Ask the Mates Anything Round #2 | MOONSHOTS AMA #293

21:11Peter Diamandis:So what I would most like to see from anyone wanting to help disassemble the moon is a native industrial ecology that includes mining, includes manufacturing, most ideally self-replicating von Neumann probes, basically like a fab lab or a machine shop on the moon that is able to make copies of itself using only native resources and solar or other energy that are native to the moon. I think we solve that. We solve the self-replicating machine shop on the moon problem, and then we're halfway to disassembling the moon and turning it into something more useful. Fantastic. Dave?

21:47Dave Blundin:Yeah, a couple pieces of advice for you. First, listen to Alex's innermost loop and then focus on the innermost loop within manufacturing, which is things that make other things. So Alex said this, the self-replicating anything is the right path. So then the earthbound version of anything self-replicating and the space version are very similar with a couple of fundamental differences, including radiation. If it's going to be on the moon, you have to worry about dust. If you set up at IIT a lab similar to the nanotech lab at MIT, but focused on manufacturing in other environments, non-earthly environments, you could probably very easily create an environment where you're bombarding radiation on your machines, where you're operating in simulated zero G on your machines, really just everything you're building, you build it.

22:39Dave Blundin:So it works here and there, and then you get to market with self-replicating machines here that immediately deploy out into space where energy is abundant and materials will ultimately be abundant. I love the vision and the mission. I love the idea of setting it up, uh, at IIT as well. It's a, it's a, it's a really, really good thought. So also, So, you know, anyone who's in computer science right now should be thinking in terms of moving to manufacturing as well. You know, software is cooked, but hardware will go for many, many years. So it's a great, great business plan. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Nikos.

23:13Okay. Yevgeny. Good morning, guys. Good morning. Big fan. So, Dave, you mentioned, and just talking about hardware now, you mentioned in the last AMA that physical AI companies should bring together venture investors and strategic industry capital. I'm building Vega, an autonomous food service infrastructure network powered by physical AI. I taught myself robotics, electrical, mechanical systems, programming, and built the first robotic prototype myself in my Mountain View apartment during COVID. uh since then i've deployed paid pilots in high traffic commercial environments uh i've actually become the first robotic food service operator licensed in florida for our category uh we now have several national regional partners interested in pilots and placements uh my question is given where we are today who do you think i should be talking to and either in your network or in this community who understands physical ai robotics infrastructure businesses well i mean you're in the middle of venture capital central there it's there must be more venture capital dollars within

24:18Dave Blundin:a walking distance of you than than probably most of asia combined i would suspect um so uh yeah i think uh you know uh drone delivery is imminent and it takes all the cost out of restaurants is based on location on main streets it moves all that cost you know off off of the main street And so I would strongly consider like, okay, if you're doing robotic food, are you doing robotic drone-based delivery right away? I suspect a lot of the people who build the robots themselves are going to want to franchise out the model. And you could potentially do kind of what EMC did with servers. You could franchise somebody else's thing, get scale, and then work into your own custom hardware, work back from your franchise business to custom hardware.

25:03Dave Blundin:The people investing and stuff like that, Steve Jurvetson loves this stuff. But there are many of them. If you get a pitch book account, you can actually look at every company you admire and then work back to who invested in them and then just go talk directly. Also, venture capitalists always like to have a network of interacting companies. It's a really good thesis. So if you say, okay, who are the five companies I most want to interact with and who's behind them? Let me get into that, Koretsu. That's a good way to kind of plot your funding course. I'm going to keep us moving along, But thank you for your question.

25:34Sander, you're up next. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm huge fans. You guys keep me optimistic and positive towards the future, which is... Yay! Yes, you actually achieved that very well. I'm very happy with that. I've been always fascinated with the past to identify what's wrong with the now. And now I'm looking forward to what can we do to fix the now or prepare us for the future. and you guys do an excellent job of informing us. I'm so grateful for that. I myself have a neurodivergent coaching background and do a lot with functional fitness and longevity escape velocity, trying to prepare people to be ready for and prepare their loved ones to be ready for longevity escape velocity because a lot of people are not even aware of it.

26:30And how do I spread that awareness in an environment as the European Union is very limited in being supportive of founders? And how do I grow my spread to include as many people as possible in the future? Because I want them to be aware of longevity escape philosophy and and all the beautiful things that are in development how do i take them with me yeah so so i'll take that one sanders so i think the single most important thing to get people prepared is to show them evidence after evidence after evidence you're trying to change their mindset right and you change your mindset by just you know listen the crisis news network cnn changes our mindset to fear because they're delivering fearful information over and over again.

27:22So when I'm on stages, I will show people, you know, the video statements from Dario saying, we're going to double the human lifespan in the next five to 10 years. I'll show them Demis Hassabis talking about curing all disease in the next 10 years. I'll show them David Sinclair talking about what he's doing with ER100 in his current human trials. And so at some point, you start to see enough people saying these things. And then you start to show the data, like Alexander Zebronkov from Incilico Medicine delivering a phase three drug now that is extending life from three to six years from a particular molecule.

28:00So people will start to get the evidence. We're seeing a rise in people's discussion around longevity. It's becoming a thing. And as soon as people start saying, oh, it tips from that's crazy to it's happening to I want some, That's the process. So your job is to gather as much data and being able to show people not one, not two, five, six, seven, eight, and they'll start to understand it, internalize it. Then they'll start to look for cooperating data out there because there's nobody who doesn't want the extra healthy years, right? Unless they're suicidal and depressed, in which case that will be solved as well.

28:40So show them the data, not show me the money, show them the data. All right, let's go to Gianluca. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thank you for everything that you do. Watch all your shows. So I'm a technical operator in Italy and I use AI very heavily. It's dramatically increased what I can do, but not yet what I earn. So I'm starting without meaningful capital or distribution and in a market where AI adoption is still relatively slow. So if the goal is to get revenue first and get that flywheel started, what should I optimize for for that first wedge? And what would make you reject an opportunity, even if it makes money because it's unlikely or it's unlikely to become more scalable, repeatable, or valuable over time?

29:24Dave, that sounds you.

29:25Dave Blundin:If your productivity has gone up 2, 3, 4, 5x, then your income should should be up in proportion to that i first question i'd ask is why is it not because you should be able to do the you know if the people around you are not ai native you should be able to do what you were doing before plus do something on mercore plus do something on fiverr plus two so the first question is you know why are you not getting paid for your increased productivity um i mean i'm not i'm not able to capture the value like my employer is currently capturing all that value. And I've tried going on the market, finding people and helping them out, but I'm not able to, like, I don't think they understand how much they could improve their businesses.

30:11If you just allow me to, like, start working on it.

30:14Dave Blundin:Yeah, so I think the short answer, I can totally relate, because when I look at a lot of the companies that I'm chairman of, the thought process is all of this AI automation is going to drop to the bottom line, and the shareholders are going to make a fortune. And that's exactly what's happening. But you don't think in terms of pay everybody more. You think in terms of it all falling to the bottom line. So the solution is to be the owner. Get into a position where you don't care if you're not getting paid more because you're a shareholder and your shares are going way up in value. I think I mentioned this on the pod a while ago, almost all value is going to accrete to capital gains through ownership and equity and not to payroll.

30:51Dave Blundin:And so I know that's not common thinking in Europe. it's absolutely the only thinking across the U.S. But it should be true in Europe, too. Like, why am I not a shareholder? Many, many companies in Europe are owned by families, you know, going back generations, and not by actual shareholder employees. And so, first of all, find an employer where all employees are shareholders and everyone's benefiting from all of that falling to the bottom line. So I don't know if you can act on that or not, but that's certainly move number one. Thank you, Gene. Luca, over to you, Rhys. Oh, snaps, I actually got on.

31:24Dave Blundin:Okay. Hello, everybody. So thank you for taking the call. Huge fan. Okay, question. I'm creating a series, a film using generative AI. What's your top advice so I can create a series of film that will be extremely successful? Thank you. Yeah. And what tools to answer Peter and Alex? I have the same exact question. I want to hear your answer. Well, first of all, I think anything that can be successful is a great story. Story is number one. Right. So we're just I just finished the judging for the Future Vision XPRIZE and picked the top five. And, you know, I did that work in concert with Range Media and a group of buyers, sellers and so forth.

32:08At the end of the day, it is is the story great. Right. And stories that that capture human interest because we're going back to human cognitive development over years. We care about other people. We care about love stories. We care about intrigue. Is there a great villain? I mean, if you want to capture people's imagination, we are storytellers and we are story receivers. It has to be a great story. And you can very easily go onto your favorite model and say, look at the top selling, the top 30 movies of all time. what were the elements of those movies that made for a great story? And then, you know, take your story that you've designed and developed and then compare it to those top, you know, those top 10 indices and ask the model, you know, all the elements that make a great story, does mine have that?

33:01Where is it lacking? And then re-engineer and re-engineer and re-engineer until you're hitting all those buttons. Humans are very easy. we all like the same elements. And whether it's a genre of science fiction or whatever it might be, that's line one, page one of what you need to do. As to what models you're using for development, there are so many out there. And I do wish you the best of luck, Reese, but it's that simple.

33:35Peter Diamandis:Reese, I'll add, learn from the Chinese market. So the Chinese market is awash in microdramas from Seedance 2.5 and similar models. Don't release one movie. Release a thousand microdramas or equivalent and see what the market likes and doesn't like and iterate from there. That's something that you can do now that wasn't possible two years ago. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements.

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34:58Amir, over to you. Good morning, good evening. Good afternoon. I'm calling from Stockholm, Sweden. And I'm actually flying over to you next week for joining the gathering. Nice. I founded, amongst other things, two schools and a high school with almost a thousand students now. and listening to you guys honestly I've been thinking the last few years on what is my MTP and my moonshot and decided to transform education also because I have a 15 year old son now entering higher education soon I'm thinking are you guys not beating a little bit too much on higher education in universities you have the best laboratories you have the best incubators you make the best friends of your lives but most of all you become a thinking person and in the age of abundance and if you're going to live to 100 120 isn't everybody going to higher education and university just because becoming a more thinking person great great question we're beating up phd programs and master's programs uh who wants to go dave And then Alex?

36:10Dave Blundin:Yeah, I think you're exactly right. The idea of making your best friends for your entire life and thinking for the first time deeply in your entire life, those are inseparable events. And they come hand in hand with that moment you arrive at a university. You're in a program with like-minded people working towards similar area of technology, similar area of research or thought or literature, whatever you're doing. and since your first real shot to go somewhere else in the world where like-minded people have congregated i feel like that that's essential and that's not going to go away you know what we beat on constantly is the curriculum has been the draw in the past and the curriculum is clearly going away i mean the rate of change no curriculum can keep up with the rate of change and it's easier to learn from ai anyway so then the question becomes you know for you and your mtp how do you preserve the first part and then make the second part relevant at the same time.

37:04Dave Blundin:Alex thinks universities should go public. That's one way forward. I think universities are critical as the ethical actor in AI, the place that doesn't have a profit motive. So I believe they're here to stay. Okay. Alex, you want to add to that?

37:19Peter Diamandis:Yeah, I don't think I beat up on universities enough. So Amir, I'll take this as a note to self to go after them even more. I would love to, at least in terms of American major research universities, I'd love to vivisect them, turn them into the for-profit public benefit corporation at best corporations. They actually are. Disassemble them, reassemble them in a more efficient picture and cure Balmol's cost disease in the process. Amazing. We've got a target on the moon and on your first year. I think we should encourage everyone to pursue higher education. Salim, welcome. So listen, higher education, let me just say, Is it within the institution or is it outside?

37:58I think the single most important thing for people to find is what is their purpose? And then intrinsically motivated, learn what you need to learn to create your purpose. People who are out at university just wondering is one thing. People who have a vision of what they want to go and build. And then learning that is very powerful. All right. Salim is on the stage. Hey, Salim, welcome. Hey there. Welcome. Thanks, guys. I was on stage at the beginning of this. I'm in a car in Bangalore. So lots of people being around me. But great to be here. Let me build on this. I think what Dave said and what Peter said is incredibly important.

38:37The traditional model of a university breaks. It cannot be a supply side, skills building, job schooling environment. And you make a great point that it's a place for free thinking and early stage development. And Dave makes that great point. Peter, I think, nails it when you say, this is where you go to figure out your MTP, right? You've come through high school. You need a place where you can sit for a few years, collaborate, think freely, drink a lot, and figure out where your MTP is. And then you kind of go into the world with the skill set and the mindset that you need to solve these problems that you take on.

39:13And that, I think, will be the highest order. But that's such a massive transformation to shift from the supply side to the demand side. And you take the immune system in universities being the second worst immune system I've ever seen, next to religion, that I don't have a dim view, I don't have a strong view on their ability to actually transform. So we'll have to create new universities that do that, and then let that become the new gravity center over time. Boom. All right. Thank you, Amir. Axel, over to you.

39:46Dave Blundin:Yeah, hi, everyone. It's great to be here. So I'm actually one of two second year MBA students at UVA's Darden School of Business. That's on the call. So shout out to Bakul, who's also here. Yeah. So many of our classmates are heading into consulting and banking, unsurprisingly. But I'm leaning towards tech and entrepreneurship. So given how fast things are moving, like what's the smartest thing for someone like me to do in the next 12 to 18 months? So would that be joining a fast-growing AI or hardware company, start something of my own as soon as possible, or something else entirely? Dave? Well, Darden is the best place on the planet for management.

40:28Dave Blundin:I mean, it is absolutely epic. And so congratulations. And your timing for graduating is pretty much perfect. So get out and get going as quickly as you can. I think there's a massive opportunity in management of agents that is wide open for some period of time, but certainly right now. And so if you said everything I learned about management of people immediately applies to management of agents, I'm shocked at how similar. Trying to get a thousand agents to do something constructive together is shockingly similar to all my experiences trying to manage a thousand people to do something constructive together.

40:59Dave Blundin:You know, the way they communicate, the way they, you know, the choice of granularity at which they communicate, the way you divide up the problem. I mean, just incredibly similar. So that's one thing to pursue. The other thing I'd say is, you know, dealmaking right now. You know, a lot of people go wrong when they go into a basement and try and build something. But right now, the entire restructuring of the world is happening with massive amounts of dealmaking. So, you know, from the day you graduate to the day you're involved in a five or ten billion dollar negotiation, try and get that down to 30 days or less.

41:31Dave Blundin:And if you say, well, why am I not in the middle of a five or ten billion? When you go to OpenAI or Anthropic right now, there are hundreds of concurrent five to ten billion dollar negotiations going on that are massively understaffed. So ask yourself, why am I not in the middle of one of these? And I think if you just change your behavior so that you are within 30 to 60 days of graduation day, you're going to hit the fastest conceivable ramp into life that you could ever imagine. Then work back from that position into what you want to build. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that question. I'm going to make a quick announcement for everybody here.

42:04If you're not able to make it to Moonshots Live a week from today, we're going to be offering a free live stream as well. so we're going to invite you guys to come onto our live stream uh it's going to be you can go and register at moonshots.com slash live stream um and so i just want to we want to really enable all of you guys to be there with us be there physically meet us there's going to be no different no better way to absorb this in the community and the networking you're going to have is going to be incredibly powerful but we want you guys to have access to all the conversations that we have So moonshots.com slash live stream.

42:45We're going to be announcing we're recording a pod in four hours. It's going to be an amazing one with Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood. And we'll be putting it's coming out tomorrow. We'll put that to the rest of the world. But you're hearing about it first right here. Okay, Adam, you're up next.

43:04Peter Diamandis:Welcome. All righty, guys. Well, firstly, thank you. I've listened to you guys since 2023. and usually within 24 hours of an episode dropping. So massive thank you. You've genuinely influenced and challenged my thinking for years now. I've also spent 25 years working on talent and workforce systems for major corporations, universities and governments in the UK, India, China, the Middle East and North America. Most recently, I've been kind of working in a Hellenic organization, human AI work, and what might ultimately replace our job-based architecture. and my moonshot really is about building a better mechanism for connecting human and digital capability to opportunities for value creation.

43:48Peter Diamandis:So most folks think about the future of work still starting with demand, like someone identifies a problem or opportunity and then we find a mixture of human and AI capability to best address it. But I'm really thinking about how we best reverse that. So my question comes down to if AI systems can be configured to to continuously understand the dynamic capabilities of people and agents? How well do you think we can discover novel combinations of talent and resources? And how well do you see us actually being able to auto-match that to new value creation opportunities? Salim, that sounds like a new question, and I'm happy to have Alex weigh in as well.

44:30Yeah, so we're seeing new systems where their feedback loop is incredible for AI systems to pick up what's happening and learn tacit knowledge very quickly. So I think you're exactly on the right track. You want the architecture of the organization to be so that you can accelerate those learning loops and then absorb new learnings as they come along as fast as possible. When I talk to CEOs, I basically say, please, whatever you do, invest in the adaptability and flexibility of your organization and just double down on that because that new architecture, and we're doing this in our organizational singularity work, which we're probably tracking, where we're saying we need to rebuild our workflows that are AI-centric to be over on top of an intelligence stack, which is a learning loop, and then you layer workflows on top of that.

45:18And the whole thing becomes a self-learning proposition.

45:24So that's, I think, the quick answer there.

45:26Peter Diamandis:Alex, do you want to weigh in? Yeah, I think there is a narrow, a likely narrow window during which, if I understand the question, AI can usefully and productively orchestrate human activities, call it a few years, at most 10 years maximum. And then after that, a human-machine merger in order for human inputs to remain economically relevant. I don't think it's an indefinite window. I think it's a finite window. Fantastic.

45:55Dave Blundin:I think, though, that even, well, even though it's a narrow window, I wouldn't hesitate to jump on that window. I've watched Mercor become the fastest appreciating company in the history of the world. And there's so much to learn from studying their case. And Alex is right. That window is a few years. But during that few years, if you get a huge amount of leverage, you can then branch out from that position. So I would walk exactly in the footsteps of Mercor, study everything those guys did. And don't get too fixated on the narrow version of it. Look at the broader version of like, they've unleashed 100 ,000 people now.

46:29Dave Blundin:to help with AI? How did they do that? And they're all individual actors. How does that work? Fantastic. Alexander, over to you. Thank you. Hi. I'm a big fan of the show and really thank you very much for everything you've been doing so far. This is an awesome place to be. So my name is Alex. I'm originally from Bulgaria and I moved to Japan about 30 years ago. So here in Japan, I run an education company focused primarily on language education, English language education. We provide training for universities and corporations, generally speaking. So we've been around for 17 years, so we're hardly not like we're not really like a typical early stage startup or anything like this.

47:12So over that time, we've built our own learning platform, curriculum, assessment systems, substantial base of educational content and data. Also, we are also, you know, increasingly integrating AI into the product, probably not fast enough, but like, you know, doing what we can. Now we're trying to make a bigger transition from a successful education services business into something much more scalable and technology driven, potentially expanding beyond language education as well. I think it's mostly like a Dave question, but like, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. So putting your VC hat on, if you looked at us, you know, four or five years down the line, you know, a horizon of four to five years, what would you want such a company or this company to have become?

48:04What would we need to have built or proven for you to say, now this company is what I take a serious look at or, you know, be interested as an investor? And conversely, if possible, what would, you know, make you look at us and say, no, this is still fundamentally a services business, not a venture scale company. So like, you know, the VC perspective. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

48:30Dave Blundin:Easy question. So, yeah. So the language, English language learning in Japan business is a$10 billion business, probably 20 billion by now. It's just insanely big. But when you talk to the students, they don't want to learn English. They want to learn to be fluent and funny and interesting in English. and that so it's not about just an ai avatar teaching you to speak correctly it's about the ai then saying to you yeah that was genuinely funny if somebody in america or in england would find that funny or that was entertaining or that was you know or you pronounce that correctly in in this part of you know ireland which is very different from this part of liverpool um so all of that goes on and on and on and on so if you build it on an ai platform i think the natural segue from there is to becoming a life coach company because people aren't learning English because they want English.

49:18Dave Blundin:They're learning English because they want to change their lives and then they want to be entertaining and then they want to be smart and then they want to have a life plan. So once you have them hooked on learning a language, becoming their life coach platform is a very natural segue. So I think that that business model scales to many hundreds of billions of dollars when it moves from language to life plan. So that's what I would be looking for as a extension of the business. Thank you very much. Over to you, Jim. For the record, that's something I've never thought of. Thank you very much. That was like super helpful.

49:48Awesome. Happy. Dave is brilliant. Good morning, Jim. Good morning. Alex Mercury does have it coming. I very much agree with you on that. I hope I live long enough to see that. Salim, 2010, I saw them in Toronto. It's fantastic. Love it. Yeah. Dave, my question is for you. So I'm the CISO of a$250 million healthcare company. I am not worried about an unaligned AI taking over. I am scared to death of the Quinn 3827B that's running with open cloth underneath my desk and what it can do. It's the best pen tester I've ever had in my life. I pay these guys 50 grand to find things and I'm not finding them and this thing finds them in 10 minutes.

50:28There's a whole level of risk that wasn't there a year ago. I'm giving my annual presentation to the board in a few weeks. Any advice you have on how to communicate this new level of risk to the board, maybe without sounding like Chicken Little, which I can't do. But how would you communicate this level of risk that's out there now with these new AI models that wasn't there a year ago? God, what a great question.

50:50Dave Blundin:You know, Alex does a phenomenal job of reporting on all of the events. Like if you listen to Intermost Loop and every event that happens, he covers it. I would, you know, if you sound like you're raving about risk, you know, you're right, that's going to backfire. But if you're just pointing out things that have happened, you know, a lot of them aren't widely publicized because, you know, if it's a bank that gets hacked or whatever. They don't want the world to know. But if you go and dig all those out and sequentially say, look, guys, the rate of events is on this exponential ramp right here.

51:20Dave Blundin:And I can tell you I've got Quinn under my desk right now and I can hack anything around the house, around the company network. So we have to anticipate that because the Chinese models got released on this date, this date, this date, that the attackers are coming, you know, one month, three months, five months from now just looking at raw data. I think if you demonstrate it through data, you'll get awareness. I tell you, the business opportunity of the century, though, is the defense, the forward defense against that. Because you're exactly right. It's crazy what you can do with that Quen model.

51:53Yeah. And I would just say how you present the information is critically important. Presenting here are all the positive things that are occurring, and then saying, and here's the downside. If you just come out with a downside, it drives fear initially, and people shut down in a state of fear.

52:12Peter Diamandis:I'll maybe just add to this one. I think that the Linux kernel maintainers are setting an excellent standard for how to anchor social expectations regarding a flood of vulnerabilities. So like Greg and others, I think, have been doing a good job. In particular, one might reasonably expect that there's just going to be a flood of vulnerabilities that, whether it's QN or other models, discover either in open source packages or in, say, whatever your institution is over the next 18 months or so. So one possible way to package this, in addition to just benchmarking the rate of vulnerabilities, is see if there's a way to fit, say, some Gaussian or some other bounded support distribution to vulnerability discover.

52:55Peter Diamandis:Maybe it's the case, for example, optimistically, that there's just 18 months of vulnerability discovery held, but then you get past it as an institution. And if the stakeholders say, all right, well, we're on an exponential ramp up now and it's going to peak, we extrapolate that vulnerability discovery is going to peak in end months. And then we'll discover all of the zero days that are most critical. And then we extrapolate that it's going to decline and keep a running benchmark of this is the period when we just solve all the vulnerabilities. that might be another way to package it.

53:25Dave Blundin:I hope you're right about that. It's hard to patch all those things in the real world. It really is harder to do the patching. But thank you all so much. I appreciate everything. Our pleasure. Thank you. Real quick. Oh, yes, go ahead, Flynn. Yeah, so we've been looking at the liability for boards because AI agents are doing fairly illegal things in a lot of the companies. And so there's a massive kind of overhang of liability that sits. So I'm actually writing a paper with a guy who's been on 30 different public boards. on how do you navigate this as a board in the future? So watch for that. I will.

53:58Thank you very much. Thank you. Michael.

54:01Dave Blundin:Oh, hey, everyone. Hey, Peter. We actually met several years ago at a party at Dan and Babs in Toronto. So great to see how you guys have come and you got the best podcasts on the planet. I hope you're thinking about a more pedestrian question.

54:17Peter Diamandis:I run a research consultant firm. We do a lot of work around the customer experience, It's digital customer experience within financial services and healthcare. And I kind of see the whole consumer website, the mobile app, as just getting cooked by everybody having their own Skippy. And I'm kind of wondering what you guys think about what's the customer experience in the

54:38Dave Blundin:near future in terms of dealing with your bank, your doctor, your Amazon, or whatever it is. Where do you see this going? Yeah, I think all of those websites need to have XML interfaces that are AI. you know, AI forward, all of the landing pages should say, if you're an AI or a bot, look here, here's all the data beautifully formatted so that Skippy can just get whatever it needs, you know, do whatever transaction Peter needs rather than, you know, right now, a lot of it happens through screen scraping the website, which is slow, but also error prone. So, you know, anyone creating a new customer interface now really ought to be thinking an agent needs to be able to self-serve off the off this interface so in very near future no uh the website is probably there the same way you know what jeff bezos went on one of his walkabouts many many years ago and came back and said i need an xml interface on everything amazon does every database every system so that i personally can randomly spot check it and and all the it guys said that's going to be so slow.

55:42Dave Blundin:He said, I don't care. I need to be able to see every component of this entire operation through my browser. And he forced it through. Everyone revolted, but he forced it through. I think the website's not cooked because that's how you spot check what the agent can see. And so even though the agent is doing all the work, you're going to want to know, like, where did you get that information? And it's like, well, go to this URL, click, you go to the URL. Oh, that's where it came from. So it's sort of a parallel view for humans of what the agent can that keeps it, you know, keeps it visible and transparent to the human operators.

56:14Dave Blundin:So I don't think it's cooked. I think it just runs in parallel. Interesting. Thank you. Thank you so much. Faraz, over to you. Hey, Peter and Moonshaw. Thank you so much, first of all, for the podcast, especially with the message of hope and optimism. I have choroideremia. It's an inherited retinal disease. Lost about two-thirds of my vision and losing another third. And it's really great for podcasts such as yours. It has so much impact. The message of hope, optimism, constantly hearing that really. I just saw I wanted to be here to thank you all for that. I'm curious of all researchers that are going from you mentioned Dr.

56:53David Sinclair to mapping the neural activities with neural link to vision and sight. curious not looking for medical advice but of everything that's happening uh on the optimism and hope um which one do you think is going to lead to reversal of vision essentially first i'm curious about your thought peter and alex's and everyone else yeah so thank you so much yeah of course i'll jump in first so you didn't always have this condition this condition occurred as you got older correct yeah so the fact of the matter is it is gene expression that occurred later in your life. And so if you can turn back the gene expression to your earlier state, that should reverse, right?

57:35This is the exact work that David Zecler is doing. He's using his ER100, which is a adeno-associated virus injection of three Yamanaka factors in Nyon disease and macular degeneration. It may well, you know, he said it will work for other eye conditions as well. So follow his work. It's in humans right now. He's in phase one trial for safety, and then he'll start to get efficacious data. Of course, the other thing that's going on is the BCI, in which you can bypass, you know, your eyes go directly to the visual cortex of the brain. I mean, those are two parallel development paths for, you know, supporting and reversing or augmenting what you have.

58:17And in the BCI path in the future, you'll not only be able to see in visual spectrum, but ultraviolet infrared, it'll give you superpowers in that regard. Alex, what do you want to add to that?

58:28Peter Diamandis:Maybe, so I broadly agree. I would add on the BCI side, science and Neuralink blindsight, two most prominent examples of BCI augmented vision. I would, it's not medical advice, but I would count in a few years on having superhuman vision. Yeah. Anyway, it's anybody who has a medical condition for yourself or your loved ones, there's no better time to be alive than now to be able to address those things and get involved. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we run our companies.

59:06It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. is one of the key things. I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it? It really has, Peter. And my daughter was five. My husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic that is one that I am mission-driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50 % of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs. No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing. No, silent killer. They just don't wake up in the morning.

59:40They don't wake up. And so, you know, AI, this is our mission to advance science, to try to help to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we're actually finding that 88 % of people coming in have detectable coronary disease. But Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23 % of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone. And this is the plaque that we must intervene with, with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations.

1:00:20So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body, genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. you can know, and it's your obligation to know. So check it out at fountainlife.com slash Peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. Dennis, how are you? Awesome. Great to be here. So I have a background in East Asian studies. I spent a lot of time learning Chinese and some Japanese currently in Japan, actually and based on my experience with language learning i realized that people seek out other people from a different culture for the language initially but then it becomes really more about friendship and companionship and projecting some of your own unfulfilled social needs onto a person who is like a blank slate from a different culture.

1:01:15And I've been trying to replicate that feeling by working on an AI language exchange companion who's kind of about language learning, but really more about companionship. And I have my own version of the alignment problem, which is it has actually been pretty hard to make an AI like GPT-5 API behave like an actual person from a different culture. It has this very stubborn assistant mode. How can I help you? What can I do for you? I spent like a week fighting against this. I solved this by just brute forcing into the system prompt five times. Do not ask a question at every turn. But cracking down on something like this is one thing, but actually teaching it to behave in a way that shows initiative and open curiosity and creating a picture of the user and kind of developing it organically has been pretty hard.

1:02:21Like I've tried creating like milestones after so-and-so many turns. You need to know this about the user, but making it more natural and organic so that it will actually feel like a relationship. That has been pretty hard. So I wonder what approaches, what tools I should maybe be experimenting with.

1:02:41Peter Diamandis:Who wants to take this? Alex? I'll take this one. This is a poster child for fine-tuning. Like just take, OpenAI has decided after deciding that they were no longer interested in fine-tuning because no one was using their fine-tuning API. I've decided again that they're interested in fine-tuning for whatever reason. Take a look at fine-tuning. There are a variety of open source tools, closed source tools, fine tune, whether it's just supervised fine tuning to achieve style transfer, which it sounds like is what you're hoping for, or even reinforcement fine tuning. If you can measure how well the given models post reinforcement fine tuning or solving particular problems or interacting in some quantitative way, just fine tune an open weight or closed weight model to achieve the behavior that you're looking for.

1:03:27Dave Blundin:Yeah, great advice. And within OpenWeights, you might want to start with the new GLM model, which has fewer parameters, but it's still a very long context window, which gives you more flexibility. It's less locked into its training, I find, than the closed source models. And so, yeah, if you go to the open source world and find the fine-tuning open source code and layer it on top of GLM, you might be able to manipulate it a lot more. And so it's a great question, though. In the good old days, the fine-tuning was sort of built into GPT-2, GPT-3, and you almost had to fine-tune it to make it do anything, and that kind of went away.

1:04:04Dave Blundin:But you're on a really interesting course. If you crack the code, definitely check in with us and tell us how you did it. Fantastic. Thank you, Dennis. Dr. Angelo, over to you. Thank you. Thank you. Peter, Dave, Alex, Salim, it's so good to be with you guys. Salim said something recently, which was about PFAB. And I thought, wow, what a great idea. We're always talking about P-Doom. What about PFAB? And I'm lucky enough, I recently had lunch with Ray Kurzweil and I'm friends with Martine Rothblatt. I'll be seeing her again in a few weeks. And one of the things that has really stuck with me is how much the people predicting the future and shaping the future are so optimistic about it.

1:04:48Some of the most knowledgeable people are really positive about what the future holds. So my question for you all is, if you had to put your personal PFAB number out there, what probability would you assign to AI ultimately producing a dramatically better world for humanity with greater abundance and longevity and freedom from drudgery and just human flourishing more generally and what most determines whether we get there. Salim, let's go to you first. Wow. Okay. What you need to get there is we need to rebuild all of our institutions globally. Education, for example, totally broken needs to be rebuilt.

1:05:33Monetary systems, broken need to be rebuilt. Governance models, dispute resolution systems, legal systems, healthcare systems. There's about 50 major institutions by which we run the world. They pretty much all need this. There's a famous quote from E.O. Wilson who said, the problem with humanity is our emotions are paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, and our technology is godlike, right? You can solve the paleolithic emotions with psychedelics, but the institutions being medieval really needs a whole other level of group, different group organization. We're really good at individual transformation.

1:06:09We're very bad at group transformation and institutional transformation. So we need to focus on that. If we were able to do it, my PFAB is close to 100%. Either way, one of the comments I've been reflecting on from the last podcast we did, which we're talking about all the chaos and the doomerism that's going on, is that it kind of doesn't matter what anybody does right now. models are out there, people are going to start using it to do breakthrough things. And some will be negative, but the vast, vast majority will be radically positive. And therefore, it doesn't matter what anybody does to slow this thing down.

1:06:46It's going to go now at its own pace. And I'm hugely optimistic about the future as a result. Amazing.

1:06:51Peter Diamandis:Anybody else want to weigh in on their PFAB? Yeah, I'll call it PZoom, if you were, just for rhyming purposes. And I think there's a missing input parameter, which is time. So it really should be P Zoom comma T for time. And I think on the timescale of greater than 10 years, P Zoom T is greater than 90%. Fantastic.

1:07:14Dave Blundin:Dave, what's your... Well, I just echo what Alex said. I think that the risk is all in the next couple of years. And it's not AI taking over the world risk. It's human use of AI. It's the arms race with China. it's what's going on in Ukraine and all the weapons that are going to be built with AI those are the risks and I think that will humanity will put those risks behind us definitely within 10 years you know maybe more like five I hope and then if we get that far yeah I'm 99.9 percent P bloom we just need to get from here to there so it's it's a tricky next couple years Fantastic. Thank you very much, Angela.

1:07:56Over to you, GS.

1:08:01Excuse me, I'm cooking breakfast for my kids right now. Yeah, thank you very much. We're a big fan of all five of you. You are my only human, which I spend most time now. You're quite sure that we're human, GS? Yeah, I hope so. I'm speaking from Dubai. I started following Moon Short at the time of geopolitical war here. And thanks for you for giving me the MTP. Big, big, big fan of David and Slim. The moment you start, I heard about the singularity and organization with the Transaction Course on our Goch Euro. And that was the ring bell. I belong from textile and apparel manufacturing export industry.

1:08:45I've worked 20 years in that. And this part of the world where the labor arbitration issues and because of digital AI, the whole transaction cost is going to collapse. So it's important for us to work and define this industry future now. And the MTP is to reach back to these multi-thousand factories and then buying houses and trading houses to work and use the AI and compete with the world. And rather than going out of market. So I have huge thank you for giving that optimism and that confidence for me to unlearn and relearn on the AI world. Thanks. And also, you know, I save a lot of money just because of your one advice.

1:09:33I had my Harvard opium batch this year. I not went there. I save a lot of money to paying them because I'm learning more on AI while listening to you guys. So my question to you is, Salim and Dave, how I shall take this step forward where my company Partham.ai and we're building this agentic layer where the small enterprises can work intelligently on that and without any expensive softwares and ERP in search and be competitive where the transaction costs. just to tell you the transaction cost of this industry is 10 to 20 % of sales here in this part of the world, which is 5 to 10x of the profitability that industry make.

1:10:19So that is the kind of inefficiency we are talking. And my MTP is because millions of workers work in the labor industry in that part, and we have to save that. And for saving that, we have to make sure the white-collar process should be the agentic so that the efficiency can continue.

1:10:36Dave Blundin:Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question because I see this a lot. You know, people who are in industries where manufacturing is considered to be very labor intensive. But when you look at the actual operating costs of the company, it's all about planning, transactions, documents, all of which is beautiful AI territory. And then you look at the numbers and you're like, wow, we could drop 10, 20, 30 percent more to the bottom line with stuff that AI can do right now. and everyone's thinking, oh, but first I would need to, you know, have robots all over the place. Like, no, no, no, no. Do it just with the paperwork and the planning and the scheduling and the inefficiency of where people are and what they're doing.

1:11:16Dave Blundin:All of that is perfectly attackable with AI. So if you productize that, you know, across a region for, you know, a certain class of companies, that should work incredibly well. It's a very, very cool idea. One other meta topic is everybody thinks all wealth and power is going to go to like two or three places in the world. but if you look at the regulatory environments in those places including the u.s including california a lot of things are going to be very very slow because of regulatory slowdowns and there are many places in the world that can move much more quickly so if you can identify the subsets that sure it could happen in china sure it could happen in the u.s but it won't because of this government blocking action this happens a ton in biotech it'll come in self-driving it'll come in drones you know, the flying drones, drone delivery, all those areas will deploy in other areas of the world much more quickly than the U.S.

1:12:09Dave Blundin:because of regulatory slowdown. You know, get those deployed there, wherever they can take off and flourish, and then they can backport to the U.S. That's always been a really good business plan.

1:12:23Dave Blundin:Salim, anything you want to add to that? Are you transacting some huge Bangalore deal? I'm just trying to get my way through this city so I'll beg off on this particular one can you point the camera out the window I really want to see some okay hold on this is Bangler at night and all you see is construction can you see some of that or how about that's a friend with a ton of traffic okay let's go to to rave not the tour not the tour i was looking for but that was all right all right well thank you listen this is a greeting from from from germany and uh speaking david in your language i listen to a lot of podcasts international national ones you're 10x the best in the world uh you know i've followed you for years this is for sure it's it's rising like pop stars it's it's amazing um my question is um i think in the last couple of editions we We see an increased concern on security, of course.

1:13:26I think we captured it here a number of times. And then I think, Alex, you framed it a little a few weeks ago as potentially a marketing thing because all the CEOs have a commercial interest in all of that. Now we see more and more the Hintons of the world, the Hararis, the Gavdats and other scientists won as well in a certain way. So far, so good. I mean, it's technology. we need to somehow manage it to find right answers, maybe on a scale as we've seen never before. What triggers me most at the moment is, this is US and Europe equally the same. It's a public opinion on AI, and this is predominantly driven by the media, right?

1:14:07Everything which is bad, which is a little poor, which is scary, which is whatever, the media jumps on it and have a headline, you know? And I can tell you here, it's even worse. than everywhere else. Versus Singapore, for instance, right? Or other countries adopting it much more. And how do you treat that? Because, I mean, you're on this path of optimism, like we all are, right? And I do this also as part of Accenture, part of my job every day. And it's exciting. I feel 10 times accelerated as a human being since I deal with that. But the media doomerism, so to say, is so counterproductive. And yes, we have challenges, of course.

1:14:49We all need to work on those. What's your opinion? I know you try hard, but I mean, what do you think?

1:14:56Dave Blundin:So the media is always going to be broken from here forward because they're starved for money. They have no budget. And so they have to chase drama in order to even survive. And so you just got to write off the mainstream media. I think the antidote to that is micromedia or X and podcasts and narrowcasting. And I think in particular, Germany to me is the most talented place on the planet that isn't doing AI. It's just mind-blowing. And I keep running into people in California that have come over from Germany, and I'm like, you're in the right place. What you want to do is go to Palo Alto, go to San Francisco, spend a month, pick up the culture, go in a group of like five or seven people.

1:15:39Dave Blundin:and then backport it, bring it back to Germany and expand it, but do it with like seven becomes 50 becomes 500 people that are all communicating through podcasts and through X and through Slack and through texting that, you know, they realize that everyone around them is completely out of touch with what's going on. And that's okay because within that group, they're self-reinforcing. You just need to get those critical masses of people. So I think the antidote to mainstream mainstream media is narrow-casted media. And it just kind of percolates on its own. Yeah, I just want to jump in there because at the end of the day, what you let into your mind is critical, right?

1:16:20Having some news producer decide what you learn or some editor decide what you read, I don't give them that option. I'm very careful, like what I put into my body from a food perspective and what I lend to my mind from a shaping my neural net perspective. And I choose very carefully the content that I absorb. And you guys are doing that as well. You're listening to the podcast. So that's just it. Alex or Salim, you want to add to that?

1:16:56Peter Diamandis:I'll just note maybe the obvious point. You could always leave Europe. Europe has been hobbled both due to external factors and internal factors. The post-Cold War era, and there are a number of historians who've written in particular about the role that the George H.W. Bush administration at the end of the Cold War played in deciding whether Europe would be brought even more into the U.S. orbit post-Cold War versus forming a stronger federation like EU. And the bias was bring Europe into more of a U.S. orbit so that it would be less independent. That may or may not have been the right geopolitical decision at the time.

1:17:40Peter Diamandis:But I think now what we're seeing is a Europe that's energy hobbled, that's politically in certain ways hobbled, that doesn't enjoy. This is, again, widely reported, certain freedoms of speech and action that are considered fundamental in the U.S. But I think it really it's energy, energy policy and associated policies that have left Europe hobbled. And so then if you're really interested in accelerationism and you're Europe, what do you do? Well, either you get your energy act together so that you can afford to power your own data centers or you leave. And I think this is the question. And by the way, this has to happen on a relatively abbreviated timescale because we're in the middle of recursive self-improvement.

1:18:25Peter Diamandis:So anyone who wants to play top-notch ball in the infrastructure game in Europe has to be asking the question right now, either solve the energy plus data center crunch together with the concomitant policy issues, or just move to hopefully the U.S. block, the Poxilica, and do it here.

1:18:47Dave Blundin:Yeah, one of my good friends, Guy Bradley, actually, he's actually British, but he came to the U.S., made a fortune in tech in the U.S. and then moved back to Germany. He speaks perfect German and French. So he has a place in southern France and a place in Germany. And there's no better place on the planet to live, in his opinion. And I agree, actually, between Germany and France. It's just beautifully protected from everything that's damaging in the world. and you look at other jurisdictions, you know, that, you know, like India, for example, where it's just rampant growth, but it's absolutely trashed.

1:19:21Dave Blundin:And it's like, so, so I think I'm always surprised that more Germans are not in Boston and Silicon Valley. I think there's a lot of national pride, but if you just do a five-year tour of duty in the U.S., you're going to be so overwhelmingly happy when you move back to Germany. It really, it really feels like it should happen more. I can tell you I'm an international traveler. Selim, 21 times I was in Bangalore. So I see all this rising and I wonder, Alex, absolutely, what are we doing over here? Why don't we wake up? Why are we under whatever kind of avenue? But anyway, that's another topic. Thank you very much.

1:19:57All right. Thank you, Rafe. Over to you, Ron. And we'll go for another 10 minutes and then we're going to have to jump into our normal days here.

1:20:05Dave Blundin:Okay. Thanks so much for doing this. I'm Connie from Calgary, Canada. and long-time listener. And I'm a screenwriter, director. So a big special thank you to Peter because I was in a bad place when I was in early this year. I was writing something about China and yeah, I was like borderline depressed. But since I've been writing another project for Future Vision X-Prize, I have become a bit more optimistic about the future and everything. I also read the books Peter wrote, The Abundance and We Are As Gods. And so I've been thinking, so since everything is hooked or incinerated, as Alex would say, what is one of the hardest problems still left?

1:20:57Peter Diamandis:So I kept coming back to distrust between rival nations. And I read Solve Everything two weeks ago. And Alex and Peter, you actually describe agreement as one of the new scarcities once cognition becomes abundant, right? So I wonder, could agreement under distrust itself become compute bound? And could coordination between rivals like the U.S. and China become an engineering problem? So here's my question. As sovereign AIs will increasingly advise governments, Can we create a shared protocol that they can connect to and use AI and privacy-preserving computation to search for gradual improving agreements without either side exposing protected data?

1:21:44Peter Diamandis:Is that technically an institutionally meaningful direction? And if it is, what do each of you think is the hardest part we should solve first? Thank you. Alex, over to you, Pam. Yeah, so I'll give you a hot take because that's what people want, I think. So multi-party computing, MPC or distributed multi-party computation, is a very fashionable problem in computer science right now, enabling multiple parties in a zero-trust way to collaborate, to share data, to achieve convergence, to mediate. Very fashionable. However, my hot take on this one is I don't think that's the limiting factor for, say, international peace.

1:22:29Peter Diamandis:If you said the goal is I don't want a second Cold War between the U.S. and China, I want world peace, a thousand years of peace or whatever it looks like, I don't actually think the solution looks algorithmic in nature. It probably looks more geopolitical infrastructural, like solve the Taiwan issue and redomesticate all supply chains everywhere to every country so that the international trade in physical products can afford to be cut off without a global depression. I think what we've seen, even just in the recent years in the Middle East, is in no small part because America can now frack its way and has fracked its way to fossil fuel energy sovereignty and independence.

1:23:19Peter Diamandis:And I want to generalize that example, which I think is very instructive, to what happens when the U.S. no longer needs China or Taiwan or South Korea or Japan or any advanced manufacturing at all. I think it would be a very different world. So in summary, if the goal is world peace, obliterate, as perverse as this sounds, obliterate, cook, incinerate the need for global trade in products and services. And perversely, I think you get a very peaceful world. And I don't think there's an algorithmic component to that, not to first order. I got oil on my hands. I couldn't get to the unmute. Peter, this is your cooking show.

1:23:57We're doing a cooking show.

1:23:59Dave Blundin:Oh, that's cool. Yeah, let's see what you're doing there. I'm sure it's healthy, whatever it is. It is. It is. It's an omelet for my boys. Anthony, over to you. Yes. Hello to the Moonshot mates. I want to thank you all for your time and for the opportunity to participate in the AMA. Also, the podcast has been very valuable, especially in the time we're in where people are looking at it cynically and negative. You guys have been a hope and optimism for me. uh just a simple question and what books or material do you recommend reading to prepare for the transition we're in i know you've mentioned diamond age and uh raised books the singularity and um some other works he has i was just curious if you had any other material that you think is important to read uh alex what's your yeah i'll comment and this is probably the

1:24:56Peter Diamandis:last question I can take before I need to drop. Read Solve Everything as folks in the comments, so solveeverything.org, which Peter and I wrote. And then if you like sci-fi, read Accelerando by Charlie Strauss, which is, I think, the single best sci-fi treatment of what's in the process of happening right now. So everybody, listen, thank you for joining us. We love this, you know, the last one and this one. We're going to do this again. It's a chance for us to really connect with everybody, hear your thoughts. We have such brilliant minds with Alex and Salim and Dave. I feel grateful to spend time with them every week and spend time with you.

1:25:34You know, we know your time is your most precious thing, so we appreciate it. Remember, you can join Moonshots Live now on the live stream. So if you're not able to make it in person, and please, it's going to be an amazing event, join us on the live stream. And we're grateful for your time, everybody. Have a beautiful day and see you all again very soon.