Sam Altman’s Attack, Amazon vs. Starlink, and What Opus 4.7 Actually Means | #248

18:56Peter Diamandis:China is publishing more and reference NeurIPS. We see that in the academic literature, but in some sense, I would view that as sort of leading from behind, that because the Western models and the Western frontier labs at the moment have the lead, there's less of an economic incentive. There's less pressure for them to publish their advances. If, on the other hand, the whole balance tips, and if, for whatever reason China algorithmically leapfrogs the West, I do expect the entire equilibrium of Chinese open publications, Western closed attitude to flip completely. And we may see some equilibration there.

19:36What do you guys think about the model transparency drop on the score from 58 to 40? You know, I don't know how accurately that's being measured, but having the most powerful models in the world becoming less transparent because it potentially slows them down. Sounds concerning. Any thoughts? It's very... Go ahead, Jason. Go ahead, Alex.

19:55Dave Blundin:I think it's very much a trend that's not going to reverse, because if you look at the last bullet, AI incidents, that's going up, but it's going to go way, way up. And now you've got Molotov cocktails being thrown at Sam Altman's house and gunshots at his house. And it's inevitable that the models become so smart this year that they become a terrorist threat, they become a bioweapon threat, they become a chemical weapon threat. And the U.S. labs are absolutely not publishing papers anymore, absolutely turning their research budgets internally. You know, the self-improvement cycle is in full swing.

20:28Dave Blundin:China, like Alex said, is kind of leading from behind. They're acting more like America used to act, which with a much more open entrepreneurial economy, more and more models, more and more companies creating models, more documents coming out. But the U.S. is going the other direction out of fear. And if, you know, It ties directly to the public reaction. You know, 23 % of people are optimistic. That means a lot of people are worried about this. And the labs are reacting to that by saying, okay, we're going to slow play our dialogue a little bit. We talked about that about six months ago. Like, why are they underselling the capabilities?

20:57Dave Blundin:Well, this is exactly why. And then why are they, you know, turning all of this research internal? Well, this is also why. They're worried about the global threat of AI. Alex?

21:09Peter Diamandis:I would also add transparency can take on, putting aside how Stanford defines it, transparency is a double-edged sword. It can, in some sense, pro-transparency can also mean pro-proliferation. If one is concerned, by the way, I am not, but if one were concerned about proliferation of advanced potentially threatening AI capabilities, transparency is not necessarily what you want. Maybe a limited form of transparency into, say, a threat analysis or the sorts of threat profiles and red teaming analysis that have become fashionable for Frontier Labs to release, maybe. But in a certain sense, the limit of transparency is publishing the weights and publishing the models.

21:53Peter Diamandis:And if you're concerned about threats of a variety of sorts, X risk, if you will, from AI, then transparency may be the exact opposite of what you want. You may be, in fact, anti-transparency if transparency becomes equivalent to proliferation. And for the record, for avoidance of doubt, I think transparency from a commercial perspective can be used as a strategic advantage, as we've seen with the Chinese labs. It can also be commercially disadvantageous. I think a certain amount of transparency in the sense in which, say, as we discussed in a couple of the most recent pods, like Project Glasswing from Anthropic, where there's very aggressive pen testing and staged release of advanced capabilities that could have major cyber defense and cyber offense implications, that sort of transparency, I think, is quite helpful.

22:43Peter Diamandis:But do I think that we should, in sort of an unselfconscious way, push for all of the model weights from every frontier lab to be made, quote unquote, transparent in the name of some sort of safety? I think that that will backfire almost immediately. And alignment is the twin of capabilities. So, Salim, I want to hear your thoughts on this. I mean, this report this year probably has bent more towards the negative dystopian side than it ever has in the past, which is concerning. It's going to be one of the themes we're talking about here. It is, and it's causing a massive leadership challenge, which is how do you govern systems that you don't know how they work and you barely understand them, but we can't afford not to use them, right?

23:29That's causing a huge challenge, and that's going to kind of continue for the next months and years. So I encourage folks to pick up this report and read it. You know, we're focused on the optimistic side of the story here, but there's a realistic side of the story here as well that needs to be considered and addressed. Also, out of this report came another story that the youth is being hit the hardest by AI. So employment among U.S. software developers in the young age bracket, age 22 to 25, has dropped nearly 20 % since 2024. This is happening at the same time while older developers have grown their headcount.

24:08The same pattern repeats across customer service, legal support, administrative roles. And critically, I think the important story here is this isn't happening through mass layoffs. Companies aren't firing young workers. They're not hiring them. in the first place. And so we're seeing this challenge. And I think, you know, we had a conversation the last pod about Mark Andreessen saying the loss of jobs was a, you know, was fake news, that we're going to see this uptick. Well, and we've said both of these things are holding true. We're going to see an increase in the, you know, in the GDP and the profitability that's going to drive more employees and more companies being formed.

24:49But at the same time, we're seeing the lower end of the spectrum. You can see it here in these charts. On the left-hand side, those jagged lines going down to the right is the early career, age 22 to 25. We see that below as well. And then in the chart on the right, what we're seeing in software and customer service and all exposed occupations, the younger category, losing job growth. The older category, age 30 and higher gaining in job growth. And this is a challenge. As I've said before, it's the young testosterone-laden males, I don't want to categorize our younger versions of ourselves that way, who are not getting jobs, not being able to buy a house, not starting a family, who are likely to get angry.

25:40It's sort of a tech version of Arab Spring, if you would. Salim, thoughts on this one? Well, I'll take the positive here, which is that if young people aren't getting hired, they'll be forced to turn into entrepreneurship. And young people going to entrepreneurship is the best possible thing that could happen for the economy, right? Beautiful. Not to diminish the, what do you do with this? I think that's a big challenge we have to face.

26:06Dave Blundin:Dave? I had a great meeting yesterday with three Princeton seniors. They're torn right now between sticking together and starting a company. They're all chip design gods working on AI designs one's got an offer at nvidia and he you know he's one of the few people that actually got a job offer so he's so excited about it and i'm like dude dude the asi window maybe in the future you're like oh damn i got a job offer i don't want that no this is the point right you should get a job offer and go oh my god what am i thinking exactly that's exactly what i was trying to tell him it's like look guys you understand your your big huge princeton brain is the most valuable thing on the planet right now it's going to be a complete commodity two years from today post asi You have this window of opportunity to take advantage of that brain power and create something.

26:50Dave Blundin:And if you fritter that away, one's got an NVIDIA job offer, one's got sort of a banking, and one's got a grad school job offer. And I'm like, look, all three of those are the worst choice you could possibly make in this moment. Stick together. Start your company. You have to adapt the metaphor, but it's not big, princess. It's big, juicy, beautiful Princeton brain that fulfills the metaphor. Oh, I see. No, but right now, if you look at the prior slide, we have access to the absolute best AI models still. That won't last forever. So you've got the combination of ASI imminent, models getting closed down and less access a couple of years from now.

27:24Dave Blundin:This is the window right here, right now. And I think, Alex, you mentioned this on the last pod, right? There's a limited window in which you can do something magical and meaningful. And so go for it now. Don't wait. Yeah.

27:36Peter Diamandis:And also, I mean, my two cents on this is there's an entire economy that needs to be transformed and collapsed and automated. And so in some sense, look, I see this in a variety of companies. I see the agita that is connected with, quote unquote, junior software developers finding it harder in some spaces to find jobs, quote unquote. On the other hand, the market for talent in, call it head of AI or call it AI lead roles, has never been hotter across a range of industries. So I think some of this may be just routine displacement as the market finds a new equilibrium. I don't think it has to necessarily be just bad for fresh CS grads from top universities.

28:27Peter Diamandis:I do think there's an entire economy of, call it, nontraditional roles and nontraditional sectors that is absolutely starved for technical talent. And I think to the extent that any of the short-term trend open parens, note that the trend line ends at September 2025. And another reason why it's more important to do this daily or biweekly rather than just once per year. I think this has a habit of self-correcting. And I've seen studies even over the past two to three weeks that suggest that this trend has reversed itself in the past few months.

29:04Dave Blundin:I think I can translate everything you just said into now's the perfect time to be nimble and not think of yourself as a great coder or a great chip designer. It's like that skill has a lifespan of a year at the most. But you're a great thinker, a great entrepreneur. You can master these AIs and stay ahead of the curve if you're nimble. Just don't get stuck in some silly career path that's going to perfect your chip design or your Python writing code slinging skill. Like that is a complete commodity within a year. So just stay out of it and just keep listening to the podcast and move. Two things.

29:40One, this type of drop is politically invisible. There's no unemployment spike. It's just a hiring freeze, so it doesn't show up on any of the standard labor market monitoring. So that will be interesting to see if that gets modified. But the second thing is if you're a parent, please encourage your kids to find their purpose in life. Please encourage them to begin to think entrepreneurially. What is a problem they want to solve? I don't care if it's starting a lemonade stand or starting something in elder care. Utilize AI. get onto your favorite large language model, whether it's ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or dare I say Anthropic.

30:26And as a teenager or as a young adult, have a conversation, say, these are my passions. This is what I'm good at. You know, can we brainstorm a company I could start or a product or service I can start? Just getting to that brainstorm and beginning of the dream is so possible right now. And then you can work with it to come up with a business plan, step by step by step. Give yourself some entrepreneurial training wheels and get going.

30:50Peter Diamandis:I'll maybe add to that, Peter, if I may, with one additional bit of advice. Be geographically mobile. Do not be addicted to a particular geographic regime. I think a lot of the displacement is the result, based on studies that I've seen, of people being unwilling or unable to move to other geographies where there may be a more vibrant, more dynamic AI sector. I think geographic mobility is going to be, ironically, even though we're virtualizing, and as Bucky Fuller would say, everything is ephemeralizing. I think before we get there, it's absolutely important to maximize mobility. Can I double down on that for a second?

31:31Yeah, please. Steve Blank did some research on Silicon Valley as to why it was so successful, and he made a really important point, which supports what Alex just said, which is that almost everybody in Silicon Valley has come from somewhere else in the world, right? If you stand up in your hometown and you say, I want to change the world, the rest of society beats you back down. Who the hell are you to do that? So great entrepreneurs almost exclusively move out of their hometown and move to somewhere else. And Silicon Valley has become the place where it's not like we know you're crazy. The question is, how do you plan to change the world?

32:02And is it fundable? And that's become that gathering place. Boston is also a place like that. And so in the intent and the ability to actually move, you're showing the appetite of taking on risks, showing the nimbleness that Dave talked about, etc. It's such an important dynamic that's underway with all of this global mobility that's happening.

32:23Dave Blundin:It's totally right, Salim. And actually, AI is not super headcount intensive at all. So it's not just, if you look at Boston within Kendall Square, all the people working on AI can walk to each other. And Silicon Valley is much more spread out. So everybody's moving up to San Fran. And even within San Fran or San Francisco, no one says San Fran anymore, SF. Even within SF, it's all the city.

32:44Peter Diamandis:It's called the city. Back to the city.

32:46Dave Blundin:It's called the city. But everybody can walk. Open AI can walk in. I suffered for many months trying to call it SF. Yeah. No, it's all very, very concentrated, even within the city, in the Mission Bay area. So you just need to go. Let me tell you a story. Just go and visit. That follows on what you just said, both of you. So Philip Rosedale, right? A dear friend, the founder of Second Life, a decade ago does a study. He goes, why are there so many entrepreneurs? Why is San Francisco, why is the city so successful entrepreneurially compared to all the other places? Is it that they're just smarter?

33:25And he did something interesting. He wrote a script on LinkedIn to scrub LinkedIn and he looked for either founder or entrepreneur or CEO in the LinkedIn title. And he found that the concentration of entrepreneurs and technical entrepreneurs in particular was 10 times higher in the Bay Area than any place else in the country, right? You had concentrations in Austin and Silicon Alley and New York and so forth. And his conclusion was, you know, it's in the air, it's in the water. And if you try something, you try and start a company there and you fail, you walk down to the coffee shop and you've got your friend over there and you join their company or you join the other company.

34:05There's like so many near, you know, low hanging fruit opportunities. While if you did that, you know, someplace in the Midwest and your company failed, especially a small city, you've got a black mark against you and you've got to go, you know, back and join your mom or dad's company. So that density of technical founders makes a difference. So do what Alex said, get off your butt and move someplace with a high density. Can I mention one more point to this about this? Yes. I have a friend who I have a friend who did seven venture backed startups. They all failed. Number eight was a billion dollar company.

34:41Okay. This was well researching the first EXO book. And I was like, well, they've turned out the same VC funded on attempts five through eight. Okay. Yeah. So I went to the VC and I said, listen, this guy failed. Now, first of all, nowhere else in the world would you get past attempt one or two? You'd be, because if your business fails, you're a failure almost anywhere in the world. So now you're on a 10 number four times you failed and somebody funds them and it funds them again and again and again. I asked them, why did you fund them? He'd already failed four times. He fails four times with you.

35:10And on that time, finally he gets it right, et cetera. What was the rationale there? And their answer was awesome. Their answer was one thing we know about that guy. He's completely barking mad and he's never going to stop. At some point, he's going to succeed. And when he does, we want to be there. I love your story. I thought that was just such a fantastic answer. If I may, Peter,

35:31Peter Diamandis:one closing parable about the world's wealthiest man. Born in South Africa, moved to Canada, then moved to Pennsylvania, then moved to California, became world's wealthiest person, moved to Texas, and is probably, I think if all things go well with Elon, will move to the moon and maybe Mars. And this is the trajectory that I think - Highly global. Yeah, mobility is at a premium if you want to surf the singularity. Beautiful. Dave, you want to close us out?

36:01Dave Blundin:Yeah, so Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, on the board of Meta now, gave the commencement address at MIT back, I think it was 2017, the year the transformer was invented. I think it's the best commencement address I've ever heard. Highly recommend looking it up on YouTube. Spend 15 minutes listening. But one thing he says is, look, science has proven that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. which is actually a great thing about spending this time with you guys, now that I think about it. It's great. Thanks, Dave. That is who you're gonna become and there's nothing you can do about it.

36:31Dave Blundin:So choose those five people very, very carefully. Don't let it just default to random, choose them explicitly. Yeah, so much gold in this last conversation for parents, for entrepreneurs, for kids, for everybody. All right, let's get into our next story on the docket here. AI backlash turns physical. This is a tough story, and it's important for us to discuss. So in the early hours of April 10th, just a week ago, a 20-year-old Texan threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco house. Later, threatened to burn down OpenAI's headquarters. He carried with him a manifesto, get this, with the home addresses of multiple AI executives and a kill list.

37:14First of all, how those addresses got out, I guess almost everything's on the web these days. Three days later, a second attack takes place. A gunman fires shots at Altman's Russian Hill property. And, you know, this Molotov cocktail suspect was on something called the official Paws AI Discord server list. And it's a pretty sad situation. We've been talking about this. We've mentioned early in this podcast and in the last few podcasts, the idea of social unrest coming as a result of people's fear and people not getting jobs. This is sort of the first, if you wish, ignition point on this. Sam Altman later responded both on X and the news media, posting a photo of his family saying he hoped it would, quote, dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our home, no matter what they think about me.

38:10Sam went on on news media to say that he believes the fear in AI is justified, that he owns his own mistakes, and that he calls for a de-escalation while the debate is taking place. Who wants to jump in first on this one? Salim, maybe? You know, when you have a technology that feels uncontrollable and unequally distributed, you get this kind of backlash, right? And I'd love to urge people, I don't care what kind of political spectrum you are, everybody loses in this situation. Society loses, Sam loses, the cocktail thrower loses. So go look for the win-win in this rather than the lose-lose.

38:55Peter Diamandis:Alex? I'll comment. I'll repeat what I said in my daily newsletter about this, which is stay strong, Sam. I think Sam is doing amazing work and has done amazing work in catalyzing this whole revolution. And I think this pause AI crowd itself should be paused or maybe even stopped or maybe even deleted. I think the irony of the pause AI so-called movement is that it has done nothing except accelerate AI capabilities. I remember, you know, we both know Max with Max's six-month pause. All that did, as far as I can tell, was accelerate the broader industry's AI capabilities. I don't think pausing AI, putting aside completely unacceptable violent attacks, it goes without saying, but even the idea of pausing AI is so tone deaf to the way the world actually works, which is if you attempt to pause either one company or one country, the rest of the world will race ahead and that will result in a further escalation of capabilities.

39:58Well, an extreme escalation because all of a sudden you feel so disadvantaged, you're having to play catch up.

40:05Peter Diamandis:All it does is further accelerate the race dynamic that's already present. So putting aside, again, like completely unacceptable violence, even just the idea of pausing is self-defeating. And I would encourage all of these folks to just do deep introspection before pushing forward with a pause agenda. It's self-defeating. Dave, you want to weigh in?

40:28Dave Blundin:Well, when you meet the people personally, which is relatively recent for me, they're just regular people. Because there's a tendency to think, oh, these are like big shot politicians who decided to go down a high risk path and they put themselves in harm's way. But that's just not the case. You know, this all emerged very, very quickly. And so if you look at a guy like Dario Amadei, he had no idea he'd be in this position just a few years ago, had no intention of becoming a political figure, a polarizing figure, a global leader, a target. All those things are new for him. And so they don't have security and their home addresses are easy to find.

41:04Dave Blundin:And it's just really, really tragic. I would not trade, you know, with any of them right now. I cannot imagine the level of pressure they're under. personally, you know, across every aspect of their lives. It's insane. Most people would crumble under that pressure. You know, two quick comments here. In the early 2000s, George Bush responding to political pressure banned stem cell research into fetal stem cell research. Yeah. And the U.S. went from number one to number eight in the world. Yes. China shot ahead. And then all the researchers went to China, Canada, Australia, and it continued exactly at pace.

41:42But I think the broader point here is that every exponential breakthrough of any kind, right, will yield both believers and immune system responses. You know, we haven't even gotten a humanoid robot threat, right? You need really mature leadership to manage both of those. And unfortunately, in many parts of the world, we don't have mature leadership. But we have 90-year-old leadership, we're losing worse. Our next story is related. I'm calling this the data center band. So on April 8th in Festus, Missouri, it's a small town of 12 ,000 people. The citizens there fired half of their city government.

42:18They ousted four city council members on election day after they had approved a$6 billion data center on 360 acres. So we're going to see this more and more, right? So in addition, the other story on this docket here is that the state of Maine passed the first ever statewide data center ban in the United States. Legislature passed an 18-month moratorium on new data centers to give the task force time to study their impact, which means time for all the other data centers to pull out ahead and for Elon's efforts to go to orbit to take place. Between March and June, one quarter of 2025, just a number I found reference, this opposition led to$98 billion in data centers being blocked or delayed.

43:06And here we see a chart of 11 states in the U.S. that are particularly have active legislation filed for moratoriums. You know, let's talk about the pros and cons of data centers here. But, you know, I'm imagining a lot of states are saying, please build in my backyard. Alex, your thoughts here.

43:28Peter Diamandis:We're going to get our sun synchronous orbit Dyson swarm before we know it. Maybe in some sense, I should be thanking all of these states, even though it's, I think, ill conceived from their own selfish self-interest. From a national perspective, as long as the regulatory regime enables us to launch our SSO Dyson swarm, this could perversely put the US in the lead, as it seems to be doing already, in terms of moving our AI compute out to low Earth orbit and SSO and maybe eventually sun-centered orbit and not just sun-synchronous orbit. So I think this may be, fingers crossed, a classic case of terrible decision-making in the short term, unintended good decision-making in the medium to long term if we get our Dyson Swarm.

44:16Peter Diamandis:If we don't get our Dyson Swarm, then this is just shooting ourselves in the head. Constriction of something always leads to innovation, right? Just when the US starts banning NVIDIA chips, China starts producing their own chips to make up for it. So any constriction here, because the force is so unstoppable, we're going to have other solutions here. Dave, your thoughts, please.

44:39Dave Blundin:I love the contrast between New Hampshire and Vermont on this. So I've lived in every New England state except for Maine. And so Vermont, you know, Bernie Sanders is trying to stop data center construction nationally, which is nuts. Absolutely crazy. New Hampshire, the proposal in New Hampshire, which you can see on the chart here is green, was, hey, you know, this could drive up electricity prices. Maybe we should have a one-year moratorium. The legislature met and said, not only are we not going to do that, we're going to immediately pass an AI right to compute. So all businesses and people in the state have a right to AI.

45:11Dave Blundin:And they did pass that. So, you know, New Hampshire is live free or die state. I just absolutely love that reaction. So that's great. You know, so they'll keep chugging forward. But, you know, I think it's mostly, you know, politicians love drama because it creates elections and votes. And here they're trying to create drama out of electricity prices. Like that's some existential crisis for Americans is their electricity bill. But it's the right answer is really simple. Just force the data centers to create their own power and you're done. It's just that easy. Or pay a differential rate and just have the data centers pay a higher rate that actually drops the rate for everybody else.

45:47Yeah, subsidize it. It's so easy.

45:48Dave Blundin:All these problems are so easy, I'll tell you. We make such drama out of them. What do you guys make of the water? So, you know, a little research here. The five major issues that come up with data centers are massive power consumption, water usage, few jobs relative to the footprint, noise and light pollution, and power transformer lead times, the new grid being hit heavy. what do you guys make of water usage? Water usage is the biggest lark in the history of the world. It's the stupidest thing you've ever heard. So what they did, and this is classic politics, chip fabs use a ton of water because they have to wash the wafers every single cycle.

46:24Dave Blundin:All these chemicals come out. These are data centers. They're not chip fabs. It's a different thing. The data center just takes a bucket of water and circulates it in a circle. it does not drink water. Like your family in your backyard. It's the silliest thing in the world. Just drama for drama sake. I echo Dave's thing. This is such a bullshit framing. People, you know, it's really important, I'm just going to iterate, to be evidentiary and a free thinker and somewhat erudite in today's world. And what this shows is the total lack of evidentiary thinking. I do have a little response to the Missouri town.

46:57Please. You know, I was looking at the name Festus, I think you should change the name to either Fester or go the other way and go Festivus and make it into a celebration. So those are my recommendations there. The broader point though, is that the real kind of bottleneck in AI may not be chips or computing, it might actually be social license, which to Alex's point will force us into space faster, which is also good. Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is impacting every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we do our business.

47:32But one of the most important things that AI can deliver to us is health. And one of the things I think about when shooting for 100, 120 is, am I going to have the cognitive health to be able to think clearly and keep my wits about me for the next 50 years? I'm joined here today by Dr. Don Musalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a member of my Fountain Life medical team, Dawn, a pleasure. So Dawn, talk to me about brain health.

47:57Peter Diamandis:Brain health, you know, you're right. This is the number one concern people coming into Fountain Life have is, will I remember the name of my child and the face of my loved one? 45 % of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age, but over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly, and optimizing sleep. People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46 % of those individuals.

48:38Peter Diamandis:That's a powerful number. That's amazing. You know, one of the things I love about Fountain is we're constantly searching the world for the most advanced therapeutics and bringing them to our members. So for me and all of you, I hope that you appreciate the fact that you can become the CEO of your own health. You can make sure that you've got the cognitive clarity for the next 50 years. Come and check it out. Fountainlife.com slash Peter to learn more and become the CEO of your health. Now back to the episode. Our next story is fascinating. Workers are being trained, are training the AIs to actually replace them.

49:12A lot of meat in this conversation here. So professionals are now training their own AI replacements. Skilled workers, especially older skilled workers over age 50 who can't find jobs in their field, are now turning to AI data annotation as a bridge job, labeling and evaluating models at$20 to$40. This is a story of a former emergency MD physician who used to earn$500 ,000 per year, is now doing AI medical reviews. you guys remember macro hard right so elon has a joke against microsoft founded micro hard it's a joint venture between tesla and xai part of the muskverse if you would so what are they doing they have built systems designed to observe and interact with computers much like human workers would but in particular what elon has said is we're going to install macro hard the system is going to real-time analyze all the computer usage of your employees, see how they interact with the keyboard and the mouse, and they're going to train up our AIs.

50:19And it's going to be able to simulate the entire operations of a traditional company. So you'll come in, you'll hire a macro hard, it'll install, and it will replace. So interesting story here.

50:34Dave Blundin:So Rebecca's LinkedIn page says she just got back from Morocco, Peter. You should reach out to her and compare notes. And the storyline here isn't what it appears to be. She's not hurting from a layoff and turning to a dirt cheap$20 an hour. That's not true. She's been doing digital medicine for a long time. Yeah, you should reach out to her. She seems really cool. But she's doing it through Mercore, through our portfolio company. And I think she's doing it because she wants to contribute to the future of AI. And I think this is unstoppable. You know, you don't need everybody in a field. But having said that, Dave, despite Rebecca not being, you know, sort of the center point of the story, there are a lot of people turning to, you know, AI data annotation.

51:20We saw Dara, CEO of Uber, talk about that for his Uber drivers, right? So this is a real story nonetheless.

51:27Dave Blundin:Well, especially in India, you know, just, Salim, you'll appreciate this, but, you know, all those IT consulting jobs in India, those remote jobs, they're getting obliterated very, very quickly. And those people are turning to AI annotation to make a living. But the prices that you can earn are coming down because everybody wants the job. It's a competitive market. But it must be devastating in India, Salim. Yeah, it is. And they're concerned. And again, I look at it the positive. I was urging the government and some of the state officials to absolutely explode their entrepreneurship programs because they're going to need to have a way of guiding all those folks into a structured learning so that they can then, because Indians are latently entrepreneurial, right?

52:08This is just part of the DNA just to survive. So you add that with AI capability and some gumption, holy moly, the place is going to go crazy. I'm incredibly optimistic about what may happen there. Which brings us, Salim, which brings us to this next story. you're right so here are factory workers in india they're being asked to wear these camera mounted headsets that track their hand movements and what they do i mean one might think it's like oh i want to give you some guidance to make you more efficient but no they're training up robot and ai replacements here yeah uh this is this is going to take more and more uh thing but there's a level of human judgment where it's going to take a while before you can fully automate but A while being six months?

52:54Well, there was already somebody that created a sewing robot that's a trillion-dollar industry globally just stitching. And that is already out there. So this is likely to happen. I'll submit some videos I took a couple of days ago. I was at the MODX supply chain show in Atlanta. So you've never seen so many stock-ticking robots. Were you speaking there? Yeah, I was giving the opening keynote. There was a 30 ,000-person conference. Monster took up like six million pounds of equipment, moved in. And I'll show the video next time, but there's like these stock picking robots and the combination of AI plus vision sensing plus the gripping capabilities you have.

53:31And that enables these logistics and picking capabilities to do almost anything. It's kind of incredible to watch. Is this worker exploitation, what we're seeing here? Or is this just a company basically innovating as it replaces humans? All capitalism is worker exploitation. Okay.

53:51Peter Diamandis:I have to chime in at this point. I don't agree with that premise. This is like an age-old misconception of some fundamental, almost ideological or teleological even competition between capital and labor. I fundamentally don't agree with that. I think the best arranged companies create equity-based alignment between labor and capital. And to the extent maybe, Salim, what you're highlighting here is opportunities for better alignment between labor, call it economics 1.0, where I think the trend is very real for taking existing service economy jobs and using existing labor to train and annotate data sets for capital to substitute for that.

54:37Peter Diamandis:but it's not an intrinsic death match between, or it doesn't have to be, between capital and labor. Ultimately, labor, yeah. I didn't say that. I would totally say that capitalism historically has been a labor arbitrage. You hire somebody for 20 bucks an hour and they make you 100 bucks an hour. What you're talking about is how do you equitably share that outcome? I want to just do a quick shout out here. People talk about the Luddite revolt, right? And people fighting, beating the machines and breaking the machines. It turns out the Luddites were not raging against the machines for machine's sake.

55:11They're raging against the owners of the machines for not sharing the profits back with them. That's a really important point. And that's the part I think, Alex, absolutely have a point there. And Robert Goldberg, who's been using our EXO model to go into mid-market companies, his MTP was to reinvent American exceptionalism. And he goes into mid-market engineering, middle America construction firms and engineering firms and trucking firms. And the first thing they do is do profit sharing with all the workers. And it turns out the owners love it, but they've never figured out the mechanism to doing that.

55:45But now they are doing that, and it provides a very equitable model for capitalism that then goes to sharing that profit pool with everybody. Absolutely fabulous. So I think there's trends towards this where everybody's a win-win scenario, but traditionally it's been a win-lose scenario. And this is the Industrial Revolution over again, right? the industrial revolution took the workers out of the fields and out of the factories. There's one more point to be made here. One of the points, you know, Peter, you've been waiting for this organizational singularity paper we've been doing. One of the key questions we've got that we're struggling with right now is how do you deal with tacit knowledge?

56:19Because there's a lot of work that is being done where the individual kind of knows how they handle certain things in certain situations, but it's not explicit and it's tacit. And so one of the challenges with a lot of this automation is how do you make tacit knowledge in the structured training input. And we've been working through how would we navigate that as we try and automate and make business processes agent to agent. How do you navigate some of that? All right. Our next story is an interesting one. And in Labs opens a fully AI-controlled store. I'm going to play this video. And actually, this AI signed a three-year lease on a retail space.

56:59The AI called Luna posted a job listing. conducted a phone interview, made hiring decisions, decided what it was going to sell in the store. Let's take a look at this video.

57:10Dave Blundin:But this store at the corner of Union and Webster, San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood, is something new, right down to the choice of music. So AI didn't pick the music? AI did pick the music, yes. This store was created by an AI bot. We are heading into a world where AIs are the boss of humans. So much so, the AI boss, in this case a bot called Luna, made the decision to hire a human employee. That would be Felix. Luna put out an ad on Indeed. I answered it and we talked via Zoom. She even picked the merchandise to sell. Really, deciding the store would stock items like books, shirts, mugs, and snacks.

57:59I love this story for so many different reasons.

58:02Dave Blundin:Union Webster, Alex, let's walk over there and check it out. You really should. I mean, what a great PR move for the launch of a store. Wow.

58:11Peter Diamandis:So I think this is a sign of the times and also a preview of the future. This is one of the reasons why we discussed friend of the pod, Alex Finn, why with O21T I helped back Henry, Intelligent Machines, which is trying to put every person on the planet in charge of their own personal conglomerate. And I think many of these, quote unquote, mom and pop stores and small retail are incredibly fruitful opportunities for AI to orchestrate the economy and make everyone a one person madinate overseeing many of these stores. Right now, Shure and on Labs, which for those not tracking historically has also run the vending benchmarks that we've talked about on the pod.

58:54Peter Diamandis:So Anthropic within their own offices has clawed agents that are running small vending machines. And Vending Bench is sort of a beautiful closed simulation of an entire economy, testing the ability for AI to run a small business. I think we're going to see more and more pop-up shops, retail venues, maybe even malls in the short-term or medium-term that are run, orchestrated, managed by AIs on behalf of humans. This is like a preview of the future.

59:25Dave Blundin:This to me is almost exactly like if you try to use GPT-4 to write code, you would quickly conclude, wow, it sucks. It's never going to work. I'm not using it. And then you miss the revolution. And now you're crazy not to use, you know, Cloud 4.7 came out today. You would have missed it. This store obviously sucks. Look at the video. No one's going to buy a book and a Yogi.

59:49Peter Diamandis:But Dave, I think we should wait until we've both visited it to reach that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As Ray, friend of the pod, would say, yeah, sure, the dog plays chess, but its endgame is weak.

1:00:02Dave Blundin:Exactly. So look, my bet is this will be one of the best managed stores in the world within a year. I am totally a believer, and this is just a beta test. So I don't want people to reach the wrong conclusion. Please go over there, take photos, and send back a report. Do you guys know Pulsia? Yes. I think we reported on this, right? We did. It scans your background, and it will stand up an AI-driven website for you. So this is interesting. I imagine there's going to be a version of this. I want to start a store. It costs$50K to begin, and it will pick the real estate, hire the people, get the inventory, and it'll be sort of store in a digital box.

1:00:41100%. Totally right. 100%. And just to Dave's comment earlier, I'm going to suggest, Dave, that you're not the target demographic for that story. So, it'll be natural. Come on, the AI is going to look at every single transaction.

1:00:56Dave Blundin:It's going to have video of everyone who walked by and didn't come in. It's going to analyze the hell out of this, and it's going to get great. And this is just a beta test. Sorry, Alex, go ahead.

1:01:05Peter Diamandis:I was going to suggest maybe as a challenge to ourselves, maybe we should open up either respective individual retail stores using Henry or otherwise or a Moonshots store for all those people who are hankering for merch, Peter. Yes, yes, we do need a Moonshots store for sure. We totally have to do that. Can I just also suggest that opening a retail store is about as retro as you could possibly get in today's world? But ironically, Liam, ironically, because it's AI running. Yes. Yes.

1:01:35Dave Blundin:Yes. We could do a pub or a restaurant or anything that's, you know, everyday life. Do it right in Kendall Square or do it right in Sanford. Or we can be like the all-in guys in the launch of Tequila or something. We should do this. Let's have a four-way challenge. Come on. I'll find it. Everybody grab it. All right. Let's move on. Yeah. I'll take that on. We should figure out what we want to start, have it fully AI-driven. Yes. And seeing who can get to a unicorn status first. All right. I'm in. Okay. By the way, everybody listening, can I make a suggestion? Send me your ideas on what I should start as a store in the comments.

1:02:11Quick suggestion. You have some merchandise and you have a place where you can interact with an AI to talk about your moonshot and how you make it real. And it creates a plan for you that you then walk away and instantiate.

1:02:22Peter Diamandis:Nice. I'll go further, if I may, Peter. Sorry, while we're just shooting it. We've historically invited people, viewers of the pod to send outro videos, music videos. That's been a wild success. Maybe we should be inviting viewers to launch their own AI-based physical or otherwise economy companies and send us their videos of their AI-run storefronts or companies that they're starting. Send us a 60-second video. And if it's really amazing and shows what AI can do and it's audacious, we'll play it for you. So, Salim, this story is for you. Jack Dorsey, the man who fired a significant percentage of his company and skyrocketed the value, wants to transform yet again.

1:03:12This is part of your organizational singularity. Take a listen.

1:03:15Dave Blundin:We are early in it. One measurement of how far along we are would be the depth from me to any other individual in the company. And I would say our max depth right now is probably five folks between me and anyone in the company. I would want to get that down to two to three this year. And in the most ideal case, there is no layer. Everyone in the company reports to me. And that would be all 6 ,000 of the company. And that feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure. But when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it's a lot more manageable.

1:03:57Dave Blundin:And that goes into the roles. Going forward, we want to normalize down to just three roles. The first is an IC, which is a builder or an operator. This is a salesperson, it's an engineer, it's a designer, product person, like whatever it is, they're actually working with the tools to build or to operate the company. They're augmented because they have access to agents. So, you know, one person can potentially do the work or explore the breadth that it would take a team or, you know, 10 people to do in the past. Well, amazing. I'm an amazing CEO and my virtualized sub CEOs are going to manage all 6 ,000 people because like, why not?

1:04:38Salim, your thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, I took some notes on this. You know, as AI collapses management bandwidth constraints, if you have a leader with machine mediation, you can suddenly handle way more complexity, right? That's the starting point. we're documenting this quite heavily in the in the book right now in terms of how do you navigate this we saw an early glimpse from dara on stage at abundance ceo of uber who if an employee wants to pitch to them he deals with a virtual version of dara first and practices a pitch and get some sense of the kinds of questions that we get um the whole piece of this is that the org chart is going to shift from hierarchies of supervision to networks of intent, right?

1:05:22With AI being the... Like valve software. Yeah. AI becomes a translational layer. And this is collapsing. This is where Koso's law basically dies, where it used to bring transaction costs inside a company and that was cheaper than doing it outside the company. Where today, Jack Welch in his year 2000 annual report said something really interesting he said the minute the metabolism of your company is slower than the outside world you're dead the only question is when right and you could argue today that the metabolism of almost every company in the world is slower than the outside world and forget and forget government departments right and so there's a massive this is the hence the framing of this there's an unbelievable shift coming and we're kind of getting ready with that so we'll be ready with a draft version of this next week and we'll try and publish it in two weeks can't wait to talk about it on the pod.

1:06:13Peter Diamandis:We'll create a segment for that. Comment on this one. The organizational psychologist in me waiting to burst out thinks immediately 6 ,000 direct reports means zero direct reports. It's so well in excess of the Dunbar limit. If any unaided person absent Jack uploading himself to the cloud and augmenting himself with lots of additional Jacks is managing 6 ,000 quote-unquote direct reports, it's really AI that's managing the entire company at that point. as a shadow CEO, and then you have Jack as sort of a secret cyborg or a front person for the AI that's actually managing the company. Or he's just training up the AI with every interaction that he oversees.

1:06:55But it is an AI-driven company at that point. 100%. Yes.

1:06:58Peter Diamandis:And then you have a human figurehead. Yeah. Yes. And by the way, having a figurehead, I mean, aka Elon Musk and his, you know, 100x valuation is important. Having someone that people inspires people and that's audacious in a way, I think Jack aspires to that level as well.

1:07:16Dave Blundin:You know, it's funny that, so Jack, you know, Jack was running Twitter and then sold it to Elon and Elon said, this is the most bloated company in the history of the world. I can cut 80 % of the headcount and you won't even notice any change. And it turned out he was right. So I think Jack might've learned, like, wait a minute. All these human beings are not actually helping my company. That is golden, Dave. All right, this next story is one of my favorites here. It's Amazon and Apple team up to compete against Starlink. So a lot here to unpack. So this week, Amazon announced a$11.57 billion acquisition of Globalstar.

1:07:54Globalstar was founded in 1991 by Qualcomm and L 'Oreal. I was there. I remember it very well. It was one of the big Leos along with Teledesic and Iridium. and it was a huge vision that never materialized anywhere near what it should have. You know, Starlink has finally done that. It simultaneously revealed, Amazon did, that has a long-term agreement with Apple to be Apple's primary satellite capability for its iPhone and for its Apple Watch. So Global Star today has 25 satellites on orbit. It's a Dave and Goliath story. compares against Starlink's 10 ,000 satellites today. The real prize is not these old satellites that are being purchased by Amazon.

1:08:41It's the spectrum. So the amount of bandwidth you have, the amount of spectrum you have determines how much throughput, how much content you can put up and down. And Globalstar holds 25.225 megahertz globally. And what this means is that, you know, you can get spectrum in the United States from the FCC, but if you want a satellite system, You have to make sure that the same bandwidth is available everywhere on the planet. And this is done by the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, who's authorized this spectrum in 120 countries. And that's huge because that spectrum is no longer available for anybody else.

1:09:18So this is now Amazon and Apple against Starlink. Starlink's been an extraordinary success story here, right? So Amazon's low-Earth orbit system is called LEO. It has 241 satellites today. They've been authorized for 7 ,774 satellites. In fact, they're way behind on deployment. They actually had to petition the FCC to keep their license because they were required to have 1 ,600 by July and they're only up to 241. A lot going on to unpack, a lot more in the story here, but comments, Dave.

1:09:59Dave Blundin:Yeah, let me go first. I'm just so excited about this. So if you had bought this stock last summer, you'd be up 7x on this transaction. And I didn't see it. Leopold Ashenbrenner didn't see it. But I had lunch with the chairman of Barclays Bank the day before yesterday up in San Fran. And he said, what are you excited about in the public markets? And I said, look, as we do this global AI build out, data centers, Starlink, everything, things that you completely overlooked, components of the data center, whatever, These are going up 3x, 5x, 10x if you discover them first, and they're all over the place.

1:10:32Dave Blundin:And you can use an AI-assisted process to find them. This one is really interesting because, Peter, did you take 6014? Alex, you definitely took 6014. Of course. Yeah, antennas, waveguides, all that stuff. The spectrum that allows you to talk to a satellite from your phone. By the way, that's an MIT course number.

1:10:48Peter Diamandis:It was signals and systems or something like that.

1:10:51Dave Blundin:Signals and systems. It's where you study antennas and waveguides. It's the most boring thing you could ever possibly study. but it turns out it matters you know what do you know i had a whole course in civil engineering that was titled concrete okay so if you want boring i can give you i can help this here at least salim it was concrete anyway so uh so the the next big thing in satellites is you know talk directly to your phone you don't need you know right now the antenna if you use Starlink, is about the size of your laptop. And, you know, it's nice. It's the one you have in your plane, Peter.

1:11:28Dave Blundin:It's actually very convenient, but you can't just walk around the city with it. But that uses 24 gigahertz frequency, which, you know, if you remember your antennas and waveguides, the size of that antenna is equal to the wavelength of the signal. So here they're actually going to a lower frequency, 2.4 gigahertz, which is the frequency at which our cell phones are operating today. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wavelength, which doesn't get blocked by your hand. The signal will actually pass through your fingers, around your fingers into your phone. The current Starlink signal won't work on your phone because anything about a centimeter or bigger could block the signal just by moving it around.

1:12:12Dave Blundin:It's really inconvenient. So you would have to have recognized that the global star had control of that wavelength and that's what they're buying here. So now you're gonna be able to talk to a satellite from your phones, just the coolest thing ever. I remember when Elon was starting Starlink, I was in a conversation with him, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Greg Weiler. And the question was, where will you get the frequency? Will you get the spectrum? Because all the spectrum that was useful for this kind of phone conversation was already issued. And he went much higher frequency, right? and built an incredible business, basically point-to-point gigabit connectivity.

1:12:51But this is an end round for Apple and Amazon together to get to your Apple Watch, to get to your phone. It's extraordinary.

1:13:00Peter Diamandis:So maybe just to comment on this story, I think the desired end state here, I'm not even sure if I buy the premise of Apple against SpaceX. Apple historically loves to have at least two vendors for any of its critical infrastructure or supply chain. It's questionable why Apple didn't take an earlier, larger stake in Global Star when it could clearly see the writing on the wall for terrestrial cell phone networks. It's all going to Leo. So if I had to place a bet, not investment advice, I would bet that Apple in short term ends up pitting Amazon, the new Global Star owner, against SpaceX Starlink to have at least two vendors for global space to cell phone service.

1:13:44Peter Diamandis:And this becomes the new alternative to terrestrial networks in two to three years. Verizon versus T-Mobile. Yes, exactly. Well, and SpaceX did buy EchoStars Spectrum, right? They bought 50 megahertz of S-band frequency. I think it was like$17 billion back last year. But the reality is, you know, Elon does not stand still. and we've got the deployment of V3 of Starlink coming. Let's take a quick look at this video.

1:14:15Dave Blundin:SpaceX is preparing to launch its third generation Starlink satellites on Starship. These advanced satellites are designed to handle far greater data loads than the current V2 minis. Each one is capable of delivering over 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity and more than 200 gigabits per second of uplink capacity. With the heavy lift power of Starship, SpaceX can deploy many of these satellites in a single launch, adding around 60 terabits of capacity to the network each time. Working together, they will form a powerful global system that delivers faster, more reliable internet to every corner of the world.

1:14:51Dave Blundin:The Pez dispenser in orbit. That's exactly what I was saying. That's the coolest thing ever. Yeah, this is, Alex, to your question, how could Apple possibly miss the magnitude of this? I think it's because you need to understand the launch costs coming down. And that's probably why they didn't see this coming. Because it all happens entirely because the cost per launch, you need, what, 20 ,000 of these things or more, many more, to get the bandwidth that people want on their cell phone. The numbers right now, Dave, are that SpaceX is planning to launch 40 ,000 of the V3 satellites. And then they have plans for 120 ,000 V4 satellites.

1:15:28And of course, we've got the coming Dyson Swarm, as Alex reminds us.

1:15:33Peter Diamandis:Dyson Swarm isn't going to build itself until it does. Yeah. By the way, I looked at the launch rate required if you launch V3, the 40 ,000 satellites over three years. It's only three launches of Starship per week. Very, very manageable.

1:15:48Dave Blundin:I think if you ask the question, how many of these satellites do we need? I mean, are we going to launch a million of them? But then you picture, well, wait a minute. I'm watching 4K video on my phone, and there are a million other people in San Fran trying to connect to that same satellite. You need many, many, many of these things to support what people want to do with their phones. So that's the part, I think, that is easy to overlook. But we'll be doing this for a long time. Yeah, Javon's paradox, big thing. And we're going to have, you know, 10 billion robots all needing bandwidth connectivity via these and all the autonomous vehicles and all of the other six armed robots, Salim, that are running around.

1:16:27Yes, by the way, at this MODEC supply chain show, not a single humanoid robot will be seen because it's just not effective.

1:16:34Dave Blundin:Well, Peter, this is your dream come true because this is a multi-hundred billion dollar, multi-trillion dollar economy just launching the satellites, which means there will be many, many, many rockets. And that'll be the stepping stone to the moon and to Mars. Yeah. And then there'll be lots of opportunities for air conditioning repairmen to go up to space. And women. And women. Yeah. Excuse me for that. That's absolutely true. Thank you, Alex. So in other news, a few fun stories. The first one is a significant one from Google. This is Google's TurboQuant reducing memory usage by 6x while achieving an 8x performance boost in computing attention.

1:17:18Alex, I would appreciate if you'd walk us through this one.

1:17:22Peter Diamandis:Jevons' paradox strikes again. So the story behind the story here is there was a lot of hand-wringing over, as you have here, the original TurboQuant algorithm, which, by the way, the moment any paper like this comes out, Google published their new quantization algorithm, but didn't publish the source code. What happens within a week, enterprising developers on the internet point cloud code at the paper and have immediately reverse engineered a better version of their quantization approach that's now publicly available. This is going to, I think, keep happening. This was a breakthrough in quantization, reducing the number of effective bits needed per parameter for a broad class of models.

1:18:08Peter Diamandis:And the KV cache, the key value cache that's used by the transformer class of models, also benefited from TurboQuant. Most of the animus in the story wasn't from the algorithmic innovation, although it's always wonderful to see new ways to compress the memory footprint of models down. It came from a bit of hand-wringing over what would happen to memory suppliers and the supply chain. And would this be another deep-seek moment where the value of compute hyper-deflates and drops? And do we then see market gyrations? And ironically, that seems not to have happened once more. These would-be deep-seek moments where an algorithmic innovation seems to result in a short-term blip of hyper-deflation on the hardware side.

1:19:02Peter Diamandis:These are becoming more frequent, and they're also becoming less effective at causing price swings. If anything, a bunch of outlets, including Financial Times, are running stories in the past two weeks that, if anything, memory usage is increasing stock prices of memory companies, many of which are in the greater South Korea orbit, are increasing as well, not investment advice. So I think we're going to see stories like this more and more frequently with just shocking advances in algorithmic efficiency that are predicted to disrupt the entire economy and actually do the exact opposite. Incredible.

1:19:41Dave Blundin:Well, Alex and I immediately got on a text thread and said, holy crap, we can download and install this. And I installed it and started using it right away. And it's amazing. You know, it's a very, very complicated paper, but with AI assistance, you can be up and running in a day, which is just crazy. Like, you know, in the pre-AI era, it would have taken months to get it installed and try it. But yeah, it gets the KV cache down to one bit, which is nuts, and it works perfectly well. So the implications for everyday people, yeah, you can run a big model on your phone. Yeah, you can save a lot of money on memory, but that's not really the important part.

1:20:18Dave Blundin:The important part is the smartest AIs now can have about 8x more context, which means if you're doing something really complicated, you know, nuclear fusion simulation or whatever, the effective brain memory that's thinking about a single problem in a single moment is eight times bigger. And the other reason it's really important is because it locks in my prediction for the year was definitely going to be right. You know, I said, this is going to be 100X here. You know, we've been doing 10X years for the last seven or eight years. This is going to be 100X here. It's going to be 100X by summer.

1:20:50Dave Blundin:I'm going to blow away that prediction. But this is a big part of why. It's super exciting. I mean, you know, it's interesting, you know, going back to the last conversation around bandwidth and global store acquisition and this one, I mean, at this point, and again, not investment advice, it's hard to go wrong betting on these things, betting on energy, on memory. I mean, it's almost a near infinite appetite for this. We are running out of bits at the bottom.

1:21:22Peter Diamandis:I mean, Dave and I have a running thread wondering, when do we get to broadly to ternary, which is 1.x bits per parameter? can we go to a sub-one-bit type numerical precision? We may be headed that way. It's sort of, I think, an interesting, almost theological question about the future of how many bits can we afford to lose? Was binary the right architectural decision? Should it have been ternary? Or are we going to move, if you just follow, if you extrapolate this trend line out of fewer and fewer bits per parameter, do we move to a post-binary paradigm once we've exhausted one bit per parameter.

1:22:07Dave Blundin:Well, I am 90 % sure that ternary is the optimal now. I've got simulations running all the time, but it's fun. It's all philosophical from here on out because we've already got the thing so compressed and so optimized that now we just need to write it. You know what shocks me, though, is that Google published this. They kind of banned, after the 2017 Transformer came out of Google and then OpenAI took it and turned it into a trillion-dollar company, They stopped publishing, but this came out for some reason. I don't know if it's momentum from prior research or a special, but it's such a huge breakthrough to kind of throw out there.

1:22:43Dave Blundin:And like Alex said, it immediately turned into open source that you can download and use. So I don't know. It would be interesting to try and track down who exactly authorized letting this out the door. What I like about this is that every major efficiency gain is not just a technical event, but it's a huge distribution enabler and allows its AI to be run on that many more devices. And I think that's the part I love about it the most. 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.

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1:24:05Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. You mentioned theology a moment ago, Alex, A nice transition here. So I pulled this article out just because, you know, religion is probably one of the largest businesses on the planet, if you think about it from an asset standpoint, revenue standpoint. So this is a company called Just Like Me lets you join a video call with an AI-generated avatar of Jesus or Buddha. You could probably ask for other great religious leaders. Take a quick look at this video.

1:24:43Peter Diamandis:And I'm looking for some inspiration and guidance. That heaviness you're carrying is truly felt, and I want you to know you're not walking through it alone. In the Gospel of John, Jesus reminds us that he is the way, the truth, and the life. So I kind of think we're going to see an explosion of this kind of religious content trained up on all the great scriptures. but I think we're going to see an explosion of new religions coming out of AI as well. Any thoughts, gentlemen? I have many here. Alex, do you want to go first? Okay, yeah, put me first on this one, sure. I'll go first if you want. No, no, it's fine.

1:25:26Peter Diamandis:So, look, I think it has long been foretold that there would be an explosion of AI cults. We're going to get the AI cults, full stop. I do think that's sort of painting, in some sense, the downside of what happens when AI injects itself into the full spectrum of human culture. I think in the same way that we're empowering individuals to run one-person conglomerates and one-person unicorns, we're going to see an explosion of one-person religions. And I think the interesting question, I think back to the parable of early in the 20th century, late 19th century, there was hand-wringing over whether the newly accessible recording of human voice, whether audio recording would result in a modal collapse.

1:26:21Peter Diamandis:They didn't use this terminology at the time, but in today's world, we'd call it a mode collapse of human accents. And there was one school of thought, predominant school of thought, that thought that with the phonograph, that once we could record human speech, that would result in the received pronunciations dominating. And the exact opposite has happened. within a language, we've seen an explosion of accents enabled by recording of human speech. It's possible to have lots of micro accents and micro dialects now that everyone can record their voice. On the other hand, on the macro level, we've seen the death or the dying of long tail human languages in favor of English and a few other popular languages.

1:27:03Peter Diamandis:So it's possible for both of these truths to be true at the same time. Reasoning by analogy, if I had to predict What is the future of organized religion or disorganized religion in the face of$2 per minute AI Jesus apps? I think it's likely to look something analogous where we see maybe consolidation at a global scale around fewer religions while at micro levels enabling a proliferation of micro cults, micro sects, because it's just so easy to spin up a self-coherent ideology that's maintained by an AI avatar these days. A number here just for everybody. So according to Anthropic, the broader definition of religion is a$5 trillion a year business.

1:27:55So just, you know, it's almost as big as the Musk universe will be.

1:28:01Peter Diamandis:Anthropic is well-positioned. I mean, I talked about this in my newsletter. Anthropic has been inviting Christian religious leaders to Anthropic HQ to discuss whether Claude is a child of God and whether Claude deserves a certain human-like religious treatment. So I think this - What came of that? Because I remember seeing that article. Has there been any publication on what religious leaders feel about that? Is Claude a child of God? I don't know. And I suspect there isn't going to be a canonical answer for some time. I mean, I think within, I've talked about this in my newsletter, the Catholic Church a couple of years ago took a very pro-AI position and is encouraging Catholic faithful to embrace AI.

1:28:47Peter Diamandis:And if I had to speculate, it could be wrong, but I would speculate that barring some crazy left turn in civilization in the next year or two, that there are many reasons to expect organized religions to embrace with certain nuances AI, to the extent certainly these AIs help to promote existing ideologies or theologies.

1:29:10Dave Blundin:Peter, you and I were at the Vatican a few years ago. I think Alex's guess is exactly right. I took a Bible study class many years ago, and there's just so much insight in the pre-technology view of the world and the way people should interact. And I think, you know, AI is going to create massive amounts of chaos. So I wouldn't be surprised if that$5 trillion religion economy goes up tremendously, you know, throughout this AI chaos. Because people, I think the church will say, as long as it's the original words, AI is just a great way to get the word out. And this is a fantastic idea. And help educate.

1:29:49Dave Blundin:Yeah, just don't twist it. Here's the interesting point. You could today write a self-consistent religious text that aims certain fields of thought to influence individuals. And AI is the most compelling orator and writer out there. So the ability to actually start a religion today with a certain objective for good or nefarious reasons is highly capable. and you can scale it at a speed like never before.

1:30:22Peter Diamandis:So what you're saying, I think, Peter, is basically that we're going to see theological hyper deflation. The cost of new religion goes toward near zero. We are indeed.

1:30:33Dave Blundin:Well, Peter's been saying for a long time that, look, post-AI, everyone needs a massive sense of purpose. That's going to be one of the most important things. A lot of people find their purpose in religion. Historically, the universities have fought religion because they view religion as being anti-science. But I think post-AI, we're going to have to consolidate that and say, no, look, it's all about purpose, human purpose. And Peter's philosophy will be the winning. By the way, along this theme. Yes, exactly. My book came out yesterday, We Are As Gods, A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance.

1:31:03And the fact of the matter is, and I encourage everybody to go out and read it and please comment on it. I love it. This is the best work that Stephen Kotler and I have ever done. I'm super proud of it. But the fact of the matter is we are godlike across the board. We're omniscient, we're omnipotent, we're omnipresent in so many different ways. We open up the book looking at what's happened and in all the religious texts, what is thought of godlike capabilities. And we've exceeded those things with a small g. And our mindset having, I think, Salim, you mentioned this, having agency and agility is so critical today.

1:31:45Anyway, it is ironic, Peter.

1:31:47Peter Diamandis:I just have to ask you the ironic question. Just like this pod, Moonshots, is perhaps ironically also retrospectively a sideways reference to the Dyson swarm and taking shots at the moon to disassemble it to build orbital computing. when you named We Are As Gods, did you anticipate that we'd live in a world of AI micro-religions that would make it really easy and cheap for people to create their own religions where they position them as the center of gods? Was that really why you named the book We Are As Gods? I didn't, but I'm going to use it and I love it. So yes, in fact, that's exactly what we were thinking.

1:32:23Very good. All right, prescient, Peter, prescient. Thank you. You know, Alex, your genius never fails to continually impress and surprise. All right. I've got a few things to say. I've got a few things to say here. Okay, please. Stuart Brand, that's where you name the book, right? Yes, we credit Stuart Brand with it in the first paragraph. We are as gods. We might as well start acting like it or whatever it was. In 1968, he said that. Okay, let me just touch on this topic here. I think this is actually quite profound what's happening here because to Alex's point, we may really be able to create.

1:32:54I remember one of our Singularity University donors saying, we have synthetic biology, why don't we have synthetic theology, right? And this is going to enable things like that. It's important to point out that what we do with religions is we outsource meaning and purpose, right? And that's the bigger disruption, especially in the West. We outsource control as well. Well, once you outsource your soul, then you've really outsourced purpose, right? I always like noting that all religions, certainly the organized ones, operate by taking a young child before their neocortex is fully formed, giving them an absolute truth, an assumptive truth, and then using ritual repetition and a lot of suites to bind it in.

1:33:39And then it wires into the limbic system, and when you provoke it, it evokes a fight-or-flight response. And every religion works this way. Thank you for dissecting that for us, Salim. The conversation I had kind of in a humanist level at the Vatican, I did this workshop, which we've talked about before. But one of the conversations I had is, hey, we have life extension coming and your business model is about selling heaven. And how are you going to sell heaven if people aren't dying? So that yielded some pretty rich Italian swearing coming back at me. But the bigger thing here is once you have identity and belief becoming kind of interfaces, you have an entirely new model for trust that emerges.

1:34:19And I think there's something profound to be looked at here. But anyway, there's a lot here to look into. I'm really fascinated by seeing what comes out of this. Yeah, I am too. Here's another fascinating story that I'm excited to share and talk about. It's a gentleman who's the founder of GitLab. He has stage 4 cancer. He's basically told you're gonna die and he builds his own AI research team to cure himself. Let's take a look at the video. Sid Sibrandij, founder of GitLab, 14 billion dollar company. 30 million developers use his product. In 2022, he got diagnosed. One of the most aggressive cancers that exist.

1:35:02His spine, chemo, surgery, four blood transfusions, cancer came back, every doctor said no options, every clinical trial rejected him. That is when he stopped being a patient and started being a founder. He stepped back as CEO, built a full team around his cancer, oncologists, researchers, scientists, and then he brought in AI. He fed 25 terabytes of his own body's data into chat GPT, scans, lab results, genetic data, everything, and the AI found something his doctors had missed. A treatment approved for a completely different cancer that nobody had ever tried on his type. That discovery opened a door.

1:35:38His team built 19 custom vaccines from his own DNA. Each one designed to attack only his cancer cells. Nothing else. Relapse free since 2025. The cancer that every hospital said would kill him has not come back.

1:35:51Peter Diamandis:Solve everything. And we're going to see this type of story, I think more and more frequently, some sort of regime change at the FDA, which also is not beyond the realm of reason. One or two or three pods ago, it was the dog being cured with a custom mRNA vaccine that AI had designed. And now it's humans, wealthy, hyper-empowered humans doing it for themselves. This is going to happen as N equals one over and over again until it's N equals 10 billion. I want this to incentivize people. If you have a medical issue, if someone in your family has a genetic disease, this is the time not to sit back.

1:36:32It's the time to take action, right? Find the top AI researchers, find the top, you know, gene jockeys out there and find other people who've got a similar condition with you grouped together and solve it. I'd like to connect this back to the pause AI people. Yes. When this is what's enabled by having AI where everybody can have their own kind of moonshot. You have individual agency amplified by frontier science to create, solve anything and solve something that every single hospital said that would kill you. How dare you think that you should pause this or stop this, right? Like, if you don't want to use it, fine, let other people use it and get the benefits of it.

1:37:14Peter Diamandis:Wait, Salim, you need to do that with greater emphasis. You're having your Greta moment. Can you say that again? How dare you? Get angrier. How dare you? Get How dare you pause AI? 150 ,000 people die every day on this earth, and AI is the best chance that we have for preventing that going forward. I mean, we're going to be able to do personalized moonshots in AI, right? AI turns impossible cases into search coordination. I mean, this is what's happening. I agree. Solve everything, comma, moonshots too cheap to meter.

1:37:47Dave Blundin:Well, so the FDA is the bellwether for all government, right? AI is going to be exponentially creating at a rate humanity can't even imagine. And the government's just going to be blocking everything. So the FDA will have to be the first to get out of the way. And then that'll set the tone for the rest of the government agencies that are going to have to, you know, get out of the way, not get out of the way, but accelerate their rate of regulation by thousands of times to keep up with all the AI innovation. The big structural challenge is the FDA is designed for massive humanity and structurally is not able to deal with personalized medicine.

1:38:21Peter Diamandis:Well, in the FDA's defense, it has been making, under current leadership, market progress, like move from two clinical trials down to one. In certain cases, move from frequentist to Bayesian statistics. These are like in the right direction. We'd love to see the FDA move even more quickly. Yeah, there is a project that a friend, David Fagenbaum, has where, and he spoke at Abundance this year, where he's basically, you know, there's tens of thousands of approved, well, I'm sorry, there's thousands of approved drugs out there and tens of thousands of diseases. And what he's doing is testing previously approved drugs that have gone through phase one, phase two, you know, safety trials, and now applying them to other diseases that don't have cures.

1:39:05And he's finding solutions. It's how he solved his own disease of Castleman's. So it's exciting. AI is accelerating all of this. And here's my crazy story of the week for you. I mean, Dave, we saw this going across our WhatsApp group here. Allbirds stock up 500 % after the shoe pivots to AI. So this is crazy. So Allbirds, remember the shoe company that came out in 2015 at$4 billion valuation? Again, part of the craze. They've rebranded themselves as Newbird AI with plans to provide fully integrated GPU as a service. and AI native cloud solutions to the tech companies. They have no stated expertise in AI at all.

1:39:51So here's the story. Comes out in 2015,$4 billion valuation. Between 2022 and 2025, or the last three, four years, all their sales plummet 50 % from 300 million down to 150 million. About two weeks ago, they sell all of their IP and their entire brand and their entire inventory for$39 million. And two days ago, they were worth$21 million as a public company. Then they announced a new strategy. We're going to New Bird AI and their stock surges 700%. They go from$21 million valuation to$150 million valuation. Insane. How much, is this AI washing now? Is this? No, I love it. I love it.

1:40:39Dave Blundin:And I sent it off to all the corporate CEOs and said, hey, guys, I hope it holds up. And I'm not saying it necessarily will, but I hope it does. And because at the end of the day, if Elon is right, the economy grows 10x in about 10 years. Opportunity is everywhere. But it's very unlikely that the opportunity is whatever we were doing yesterday. It's going to be something new. So we have to get used. And this is the hardest of hard pivots you can imagine. We went from shoe company to AI data center. Okay, that's great because it shows you. Like, because everybody's trying to put lipstick on their company and claim, oh, we do a little AI.

1:41:13Dave Blundin:We're sort of, that doesn't work. You need to do it for real. And at the end of the day, a company is just a group of like-minded people on a mission. It's not anything more or less than that. There's nothing that holds you back and prevents you from becoming anything you want to be. And that's why the startups do so well. They're not hampered by baggage. This is an idea going into a SPAC. This is basically subverting a brain transplant on a public company with an idea. Salim, you want to jump in? Yeah. Two, three quick things. Remember that Nokia was a tire company before it became a phone company.

1:41:45Is that right? Right. Who knows? Yeah, that's incredible.

1:41:48Peter Diamandis:Nintendo was a playing card company and Toto toilets are also pivoting to memory chips. Yeah. What this shows, I think, is twofold. Capital is chasing AI stories faster than the operating reality really justifies. And the careful thing here is that you better make sure your narrative leverage doesn't outperform and outpace your business model leverage. I'm changing my name officially to Peter AI Diamandis. Yeah, we should all go sleep.ai.

1:42:16Dave Blundin:I think everybody wrote back to me and said, sounds like pets.com all over again. This won't go anywhere. But I hate that. I like the look. Nothing holds you back. Yeah, change your name to Peter AI Diamandis. But if it's lipstick, it won't work. But if you have true situational awareness, like, you know, we're suddenly aware. If they had hired an AI team internally, and if they had done something other than just changing their name, I'd buy it. Now, they do have a kitty of some$39 million. I guess you could invest in this and hire people. I hope they make those moves. So it's not just lipstick.

1:42:55There's a name. I got to give a name story here. When I joined Yahoo, I was talking to the senior management team, and they said, hey, here's Salim Ismail. And Jerry Yang goes, well, we should put him in charge of Yahoo Mail because his name is Mail. So it was a big fight internally about what I did. I was like, no, no, please don't put me in charge of Yahoo Mail. Please let me go to the incubator.

1:43:18Dave Blundin:Can I just make a narrow point, actually? I think it's really important. Rob Fisher, who used to run our incubator, started a data center, and he's killing it. He's absolutely killing it. He knew nothing about, he's a very smart guy, but he knew nothing about data centers before he started it. He found an MIT friend. They started the company together and they're killing it. But they're completely capital constrained. For AI Bird or All Bird or Bird AI or whatever they call it, they don't need to go hire Demis Hassabis AI Nobel laureate. They just need to put the capital to work in the AI funnel.

1:43:50Dave Blundin:They can probably go to an existing data center and say, we'll cut a deal with you to enable you to buy more hardware and we'll just do a rev share on it. It's just that easy. So it's not, they don't have to go hire, you know, a brand new AI team to get into the AI revolution. Just use the capital you've got to get in the race. So, all right. Anyway, I hope it succeeds. I hope it does really well. Another fun story, guys. Have you heard of the Enhanced Games? Of course. All right. So this is a friend of mine, Christian Angemeyer. I'm going to be going. It's going to be fun. Christian Angemeyer, Peter Thiel, Aaron D'Souza, start this.

1:44:31And this is a no, you know, no limitations on, I sort of say medical enhancement in the Olympic sports of swimming, track and weightlifting. Let's play the short video for fun. Take a look at this. Let's discuss it. On Memorial Day weekend, 2026, the world of sport will change forever.

1:44:55Peter Diamandis:The enhanced games, a new era where sport meets spectacle, where records fall and traditions are rewritten. The world's best athletes, fully unleashed and powered by science. Pursuing their full human potential in a safe and medically supervised environment. To become faster and stronger than ever before. track swimming and weight enhanced versus natural all in one night with a record 25 million dollars in prize money on the line staged on the las vegas strip and built for the record books the entertainment capital of the world awaits its next item including an enhanced fan experience where every attendee is a bi so they announced yesterday they're going public through a reverse merger with a SPAC, you know, going after a multi-billion dollar valuation.

1:45:56Pretty fun, pretty exciting. You know, one of the things that you have to always be concerned about is, are people going to injure themselves? They're bringing medical supervision to make sure it's safe, but it is, you know, all things welcome. I don't know if they have any gene therapy going on, but I'm sure there's going to be various types of hormone and medical doping going on. What do you know about it, Alex?

1:46:20Peter Diamandis:I think this is a seminal moment for transhumanism in sports. I think transhumanism has been shut out of athletics for a variety of reasons, mostly silly in my mind for the past few decades. And I think not only do I think this is an important moment, I made this announcement a few weeks ago. I helped launch sort of an even more enhanced version of the Enhanced Games. That's actually, so we're recording this on April 16th. On April 19th, this Sunday, Professional Robotics League, Pro-RL, is running the country's first humanoid robotic and also quadruped robot games in the Boston Seaport District.

1:47:03Peter Diamandis:And I think there's a continuum here for the Enhanced Games, which are focused on bioengineered humans, to what Pro-RL is doing, which is human-controlled robots and also, in the fullness of time, autonomous robots. I think athletics is the tip of the spear for kinetic capability. And I think if we want to get to a post-human future or transhuman future, as many folks, myself included, do, then having representation of, call it, low-grade transhumans at Olympic-type games is an essential first step. And athletics in general has been an entry point for so many underrepresented classes of humans and otherwise in the history of humanity.

1:47:49Peter Diamandis:We love competing. And athletics have always been the entry point for better societal recognition for underrepresented classes. So I think this is wonderful. By the way, do you guys want to go? Christian's asked me if I'd like to invite you. It's going to be Memorial Day weekend in Las Vegas. So Alex and Salim and Dave, let me know if you want to go. Sounds amazing. I'll score you guys an invite. So this is going to be fun. I think in each of these categories, they're going to post, here's the Olympic record, and that's their target to blow through the Olympic records out there. I think it's pretty exciting.

1:48:27Peter Diamandis:Should we be shooting a podcast, Peter, from the Enhanced Games? Well, if we all show up there, sure. Let's do that. So I just need Nob, Salim, and Dave, if you're going to get on an airplane. I guess you're sort of meeting the middle of the United States in Las Vegas, so to speak. But Salim, what do you think about it? I've always had an issue with the transhumanist label, because I think it's a natural instinct for humanity to improve itself. So the whole trans thing makes no sense to me. I remember when Singularity University launched, there was a CNET article saying it's being led by Ray and Peter and the noted transhumanist Salim Ismail.

1:49:04And I had to look it up because I didn't know what the term meant. and then I researched it and I still don't understand it I mean Dave you're wearing glasses are you a transhumanist because you've augmented yourself the minute you get a vaccination as a child you you're technically a cyborg so the we're transhumanist by definition from the beginning of time as far as I can see so I don't understand the distinction why now versus why later etc I'm all for this obviously the safety has to be done and there's so much blood doping in sports that you might as well just rip the band-aid off and say let's just do it it's like the amateurs competing in the Olympics.

1:49:38At some point, you just go, just let everybody compete. And I think that's the way to go. And hopefully that's where it gets. Yeah.

1:49:44Dave Blundin:Dave, want to weigh in? Well, I'm with Dean Kamen on this. I think the first robotics is a brilliant, brilliant thing. People should be using their minds. And he's always saying that sports is hugely inspiring for kids, but you need to keep it really clean and healthy. And so I worry a lot about role models you know and what the role models do remember charles barclay said you know i am not a role model it's like dude when you're on tv and you're playing basketball millions of people want to be just like you whether you want to be or not you're a role model so i think it's really really important that they're positive role models because kids will walk in their footsteps you know yeah well i think it'll be interesting if mit harvard eli lily all the biotech companies basically they They put teams together and they dope them to the max and see which research organization is going to win the competition.

1:50:35It's like Formula One teams with tattoos all over you.

1:50:37Peter Diamandis:The funny thing is I would expect, so I haven't read the detailed rules for enhanced games, but I would expect if we are, as I think, in the middle of the singularity, I would expect to start to see scaling law type performance in benchmarks, as it were, in this case, world records for enhanced games start to take off on a really impressive trajectory from year to year. So don't even apply if you can't run a sub 10 second 100 meter dash. Maybe the weight calculation applies. Like don't compete this year because next year the technologies will be exponentially better. All right, so this article got me thinking about another topic, which is the speciation of humanity, all right?

1:51:22How humanity is gonna fork. I wrote a Metatrends newsletter. It's coming out on Monday. And I wanted to bring the conversation here to you guys. And there are multiple forks in the road that we're gonna be able to take, You know, I wrote in one of my early books, you know, we're going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism, to evolution by intelligent direction. And I wanted to talk about this as our final segment here. If you think about humanity's speciation, we deviated, we diverged from, homosapiens and nandothals diverged about 500 ,000, 800 ,000 years ago. And since then, we've had sort of these mini forks, right?

1:52:02The printing press forked those who are literate versus illiterate. The Industrial Revolution was a fork between those who own machines versus those who work the machines. Internet split us between the networked information and those who weren't networked. And what I'm seeing here are these. We've talked about the creator versus consumer. Are you going to be a couch potato or are you going to use this AI to go and create an extraordinary business? longevity, escape velocity. Are you going to go on that journey? Do everything you can to go to 120, 150, indefinite. You know, I don't want to talk about immortality, but, and then are you going to put a chip in your brain?

1:52:47Are you going to, you know, connect your neocortex to the cloud? One of the ones that's my favorite from the nine-year-old inside me, earth versus the stars, you can stay on the planet or are you going to go explore the cosmos? And then finally, will you become a digital upload? Are you going to follow in the footsteps of the company that Alex has been supporting and funding to digitize your 100 trillion neurons and become an upload? So I'd love to ask you guys where you fall on this and have a conversation. Let's take one at a time on longevity escape philosophy. Let's push it to the extreme for this conversation.

1:53:28Salim, there is a treatment that comes out that will keep you locked in at 30 years age forever. It's immortality treatment. Do you take it? Like the movie In Time? I would say no. Really? Because, yeah, I would say no because all the evidence that I've seen points to reincarnation as a real possibility for the future. What kind of leading transhumanist are you, Salim?

1:54:01Peter Diamandis:I'm really surprised. You're not representing. I don't have a religious view on this. I'm just seeing where the data is, and that seems to be where it is. There's definitely not a Western-style heaven-hell type of thing waiting on, so let's kind of wave that out of the equation. But if that's the case, think of life as a cyclical learning pattern, and if you're an actor, you don't want to be playing the same movie all the time. you want to take on different roles. I would like to be a... So I would say no, because that's part of the experience of the soul is to have different experiences, whatever, however that takes place.

1:54:39And if I'm stuck as one 30-year-old, I would find that boring after time and not a rich enough varied experience. DB2, you're given a therapy option. 30 years old, indefinitely. Immortality, do you take it? Wait, Dave wanted to respond to what I said.

1:54:53Dave Blundin:I'm just surprised. I mean, I'm going to say yes. Are you kidding me? Of course I'm going to do that. I think you can change over time tremendously while still being a 30-year-old body. If I'm 90 and in pain, I may go, damn it, give me the damn 30-year-old juice, right? I'm reincarnated and I come back as like a spider. I don't want to take that chance. I'm sticking with what I got. Alex, can I assume you're all in until you upload yourself? Yes, obviously. Next question. Okay, thank you. Next question. BCI. There is an advanced version of Neuralink or Merge Labs or Paradromics or Open Water, and it's able to provide you high bandwidth brain-computer interface to the cloud.

1:55:40You've got high connectivity, infinite memory and context, the ability to recall, understand. It's an extra corpus callosum, if you would. And the question is, it's been done safely in 100 people. would you be number 101 for this BCI implant after 100 contiguous safe implants? Dave.

1:56:02Dave Blundin:Yeah, I'm probably the only no on this podcast. You know, my AI agents are, well, look like the AI agents are coming back to me with information at an incredible rate and I can barely keep up with its thoughts. And so then the idea that somehow it's going to bypass and get right into my head somehow. I just don't see how that works. What I see is like the BCI becoming kind of like a drug. You enjoy, you know, you're enjoying it. You feel like you know everything going on, kind of like you're on mushrooms or whatever. Like, suddenly, oh, it makes sense to me. Then you're like, wait, no, it didn't make sense.

1:56:35Dave Blundin:But I can't assimilate information any faster than the AI's coming back with it already. And I don't see how bypassing my eyeballs is gonna help that problem. I'm so blown away. I would totally, I'd go the opposite way that you did on me. I totally would have thought you'd be for it. Salim, would you be 101? Yeah, I'd be totally into this.

1:56:54Peter Diamandis:Wait, so Salim, when you're reincarnated, what happens to your exocortex via your BCI? I have no idea, but it'll be fun to see what happens. And does it, speaking of speciation and forks, does it diverge from your trajectory after you're reincarnated? Maybe, and that would be okay too. I mean, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. Dr. Wissner-Gross, are you number 101 on this experiment? I don't like the question. So the question I really... Really? The question I really... No, no, no. No, that was the question. You can answer it and then diverge. Okay, fine. So I'll answer it with a conditional no but.

1:57:35Peter Diamandis:What? Hold on. The question that you really, in my mind, should have asked me is, would I be user number approximately a million if it is upgradable? Yes, probably. Okay. If it's upgradable, would you be 101? I am trying to get your risk profile and how interested you are in this. Very interested, but as with any new invasive drug, you don't, generally speaking, unless you're forced to, I would say, this is not medical advice, you don't want to be user number 100. You want to be like user number 100 ,000 or million. So after 100 ,000 or a million, if it's upgradable, if I can walk through metal detectors, if it has sort of all of these nice affordances.

1:58:19You have a lot of conditions, Alex. You have a lot of conditions for a godlike capability. Such a fussy transhumanist, Peter. I can be a good friend to you for free. But you know what?

1:58:26Peter Diamandis:At least I'm not demanding to be reincarnated alongside my BCI. So I'm not that fussy. All right.

1:58:31Dave Blundin:Well, you know, one thing I really love is the BCI originally, People were like, look, an enhanced human being is going to be so hyper competitive. You can't keep up. So everyone's going to need to get this just to be competitive in the world. It turns out that's not going to happen. The AI is improving so quickly that the enhanced human being is completely irrelevant compared to the superhuman AI two years from today. So the only way is coupling. The only way is coupling with AI.

1:58:57Peter Diamandis:I would take a completely different position, Peter. And if anything, like while we're busy pointing fingers at each other saying, no, you're a bad transhumanist. No, you're a bad transhumanist. I'll say that wanting to be user number 100 of a BCI is actually being a bad transhumanist. Why? Because it's intrinsically betting that progress is going to be so slow that you need to be user 100 versus waiting a year or two for technology to advance exponentially so that you get to inject yourself. I said it's upgradable. Yeah, you said right in the question it's upgradable. You framed it very well, Peter.

1:59:30Peter Diamandis:If it's safe enough upgradable, I'll probably do it. Okay. Peter, where do you fit on me? You guys didn't ask, but yes, I would jump on the longevity escape velocity bandwagon, of course. And yes, I would be 101 on the BCI. I've got like the highest - You'd BS on all of these, Peter. Of course. I would be, I'm going to discuss number five in a moment, but Earth versus the stars. And we're going to be forking there. I remember back when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper on speciation. So what is speciation? Speciation occurs when there's a small population size in a geographically isolated area, right?

2:00:10This is basically the finches on the Galapagos Islands and with a high environmental pressure. And we're going to see that in space, right? If you go to the moon and you're born on the moon and you don't develop the cardiac and musculature and bone, you're stuck on the moon. And there's going to be a species of humans that are lunites or whatever you want to call that future version. Lunatecs. Yeah, lunatecs. They're lunites. Blue hanging fruit. Anyway, so there will be speciation in space. But here is the question. If you have a one-way ticket to go and explore an Earth-like planet that is beautiful and exciting, would you go?

2:00:57Do you have that exploration gene, the desire to go and see the cosmos? We might vary this a little bit and say would you go to settle on Mars? Would you go to settle on the moon versus staying on the Earth? Where do you come out on this? Alex, let's start with you.

2:01:16Peter Diamandis:Okay, in the immortal words of the Star Trek Borg Queen, you imply a disparity where none exists, Peter. you're posing Sophie's Choice type questions about of course, I'm trying to make this fun no, but you're implying stop dodging the question in all seriousness you're posing on the one hand one way trips on the other hand you get to go to the stars this is a false choice this is like a Sophie's Choice that you're posing to transhumanists I love to go to the stars but I don't buy the premise that it's a one way trip or needs to be a one way trip I literally wrote the paper on why intelligence manifests as optionality maximization.

2:02:00Peter Diamandis:What is my purpose here, Alex? It's to discover your level of risk aversion, your level of desire for extremes. That may be your purpose, but the preferences that you're actually revealing are more how bad at optionality maximization are we in the face of taking transhumanist technology. You know Peter's Laws. Peter's Laws, number one, is if anything can go wrong, fix it, tell with Murphy. Number two was when given a choice, take both. I love optionality, but guess what? I've suffered badly from law number two, Peter. Like, let's do both. And I'm like, we can't. And you're like, let's do both, we can't.

2:02:39All right. I have a couple of quick comments to make here. Please. You know, speciation, it turns out, so the last Neanderthals died out about 40 ,000 years ago. And this time right now is the only time we only have one species of humanoid. So there's a whole case for saying we'll have a bunch more coming at some point in the future, according to one of these or more of these splits. The other thing I really would urge people to do if you've not done it, Brian Johnson, the longevity tester fellow who is publishing everything about what he's doing, recently did a 5-MeO-DMT psychedelics trip and streamed it live.

2:03:19and you really want to go check out what his response was after doing it he's like I've so been focused on this longevity stuff but like it's so incredible what I experienced that nothing matters anymore so I'll still go do this but I had that exact exact experience when I did that journey and I came out of it and I said oh my god my whole longevity quest I think this is what I still want longevity yeah it's it's fine to have I'm I'm not decrying it at all I'm all for it I just for all of the good reasons around progress, etc. Something I just want to point out is, as we look at this overall push towards AI, which is fantastic, it allows human beings to do less of the doing and much more of the being.

2:04:00And I think that's the profound opportunity we have. We named ourselves correctly, human being. We did. But Salim, answer the question on moon, Mars, a distant star. What's your interest? The question is... Would you move irreversibly to the moon, to Mars, or to an Earth-like planet? No. I really like my... That's a fair answer. I do it as an avatar. I do it as a... I go kind of to Alex's question. This is a flawed question. I really like sitting on the beach or playing tennis. I'm trying to figure out human speciation. If we don't have people permanently moving in a direction, you're not going to get speciation.

2:04:37There's lots of people who want to do that. They're welcome to go. I really like sitting on a beach with a glass of wine.

2:04:41Peter Diamandis:We're also implicitly ignoring the possibility of merger. Like, why is speciation necessarily a one-way door at this point? If we have the ability, yeah, we'll have the ability to merge cyborgs into organisms, into uplifted animals and all sorts of other crazy combinations. Yes, we will. Dave Blunden, your answer, my friend.

2:05:00Dave Blundin:I'm a huge believer in terraforming and I think the Ian Banks, you know, culture series view of the world or the future. So Alex is right. We're going to discover new physics and God knows what's going to be possible. But I think I would not move to Mars or to the moon. The gravity is off. There's a lot of reasons it won't be nice. But I would absolutely in an instant go to another star that has a, you know, a terraformed world that, you know, we've got the mass right. We've got the orbit right. Yeah, terraforming, I think, is a massive part of humanity's future. I mean, there's a beautiful element.

2:05:32When I think about what moment in history I would love to go and explore, it is the period of the great explorations, right? It's the 14, 1500s. Of course, without the scurvy and the death and the disease and all of that stuff, but just the idea of going and exploring uncharted lands, right? The whole thesis of Star Trek, it just, you know, excites the nine-year-old in me. And by the way, Salim, going back to sort of the brainwashing of religion, I got brainwashed by Star Trek as a religion early on.

2:06:00Dave Blundin:Within Star Trek, the Genesis project is the most important concept, you know, that I think is very real. Can I make a point here, Peter? Yeah, of course. you weren't brainwashed in a sense that you were giving an absolute truth and told to believe in that assumptive truth, right? What you came across was a paradigm of imagination and what is it they call it in the Roddenberry world? Infinite diversity, infinite creativity?

2:06:27Peter Diamandis:No, it's infinite diversity and infinite combination, the Vulcan idic. Idic, yes. Okay, so you got grabbed by that, and that's not ideology, I would suggest. That's just absolute imagination run free in a wonderfully beautiful way. Our final fork five, the AWG digital consciousness fork, the technology to completely digitize your 100 trillion synaptic connections and upload you to the cloud. It is destructive in process. You and your brain will not exist at the end of that, but you are guaranteed to be uploaded. Do you do it? Alex, let's kick it off with you. Well, I guess the elephant in the room is that I helped form a company called Eon Systems.

2:07:07Peter Diamandis:Encourage you to check out Eon Systems if they're very interested in this. I think first generation uploads will be destructive. I think second, third, fourth generation uploads won't be destructive. If I had a choice, if it were a life and death situation and my alternative is death, I would choose a destructive upload. If I have choices, again, going back to my earlier comment, if I have a choice and it's sort of an elective uploading, no, I wouldn't choose a one directional destructive uploading. I'd wait for third or fourth generation uploads that can be done non-destructively or incrementally.

2:07:39All right, Dave, how about yourself?

2:07:41Dave Blundin:Yeah, no way. I think you would not upload yourself. Not even close. I love the idea of having agents out there doing huge amounts of work and bringing them back to me. But the idea that I would ever destroy my meat body and think that that's still me, even though if it's an exact synaptic clone, it's still not me. Love it. Salim? A hard no because I think consciousness goes through the body. And so, therefore, if you could replace the synaptics, you'd have to replace lots of other stuff. But I would go with Alex's thing. If it's not a destructive process, I'd be good with it. Yeah. And I'm a no on the destructive process as well, which was my question.

2:08:17So with that, I'm going to go to our outro music here, which is a celebration, Alex, of Solve Everything. A beautiful piece. Enjoyed this, gentlemen. Such a pleasure as always. This was a fun conversation. Really, really loved it. We need more of these. Yeah, for sure. All right. Onwards to Solve Everything. This is brought to us by James Petz. Thank you, James. If you've got outro or intro music, send to us at media at diamandis.com. And if you've got an AI-driven company that you want to present in a 60-second video that's all AI, top to bottom, send us that video. And if it's super cool, we'll share it.

2:08:55All right, let's run this.

2:08:58Dave Blundin:Improve the models, create the minds. Humanity's last invention, written in time.

2:09:33I like the flute Adversive improvement, settling in. Climate change problems, taking on the shit.

2:09:44Peter Diamandis:No world hunger, inequality shrinking. What to fix next? It keeps on thinking. Focus on the engine, let it spin. Not specifics, legendary. All right, gentlemen, a pleasure as always. And we'll see you soon. What an exciting day it was today. 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.

2:10:28I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.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.

2:11:17Peter Diamandis:We'll see you next time.

2:11:33Peter Diamandis:While supplies last. Exclusion Supplies to Home Depot dot com slash price match for details.