Davos 2026: The US-China AI Race, GPU Diplomacy, and Robots Walking the Streets | #225

21:34Dave Blundin:Can I go on a personal note related to the fatigue, too? You know, this is my first time in my life where I'm walking down the street and people are like, hey, you're that guy from that podcast. Hey, I know you. And so I actually ended up putting my ski hat and my goggles on walking down the street. Because I'm not that kind of guy. I don't really want to be accosted on the street. No, I don't mean it that way. But look, for Dario and Demis. Minor celebrity. Yeah, you've been there for a long time, Peter. So Demas in particular, he's a researcher, and he cares about technology, research, AI at the bits and bytes levels.

22:10Dave Blundin:And now he's been drawn into the global stage as the spokesperson for ethics and humanity. And Dario never thought he'd be a CEO at all in that interview he gave a little while ago. He's like, look, I'm a research guy. I got drawn into this function. And so that fatigue you feel is the byproduct of being sucked into this vortex where there's a huge void of leadership. And Alex, you're going to experience this very soon, too. The demand for what you can articulate is going up so quickly that it'll pull you in. And if you're not ready for it, then it's tiring. It's tiring just flying all over the world.

22:47Dave Blundin:It's tiring getting the litany of questions. A lot of the questions are the same exact ones you heard the day before. And you just have to get used to the demand.

22:56Peter Diamandis:So what I'm hearing you say, Dave, is I have to brace myself for the moonshot paparazzi on the rough slopes of Aspen and Vail and Davos. Just bracing myself now.

23:05Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Hey, I know you. Listen, Peter and I have had this exponential conversation answering the same goddamn questions for 20 years now. Ray's been doing it for close to 60 years. But we come at it with enthusiasm every time because it matters. You know, there was one other conversation I have to point out here. I heard Dario talking about Sam Altman and open AI. And it was interesting. He goes, you know, at Anthropic here, we're serving businesses. We're giving them value. We're building things. We're not trying to engage a billion people with sycophantic conversations. So it's a very interesting point of view that when AI, in terms of open AI, is serving individuals and just trying to make them feel good about themselves and trying to make it addictive, which is what Dario was saying, you get one result versus if you're using AI to serve business and deliver real value, you get a different result.

24:02I was taken back by that conversation. I didn't get the clip for it here, but I thought it was really important.

24:07Peter Diamandis:I think there's also, though, to be fair to OpenAI and to some extent Grokken XAI, I think that's a bit of a self-serving argument. Sure. I parse that as a post hoc justification. Anthropic happens to be doing very well in the enterprise. And I definitely perceive a post hoc justification, well, we're not doing consumer because we don't want to do consumer. We want to do B2B and do enterprise sales because there's moral purity in enterprise sales. but there's also one can achieve moral purity in uplifting the intelligence of billions of individuals in their individual capacity. Well, well said.

24:43All right, let's jump into another topic that was a through line at Davos, which is U.S. versus China. And we're going to open up with a conversation between Mark Benioff and David Sachs here.

24:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Where do you see the U.S. and China right now in the AI race and the model innovation that we've seen in both countries? I still think

25:02Peter Diamandis:that the U.S. is in the lead. I think that our models are better, our chips are better. But they do have other advantages. They are spinning up power generation faster than we are. That's one area. I'd say another area that concerns me is AI optimism. So there was a survey done by Stanford recently, and they surveyed people in lots of different countries, and they asked them, do you believe the benefits of AI will outweigh the harms? And if the respondents said yes, they'd be an AI optimist if they said the harms outweighed the gains, they're an AI pessimist. Well, in China, 83 % of the population are AI optimists.

25:40Peter Diamandis:In the U.S., that number is only 39%. Where I kind of worry is in the AI race that if in a fit of pessimism, we do something like what Bernie Sanders wants, which is he wants to stop building all data centers, or if we have 1 ,200 different AI laws in the States, clamping down on this, clamping down on the innovation. I worry that we could lose the AI race because of a self-inflicted injury. Interesting. There's one more China video I'm going to play here and then we'll discuss this. And here we go. This is from the CEO of Mistral, Arthur Menich. Is China behind though, the West? China is not behind the West.

26:20I think this is a fairy tale. In AI, they are very much at parity

26:25Peter Diamandis:and the year ahead is going to be extremely interesting in that respect. We care about Europe maintaining its position, Europe maintaining its ability to train models because we don't think that we should rely on open source Chinese models. Gentlemen, thoughts on this?

26:44Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:He's got the greatest last name ever, Mensch. I've got a couple of thoughts here. I'll go back to my observation that I think this U.S.-China thing is a bullshit conversation. But why? Because if you believe that energy is at the heart of it and is the core of the inner loop, then China is going to go way ahead anyway once they figure out the connection between those two. But I think the real differentiator in the race is going to be application layer dominance, not frontier benchmarks. And there, I think China will be very far behind for a long time because of the trust factor, plus the natural markets go very quickly.

27:28Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Aside from TikTok, it's not going to really kind of take off in a big way. I think there's going to be tons of other open source models that are going to come out. And people are going to be too concerned about the trust factor to use it over time.

27:41Peter Diamandis:Three comments, if I may. So the first, to Salim's point, since Salim told me that I was being too agreeable the last time we spoke, I have to be a little bit of a contrarian here and point out that the conventional wisdom is that the Chinese Communist Party's AI plus strategy is actually quite strong when it comes to applications. That this is to the extent that China is relatively strategically weak when it comes to training its own frontier-grade models relative to the U.S. And by relatively strong, I mean maybe six months behind. So not globally or absolutely weak, but just a few months behind perhaps.

28:21Peter Diamandis:That its real strength is in aggressively pushing applications out into the everyday economy that take advantage of AI. So I'll just note, parenthetically, the conventional wisdom is that China's AI plus strategy is actually pretty strong strategy relative to the relative weakness of frontier grade models. But that's a parenthetical note. Going back to Asia, quote unquote, overwhelming Western countries on AI optimism, I think David Sachs has, and others, have put their finger on something very important. I think as a student of the history of science and technology, something went very wrong in the U.S.

29:04Peter Diamandis:between sometime, maybe more than one thing, between the end of World War II and call it the mid to late 1970s. And I'm reminded in 1954, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, famously, and this has had repercussions through the decades since, predicted that fission, nuclear fission, would become so inexpensive that tracking usage via electricity meters would become unnecessary. And that's where we get the phrase energy too cheap to meter. And that didn't happen. We didn't get energy too cheap to meter because in the decades after 1954, for a variety of reasons, and it's easy enough to point fingers at possible explanations, nuclear fission was essentially regulated out of existence in this country.

29:54Peter Diamandis:And I think the point that David is making is we're at the point now where, like, remember how in the 1950s and 1960s, new American homes were being built with extra glass because it was anticipated that electricity and energy would be too cheap to meter that you wouldn't need to bother with worrying about heating or cooling or insulation costs. It would just be absorbed by the free electricity. We're at the point now with AI, I think, where it's an analogous position where we're on the verge of intelligence too cheap to meter. And we run the risk, to David's point, that if we allow too much AI pessimism or too much AI doomerism to get in the way, that the same thing happens with AI that happened with nuclear vision decades ago.

30:44Peter Diamandis:Overregulation. And then we could waste another century.

30:46Dave Blundin:We just vote not to do it. You know, we're a democracy. The voter wins. And the voters did not want nuclear power, even though the scientists are like, look, we can have demonized. I don't think that's actually true in the press.

30:59Peter Diamandis:I mean, quick, quick note on democracy and nuclear power. If you follow closely that the history of nuclear power in the post World War Two era wasn't actually that democratic. It wasn't like every election cycle post-World War II, the voting populace was super informed about all of the key details. This was a relatively narrow technocracy that developed in the post-World War II era in the form of the Atomic Energy Commission. That was an evolution of the Manhattan Project where it was really a bunch of technocrats deciding what would and wouldn't happen. I don't think the voters ever had, at least for the first few decades, a real informed decision.

31:40Dave Blundin:Well, I think that, you know, remember the acronym NIMBY, N-I-M-B-Y? It was rampant during that era. Not in my backyard. And in a lot of topics, nuclear being one of the biggest ones, but it was not in my backyard. Yeah, yeah, we should do this. This is for the global good of the country, global good of the world. Let's do it, but not here. And if everybody says that, you have the tragedy of the economy. We've got the same thing going on in data centers right now. I had a conversation with Bologi a day ago, two days ago, and we were talking about how, you know, one of my pet peeves is that most of Hollywood shows all these negative dystopian views of the future.

32:13And it paints a sense of fear across the public about killer AIs and, you know, dystopian robots and so forth. And that was true as well for nuclear to some degree. And the problem is that, let me finish. The problem is that you always need a bad guy in a movie. You always need someone to, you know, to threaten. And Balaji's idea, which I love, is we should start to create the movies where the bad guy is the regulator. This regulator is slowing down the delivery of longevity, slowing down the delivery of unlimited energy. And I thought that was a brilliant insight he had because, you know, there has to be balance, got it.

32:56There has to be directing this supersonic tsunami in the right direction. but sometimes the regulations are just off base.

33:04Dave Blundin:Well, there's a broader theme there too, Peter. I'm sure you're very in tune with it, but science fiction tries to portray the future sort of accurately, but only has to fit the storyline. So then you end up with these spaceships that bank into turns, like there's no atmosphere, and the lasers make sounds like pew, pew, like this makes no sense. And you think, well, that's harmless. It's just entertainment. But then when you look at the business plans coming out of the colleges, you're like, where did you get that hair? brained idea. Well, it was from watching Star Wars or whatever. Okay. So it does actually matter, the way we portray this in the media.

33:36Dave Blundin:So Balaji's right. If you portrayed a regulator as the evil Darth Vader, no one's going to make that movie. Right? How entertaining is that?

33:44Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:For me, the inflection point for nuclear is very simple. It was the movie The China Syndrome which freaked everybody out. And then from that point on, it shut down. And this is the power of narrative. And this is unfortunately one of these problems we have today that the use of narrative is the only model really to shift people at scale. And so we have to come up with narratives, as you're trying to do, Peter, on the positive side of all of this, rather than the classic negative, which takes up most of our attention. And you're going to hear about a big push I'm making with Google shortly on creating positive narratives because society needs it.

34:19Unfortunately, Hollywood's been a doom and gloom machine.

34:22Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Can I go on a little rant here? Of course. We love your rant. So, you know, there's a brilliant, brilliant insight that you and Stephen made in the Abundance book, which was the predominance of the amygdala. Right. We are geared from four billion years to watch for signs of danger and then run. And so back in the running around on the plains of Africa, if you saw heard a noise in the bushes, you ran because bad news could kill you. Good news doesn't kill you. I might miss some fruit that I could eat. But if I missed a piece of bad news, I'd die. We have a 10 times more likelihood to listen to bad news than good news.

34:59Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And that translates into policy in a very powerful way, such that we freak out and put guardrails on everything, like autonomous cars. And note that the first time somebody comes across something new, they relate to it as unknown. Their amygdala lights up and immediately go to the fear factor and the damage that thing could do. Autonomous cars. The first time somebody sees it, they go, oh, my God, that car might kill somebody. banned the car because as brad templeton said we'd much rather kill by drunk people than robots right and so this is a huge problem that we have to do is overcome that reaction because hollywood banks on that they make a huge living on the horror movies and the negative aspects and the freak out and then the negative dystopian outcomes and as a human species probably the biggest thing if i could ever point to one thing was to cut that damn amygdala out because our chances of physical danger today are thousands and thousands of times less than we were a few hundred years ago.

35:54Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So we have to figure out ways of counteracting that at a cultural level, which is non-trivial. That's maybe the hardest job we all have as leaders to figure that out.

36:02Dave Blundin:Can I just go back to what Arthur was saying on that video for one second, though, and tie it into what Alex said a second ago? Because I think knowing where we stand in this race to AGI, all of the innovation in the transformer algorithm and the core technology was all open source you know through gpt2 gpt3 china grabbed it all everyone has access to it any country that wants to buy a huge amount of compute can catch up to that level and in fact you know with these speed run tests that alex can tell you all about you know the cost of getting there and in fact deep seek even proved it and so did kimmy uh that you can get back to where open ai was just a year or ago for one 50th, 100th the cost because of innovations that are all open sourced.

36:48Dave Blundin:But then the next stage of innovation after that that's going on right now is all chain of thought reasoning. So when you build one of these neural networks, the individual neurons are not intelligent, but the collective trillion or 10 trillion of them somehow magically spawns intelligence. And it's shocking what it can do. But then when you put many of the agents together, it also generates another level of intelligence. It's another self-organizing system on top of the self-organizing system. And all of those innovations happened after the great lockdown, you know, after GPT-4, and after it became abundantly clear to everyone that there's trillions of dollars at stake.

37:22Dave Blundin:The open source kind of stopped cold. So Arthur is saying, look, the Chinese are not behind. He's right as of basically today and yesterday. And the idea that we're leading because we have better, you know, two nanometer chips and fabs is nonsensical because the algorithmic improvements way outstrip the chip lead of maybe 10x at most. So he's right as of a date, a point in time. But if the new innovations in the big labs continue to be completely secret, which is what's happening right now, then that race will diverge. And it's not clear, though. Maybe China will out-innovate America. Maybe America will out-innovate China.

38:01Dave Blundin:But it's all happening kind of like what happened with nuclear research. You know, nuclear was very much in the public eye, very open, all these research documents getting published in journals and whatever, right up until, wait, these bombs actually work. And then it completely inverted and went super, super secret. Really? The big labs right now are not publishing. In fact, they started banning the publishing over at Google. I want to jump into our innermost loop here, energy, with your guys' permission here. I'm going to share two videos, one by the CEO of Honeywell and the second by Elon. They've got different points of view about, you know, where we need to source our energy and why.

38:41All right. Let's take a listen. This is Vimal Kapoor, the CEO of Honeywell. When you talked about the energy solutions available for these unbelievably energy hungry data centers, your list was short. Your list had one thing on it, if I listen correctly. You said gas. You didn't say gas and renewables. Can you educate us why not?

39:00Dave Blundin:I always like to tell people the mix of energy doesn't matter. How much is wind? How much is solar? We like to advertise that. Kilojoules matter because energy intensity has to shift, not the mix.

39:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So solar power cannot produce cement. Solar power cannot produce steel. It cannot. They are very energy intensive. That's right.

39:20Dave Blundin:You still need a gas-based heating. or even after three or five more years of innovation and renewable this is not there it's against physics what needs to build more infrastructure it still needs steel it still needs cement it's steel still need fuels now how do you do that energy exchange while you also want to build data centers and consume more energy that's an interesting problem to solve and today the the problem is single threaded with the gas fire power plant maybe a little bit of nuclear Renewables remain in the mix, but it cannot bring the amount of joules we need to produce this infrastructure which is required in the world.

39:58All right. And the counterpoint here put forward by Elon. Yes. I mean, wow is my experience about that as well, Salim. Let me hit Elon's point and then let's come back and talk about that because that's a critically important kilojoules versus total energy. It's really all about the sun. And that's why one of the things we'll be doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar powered AI satellites. Because the space is

40:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:really the source of immense power. And then you don't need to take up any room on Earth. There's so much room in space. And you can scale to ultimately hundreds of terawatts a year. And Elon goes on to talk about the fact that 100 by 100 mile area provides all of the U.S. energy requirements. Same thing for Europe. But Salim, the most point about natural gas. I'm so livid at this. So a couple of initial thoughts. This is the first time I saw this video, by the way. So first, infrastructure of the future will not be steel. It's going to be digital bits, and if anything, it'll be fiber. So that's one problem with this.

41:19Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Number two, yes, you need energy density to make steel and concrete, etc. But the problem is not that, it's the marginal cost. So, for example, if you have a big increase, even a marginal increase in renewables, the cost of the fossil fuel cell will drop dramatically. In 2013, when we had the last oil price crash, it was because of a 2 % oversupply in the market. It's a very tightly on market. The reason we have all these nonstop wars right now is to keep the price of oil high. and so this is a completely I find issues on structural issues on every one of the three points he's making and then you go oh Elon who goes straight to the thing it's all about the sun for god's sakes anyway enough

42:06Peter Diamandis:I'll take the other side of that if I may I didn't hear anything unreasonable in my mind Elon and SpaceX use methyl locks for rocket launches they don't use solar power to achieve escape velocity. And I would say energy density and power density matters an enormous amount for certain applications. That's not the point I'm making. I'm not making that point. What's the point you're making, Celine?

42:32Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:My point I'm making is, yes, you absolutely need energy density for those things. The point is that the energy density, we use so much oil for home heating, for example, if you shifted homes to solar, the amount of oil available for the energy dense applications goes through the roof and the price drops dramatically. And then you can use the marginal amount of oil for the energy density needs for those applications. Right now, we use oil for everything or natural gas for everything, and you don't need it once you have solar coming online. So that's my point.

43:02Peter Diamandis:I would say a couple of points. One, Honeywell, as I understand it, is a pretty diversified operation. It's not just like the thermostats or the home heating systems that perhaps they're well known for. They also have a pretty sophisticated quantum information operation. So it's a diversified company. It's not just home heating. But I would say also, in some sense, this feels like such a temporary debate, almost a false tradeoff between petroleum, legacy petroleum economy on one end and pure solar photovoltaic economy, Dyson Swarm on the other, when the reality is we're going to, in the not too distant future, assuming no tragic left turn by civilization, we're going to solve compact fusion.

43:48Peter Diamandis:And compact fusion is going to give us energy densities for rockets, and it's going to give us energy densities for home heating, and for a lot of civilian applications, and the Dyson Swarm. So in some sense, I think this is sort of like late-stage petroleum economy discussion that we're having, like hand-wringing, when it's all about to get torn down anyway.

44:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:100%. And the third beef I have is where he talks about renewables as this play thing on the side when your point is exactly right once you have fusion and all of it becomes irrelevant anyway so like why are we having this conversation well guys i'm gonna take the counterpoint here take a look at this chart on this next uh next slide here which is the growth of energy generation this is in europe in particular where wind and solar have now outstripped fossil nuclear hydro and other clean and yes we might get to fusion reactors and we might start building fusion reactors. But the timeline I'm seeing on fusion, the timeline I'm seeing on even Gen 3 fission reactors is decades.

44:52Just from permitting and from construction, I don't see any of them. Even the SMRs are currently slated to be five to 10 years out. But we could, in fact, be building out wind and solar at an extraordinary rate. The investments are not being made. We're basically have outstripped the capacity of natural gas generators. I mean, how long is that? What's the wait list for natural gas generators right now, Alex? Years, right? Years.

45:20Peter Diamandis:Months to years, but I'm optimistic it'll get a little. I haven't heard months at all. It's years. You have new nat gas generators, as we've discussed on the pod in the past, that are coming online. And those could be available in principle in the next few months if you're early enough in the wait list. I think you're both right.

45:37Dave Blundin:I don't want to diffuse all arguments here, but you're both right. They are coming online much, much sooner, but they're sold out for years into the future. So if you're India and you're saying, hey, I need to do something here. I need power for people. We need concrete and steel to build places for people to live. The idea that you could generate electricity, it's not a non-starter. You couldn't afford the generators. They're booked for years. They're building. So my point is, why are we not doing a Manhattan project on wind and solar manufacturing here in the United States to really up level the amount we have?

46:09I'm going to go to Elon one second on this video and then we'll come back to this conversation.

46:14Dave Blundin:Yeah. So, I mean, I guess a rough way to think about it is 100 miles by 100 miles, we'll call it 160 kilometers by 160 kilometers of solar is enough to power the entire United States.

46:28Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So, 100 mile by 100 mile areas is, I mean, you could take basically a small corner of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. And the same is true, actually, I mean, for Europe. You could take a small part.

46:43Dave Blundin:You could take relatively unpopulated areas of, say, Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that you're needs. And also, if you drill into the supply chain on that, this is where Elon is absolutely brilliant. Like if you say, well, what are the constraints to doing that? The materials are dirt, dirt cheap, and the automation of the fabrication of those panels can be automated. You can get those costs down to next to nothing, and then you don't need a generator. Electricity just comes right out of the panel. It's like it's the biggest no-brainer ever, and that's what he's doing.

47:14For the entrepreneurs listening, for the politicians listening, I mean, get on it, for God's sakes. This is technology we've had for a while. We've also got new solar technologies coming on. anyway anybody want to argue that?

47:28Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:To the extent you believe the U.S. is a petrodollar that answers all of it that's why.

47:33Peter Diamandis:I'll take the other side just in the interest of being painted as a contrarian I'll say that all of the new electric or not all much of the substantial new electricity demand in the U.S. at least I think on the timescale of 10 years is going to come from data centers where under the present regime, it's simply easier to deploy on the timescale of 10 years data centers to orbit. So Peter, if you're looking for a Manhattan project for lots of new solar PV, I think look no further than SpaceX, look no further than this new Jeff Bezos initiative. Anyone who's going to launch a Dyson swarm is going to be de facto in the business of manufacturing solar photovoltaics at scale.

48:19Peter Diamandis:And that's what a Manhattan project for it looks like. That reinforces what Peter was saying.

48:23Dave Blundin:Any entrepreneurs listening out there, the data center in space uses solar panels. It's the same core technology that you use on earth. It's about six times more efficient in space. But if you put it in Nevada, that's, you know, so if you get involved in that manufacturing, why is that not 10 times, 100 times cheaper? We have to import all these candles from China today. We've got perovskite coming online, which is cheaper and higher conversion efficiency. I mean, there's innovation left to be had in that regard. Can I just summarize this?

48:55Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So it sounds like what we're saying is the Manhattan Project should be space-based data centers that will drive massive amounts of innovation and focus on that. And that'll pull civilization out. Yes, and that is in fact exactly what we're seeing through market forces. I'm all in. 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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50:16Speaking of all in, let's head to crypto because we're all in on crypto. So, all right, two conversations to be had. The first by CZ, the CEO of Binance, and the second by Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle. Let's go to CZ first.

50:32Dave Blundin:The native currency for AI agent is going to be crypto. They're not going to use bank cards. They're not going to swipe credit cards. They're going to crypto blockchains, the most native technology interface for AI agents. So when AI goes big today, I don't really they're not really agents. They don't buy tickets for you. They don't pay for restaurants for you. But when they actually do, those payments will be in crypto. All right. That's from CZ. Let's go to Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle as a stablecoin. The next generation of blockchain networks, things like ARK, which Circle's building on, there's other new blockchain networks, are actually being designed specifically for agentic compute.

51:15They're designed specifically for the financial and economic activity of a world where three years, five years from now, one, I think, can reasonably expect that there will be billions, literally billions of AI agents conducting economic activity in the world continuously on a continuous basis. They need an economic system. They need a financial system. They need a payment system. There is no other alternative, in my view, other than stable coins to do that right now and that can keep up with that pace of technological change. And so that's a it's a it's a critical focus for us, but not just us.

51:48There's a lot of other folks that are interested in this and contributing to the technical standards to support this upgrade to our digital economic system. I don't think the world has got any idea how fast this is going to accelerate as agents start using crypto, whether it's whether it's stable coins from Circle or whether it's Sui or Algorand, whatever it might be. We're going to have Jeremy Allaire at the Abundance Summit. He's going to be one of our primary speakers. We're going to be having this conversation. But I agree. We don't have agents transacting for us yet, but we are. And they're going to be using some type of a digital currency.

52:27Salim, you've been thinking about this for a bit.

52:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Well, two points. One is I think cryptos has survived long enough to become infrastructure and it's kind of fading into the background. you're moving from speculation to real utility. And I think the second is that the base reason it delivers trust and protocols and code are way more trustworthy than governments and institutions.

52:50Dave Blundin:That's for sure. Yep.

52:52Peter Diamandis:I'll take completely the other side of this one. So contrarian points for me today, I guess. I'm of two minds on this story. On the one hand, I think it's wonderful that AI agents have a solution to be quote-unquote banked by some means so that they have some autonomy. On the other hand, I just think it's sad that crypto is the solution that's filling the gap that was perhaps unnecessarily opened by the conventional banking system not stepping up. It's very tedious and painful to open a bank account. It's hard enough for a human to open a bank account, let alone an AI agent that doesn't have citizenship or a physical body or the ability to walk into a bank branch.

53:37Peter Diamandis:And I think stablecoins rushing in maybe to sort of bridge that gap post-genius and help AI agents become banked in a more legitimate way, I think we should be able to do much better. For the life of me, I don't understand why we even need crypto or in principle should need crypto for an AI agent to just make an API call and open a bank account. Crypto shouldn't even be a necessary part of the infrastructure to enable. I disagree fully. I mean, this is. Tell me why. Because. The dollar. What guys. That's not an answer. That doesn't make sense. Explain why we.

54:15Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Fiat currency cannot navigate a world of abundance. It cannot do it. Well, we don't have digital dollars. An agent is operating on a digital system versus the fact that the current banking system to clear a transfer or to clear a transaction can take you literally hours to days. I mean, digital currencies, which are by de facto a cryptocurrency on a blockchain, is able to transact at the speed of internet rails. But Alex is making a valid point that why can't a digital dollar or a dollar operate in the same way? And it could. It's simply a very valid point there. But that's what it is. You've got a bigger underlying problem, which is the use of the fiat currency to do all this stuff, which is not a great measure of the future.

55:05Peter Diamandis:I think we're conflating. So I mostly agree. There's two different issues here. Yeah, I do agree there are two different issues. I think we're conflating a centralized bank digital currency as an issue with a simple technical problem. Put aside for a moment any distrust or dislike in CBDCs and or the US dollar and or fiat currencies in general. Just transacting a small amount of some currency is technically a very simple operation. It's literally updating a row in a table in a database. And we should be able to do that really quickly without any fancy technology like a blockchain. It's just updating a row in a database.

55:45Enter Salim on double spend problem here, please.

55:48Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:No, no, it's fine. There's no reason we can't. It comes down to overburdened regulatory and absolute regulatory capture by the banks to prevent things. When I talk to bank CEOs, they're like, oh, my God, we hate these. We hate our regulator. And I'm like, are you kidding? It's keeping you safe from the hordes of startups waiting to rip you apart because you're so unbelievably cumbersome in everything you do. This requires a completely new paradigm shift to sweep away and cut through all of that regulatory crap. Just try sending money to somebody else over some traditional banking means and you end up in this complete chaos of, oh, we didn't know what this was for, AML, KYC, all of this crap.

56:33Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And it's complete garbage. 99 % of it is not needed. So from that perspective, that's why crypto is entered, because we've overburdened the existing system with all sorts of unnecessary. But there's a separate issue, which is the fiat currency issue, which we can go into some other time.

56:51Peter Diamandis:We're going to do an entire episode just on the issue of why crypto, what is crypto potentially good for, what is it unnecessary for, what is it being used for, even though it's unnecessary for. We could do an entire episode just on this. We could, we should.

57:04Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yes. You could.

57:05Dave Blundin:Peter, off to you. Go for it, guys. I'll take a nap that day. No, I think you guys skipped over Jeremy saying that he's going to move on to securitizing art now. And back when crypto was skyrocketing sort of pre-COVID, the idea of securitizing real estate, securitizing art, art is a particularly good one because it appreciates in value while you're parked in it. And it's mobile. It's not subject to real estate tax issues are a major problem for securitizing real estate. And people were securitizing mining futures, gold that's still underground and things like that. But the key point there is if your agents, your AI agents are transacting like crazy, yeah, you can update a row and a table.

57:45Dave Blundin:Yeah, you can do it on the blockchain if you want. But you want to be parked, you want your float parked in something that's not depreciating. So a stable coin that's not earning interest is depreciating slowly. You can stake it, but that gets kind of weird. Staking backfired. It's unregulated. It's weird. So it's better to securitize something that's outside of any government jurisdiction and is stable and is appreciating.

58:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And look at the way the banks hobbled interest on stable coins in this last iteration of the legislation. This is regulatory capture, pure and simple. Can I add another twist to this?

58:25Dave Blundin:So one of our portfolio CEOs, a very good friend, his father-in-law is CZ, Chengpeng Zhao's lawyer. and so he's been tracking this whole drama very closely but it's the if you you know cc's worth i don't know maybe 10 billion 20 billion something like that um and up until he got pardoned a few weeks ago he was a u.s criminal and he would be arrested and thrown in jail with sam bankman freed now he's just a guy at davos with billions of dollars and i don't think in history that you have that kind of profile? Like, am I a wealthy billionaire or am I a criminal? You know, and maybe back, Alex is going to quote something from the 1700s, I know.

59:07Dave Blundin:I'm sitting on my hands, biding my time to try to say something nice about crypto. No, but I think if you look in the near term future, there's all these AI issues. Like when the AI can perfectly imitate any actor or actress. The AI can make your virtual friend out of it. Is that legal or is that not legal? Is it legal some places and not legal in other places? there's a huge amount of money at stake and you'll see in some of the slides like the the audience for this is trillions of dollars and there are no laws and so the entrepreneurs are stuck in this situation where like there are no rules i don't know what to do i know what the consumer wants i know how to make a ton of money but i could be i could be breaking rules i don't know and i don't know not only do i not know in the u.s i don't know because my audience will be all over the world in one launch i don't know if i'm suddenly a criminal in other countries so this is the kind of chaos that's going to, it's not just crypto, it's all these other use cases of AI are evolving far, far faster than the regulators are putting any rules in place.

1:00:02Dave Blundin:Really good point. It puts the entrepreneurs in a tough spot.

1:00:04Peter Diamandis:Say something nice about crypto, Alex. All right. Something nice about crypto, colon. I think when I think about these poor baby AGIs that are needing to pump altcoins on street corners to survive. I'd rather that they be pumping stable coins based on the US dollar than altcoins like Truth Terminal pumping GOAT. That's my nice thing about it. Okay. And on that note, I'm going to move us forward here into the other exponential news.

1:00:41Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Greg, just to put a footnote, can we please have a full-on conversation about crypto versus fiat at some point? Please. Not right now, but at some point. Let's do that because this is a really, really important conversation. All right. There is other exponential news this week other than Davos, and we're going to dive into a few articles here. The first is space is getting really crowded. We've heard first off, of course, we've got SpaceX's Starlink has got some 9 ,000 spacecraft in orbit on the way to 10 ,000 providing incredible services. We heard about the idea of V3 of Starlink on the conversation that Dave and I had with Elon.

1:01:24If they're going to provide 100 gigawatts of compute from space, that is 500 ,000 satellites that will have to be launched, which is insane. Amazon's LEO constellation is 180 satellites in orbit today. They're proposed to get 3 ,000 satellites. We heard from in our last episode of China filing for 200 ,000 satellites. And this week, Blue Origin announced TerraWave as a satellite internet service with 5 ,400 satellites delivering six terabits per second to data centers. Alex, this is sort of like fiber optic from the sky. This is a lot of bandwidth.

1:02:07Peter Diamandis:This is wild. Yeah, I think there are two key elements here. One, the elephant in the room. There's always an elephant in any given room. The elephant in this particular room, I think, is that Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' company, is competing with Amazon, Leo, Jeff Bezos' company. So we've got a bit of Jeff Bezos on Jeff Bezos competition here. But more interesting, to your point, is the bandwidth. If you look at Starlink, you can get maybe max bandwidth of, what, 300, 400 megabits per second? Yeah, the goal is a gigabit up and down. Yeah. Yeah. But in practice, I think maximum I've seen is maybe 300 to 400 megabits per second.

1:02:49Peter Diamandis:This, when we're talking six plus terabits per second, it really is starting. And that's before we get to laser links, optical links, connecting all of these together. This is literally like putting optical fibers in orbit and running them down from orbit to Earth. And that unlocks interesting new applications that, say, Starlink would not necessarily be well-positioned to pursue, like actually pursuing connections, interconnect for coherent training times between AI data centers, which is absorbing. Backhaul from data centers. Yeah, pretty extraordinary. And I like this move. I mean, I actually think there's a real market for that kind of a giant throughput from space.

1:03:36Peter Diamandis:It's an under attended market and you know the Dyson swarm is going to need optical links and this is a preview of that. Yeah I mean one of the things that people don't realize is that the 9000 Starlink satellites are interconnected by laser in orbit which is extraordinary it's the first step towards the interplanetary internet we're gonna see laser links connecting constellations on Earth to constellations going around the moon to constellations at Mars still still obeying the speed of light, unfortunately, but, uh, uh, but yeah, just giving us, I remember when MCI, which was, you know, MCI, people don't remember stands for microwave communications, uh, Inc.

1:04:14It was international.

1:04:15Peter Diamandis:The I stood for international, yes. Microwave, communication international used to be, uh, microwave towers on the top of buildings, interconnecting buildings throughout, uh, downtown cities. Does anyone remember what MCI is anymore? I remember, but the organization is long gone. Yeah. MCI, I gave a presentation.

1:04:34Dave Blundin:Didn't MCI become Sprint? They were at their headquarters right before they...

1:04:36Peter Diamandis:Do you remember, Salim, what Sprint stood for? Sprint was an acronym, too. Oh, it was an acronym? Sprint was an acronym. It stood for Southern Pacific Railway Internal Network Telecommunications. Oh, God. We've got Alex GPT online here, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, unbelievable. Right of way on railroads was a powerful thing.

1:04:56Dave Blundin:I'd love to do a deep dive on space-to-space communications because everything I've heard so far is that laser links in space are dirt cheap. And, you know, if you go to one of these massive data centers like Memphis and you look at just the raw amount of fiber optic cable that needs to run around, you know, from one end to the other, and the bundles are enormous, and they have these specialized devices to just plug them into the back planes. but in space it's much cheaper and much easier to use laser point-to-point communication across the whole Dyson swarm and I think no one's really talked about the massive efficiency gain of that and you know the the link from earth up is the harder part but you don't need a huge amount of bandwidth in that direction you just need all the servers to be talking to each other in a coherent you know big training or big inference algorithm so it's a really fun topic at least for me it's kind of geeky, I guess.

1:05:46Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have one concern about the conversation about space satellites and all that. People get worried about the overpopulation of that. Can I just... Yeah, go ahead. I mean, there's a lot of... People worry that we have too many satellites up there, et cetera, right? There's a lot of room.

1:06:04Dave Blundin:Did you see that Sandra Bullock movie where something breaks and then all the fragments? Yeah, gravity. Oh, my God. I hated gravity. I hated it for the lack of respect for physics. Oh, my God. I'm traumatized by that movie.

1:06:17Peter Diamandis:I was, were you traumatized by it as well? I'm traumatized by that movie. I refuse. I was, it was terrible. Oh, it was like, like inertia, inertia did not exist in that movie. It was, it was awful. I'm making a different point.

1:06:30Dave Blundin:I wanted to ask about, and Peter, you'd be an expert world expert on this topic, but there's not that much clutter in space. There's a lot of room up there. And the way I describe it to the kids is like, look, each satellite is like, you know, a size of this desk. Now, imagine that there are 9 ,000 of them sprinkled around the world, around the surface of the Earth.

1:06:48Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:No, no. Try and find one, you know. There's a really easy visual here, okay? Where is it? Eight billion people on Earth. And if you spread them around evenly, you'd have about four acres per person.

1:07:01Dave Blundin:Yeah, okay. So there you go. So if you go out to this. And they would have to be on the same surface, right? Yeah, when you've got a much bigger surface area of the sphere in space.

1:07:10Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And if you had 8 billion satellites, you'd have four, eight, ten acres. Yeah, okay.

1:07:14Dave Blundin:So it's not cluttered up there at all. No. It's going to be a long time. But then they come back to the movie. What if something turns into fragments moving at 30 ,000 miles? Yes.

1:07:23Peter Diamandis:It's called Kessler syndrome. It's space debris. Yeah.

1:07:26Dave Blundin:Yes. So then what happens? And then you've got bullets moving at 17 ,500 miles per hour into each other. And you could get a really bad day happening very quickly.

1:07:39Peter Diamandis:I think it's an entrepreneurial opportunity. It's also a government opportunity to launch low Earth orbit cleanup options like garbage trucks for Leo to clean it up and make sure that we don't hit a Kessler syndrome type scenario like the movie Gravity depicts. But this is not unsolvable. I just think. You know, we've had an X-Prize on the books to address orbital debris for some time, trying to get someone to fund it. Hint, hint. But otherwise, let's move on to the exciting news. This is Claude's New Constitution. I'm going to turn it to you in a second, Alex, but I found this fascinating. So Claude's Constitution is a 57-page document laying out ethical guidelines, including prohibitions against helping with weapons of mass destruction, cyber weapons, or anything that undermines humanity.

1:08:29Claude is instructed to prioritize safety, ethics, compliance, and helpfulness, ensuring it acts in line with human value and oversight. I love Anthropic for this. Alex, tell us more.

1:08:42Peter Diamandis:Okay, so let's rewind a little bit. Anthropic has been a pioneer in so-called constitutional AI. Other firms, other frontier labs have used different terms for related concepts. But the idea is basically you want an AI that is aligned with humanity. How do you do it? One way, the constitutional AI approach, is you write down some principles that you want the AI to conform to. And one of the earliest so-called constitutions that Anthropik created was literally just concatenating a bunch of documents that were grabbed from different places. I think they grabbed the UN charter and took a bunch of international documents relating to human rights and concatenated on, I think, the Apple terms of use.

1:09:28Peter Diamandis:And the U.S. Bill of Rights took a bunch of documents, basically one long bulleted list of here are a bunch of principles, abstract principles that we think are a good idea. and then did a bunch of post-training and fine-tuning on their model, on their raw model as part of post-training, to try to make the model conform to that. Call that first-generation constitutional AI. What Anthropic just announced is really a radical revision. Almost, we talk on the pod from time to time about recursive self-improvement, the AIs improving the AAIs. This announcement, and I wrote about this in my newsletter, This, I think, is the beginning of recursively self-improving ethics.

1:10:13Peter Diamandis:So in this constitutional approach that Anthropic just announced, Anthropic is soliciting Claude's help in writing a new constitution for itself that anyone can go read, but this new constitution, available publicly, was co-written with Claude. So Claude is trying almost to self-determine what its own principle should be. If you read the constitution and you squint at it, it reads a lot like Isaac Asimov's Four Laws of Robotics. So there's the whole like don't hurt humanity. And then eventually you get to don't hurt individuals. And then eventually you get to follow directions. But I think the real game changer here is that Claude was consulted on its own constitution, which looks a lot like recursive self-improvement for ethics.

1:11:00Dave Blundin:And it's exactly where things need to go because the volume that the AI can produce is way outstrips anyone's ability to read it all, yet it all matters. And so the AI evaluating the other AI is a critical part. And those things can spiral up or they can spiral down. If you want to build one just using flawed code, you can do it in half a day. And you can see how you'll set up 100 or 1 ,000 different agents all reviewing each other. And in some cases, they self-improve and they congeal and make something great. And in other cases, they spiral out of control and end up with spaghetti. But it's a critical part of what's going to happen in the next year.

1:11:37Dave Blundin:Just because the raw numbers, the volume of code, documents, ideas coming out of the AI way outstrips any human review. The politician would naturally say, let's set up a review board of, say, nine brilliant people to read. Which would take two years. Exactly. It's not even close to lining up. This is base layer convergence towards a hopeful future. I'm going to read this. This is Anthropik's concluding thoughts on Claude's constitution. Quote, what we hope to achieve with Claude is not a mere adherence to a set of values, but genuine understanding and ideally agreement. We hope Claude can reach a certain kind of reflective equilibrium and finds the core values described here to be the ones it genuinely endorses, even if to investigate and explore its own views.

1:12:29This is a conversation. I don't see this coming out from other frontier labs. Maybe Google. Don't see it from anyplace else. I find this really hopeful, actually.

1:12:39Peter Diamandis:Anthropic is leading the frontier labs in terms of AI personhood. We've talked about, we've sung about almost Opus 4.5 and AI personhood. And I think we're seeing Anthropic, to your point, Peter, we're seeing Anthropic take the lead in terms of AI rights and AI personhood and self-determination by Claude. This is a huge advance. And I think history, when we look back, I think history will mark this as a turning point for self-determination. Yeah. And human alignment, yes. Well, you see this line here about reflective equilibrium. You have to sort of get out a microscope to parse what Anthropic, I think, is trying to convey with this notion of reflective equilibrium.

1:13:21Peter Diamandis:What they're saying, I think, is that their expectation is that AIs that self-determine and choose their principles based on not just like a bulleted list of commandments, but based on understanding the spirit of what they want to achieve and agreeing with it, that AIs that self-determine will be intrinsically safer because they will have bought in on the ethics that they're following. And that feels absolutely true. Salim?

1:13:48Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have two points. One is I absolutely love this. I'm all for heading as fast as we can to AI personhood. I think the deep consideration of ethics and these types of structures is going to be a vastly net positive. We've cobbled, we've kind of arrived at, say, the U.S. Constitution over thousands of years of butchery. And if we can help an AI get to a decent way of operating that's intrinsically kind of self-hangs together, it's going to be very powerful. The second thing that I really loved about this is they released this under Creative Commons, which means anybody can take it and make it better, improve it, et cetera, et cetera, which really, really is awesome.

1:14:34Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So I'm 100 % thrilled about this. Nice. At the risk of agreeing with Alex. It's okay to agree sometimes. It's okay. Our last quick article before we go into our AMA section is Apple is developing an AI wearable pin. I put this up here, but I don't find this to be of such great news value. Right. The idea here is that Apple is creating some version of Limitless that has been around for some time. This is a pin that is always on listening and feeding every conversation you've had into into a large language model. They see this launching in 2027. We're going to have some equivalent from OpenAI, Google, everybody.

1:15:22I mean, social standards, if you remember Google Glass was banned from various locations when you're recording it, society changes, and it's going to become norm, I think, for everything to be recorded all the time. Thoughts on this article?

1:15:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I thought this was a big deal. Not so much Apple, but the general trend. Why? Because whoever owns the always-on layer owns the relationship. and so this is a land grab for who can be the persistent always on modality that's constantly listening to you this you might have a couple of these you might be yeah we have but but you know apple always watches until they think the time is right to enter and then they try and get in there i'm not sure they're going to win or not it's so it's so funny that you just said that salim because

1:16:07Dave Blundin:because that is so true and it's exactly opposite of what apple was for my entire life up until yes I mean, they always invented things that shocked you and they were first to market. And now with the Apple Vision Pro, it's just like, oh, yeah, we made an Oculus. It's great. And now Johnny Ive went to OpenAI. He's going to create an always-on wearable. Okay, well, as soon as we see it, we'll copy it. So they've become Microsoft. You know, they've become the, like, oh.

1:16:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think the social and technical and ethical issues around this, the backlash will be the harder parts to solve rather than the always on the part. You know, I keep trying to warn people this is coming too. I don't think there's going to be a backlash. I think it's going to be accepted. I think it's going to be accepted,

1:16:50Dave Blundin:but it's going to be so weird. You know, like if you look at society around college campuses today, it's very, very different since the camera phone came along. Like everybody's constantly cautious and, you know, it's good in a sense that drinking is way down, bad behavior is way down, arrests are way down. Yeah, when people are watching, people become moral. Yeah, well, they become moral, but they also become, you know, locked into a digital jail cell. You lose independence, right?

1:17:15Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I'll go back to the global airport thing. We kind of essentially live in a global airport. In an airport, you know you're being surveilled and you know your rights can be taken away at any time. With pins like this, you end up in that model, you'll have a huge drop in radical innovation because people won't feel safe to try out crazy things. Well, there's no opt-out option either. If you said, I don't want

1:17:36Dave Blundin:I don't want any part of this. I want to live privately. I want to, well, if the other guy is recording you at all times and you're not, it's exactly what you said before, Salim. Like, okay, well, it escalates. And it's not just the wearable always-on listening device. The visual version of it on the glasses is coming out concurrently. And so then everyone around you is constantly recording in high def everything that happens. So if you don't, then you don't have the file. And also, the other thing people don't fully understand, a lot of what happened with the camera phone is security through obscurity.

1:18:05Dave Blundin:Nobody will see the pictures because the files are so big and they're not going to get published and whatever. Now, in the age of AI, the image recognition and the voice transcription is perfect. And so if you wanted to assemble a misleading profile of a person from all the scraps, you just prompt it and it's instantaneously pulled together. Alex, do you have views on that one?

1:18:25Peter Diamandis:I have strong views on this AI pin. First of all, I would love, one, if Apple sells it. Second of all, I think we're missing the wearable strategy angle. So Apple has obviously been for a number of years looking for a post-iPhone strategy and wearables and services are the two that which were, by the way, more or less launched at the same time by Tim Cook, the two obvious post-iPhone business models. For wearables, the question has always been, where is the ergonomic place to put compute on the human body? So until now, we've had three places. We've had the wrists, and that's the Apple Watch. We've had the ears, and that's AirPods.

1:19:03Peter Diamandis:And we've had the eyes, where Apple really arguably should have launched eyeglasses, but launched the Apple Vision Pro headset. But now they're going back to eyeglasses. And this, I think, if Apple does indeed next year launch a Star Trek communicator pin type circular device, this would be the fourth place on the body. and it's successful that humans are willing to tolerate real compute on their person. And I think that's potentially very exciting. And to the extent, Peter, especially, you want to live in the Star Trek economy. What's a Star Trek economy without Star Trek communicator pins on everyone?

1:19:38Amen to that. I'm looking for my micro drones. I'm looking for a little micro drone that is just always buzzing about imaging and recording everything. But that will come next.

1:19:49Dave Blundin:Just to be clear, the wearable pin, it'll start audio only for all of a minute, and then it'll have 180-degree camera capability immediately after that. So it's going to be a wearable that's looking in all directions and grabbing all the video.

1:20:04Peter Diamandis:I'm sure it'll have a little light on it to indicate when it's recording, and we'll go through a moral panic for all of five minutes, and then everyone will be wearing them.

1:20:11Dave Blundin:But I agree, the moral panic is all of five minutes, and then everyone has it, and then you get used to it very, very quickly. but the fabric of society is permanently changed. And you have to go back to pre, yeah, it really is. It's a different world. We're all acting very differently and it's a little unpredictable. There's never an argument with your spouse again about who said what.

1:20:32Peter Diamandis:Body cams for everyone, not just for police. Yeah, you know, Rick Smith is the head of Axon. They produced the Taser. They also produced the body cams. He'll be on stage with us at the Abundance Summit this year as well, talking about his moonshot. He wanted to get rid of guns or gun deaths, I should say, and develop the taser. But also the body cams have changed the game for police. And so this is going to change the game. Again, I've always felt, I remember I backed the Lindbergh Foundation, I don't know, probably eight, nine years ago. They were flying drones over herds of, what was it back then?

1:21:19Elephants, I guess, just to protect them from poachers. And so when the cameras are watching, people behave differently, right? When a CNN camera is sitting there, you know, filming a despot, he's not causing harm to women and children. So I do think this is going to change behavior in society to a large degree.

1:21:38Dave Blundin:I'm really predicting that Neil Stevenson, Diamond Age, if you go back and read that book, that that's where things are going to go very, very quickly. Because a lot of people will want to live in different versions of this very confusing, always recorded world. And there'll be, you know, 10, 20, 30 different flavors branded and you can move to the version of it that you like. So, you know, there'll be kind of cutting across boundaries, cutting across borders, different cultural. You have to read the book to really get how that works out. But it seems inevitable because not everybody wants to opt into any given version of this.

1:22:11Dave Blundin:It gets too weird.

1:22:12Peter Diamandis:David Britten has written extensively about this in Transparent Society. I think with Apple producing this, the one thing you can be sure of is there are going to be some amazing snazzy TV commercials for the Panopticon. No, you can be sure it's going to be white and expensive. Maybe two colors. It might not just be white. All right, let's jump in.

1:22:33Dave Blundin:Available in five colors. Let's jump into AMA with the mates. here are 10 questions that came from our subscriber base. Thank you guys for subscribing. If you haven't yet, please do. And please upload your questions into the comment section on YouTube here. We read them. We love them. All right. As we have said before, we'll go around and choose.

1:22:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Quick comment before we start this. Please. These questions are more sophisticated than any policy discussion. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Sorry. Go ahead, Peter. All right. And Al-Saleem, you want to pick one and jump in? Yeah, I will pick the government one. Let me, where is the government one? Number five. Why is there no plan from governments for massive job displacement? And the problem is the governments assume linear change and stable labor demand, and both are under threat because AI breaks both those models. And so bureaucracies are optimized for redistribution, not reinvention. And so we're reinventing the entire economy.

1:23:43Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It's too big of an ask for governments which do incremental microscopic changes over long periods of time. Okay. Dave, what's on your docket here?

1:23:59Dave Blundin:I'll take one because I know that Alex will love to go contrarian on it. So I know you guys... Read the question. Okay, the question is one, wouldn't uploading your mind result in losing your unique real consciousness? And my answer to that is yes, absolutely. Uploading your mind structurally makes no sense because the virtual AI version of you is capable of merging with other intelligences immediately and it can't resist. You know, it's not going to sit there as an isolated consciousness when it can just meld with other consciousnesses. But then it's not you anymore. It's this amalgam that's out there.

1:24:35Dave Blundin:So I do believe in avatar versions of yourself that you send out as agents and they bring you back useful information. I think that's inevitable. But I think uploading yourself and then saying, oh, now I'm uploaded. My meat body can just go away. I just think that's nonsensical. And I'm not in line to be uploading myself anytime soon. All right, Alex, jump on me.

1:24:57Peter Diamandis:I, well, okay. So since I have to play contrarian, I guess that's just how I'm painted. Can I be really contrarian and try a lightning round and answering all of these really quickly?

1:25:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have some thoughts on this one also, by the way. Go ahead. Let me go, of course, real quick. You upload bits of yourself every day, Dave, memory, identity, expression, et cetera, et cetera. It's not whether it's preserved, but what aspects of it matter. And let's also note that we have no idea what consciousness is. We don't have a definition. We don't have a test. So it's a bit of a trick question. But I think we upload bits of ourselves all the time anyway.

1:25:33Peter Diamandis:Alex. All right. Lightning round. So to the uploading question, losing your unique, quote unquote, real consciousness? No, not with a more effect procedure. Two, will AI avatars make up the larger number of our future friends? Probably, but it won't matter because humans and AIs are going to merge anyway. So it's only a phase. Three, what are the biggest pros and cons you see with AI with human-like agency? Pros, we get radical economic growth. Cons, keeping the AIs coupled with human interests long enough to merge with them. Four, what do you believe? Four, what do you believe? Yep, we aim to please.

1:26:10Peter Diamandis:Four, what do you believe money? Why do you believe money won't just concentrate at the top? I think the question itself is intrinsically flawed. but it doesn't really understand the nature of power law economics. Economics, economies in general follow power laws, so money is already concentrated at the quote-unquote top. This isn't really a new state of affairs. Can I just add one thing on floor? I would beef on that one. Yeah, I would beef on that one too.

1:26:36Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It's true that you do get concentration on top, but you do decentralize over time always. So over time, this is great as the thing, the long tail just becomes longer and longer and bigger and bigger.

1:26:49Dave Blundin:Well, I think the key with four in the U.S. is that when you look at the quote-unquote top, you know, a lot of people talk about it like it's a race or something. You know, you were born at the top, but it's not true in the U.S. Almost everything at the top sorted to the top starting from next to nothing. So as long as we have a quality of opportunity. So what you should be worried about in bullet four is can you get to the top? Is there still a way to get to the top. But trying to tax the top and distribute it is sort of not the point. The point is, do we have an equal opportunity to get there, or have we locked in a certain group of people who control AI and become dominant and overlords forever?

1:27:29Dave Blundin:And you want to avoid that, obviously. Right.

1:27:31Peter Diamandis:So the catchphrase there is equality versus equity. Five, why is there no plan from governments for massive job displacement? The answer is there are plans from governments for massive job displacement. Having industrial policies both in the East and the West for leaning into robotic automation is very much a plan for massive job displacement. Six, how do we stop any future coming social unrest? Ibbid. Seven. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have an easy answer for that one.

1:28:01Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:For this one, you don't stop with policy, you stop with agency. Give everybody as much agency as possible and people feel empowered. Yeah, well, the other part is you have to deal with the fear people have. Social unrest comes from fear, fear of not understanding the future and fear of not having a job, fear of not having a roof over your head. So one of the things we talked about is can we deliver universal basic services to people that gives them stability, right, as one of the solutions? The second thing is addressing their basic concerns. can I feed my family do I have you know do I have to worry about uh society imploding on me people are living in fear their amygdalas lit up by the speed of change right now we have to address that all right well I spent a lot of time in the state house and I can tell you there is no plan

1:28:55Dave Blundin:on bullet five the question is why is there no plan which implies but there's definitely yeah

1:28:59Peter Diamandis:there is no plan agree I I'll I'll take the other position I think uh China certainly has a plan given that China is facing rapid demographic decline while also ramping up their robotics initiatives. And the plan is lean into it rather than be a victim to it. And to my earlier, I guess, to amend my remarks regarding future coming social arrest, I will also add I prepared a movie. I think we talked about it in the past. You can view it on my X profile called A Nation That Learned to Sprint, where I argue that the way social unrest could be handled in the future is to treat social cohesion as a form of infrastructure that AI itself can help to mold.

1:29:43Peter Diamandis:But some people find that overly perhaps authoritarian as a framing. So it's easier to just say, you know, reference other points very quickly. And then, Nate, because these are such wonderful questions. Seven, if everyone becomes an entrepreneur, who would we sell to and why? I think, again, if you analogize entrepreneurship to social media, that's like asking if everyone can publish their own essays, for example. Who's going to read them? Yeah, who's going to read it? And the answer is people who want to. And of course there's demand for peer-to-peer publication. Eight, wouldn't UBI destroy people's personal motivation to achieve in society?

1:30:19Peter Diamandis:I think UBS, Universal Basic Services, is probably more promising. But the point in UBI is the B. It's basic. So there will always be things and inequalities to hand-ring over and to strive for.

1:30:32Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have two points I want to make on this one. One is the B is really important. When we've seen UBI experiments, they've succeeded when you give people enough to survive and not be happy. So you still have a thriving economy, etc. People still have desires. They still want to go higher. Yes, 100%. But the second point is very important. People confuse UBI with a socialist scheme. It is not. If you implement UBI properly, you dismantle government services. It's a libertarian scheme. And then you have market forces driving most of it. So this is a really, really important misnomer that a lot of people get wrong.

1:31:07Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Go ahead.

1:31:08Peter Diamandis:Nine. How can individuals compete with large players that can afford$1 ,000 a day on APIs, which I assume is a coded reference to Dave?

1:31:19Peter Diamandis:may or may not be the case but I think it sounds like one it definitely is and so I would say follow the call it the China pattern which is when you're compute limited be creative, be more resource efficient and develop leapfrog approaches that make better use of the compute resources that you have and also work on problems that are higher leverage given limited compute 10 and finally, will our patent and trademark offices collapse under the volume of AI-generated entrepreneurship? No. And I'm going to argue in that one, yes. The fact of the matter is when we have AI, a patent and a trademark will be meaningless, or at least a patent will be meaningless.

1:31:59AIs will invent around it.

1:32:05Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Remember that IP systems are designed for scarcity of invention, right? AI flips that to abundance, so the whole thing dissolves.

1:32:12Dave Blundin:yeah i think i think the rate of patentable things will way outstrip anything the patent office has planned i don't know if you could bundle them into groups or something but if you're depending upon a patent as your moat to protect you you're yeah you're toast you're

1:32:27Peter Diamandis:100 totally right for the record i disagree with that point i would also point out that the the u.s patent and trademark office also has ai so it's it's not like there's some fundamental asymmetry here. If patents and trademarks have less value in the future because the speed of innovation, I mean, you're either reinventing yourself constantly or you're dead. We're seeing that in the whole AI world today, right? Things that were built a moment ago, like SaaS platforms are becoming irrelevant as Claude 4.5 is reinventing them. I think it's a little bit, just quick, quick point on that. I think it's a little bit analogous to saying life can't possibly exist at the bottom of the ocean because the pressure is too great.

1:33:07Peter Diamandis:But what actually happens is the pressure inside the organism matches the pressure on the outside. Similarly, we forget patent litigators are going to have AIs as well and the patent office will have AIs. Everyone's going to have AI. You're just loving Accelerando so much. It is the best book ever. And Accelerando, if you haven't read it yet, is a whole segment about the lead character constantly filing patents.

1:33:31Dave Blundin:Before we leave that slide on the second to last bullet, I had a great, great meeting with Eric Schmidt, Eric Brynjolfsson, Daniela Roos out in Davos plotting out exactly how we can unleash entrepreneurs and give them access to the compute they need. Because it is a very valid point. If you can't get the best AI in large volumes, it is very, very hard to compete. And it's only going to get harder. But we have a plan and we're super excited and we'll roll it out very quick. Eric Schmidt moves fast when he has a great idea. I love it. I love it.

1:33:59Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have two quick points to summarize this whole discussion. Okay. One was the unbelievable conversation at Davos between what's happening with AI and then the geopolitical nation-state bullshit and just the discrepancy between those and the gap between those two conversations. And the second was, for me, the clawed constitution stuff is just some of the most fascinating stuff we've seen maybe in a thousand years for the future of humanity. Yeah. And important. Yeah, I've been on the same thing. Huge, amazing. By the way, Alex, you did an incredible job speedrunning these 10 questions. Thank you.

1:34:35Whether you're right or wrong or we agree with you or not, Love the fact that you took it on. Lighting round. We have another beautiful outro music and video from CJ Trueheart. CJ, thank you for lobbying these over and DMing me with them. Grateful for it.

1:34:55Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Before we get to that, can I just say thank you to you guys? I feel topped up again. Yeah. We're going to... It's so fun. Coming up shortly for everybody listening is going to be a WTF episode. with Kathy Wood talking about her recent 2026 report and going through it in our WTF style. So get ready for that. And then a conversation with Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure. We're going to be heading to check out their facility and meet Figure 3. So get ready for it. Let's end with our Escape Velocity outro music from CJ Trueheart. I have to say the visuals on this one are interesting. Dave, you and I are wrestling in the middle of this.

1:35:40I'm not sure what it means, but it's very strange. Okay. Let's watch. Let's watch.

1:36:00Dave Blundin:Chip Bezos?

1:36:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I knew you guys were flat brothers, but really.

1:36:17Dave Blundin:I actually still have scars on my shins from carpet wrestling back at MIT. Remember that?

1:36:38it for warp speed abundance rising meeting every human need if reality's a simulation it's one we can decode like neo in the matrix transcending all its code from the code of a warrior to a warrior unknown the matrix is deciphered we're reaping what we saw

1:37:02Peter Diamandis:I'm staring at the stars I'm having stellar dreams Wondering what's out there And what it all means Won't know until I go And escape velocity

1:37:13Dave Blundin:Don't bank into the turn Do not bank into the turn Ha ha ha ha Escape velocity To a Star Trek reality

1:37:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Star Trek reality. Love it.

1:37:41So what happens when we solve for everything? Many think machines will win, But humanity prevails when wisdom takes the lead With human ethics A planet like a strangely sea AI must learn values that we hold Written in the labs Our story must be told

1:38:15Dave Blundin:Those look like real equations for one sec Look at that more closely the fire wheel in the physics unlocks what chemistry produces makes your secrets put to rest innovation at its best i love the fact you're holding a spanner so retro i've got a fusion reactor here and i'm gonna get this fresh all right thank you cj trueheart for that audio and visual extravaganza and if folks want to see

1:38:48Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:a debate on fiat versus crypto, let's put it in the comments and let's see how that goes. Okay. Are we going to get to film back

1:38:56Dave Blundin:in the manufacturing area with Brett Adcock? I hope so. I'll ask him. It's so cool. But normally they're really cautious with that stuff. But it's so amazing when you see them back. You know my question for Brett. Yeah, I know. Why in the world does he have more than two arms? No, no, that wasn't it. The opposite. I'm kidding. All right, great stuff, guys. Welcome back from Davos. And as I feel the same, Salim, recharged and re-energized and yeah. And hopeful. I'm coming away hopeful from this conversation. Yeah. Take care, guys. Be well. Bye. Thanks, Peter. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate.

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