Our Updated AGI Timeline, 57% Job Automation Risk, and Solving the US Debt Crisis w/ Naveen Jain, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wisner-Gross | EP #212

30:20AI traffic was up 805%, wow, with$3 billion in sales driven by agents. So this is about making it easier for you to spend your money and bypassing all the middlemen. A lot of implications here. Naveen, you've been in all kinds of internet-related sales industries. What do you see here? I think what's really the biggest change is that as opposed to people going to Google and really trying to find the right thing to shop for or right place to shop the item they're looking for. Now they're asking the AI to tell them, what's the right product? Where should I buy it? And I think that's a big change that in the whole model around Google actually being the intermediator or Amazon being a place where you go to shop.

31:10Now people are going to AI and AI agents to say, look, here is the problem I'm trying to solve. Here is what I'm trying to buy. What are the right products for this person? And where should I buy that from? And which is exactly the right brand and the right price I should be paying for it. We've talked about this a bunch where, I always think of Jarvis as my personal AI just because I'm an Iron Man fan. And I'm just gonna give Jarvis all responsibilities. Sometimes I give Esther, who's my chief of staff, I say, please find me something. And I trust her and she goes off and does it and she has a great taste.

31:47And I can imagine in very shortly, it's gonna be my version of Jarvis that is, I'm just, you know, it's like ask and forget. And it happens. Alex, what am I missing here? Yeah, I've read that the average American spends approximately three hours per week shopping out of which two hours are spent grocery shopping. That's an enormous cognitive burden. Maybe some would disagree and say, no, I love my shopping. You'll pull it out of my cold dead hands. But it's an enormous cognitive burden. And I would argue it could be put to much more productive uses if we simply solve shopping the way we're solving math.

32:26So I view this as a positive development. Let's solve shopping while we're at it. We're going to have a shopping benchmark very soon. I can hear it coming. You can hear it probably already here. Okay. All right. I found this one fascinating. Thanks for raising it, Alex. Mathematics facing existential crisis due to AI. I'm going to start with the quote down below from a professor at Ben-Guron University. I'm writing a bunch of papers, and I don't know if I should bother publishing them. That's fascinating. Alex, what are you hearing in the drumbeats in the math community? I'm hearing quite a bit of this, and not just from the math community.

33:05I'm hearing it from the physical sciences as well. And I think the anthropologists and the economists will be studying this moment for many years to come. well after the singularity is well and truly over. And I think my suspicion is this will be viewed as a sort of professional hyper-deflation. In a deflationary regime, why spend your money now? You should wait until later when your money can buy more. Similarly here, if we're in this mode of, call it professional hyper-deflation, why spend any effort doing much of anything, let alone writing hard math papers now, if AI will make it much easier, if not effortless in the future.

33:46So I think this is going to get solved at some point when we start to up the ambition level of problems that we're solving. But for the moment, I think we're in a moment of professional hyper deflation. It's very exciting. This is the equivalent of don't bother going in a starship because by the time you get to the planet of targeting, technology will advance so far that you'll meet an entire population there. That's right. And there's a term for that that's called the weight equation. And we're seeing the weight equation play out now across every discipline, including math, that's just getting solved by AI.

34:20I'm really excited because I think this indicates a collapse of traditional academics. Because it will have to rethink itself, right? God bless. Yeah, for sure. And anyway, we are seeing a collapse of the college-university system for lots of other reasons. All the laws and regulations, Peter, still have to change because they're still not allowing the AI to be co-author on papers, right? And that has to eventually change because what's in AI and what's human is starting to blur. The line between humanity and AI is going to blur. Alex, what do you think about that? Yeah, I think regulations are separate from norms in many cases, although certainly there's quite a bit of interplay between them.

35:05So on the regulation side, we're not covering it here in this pod, but the U.S. Patent Office has recently made some positive motions in the direction of supporting AI-enabled patent applications, for example. So I think there is progress on the regulatory side. On the norm side, I think that's in some sense far trickier than the evolution of regulations because in some cases I think you have entrenched communities that are actively disincentivized from allowing in this rush of progress. If your entire discipline is about to get solved in the next three years, which in many cases I think will be the case certainly with math over the next two to three years we're seeing the solution, then there are perverse incentives at play to discourage all of this innovation and to protect your professional livelihood.

35:51And that's just something as a civilization we're going to have to get through as quickly and painlessly as possible. I mean, I have to imagine that every patent being filed right now is in part being developed with AI as a tool. And I have to also imagine that, you know, in figuring out the claims and figuring out extensions and figuring out, you know, new strategies or how would you disrupt this patent, all of that is going to be done using AI. It's like security. It's an arms race, right? You find a way of hacking, then you find a way of protecting. You find a way of hacking, you find a way of protecting.

36:24It's the same thing because the AI side will uplift both the filing of the patents and the evaluation of the patents. But the entire concept now, because we're shrinking time, how do you give a patent for a number of years? And what does that mean when, say, the CRISPR patent was routed around within 18 months? See, I think the hard part isn't the patents themselves. it's what happens when in the next few years we're facing a glut of innovations due to AI solving everything and we don't know how to metabolize that as a civilization. Like if AI solves the top 5 ,000 diseases in the next five years, as some frontier labs, as we've talked on the pod, are now doing, how on earth do we metabolize 5 ,000 major disease cures into treatments for everyone?

37:09It's hard. The current timing is about 17 years from known cure to full deployment going through all the regulatory. Yeah. I remember I was on stage with Astro Teller and Steve Jurvetson. And we were talking about what the world looks like as we're approaching the singularity. And it was something that was said that blew my mind. It was, you'll never bother patenting anything ever again. because as soon as you file something, as soon as you create a product, there'll be an army of AIs that are figuring out how to produce that product around any patent that pre-exists and make it more efficiently from a different approach.

37:48And so your only defense is no longer patents. It's continuous innovation. You've got to be continually re-innovating yourself. I think for what it's worth, that's sort of a nonsensical argument because we're also going to have an army of AI patent litigators to defend all those patents. God, great. No, no, but Peter, I think you're making a really important point. I'll go back to the CRISPR thing, right? They spent years fighting over who invented CRISPR, Jennifer versus the other folks. And they finally got through it all, resolved it all. And then by that time, they'd found four other ways of pathways.

38:22And I think it was nine other pathways of getting the same outcome, but not using that IP. So I think that's the part that's going to break lots of other things. Well, again, AI entering our world. I think there's very soon a period of time where every Nobel Prize is being done in partnership with AI. Not that they're being recognized. All right, let's jump into where the rubber hits the road. I want to talk about jobs and the economy. A lot of interesting news here. The first is a study by McKinsey on how AI is reshaping skills and work by 2030, saying that AI can automate already 57 % of current U.S.

39:00work. And the goal here is shifting, not eliminating roles. And the demand for AI fluency has grown 7x in two years. It's the fastest rising skill in the U.S. And finally, that we're going to see$2.9 trillion in economic gains by 2030 as a result of this. Alex, you want to kick off the conversation? Yeah, I tell people who ask me for career advice to make sure that their skills and their work goals are aligned with an intelligence explosion. In other words, to accelerate it and make sure that intelligence, superintelligence is evenly distributed. I think the exact wrong thing to do, as we were just discussing, is to not align your work with the boundaries and the vectors of this explosion, worst case, to try to slow it down.

39:54And I think that's being reflected already in automation. If you're in an industry and if you're a mathematician and you're concerned that all of your work is about to be automated, why do anything? You're facing your moment of ennui. You're staring down the weight equation. What's the point of anything? What you should be working on, I would argue, is AI for solving math. And maybe it's time to jump up a layer of abstraction and supervise a fleet of AI agents that are automating your former field. Yeah, I love that. Well, I think, Peter, I think to me, the AI fluency, what does it really mean?

40:28Because you never really interact with AI. You really interact with an application that's built on top of AI. And those tools are constantly changing. So really developing AI fluency has really no meaning as such, because those tools are going to be constantly changing and becoming more and more different and advanced. So I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here. How do you actually have a way to encourage and educate children where they constantly become lifelong learners? And knowing that intelligence is going to be the capabilities to learn, not the knowledge you have.

41:07So the whole thing has to shift from knowledge to our capability to learn. Yeah. And we talked about continuous learning in AIs as well. I've often tweeted at MIT and Harvard, my universities of history, that you've got to change. The idea of being admitted for a four-year degree is crazy. You should be admitted for lifelong learning. You're a member of a student body for life. That works really well until we have BCIs in a few years and can do high band width downloads and sideloads of new information and don't need traditional universities. I can't wait. Well, listen, the universities are going to sublimate very shortly.

41:50I think I would make the two points here. One is that for the education side, that we're moving from the supply side where you learned engineering, math, accounting, and then trying to sell it in the job marketplace. And we're moving to the demand side where you pick your massive transformative purpose and your big problem you want to solve and then go acquire the skills that you need to solve that problem. So that's one big shift. I do want to call BS on one thing in this chart. which is that 2.9 trillion economic gain that all sounds wonderful except they're not talking about the demonetization that is taking place radically across the board which i think dwarfs that yeah it's mckinsey yeah it's a good song yes on big chunks of this but can you can you double click on what that means because uh it's important to for folks to understand for example uh there's an innovation out there called well ways which may solve breast cancer because we can detect breast cancer it stays zero now okay we spend half a million dollars per person on average in the west treating breast cancer somebody that's gotten breast cancer if you've solved breast cancer gdp drops even though you've solved a major problem gdp dropped this is why imad talks about whoever the fellow that created gdp said it's the worst form of worst measurement of the economy possible yeah because as we increase efficiency gdp actually drops i use the example of that $1 ,000 TV that can only be sold for$500 a year later and$250 a year after that, those are all drops in GDP.

43:17And so we're missing that unbelievable hollowing out of all of the work that's going to be done. That 57 % of US work that's being automated is going to decimate GDP. So that's the part to take into account as well as looking at the upside. I thought you were going to say something different, Salim. I thought you were going to say the fact that$100 by 2030 buys you so much more capability than$100 does today. That's all built into the same thing. It's all built in. The amount of stuff I can do with$100 is 100 times more than, say, 10 years ago. Even though the dollar is deflated, etc. The productivity of the$100, I can launch a whole business with$100 today, which I couldn't do 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago.

44:04All right, well, let's move on to another MIT study. MIT finds that AI can already replace 11.7 % of the US workforce. So MIT found AI can handle jobs tied to about 1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare, and HR. I completely believe that, right? Their iceberg index simulates 151 million workers and 32 ,000 skills to see which tasks ai can now perform and tech layoffs are just the surface of a 2.1 and 2.2 percent of exposed wages thoughts salim um this speaks to what we spoke about in the last slide essentially we're going to see this huge demonetization take place i don't see anything massively meaningful here except that you will automate a lot of tasks i go back to eric brinny also's comment that to do a particular job, you might have 27 tasks and AMA automate like half of those, but you still have to do half of those.

45:03And it also speaks to the middle to middle comment that Balaji talks about. I think the big shift will come when we move away from human centric workflows. So think about the idea that right now, all of our work that we do in any company or any function is human centric. You go from accounting to fulfillment, you have marketing of accounting, and you have a person there. When you have an AI that can rewrite it, the rules, you can get rid of all of those people-centric tasks into being functionally centric. Naveen, what are your thoughts? I think this is slightly different. I think what Satya said a couple of days ago was really meaningful.

45:40He says, look, yes, we're going to have AI agents, just like I have a bunch of employees, but they go out and do the job because I delegate them. But they still come back and say, I'm finished this, I'm stuck here. What do I do here? What's my priority? Should I do this or this, right? So point is the humans will always going to be there irrespective of all the agents and the new agents actually being deployed. It just makes them more productive. It allows them to do more. So I don't believe the jobs are going to go away. It will just allow the same people to be able to do more. You know, this goes back to a couple of pods ago when I was showing the data from FI9.

46:26And this is not just in the US, in the tech industry, the notion that there's still a lot of fear around the world of can I find a job and can I afford to live in this future? and the, you know, I'm out right now actively speaking to people and there's just a tremendous amount of fear around the future for their kids and the future for their ability to survive and thrive, right? So that is still very real. I'll just mention on that pod, I said to our subscribers and listeners, you know, we would love to get together and have what we call a moonshot gathering, probably in the fall of next year.

47:14And to talk about how do we solve these problems? How do we solve these huge problems of fear and uplift society for a man, woman, and child? And I said, if we can get 1 ,000 Moonshot subscribers, we're at like 850 now. So if you're interested in potentially a Moonshot gathering with the Moonshot mates, probably in LA in the fall of 26, send an email to moonshots at diamandis.com. We'll send you some information. And again, I'm just, you know, right now we're asking, is this of interest to you? If you want to be part of these conversations over a couple of day event, we'd love to have you. So again, just send us an email.

47:54We'll send you back some information. If there's an abundance of wine, I'm there. There's an abundance of what? Wine. Wine, okay. You're a resveratrol. All right. So moonshots at diamandis.com. All right, let's move on to our next article here. Here's a flip side. Claude conversation suggests AI could double US productivity growth. So an analysis of a thousand chats, a hundred thousand chats, found tasks without AI took an average of 90 minutes. And Claude helped cut the time by 80 % on the average task with healthcare being cut up to 90%. And being in the healthcare industry, I know this to be the fact, right, is so much that can be improved on every aspect of the, it's not healthcare, it's sick care, right?

48:46So let's just be very clear. Claude could help, you know, cut average task length by 90 % in the sick care industry. So what this means is you can get a procedure or some task done for like a tenth of the cost, right? That's the demonization we're talking about. It is. And when you bring in intelligent humanoid robots, you're going to start to get medical procedures done at a tenth of the cost. Can I give a personal anecdote here? Please. I have a big screen TV that just went blank on it. And so I went into ChatGPT in Gemini and I said, my TV is not working. And here's the model number. And it said, is it making a buzzing sound?

49:30And I was like, what? So I listened. It was making a buzzing sound. i said yes it said is it making a buzzing sound every for two seconds spaced by seven times in a row and i was like yeah and it said here there's a diode on the power board that's gone bad and and here's how you fix it now this is mind-boggling because that would have taken hours and hours and hours that take the tv apart guess at 100 things to figure out carry the whole damn tv into the into the repair shop to figure out what the hell's going on or Or do you even just chuck the TV? And I could go in there, the guy soldered a new diode for me, and it was back to scratch.

50:06That, I think, is the kind of thing that we're going to see hundreds of times over in all sorts of... In healthcare as well, yeah. And in healthcare, 10 times over. Wow. Wow. But I don't think the healthcare cost has anything to do with what people charge. I really don't think this will change how much money we spend on healthcare. It's not really the cost issue. It's not about how much money you spend. It is primarily driven by litigation, and that's not going to change. Ah, fascinating. Well, I mean, it can change, just not easily. Yes. My expectation for what it's worth is that the Jevons paradox is going to strike yet again.

50:41And just as a reminder, the Jevons paradox is that as the efficiency of a good or service increases, it's often the case that overall demand increases even more. I think whether it's with healthcare or with television repair or just service economy tasks in general, I'm finding anecdotally and seeing more generally, as productivity skyrockets thanks to these tools, you take on more tasks. You take on more projects rather than taking a two-day weekend and turning that into like a four-day workweek. The exact opposite is happening. We're doing far more with less. Yeah, our multiplexing lives are just going hyper-exponential.

51:21I think this is a key point. Like, for example, we talk about automating software writing, and I think we'll just end up writing 10 times more software because there's nothing to be done. And lots of slop, of course. But how many hundreds of thousands of things do we want to keep automating? We were at the very, very beginning of all of that. Yeah. In the economy, here's a fun conversation, an interesting article. Some New Yorkers are getting$12 ,000 in crypto. It's a basic income style pilot by Coinbase. So 160 New Yorkers in the Bronx and East Harlem are getting 12 USDC or 12 ,000 USDC, right?

51:59And we had Jeremy Allaire on this pod, the CEO of Circle. As part of a basic income pilot, it's funded by Coinbase. Each participant receives$800 a month, again, in USDC for five months. plus an$8 ,000 lump sum. And the program is testing whether crypto payments are useful or perceived differently in low-income communities. Gentlemen, who wants to jump in? I think I love the idea they're running this because the more data and the more UBI-type pilots we run, the better. We've seen profound positive results when you truly run a UBI, meaning it's truly universal, it's truly basic, and it's basically just giving the income to the people.

52:43In this particular case, I think there can be a huge age demographic split between young people going, yeah, I'll use the damn crypto and the older folks going, give it to the kids and they'll figure it out. I'll comment on this story as well. Critically, this is not a UBI. This is a GBI, which is a guaranteed basic income that restricts the targets of the recipients to certain economic demographics. So it's not universal. is just basically for those who need it, according to some definition of need, to bring them up to some floor. I think what this represents is we're seeing an evolution. There were a variety of trials of, call it first or second generation UBI.

53:26Some of those succeeded. Some of those arguably did not succeed. I think it's very helpful that we're seeing innovation and iteration and evolution of, call it post-economic paradigms like this. I'm still a big fan of universal basic services and universal basic equity, not just basic income guaranteed or otherwise. But I think we should expect to see many more iterations, trials, evolutions like this before we finally figure out what it looks like to live in an abundant economy. Yeah, we had this X Prize at this year's Visioneering. Salim was there. Naveen, I'm sorry you weren't able to make it this year.

54:05But the prize that won Visioneering this year, it was called the Abundance XPRIZE. Two of my Abundance 360 members pitched it, proposed it, and won. And it's for universal basic services. The idea is can you provide for a flat fee of$250 a month housing, food, water, energy, and bandwidth, right? That's the goal. And I love the idea because if a family has a roof over their head and guaranteed food and bandwidth and energy, they can start thinking about their future. They can start thinking about how they become an entrepreneur. What do they do? How do they upskill themselves? But if you're a mom or dad fighting to put food in your kids' mouths, nothing else matters.

54:59This was so exciting to see because it's the first time we've also moved away from the hard technology stuff to more of the social contract. And the biggest problem in the world is that what's happening as we move this massive transformation is the old social contract is absolutely breaking. Yeah, for sure. And we need to recreate some new model. And some model that covers the bottom couple of layers of Maslow's hierarchy is just going to be unbelievable for the world. Yeah, and we want to make this a$50 million prize. I had my first conversation with a friend who's a multibillionaire, not in the U.S., who said he's open to funding it.

55:34So I'm looking for funders. If you're listening and you want to fund this Abundance XPRIZE, please let us know. This may have a bigger impact than any other prize we've ever done. I agree. I mean, again, going back to the potential moonshot gathering we might have, there's a lot of fear out there in the world. And there's fear about how do I navigate in this future of AI disruption? and if people have a safety you know a foundation that enables them to feel safe and then they can start to learn and go forward it reduces the fear significantly and that's the goal and if you can tell people that look there's a line of sight you know two basic needs being covered for 250 a month everybody kind of breathes a huge sigh of relief and and you take away that angst that's there.

56:36Right today, one of their family members gets sick, the whole family goes bankrupt. It's unbelievable today. 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. Blitzy 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.

57:22Enterprises 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. Next article here is NASDAQ pledges swift push for SEC approval of tokenized stocks. So tokens would have the same rights and protections as normal stocks, including dividends and voting. The move is meant to modernize rather than disrupt. NASDAQ considers this an evolution in trading.

58:06And tokenized stocks would be digital versions of regular shares on the blockchain. Naveen, how do you think about trading 24-7? First of all, it's already happening. I mean, most of the stocks are trading 24-7 anyway in different markets. Obviously, if you look at Bitcoins and others, they trade 24-7. And so it is not a massive change. Call them tokenization, but things like iShares. I mean, iShares has been around for a long time. People have looked at how do you buy partial shares. So yes, it is a small incremental thing by putting on a blockchain, but really the idea of buying partial shares have been around.

58:48People have broken the shares into dividend shares or the growth shares. So, I mean, there are many, many ways of owning a share. And this is just yet another way of doing it. Alex or Salim, you want to lean in? Yeah, I'll comment on this one if I may. When we spoke with Toli a number of episodes ago about Solana, we talked about how increasing the efficiency of financial services was maybe the killer app of crypto, may be the only killer app at the moment. I wish there were more compelling killer apps besides that. And I view this step by NASDAQ. This is iterative. It's a foundational step, but a step, I think, in a very positive direction.

59:31It does not critically give us 24-7 trading as much as I would like that yet. But it could be an enabler if the SEC approved 24-7 trading down the road. It could be an enabler for fractional tokenized shares. You see, that's what enabler. Yeah, that's what I like, right? And the idea of I can own a fraction of a particular, you know, share, and then a fraction of a particular piece of real estate and then tokenized assets. And then add to that, you know, you know, agents trading and you get an explosion in the economy. Today, you can do that with a single stock ETF. So you can buy a partial shares.

1:00:12You can buy fractional shares. You can buy a whole bunch of things similarly today. So yes, I just say it's incremental and it's an enabler, as Alex rightly pointed so, rather than a big, massive change here. Yeah, for me, I'm with Naveen. This is like incremental and it seems like modernization with regulatory blessing rather than anything monster. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, thank God. Okay. All right. All right, our next segment here is titled, Elon and how to solve the US debt crisis. Let's take a listen to the video. As long as civilization keeps advancing, we will have AI and robotics at very large scale.

1:00:58The - I think that's pretty much the only thing that's gonna solve for the US debt crisis. because currently the U.S. debt is insanely high and the interest payments on the debt exceed the entire military budget of the United States, just the interest payments. And that's, at least in the short term, going to continue to increase. So I think actually the only thing that can solve for the debt situation is AI and robotics. Fascinating. I believe that AI and robotics are going to basically light in a positive fashion the economy on fire. I disagreed in saying, you know, I've had this conversation with Elon.

1:01:48And by the way, I'm in texting back and forth right now to get him scheduled to come on the pod. So that will be a fun episode. We have a lot of amazing people coming up on the podcast. We've got Mustafa Saliman coming up next week, who's the CEO of Microsoft AI. We've got Ray Kurzweil coming up, Kathy Woods coming up. So a lot of fun conversations and looking forward to getting Elon scheduled. But what I was saying was, you know, another thing that can solve the debt is actually extending the health span of individuals, right? If you could add two, three, four, five healthy years on people's lives, that would massively transform any country's debt position.

1:02:31I have issues here. Okay. The, you know, trying to solve the problem, the problem is the underlying fiat currency structure is flawed. if we have increased productivity, my fear is it just gives governments, oh, we can spend more, and they'll just start spending more or printing more money, which is what they've done repeatedly in the past. You have to break that problem first. And Bitcoin is the only model that does that. So I don't know how you solve for that problem, because you can't solve for the unbelievable ability of governments when given a little bit of rope to spread the primal money.

1:03:09Alex, how do you come up?

1:03:37cures all woes or almost all woes. I do think economic hypergrowth that stems from AI and automation can solve the so-called debt crisis, but I also think it can solve many other things. I think there's a debate raging right now in the reinforcement learning and machine learning community as to whether some of the hardest problems, like curing all disease, can we cure all disease with AI right now? Or does the economy need to be much larger in order for us to be able to cure all disease? I think if we find ourselves in a future where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next three plus years, it's not just the debt crisis that we'd be talking about solving.

1:04:18It's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table. Naveen, where do you come out on this? I mean, from my perspective, the first thing is that, You know, obviously, economic growth gives you more revenue, but you have to fundamentally solve the problem of balanced budget until we get to a point where actually, like every single person in their home, they have to have a balanced budget. Every state has to have a balanced budget. Federal government is really the only place where we don't have a balanced budget. So once we start to look at we can't spend more than what we earn, and as we earn more, we have to pay back the debt before we start spending it.

1:04:58That we have to say that as the economic growth happens, Salim, to your point, we have to say 90 % of that is going to go towards paying the debt back. And unless our debt is back to zero, we're not going to spend it. So balanced budget using the economic growth that is going to come through AI and robotics to pay back the debt before we start spending it is really the only way we can solve this crisis. Somebody must be modeling all this out somewhere because it can't be that hard to model out. Well, I think Iman's been playing with... You take some assumptions like economic growth by economic increase from AI versus the deflationary versus the money printing versus the debt payback schedule.

1:05:35We've talked in the past on the pod about how the Dallas Fed is already monitoring, modeling the singularity. So it's not like these discussions aren't being held in either regulatory circles or macroeconomic circles. I think really, to the extent debt is just borrowing from the future, no one is super confident right now what the future trajectory looks like. Do we solve all problems in the next three to five years? In which case, yeah, sure, borrow from infinity. That's great. Or does it take longer? Just to remind the viewers, the Dallas Fed said realistically it could be like this. If we have a good singularity, it's vertical.

1:06:09And if a bad singularity is vertical, the other way, it was kind of like binary. Borrow from positive infinity. Do not borrow from positive infinity. Don't borrow from negative infinity is the resolution here. All right. Let's move on. I have some news I want to share with my moonshot mates here and everyone on the pod. My next book is coming out. It's called We Are His Gods. It's coming out in April of 2026. It's called We Are His Gods, A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. Once again, I've co-authored this with Stephen Kotler, who's an amazing, amazing writer. And this book is the sequel to Abundance that came out in 2012.

1:06:56and it's much, much more than that. It's, you know, for me, this is a guide on how to survive and thrive in the decade ahead. And my message is to get, my goal is to get this message out as far and wide as possible. And if you've ever written a book, you probably know that bestsellers don't just happen, they're engineered. And it's all about the Amazon algorithms and it's crazy, but I would love your help if you're willing. So I need to hit 500 books sold in December, four months ahead of the book release in order to make the algorithms work. And so I wanted to extend a special offer. If anyone here wants to go to purchase one of these books now, we'll give you, Steve and I will hold a private 90-minute AMA answering any questions on any of these subjects, on AI and mindsets and humanity's future.

1:07:56Also, if you buy two books, we're gonna give you 140 abundance charts. So I have a collection of the most amazing charts showing the upside of abundance, the downside of abundance, all the exponential technologies. Anyway, if you wanna join the team and help us with this pre-launch campaign, help me rocket this into the stratosphere, I would be grateful. You can go to diamandis.com slash book and join this pre-launch effort. So let me just say off the top, thank you for considering it. We're going to have the 90-minute AMA towards the end of December, probably December 17th to 22nd, and it'll be a lot of fun.

1:08:40So join me if you can, diamandis.com slash book, and we'll put the link below as well. All right. Let's talk about energy, gentlemen. shall we? This was amazing. Check this out. Microsoft's Fairwater facility to use more power than Los Angeles by late 2027. Who wants to jump in on this one? I mean, AI is sucking up electrons. I'll comment that the multi-trillion dollar question in CapEx is whether coherent super clusters will keep increasing in size. We don't know the answer to that yet. It is entirely possible that we'll see a peak in terms of the size or the energy footprint of coherent training clusters sometime soon.

1:09:30Maybe shortly after late 2027, we'll look back and say, gosh, that was the peak. And hereafter, advances in distributed training algorithms mean that we can spread the wealth, spread the energy footprint of training runs across the entire surface of the planet or in low Earth orbit, perhaps. And we'll say, now, naive extrapolation called for larger and larger clusters, but actually that's not what happened. And we didn't need black hole supercomputers after all. I don't think we know the answer to that question. I think it's going to be almost entirely dictated by algorithmic advances in distributed training.

1:10:07Interesting. I'm staggered by how big this thing must be. I mean, how much of Wisconsin is this thing covering would be an interesting question. Well, it's basically two and a half nuclear power plants, right? That's the way I think about it. And I think, Peter, I think the two things are going to happen. Obviously, either we don't need that many bigger clusters, Alex pointed out. Secondly, I really think that some of the fusion stuff that I think we may have talked about in the past, but I was just at Helion last month. And I really think they're already digging up the things for Microsoft Data Center in the state of Washington, where I think they're going to have a positive fusion reactor for Microsoft in 2027.

1:10:48And I really think at this point, they're so close because of how they're using the capacitors and supercapacitors in terms of to be able to recapture 95 % of the pulse that they send to the fusion reactor. So I really think this is a good problem, could be a modular fusion reactors. and I think this problem can be solved. Yeah. Well, we're starting to see communities who are saying no data center in my backyard because they're concerned about the price of energy going up. I just want to do a shout out again to Google and Nano Banana. By the way, this graphic that you're seeing if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, when Gianluca on my team first put this up was really faint, really difficult to read.

1:11:36I took a screenshot of the image and fed it to Nana Banana. I said, make the lines darker, thicker, make all the characters readable and it generated this perfect. So it's just so simple. And over the Thanksgiving break, I was at my mom's house in Boca and I went around and I photographed all the old photographs are like a hundred years old that are black and white and crinkly and fuzzy. And I fed them all into Nana Banana And it did an amazing job of making them crisp or modernizing them or colorizing them. A lot of fun. So at least the electrons are going for something good and useful. Absolutely.

1:12:14I like this one. I know you would, Salim. So XAI plans to build 88 acres of solar panels around Memphis Data Center. So this is 88 acres of solar farms, right? 30 megawatts. Only 10 % of the site's power demand. but still a nice move. I mean, you have to remember that Elon started SolarCity with his cousin. That was then acquired by Tesla. And so, you know, solar has been a focus for him. Salim, do you want to go more data centers, more solar? Well, I think solar is just the most, you know, we have to remember that solar is an exponential technology. is doubling every 22 months in its price performance, has been doing that for 40 years.

1:13:05So every couple of years, we double the price performance of solar. It scales, and therefore, this is very, very exciting. Yep. Naveen, anything you want to add? I think I'm simply going to add, I think solar is good, but I really think the nuclear and fusion is where the future is going to be. The challenge I have with that, and listen, I agree, But when I look at the articles on nuclear, on generation three and four nuclear and small modular reactors and fusion, it all looks like five and 10 year timelines. And China is deploying solar 10x faster than we are. What do you think about this, Alex?

1:13:51I don't think that nuclear is really the problem in terms of us not being able to build safe nuclear reactors. We have been using them in aircraft carriers and with no incidents at all. Sure. We know how to build a small nuclear reactor. It's permitting. It's all regulations. Yeah, it's all regulations. Agreed. And, you know, the question is, when is the government going to change that? Well, but the problem is we have two problems. One is that for us to move fully to solar, you have to cover the baseload because solar scaling will be a long time before it gets to the level where it covers all of our electricity needs.

1:14:26So that baseload problem is where we need nuclear fusion. The problem is it's going to take several years to build a nuclear and definitely for fusion. Remember also, solar and fusion are the same energy source. We get solar power from fusion in the sun. So it's really a question, if we're going to put solar on one hand and fusion on the other hand, where is the fusion taking place? Do we want it taking place at the center of our solar system, or do we want it taking place at a number of locations on the Earth's surface? And I think there is an argument to be made that for certain purposes, you want a very large fusion reactor, like for really large training runs that require large power sources that are locally available.

1:15:06And for certain purposes, you want distributed fusion. So I can see an argument, you know, projecting out 10, 15 years when perhaps we get our solar Dyson swarm as naively extrapolating. Seems like we're on that trajectory regardless of whether you like it or not. We're on that trajectory naively where we're going to get both. We're going to get lots of solar-based fusion and also we'll get lots of land and low-Earth orbit-based fusion and they'll coexist. We'll discuss disassembling the moon in a little bit. Okay. All right. Let's jump into health and a topic that Naveen and I both dearly love and spend a lot of our time on.

1:15:45And we're going to start, Naveen, with Viome. Again, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. I love having you on our board at Singularity and XPRIZE. but day-to-day you run Viome and we have two articles I'd love you to comment on so folks understand what it is Viome does jump in on this one well I think Peter more than just what Viome does I think what I find really really fascinating is this is the first time in the human history where we are starting to see what is it at a molecular level that is changing inside the human body that we have been measuring for so long. So we have had these standard lab tests that says your cholesterol is high.

1:16:29And the only solution has been take a statin, right? But nobody has ever looked at and seen what is causing this cholesterol to go high. Is it your gut microbiome is really converting, you know, the oscurobacter, is it actually converting the dietary cholesterol into copper estenol, which essentially doesn't get absorbed. So you have a low cholesterol. Can we do that? Can we actually change from bile acid to secondary bile acid? Can we increase the short-chain fatty acids? And by simply understanding exactly what is a root cause for you specifically, that causing the high cholesterol, we can come up with a very personalized solution rather than a one-size-fits-all.

1:17:13And that's really the key is to understanding for each individual what is going on inside their body so we can come up with a solution that works for them. Got it. There's a second one I'd love you to cover if you would, which is, you know, not something most people think about, but what is the root cause of constipation? But it's really interesting, Peter, that we may not think about it often, but there's 15 % of our population in the United States suffer from IBS and they have mostly constipation. This is a big problem, right? Now, most of the times people have constipation, doctors will take lexative.

1:18:02Lexative doesn't cure constipation. It simply relieves the symptom of the constipation, but you still have constipation. And again, looking at from the biological perspective, what we found, having Peter now, I don't know if I told you or not, we have now analyzed 1.5 million tests. And we have analyzed over 400 quadrillion biological data points. And what we saw was that constipation can be caused by many, many different things. For example, in some people, it was caused by having high methane gas production because we know that methane gas slows down the motility of the gut, right? It could be the low serotonin production.

1:18:46It could be the short-chain fatty acid. It could be the bile acid, right? So it could be many, many different reasons. by looking at what each individual has, we were able to identify what was causing the constipation for them and give them a personalized nutrition of the food and supplements. And we actually did a blinded placebo-controlled study that showed in 90 days, 64 % of the people who had constipation with the personalized nutrition and supplement, they became healthy compared to 10 % on placebo. So not only we can identify what's happening. Yeah. And that's my point, Peter. For the first time, not only we can identify why it is, what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do about it for you.

1:19:33I mean, most people, you know, it's interesting, right? It's only the last four or five years, maybe in the last three years, that the microbiome has been identified to correlate with so many different health failure modes. you know people need to realize your collection of 40 trillion human cells and something on the order of 100 trillion uh other life forms bacteria yes and outer outerwear for bacteria yeah well the human the human being is simply a mechanism for carrying bacteria around the planet but... Quick question for Naveen. Yeah, let's go ahead. Quick question for Naveen. How do we get more refereed published studies into the space?

1:20:22Like for hypercholesterolemia, for example, on the previous note, like is there a peer-reviewed published study that we can point to? Yes. So there is a BMCGI, which is just article, just we just published on a peer-reviewed journal, which is one of the most prestigious GI journal. and we actually showed that we can identify by looking at your gut microbiome exactly what is causing, for example, constipation or what is causing the hypercholesterole. So we actually are able to identify and publish these people. And this is, by the way, not N of 20 or N of 50. There was an N of 86 ,750 people. It sounds very exciting.

1:21:05So how do we like do this at scale? So if there really is artisanal progress being made on hypercholesterolemia or constipation, how do we, to the extent that microbiome is a gating factor for a wide variety of diseases, how do you just like solve all of the microbiome-gated diseases at once rather than doing this individually? And again, so two things is that even though it is, the underlying reasons for each individual is very, very different. So it can be a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas the healthcare demands one-size-fits-all approach. And what we're finding is the underlying reason for the same symptom is very, very different.

1:21:46That means for some people, the high cholesterol is being caused by high secondary bile acid, or some people it's being caused by a completely different reason. So you have to really look at the underlying reason, And that's the reason it has to be hyper-personalized rather than one size fits all. And the second thing is, in our current healthcare system, as Peter very well knows, it is really, is not designed that everyone in the healthcare system, this is the only industry where healthcare system is the only industry where they make money when their customer is unhappy. And they stop making money when their customer becomes happy.

1:22:27I mean, there's no other industry, right? So it's not designed to keep you happy. They want to actually solve the symptom of the problem so you become a lifelong customer. And by the way, you can't use nutrition as a mechanism to solve it because then if they call it a drug and then you have to wait for 20 years before the drug comes out. Yeah, and I just mentioned more. I remember interviewing the head of Google Health at a conference once. And I said, I'm Canadian, please explain the US healthcare system. And to your point of view, he said, the whole healthcare system here is designed to get you sick, keep you sick as long as possible without killing you.

1:23:01And I was shocked as a Canadian, but the whole audience, about 500 people are like, yeah, that's about right. That's about right. Just unreal. If I might ask just one more question, Naveen, if you project out forward past the difficulties of the present healthcare system and you had to outline what you think is the shape of the final solution for microbiome health management. Does it look like fecal transplants? Does it look like purely dietary interventions? What is, with 24th century technology, what is like the fully realized solution for microbiome health? So I think the idea of a microbiome being a one single organ or the set of species or ecosystem is completely fundamentally wrong.

1:23:44And this is really where I think the biggest change we saw, that everyone else was looking at microbiome as a set of species or strains of species that are out there. And what we focused terms are functional. So what they do is what matters, not who they are. That means same organisms can do something good in one environment and the same organism can produce something toxic in a different environment. So looking at the functional microbiome and once you know what functions they are performing or not performing, then providing the right set of substrate and the substrate can come from food, supplement or drug.

1:24:20But that is really the key is to understanding what is going on functionally and then providing the intervention, the substrate that can come from food or supplements to actually modulate them. And Peter, you know, I, as you know, I'm not the scientist or a doctor, but the fact is this has become a really a technology data and AI problem. Yeah, well, you've built quite an AI team and a massive data collection platform, and which is where the insights are coming and continuing. And we have a lot to cover. So I'm going to continue on, if it's all right with everybody. I found this fascinating. David Sinclair, which many people on this podcast have financially supported as part of Friends at Sinclair Lab, was just granted a patent, patent number 12 ,274 ,733, for cellular reprogramming method using the OCT4, KL4, SOX2, and not the cancer-causing MYC-C, Yamanaka factors, to safely reverse epigenetic aging markers without driving them all the way back to pluripotent stem cells.

1:25:32So this is his work in partial epigenetic reprogramming. His company, Life Biosciences, which has rights to these patents and this work, have gotten FDA approval, and they're entering human trials in the first quarter of 26. This is the first time we're going to see a epigenetic or partial epigenetic reprogramming in humans. It's just completed its non-human primate work. So fascinating. I only hit a couple of articles. We can talk about all of them together. This is another interesting idea. Researchers sequenced 100 cells from 74-year-old man finding major genetic differences between cells. So it's the idea that, you know, we kind of think that the genome in all of our cells, in our 40 trillion cells, is the same.

1:26:24Well, apparently that's not the case. And one more, and I'll stop with that. So any comments on these two? I remember first hearing this at Singularity University years ago, and it just blew my mind. We all had this conception that every cell in our body has the same DNA. And the expression of it is what varies. And now we find that's not a reliable thing either. And where do we get it? Some reliable footprint of identity. I'll comment on this story. So this is an effect called mosaicism. You're a mosaic. You're not a single genome. It's actually really difficult at the moment. Here we are stuck in 2025 to sequence the DNA from individual cells.

1:27:09And there's a recent invention called primary template directed amplification. You may have learned about PCR polymerase chain reaction. This is a more sophisticated version of PCR that's now made it very recently, like past couple of years, easy to read, to sequence DNA from individual cells with low error rates. So now this is like this big unlock enabling us to sequence lots of individual cells from all over the body. And what's the first thing that we discover that the DNA is actually, in many cases, wildly different in different parts of the body. So this has the potential to unlock cures for cancer.

1:27:46Cancer, that's a function of high mutation rates in somatic cells, could unlock cures for heart disease. And in some cases, cardiovascular disease is caused by change or loss in the Y chromosome. I think this is a big unlock for healthcare. Yeah. Fascinating. All right. Going back to MIT. This is a friend, Dablina Sarkar. She runs a lab at the MIT Media Lab. And I heard about this when we visited her. We had, this is about three years ago during one of the Abundance longevity trips. And she unveiled this, but under wraps, it's finally come out. And she's created a non-surgical brain implant by attaching these tiny wireless electronics.

1:28:33I mean, literally like super small etched electronics like you'd get in circuit design to immune cells. And this cell electronic hybrid can be injected through a vein, and it implants itself in deep brain areas, right? The immune cell helps it target specific locations. And then upon implementation, the devices can wirelessly stimulate specific neurons with high-precision light. So this is – I've had these conversations with Ray Kerr as well. And again, we'll have Ray on the pod in early January talking about his predictions for the decade ahead. And one of his predictions for the decade ahead is high bandwidth BCI.

1:29:17His expectation is through nanotechnology. And this is probably the closest nanotech approach that I've seen. Any comments on it? Is this optogenetics where they have specific neurons? This is very much not optogenetics. It's different, right? It's not genetically engineered neurons. It's just planting. Optogenetics, you're inducing cells to express rhodopsins to be sensitive to light. If you've seen like Star Trek Voyager, there are episodes with Borg nanoprobes that are shown, that are being depicted like attaching themselves to cells. This looks far more like Star Trek Voyager Borg nanoprobes than it does optogenetics.

1:30:00Alex, if you turn to the side, people could see the nanoprobe pipe going into your brain. Really? I thought I was just an AI, and this is a generative background. This is the beginnings, I think, of a Moravec procedure. Hans Moravec, before Ray even, laid out this notion that the way we're going to solve human mind uploading is by replacing brain cells, ship of Theseus style, one by one with trained simulations. If you look at Dublina's paper in Nature Biotechnology, it was like really amazing paper. Take a look at the figures. This looks like a scene out of Star Trek Voyager with these photovoltaically sensitive sandwiches that look like coins attached to spherical cells look like the Borg nanoprobes out of Star Trek.

1:30:45I think it's a very promising direction. Naveen, you ready for the implant? I am absolutely 100 % because I really need my brain to be uploaded before I lose it. I just don't want to be first. Okay, well, if you didn't go first, you can go second. So, you know, kudos to Demis Hassabis and the team at DeepMind for their Nobel Prize winning work. So AlphaFold has revolutionized science in just five years. Alex, why don't you take this? yeah i would say it's it's uh it's remarkable to look back at what the world before alpha fold one looked like we were talking a while ago about hyper deflation and professional hyper deflation there it used to be the case prior to alpha fold one but certainly prior to alpha fold three that you'd spend an entire phd yes these these poor chumps spending their entire phd trying to determine the structure of a single protein.

1:31:43Sequencing a single gene, yes. What a waste retrospectively, at least for those who were spending PhDs in structural biology, right before the problem, right before the whole field got solved by AlphaFold3, arguably. Now you can just do it overnight, and we saw an entire discipline get solved by AI. So I think AlphaFold3 in particular is a template for what we're going to see everywhere else. Whole disciplines are just going to get solved. Yeah, the numbers here are impressive, right? So AlphaFold has enabled a database of 240 million protein structures that have been accessed by 3.3 million users in 190 countries.

1:32:22I remember when I was in medical school, we used to talk about the supercomputing problem of the future is being able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence. and we always used to talk about what would it take, how much computing, when would it be done? And extraordinary that the damage in the team did it. I think two things here. One is I think this speaks to the incredible ability of AI to solve these what we thought was intractable problems with having to throw so much compute at it and just solves it. So it goes to Alex's inner loop thing. The second point I'll make is if you've not seen the documentary, the thinking game, which lays out the arc of the timeline of all of this and goes into detail into how they went about doing it.

1:33:08It's just unbelievable. Go watch it. Yeah. Again, this is the... Maybe just a postscript on this, if I may. This was also like the protein folding problem was supposed to be one of the killer apps for quantum computing and quantum simulation. Yes. And Alpha Fold, in addition to everything else that it revolutionized, I would say also was a nail in the coffin of many expectations for what the killer app for quantum computing would look like, and we need to find something better. Amazing. I'm going to cover this article very quickly just because it's an important, you know, I talk about that when people go through Fountain Life, we discover that 3.2%, that's the number based upon the populations we processed, have a cancer they don't know about, which is problematic.

1:33:56and it turns out that 70 % of the cancers that kill people are not the cancers we routinely test for. So you're not dying from typically breast or prostate or colon because we can test for those. It's the ones we don't test for. It's pancreatic, it's glioblastoma, it's ovarian cancers. And a lot of times, I think of pancreatic cancer as a death sentence. So, those who have had pancreatic cancer in their family, it's an important article to hear. So, it looks like scientists have developed a one-product-fit-all immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer. This is out of UCLA. A new off-the-shelf therapy that can attack pancreatic cancer even after it spreads.

1:34:48engineered CAR-NKT. These are natural killer cells made from donor cells costing only$5 ,000 per dose, which is incredibly small price tag for cancer therapeutic. The cells can - I think Peter, the only thing I could - I'm sorry, please go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I'll just say that the cells can reach and infiltrate through tumors in the pancreas, liver, and lungs. So please, Naveen. I was simply going to say that, Peter, this is so close to home because I lost my dad to stage four pancreatic cancer. And I'm just so, so happy to tell you that in the next three months, we are launching a stage one pancreatic cancer test.

1:35:25This is a complete game changer. At Viome, at Viome. At Viome. Stage one pancreatic cancer test with 94 % specificity and 84 % sensitive. That's amazing. I mean, the best way to cure it is to find it at the beginning. Early testing. Yeah, and Naveen, what other forms of cancer has biome been able to detect through the massive data sets you're collecting? So we started with oral cancer, throat cancer, and now we have pancreatic cancer. We have the thing for IBD. And the next thing is we're just validating a test with the Scripps research for colon polyps, which is seven to 10 years before you develop a colon cancer.

1:36:03And I think if we can really look at advanced adenoma, then I think we can absolutely get rid of colon cancer completely. Yeah. I mean, the range of things that you do, I mean, I encourage folks, you know, go to Viome.com. The full body intelligence test is, you know, it takes a sample of your blood, your sputum and stool. And it's incredible what you can learn. So, and it's, what's the price tag on that? It's not expensive. $279, Peter, right now. For three tests, all three tests. Yeah. Again, another impressive story. I mean, type 1 diabetes is a big deal on the planet. So a man with type 1 diabetes survived for 12 weeks with no immune suppressing drugs after doctors transplanted gene edited insulin producing cells.

1:36:59So this has been the holy grail, right? If you have type 1 diabetes, you've lost your islet cells in your pancreas. You're not producing insulin anymore. Can you transplant them back? Well, these cells were edited with CRISPR to hide from the immune system, adding a don't eat me signal from CD47. And the patient started producing their own insulin. So a lot of, I don't know what the numbers are in terms of the total number of cases of type one diabetes. Anybody know offhand? Yeah. All right, another big story. I mean, I love seeing the pace of breakthroughs that we're seeing in health. Yeah, amazing.

1:37:38It's nice seeing also CRISPR making its way into the clinic, that this is a big victory for CRISPR and hopefully we'll see a lot more CRISPR for managing transplants. Yeah, amazing. All right, let's go into robotics. A lot of fascinating stories here. This is a fun one. It's a tweet from Elon. Of course, Elon sort of like has fun with his hyperbolic tweets here. So here it is. Optimus will be the von Neumann probe. and Alex and I laughed about this. Von Neumann probes are fun concepts. They're robots that are self-replicating like viruses. They go out into the galaxy. They capture materials from asteroids or sometimes moons, and they build other copies of themselves, and they replicate at an exponential rate.

1:38:33So I love this. I want to joke that the Dyson Swarm won't build itself, but maybe it will. You know, we put a book corner in today on this front. I'm going to chat about mine here. So this is a five book series by Dennis Taylor. My son Jet and I have read this series twice. We absolutely love it. So it's called We Are Legion, We Are Bob. And it opens with the guy who's a tech CEO who signs up for effectively Alcor, right? To cryopreserve your body and brain. He leaves this conference and gets hit by a bus. And it picks up a hundred years later, where he basically wakes up and is now an uploaded brain.

1:39:24I won't ruin the story because it's so much beautiful here. And he finds himself as basically the brain and operating system on a von Neumann probe heading out of the solar system to go and start colonizing and getting other solar systems ready for humanity to come join. So amazing series. I love Dennis's writing. And if you love hard science fiction, this is a great book for you. AWG, how about you? Yeah, so my book recommendation for this episode is Understand by Ted Chiang. Ted is perhaps better known for the movie Arrival, where he wrote the original story behind it. But a common theme throughout a lot of his writing is what I would call linguistic singularities, ways that we arrive at superintelligence by way of language one way or another and the consequences there.

1:40:21So Understand is the story, it's a short novel, of a person who becomes superintelligent as a result of a medical treatment. So if you've seen the movie Limitless or you've seen the movie Lucy, think a little bit along those lines, except that unlike with those movies, we see the world in rich detail through his eyes as his intelligence increases, as he reorganizes his mind and treats his mind like a software operating system and ultimately encounters other super intelligences. Nice. All right. I've given that nobody reads books anymore. I'll reference back to the documentary I just did, The Thinking Game.

1:40:58It's such an amazing process to follow. And it gives you an inkling as to where things are going. And it's science fiction kind of being made real today. Hey, my kids read books. My son reminds me, Dad, you don't read books. You listen to books, which is true. Everything's on Audible these days. I want to jump into the robot world a little bit, in particular in China. And I'm going to hit on a couple of pieces here, then we'll talk about them. So this is the first one, AggieBot A2. This is a humanoid robot in China, has hit a Guinness World Record by walking 65 miles using hot swappable battery packs, right?

1:41:40This is 175 centimeters, 55 kilograms in weight, advanced GPS and LiDAR. So keep that in your mind. and then I want you to check out this video. I saw it this morning and it blew me away. It came from the humanoid hub and it's important to realize they specifically state this is all real footage. There's no CGI, there's no AI, there's no video speed up and this thing is called T-800 which sounds to me like Terminator 800 and after you see this video, I think you'll appreciate it even more.

1:42:45Okay. Okay. I mean, that, Salim is like, it's game over. No, no, it's not that. It's that, you know, if you're trying to promote a robot, having it doing kickboxing is not the great first thing you want to show. I can't wait to see. You pick another activity. I can't wait to see Optimus versus T-800. That's, you know, and by the way, there are a lot of groups getting ready. Show it drying dishes. is a lot of groups getting ready for unlimited fighting uh between robots uh first of all that if that was not cgi and i can't guarantee it's not they state it's not it looked awesome um naveen what do you think of that one i mean it's awesome as you say it's i think i'm i don't believe it's not a CGI, but we know.

1:43:39It looks pretty unrealistic to me. I mean, just the way the movements there, right? So it's crazy. Alex, what do you think? There's an entire two thirds of the surface economy that includes manual physical labor that is just waiting to be automated by humanoid robots. Even if they have battery lives of only three hours at the moment to need battery replacements or some sort of bucket brigade. This is happening. And we've talked for decades, going back to Asimov, going back to Rossum's universal robots, RUR, the original pointage of robots. This is what we've been talking about for 100 plus years at this point.

1:44:20It's finally happening. So coming back on a third story here in China, robots are remaking the Chinese economy. China installed 295 ,000 industrial robots last year, nine times more than the US and 50 % of the world's total industrial robot base, right? They're automating their factories and they need to, their entire economy was based on manufacturing. It's 25 % of China's GDP. And check out this quote down at the bottom, which came up when I was doing research here. And so it's China's National Development Reform Commission, spokesperson Li Chao warned of a humanoid robot bubble. There are now more than 150 humanoid robot companies in China.

1:45:06So we've got AI bubbles and humanoid robot bubbles. Interesting. Any comments on this, guys? The statistic that manufacturing 25 % of their GDP in robots are going to be doing most of that is an incredibly amazing number. Well, I find the idea that they put in nine times more than the U.S. an incredibly amazing number. I've made the point in the past that intelligence isn't just going to stay locked up in the data centers. It's going to walk right out of the data centers. And I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that in China. And we're going to see that increasingly in the U.S. and in the West as well.

1:45:47I agree with Jensen Huang that humanoid robots are one of the next multi-trillion dollar markets. All right, we've saved a fun conversation before we show you an incredible video outro here. So I'm going to play this. This is a clip from the promo for Age of Disclosure. We are not alone. How long have you and I been discussing this, Alex? I don't know. It's an interesting question. But I will say the allegations in this documentary are extraordinary. and maybe happy to comment more after we play the short clip. The American people are ready to receive the truth.

1:46:36Humanity is not the only intelligence in the universe. Humanity is not the only intelligent species. We are absolutely not alone. Non-human intelligence exists. UAPs are real. They're here and they're not human. I spent 25 years as a senior official with the CIA. I worked on highly classified UAP program. 28 years as an astrophysicist. I served as the fourth director of national intelligence. Director of aviation security in the National Security Council. The one-star admiral after 32 years of service. People that come forward with this, I feel like they've taken their life in their own hands.

1:47:11Wow. I watched this documentary twice, and I commend it to everybody. I think I, my personal opinion is, yes, of course, there is other life in the universe and in the galaxy. I think it's naive for us to believe anything less than that, right? We are one of a hundred million stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of, at last count, two trillion galaxies in the universe. And there may be an infinite number of universes. And just the notion that we are that special, you know, has been crushed every time by scientific discoveries over the last, you know, few thousand years.

1:47:56So, Alex? Well, I think the elephant in the room is that the allegations in this documentary go beyond asserting that there is non-human intelligent life elsewhere. The documentary contains what I view as incredibly serious allegations by 34 current and former U.S. government officials and contractors that, in short, that there has been an alleged 80-plus year-long cover-up of aliens, of so-called non-human intelligence or NHI. Of the spaceships, of the bodies, of the communications. of UAP crash retrievals, of recovered bodies on Earth. And I have so many thoughts regarding the allegations in this documentary, but maybe one more obvious thought, one less obvious thought.

1:48:49The one perhaps more obvious thought is if the allegations, even some substantial fraction of the allegations in this documentary are accurate, then the alleged legacy program, so-called, that's been responsible for the alleged cover-up, will perhaps have been responsible for sabotaging 80 years worth of potential scientific, technological, medical, maybe even ontological advances, and setting humanity back almost a century, maybe more. Again, assuming the allegations are in substance accurate, And I think history would judge any such program accordingly for setting back human progress if these allegations are accurate.

1:49:31That's the more obvious comment. The slightly less obvious comment is, again, assuming the allegations are substantially accurate, superintelligence, which we talk about all the time on the pod, seems to me like it's on an imminent collision course with any so-called non-human intelligence. If there is any non-human intelligence anywhere in the solar system, including on Earth, in the oceans, in low Earth orbit, etc., as alleged by this documentary, then I've mentioned in the past this notion that given enough superintelligence, any hidden agents become shallow. Superintelligence, AI, it's going to discover this.

1:50:14It's going to unearth any hidden agents anywhere in our solar system. So I don't think it's a tenable state of affairs if the allegations in this documentary are accurate, that basically, to caricature the documentary, the documentary tells the story of how humanity is basically drowning in technology that's falling from our sky from non-human intelligence. If that's accurate, AI is going to blow this, and superintelligence is going to blow this wide open. Yeah, the timing of all this is interesting. The documentary basically says, listen, it began before World War II in the 30s, into the 40s, and through today.

1:50:53And it talks about the interplay and the dance between alien visitations and UAPs flying to nuclear silos and disarming and arming nuclear warheads. So, I mean, it's a fascinating storyline here. But then what I find equally interesting is the fact that this process of disclosure is beginning now, like you say, on the precipice of humanity unveiling ASI. Coincidence or not? Yeah. Like ASI and NHI, if you want to call it that, these seem like they're on a collision course. Is it a predestined collision course if the allegations are accurate? I don't know, but it's, yeah. There's so many good science fiction stories that, you know, it's like, you know, they're here to prevent us from blowing ourselves up.

1:51:45They're here to prevent us from having rogue AI go in the wrong direction. That's the savior modality of these aliens and UAPs, which I'd love to believe. It does feel, oh, go ahead, sorry. No, I was going to say, Naveen, did you see this at all? I have not seen the movie, but Peter, to me, I just say there's no doubt we are not alone. And we all agree we are not alone. But I think this to me is more like a science fiction than really a reality here. I just absolutely do not believe that any cover-up can last 80 years, and especially a cover-up like this. This is something that would have come out long, long ago.

1:52:25I believe this is mostly some people who are delusional or some people who are looking to become famous or some people who just always say anything to give them a camera. If you watch a documentary like I have twice, and I think you would change your mind, the level of professionalism of these heads, these leaders from the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines, Senate, House, Defense Department, their pristine reputations and what they speak about. And again, they are putting their reputations at risk here. I think it leaves zero doubt for me that it's there. I'll just comment maybe at the meta level.

1:53:19I don't think for a topic as important as these allegations, we should need to rely on hearsay. And this is one of the reasons why I think artificial superintelligence is potentially so transformative. Superintelligence, if there are, as alleged, if our solar system is teeming with non-human intelligence, AI is going to find that, and I would expect it to find it pretty soon. So it may be the case that whereas there have been many allegations over the past decades of such cover-ups, but ultimately they're reduced to hearsay, I would like to see a far more scientific approach. And I think the key lever is going to be AI.

1:53:58Yeah. You know, I think what's hilarious is the state of humanity today. These aliens could land on the front lawn of the White House, you know, get on news cameras. And then the next day, everybody would say, well, you know, what's my Bitcoin price and who won the game? You know, we've become so numb to these extraordinary things. But - We have. And Sam Altman's also pointed this out, that we went from a world without AGI, arguably, to a world with AGI. And yes, it's economically transformative, but you didn't see people sort of riding in the streets or massive, truly massive social disruption.

1:54:35I think if the allegations are accurate, similarly, people will ask, as you say, like, what's next on television? All right. We're going to close out with this outro music called Dear Moon by David Drinkall. but I want to, you know, the lyrics on this are so incredibly good. David, you did an amazing job. I want to just take a second and read some of the lyrics. It says, Oh dear moon, you've had it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you in a pile. We're building Dyson swarms and the rent ain't cheap. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers weep. We'll miss you when you're gone, but the future marches on.

1:55:18Alex on the podcast with that apocalyptic, apocalyptic, apocalyptic, apocalyptic, that's it. Thank you. Alex with that apocalyptic grin, training wheels are off, folks. Let the real future begin. While Peter's yelling, asteroids first, Salim's saving one small piece, Imad's already pricing lunar credits on the lease. Do you want to express your feelings about the moon, Alex? Yes, please. I feel like just for the avoidance of doubt, I have to make a firm affirmative stance that I'm not anti-moon. Just for avoidance of doubt, it's crazy. We're in 2025 and I have to say that I'm not anti-moon. I'm not anti-solar system.

1:56:07I'm merely observing that naively if one extrapolates present data center trends, then disassembling the solar system becomes an attractive option inclusive of disassembling the moon. But I'm not anti-moon for what it's worth. Well, we appreciate that. We've had a lot of interesting comments about your commentary. And by the way, the current projection, for example, of Elon using mass drivers on the moon to get us to 100 terawatts of year of solar or of data centers doesn't make an appreciable dent in the moon. It still looked the same. But when we get to Dyson swarms, it's going to change. All right.

1:56:48Thank you, David Drinkall. Dear Moon, everybody enjoy this. It's a beautiful song. You hung there every evening Silver coin in the black Pulled the oceans like a lover Kept the planet on its track You gave us tides for sailing Gave the wolves a song to sing And every teenage heart Alight to swear eternal things Couples parked on hilltops Poets ran out of praise You turned ordinary nights Into extraordinary days For billions of quiet moments You were perfect, pure and true So thank you, darling moon For everything you do Oh dear moon, you've had it coming for a while We're kind of sorry but we need you in a pile We're building dice and swarms And the rain ain't cheap We'll turn you to solar panels While the lovers weep We'll miss you when you're gone But the future marches on Oh, but the future marches on Oh, we'll keep a little fragment Maybe one percent or two A crater with a plaque that says we once looked up to you We'll simulate the tides with orbital tugs and rings And VR honeymoon packages For nostalgic human beings Oh dear moon, you've got it coming for a while We're kinda sorry but we need you in a pie We're building Dyson swarms And the rent ain't cheap We'll turn you to solar panels While the lovers weep We'll miss you when you're gone But the future marches on Oh, but the future marches on Oh, Alex on the podcast With that apocalyptic grin Training wheels are off, folks Let the real future begin While Peter's yelling asteroids first Salem's saving one small piece Am I already pricing lunar credits on the lease Oh dear moon, you've had it coming for a while We're kinda sorry but we need you in a pile

2:00:32You were beautiful and vital, you were poetry and art Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. All right. DB2, Dave Blunden, we miss you. And Salim, sorry you missed that as well. Naveen, thank you for being a friend of the pod. Always a pleasure, brother. Thank you, brother. Yeah. And Alex, looking forward. We've got a recording on Friday. We're going to be up with Mustafa Salimán in Seattle. That'll be fun. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI. And then we've got another WTF episode on Saturday. A lot coming. If you've not subscribed, please do. That way, when we drop our episodes, which are becoming more frequent because the speed of this innovation is just skyrocketing, you'll know about it first.

2:01:34Gentlemen, have an amazing week and see you guys soon. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this reports for you.

2:02:10Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandis.com slash metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.

2:03:01even those who are hard to shop for. Toys and jewelry to new beauty brands and styles, these gifts go seamlessly from our stores to under your tree. Seriously, with these savings, why shop anywhere else?