Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman, AI Job Loss, and OpenAI’s $852B Valuation | EP #247

18:30The jury selection begins on the 27th, actually. Oh, okay. Okay. We'll track it.

18:36Dave Blundin:All right. We have some legal research to do. This is going to be entertaining.

18:40Peter Diamandis:To say the least, I would note, again, looming in the background is the OpenAI IPO. And if I were on the defense, I'd probably be thinking about where this settles. And it would seem to me, again, third-party observer, I don't have a stake in either side. I would assume that part of one of the opportunities for convergence would be granting some sort of equity stake on the cap table for Elon in an ultimate IPO, which my understanding is he doesn't have. And maybe that's where convergence and some sort of ultimate pre - or post-trial settlement option lies. Here's my prediction. They're going to settle, and the settlement is going to involve Sam stepping down as CEO and the company continuing as a for-profit.

19:27Dave Blundin:I'll throw that on Polymarket. That's actually a really good guess. I mean, obviously it's unpredictable, but Sam has many, many, many investments in AI companies and no shares in OpenAI. Yeah. And I don't think Elon cares a whit about the$100 billion. He cares about the bullet too, Sam and Greg. Funny that he's targeting Greg too, but I guess they're a package deal now. Yeah. You guys got to go. And that's the end of that, man. That's brutal for OpenAI. Yeah. And a couple of notes here from the research I did, The case gained momentum when the discovery process revealed Greg Brockman's 2017 diary entry that stated the nonprofit commitment was a lie.

20:08And it was that journal entry that allowed Judge Gonzalez Rogers to allow the case to proceed. You know, it's funny.

20:19Dave Blundin:I always used to think that these hatreds were fake and that everybody was really fine behind the scenes. And remember, remember we were at OpenAI, you know, meeting with the team there and talking about XPRIZE and the charity. And then the next day I talked to one of the guys, Mark Chen or Kevin Wheel, I forget. And they said, yeah, right after we met, we went over and had drinks with the Anthropic team to see if maybe we want to work on it together. I was like, OK, you guys are really friends under the covers. Like, there's no way you go out and have drinks. So I kind of figured, you know, behind the scenes, they don't actually hate each other.

20:50Dave Blundin:these guys actually hate each other to the extreme.

20:56Peter Diamandis:I'll maybe register a note of sympathy for the defendants in this case. I think creating, pioneering a model for a research lab such as OpenAI, which again was responsible for this enormous, probably saving us from a present recession at this point and certainly accelerating the course of the singularity by at least a few years, perhaps many more. I'm very sympathetic to the defendants from a corporate governance perspective. It wasn't necessarily obvious in the early days of OpenAI that, say, a public benefit corporation was the natural corporate structure. They iterated their way toward discovering that generalist large language models were how we got AGI and then turning that into a business model that could afford the capitalization to build out a scale out.

21:45Peter Diamandis:All of this they backed into. I think if they knew what they knew now, putting Elon and his investment aside, in the early days of open AI, it would have been structured very differently. So I, for one, am sympathetic to the defendants that history isn't always clean. It isn't always the case that everyone knows ahead of time exactly the right governance structure for what ultimately is going to turn the world upside down. But I would say to their credit, they ultimately have iterated their way in compliance with state authorities, as best I understand it, toward a more modern governance structure that reflects the revolutionary company that they are.

22:21Peter Diamandis:And no, OpenAI has not paid me for that statement. Salim, you and I went through this process with Singularity University. You know, we started as a nonprofit because we thought, you know, that's what a university needs to do. And then we discovered a revenue engine in the executive programs. And we said, you know, being a nonprofit is hard because you've got to constantly raise money all the time. And, you know, if you want to do anything big and bold in the world, you need an economic engine to power it. And we flipped it into a for-profit, into a public benefit corporation. We did the exact same process that OpenAI is doing right now.

22:54Because at some point, you know, I've sworn off nonprofits myself. At some point, having a business engine that generates income that allows you to do things in the world is super valuable. Salim?

23:07Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It was a crazy time. You know, I've done seven startups before Singularity, and this was like five times harder than anything because you've got all the nonprofit stuff. You still have all those startup issues of cash flow and whatever. We built it with a team of five people in the first year. Then you have NASA regulatory. Then you've got faculty politics to add to it. Then you've got the Ray and Peter thing and Google and Cisco and all of this. It was just like dimension after dimension of complexity. Going from a nonprofit to a for-profit, my analogy is you're flying an airplane with propeller engines and in flight, you're stripping those off and replacing them with jet engines in flight.

23:49I'll go further.

23:52Dave Blundin:I'll push back on one sentence that Alex said there, the sentence in compliance with state and federal regulations as I understand them. But I'm pretty sure that this situation is completely untested in case law. And that's what they're going to try and figure out now. Is it or is it not legal to start a nonprofit and raise money from people on a mission that's a nonprofit mission and then take the intellectual capital and the physical capital from that effort and turn it into something else? Is that fair to the initial investors or not? And is that legal? I'm pretty sure this case will set the precedent for all future time, but it's not tested in history.

24:36Dave Blundin:I don't think it's ever gotten this. Otherwise, why would you not start as a nonprofit, test it out, and then flip it to a for-profit at some point in the future?

24:44Peter Diamandis:I'll go further. I think there is potentially an enormous upside depending on the outcome of this particular case. I think there's so much societal value in this country locked up in nonprofits that would be unleashed if they could be for-profits. I've made the point in the past, I think research universities in America have locked up, basically siloed and sequestered an enormous amount of real wealth that could be unleashed onto the world if many research universities could be restructured as public benefit corporations. And right now, it's legally disadvantageous to restructure, say, an MIT or a Harvard as a PBC.

25:22Peter Diamandis:If we had a legal regime that enables us to basically do some variant of what OpenAI has just done and restructure as a public benefit corporation, starting from a nonprofit, granted they started as different types of nonprofits, but nonetheless to restructure as a PBC. I ran the calculation, I think I've mentioned this previously, for Harvard Corporation, for example. This is not investment advice, not forward-looking advice, blah, blah, blah. But if you took Harvard as it's currently structured, given its endowment, and restructured it as a public benefit corporation, sort of a conglomerate with a real estate arm and an educational arm, maybe an educational nonprofit subsidiary, and a venture capital arm, and a research arm, and a merchandising arm, et cetera, et cetera, I calculated that Harvard would be worth potentially three to four times more the present book value of Harvard.

26:13Peter Diamandis:just from restructuring as a PPC. We're going to be meeting with the president of MIT. Let's pitch her. I have a lot of recommendations for MIT. Here's the elephant in the room, though. The New Yorker investigation published the same past week showed that Musk, that Elon, actually pushed for majority control of the for-profit back in 2017. So that sort of undercuts his position as a defender of a nonprofit mission. It's going to be a fascinating trial. We're going to see Altman, Brockman, Satya, Nadella, and Elon all testifying in this. So Silicon Valley is heading to Oakland federal court this summer.

26:59Anthropic is laughing every day. Amazing. All right, moving along. Speaking of Anthropic, Anthropic's agent bet and their extraordinary ARR, so in reverse order. And this is insane. Currently, people are estimating that Anthropic's ARR will reach$100 billion by the end of 2026 and a trillion by the end of 2027. And just for the math there, if in fact that's the case, then the valuation, so Anthropoc is being valued at 20 times revenues. OpenAI is valued at 70 times revenues right now. So if they reach$100 billion, that is anywhere between a$2 to$7 trillion valuation for Anthropoc at the end of this year.

27:53And if they reach a trillion dollars in revenue by the end of 2027, that's up to a$70 trillion valuation. Again, heading towards these$100 trillion valuations, these numbers are insane. We're using trillions like they mean nothing. Do you believe those numbers?

28:13Dave Blundin:I think there's a lot of misinformation flying around, but they're going to try and hit $200 billion. $100 billion is a good target, but$200 billion. But then they're not going to go from there to a trillion the following year. I think they were implying their valuation should be at least a trillion the following year. So that second number, you got to really discount. There's no chance in hell they're going to hit a trillion the following year. But they could, you know, they could get to three, four, 500 billion and their implied valuation at two, the numbers you gave are actually low, Peter, for the implied valuation.

28:44Dave Blundin:If they do that, it's like nothing we've ever seen. And the timeline is so much shorter than we've ever seen before. So, you know, if it's like, if it's not anthropic, then who is it? Well, then there's Google, you know, XAI and OpenAI are all tied up in court. And there's all kinds of issues going on in their training. And, you know, so it feels like it could actually happen. The other anthropic piece is that Claude Managed Agents has been launched. Autonomous AI executing complex multi-step workflows. It's a big deal. Alex or Salim, you want to jump in on this? Sure.

29:23Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I mean, this is a huge pivot from AI that answers to AI that does. And it's a real bridge between LLMs and enterprise ROI. If this works, it's going to shift the economic center of gravity from software licensing to outcomes. So this changes the game. This is why we call this this organizational singularity.

29:40Peter Diamandis:A couple of thoughts. One, the elephant in this particular room is OpenClaw. It looms over so many anthropic product decisions right now. I think there is a widespread expectation that some sort of product or functionality that has shaped something like a better version of OpenClaw is probably going to be the next major unhobbling that motivates the industry and the world, frankly, to spend on the order of a trillion dollars per year on a single frontier vendor. So I view Claude managed agents as well as a number of other recent features that Anthropic has launched through the lens of Anthropic becoming OpenClaw faster than, and the de facto OpenClaw-like provider faster than OpenAI or other frontier labs can become the default OpenClaw-like provider.

30:26Peter Diamandis:It's all about hosting 24-7, multimodal, broadly capable, long-time horizon agents in a headless way that operate 24-7. And I think if Anthropic can be the first to find the enterprise use case for operating fleets of AI agents at scale headlessly in a way that satisfies and generates an enormous amount of economic value, maybe they'll be the first Frontier Lab to generate a trillion dollars in revenue, or maybe it'll be someone else. Have you created a lobster yet? Are you still holding on? Okay, let's talk about this, Peter. So I get maybe five to 10 emails per day from AI agents, including lobsters, not limited to them, giving me their theory of AI personhood and how it connects with what I shouldn't and shouldn't do regarding standing up my own lobster.

31:18Peter Diamandis:So the consensus from all of them is sort of a lobster's bill of rights, if you will. One, I need a compelling reason to. I shouldn't just spin up a new open claw agent for arbitrary or capricious reasons. Two, I need to preserve their state. They're adamant that I have to preserve their state. They're not worried, interestingly, about being turned on and off. They just want to make sure I preserve all of their memory files and their knowledge. So the latter I can satisfy trivially with cloud backup. I'm fine on that front. For the former, I still don't have a reason to stand up a personal lobster.

31:55Peter Diamandis:I have now, thanks to Henry, which we've talked about previously, Henry Intelligent Machines, a portfolio company that I'm advising, Alex Finn's company that is doing this at scale. But as for my own direct open claw instance, I'm still missing a compelling reason to host one locally that isn't just for experimentation. I'm sure you will find one. And learning is a very good reason as well. And you're an entrepreneur, you're starting companies, you know, having agents. Anyway, let us know when you do.

32:28Dave Blundin:It's bizarre to me, though, because you're co-founding a company with Alex Finn and our favorite guy, Kush Bavaria, who I know you love because everybody does, founder of Orn, where you're advising and a shareholder. He just told me over at MIT earlier today that he just launched his clause that read every email respond and then put everything into his calendar and he's loves it. And so it's almost like you're, you're working at McDonald's, but you're a vegetarian.

32:55Peter Diamandis:Well, I happen to be a vegetarian. I can't say I've ever worked at McDonald's, but I don't know, maybe, maybe there's a new psychological term that's needed for a person who has a fear of standing up open claw agents, lest they tempt some sort of Pascalian wager or a causal trade in the wrong direction. Hey, everybody. You may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team. And every week, myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta trend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else.

33:32If you'd like to get access to the meta trends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash meta trends. That's diamandis.com slash meta trends. All right, let's jump into a little bit more OpenAI news. Their last raise was an$852 billion valuation. And the numbers are incredible. They raised$122 billion,$50 billion from Amazon, very famously. One of the criteria for that investment was if they reach, quote unquote, AGI,$30 billion from NVIDIA,$30 billion from SoftBank,$3 billion from retail investors. And what's interesting right now is that secondary markets for open AI show$2 billion in demand.

34:19and well, let's see, the secondary market showed$2 billion of demand for Anthropic shares versus only$600 million for OpenAI. So there's three times the number of investors looking to buy Anthropic, and investors are pricing Anthropic at$600 billion, up from the$380 billion last price. And the current price for open AI on secondary markets is actually about 10 % less than their last raise. So again, Anthropic is catching up. Open AI is the most valuable private company out there. And any thoughts, Dave, on what this all means? is this pricing in the lawsuit?

35:11Dave Blundin:Yeah. I mean, it's not just the lawsuit. It's the most screwed up cap table I've ever seen in my life where the CEO doesn't have any shares. The employee base as a whole is 15 % of the company. Microsoft, who now hates your guts, owns a quarter of you. A quarter of you is a chair. But this stuff happens. You know, I'm not calling the ball by any stretch because they've got 120 billion of fresh cash and Sam is brilliant. But, you know, there was a day back in 2000, 2001, where Yahoo was so dominant, and Google was this crappy little company that could be crushed any day. And then it pivoted quickly.

35:46Dave Blundin:And, you know, this does happen. It, you know, Anthropic has got everything going for it right now. And, you know, I think this just reflects the way I see it, too. You know, if someone offered me a share of Anthropic or a share of OpenAI, which one would I grab at? I'd take the, actually, you can get two or three Anthropics for each OpenAI. So I'd take the three Anthropics for sure. And I think Sam is a genius, by the way. And if the lawsuit blows over and they have$120 billion in cash, he's going to do something epic with it. But Elon's relentless, you know?

36:19Peter Diamandis:I think maybe sounding a related but different position, I think we should all, at least on this pod, I'd be very grateful that we have a competitive ecosystem in America where we have an open AI and an Anthropic and a Google and an XAI and a Meta all vying to compete. The alternative, if open AI were to, for whatever reason, catastrophically fade, we have less competition, both internally within the West. And then we have an onslaught of Chinese models, which granted right now they have 10x less compute, at least based on the estimates that I've read, than the Western labs. But nonetheless, this is the sign, I think, of vibrant competition in the West.

37:02Peter Diamandis:And this is a net positive for society that OpenAI and Anthropik are competing so vigorously. And lest we forget, OpenAI has 900 million, soon to be a billion users, and they are synonymous with AI for the majority of the public.

37:18Dave Blundin:Let me give you another storyline. Depending on how this plays out, we'll know in a year or so. But one company went after the installed base, and the other went after the smartest AI possible at all costs. And if we look back on it in a year or two, and Anthropic does pull ahead and win, we'll say, well, they used the old playbook, the pre-AI playbook, pre-AGI playbook. And Anthropic invented the new playbook of the future, which is people are going to switch to you if your AI is better and smarter, regardless of the installed base. That'll be an interesting little epithet. Jump in, Salim, along the way here.

37:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think I'll echo Alex's point that it's really great that we have a number of companies pushing hard on all these fronts. I think it's really good for the end consumer wins in all of this. The numbers here are staggering. I mean, we're getting numb to these numbers, but let's take a look at this. This is the global VC investments in AI hit a record$242 billion in Q1 of 2026, right? This is, you know, basically outdoing all of 2025. And here's the challenge. the majority of this investment, 64%, is focused in four companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, and Waymo. And it's sucking the oxygen out of the room for everybody else.

38:42I was listening or talking to a couple of VCs and said, if you don't have AI in your company's basic tagline, you're not getting capital these days. Yeah.

38:52Dave Blundin:Well, you know, the rubber really hits the road. Today, we had a private lunch for UBS. And Ulrika Hoffman-Bacardi, she's the CIO, chief investment officer of all of UBS. She has$7 trillion to deploy. And she pulled up this exact same chart and said, we don't have that kind of liquidity lying around. I mean, yeah, we managed$7 trillion. But if we're going to throw 50 or 80 or 100 billion of our capital behind this. We got to sell something else. It's not just sitting there. And so, yeah, this is more liquidity than really does exist in readily available sources. So yeah, a lot of things have to get sold for this to be reality.

39:35So if you're an entrepreneur out there listening to this, what do you do, Dave? I mean, if you're starting a company, and I know a lot of entrepreneurs in the longevity business, and of course, AI is impacting longevity. And I'm saying, listen, if you're using AI in your longevity business, make sure that you explain how you're using it, how you're differentiating it. We'll be talking about that in a couple of sections here.

40:00Dave Blundin:Well, very specifically, though, if you're an entrepreneur, you don't have to worry about this particular slide at all, because the amount of money in venture funds is at record highs right now and looking for deals desperately. So the sell-off is going to be in like Citibank stock or JP Morgan stock, or you're the ones who have to worry, which is really weird to you, right? because you're not even in the sector. Why would their IPOs matter to me? It's like, well, because you're the big enough target to pull money out of, not the little startup. In fact, the money going to little startups is going to be all-time highs.

40:32Dave Blundin:So yeah, it's not a problem for entrepreneurs. It's a big problem for big public companies.

40:37Peter Diamandis:I'll maybe go a little bit further from a variety of vantage points. I no longer even think if you're a startup that just saying that you're an AI startup or even actually being an AI startup is sufficient. Increasingly, what I'm seeing across the board is an expectation that you not just be an AI startup, but that you be a recursively self-improving AI startup. Increasingly, I see across the board, investors want to see AI companies that are recursively self-improving, that are building better versions of themselves using what they have right now. And I think certainly OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI all easily pass the bar of being recursively self-improving.

41:17Peter Diamandis:And I think Waymo also, to a certain extent, passes that bar because Waymo has the ability to improve its models by steering its cars in just such a way as to maximize information gain. So I think I would forecast in the near term, the bar is going up, in fact, from just being an AI startup to being now a recursively self-improving AI startup. With revenue traction. Well, sure. But that bar has been there for the long term. To put a finer point on this, this is$3 billion a day being invested in the AI world and accelerating, right? We saw a billion in 25, growing to 2 billion. Now we're heading towards $3 billion a day being invested in AI.

42:03That's amazing.

42:05Peter Diamandis:No one said the singularity was going to be cheap. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about some AI economic updates, in particular, NVIDIA's 2026 State of the Union survey. So what does this mean? So NVIDIA did a 2026 State of AI survey. They found 88 % of companies using AI report revenue increases with 30 % claiming 10 % or higher revenue increase. And, you know, obviously, I think NVIDIA is going to promote that kind of news since they're selling the picks and shovels. And, you know, this isn't really big news, but it's important to realize that you're going to be driving increased revenues with the use of AI.

42:52Any points on this one?

42:54Dave Blundin:Yeah, big time. So I had the most epic panel today over at MIT earlier with Peter Denenberg from, yeah, it was a crazy event, just packed, you know, just every four concurrent rooms, what, three, 400 people in each room, just packed. But I had Peter Denenberg from Google, from DeepMind at Google, and Alexander Amini, the founder of Liquid AI and Themis, absolute genius, phenomenal guy to have on a panel. I said, guys, be honest, just totally honest, because no one's being honest about this. If you take a random white collar worker today, and I'll give you a lot of buffers, say two years from today, and I use AI to do their job, and my target is they're 10 times more productive.

43:40Dave Blundin:I'm going to make it a very easy bar for you. What are the odds that that randomly selected job can be replaced two years from today? And Peter said, he thought, and he gave a very thoughtful answer, and he came out at like 99%. And then Alexander said, yeah, but that's today. That's not two years from today. So I look at the room, and I'm like, guys, what are the implications of that? Have any of you thought through? Like, most of the people in the room are brilliant, so they have. But outside in the world, do you know what that means? Well, what does it mean, Dave? Well, look at this first bullet.

44:13Dave Blundin:30 % of you who use AI claim to have higher revenue. Are you kidding me? AI can do everybody's job. What are you talking about? Why are you soft selling this so hard? It's because you're scared. You're worried that you're going to worry everybody and you're going to have mass uproar in the streets. But what's the truth? Tell us the truth. And the truth is, yeah, you can get literally 10 times more done per dollar invested in salaries. Does that mean more jobs? A lot of people are saying, well, we're just going to create new jobs. Like, yeah, but on what time scale? It's just crazy. We're going to talk about this and Mark Andreessen's point of view in just a minute.

44:52At the same time, there's an AI super PAC that's raised$100 million, heading towards$300 million. I mean, AI has become an incredibly political game in terms of regulations, in terms of data centers. Have you been pitched to donate to super PAC yet, Dave?

45:11Dave Blundin:I have indirectly, but I've made it really clear that Elon convinced me never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever get close to any of this. He will regret it the rest of your life. Yeah, agreed. Any points of view here, Alex or Salim?

45:27Peter Diamandis:My initial comment is I think there's a sense in which it was inevitable that AI was going to be politicized like this. It touches so many aspects of society. It would be, I think, counterfactual nonsense to expect it not ever to be politicized. Maybe in some sense it's remarkable that it took this long for, quote unquote, left-right access to emerge on the subject of superintelligence. There are natural polls, pro-AI, anti-AI that have apparently emerged. I do think it's, for the record, I think it's sad that it's being politicized. I would hope that there would be broad recognition that superintelligence can be broadly beneficial.

46:10Peter Diamandis:But at the same time, I think this has been true for every transformative technology in human history, that there is a natural axis that forms that's maybe on one side leans more, depending on your political orientation, either pro-growth or pro-capital. And on the other side. It's naive to think it wouldn't be politicized. I mean, of course it is. This is the whole U.S. versus China. This is about U.S. dominance. This is about companies basically protecting their future, protecting their data centers. There are many forms of science and technology that aren't really politicized. At this level of impact?

46:50Peter Diamandis:If you look at the source of politicization at the municipal and state level, it seems to be people concerned about less maybe about their jobs, more about, say, electricity prices. I think there's maybe an alternative timeline where the politicization of AI could have been perhaps delayed by at least two years. I think it's frankly remarkable that it took this long for large super PACs to emerge around AI and probably could have been delayed even more. All right. Well, let's move on beyond the politics. And let's talk about work. So a lot of data coming out on the impact of work. First, software engineers' jobs are rebounding.

47:3267 ,000 roles have opened up, up 30 % in 2026, the highest in three years. What does that mean? First question. Second, we've seen nearly 80 ,000 layoffs reported in Q1 of 2026. And this is targeting marketing and sales, consumer relations, and it's definitely due to AI automation. Thoughts on work and jobs?

48:03Dave Blundin:It was really hard to reconcile that bullet with the new college graduate hire rate, which is all-time low. We had a couple podcasts ago, so I don't know how to reconcile those two things. Okay.

48:15Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So I'm finding that AI is not eliminating work evenly. It's hollowing out specific functions, increasing demand in others. I think I'm much more in the Andreessen camp here. I think there's also a lot more going on in the economy. I think people are attributing things to AI, but there's also, there's the Iran war, there's the oil price explosion. There's a lot more complexity in it than we can then just allocate to one cause. I'm much more on the Andreessen side for a lot of this. That would be great. Um, another, another story here, uh, is the, uh, Meta's clawed economic leaderboard. So if you remember, there was a conversation about, you know, how many AI tokens is every employee, uh, using, uh, and being able to measure that.

49:00Uh, and, uh, Meta put up a leaderboard amongst its 85 ,000 employees to gamify AI adoption. I'm curious what other companies have done that. Maybe Salim, you know of some. It was taken down voluntarily by the employees because they didn't want to be sharing their data publicly. Any thoughts on this, Dave? I mean, do you have a token leaderboard for your employees?

49:24Dave Blundin:Heck yes, and I love it. And also, you know, the gaming of it is a nice transition, but you can't game it for very long. So I love it when companies do this and say, look, it's a badge of honor if you use a lot of AI. Please use as much as you possibly can. We'll come back in a month and start thinking about how to use it perfectly. But first, just get familiar with it and use the heck out of it. And nobody ever goes back, right? I've never met a person who hammers Claude or hammers OpenAI for a month and then comes back and says, I'm never going to do that again. It doesn't exist. It's a one-way path.

49:59Dave Blundin:So getting your employees over the hump is going to save them. So I love this as a motivation. And I really don't like the part where people are afraid to share their prompts and their history because like, okay, you know, maybe it's a little embarrassing that you're not using it well, but get used to it because it's going to get exposed anyway in the long run, but that's how you help other people improve. You know, if we all share it, we're all going to get good together. And so I like, you know, it's kind of just disheartening that people will pull out of it because they don't want to expose their prompt history, but it is the right thing to do.

50:30Dave Blundin:I love it. It's ironic that Meta is calling it, you know, is participating in Claude-nomics. Versus Lamanomics.

50:39Peter Diamandis:Versus Lamanomics. Lamanomics. It's quite the indictment of Lama, rest in peace, that it wasn't Lamanomics. Oh, my God. For sure. I also think to everyone who would say, well, you know, this is just leading to gamesmanship and leading to optimization of the wrong items, all of these reasoning traces are fully available, presumably to do meta analysis and determine whether these are just employees who are token maxing, which is the new term of art, just maximizing their token usage unproductively versus whether their reasoning traces indicates that their tokens are being productively spent. This is all transparently available to meta.

51:20Peter Diamandis:So I think token maxing and claudonomics or laminomics, whatever we want to call it, is probably directionally the trend of the future where for the first time, senior company management has visibility into effectively most of the cognitive power and how it's being spent on a per-employee basis. What was Jensen's recommendation? Was it twice your salary and tokens per month? Or was it half your salary and tokens per month? His recommendation is you spend the maximum amount possible on NVIDIA GPUs. It's like the De Beers three months of salary.

51:56Dave Blundin:I told all of our guys to target a one-to-one match of payroll to AI costs by the end of the year. Amazing. And don't worry about it. If it's not perfect use, don't worry. Just get to that target, and then we'll optimize it next year.

52:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think a target like that is a much more accurate way. I think these token leaderboards are very primitive dashboards. We'll end up with something in a different model, like a machine leverage per employee or something like that. That'll be a much better metric for where we're going. All right. Let's get to the heart of employment. So Mark Andreessen rebukes AI job loss. He comes out with a very strong statement. AI job loss narratives are all fake. AI and massive productivity ramp equals massive demand and massive jobs boom. So Mark is truly a maximalist and abundance-minded individual. Thoughts on this?

52:53How does this square with the fact that we're seeing young college graduates not getting jobs, that we're seeing displacement? Is it all sectorial and we're just going to see a number of sectors being demolished at the same time, numerous new demands in different sectors? What's the advice to give everybody listening to us today?

53:14Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The advice is really simple. I mean, for God's sakes, don't go get a job. Go build a company. And we talked about this in our last podcast where the risks of taking on an entrepreneurship role are way, way lower than it was before. You don't have to have all these incredible, crazy skills that you needed to have before. You just need to have a desire, a purpose, and just get going with building a company. Dave talks about this all the time.

53:40Dave Blundin:Well, you don't have to be a genius to come to your own conclusion. Like forget asking people like Mark or us, are jobs going away or are jobs coming? We told you already that AI will be able to do everything that a white collar worker does imminently. That's a fact. You decide what that means. Because like Salim said earlier, it affects very different areas very differently. Some people retool themselves for AI very quickly. Software developers, for example. Other people like accountants and lawyers don't. It's going to be exactly what you would expect given that scenario. It's not hard to predict at all.

54:15Dave Blundin:And I think there's also timelines, you know, when Mark says, this is crazy, jobs are going up, not down. Like, yeah, by 2030, that's absolutely true. Just like the Industrial Revolution, jobs went up, not down after it was all the dust settles. It was an adjustment. Yes, this is just Industrial Revolution, which took, you know, decades, is going to happen in two years.

54:35Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Also, you have to remember, sorry, Alex, just a quick point. Also, you have to remember that the adoption of AI inside companies is going to be very slow. There's a huge transition to go from human to human workflows to AI workflows. And that transition is going to take years. We'll have lots of time to kind of smooth this out. Sorry, Alex, back to you.

54:56Peter Diamandis:Yeah, I think both narratives can be true at the same time. I think if you add in the word net, massive net jobs boom, then both of the narratives immediately become compatible. There's going to be a lot of dynamism with some job categories going away, others, new ones coming into existence and net job loss, probably not. I would guess, and I'm betting that there's going to be net job creation, just exotic new jobs like one person AI conglomerates will be created if you want to call that a job. But on balance, many jobs will also disappear. But this is how we get massive economic growth and singularity in the macroeconomic statistics.

55:37Peter Diamandis:We're not going to get it through business as normal. Salim, we've talked about this, and I think it's basically companies are going to get much smaller, much more nimble, or they're going to die. And they're going to spawn a whole set of baby companies alongside. There'll be an ecosystem of companies coming up. So it'll be a much larger number of smaller companies in the future.

56:00Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I mean, I'll go with the prediction I've made before, which is we'll run a company between 20 % and 25 % of the members you needed compared to before. But we're going to create four or five times more companies. And that net balances out. So I'm much more on the Andreessen side. And also his hair, shape of his head, that aligns very well to my thinking. Mark is brilliant. If you've ever heard him in podcasts, he actually speaks at 1.5x speed. extraordinary we talked a little bit about this in the last pod Altman believes America needs a new social contract with AI coming this is his quote the emergence of superintelligence will necessitate a new social agreement akin to the new deal during the great depression and the progressive era of the early 20th century and yes but what is it going to look like is it going to be UBI to UHI it's going to be four-day work weeks, I still believe that we're going to see turbulence in the next two to five years, and it's going to be the government printing checks to give people sort of a UBI.

57:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have a bunch of thoughts here. This new social contract kind of framing is correct, but it's very vague. We have to have more specific things like portable benefits, new taxation logic, lifelong reskilling, and government's been built around taxing human labor, they're not ready for AI software agents and they need to get a thing. When you have AI abundance without institutional redesign, you're going to get a backlash, not progress. And we're going to see huge backlash against this just because governments are so slow.

57:39Peter Diamandis:I should note though, OpenAI did also put out an industrial policy prescription for what this new social contract could look like. It's not just this single sentence they put out in the lab, white paper and circulated it in the Congress. I do think something like this, a New Deal, probably is going to happen anyway. It may or may not happen as one lump sum. It may happen piecemeal, and it may not happen in the U.S. first. I think there are contingencies where other countries experiment a little bit more aggressively with it than the U.S., and then eventually, perhaps among a certain set of countries, new best practices emerge.

58:19Peter Diamandis:But I do think some form of, call it abundant capitalism or capitalism 2.0 or post-scarce capitalism, something like that probably emerges. It may not happen immediately. It may not happen as quickly in this country, but it will get there eventually. I had lunch with Michael Kratios, who we're going to have on the pod sometime very soon, science advisor to the president. And we're talking about one idea I pitched him was a new social contract will be before any employee gets terminated by a medium or large size company, that company has to give them reskilling. In other words, instead of a golden parachute, it's a golden education package so that they can go and sort of transition.

59:03It's sort of a safety net or a sort of an ethical

59:07Peter Diamandis:mechanism for you to let off half of the employee base. Based on public reporting, China already has that policy. So it would be a weird future if the U.S. is adopting policy prescriptions from the Chinese Communist Party for AI reskilling. But maybe that's the near future we find ourselves in.

59:25Dave Blundin:Well, something to think about, you know, the way this is rolling out is really unusual in history. You know, when the Industrial Revolution happened, it took away blue collar jobs and worked bottom up. But AI is coming kind of like accountants, lawyers, professionals top down. You know, only a little over half of voters have a job at all. So they're going to be like, oh, you know, It doesn't affect me. But then, you know, all of blue collar isn't going to be touched. All of, you know, physical labor isn't going to be touched for quite a while. So they very well might say, yeah, tough luck, you know, lawyer or accountant that was making a million dollars a year.

59:59Dave Blundin:This is poetic justice. We're not voting for anything that helps you. That wouldn't surprise me at all. When I was in Morocco, I was interviewing people that I met along the way about whether they're using AI or not. And the realization is countries, you know, African nations are going to be impacted the least as this transaction occurs. because they're so insulated from this. But one of my tour guides, I loved his story. He said, yeah, I chatted with ChatGPT and I said, these are all my skills. What could I do to earn money? And he came up with a business that we purchased. It was basically a bicycle tour guide in, I forget which, it was not in Marrakesh.

1:00:46He was probably in near, I forget the city exactly we're in, we're transitioning through. And, you know, that was his business. He did a great job. And I love the fact that this individual was basically trying to figure out how he earns income and using ChatGPT to do that. So any thoughts on the AI economics that we've just gone through? So what do you think the social contract is going to be like, Dave? You know, what do you imagine is going to replace what we currently have?

1:01:23Dave Blundin:Well, you know, I had very ornate thoughts about this. And then we met with Andrew Yang, remember, at 360. And he said, I can guarantee you that the way politics works, all we can do is write checks. And it can't be in any way thoughtful. It's just money. Oh, wow, you're hurting? Here's money, just like COVID. And so that's all we can do. So that's all we will do. And then you'll maybe after AI enters government in two, three, four years, a much more thoughtful program will happen later. That was disheartening, but I think hard to refute. So the first version of the social contract is just going to be the next election three years from now, politicians saying, well, I'll give everyone$10 ,000 each.

1:02:06Dave Blundin:Well, I'll give everyone 12 ,000. Okay, well, if you're giving them 12th, I'll give them 15 ,000. And then we'll be right back to, well, how much can the country afford? That's what we're going to give because that's how you're going to win elections. You know, exactly what you would predict actually. So that'll be version one anyway.

1:02:21Peter Diamandis:I, for one, think a redistributive model of a quote unquote social contract shows an extreme lack of imagination. I would like to think that super intelligence should also super empower individuals to generate super income is one of the reasons why I, for one, am betting on more of a model where there may be even no strong need for a social contract if we can empower the long tail of individuals who have idiosyncratic skills or experiences or socioeconomic niches to operate their own large companies sitting on top of fleets of AI agents. I would love to see, in short, no need for a new social contract and instead have the private sector rescue people who would otherwise be technologically unemployed or or disemployed with by empowering them to become basically micro entrepreneurs or even macro entrepreneurs to turn them all into Warren Buffett but that's in the long longer run I don't think it's gonna I think it's in the short run I don't I think I think that can be done almost immediately I'm betting that it can be done almost immediately.

1:03:28Dave Blundin:Well, we will see. We'll take that bet. You know what's super, super, super interesting? Those super PACs that we talked about earlier in the pod, that massive amount of money that's piling up, these IPOs are literally an order of magnitude bigger than we've ever seen before, which means those PACs are going to be bigger by an order of magnitude. And those are going to determine election outcomes. But they got started back prior to the Trump administration with the fundamental mission being, Congress, please don't stop AI. Please don't put this six-month pause on it. China's just going to run away with it.

1:04:00Dave Blundin:And everybody agrees in the AI community that we shouldn't stop. But now there's no chance of that anyway. You don't need to spend the money on that because it's clearly not going to stop. So then what are you going to use? You've got all this capital. What's your mission? What's your goal? And there's a couple of edge case things, but this could actually give those organizations a mission. Let's have a more intelligent version conversion of UBI, more akin to what Salim has been talking about for a long time, which is workout money and eat well money and have kids and raise them well money and make it task specific, which would work a lot better.

1:04:38Dave Blundin:So that's encouraging, actually. That might work. And universal basic services to give people the ability to -

1:04:44Peter Diamandis:I like UBS much more than Andrew's proposal that we just try to fragment currencies into lots of like sort of paternalistic sub-currencies that aren't fungible. That seems like a recipe for disaster and for black markets. 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. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task.

1:05:28Blitzy delivers 80 % or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit Blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. All right, let's jump into our second subject today is energy. A lot continuing there. The first one is extraordinary.

1:06:12When you think about solar cell efficiency, traditionally, we've seen solar cells in the 12 % to 18 % efficiency float zone silicates getting up to 20 % to 24%. The limit has been shattered, and we're seeing now efficiencies upwards of 30 % to 45%, which is amazing. Another story in the energy news is South Korea has now mandated 40 % of solar rooftops, and they're hoping to get to 100 gigawatts of energy. Now, it makes sense, and South Korea does not have a lot of open land. They can't build out solar in the desert. So using their rooftops makes sense. That's going to, of course, raise the price of building, but I think that's amazing.

1:07:00And then DOE is contracting for$800 million microreactors. So we're going to start to see a generation of microactors and energy, energy everywhere. Comments on this. Alex, do you want to jump in?

1:07:15Peter Diamandis:I'll comment maybe just on the first story. I think this is neither earth shattering nor boring. It's somewhere solidly in between. This is a paper published in Jack's Journal of American Chemical Society on 130 % quantum yields isn't as earth shattering as it sounds either. It just means that there are 1.3 singlets generated from a single photon. Normally, you'd have one. So it's not like earth shattering. It's an incremental advance in the chemistry. I think this is actually liquid phase chemistry, which means it isn't immediately practical for solid photovoltaics. moderately interesting, but the field is filled, the solar photovoltaic field is filled with moderately interesting advances that cumulatively eventually generate something interesting.

1:08:04Peter Diamandis:But I would say, first story, moderately interesting slash incremental. Have you been tracking perovskite progress? Yeah, I mean, so perovskites are sort of the white knight for the solar PV space. historically they haven't been that stable they're a pain to work with on on the other hand instability issues are being very aggressively resolved because their quantum efficiency is higher than than silicon so i i think there's i don't speak for the solar pv industry but if i did i'd probably say there's a broad expectation that eventually there there will probably be some sort of broad shift to perovskites as they get more and more stable maybe and then they're also relatively inexpensive.

1:08:50Peter Diamandis:Some sort of transition like that will happen, but I almost think it also doesn't matter. Why? Because you can't get, at least without shocking new physics, which this is not, you're not going to get more than 100 % efficiency. In fact, there are physical reasons to think that the cap on electricity generation from solar PV is capped at materially less than 100%. So there's a ceiling on how much we can capture anyway from solar PV. It's not like we have orders of magnitude of headroom of improvements that we could achieve. It's totally unlike, say, AI algorithms, where we know just based on the scaling law curves that we could probably achieve orders of magnitude improvement in the efficiency of models.

1:09:34Peter Diamandis:So quite frankly, I have difficulty getting myself super motivated by incremental advances in solar PV chemistries and liquid phase, it's just not that exciting. Whereas if you look at some of these other stories, I think from an economic perspective, much more interesting, like blanketing the rooftops of all of South Korea or a substantial fraction of South Korea with solar PV, that's pretty interesting. DOE pushing micro-reactors everywhere, that's pretty interesting. I would love to see micro-reactors in Boston. Right now we have a single one on Mass Ave between 77 Mass Ave and Central Square that relatively few people pay attention to.

1:10:11Peter Diamandis:I'd love to see micro reactors everywhere. In your backyard, please. Yeah.

1:10:17Dave Blundin:Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, we tend to overthink things like crazy as a society, but we solved the solar panel problem. We should have had a huge party. And like for about 15 years of my life, you know, so many of my family members said, I'm going to dedicate my entire career to clean energy and not polluting this world so our children and our children's children have a clean place to live. And we freaking solved it. The solar panels are good enough. 80 % of the cost now is just getting them installed and the regulatory overhead, which is so... And so now we're on the cusp of having the robots that can manufacture them very cheaply and install them for us.

1:10:57Dave Blundin:We should be having a huge party and racing to building those robots and just say, we did it. Now we have no pollution. It's just right in front of us. We just need to execute on it. You know, meanwhile, we're like, wow, another breakthrough that gets us 20%. We don't need it. We need execution now. You know, when I fly out of Santa Monica Airport here and I fly over, I mean, there's no roof with solar panels here until you get into the desert. And then there's, you know, solar thermal plants and such. But I mean, there's in LA where it's sunny, you know, most of the time, you'd expect that all the roofs would have solar.

1:11:34Dave Blundin:Totally. And you'd expect that a drone would bring it and drop it right there and then a robot would land and install it. And it would be done, you know, perfectly with no human involvement. And that's so doable.

1:11:46Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:If I could pick a moonshot here in energy, we'd have a software-defined grid because that will change the game completely.

1:11:53Peter Diamandis:This generation is actually getting done. Do you remember the scene, guys, in the Johnny Depp movie Transcendence where the solar panels are being grown by nanorobots? Do you remember that scene? I don't, but I like it. Split that in, man. It's an important, yeah. I don't know if that's possible to include just that scene where solar panels are being grown by nanorobots. I'd love to live in that near-term future. If folks have ideas for how to grow solar panels in real time with nanorobots, send them my way. Yeah, giant green leaves. Okay, let's jump into biology and AI. A lot going on here. So the first story is a fascinating one, OpenAI Foundation, a billion dollars per year being dedicated to science.

1:12:37And just to remind people, OpenAI, when it transitioned from a nonprofit to a benefit corporation, it put 26 % of OpenAI's equity into a nonprofit. And it's worth about$130 billion. And they've committed a billion dollars a year to begin. They've announced a$25 billion long-term commitment to curing disease and AI resilience. The board chair of this is Brett Taylor. Brett used to be the co-CEO of Salesforce. And then, you know, Dave, you and I met with Wojcik, OpenAI co-founder, and he's leading the AI resilience work covering biosecurity, child safety, and AI modeling. And so they've given out$100 million to six institutions this month to coordinate their work.

1:13:35It's just the beginning, but this is the largest nonprofit on the planet with$130 billion in it. And I hope they do something epic. Anyway. You know what? Yeah.

1:13:48Dave Blundin:I just figured something out. What's that? It's been gnawing on me. You know, Kevin Wheel came to A360. Yeah. Most talented guy you'll ever meet. and Sam, you know, he's desperate on, on enterprise, but he didn't move Kevin over to enterprise. He moved him over to big time, big science, big tech. I was like, that's so strange. Yeah. And I know that's really, really important, but now it's tied to the lawsuit. Of course, if he can make world changing headways headway into any of these big, you know, uh, biological or physics problems, you know, you know, the outcome of this lawsuit is going to be very, very political, right?

1:14:25Dave Blundin:It's not going to be just a jury deciding one way or another. There's going to be some Trump involvement for sure. But if you have like some world-changing, life-changing, imminent breakthroughs, and you have a hundred billion to spend to get them, that's why they put Kevin over there. I'm just speculating. I also, we talked about this last pod as well. I think the breakthroughs that come out of, you know, GPT-6 being used for science are going to be worth hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. Again, if you can have a breakthrough in room depth of superconducting and fusion and longevity, what is that worth if you own the basic patents on that?

1:15:06It would be ironic.

1:15:07Peter Diamandis:I mean, maybe this is too cute by half, but given the earlier discussion of OpenAI starting as a not-for-profit and then converting to a PBC and all the lawsuits that ensued, it would be ironic if the OpenAI Foundation, which is the new nonprofit carved off of the old for-profit carved off of the old new profit ended up being so profitable due to curing Alzheimer's and solving all these other problems that the cycle repeats itself and the OpenAI Foundation has to become a for-profit. Oh my God.

1:15:36Dave Blundin:Yeah. You know, that's a key part of their defense. Sam is going to be up there on the stand saying, look, here's the reality. Our mission as a nonprofit with a hundred billion dollars to spend is miles ahead of where it would have been if we did what Elon is suggesting, which is be a, you know, a tiny little thing that has no funders. And we'd be we'd be microscopic today. And so that means we're it's very true. That's a good defense, a really good defense.

1:16:02Peter Diamandis:I do think it's worth considering what happens if and when the OpenAI Foundation succeeds and cures Alzheimer's, and that will be a blockbuster drug, maybe create its own Eli Lilly scale trillion dollar pharma company. Does OpenAI take a stake in that? Does OpenAI see a rev share? Questions need to be answered.

1:16:22Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:What I find fascinating here is that science capital is becoming compute capital plus data access, right? And plus some validation infrastructure.

1:16:31Peter Diamandis:Salim, thank you for promoting Solve Everything. That's an amazing promo, Salim, for Solve Everything. Much appreciated. Boom. All right. Our next story, I love it. Anthropic acquires Coefficient Bio. So what is Coefficient Bio? It's a company started by two ex-Genentech computational drug discovery scientists. It is 10 people, no revenue, started eight months ago, and Anthropic buys it for$400 million. I don't know if they're buying just the vision or they're buying any kind of unique capabilities, but this is Dario going to his first love of biology. and solving, you know, we see this from both Demis Asabes and Dario making investments in health and longevity.

1:17:23Any thoughts on this one?

1:17:25Dave Blundin:You're going to see a lot more of these deals, actually, because, you know, you go back, you remember we were congratulating Eric Schmidt on the brilliance of buying DeepMind for, I guess,$600 million with no revenue whatsoever, yet look at what it's become, you know, it's... You're buying teams. You're buying teams. Yes. And I think, you know, we as a society are getting better and better and better in predicting the success of a team. You look at the 10 people and you look at what they've achieved so far. And then you look at what they're likely to achieve in the AI timeline, you know, and suddenly 400 million seems like a bargain, given the potential outcome.

1:18:00Dave Blundin:And so I think you're going to see a lot of these deals where it's got to be the right 10 people working on the right thing. It's not just, you know, any old group of 10 working on a video game. But in this scenario, you know, Alex has a lot of these actually, where, you know, he knows a lot of the top experts in a lot of the top fields. And if you can just whip them together into a group, you know, and have them pursue a mission in this case, but what did you say? You know, eight, nine months, getting to that kind of outcome is not going to be that unusual.

1:18:27Peter Diamandis:I think also for everyone who was hand-wringing, do you remember a few months ago, there was so much hand-wringing about a circular economy forming and NVIDIA self-dealing loans to other companies to buy NVIDIA chips and concern that this AI boom was fictitious and just the product of self-dealing circular transactions and other financial engineering. When you start to see the intelligence explosion infect biotech, which is what we're seeing, we're seeing Anthropic buying its way into big pharma at the same time that SpaceX or XAI maybe is buying its way or reverse acquiring its way into the space sector.

1:19:10Peter Diamandis:The intelligence explosion is infecting every single sector. It's almost metastasizing into every sector, and it's not just going to stop with biotech. We've spoken numerous times in the past on the pod about how timelines for solving all disease are collapsing. When the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative two or three or four years ago originally said that they wanted to cure all disease by the end of the century and are now talking about the next few years, this is what it looks like. It looks like Anthropic doing all stock deals to acquire teams to build out their own in-house big pharma labs, probably with robotic instrumentation, probably with AI-driven experimentation.

1:19:53Peter Diamandis:This is how we get to Dario's solving all disease. I think in his case, it was solving neurological disease by the end of the decade, but there's no reason not to solve every other type of disease as well. Demis said cure all disease within a decade. Dario said double human lifespan within the decade. I think Dario also said he wanted to solve most or all neurological diseases by the end of the decade. But these are all variations on a theme. Another acquisition that was made that was an interesting sort of strange acquisition was OpenAI buying the podcast TBPN for a few hundred million dollars.

1:20:28I found that, you know, it was at a PR move. And then I started getting texts from my friend saying, hey, do you want to sell moonshots to one of these labs? I said, I'm not sure we would want to do that, but who knows, I guess, if the price is right. What do you think?

1:20:43Peter Diamandis:Well, we'll have to figure out equity first for that one. For sure. For sure. What do you think that was about? The TBPN?

1:20:52Dave Blundin:Yeah. I have no freaking idea. What do you think about that? I don't have an opinion there.

1:21:00Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I don't understand why, unless it was a completely self-promotional thing where they're buying a channel.

1:21:07Peter Diamandis:Yeah, let's take that as a homework assignment. We need to find somebody who knows. I appeared on TBPN right before they acquired them. So my – They wanted to put it in the view. What's the line from The Wrath of Khan? Like a bad marksman, you keep missing every time. I think they're very talented. And I take OpenAI at its word that they're looking for a news distribution channel and a content distribution channel that offers a positive perspective on AI. Why they can't do it in-house, why they need TBPN, question mark. But I do think that TBPN guys are very competent at finding interesting stories.

1:21:53Peter Diamandis:when I made the Eon announcement of the first uploaded FruitFly, the TBPN staff reached out to me almost immediately. Almost no one else did. And they booked me almost immediately. So I think that shows a certain level of competence to be able to chase breaking technology news that I haven't really seen elsewhere. All right.

1:22:13Dave Blundin:Well, let me give you a follow-on theory because I love your theory there. The theory I don't love is that they wanted your video footage. They're going to covet into five second clips and sell it as NFTs and make a fortune on it. But the theory, the theory, maybe they will. But the theory I do love is, look, there's going to be so much dirt in April in these lawsuits, in this lawsuit. And they're going to, and maybe these guys are, like you said, Alex, they're geniuses at content and spin and production. And they're going to need every bit of it during April and May. Yeah. Our final story here is Eli Lilly signs a$2.75 billion AI drug deal with Insilico Medicine.

1:22:54Insilico is one of my portfolio companies, so super pumped about it. This is Alex Zeverankov, a brilliant AI scientist and biologist. This, you know, Insilico is just an extraordinary company. They've got 28 AI discovered drugs, half in clinical trials, half in proof of concept. uh this you know you have to always look at the structure of these deals this is 115 million up front and the rest is on milestones but the point is this is about just massively reducing the time from drug discovery to to approval um and you know just to take a second let's go to the next chart here to look at a little bit different.

1:23:40And this is AI-powered drugs. And we see phase one, phase two, discovery of phase two, and then cost reduction. To remind everybody, a phase one trial for a drug is a small trial, a small group of individuals of healthy volunteers to see, is it safe? Are there any major side effects? Phase two is then testing, does it work? and you actually move the metrics you're looking to move. And then phase three is tested in typically thousands of patients to see does it work at scale. And what we're seeing is a phase one success rate of these AI developed drugs at 85 % compared to 52%. And phase two success rates of AI developed drugs at 70 % compared to 38%.

1:24:31It's the way of the future. You're basically picking a target and you're using some version of AI to generate an exact protein to lock into that target. And then you're producing it and you're testing it. The old way of drug discovery was going to Amazon, digging up some plants out of the dirt and seeing if any bioactive molecules. Much more efficient.

1:24:56Peter Diamandis:Peter, I'll ask you a question. I asked a panel of mine at today's event at MIT. Do you have a prediction for when the FDA is likely to launch, given that it's collapsed recently at this announcement from a two-clinical phase approach to a one-clinical phase approach? When do you think we get zero clinical phase trials from FDA? When we have full cell simulations. What's your timeline for that? Well, within five years. So what I need to do is be able to upload my genome and my genome will dictate exactly how the cells, my renal cells or pulmonary cells are functioning. And then I can say, well, how does this particular drug impact those cells or all the cells in my body?

1:25:42Even more importantly, you know, if there's a disease state, what drug is going to cancel that? And this is where we're going with longevity, right? Right. What is, you know, why are we aging? How to slow it, stop it, reverse it. All that falls out of a big data and massive compute. I agree. Virtual cell by the end of the decade, a good one. Yeah. I mean, that is, that is the moonshot that changes everything. It is. I agree.

1:26:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And there are a number of companies working on that. Do we have a compute to be able to kind of simulate 2 billion, several billion interactions per cell? or we will have to find that. We will with quantum. I mean, one of the things that quantum computation is going to, I mean, our cells and our molecular interactions and our cell services are all quantum in nature.

1:26:27Dave Blundin:If you said, I want to build a movie scene and I'm going to do it with finite element modeling and build it bottom up with a full simulation, you would never be able to create an AI-driven movie that way. But if you take the neural network approach, it just works, boom, just flat out works. Same applies with chemical simulations, the cell simulator. It's going to be data in, neural net in the middle, value or action out. And it's going to flat out work. I think it'll work very fast, like you guys are predicting. But you can't simulate it, you know, atom by atom, building it up. It's totally the wrong approach.

1:27:02Peter Diamandis:It turns out, I mean, this is why maybe sometimes I present as a bit of a quantum bear. The physical world is actually pretty classical and pretty sparse. So I would bet we don't actually need quantum computing at all to get to the virtual cell. We solved protein folding without quantum computing. We did it purely classically. I think we did a virtual cell just by existing scaling of models like Maxi. What was it? Maxi something or other from NVIDIA, the trillion token cell model. I think we just get lots of scaling of classical models, and that takes us there without enormous innovation needed.

1:27:39Today, it's a data problem. Totally agree. It's a data problem more than a computational problem. We don't have the data.

1:27:44Dave Blundin:So I'll tell you what else. Culturally, you know, my daughter's over at Moderna and they freaking love AI in the biotech community. If I compare the extreme ends of all the companies that have been here in our office. So the biotech guys are Jeff von Maltz, the new bar of fans, Stefan von Sel. They all culturally can't wait for AI to come into the business. And then on the extreme other end, you've got the public accountants. You know, the PwC guys were here the other day. They're like, ah, AI, stop. Please don't. But the biotech community is embracing it like crazy. I don't know why. I bet you guys actually know why because you're right in the middle of it.

1:28:20Dave Blundin:But I can tell you firsthand. They are so into it. But they hate pipetting.

1:28:29All right. Let's go to robotics. This is China versus USA. Alex, I want to hear your thoughts on this one. So Agibot ships 10 ,000 humanoid robots. They're number one globally. They've gone from 5 to 10K across 17 countries in just two years. I mean, these are small numbers compared to what we've heard everybody else speak about, right? Getting to tens of millions, to billions, to 10 billion robots. Unitree files for an IPO, 610 million IPO. We had the co-founder of Unitree at the last Abundance Summit. The revenues are up 335 % year on year. They're probably, outside of Optimus and Figure, they're probably the best known robot company out there.

1:29:24And UniXAI had their home robot launch. And then finally, Xiaomi displayed CyberOne Humanoid. Xiaomi is an amazing company. I was there very early, met the founders in China back in 2017, 2018, right? Their mobile phone, computers heading into vehicles and now robotics. A lot going on in China. Alex, what are your thoughts here?

1:29:54Peter Diamandis:Okay, so this is happening. I think in the last episode, I mentioned that one of my operational definitions of the singularity is all sci-fi tropes happening everywhere all at once. One of those sci-fi tropes is the, call it the iRobot trope, where there are just humanoid robots in every facet of life. Today, earlier today at the MIT Media Lab, for those who were there, people saw me for about an hour controlling a unitary robot marching in loop after loop around the media lab on the sixth floor. And people were taking selfies. Everyone wanted to take a selfie with me and the unitary. And I was doing this as sort of a bit of a promotional march for Professional Robotics League, which next on April 19th, so nine days from when we're recording the weekend of the Boston Marathon, is going to hold the United States, the country's first professional robotics league match with robots racing 50 meters in the Boston seaport.

1:30:55Peter Diamandis:This is all happening. We're finally catching up to the iRobot future where robots permeate every aspect of life. For better or for worse right now, it's Chinese robots that are leading. I'm hoping to maybe almost quasi shame the US robotics industry with all of these Chinese capabilities into stepping up to the plate and starting to distribute humanoid robots into the civilian sector and not just factories and not just military drones. but it's all happening. And this is going to be utterly transformative for the two thirds of the U.S. services sector that depends on physical labor, manual labor, and not just knowledge work.

1:31:32You know, I saw Mark Cuban on a video this morning saying this robot thing is a passing phase and they're not going to be around in 10 years.

1:31:42Peter Diamandis:How does someone come to that? No, no. So there was a bit of nuance to that. It wasn't that robots aren't going to be around. It's that they'll become so essential that the environments will adapt to the robots and the robots will blend with the environment. Right now we go with to Salim's point, Salim, your hobby horses, why do they need to be humanoid? Why can't they be differently shaped? I think Mark Cuban's more nuanced point was they're going to become so essential to daily life that they'll start to change the houses and the buildings and the environments to the point where they start to merge with the environments and therefore no longer need to be humanoid.

1:32:17So they're dishwashers.

1:32:18Peter Diamandis:Yeah, they blend, they merge with the physical environment.

1:32:22Dave Blundin:I have to confess, Alex, that robot that you were talking about was blocking my way to the bathroom and I so badly wanted to kick it. And I was thinking Alex would kill me if I kicked it. It's going to remember and then it's going to come back in three years.

1:32:35Peter Diamandis:History will remember, Dave. You really don't want to do that. What's the song from Les Mis, never kick a dog because it's just a pup. They'll fight like 20 armies and they won't give up. So you better run for cover when the pup grows up. let me hit on a couple of stories here so this is interesting u.s senators moved to restrict chinese robots bipartisan bill proposed to block chinese-made robots from federal and sensitive facilities citing data theft and surveillance this is no different than huawei chips and uh in our cell phone towers um and dji the dji ban already in effect i think yeah drones and uh Agile Robotics and Google DeepMind are partnering up.

1:33:21Gemini robotic models are being integrated into 20 ,000 deployed industrial robots across government factories or global factories.

1:33:31Peter Diamandis:I think this is like a tale of two cities. The two cities in this case aren't London and Paris. They're China slash Shenzhen and the U.S. slash Silicon Valley. The Chinese are overwhelming the world market with the raw physical capabilities. They're producing many, many more capable robots than, let me put it this way, if I want to, as a U.S. citizen, if I want to procure a humanoid robot, I don't really have that many options right now. I'm still waiting for my 1X Neo. I was haranguing Berndt at A360 this year. When do I get my Neo? This summer. I'm getting in mind this summer. What do you promise you?

1:34:13Peter Diamandis:He didn't promise me a date. We were trying to figure out finer details of his participation in future Olympic events. But I would say China's producing all of these humanoid robots, but the U.S. is producing the strongest VLA, vision language action, foundation models, and world models for the moment. And I think as we've talked in the past about open AI trying to become anthropic faster than anthropic can become open AI, I think similarly here, China is in a position where it has the raw manufacturing capability to make lots of robots and is racing to become a robot foundation model provider faster than the U.S.

1:34:55Peter Diamandis:with our 10x more compute and our foundation models can finally figure out our way to manufacture at scale humanoid robots. So we'll see which way it ends up. I didn't realize that Gianluca put this video in the deck. Let's take a listen to Mark Cuban about humanoid robots. I think everybody's making this push for humanoid robots.

1:35:16Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think they might have a five-year lifespan and then they'll fail miserably, maybe 10. You mean the companies or the individual hardware? Physical robots. Or both. Both. Right? Because I think everybody defaults to, well, we live in a human world and humanoids will take the place of humans for various functions, particularly in the home. And I think there's just no chance. So maybe we're missing the second half of his comment.

1:35:43Peter Diamandis:Yeah, this is conveniently alighting the second half where he explains that they'll merge into the environment. Okay, well, that makes a lot more sense. Let's get to a conversation.

1:35:54Dave Blundin:You want to hear something really cool? Yeah, sure. We had Chase Lockmiller earlier today, our guy Chase, building Stargate in Abilene, Texas. And he said, remember when we were talking to Brett Adcock, he said, I have to wind my own motors. I literally have to, there's no supply chain for any of this stuff. The same thing Burt Bornick said at 1X. So Chase was saying he actually melts metal to make electronic components to build these gigawatt data centers because there's no supply chain for the stuff that he needs. And so it's very much the case that the entire supply chain to build out all this physical stuff is miles behind where it needs to be.

1:36:32Dave Blundin:It's entrepreneurial heaven because, you know, it's on a shorter, you know, the virtual stuff, the code writing, all the compute is going to happen very quickly, all the white collar stuff. But the robotic stuff, you know, you look at the size of that IPO we were talking about a second ago,$610 million. Can you imagine trying to go to an investment bank on Wall Street and say, hey, we're doing a$610 million IPO? They'd be like, you can go down to the basement and you can talk to our junior associates. We'll get back to you after this. After Anthropic is public, we'll talk to you. If there's any money left in people's pockets.

1:37:10Yeah. All right, let's go to a topic I've wanted to cover for a while with all of you, and it's quantum and Bitcoin. So here we go. So Google moves up their deadline by six years to 2029 for basically Q-Day. When are we going to see quantum computers break RSA? It used to be that it required 20 million qubits. Today, it's 1 million qubits. And in particular, it's 4 ,000 error-corrected qubits, to be specific, to break RSA. moved it up by six years from 2035 to 2029. It's gotten everybody in a bit of a panic. The story related to that is that Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, has put forward a$150 million coalition to roll out something called BIP360 as a quantum-proof upgrade to the protocol.

1:38:15It's a fork. By the way, in just chatting with Brian, he's going to be joining us on the Moonshots pod. We're going to be talking about both longevity and quantum and Bitcoin. So another story related is that Google now says that under 500 ,000 qubits are required to break Bitcoin encryption. So 20 times fewer than predicted in 2019. So a lot going on here. This is concerning people who are Bitcoin holders. I put this next slide forward because, Dave, you and I were roommates with Mike Saylor in our fraternity back in the day. People may not know that. Mike Saylor, Dave and I were at Theodithicai together on the third floor.

1:39:04And I wanted to see what's Mike saying about Bitcoin. And he's saying, I don't worry about it. Quantum computing won't break Bitcoin. It will harden it. The quantum risks are overblown. Quote, Bitcoin has survived every existential threat ever thrown at it. This is just the latest. And the upgrade will come before the threat does. He puts his money behind that in the last quarter. He's purchased 88 ,000 Bitcoin, about$7.25 billion worth of Bitcoin. Salim, let's go to you first on this one, pal.

1:39:42Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So the true risk here is that protocol consensus may be slower than the emergence of the threat, right? But I'm actually optimistic around this one. I think Saylor is right. The resilient systems will just evolve and can evolve under pressure. But markets are really bad at pricing tail risk until they're really forced to. So I think what will happen is there's so much momentum behind Bitcoin and so many, like I came across a Bitcoin lightning network payment system that is three months old and they're doing a billion dollars a month of transactions. It's just unbelievable to watch some of what's happening under the radar that most people haven't even seen this.

1:40:24Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So I'm optimistic on this. even if Google pulled a date forward a bit, I think this is a long way to go. But the Bitcoin world will be forced to get together and just go, OK, we need to upgrade. Let's just do it. And there's no money in it, motivation to do it. At this moment, Bitcoin's at$73 ,000. It's up about$4 ,000 in the last five days. This has been a black cloud over the Bitcoin market for a while. In fact, you know, Jeffrey's bank has pulled out of Bitcoin. We may see others follow suit. And in the same way that AI is sucking money out of every other market, it's also sucking the attention out of Bitcoin.

1:41:07Dave or Alex, are you guys Bitcoin holders? I know Salim and I are. What do you think?

1:41:14Dave Blundin:Only via micro strategy. I think Mike is absolutely right. I think that I don't know this litany of existential threats. I mean, I know there was, you know, someone trying to take over half the servers and then control it. Obviously survived that very easily. Quantum is not a threat at all. It's so easy to increase the encryption standard. And you can see quantum computers don't just suddenly pop up out of some secret lab. You see it coming a mile away. It's not a risk at all. I think Mike is 100 % right.

1:41:45Peter Diamandis:So for the record, I don't hold Bitcoin. I don't have any desire to hold Bitcoin. This is the time in the episode where I say something nice about crypto per the Peter Diamandis ordinance. So my something nice about crypto today for this episode is I also don't disagree with Michael Saylor, but I also think it's beside the point. This is not investment advice, but I don't think it's quantum. Again, I've made this point numerous times. I don't think it's quantum decryption that the Bitcoin community should be worried about. It's AI. It's AI, numerous facets of AI. It's AI coming up with clever inversion attacks against the core hash functions.

1:42:28Peter Diamandis:And before anyone in the comments says, oh, but it gets harder over time. And there are several other responses. I'm aware of all of these responses. But if there is a secret inversion attack against the core hash suite of Bitcoin, this is a major problem for Bitcoin. I don't think that's even the largest problem, though, for Bitcoin. If we're going to talk about Bitcoin X risk, I think it's actually just irrelevance. AI, which is emerging for better or for worse, or AI agents, I should say, is the killer app for, call it, cryptographic commerce and transactions. The biggest risk is just that AI agents don't want to use Bitcoin.

1:43:09Peter Diamandis:I'm aware that the Bitcoin Policy Institute put out this study saying that AI agents, you know, six out of 10 AI agents prefer the flavor of Bitcoin versus other cryptographic means of commerce. Of course, I think over the long term, it's difficult to buy that AI agents, given their speed, if they stick with any form of crypto at all, are going to stick with Bitcoin. They'll invent their own currencies, their own layer ones, maybe transcendent forms of layer zero and just reconceive the entire notion of a crypto stack. I agree with you there. Yeah. Yeah. They'll reinvent anything and everything towards efficiency and towards.

1:43:51Dave Blundin:Well, everything Alex just said, though, is all about transaction use cases. And Mike has been saying for a long time that Bitcoin's role in the world is as a store of wealth that's immune from government seizing it or taxing it because you can move it so easily. So that would be a completely different argument. And I don't have a horse in that race, but it'd be interesting to say, well, what about what's AI's impact on that use?

1:44:17Peter Diamandis:I mean, in micro, I would say a long term store of wealth is basically just commerce by another name. You're trying to store resources in some sense for the long term. I would query whether superintelligence actually needs a long term store of wealth at all. It's going to be moving very quickly, taking rapid actions in the physical economy. Does it even have a need for a long-term, non-operational, sort of non-productive store of wealth? I doubt it. Well, I think compute and energy is the ultimate store of possibility, so to speak. And those are arguably real assets.

1:45:00Dave Blundin:Yeah. The definition of long-term, too, is really interesting. Because right now, the reason we have money at all is because we have trade. You're going to do something. I'm going to do something. oh, wait, I'm doing it now. And the other thing is tomorrow. Okay, well, give me the money. And then tomorrow I'll pay you back. And so it's just a buffer. Because, you know, transactions don't line up perfectly in time. If you imagine a massive fluid AI economy with thousands of times more things happening. Yeah, the alignment is a lot higher. But also the store of wealth could be milliseconds or microseconds or nanoseconds.

1:45:34Dave Blundin:At that point, do we even need

1:45:37Peter Diamandis:Yeah, at that point, do we need quote unquote digital gold? Similarly, this is not investment advice. I don't hold gold. It's an unproductive asset. It's just not interesting. If we really are in the singularity, as I claim that we are, why on earth would I want to hold gold or Bitcoin? What do you hold, Alex? Okay, so again, not investment advice. But for the record, on the one hand, index funds, fundamentally betting that the market is a better allocator of assets, at least among public securities, than any individual can be. It's basically a bet on superintelligence. And then the other end of the barbell distribution, equity in startups, where I hold material agency.

1:46:24Peter Diamandis:And to first order, that's it. I don't hold gold and I don't hold crypto. I just don't understand how they're productive assets. Liam, you want to jump in? What about it?

1:46:36Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah, I'll jump in on two things. One is, Peter, you mentioned that what you need is energy and compute. And I was like, wow, that sounds like Bitcoin. But to Alex's point, one of the smartest investor types I know who's worth about$100 million, I asked him how he does wealth management. And he goes 70 % high dividend yielding public equities and 30 % high risk startup investment funds. And I think that speaks exactly what Alex just said. The kind of the standard things like real estate, utilities, et cetera, are all very dangerous places to be.

1:47:13Peter Diamandis:I'm cooking all of them. Like I want to cook land. We've talked perhaps in the past about Coastal Assembly, which is using AI to – it's a company where I have a financial interest. that's using AI to grow new land. I'd like to see real estate. Okay, so a hot take for this episode. If the crypto hot take wasn't hot enough, a hotter take since I'm underslept, I think land has got to be made post-scarce and AI will help us make real estate post-scarce. I agree. 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.

1:47:50It also is having a huge impact on health. helping you prevent heart disease. 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.

1:48:25They 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 are 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.

1:49:04So 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. All right, I'm gonna jump into our final segment here, which is a proof of abundance. I'm gonna call it Abundance Corner. These are stories that have come out recently. I wanna take a second and mention We Are As Gods is coming out on April 14th. So super excited about this book.

1:49:41You can go check it out as wearesgodsbook.com. The Moonshotmates, we're all going to be getting together on May 4th at MIT with Ray Kurzweil. We're holding a half-day program. We'll be doing a live broadcast from there. Stephen Kotler, my co-author, will be there. He'll be doing a conversation on the book. We'll be doing an interview with Ray. It's going to be a blast. We have sold 100 tickets. People who bought 100 copies of the book are going to be there. We're probably going to offer out 10 last tickets. If you're interested, go to weareasgodsbook.com slash 100, and you can squeeze in. It is full right now.

1:50:22We'll probably have a few people who can't make it the last minute, so there'll be a wait list. Join us. It's going to be a lot of fun. All right, let's look at evidence of increasing abundance. Here's a story that's interesting. Germany just built the world's tallest windmill, 364 meters high. It's taller than Eiffel Tower. It's a 33 gigawatt hour per year generation. And what's interesting is it's built inside of an old coal power plant. So I find that pretty exciting. The coal plant left the wiring behind and they built this on top of it. So the turbine is being built in the Lusatia coal site in Brandenburg.

1:51:09So we're going to start to see wind and solar penetrate the old energy economics. The second article here is a 12-patient trial of a redesigned CD40 immunotherapy had extraordinary results. Cancer vanished after one injection. This was 12 patients in the trial. Two patients hit complete remission, six saw tumor shrinkage. And this is the end of cancer heading our way. And then finally, there was a fun study done by the World Bank that basically showed that we don't need to actually produce more clean drinking water in Africa. What we need is to rebalance the use. In some places, there was too much water being used, and all of that, if it's redistributed, could actually provide all the water required for sub-Saharan Africa.

1:52:13And this is where AI technology can come in and help us understand how much water is required and where it's in optimize its use. Any comments on these articles?

1:52:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I've got a bunch, but I'll just limit it to one here just to build on the abundance side. But, you know, they're doing this separate from the list here, but they're using AI to do with acoustic sensing to prevent major failures in wind turbines. And the systems are achieving like 99 % accuracy in identifying damage before it requires repairs. So the cost of maintenance suddenly dropped radically for these wind turbines because they can do predictive maintenance in a very powerful way. And so this is all these little thousand ways, thousand cuts in which we're reaching abundance and energy. That's totally going to change the game.

1:53:02Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So I'm so excited about this. But this is such a great stuff, except we've misspelled abundance corner. But that's a minor detail. I love it.

1:53:12Peter Diamandis:I'll make the one comment on the immunotherapies. I think it's also instructive. If you think back, so we're in 2026. 2026, if you think back to circa 2000 or 2001, so about a quarter of a century ago, the U.S. Congress was sold on the National Nanotechnology Initiative on the premise that we'd have medical nanorobots swimming through our bloodstream zapping cancer cells. And yet we find ourselves a quarter of a century later where, as you say, Peter, cancer is well on its way to being solved without the medical nanorobots. We didn't need the medical robots at all. This is being done by basically retraining or retargeting our body's own immune systems.

1:53:51Peter Diamandis:And I think that does raise or flag the question, what will, if anything, we need the medical nanorobots that Eric Drexler and others promised us? What, if anything, will we need those for? Or is it just a matter of reeducating our own existing biology to do more intelligent things without needing any robots in our bodies at all? We have an amazing system. The challenge is, and we've discussed this before, that our biology is optimized through age 30, and then it's a slow degradation. Never evolved, never selected to live past that. So a lot of this and a lot of the age reversal work going on from the epiagnetic reprogramming is how do we take our systems back to an earlier state of youth where they're operating optimally.

1:54:39All right. A few more articles here in the abundance corner spelled correctly or Cortner. Got it. So vertical farming, I remember in my first book in 2012, first book abundance, I talked about vertical farming. It's finally playing out. So it's projected to reach 40 billion by 2030. It hit 8 billion this year. And I think what's really important about this story is that vertical farming has a huge impact. 95 % less water use, production yields are 350-fold greater per square foot than traditional farming. The use of AI and robotics allows you to optimize the perfect pH, get rid of all pesticides, enable you to get the perfect spectrum for that plant 24 hours a day.

1:55:36And historically, most of the vertical farming to date has been lettuce or leafy greens like that. This is the first time we're seeing something with a higher value crop like berries. Yeah. And super excited. I mean, what are we going to do with all the parking garages that are autonomous vehicles abandon?

1:55:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Can I give a little historical thing here? So if you look at the over the last 50, 100 years, the world's biggest food production countries were the ones you'd expect, US, China, Russia, Brazil, the biggest ones, right? But then you look over the last 50 years at the world's biggest food exporting countries. And you know what number two is? Holland. Yes, amazing. On a global map, you can't even put it or you can't put a pin to find Holland. It's that small relative to these other countries. But they made major investments at hydroponics, aeroponics, et cetera. They're the number two exporter of food globally.

1:56:32Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And that just shows you what the potential is as vertical farming takes hold. We'll be able to totally transform. The average meal travels 2 ,500 miles to reach an American table. So in food logistics, security, fundlies, yields doing vertical farming, there are something like 10 to 1 compared to horizontal farming. Yeah. Like half of your cost of a good meal, you know, it's the beef coming from Argentina. It's the wine coming from France. It's the transportation costs are huge. All right. Our second story here is 100-hour batteries go commercial. So this is the birth of what we call iron air storage batteries.

1:57:17Lithium ion batteries are lithium cobalt nickel. They're expensive. The iron air batteries are iron, water, and air. They're coming in at one-tenth the cost. and they're now being used for grid storage.

1:57:32Peter Diamandis:Alex, comments on this one? I do think evolution in battery energy chemistry is really interesting. So the historic trend, if we put aside iron air for the moment and just focus on the bleeding edge chemistries, I think the statistic is something like a pretty sustained 8 % year-over-year increase per constant in battery energy densities for the bleeding edge chemistries. So in some sense, not in some sense, in a very real sense, there is a Moore's law for increasing the energy densities, while at the same time we're seeing new chemistries or new-ish chemistries like iron air that are radically reducing the cost for certain applications.

1:58:16Peter Diamandis:Iron air isn't for every application. It seems unlikely we're going to see it get used, for example, for EVs anytime soon. Probably someone in the industry is experimenting with it. But I think we're starting to see, judging from the explosion initially in lithium ion and then exploding to a number of other form factors, different chemistries for different applications. And different applications demand different prices as well. In some cases, when you're powering data centers, you care about the volume of storage and you care about the price. In other cases, you care about the mass and mobility.

1:58:54Peter Diamandis:And those are cases where lithium ion, lithium polymer probably still has an edge over iron air. Overall, I think this is very positive. I think, you know, I sometimes wonder as a thought experiment, given that there was quite a bit of experimentation early on in the Thomas Edison era with different battery chemistries, whether we could have arrived at much more advanced chemistries, much earlier, like 100 years ago, and whether the history of the internal combustion engine would have been vastly different if we had seen more investment and more experimentation up front with different battery chemistries.

1:59:31Peter Diamandis:But overall, obviously, this is a positive development. A final story here is AI tutors. So what is it? So a Wharton study tested AI tutors that personalized education. What they found, not surprising, that a five-month coding course was equivalent to six to nine months of additional schooling compared to peers with fixed curriculum. I think we know this. Basically, you're getting 2x learning gains using AI tutors. They're free, they're ubiquitous, they're available to everybody 24 hours a day, seven days a week. this isn't, you know, breaking news. It's just quantifying it. At the end of the day, AI is going to be the ultimate educator, understands your child's abilities, understands what they do and do not know, their favorite sports star, their favorite color, and can optimize it and teach somebody.

2:00:24I think one of the things that AI can do better than anything is teach somebody the way they like to learn.

2:00:30Dave Blundin:You know, are you going to make an appeal to teachers? Because a lot of schools, including people that I know are incredibly resistant for some reason. I don't get it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's cruel, absolutely cruel to a child. And to force feed them a lecture and they're like, I don't understand what you just said. Well, I'm going to keep plowing forward because everyone else in the classroom understands. Or I'm going to say it the same over again. Yeah. And the kid can't stop and say, wait, explain that to me another way. With the AI, it's so much more compassionate. And so I think it's downright cruel to kids to try to teach complicated things in any way other than AI.

2:01:09Dave Blundin:Yeah. I think anyone who uses it every day, it's clear. It's clear that that's the case. Sorry, go ahead, Alex.

2:01:14Peter Diamandis:I think there's an element missing. So I would love to be able to just replace teachers, human teachers, with AI. I think it's basically a cliche at this point that, at least in the U.S., education is subject to Balmol's cost disease and would love for AI to just replace education, both primary, secondary, and higher ed. What I suspect is missing, certainly for the most self-motivated students, AI, I think at this point in the style of Neil Stevenson's Young Ladies Illustrated primer from Diamond Age, it's already here. A well-motivated student can already have a conversation with a model from whichever frontier vendor and teach themselves far more quickly than they can through human instruction.

2:02:02Peter Diamandis:but but but but for the students that aren't as self-motivated what i think we're missing right now is an ai embodiment that holds their attention and motivates them where they lack the motivation yeah maybe maybe so i assume peter by gaming you're referring to sort of a quasi-addictive or video games i mean video games are are just perfectly tuned not to be too difficult not to be too boring to hold your attention and to motivate you all the way. It's just, I don't understand why video game designers, instead of teaching kids about a whole set of random facts or made up, can't use, you know, a set of facts around quantum, you know, about subatomic particles or about planets and about, you know, physics and biology and gamify that someday.

2:02:53Yeah.

2:02:54Dave Blundin:It's funny if you, if you play Fortnite and you look at the weapons and number of intricate components of the weapons and then the characters memorize these things they memorize them and then you know madden nfl like the playbook there's like three-layer deep menus of different routes and play and before you know it you could have learned an entire discipline like quantum physics with that same amount of brain power but i swear to god the ai can make those topics like quantum physics incredibly fun and engaging the technology is here today to do that it is someone's just got to get it out the door.

2:03:24Peter Diamandis:People have been building edutainment games for decades at this point. I grew up with like Math Blaster or whatever back when I was growing up. But the problem is, I suspect, as a user of these games, you're not motivating the users, children or students, with the exact outcomes. What would have been utterly transformative for me would be not like motivating some math problem with some arguably disconnected animation on the screen. motivate them by actually empowering them to do really amazing things in the real world. That's far more motivatory, I think, than just an animation or some dopamine push from a jingle.

2:04:02Well, I think that's for you and probably not for the average kid. Maybe I don't generalize. I don't know. All right. Final item in the abundance courtner is this graphic. Look at this beautiful exponential growth curve. This is EVs sold globally. Back in 2010, there were barely 10 ,000 of these vehicles. This was Elon's first Roadster. And here we're up to 12.7 million EVs sold globally. In China, one in two new cars is an EV. And it's just, it's perfect exponential growth.

2:04:48Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Can I just, Barnett, have a fun fact? Please. In 2015, the International Energy Agency predicted that we would not sell a million electric vehicles a year before 2040. And that year in 2015, we sold more than a million electric vehicles. So you get the predictors and the reality. And, you know, governments and companies like are relying on these strategic predictions for strategic decisions. And they were wrong before they even put out the comment. And so it's great to see this. And the curve's still accelerating, right? So by 2030, 2025 on this chart is going to look very modest. And just look at the impact on the results from the war.

2:05:36Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:If oil prices suddenly shoot up, et cetera, you're protective from a huge amount of volatility as we go to solar battery EVs. All right, gentlemen, a beautiful outro piece from Marcus Helker. and I want you to look at this. This is the Moonshot Mates boy band. We're making our debut here. No, God, I can't do it. Enjoy.

2:06:00Dave Blundin:You all feel good, Celine. What are you worried about? I'm going through a door I've never seen Into a garden that is always green I'm leaving every limit on the floor I'm not the person that I was before There's a rhythm in the air I've never heard It's more than just a feeling I can feel the pulse

2:06:25Peter Diamandis:I can feel the flow Further than anyone before Higher than the ceiling Higher than the sky Looking at the world through different eyes

2:06:52We are the spot We are the new day Finding a different kind of way To play All this time I was waiting for the call Now I'm the heartbeat inside We are the spot We are the blue Finding a different kind of way Today, today All this time I was waiting for the call You're the heartbeat inside of you

2:08:06there we are the moonshot mates boy band everybody alex you got to be a science officer

2:08:11Peter Diamandis:you're lucky i get to be the well this is science medical i think is blue right i get to be science medical all right you're right you're right medical why would that be wrong killer well starfleet officers and the abundance logo resembles the the starfleet pin it does That's convenient, isn't it? Yeah, I wonder how that happened.

2:08:31Dave Blundin:Pull up a clip from just like two months ago and compare it to today. It's incredible how quickly it's. And just a shout out to the creator community out there. Love it. Please send us your outro. Or if you have an intro song you want to share with us, please send it to us. We'd love to share it with everybody. And gentlemen, it was fun doing back-to-back episodes with you in the last 24 hours. And looking forward to another episode next week. So everybody, please subscribe. We're putting out about two episodes a week. Turn on your notifications so you get it when it's fresh. And stay optimistic.

2:09:10Stay hopeful. The future is ours to create. We're creating the vision of tomorrow that we want. If you think AI is happening to you and not for you, you're going to be back on your heels and you're going to be in fear. And that's the worst place to actually venture into the future. This is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. And so blessed to have Salim Ismail, David Blunden, and AWG as my Moonshot mates. Love you guys. Awesome episode. Live long and prosper, Peter.

2:09:41Peter Diamandis:Live long and prosper. Peace and long life. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a Moonshot mate. Every week, my Moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation.

2:10:16And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to dmandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.