake and move all your enterprise data out of ERP systems, et cetera, so that you have free access to it right now. Right? Like today, if you look at the enterprise architecture of your cloud and connectivity, and then you have your ERP and operational systems and your data and process workflows are all bound into the horrible mess of spaghetti there. And then you're trying to layer AI on top of that. And of course, it's not getting
1:06:07 Speaker 01 a lot of value because it's just all bound up. The future will be your connectivity and cloud, a data lake that's your proprietary data lake, and then workflows on top of that. And this is what the ERP folks are freaking out about because if that they go to that, they lose their stickiness. And so they're fighting like how to retain their position inside the corporate stack. It's quite an interesting tension playing out.
1:06:29 Speaker 00 Alex, Codex can set its own goals. What does this mean? Implications, please.
1:06:35 Speaker 02 Well, self-determination for AI agents, obviously. Oh, no.
1:06:39 Speaker 08 Personhood, baby.
1:06:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, AI personhood, we're speedrunning the accelerando or accelerando future. I think that goes without saying. I also want to comment, though, on the Sam Altman and RSI speedup in IPO timing story. I think there's a shallow take and a deeper take. The shallow take would be, well, of course, Sam is saying this. Sam feels pressure to generate revenue to justify the IPO, and most of that new revenue is likely to come from Codex, and Codex is being designed for recursive self-improvement. So a sort of a glass-half-empty take on the RSI takeoff and OpenAI IPO timing is, well, Sam is just putting a happy face on the need to grow Codex
1:07:26 Speaker 02 revenue even more before OpenAI is ready to go public. That's glass-half-empty, sort of negative take. There's a deeper take that's more profound, that I haven't heard anyone discussing, which is, if we actually take this at face value and not some sort of spin on Codex financials, if IPOs are being delayed because large, private companies don't need external capital or external liquidity because they're achieving recursive self-improvement, that, in my mind, marks potentially the beginning of a decoupling between technology and capital. Everyone, broadly speaking, a lot of people, a lot of the commentary that are
1:08:11 Speaker 02 hand-wringing, as has been the case for more than a century, about capital substituting for labor. What happens when the AI takes all of the human jobs? That's capital V labor. I've heard almost no one commenting on what happens if technology substitutes for capital. Will we need capital in a few decades? Or does capital itself get displaced by technological advances? And? This, in my mind, if the story has legs and if it isn't just a happy spin on Codex revenue generation or otherwise OpenAI's balance sheet and income statement, this is a canary for recursive self-improvement, which is underneath itself, it's technology
1:08:54 Speaker 02 improving technology, maybe not even needing capital as much in the future. And if we start to see technology decouple from capital, this is like an early warning signal for what a post-capitalist economy could look like, where technology is just so empowered, you don't actually need capital very much anymore. So, punchline.
1:09:15 Speaker 03 I agree. Just have to add, keep in mind that OpenAI just raised 122 billion, bigger than the SpaceX IPO capital raise. They literally just raised that money. So I agree that that is the inevitable outcome, but they also are so tanked up right now. They don't need the IPO to keep up with SpaceX or Anthropic on any capital raised metric.
1:09:39 Speaker 00 Fascinating. All right, I'm gonna move us on to our next.
1:09:44 Speaker 01 Wait, I just want to double down on Alex's point here. There's something really profound here, right? Which is that, you know, in the past, we valued technology, we valued assets, we valued stocks. John Hagel used to make this point that we're moving from stocks, from valuing stocks to valuing flows, right? But now we're moving from stocks and flows, forget even the thing, the data and the intelligence loop is what we're going to value in the future. And that's a very profound shift for how we're going to value everything going forward.
1:10:20 Speaker 00 Yeah. All right. If this is all exciting to you, I want to invite everybody listening to the 2026 Moonshot Gathering, excited to give everybody an update on this. We're gonna start unveiling who is gonna be at the Moonshot Gathering. Of course, the Moonshot mates will all be there together, announcing today. Palmer Lucky is gonna be joining us there. Palmer, the CEO of Anduril, an extraordinary Entrepreneur will be joining us during that day. Astro Teller, the captain of moonshots at X. He's going to be there teaching you how to create a moonshot organization. And we've got Kathy Wood, the head of Arc Invest, talking about investing in AI.
1:11:03 Speaker 00 It's going to be 1,500 builders, networking opportunities galore. We're going to have the culmination of the future vision X Prize. This is the world's largest film competition, bringing us the next generation of Star Trek. If you would, you heard Elon speaking about that earlier. We have, you know, $5 million in prize capital generating these future films. You'll see the five finalists. So this is going to be for content creators as well. We've got the Gemini X Prize. This is the world's largest hackathon, a 90 day hackathon. We have over 15,000 entries so far. The top five builders who have gone from zero to significant revenue in 90 days
1:11:46 Speaker 00 are going to be there teaching everybody what they did and how they did it. Saleem, you're going to be covering organizational singularity. What are you going to, what are people going to learn from you there?
1:11:56 Speaker 01 Well, we'll go through a whole dedicated flow on how do you navigate from your legacy of thinking on building a startup to the full pure intelligence stack and building an EXO 3.0. And we'll talk through people, how do you take an existing company and rewrite it for the new world?
1:12:17 Speaker 01 The, our initial estimates are that if you build a pure play EXO with intelligence at the heart of it, you'll, your performance goes up about 100x compared to the legacy.
1:12:27 Speaker 00 So if you want to spend some time with Saleem on that.
1:12:29 Speaker 01 Powerful attractor. Yes, we'll do a whole segment and section on that for those interested in that part of it.
1:12:35 Speaker 00 And also, Alex, super excited for you to present the paper that you have brilliantly primarily authored. I'm proud to be your co-author, but solve everything. What are you going to be covering?
1:12:49 Speaker 02 Oh gosh, this makes me sound like a management consultant, which I'm very much not. I want everyone to solve the world's hardest problems. So I imagine this will probably take some form of ask me almost anything. But to the extent that folks who were attending the Moonshots gathering are interested in solving the world's hardest problems, I would love to help you however I can, even if it's just answering questions about the book slash essay with Peter or otherwise encouraging you to aim much higher than just building yet another SaaS. Let's solve everything together.
1:13:23 Speaker 00 I love that at AMA with Alex, go deep, one-on-one with him. We're going to have a session on how to design XPRIZE, a session on investing in AI. Dave, excited to have you help lead that. And then getting funding for your startup. So it's taking place on September the 25th in downtown LA. It goes from 8:00 AM till 10:00 PM. It is a full-packed day. We are just opening tickets now. Many of you pre-purchased tickets early on and we're opening up the main flow. Go to moonshots.com to get more information and join us. It will sell out very quickly. It's at a beautiful theater. All right. So excited for that, guys.
1:14:07 Speaker 00 It's going to be an awesome day together. Our next topic, data centers. Okay, so let me give you the single most exponential number in AI right now. Epic AI reports that since Colossus One came online in August of 2024, right? This is what Elon built in 122 days. The record for compute in a single AI data center has doubled every seven months. There's no sign of any slowing through 2028. Globally, AI computing capacity is now 3.3X per year. That's the demand curve and it's going vertical. Now, this is where it all hits the wall. If you want to build a data center, and this blows me away, there is a two-and-a-half-year
1:14:51 Speaker 00 wait on power transformers alone and a three-year wait on step-up transformers. The bottleneck in AI is no longer the chips, it's not even the money. It's the boring, unglamorous, century-old electronic hardware here. So, you know, I did a little search. The companies leading in these areas are Hitachi, Siemens, GE, Vernova, Hyundai, Hisong, Hikko, Virginia Transformer, and Delta Star. And these companies have been rocketing like, you know, 100% to 400% year-on-year growth. Alex, what do you think about this?
1:15:29 Speaker 02 There's an elephant in this room, not just in the other room. The elephant is terrestrial versus orbital data centers. So if you just extrapolate this trend out, you find that for the foreseeable future, the largest data centers need to remain terrestrial, while perhaps by the early 2030s, barring some left turn in civilization, much of the marginal new compute will remain in orbital data centers. So we have this sort of weird bipolar civilizational compute footprint where if you need to do very large coherent training runs, you'll do it on land. But if you want inference, where you don't necessarily care about coherence, you'll deploy it to orbit.
1:16:13 Speaker 02 And sort of squint, maybe Earth, at least until we figure out how to build very large coherent clusters, not terrestrial, Earth becomes the training hub and space becomes the inference hub. And it's the sort of weird gradient between them. We build on land, we deploy to orbit. That's, I think, the regime we're likely to find ourselves in, again barring some left turn in the early 2030s. The question, and the elephant in the room is, at some point, if Elon's Dyson swarm or competitors' Dyson swarms come to pass, someone is surely going to look around and ask, again, barring some radical advance in distributed training, why do we have so
1:16:58 Speaker 02 much compute in orbit that we're not using for training? And why aren't we building larger clusters? So I think at that point... The future bifurcates. Either we get some radical algorithmic advance in distributed training, in which case this trend towards ever larger, single coherent clusters, doubling every seven months, peaks. We get sort of a Hubbard peak for the size of data centers. And then data centers start to shrink and become more distributed and more edge-like. That's one possibility. And I do think we are very likely going to get major algorithmic advances for distributed training sometime in the next few years. Possibly we already have it and it's just not evenly distributed yet.
1:17:42 Speaker 02 Or if it turns out, although I suspect this is not the case, that there is no good algorithmic way to decentralize training, then the elephant left in the room is how can we build extremely large orbital coherent training clusters? And for that, low Earth orbit, sun synchronous orbit, not looking that attractive.
1:18:06 Speaker 00 But or on the moon. Train it on the moon.
1:18:08 Speaker 02 On the moon is where I was going. So if you're going to build a non-terrestrial supercluster that has to double in size, or the largest of which has to double in size every seven months, you're not going to do it in LEO, you're not going to do it in SSO. You're going to want to do it on the moon.
1:18:24 Speaker 00 On the South Pole, baby.
1:18:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, in Shackleton or otherwise. So that then becomes the argument for lunar data centers.
1:18:32 Speaker 00 Yes, agreed. Salim, I was reading into your facial expressions. Your thoughts here?
1:18:38 Speaker 01 Well, I think it's a very, very exciting future. I think it's further away than people think. And it's far enough away that we better solve our problems on Earth. Otherwise, we won't get to that point. I remember having a conversation with Masas' team at SoftBank about his 300-year vision. And I was like, great to have the 300-year vision. Let's get through the next 20. And then we'll take it up. So I think we need to spend quite a lot of time focusing on how do we navigate that? Just look at that export order and the broader implications of that. And you have to, we have to solve some really big problems here. And that will then enable us to change things
1:19:22 Speaker 01 and take full advantage of what Elon's doing.
1:19:26 Speaker 00 Dave, 3.3x growth year-on-year of data centers at the same time that 50% of the 9 gigawatts of planned 2026 compute has gotten delayed due to organized activist protests. You know, we saw the same kind of protests hit us in nuclear power plants 30 years ago. And the US has had zero new reactors. China has 100. Thoughts on that?
1:19:56 Speaker 03 It's funny you bring that up because on my graduation day, there's always somebody picketing for some reason on graduation day, and it was MIT's involvement in nuclear research. But it's always irrelevant in hindsight, you know? It's just noise in hindsight. I do want to start by saying I completely agree with what Alex just said. I reach the exact same conclusion that lunar data centers are inevitable. You need some kind of thin atmosphere to protect you. The solar efficiency drop is irrelevant. The panels are so cheap compared to everything else in a data center. And the cooling is so much easier on the moon than it is in orbit. And that begs the question of, then are we going to have Mars
1:20:38 Speaker 03 data centers as well? But I also want to say from an investment point of view, regardless of what happens in space, terrestrial data centers are going to continue to grow as quickly as we can build them, at a minimum as a backup plant, but as a maximum as the bridge to the ultimate Dyson swarm.
1:20:54 Speaker 00 And who builds the best data center?
1:20:56 Speaker 03 So anything related. Say again?
1:20:58 Speaker 00 I said, who's building the best data centers right now? Elon is. He's become a hyperscaler.
1:21:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, and Chase Lochmiller, Kruse, Project Stargate. Those are the two. The Larry Ellison universe over there and the Elon universe. And they're, you know, they share each other's houses. They're not competing. They're both building. But they both recognize there's infinite demand. This isn't all boats rising with the tide situation. If you can get the transformers, if you can get the generators, get the solar panels, you're going to make money, period. And you remember when we interviewed Elon, too, he was saying, look, 10x global GDP expansion in 10 years. So you go to over a quadrillion dollars of GDP. I keep asking all these young founding teams, how many people do you think are really working on anything foundational in AI?
1:21:46 Speaker 03 Give me a number, you know, 100,000, 10,000, a million, whatever it is. Take 1.2 quadrillion dollars, divide by that number, that's your quota. And it usually comes out to, wow, my quota is $10 billion. Just to be on par, I have to produce $10 billion of GDP expansion. And that really opens their minds to like, think bigger. That's such a great way of framing it. That's awesome.
1:22:11 Speaker 00 I love you guys. You're so brilliant. All right, I'm going to move us on to our next, our next conversation point, which is the future of work. Let me share a video from friend of the pod. All right, the question is, should AI pay taxes? Andrew Yang says yes. Let's listen to this video and discuss it.
1:22:33 Speaker 09 We should be taxing AI and the robots and the agents and try and lighten up on all of the taxes that we as workers pay and also that employers pay that end up discouraging companies for hiring people. So I'm the CEO of a company, Noble Mobile, and when we hire someone, 40 to 50% of the money we're spending does not go to the worker, either because it's social security taxes or healthcare or income taxes that are paid by the worker. So let's try and lighten up all of that and tax the bots.
1:23:04 Speaker 00 Right, tax the bots. Saleem, let's go to you first on this. What are your thoughts? Yes, no?
1:23:10 Speaker 01 No, because you're just going to slow down the, you're going to, he's basically saying tax cognition. And I don't think that's a working, you can tax the outputs of cognition, but you know, we've always been taxing labor and now labor is not that taxable because labor is kind of evaporating. So you have to figure out how to tax capital and the outputs of cognition. But if you tax, say, the tokens or the robots, you're going to just slow down progress massively in hugely important areas like, like solve cancer and other critical areas like that.
1:23:42 Speaker 00 Dave?
1:23:44 Speaker 03 It's irrelevant. I mean, we already have a corporate income tax, so if you stop paying employees, that becomes profit. The profit gets taxed. The collections on it are almost identical. It's just silly. And the same with the Bernie Sanders version of it. Oh, yeah, tax the bots. It's good for populists. You know, everyone's worried about AI. Let's tax it. Great thing to say if you're a politician, but we already tax it because we tax every corporation. And so we're fine. You know, you could make a case that people dodged the corporate income tax too much, and we need to close those loopholes. I think that's a no-brainer. I don't know why we allow those loopholes. But there's no fundamental restructuring required here. We already tax every corporation. These are very big, very profitable corporations. They're going to pay a ton of tax. Want to raise the tax rate? Raise the tax rate. You
1:24:29 Speaker 03 don't need a new law. Just, I don't think you should raise it.
1:24:31 Speaker 02 Alex, any rationale here? Probably not. So a tax on AI specifically would probably be presumably an excise tax, a tax on particular goods and services, not a broad, say, income tax or sales tax. But in my mind, every tax is a distortion. So the question you have to ask yourself is, do you really want to distort the economy by penalizing superintelligence? I think there are probably far better ways to mitigate any side effects of AI displacement of human labor than just taxing the AI. I think that's probably a relatively naive approach. So
1:25:11 Speaker 02 on the spectrum, I've mentioned this publicly on the pod in the past, but on the spectrum from UBI, universal basic income, to UBS, universal basic services, to universal basic equity, UBE, or universal basic computer slash capability, UBC, I tend to think that using superintelligence to drive the cost of living down to near zero is probably far more effective as a remediation for any AI displacement of human labor than just a naive taxation of superintelligence. I don't think we necessarily want the perverse incentives, as Saleem and Dave have mentioned, from disincentivizing the taxation of superintelligence. Totally.
1:25:54 Speaker 03 And this is, you know what you're going to see, Alex?
1:25:55 Speaker 02 On new HR.
1:25:57 Speaker 03 You're gonna see more and more politicians saying, hey, let's, let's tax, you know, if you lose your job, we're gonna tax the AI that took your job and we're gonna give you that money. And then they're all gonna say that because that's what people want to hear. But then when you say, well, I understand your idea on the tax side, what's your idea on how to give, do I get paid exactly what I was getting paid before? Or is there some declining scale? And none of them will talk about that. Because it's very hard. And it's not at all obvious how you do it. But that's the problem they should be working on. Like, the collection is the easy part. Who gets what is by far the harder part. You'll see, none of them will talk about it.
1:26:33 Speaker 00 The first person I heard speak about this was actually Jeff Bezos, saying, let's tax the robots. I wonder if he still believes that at this point.
1:26:42 Speaker 02 I think we'll probably, the irony, like, just as we were discussing earlier, Dario puts out this lengthy essay saying, regulate us, then the government regulates them, and then he cries foul. I fully expect that the frontier labs will say, like, give up golden shares, or tax us, or otherwise create universal basic fill in the blank. And then I strongly suspect in the next few months, the government's going to do exactly that and everyone will cry foul. So I think any frontier labs that, that don't have a precise idea for what they want the desired economic end state to be, should probably advocate a little bit less for just
1:27:23 Speaker 02 sort of blanket, yes, tax us to, to create UB, fill in the blank, and have a really concrete idea of what the end state is. And the end state could look like some sort of universal basic equity or dividend. I think that's probably the easiest policy to implement. It doesn't require deep thought about compute. It probably requires, at least in the US, some sort of sovereign wealth fund to manage it, which we've talked about on the pod in the past. But I do think that this is coming to a head, all of this. Taxation via excise tax, or via some sort of golden share-based universal basic dividend or otherwise, in the next few months, because we're about to see the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.
1:28:04 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:28:05 Speaker 03 Well, I think if you, if you listen to those old Elon Musk videos, which I highly recommend, when SpaceX was first getting off the ground, they keep asking him, how can you realistically expect to compete with NASA and George W. Bush? It gives you a real sense of how transient and irrelevant any given government is compared to a long-term mission like Elon's or like Amen.
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1:29:32 Speaker 00 All right, I want to close out our Future of Work section to discuss a Metatrend Substack I put out titled "The Most Dangerous Demographic in History Is About to Get Bigger." And I don't like dystopian stories, and this is more about getting the conversation out there, because I think it's an important conversation for us to have and understand what history teaches us. So, every major revolution in modern history shares one ingredient: not ideology, not technology, not even poverty. It's young men, usually between ages 18 to 28, who are educated enough to have an expectation about what the future should look like. And that gap between what they actually are inheriting and what they were
1:30:17 Speaker 00 promised is a combustible force in human history. I want to share some data, and I'd like to have a conversation. We've talked about the notion that we're going to have some turbulence over the next two to eight years, and I want to do everything I can to help ameliorate that turbulence. I'm doing that with the Future Vision X Prize and the Gemini X Prize in part, and through our conversations here. So let me share a couple of slides of data.
1:30:46 Speaker 00 So on the left is from Charter, it's the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And what we're seeing here is the difficulty in getting jobs as a function of all college grads, all workers, and recent college grads. And what you see, that red line there, is that recent college grads are the group that are out of work the longest, having the most difficulty. That spike you see, of course, is COVID. On the right hand is some charts that came from our friend Eric Brynjolfsson at the Stanford AI Index report.
1:31:28 Speaker 00 The upper chart there shows software engineers, and this is, you see a distinctly divergent line of age 22 to 25-year-old dropping in terms of software developers. So, young software developers not getting jobs, dropping pretty linearly. And then the bottom chart here is customer support agents, again, that young group 22 to 25, diverging from the rest. So, you know, we've talked about the data being murky. A lot of people are coming out right now, including Sam and Dario and Marc Andreessen,
1:32:13 Speaker 00 saying, "Listen, the job apocalypse is a myth, it's not happening." But, you know, while I might agree that in general, we have the lowest unemployment rate ever, the concern is those young men, mostly, out of work because they haven't gotten jobs after going through the social contract. And one more data point here to show, so I did the research looking at basically revolutions over time led by the youth. There are 20 of them, you know, starting with the French Revolution, where the youth helped overthrow monarchy and aristocratic privileges, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution,
1:32:57 Speaker 00 the Chinese Youth Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, Iranian Revolution, anti-apartheid Youth Revolution in South Africa, People's Power Revolt in the Philippines, the First Intifada, Tiananmen Square, Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement.
1:33:14 Speaker 00 So I raise this again because I think it's a conversation that needs to be had. And we need to get out in front of this. Saleem, you want to kick it off?
1:33:28 Speaker 01 Well, you know, in the 20th century, the big fight was capitalism versus socialism. Right? In this, we've got a better fight now, which is who owns the exponential surplus? Who owns abundance and how do we distribute that? Whether it's UBI, UBS, UB something. It is going to create a lot of angst. And what I think the bigger issue today is the social media is amplifying those like 100x. And I think that's the biggest structural problem between today and what we had before. Because bad news and panic spreads so much faster than good news and truth. And so you really have to solve for that structural imbalance.
1:34:10 Speaker 01 There's going to be no clear answer to it, except that we really have a huge problem in terms of how to distribute some of that. Europe takes the view of let's create a protective layer for all of society. Here in the US, we have the opposite view. And we have some big problems, like 50% of the country can't put $500 together in an emergency. That's just a staggering commentary for protecting that lower layer. And so we've got to figure out how to get abundance down to the bottom very, very quickly. And we get this comment repeatedly from our community members and comments, etc. How are we going to help that thing? So the abundance prize, Peter, that is on the table is, I think, maybe the most important
1:34:54 Speaker 01 thing in the world to focus on in terms of getting the cost of living down to a very low level in a powerful way.
1:35:02 Speaker 00 And by the way, whether or not it's true that youth are not getting jobs, or whether or not it's true that we're going to have a job apocalypse, people believe that, right? There's a pandemic of fear. And in that pandemic of fear, that's where, you know, negative things happen. Dave?
1:35:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, go ahead. The point I'm making is that we've kind of, there's some broad policies that have allowed a pervasive culture of fear to permeate the entire US social structure.
1:35:38 Speaker 01 Right, and that's that has to that is going to add fuel to the fire. It's gasoline on top of everything else.
1:35:44 Speaker 00 Yeah. Dave, want to jump in?
1:35:47 Speaker 03 Peter, it's brilliant that you're bringing this up and observing it. You know, the one one data point on that slide I'm most familiar with is the Iranian revolution because I was in the country right before before it broke out. And yeah, in that case, the it was the college students that overtook the embassy and then took all those hostages forever. And that started the whole thing. But you know, those college students said, look, what we are doing right now in this country is not right. We shouldn't have a monarchy. This is just not and all the concentration of wealth is nuts. We need something new. They weren't thinking that it would end up being 45 years of religious rule.
1:36:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:36:21 Speaker 03 They had did not have that in mind at all. So yeah, they get really angry, but they don't have a plan. They just know this current plan isn't right. So I love the fact that you're taking this head on. And you know, if you look at the amount of money that just got raised by SpaceX, the amount that OpenAI has in its charity, and then if Anthropic goes public, they should be taking at least five or 10 billion of that, and at least half of that should go back through XPRIZE and get laser focused on this problem because they're the ones that are going to suffer if there's a massive uprising. They have every reason to invest.
1:36:51 Speaker 00 We're all going to suffer, but they're going to suffer a lot.
1:36:53 Speaker 03 They're going to suffer.
1:36:54 Speaker 00 Alex, what's your take on this? I'm super curious, my friend.
1:36:57 Speaker 02 I think this is a problem that will be so to the extent it is a problem at all, the problem of disemployment or underemployment as a result of AI advances and the elite overproduction theory by Goldstone in revolutions. If it happens this time around at all, I think it's likelier to be felt not within China and probably not even with the US, but in the rest of the world that doesn't have superintelligence or isn't anywhere close to superintelligence. In principle, if we within the US, if we wanted, I think we can create lots of economic opportunities for our quote unquote surplus elites that we
1:37:40 Speaker 02 may or may not be overproducing, benefiting from superintelligence, colonize the solar system, we'll take apart the moon.
1:37:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, but just to be clear, Alex, I'm talking about the next two to eight years, right, versus the long term. And remember, you know, when Dave and I were interviewing Elon and remember Dave, he said, you asked him UHI and civil unrest? He said, yes, UHI and civil unrest.
1:38:04 Speaker 01 Look, we have a very dangerous cocktail right now of very high expectations, very high connectivity, very low opportunity for certain segments, and very quick mobilization, right? And so this is a very destabilizing kind of epoch in human history. And it's that, it's like your point, it's the education, educated person who's been promised a future and is watching the ladder collapse, that's the real problem here. We need new ladders for meaning, agency, status, contribution, all of that.
1:38:38 Speaker 03 You're exactly right. And Saleem, concurrent with that, we have AI-assisted social media, which we've never had before, we're all experimenting with it, and the year before an election, everything always turns to shit. So that's coming up next year.
1:38:50 Speaker 01 The good news is that we're democratizing AI so quickly, and we talk about everybody should become an entrepreneur. What we really mean is, use AI to give yourself radical agency. I've been using the phrase, you have the opportunity for future shape rather than future shock, right? Go there.
1:39:08 Speaker 02 I think, though, so to some extent, it's entirely possible that we have cosmetic color revolutions without actual revolution versus, say, the cultural revolution, which resulted in millions of people dying and which wasn't even, you know, superficially student revolution, but actually fomented by Mao to preserve his position within the elite hierarchy. Entirely possible that, to the extent anyone tells a story about AI revolutions due to elite overproductions actually just being driven by a number of other elites that are mining whatever dissent or discontent, there might be, but I want
1:39:49 Speaker 02 to go back to my point. This is, I think, to the extent there's a there there, I think it will be primarily felt not by the US, where we do have, yes, even on the two to eight-year timescale, the capabilities of creating entirely new classes of work and economic opportunity, and in China, where the Chinese Communist Party is actively driving via its AI plus five-year plan, all of this AI.
1:40:15 Speaker 02 Kicking and screaming into the workforce. It's the rest of the world that doesn't have the frontier models, doesn't have the energy, doesn't have the data center build out that I think is the likeliest to bear the brunt of any color revolutions associated with AI. Because there maybe the economic opportunities aren't as large. And I want to connect this also with the fable story. If all of the frontier capabilities are going to be export controlled going forward, then that leaves the US and it leaves China in sort of the the catbird seat to to optimally economically exploit all of these new capabilities for workforce development and economic opportunity for all of these 18 to 28 year olds.
1:40:59 Speaker 02 But it it basically shuts out the rest of the world. So I I think it's possible that export control is actually one of the one of the determining factors in any color revolutions for folks outside the US and China. And I'm thinking especially of Europe that where basically if they don't have the native sovereign capabilities to drive forward superintelligence, there is the risk that the rest of the world becomes almost vassal states that are dependent on all of these ultra cheap capabilities being produced by superintelligence and dumped, for lack of a better term, on the rest of the world. And that could create discontent.
1:41:39 Speaker 00 I'm going to add one other thing. You know, we saw the Sam Altman Molotov cocktail. We saw, you know, Eric Schmidt getting booed. There is a a growing level of discontent. I call it a pandemic of fear versus a viral pandemic. And I guess I'm hearing a lot of the tech leaders around the world saying, don't worry about the AI apocalypse. It's not going to happen. It's disinformation. It's regulatory capture.
1:42:11 Speaker 02 It's Chinese propaganda.
1:42:12 Speaker 00 It's Chinese propaganda. And that may all be true. It doesn't matter. If in fact, the US populace is in fear, if in fact, people believe their future is not going to be as good as there was promised for them, that's what foments the revolution. So I think, again, I think that if regulators who are listening, tech CEOs who are listening, we need to get out in front of this and help people understand that they're going to have an abundant future, that we're going to support them, we're going to create a basis by which they have access to this rising economy that's being created, triple-digit growth in the
1:42:57 Speaker 00 next five years. We need to give them some level of security, some level of assurance, some level of hope. This is a cry out to enable hope, at least in the US and other parts of the world. That's the point I want to make about this.
1:43:11 Speaker 02 I would just add, if we don't build it, everyone dies.
1:43:14 Speaker 03 I have to add one, just add one thing, I'd be remiss if I didn't add it, which is everything that Peter just said is exactly right. And concurrent with that, the startups are having a field day. It is the absolute best time in history for startups, which is so counter, because their classmates can't find jobs, which is great, because the startups, there's more venture capital than there's ever been before by far, and the AI-native startups can recruit anyone they want out of any graduating class, because no one can get a job. So it's really in juxtaposition of the fact that the rest of the graduating class is struggling to find anything to do. So it's really weird, but the startups are having a field day, the incubators are just going gangbusters.
1:43:58 Speaker 00 All right, it's time for the AMA mates. So we read your comments. We are grateful for everybody, all your comments. Thank you for layering in and for your questions. One of our favorite parts of the podcast is answering your questions. So let's jump in. Saleem, it looks like number one's for you.
1:44:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. Saleem, do your scale ideas framework, which is the EXO model, actually force organizations to ask, why do we own this at all? Or do they just let companies scale broken processes faster? And that's from @TomSchaeferQ20.
1:44:37 Speaker 01 So you can't think of those attributes. Those are acronyms, by the way, for Staff on Demand, Community, et cetera, et cetera. So you can look at the model if you're interested in looking at the full detail. But these are not efficiency tools that are supposed to be layered on top of an existing organization or broken organization. If you use them that way, you're going to scale pathology, right? You're going to make bad decisions faster, basically, and more automated. The real sequence is the most important thing above scale and ideas is your massive transformative purpose, your MTP. Okay? So you first have to design your MTP, then you delete your legacy, then you redesign around the intelligence stack, and then you scale.
1:45:20 Speaker 01 The MTP answers the question, why do you exist? What problem are you trying to solve? When you have experimentation, that asks a question, what evidence do you have? When you have interfaces, you're asking, or in dashboards, you're asking, what feedback loops are we using? Autonomy then says, who's closest to the information and let them make the decisions? So the framework should absolutely force the why question, but that sits above the two. But like any tool, you can misuse it by people who want speed rather than transformation.
1:45:50 Speaker 00 All right.
1:45:51 Speaker 01 So you don't want to digitize a bureaucracy. You want to delete it. One of the comments I make to CEOs these days is if they have a classic matrix structure, you've got horizontal layers that slow you down, IT, HR, branding, privacy, et cetera, et cetera. Every few years, go delete all those horizontals and reinvent them.
1:46:10 Speaker 00 Thank you.
1:46:11 Speaker 01 Because power accrues to the horizontals because it's really easy to say no in HR or legal. There's no incentive to saying yes, right? Because if you say yes, your life's a mess trying to manage a complex bureaucracy. So every few years, just wipe it out and rebuild it, and it'll force you to reinvent things in a modern way. That's if you want to take a hack at the old bureaucracy. But the real model is you have to rebuild yourself in a new model, and that's what we do with the organizational singularity stuff. Sorry for the plug.
1:46:39 Speaker 00 Okay. Alex, looks like number two is for you. AWG, why are you anti-Bitcoin? And this is from the Bitcoin Revolution.
1:46:48 Speaker 02 Well, to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, I'm not anti Bitcoin, I'm just drawn that way. I don't think Bitcoin is a productive asset. I think blockchain is this amazing mathematical technology that fell back in time from the future, and I think blockchain technology is super interesting. Bitcoin itself is a lot less interesting to me. It's, as far as I can tell, maybe there's something fundamental that I'm missing, but I don't think so. It's not a productive asset. Similarly, I'm not anti gold, I'm just not interested in gold, because by and large, it's not that productive an asset, at least not nearly as productive as the values or the prices that it seems to trade on.
1:47:33 Speaker 02 There's, I think, if the question behind the question is, why don't I invest money in Bitcoin, I would say there are a few reasons. Again, not investment advice. One, it's not a productive asset, unlike stocks and bonds that are actually being used to create new wealth in the real economy. Bitcoin, as far as I can tell, doesn't create any real wealth. And the way you know that, aside from the fact that it doesn't pay any form of coupons or dividends or interest, is it's not generating new ideas, it's not creating new structures, it's not expanding humanity's future freedom of action. It seems to be much more of a speculative asset. That's reason one.
1:48:17 Speaker 02 Reason two, and this generalizes beyond Bitcoin to other crypto assets in general, parenthetically, I do like stable coins insofar as they enable more efficient financial asset transfers, and to the extent they help to stabilize the US dollar. So I like stable coins. Right. Close parentheses.
1:48:40 Speaker 01 I'm biting my fist because I've got so many comments, we really need to have our crypto debate.
1:48:45 Speaker 00 This is supposed to be rapid-fire answers, gentlemen.
1:48:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:48:49 Speaker 01 I'm holding back.
1:48:50 Speaker 02 I will. Close by saying Bitcoin as well as alternative cryptocurrencies, the elephant, the third elephant in this episode, in this particular room is AIs and AI agents have, are fully empowered at this point to come along and invent their own L1s. And the, the argument that Bitcoin bulls make that because Bitcoin was merely the, the first L1, that it occupies some sort of primacy in the future, Lightcone, I think, falls apart, again, not investment advice. When AIs come along to the extent that they, they find any value in cryptocurrencies, they can just invent their own L1s and they'll probably be much better than Bitcoin.
1:49:29 Speaker 00 I look forward to that. All right. Dave, you have a choice of number three or number four.
1:49:33 Speaker 03 I'll let you choose. Which one? I can take either.
1:49:36 Speaker 00 Good. Jump in. Choose one.
1:49:38 Speaker 03 All right. All right. I'll take, I'll take three. The US already has a 10% equity stake in Intel. Has that helped the American at all? Why would AI lab stakes be different? And that's for, from Gear for the Year. Yeah, massive, massive difference. The US took a 10% stake in Intel, gave it $10 billion to bail it out to get chip fabs back into the US. They were threatening to shut down investment in their Ohio 1.4 nanometer project, which is critically important for the future of the country. It's very similar to when the government bailed out the car companies. We need those, and it was a great investment. The AI labs are already in the US and they already have tons of money. Why would you be buying them? Oh, but it'll get a great return for the American people. You have the power of taxation.
1:50:23 Speaker 03 You can take any amount of money on any day you want. You don't want to invest in things. Having the government be an investor is always a bad idea because some future administration will mangle the investments and there's no continuity of thought in the government at all. So you don't need to unless you're helping it bail it out or to help it grow some strategic function for the country.
1:50:47 Speaker 00 All right, I'll take number four. How do other democratic nations handle sovereign wealth funds? This is from at John Seabert 5493. So, John, I think the gold standard is Norway. Its government pension is now worth something like 1.7 trillion dollars and it's built on oil revenues. It also owns something like 1% or 2% of every publicly traded company on the planet. Singapore has Tamasek and GIC, you know, the Gulf States, UAE has Adia, Saudi has PIF. And I think the lesson here is that, once you've got this kind of a sovereign fund
1:51:28 Speaker 00 that's controlled by an outside investment group that's not tied to the politicians, so the politicians can't give favor or spend it, it drives an incredible return for the citizenry. And I think it would be extraordinary if we could do that here in the US, if in fact you're from the US.
1:51:48 Speaker 01 They've also been trained on our data.
1:51:50 Speaker 00 What's that?
1:51:51 Speaker 01 Collectively. They've also been trained on our collective data, so there should be a certain outcome.
1:51:56 Speaker 00 Okay, let's kick this one. Dave, the first one's for you.
1:52:01 Speaker 03 Okay, Dave, why are you fine with the government funding SpaceX but not taking equity in AI labs during a high-risk transition? Did the government fund SpaceX? I don't remember that. I think they buy from SpaceX.
1:52:13 Speaker 00 The government gave a con-- so, in 2008, when, after SpaceX had its third launch failure and it had its first Falcon 1 success on its fourth try, because it had an extra rocket laying around, SpaceX won a billion-dollar contract for Falcon 9. It won a contract. It wasn't given money. It was given a service contract.
1:52:38 Speaker 01 This was commercial crew, as I recall.
1:52:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, the commercial crew, right? The space shuttle was going out of business and we needed a replacement for the space shuttle, so.
1:52:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay, so that never happened. So, that answers that question. And even if it had happened, having a space launch capability is a national priority and, obviously, Elon did a good job of it, so that would have been a great move by the government. And then the second part of the question, but not taking equity in AI labs during a high-risk transition. I think the government just proved they can block any product. You know, there was a little argument for a while there that the government should be on the boards of these companies.
1:53:17 Speaker 03 Which is hilarious because a board member can't sit there and say, hey, don't release Fable 5, I'm stopping you. So the government already has massively more authority than a board member does. You don't need a board seat in addition to that. You're just going to mangle it. So it's purposeless. And like I said a second ago, the government can tax any amount they want anytime. Why do you want the stock too? But I think the government will take stock because it's politically cool and the population is in support of it, but it makes no sense.
1:53:46 Speaker 00 Give me some too. All right, I'll take the next one here, number six. Peter, do you believe a quantum breakthrough in three years can actually break the entire crypto stack? This is from at Listen Grasshopper. So my short answer is two points. One, I think the threat is real, but not in a three-year timeline. I think that's aggressive. And I think the entire industry, we heard this, we had Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, on the pod last week. If you haven't listened to it, please go check it out. And he is working on, you know, a crypto tolerant algorithm and the whole industry is, everybody's going to get there before we have to worry about this. So I'll keep it brief on that regard.
1:54:32 Speaker 00 Alex, you want to choose?
1:54:34 Speaker 02 I know everyone wants me to answer question eight, so instead I'm going to answer question number seven.
1:54:40 Speaker 02 Question seven asks, if knowledge work is cooked, why hasn't anyone suggested using AI itself to manage the sovereign wealth fund? And this is from MGP star. I think the premise is incorrect. I think to the extent the US and other countries have sovereign wealth funds like Norway, I think AI is already managing the sovereign wealth funds in the form of AI managing the overall broad public equities markets and other public markets. Almost all of the volume in public equities markets at this point is driven by algorithmic trading. AI is already managing all of these valuations. Yes, including SpaceX's now fifth largest company in the world.
1:55:24 Speaker 02 That's almost all AI. Obviously, there's a lot of retail, but AI by volume is actively doing the price discovery. So. The premise, I think, is incorrect. AI is already de facto managing sovereign wealth funds to the extent sovereign wealth funds have exposure to assets in highly liquid public markets that are themselves almost entirely dominated by volume by AI.
1:55:48 Speaker 00 Nice. All right, Saleem, this is revenge of Bitcoin here.
1:55:54 Speaker 01 Number eight, why would AI agents want to use Bitcoin when they still have to pay for energy? That's from at capilles. So two, three quick thoughts here. So agents aren't going to be ideological. They're going to be ruthlessly functional. They're going to use whatever rails clears their transactions with the least friction and the most trust, right? And trust is what the really thing. Bitcoin's energy use is not the reason agents will or will not use it. It's whether you can get a neutral, high throughput global settlement model. Now, there's something powerful about Bitcoin, why people are getting excited about it these days more so than, say, five, seven years ago, or 10 years ago. When you have a digital currency, you want three points in a triangle. You want to hit
1:56:38 Speaker 01 decentralization, you want it security, you want it scalability. When Bitcoin first emerged, it hit decentralization and security for the first time ever. And people are really excited by that because no digital currency hit those two points. But it didn't solve for scalability. So you had the rise of Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, and all the altcoins trying to solve for scalability. But in doing that, they typically compromised on decentralization, or they compromised on scalability. There was a big Ethereum fix a few weeks ago. If Ethereum was really decentralized, they wouldn't have had, wouldn't have been able to do a fix like that, which tells you Ethereum is not really decentralized, right? So this is where you saw the FTX collapse, or the Luna collapse, where they collapsed because
1:57:22 Speaker 01 of either failure of decentralization or failure of security. But with, so Bitcoin had the first two, but it didn't have scalability. With the rise of the Lightning Network, created by Blockstream a few years ago, it solves for scalability. And so now you have all three, Bitcoin hits all three, and therefore, people are getting more and more excited about the future of that. And we can get to the broader debate later.
1:57:45 Speaker 00 All right. This was quite the show, gentlemen. It was, it was fun. I mean, honestly.
1:57:50 Speaker 01 Yes. And when we say gentlemen, we stress the term to all of us. That's an old, that's an old PG Woodhouse joke.
1:57:56 Speaker 00 My dear friends. All right. I hope you guys, if you're not subscribing, please do turn on notifications. We're putting out as much as two episodes per week when there's breaking news. Our mission is delivering you the breaking news when it's happening, what, you know, what it means, what it matters to you. And join us at the Moonshots Summit. You can go to moonshots.com to get your ticket and join the mates there. I love this. And AMA with AWG. I think that alone makes it worthwhile. We're going all out. What's that? I said, we're going all out. Yes, we are. And of course, learn about the singularity, the organizational singularity with
1:58:37 Speaker 00 Saleem, investing in AI with Dave. And join us. We're going to have an amazing crew. We'll be announcing additional, you know, headline speakers besides Kathy Wood and Astro Teller and Palmer Lucky. Palmer's our newest. He's going to be extraordinary. Anyway, have an incredible week. You know, don't sleep.
1:59:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, if this week is like last week, holy crap.
1:59:04 Speaker 01 I mean, this is unbelievable, the implications of this. Every like few hours, everything changes again. It's crazy.
1:59:12 Speaker 00 All right. All right. See you guys.
1:59:14 Speaker 01 Love you guys.
1:59:14 Speaker 00 Love you too.
1:59:15 Speaker 03 Thanks.
1:59:16 Speaker 00 If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a Moonshot mate. Every week, my Moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.commetatrends. That's diamandis.commetatrends.
1:59:59 Speaker 00 Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.
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2:00:20 Speaker 11 It's me, the...
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2:00:26 Speaker 11 Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.
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2:00:39 Speaker 08 Time to read the tagline.
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Previous Brian Armstrong on Bitcoin, Anthropic Drops Fable 5 & Mythos 5, NewLimit's $435M Age-Reversal | EP #264 Next The $10B Satellite Empire Putting AI in Orbit, Why Chips Beat Rockets & China's #1 Open Model | EP #266 Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
