Sonnet 5 Drops, Fable 5 Will Return & Fusion's First Plant Gets Licensed w/ Philip Johnston | #268

24:33So they had full information before anything happened. It was kind of an amazing experience. So we've seen this trend over a long period of time. I think we can expect to see this accelerate pretty radically just because of the practicality of it.

24:44Peter Diamandis:If I might add, there are regimes as the cost of robotic embodiment trends towards near zero becomes too cheap to meter that we in the West are unaccustomed to, but that China, for a variety of reasons, including demographics, has seen for a number of years. For example, this is well publicized. The Chinese Communist Party maintains members, officers on a per block basis. Certainly, this was the case during the pandemic in China. The West doesn't really have any concept of this. If you look at how first responders are geographically distributed in the US, it's on a per-municipality basis or precincts.

25:26Peter Diamandis:There's no notion of, say, one or more officers per block that are just permanently stationed on a single block. But with drones, this becomes possible. We could have literally drones as densely distributed geographically as fire hydrants are. And you could literally just, if there's a problem in a block or at part of a block, just remotely activate the drone and then you have an instant point of presence. Let me share the second story comes out of Sacramento. There was a suspect who had a knife and they deployed a drone with a magnet to grab the knife and make the scene safe for the police to enter.

26:10Let's take a look at this. So here we see the drone going. The guy is holding a knife. A magnet or electromagnet is attached to the knife and it pulls it out of the guy's hand as he's apparently sleeping. So this is interesting. This is a drone that's disarming somebody. If you guys remember during the Abundance Summit, Rick Smith, again with Axon, showed us his taser-equipped drone, and I went on stage wearing a suit to protect me, and he tased me from his drone. So I think this is coming, this use of drones in law enforcement for both observing and for trying to de-escalate a situation. The drone market right now is about $100 billion around the world.

26:57It's going to be increasing. We're seeing drones being used, Obviously, in the Ukraine, very famously, Eric Schmidt's been funding a drone company to help the Ukrainians in their fight for independence. Dave, any thoughts from you?

27:13Dave Blundin:Yeah, you know, Scientific American did a great research study on why crime rates are down by half in the U.S. and they keep coming down. And it was entirely connected to deployment of first responders in the right place at the right time, largely driven by GPS. but now with the drone footage, you can get much more accurate. You know, the first responders want to be there and they want to help, but getting the right people to the right place at the right time. But I'm a huge believer that the video footage is going to be massively impactful and the resolution just keeps going up and up and up and up.

27:44Dave Blundin:You know, the physical side of it where you're disarming somebody, that's a little ways out. You know, that was kind of a, like, you can't see that scale. Very niche case. Yeah, very niche case. But the video side is like right here, right now. And as Alex was saying, you could easily, cheaply have as abundant a fleet as there are fire hydrants. That would cost next to nothing. So that's imminent.

28:06Peter Diamandis:I'll also point out, if I may, this was all foretold by Minority Report. You remember the scene in Minority Report with the police officers deploying spiders to search an apartment complex for Tom Cruise's character? We're starting to catch up with that now. And yeah, right now it starts with a couple of police precincts in the U.S. They're using drones for first response, my understanding, is far more frequently in China right now than the U.S. or the West in general are. But project forward a few years when there are a variety of new form factors. Maybe we get spiders. Maybe we get drones. I have to imagine the drone, the flying form factor is a good deal more versatile for interacting with hostile scenarios.

28:49Peter Diamandis:These are going to get smaller and cheaper and more plentiful. We haven't even seen what happens in the West from a first response perspective when police can deploy swarms of drones rather than just individual drones. But as cost goes down, we will absolutely see swarms. Yeah. I mean, again, I think the public is going to have a bit of a fearful reaction to this. It really depends what the drones are armed with. It depends, you know, what the drones, the guidelines on the use of drones are. And we need to address that. I mean, getting medical equipment to a site of an accident rapidly. You know, we're going to see eVTOLs, flying cars, delivering ambulance personnel there.

29:29But getting a defibrillator, for example, to a location that's jammed by traffic, drones are going to play an important part of this. And they're getting better and better. Salim, you were going to say? I just remember the counterpart here. There was a fellow from the Dutch police force at one of our singularity executive programs. and they were combating the fact that drug dealers were using drones. So they trained a bunch of hawks to drop mesh wires onto the drones to wrap them and tangle them. It was like so retro to be training up birds to be attacking drones. It was totally surreal.

30:07Dave Blundin:That's actually a real problem. Below a certain size, there are a lot of birds that go after these things. So the really small ones actually have a little bit of a problem. In the Ukraine, they're having a huge problem because they've got strands of optical fiber from all of the drones that have attacked them lying everywhere. Oh, yeah. It's a massive issue. Well, I'll tell you the number one use of drones I'm excited about came from the wildfire XPRIZE I talked about in the last pod, you know, where drones are able to get to a fire at inception, put it out rapidly before it, you know, causes hundreds of millions or billions in damage and, you know, causes the loss of significant life.

30:46Peter Diamandis:And we didn't get our flying cars in the end. I mean, we have flying car companies, but they're relatively sparse. But I do think we're going to have skies over the next few years that are utterly filled, that are densely filled, I should say, with these drones.

31:01Dave Blundin:Well, the drone ambulance is the coolest thing ever because no one's going to stand in the way of a drone ambulance, right? It's there to save somebody's life. But that will unlock all the technology, all of the airspace, all of the regulatory barriers, and also prove the efficacy. So that's going to be a great, really cool stepping stone. I can't wait. One of the substacks I put out was about the fact that we're heading towards a point where you can know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. We've got orbital satellites. We have the 200 satellites from Will Marshall at Planet.

31:34And then we're going to have an aviation layer from the flying cars and these drones imaging everything at centimeter and sub-centimeter resolution. and then all the autonomous cars, you know, gathering terabytes of data on the road. So everything is going to be imaged very soon. And, you know, the spooky side of that obviously is loss of privacy, if you believe you have privacy. The positive side is that, you know, there's no crime. I put out a part of that blog saying when people are observed, they act better. You know, I got a lot of negative feedback on that. But I think the fact that I can imagine it's true, I think, when when there's someone when a despot has a CNN camera pointing at them.

32:19They do less. They do. They they behave differently in the global stage. And one of the foundations I used to support was the Lindbergh Foundation that would fly drones over herds of elephants. And the poachers would stay away when the drones were flying over them.

32:37Dave Blundin:So, well, you want to hear a funny, funny story from China? Sean, my son, who just got back from China, was talking to a guy who was mansplaining the entrepreneurship vibe in China and how to build a great company. And Sean said, well, it's all about the team, right? This is what we preach at Link Ventures. You get great people. They succeed every time. He said, no, no, no. It has nothing to do with the team. Like, well, then is it the business plan? He said, no, no, no. It's what the government needs next. That's the only thing that matters. Wow. We're like, wow, is that discouraging? So I think, you know, with the loss of freedom and privacy also comes the loss of innovation.

33:14Dave Blundin:So I would think that I don't think the drones are going to be, you know, taking away all of our privacy and all of our freedom. I don't think that's a real issue. But in general, the slippery slope does kill innovation and entrepreneurship. Alex, should we talk about the innermost loop? Let's do it. All right. So our first story is out of Switzerland. And it's an important one. You know, Switzerland just voted to lift its ban on nuclear plans. So after Fukushima back in 2017, they phased out nuclear completely. Now they're reversing course. And just to give you a sense, you know, nuclear has been very slow.

33:57The country that succeeded so incredibly well is France, who has 57 operating reactors. The U.K. has nine. Spain has seven. Switzerland has four aging reactors that supply 40 percent of its power and they were all due to be shut down they're going to be upgraded instead of being shut down interesting I was on the on the zoom earlier today with Ramez Nam Salim and Ramez is one of the most extraordinary thinkers in energy and we should have him on the pod I mean we definitely should he would do an extraordinary job giving us an overview of all things energy across solar batteries and so forth and he was saying the reason that France actually succeeded as well as they did is because they mass produced a single reactor design instead of starting from zero and where the costs escalate and get out of hand.

34:45I asked him whether he thought other European countries would follow suit and be able to implement nuclear. And he was like, nope, not going to happen. But it's interesting that the The buzz on nuclear is beginning to soften and the need is significant. Alex, your take on this?

35:03Peter Diamandis:Europe's in a bit of a bind. So maybe here's a really relatable story. Whenever I'm in the Swiss Alps and it's not the winter, it's very difficult to find air conditioning. And I think Switzerland and a good portion of continental Europe has a real energy crisis. They have lost access to cheap Russian oil, thanks to recent events. They, except for France, underinvested in nuclear energy. They aren't this amazing native producer of their own solar PV. And they have a culture that one can sort of theorize where the culture comes from, but a culture arguably of energy scarcity. And now as global temperatures are rising and as power consumption is increasing, Europe is having to do an about face and discover, sort of learn to love nuclear energy, learn to love energy in general.

35:59Peter Diamandis:And the risk, as we've talked about previously, cite to the EU 2031 scenario and other scenarios, Europe is going to need to start to radically increase the power consumption and power production per capita. And nuclear is a very, fission in particular, is a very attractive way to do that. Otherwise, Europe will smolder in under heat domes, including the one that right now over the past week or two, Europeans have been suffering under. I forget the exact statistic, but thousands of Europeans are dying due to heat overexposure every year. It's a startling statistic, and it's unnecessary with better air conditioning and higher energy per capita.

36:44Peter Diamandis:So I think this is the obvious trend of the future for Europe. Yeah. I mean, the good news is AI is turning energy from the AI demand. it's going to turn energy from an environmental issue into a capacity issue. Into a commercial profit-driven issue, yes. Well, that, but at least into a national capacity issue. Like every country has to deliver enough energy. And it's going to get it from Frisian in the short to medium term until fusion or whatever come along to cover the baseload. So let's talk about fusion in our next story. you know interestingly enough you know the joke about fusion has always been it's 50 years away and holding well it's now here there are some 50 privately funded fusion companies that have raised about 6 billion uh two u.s companies lead the pack it's helion which we're going to talk about in commonwealth fusion i had bob mumgard the ceo of commonwealth fusion on stage with me at the Abundance Summit.

37:43They're expected, they're building a Tokamak-like design. They're expected to build their first 400 megawatt plant back in mid-2030s, circa 2032. But the second story here is Helion. It's a Sam Altman-backed company. He was the largest early investor back in March 2012, and until just two months ago, he was the executive chairman of the company. Apparently, stepped down now so Helion can actually do some large-scale partnerships with OpenAI. And on June 16th, the news here is that Helion cleared the required Washington State regulatory approvals for its Orion Fusion Power Plant, which is intended to supply Microsoft with 50 megawatts of power starting in 2028.

38:32So in success, this is the first fusion plant coming online. It's relatively small, 50 megawatts. We talked about gigawatt level plants. This is 50 megawatts. They've raised about a billion dollars at a$5.4 billion valuation. But it looks like fusion is finally here. I've got a video showing how Helion works because it's a unique design. I think it's worth discussing. But Alex, do you want to comment before I show the video?

39:01Peter Diamandis:Yeah, maybe just comment. So fusion or the lack thereof has long in futurist circles been the whipping boy of why long promised technologies never happen. But actually, if you look at one of the figures of merit for fusion, the so-called triple product, which is a product of the density of the plasma, the confinement time of the plasma and the temperature of the plasma, there has been steady progress for the past half century toward self-sustaining and net positive in terms of power production fusion reactions over the past 50 years. This has been sort of not just, it's not the case that there was suddenly some recent unlock, although arguably economically there has been in the form of high TC, high superconducting transition temperature ribbon that's very helpful for certain architectures of fusion reactors.

39:56Peter Diamandis:There has been continuous progress this entire time. So I think there's an interesting parallel that one can draw between fusion, which is arguably achieved by compressing enough matter into one volume that you achieve net power output and AI slash ASI, which is arguably achieved by taking enough human knowledge and compressing it into a small enough information theoretic footprint until you achieve really a phase transition that produces prompt engineering and large language model behavior, all of that. That's quite an analogy. Strong parallels. I think they're both inevitable, But they're both inevitable.

40:34Peter Diamandis:I'll make a stronger analogy, which is if you were watching the right metric or the right figure of merit over the long term, you could see both of these from 50 years away. You could see or maybe 30 years. It's just a slow, linear growth over time. You just watch the compression over time. Arguably, with large language models and AI, if you were, say, watching the Hutter Prize, if you're Marcus Hutter and it's the late 90s and you're watching the ability to compress the English Wikipedia over time, you could see LLMs and AGI happening from decades away. Similarly, with Helion and all of its competitors and you're watching the triple product, you could predict when this is going to happen and it's imminent.

41:20I think there's something incredible here because this is such a foundational technology for abundance. This is the abundance thesis at large, for sure. It's the foundational technology for this because once you have clean and cheap and dense energy, cost of computation, desalinization, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, I mean, everything becomes the cost of just the materials at that point. So this is such a big deal. And it's hard to get one of the hardest conversations I have with CEOs and with companies and especially with public sector is the fact that energy is becoming abundant over the next few years.

42:02And when energy becomes abundant, all sorts of other dominoes fall. Energy is the number one correlate to GDP, to health, to education. The more energy a nation has, the better it is across the board. and this is something that Europe needs to learn. Interestingly enough, the challenge here is the fission plants, the small modular reactors and the Gen 3 plants are still not going to come online really till the early to mid-2030s and the fusion plants, getting up to 400 megawatt plants like Commonwealth Fusion or getting Helion up to that level, again, those are not going to be coming online until the early to mid 2030s.

42:47And so the question is, where do we get the energy from now? I had that conversation with Ramez, and he says it's from the grid, that it's going to be from the grid and that we just need to make better use of the grid. And he's got a company, Alex and Dave, called Agentic that basically is sucking down energy to batteries in the middle of the night, you know, between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., and then pumping that energy out during peak storage. So there's plenty of energy on the grid if you could time shift it. So I think that was fascinating.

43:24Peter Diamandis:Yeah, I think one of the questions that I don't hear enough people discussing is, what is the killer app of fusion going to be? It seems obvious we're going to get it, barring some surprise, not anticipated. But will fusion arrive in time to be transformative for terrestrial data centers? Maybe, maybe not. Will it be helpful for orbital data centers? Maybe, but there's also a lot of solar in space. There's a 93 million mile away fusion plant that works really well in space. That's right. I'll tell you, one killer app.

43:56Dave Blundin:Sorry, go ahead, Alex.

43:57Peter Diamandis:So the punchline I was going to gesture at is, I think actually space propulsion is one of the killer apps. If we get compact fusion reactors, then that's a wonderful application. Yes. My nine-year-old science fiction self loves that.

44:12Dave Blundin:Yeah. Yeah. Hand in hand with that, if any material scientists or chemical engineers want to work on, if we have fusion, then any storage mechanism, even if it's inefficient, as long as it's clean, is suddenly viable. So if you have cheap, cheap, cheap, virtually free fusion energy, and you can put it into a car in a cheaper way than a lithium battery. Right now, you have to have some degree of efficiency. You don't want to throw away electricity. But post-fusion, you won't care about the efficiency of the reversible reaction. So anything is good. And that's true for launching rockets, too. Once you've got fusion energy, you can create any reversible reaction very efficiently.

44:54Dave Blundin:Then you can port it out to your space station or to your moon base, have it do whatever it's going to do, come back and recharge it. You don't care if it's only 10 % efficient. If you remember Bob Mumgard, again, the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion, when he was on stage, his goal there, once he gets his unit working, is to pump them out, to create the machine that builds the machines. The same thing here for Helion. I've got a short video that explains how Helion works. And given the fact that it may be the first fusion plant coming online, And it's unique in how it works using magnetically propelled plasma and then magnets to pull electricity out of the plasma.

45:35Let's take a listen to this. I think it's valuable for our listeners to hear about Helion.

45:41Dave Blundin:Helion's pulsed fusion device directly recovers energy, which is used to generate zero carbon electricity from fusion. It starts with Helion's fusion fuel, deuterium and helium-3. These fuels are injected as a gas into Helion's formation chamber, where they are superheated into an ionized gas called a plasma. The machine's capacitors are charged and send electricity to magnets that wrap around Helion's device. The magnets invert the plasma's magnetic field on itself into a toroidal, or doughnuts. The device's magnets fire sequentially, accelerating the plasmas toward each other at a velocity greater than 1 million miles per hour.

46:15Dave Blundin:They collide in the fusion chamber and merge to become one hot, dense plasma. In the center of the device, the machine's magnetic field is rapidly increased, compressing the plasma with a powerful force over 10 Tesla. Both these fusion reactions within the plasma convert matter into new energy, which strengthens the plasma's magnetic field. As the plasma's magnetic field gets stronger, it pushes back on the magnetic field of the machine, causing a change in the machine's magnetic flux. In accordance with Faraday's law, this change in flux induces current in the machine's coils, which is directly recaptured as electricity and returned to the capacitors that originally charged the magnets around the machine.

46:51You know, we really are living in the future. When I see that, it's like extraordinary. And their goal was to mass manufacture those helium plants.

47:00Dave Blundin:Well, you know what's really cool, too, is that helium raised a billion, also Commonwealth fusion. Remember, we had dinner with him in Riyadh, March, and he had just raised a billion. And so, you know, when we were at MIT, the budgets for this were in the tens of millions. Research budgets. Yeah, research budgets. Now, suddenly, you know, we've said this on the pod many times, but we're actually truly investing in the commercial sector in hard science for the first time in my lifetime. But something great will come out of those two$1 billion investments for sure. I mean, look, to bookend this, once you make energy abundant, every other scarcity becomes a negotiable.

47:38Peter Diamandis:It's probably also worth, I think, pointing out what the so what of that explainer video is. So unlike many other fusion architectures, the whole point of Helion's architecture is direct recovery of energy from the fusion plasma. In a more conventional, say, a Tokamak style or other fusion reactor, there's a bucket brigade of energy production. You create the plasma through inertial confinement or through magnetic confinement, and then the plasma will be used to heat something, maybe water, and that produces vapor. And then the vapor goes into a turbine, and you turn the turbine, and that you recover electricity from the turbine, inductively inducing via magnets currents in wires.

48:29Peter Diamandis:And it's like a 10-step process. The whole point and what's potentially quite seductively attractive about the helium architecture is you're just directly recovering from magnetic fields that are being induced by the plasma and then currents induced by those magnetic fields. You're almost directly recovering free energy from the plasma. So you're skipping a whole bunch of steps. It's potentially a lot more efficient. It's potentially a lot, I was going to say a moment ago, if I had to pick a sort of pattern match, a Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future Part 2 architecture and identify the archetype of any one of the now many fusion startups that are out there, I think Helion is the closest to being a Mr.

49:15Peter Diamandis:Fusion startup, because all of those extra steps that are being skipped could lead to potentially radical compactification of the ultimate fusion implementation. So it's very exciting. Yeah, it is. It's a beautiful, beautiful design. And again, something he can mass manufacture. And where does it go? It goes into every township, depending on the size, every city, every place that you need baseload energy production. Compact fusion is going to be a thing.

49:44Dave Blundin:Well, if you told me that I'd be listening to a little chipmunk voice explain Faraday's law. I know. It was like, am I running this at 1.5? No, that's the voice they chose. All right, let's jump into AI and a really fun story to kick us off. uh there's a 1.8 million dollar incentive prize that was founded by nat friedman former ceo of github and daniel gross matt i know nat is your friend roommate roommate um my it was my first roommate at mit fun stories and and that was on stage in march of 2023 at the abundance summit and he announced the vesuvius challenge uh and here it is being won uh you know some three years later.

50:27So the challenge was there are these scrolls that were basically buried and burnt under Mount Vesuvius back in 79 AD. And the scrolls are fully carbonized. You can't open them and read them without destroying them. So they said, can we use technology? You know, can we use CT scans to gather the data and then use AI to read them? Well, for almost 2000 years, they've been unreadable and they have just been one. So this is the first time it's done. You can see here in the image, these, these, you know, scrolls of ancient Greek that have been linearized and laid out by the AI, 22 columns of ancient Greek text.

51:13And there are still hundreds of scrolls that can be read. I mean, this is using AI to basically do, you know, look back in time Alex, this must be a favorite one for you.

51:28Peter Diamandis:Not just because of the NAT connection. Objectively, I think computational archaeology powered by AI is going to be utterly transformative in the future. I've argued from time to time. You've spoken about this before, sure. Yeah, the killer app of the singularity is superpowering computational archaeology. And I'll inevitably cite to Nikolai Fyodorov, one of the fathers of the strain of philosophy called cosmism, the idea that humankind's common task is to essentially resurrect every human who's ever lived using technology. And I see in the Vesuvius Challenge the very beginning of a larger arc of technological progress that may require completion of this singularity that we're in to fully run its course.

52:15Peter Diamandis:But imagine, just as a thought experiment, imagine if we could do what the Vesuvius challenge did, not just for, say, performing high-resolution scans of the positions of ink or the X -ray analysis of small blotches of ink in order to recover scrolls that were otherwise preserved from the eruption of Vesuvius. But now imagine being able to do this at a planetary scale. Imagine that somehow, not going to say specifically what the mechanism of action would be, but imagine that we're able to scan the Earth and gain fine spatial and temporal precision or position momentum, canonical coordinates, if you like, for every atom on Earth.

53:00Peter Diamandis:And imagine what if we feed the entire Earth state into an AI, what we might be able to recover about Earth's history. I think the answers would be quite transformative. One of my favorite anecdotes is environmental DNA, where if you go for a walk outside, you may or may not realize this, but you're just drowning in DNA that's been aerosolized from animals, alive and dead. If you look, if you dig into the soil, if you dig into, say, a soil near a cemetery where human bodies have been buried, DNA has a surprisingly long half-life, even under environmental conditions. So there's a lot of state left over from Earth's past, not just in these scrolls that were preserved by volcanic eruptions, but in general.

53:46Peter Diamandis:And I think, again, idiosyncratic position here, but I think with strong enough AI in combination with strong enough scanning technology, at some point in the future, we will be able to recreate large fractions of our past light cone. Well, you know, this is what Colossal is doing in a way, right? Going and extracting DNA from fossils, bringing back the dire wolf, bringing back the woolly mammoth in a very limited slice. And this is taking that to extremes.

54:15Dave Blundin:Yeah. Yeah, there's another angle to this story, too. If you're watching this podcast live and you look at the image and really zoom in on it, AI is very, very good at interpolating these fragments, these little like, If you look at the characters, no human being could ever reverse engineer what that original character was. But the AI is really good at filling in those blanks. And it's not regular LLM AI. It's not your anthropic or your open AI transformer. And this is where, Peter, you know David Siegel, right, the founder of Two Sigma? Sure. He's on the board of MIT. He has a project called Project Open Athena, which he's hugely funding, which is designed to give AI compute resources to people who have alternate versions of AI that are not necessarily transformers, that are very, very good at these types of problems.

55:06Dave Blundin:And so there are many, many, many of these. And, you know, as Alex was describing, if you wanted to look at fragments of DNA that are lying around and reverse engineer what happened in that room, that's a really good use case. But, you know, all of these world events, you know, historical events leave a little trace that's kind of scattered around. And there's usually only one interpretation of history that could have created that trace. Impossible for humans to glue together those fragments. But it's not LLMAI. It's, you know, core neural network AI that's built from the ground up to solve that problem.

55:39Let me do a shout out to the non-technical founders out there. You know, if you've got an idea for a technology or for a company, but you're not a technologist and you want, you know, it's your dream to make it happen. Imagine being able to use an incentive prize like this to actually aggregate the best experts in the world to come help you solve your problem. So in this case, a$1.8 million prize probably brought on the order of tens of millions of dollars, if not more, of genius to apply and solve the problem. So think about this. This is the basic principle of XPRIZE, to get people from around the world to focus on solving a problem.

56:24And we get 30x the prize money spent cumulatively to solve a challenge like this. Salim? I wanted to stress the prize model and the incredible powerful. What really strikes me, this is the before and after. The image of before and getting actual data and information out of it is so mind-boggling. But the audacity that you think you can do that. And I think this is the abundance thesis again, that challenges we never thought were solvable fall as a result of the technologies that we're building. Voice agents are just software, but software deserves a real development platform.

57:01Peter Diamandis:I'm Nick Leonard, CEO and co-founder of Voice Run. Voice Run is your runtime and development platform for voice agents. On Voice Run, agents are built and configured in code. No limiting, no code platforms. For developers, that means total control. And for enterprises, that means extensibility that meets your complexity. We've built Voice Run CLI first, meaning we've kept your Claude Code, Codex, and even your OpenClaw in mind when we built it. Your assistant of choice can build and deploy voice agents, can test and simulate scenarios, and can analyze and evaluate at scale. In other words, we've closed the loop on voice agent development.

57:41Peter Diamandis:We don't build demos destined to fail in production. Voice Run is where the best voice agents happen. Visit us at voicerun.com.

57:54I'll see you next time. All right, let's move to the SpaceX universe. Grok 4.5 is coming out based on a 1.5 trillion parameter V9 foundation model. Interestingly enough, Elon has made the claim that he's going to iterate a new model and release it every month for the rest of the year. Alex, let's go to you on this one.

58:18Peter Diamandis:And he said something, I think, even spicier, if I understood his announcement correctly, that he was going to start pre-training every month, not just distillation cycles or not just post-training or fine-tuning cycles per month, but start a new pre-training run every single month. A completely new model. From scratch. From scratch, yes. From scratch, which means pre-training, which is, I mean, it's audacious. It's brute force. It's exactly, I think, what the world expects of Elon, a brute force attack. I've had a number of folks, since we first discussed in an earlier episode, my comments about Grok being put on life support in favor of SpaceX's hyperscaler resources being handed over in - You got a lot of hate mail on that one.

59:03Peter Diamandis:I got some spicy comments. I had people saying, okay, well, Elon's announcing this, Elon's announcing that. Are you retracting your comments about Grok being put on life support? And I think, again, my comments may have been misconstrued. I want the frontier to be competitive. Right now, we are in arguably a duopoly between open AI and Anthropic. They're just running away with the race with Chinese open weight models a few months on their heels. And I want there to be a competitive frontier. And I think Grok is one of the possible competitors along with Gemini. And maybe Meta will come up with something eventually.

59:41Peter Diamandis:I want it to be competitive. And Elon's strategy historically vis-a-vis XAI has been brute force. And I think hopefully as SpaceX brings more and more compute online, this sort of brute force approach where he has eventually more compute than everyone else in combination with off-the-shelf algorithms, maybe this will work. I see the beginnings with Grok 4.5 in combination with Cursor. Right now, the Cursor acquisition is taking the form of post-training of models that he already had in the near future. Elon's promised that Cursor is going to be part of the pre-training recipe. If he can make that work, I think Grok has a fighting chance to join the frontier through brute force compute efforts.

1:00:30There's a few of the things he's doing. First of all, he's got, you know, tens of billions of dollars of dry powder now to focus on this. The second thing is, and he's announced he's bringing in his smartest players from SpaceX and from Tesla to work on XAI. He is by no means giving up the ghost here. He wants to be number one. He wants to beat open AI. He wants to create, you know, Grok as the ultimate greatest seeker of truth. And, again, I would never bet against him.

1:01:01Peter Diamandis:Yeah, I think the best bet here is he will brute force his way back to the frontier. That's what I'm hoping will happen.

1:01:06Dave Blundin:But, you know, well, he's got the computer doing. Yeah, what you're describing is a two-horse race. He doesn't perceive that at all. He thinks it's still a race against Google specifically because the training directly toward a customized chip is a 10 to 100x unlock. And he doesn't perceive Anthropic to be near there. And then OpenAI has some activity there, but it's nowhere near. But Google has already got, you know, their whole vertical monopoly stuck together. And so he doesn't think he's going to lose because he thinks that he's going to actually be the first to have a reasonably good model that then is custom silicon that supports the model instantaneously with the design of the chip being AI.

1:01:53You know, we're seeing verticalization win every race here. We'll see it in the space industry. We're seeing it with Google, seeing it with XAI. I mean, it's fascinating. Salim, please. Yeah, there's an idea here that could allow him to leapfrog even faster, which is we're moving from models that were built on human artifacts towards models being trained on the actual process of human machine work, which is where the cursor data becomes really useful because that creates a flywheel where you have a better model, more usage, richer workflow, and then a better model. And I think that's going to be serving very well in the future.

1:02:29Peter Diamandis:I'll comment on that point now, Ali. I think it's an interesting debate one could have. So the cursor acquisition, I think I viewed this at the time, commented on this on the pod previously, I viewed as a brain transplant for the future trajectory of Grok, given that ChatGPT also is going through the same brain transplant of making codecs, essentially a model that or a class of models together with scaffolding that were optimized for code generation and recursive self-improvement. That's becoming the new mainline chat GPT. By analogy, XAI and SpaceX acquiring Cursor post-IPO to make Cursor essentially the new mainline grok, I view as an analogous move.

1:03:14Peter Diamandis:However, the data set from Cursor, which consists in part, my understanding, is lots of reasoning traces driven from developers who wanted more cogen. I think that buys Elon sort of a leap to the near frontier in terms of cogeneration, but it will still be incumbent on Elon slash XAI slash SpaceX to achieve their own recursive self-improvement loop. You can only get so far by post-training on developer or user traces. At some point, the models need to start developing better models. And that's been historically, I think, a strength of Anthropic, probably a weakness of XAI, but maybe he can brute force himself to the front of the recursive self-improvement loop.

1:03:58Let's jump into a few Anthropic stories. Anthropic's flagship model, Fable 5, has been offline for 15 days because U.S. government pulled it for national security fears. And hopefully, we've talked to this ad nauseum. Now, Axios reports it may be back within days. Secretary Lutnik accredited Anthropic for working on the risks through the Pentagon and NSA. They still haven't signed off on that. Interestingly enough, Stripe recently reported that they ran a test using Fable 5 to overhaul 50 million lines of code base in a single day, work that will have taken engineers many months. The government's treating Fable 5 as a commercial AI model, like a controlled munition, taking it offline and re-permitting it by users.

1:04:45And we're going to have to see how this evolves in the coming days. So let's talk about this Fable 5 coming on. And Anthropic is another story, Alex, if you want to cover that one too.

1:04:58Peter Diamandis:Sure. So I think there are a couple of interesting notes coming out of this if Fable 5, as I do expect, will eventually become re-available. One of the more interesting takes, I think, is this will have been a period of a few weeks when allegedly Chinese organizations that were leveraging access to anthropics frontier models or near frontier models for reasoning trace distillation will have been denied that access. So we talk on the pod all the time about how the U.S. maybe has a three-month lead or a six-month lead or an eight-month lead, depending on how you count. There's a certain sense in which this one month-ish shutdown, future perfect tense, may have or will have denied China at least a month of catch-up time.

1:05:47Peter Diamandis:That's a generous interpretation. A less generous interpretation is that this will mark what we'll look back through time. Historians will look back and say, this period in time marked the period towards the middle or the end game of recursive self-improvement when months counted and the permitting of frontier intelligence became almost a zones of thought to borrow from Verner Vingy or a block system to borrow from the Cold War when either before anyone could access frontier intelligence versus after when now you have to be a U.S. person and there is strict export control for capabilities and there's a nonproliferation regime where you have to gain access.

1:06:37Peter Diamandis:If you're a non-U.S. person, you gain access to models that are maybe a few months behind the frontier. But I also think a few years from now, when we look back on this time, I think this will have been, yes, there was a phase change in terms of the diffusion of frontier models. But I do think sometime in the next few years, we're going to get to the end of the recursive self-improvement rainbow. And there's going to be a perfect model. And we'll look back and say this was just a period of months, you know, a delay. But ultimately, everyone is ultimately going to figure out what the perfect model looks like.

1:07:11Was this period of a month also a chance for a lot of critical systems to safe themselves against Fable 5?

1:07:18Peter Diamandis:The most essential ones, maybe. And yes, there was the stand-up, both within the U.S. government, of vulnerability scanning. And outside the U.S. government, we saw three or four independent nonprofit or for-profit organizations stand themselves up to do bulk vulnerability scaling using Fable 5. But I think to the extent pauseism has its day in the sun, I don't think this actually decelerated any AI at all. I think this is a net accelerant because even though public, sort of privately... I'm not thinking about decelerating AI. I'm thinking about decelerating black hats from being able to get in there and penetrate systems.

1:08:01I don't think so.

1:08:02Peter Diamandis:I think black hat capabilities are proportional to capabilities overall. And I think what we saw during this time is Chinese models like GLM 5.2 gain ascendancy for anyone who wants near frontier capabilities to do essentially whatever they want with them. It may not be as capable as Fable 5, but this creates enormous pressure on Chinese organizations and the Chinese frontier labs to catch up. And so I think as with the original pause AI movement, it had the net effect of accelerating capabilities globally. Same idea here. So quick two implications from this slowdown. I just want to point out one for investors, right?

1:08:40Regulatory risk is now one of the first order variables for you're looking at companies because it's real. And the second for technical founders is don't build your product or your company on a single model. You have to make sure you're able to swap out models because you have no guarantees as we're going forward. And Dave, you saw that. But do you want to, Dave and Alex, want to talk about the Sonnet announcement that came an hour ago? Dave, you first.

1:09:09Dave Blundin:Well, I mean, it's really obvious that AI is sold out and that when Fable 5 came out, you know, they doubled the price on us. But you had to use it because it's just so good. So it's pretty clear that Sonnet 5 now is a way to kind of fill this gap until Fable 5 is back out. But the price point is very high, given the amount of compute that they have to use to deliver it. But people will still buy it because, again, AI is sold out. So you see the revenues at Anthropic going through the roof. And it's because the demand for AI way outstrips the underlying chip supply. And so, you know, the byproduct of that is a lot of things.

1:09:51Dave Blundin:You know, only the very top of the mountain use cases are going to get access. and then after Fable 5 comes back out, you know, I agree with what Alex was saying a minute ago, this moment in time will be remembered in history. This is the intersection of AI and the government that's never going to go away now, but not every person on the planet and not every company on the planet is going to be able to access the models and it's supply constrained at the same time. So then there's going to be preferential routing. Sonnet 5 is a kind of mediocre capability at a high price point, but people will still need to buy it.

1:10:27Dave Blundin:And then Fable 5 will come out at its extremely high price point. That's my read on Sonnet.

1:10:33Peter Diamandis:Alex, any addition? I think this is a bizarre announcement. Admittedly, this is a hasty analysis since Sonnet 5 was released right before we went to air here. But I've been trained, as I think the majority of sophisticated users have been trained to expect that the Sonnet series from Anthropic would represent some distillation of the Opus series. And similarly, the Haiku series represents a distillation of the Sonnet series. And that as you go down towards smaller, lower parameter count, more distilled models, you see some optimal frontier emerge in price performance space where performance, at least throughput goes up, price per token goes down and performance goes down.

1:11:18Peter Diamandis:And maybe I'm missing something, and maybe the answer will reveal itself in the next few hours. But just looking at the cost versus performance at agentic tasks curves that Anthropic released with Sonnet 5, it's a little bit bizarre. On the one hand, Sonnet 5 is an optimal frontier, sort of a Pareto improvement over the last version of Sonnet, Sonnet 4.6. But Opus 4.8, which has been out for what in these singularity times passes for an eternity, is better. It's superior on a cost-performance basis. So I'm not 100 % certain I understand what Anthropic is hoping to achieve with Summit 5.

1:12:02Dave Blundin:I can tell you, Alex, everybody's working on these frameworks where you can bounce from model to model while keeping the context intact. And all of the work that's piling up, the prompt history and the intellectual property is piling up like crazy now. And so you have a choice between working in an open framework, but Cloud Code and Cloud Cowork are super compelling, you know, with all the MCP wrappers and connectors already built in. So the easy choice, kind of the Apple, like I'm going to pay more, but it all works choice, is to go with an all-Claud stack. And then when you're working in Opus 4.8, if you have a simpler question, you go to Sonnet, or it automatically goes to Sonnet.

1:12:39Dave Blundin:And if it's an even simpler question, it just goes down to Haiku. So that's the easy way to go. But the more cost effective way to go would be to bounce over to a different model. But then you have to use a third party context management platform. So that's the tension. But this is kind of like Anthropic becoming the apple of AI, where you know you're overpaying by some insane amount.

1:13:00Peter Diamandis:But I feel like my intuition is there's some branding going on behind the scenes that we're just missing. Like maybe in the sense that Fable and Mythos are the new high-end models. Maybe there's some sense in which Sonnet is the new low-end, like Sonnet is the new haiku. And just viewing it through the branding of Sonnet is maybe incorrect. Maybe we should be thinking of it as the haiku level. And it's just that Fable 5 isn't accessible. There's some weird Pareto optimal frontier, I think, that's missing in order to explain why we've seen a reversion of this optimal frontier. We will find out and we will get to the bottom of it.

1:13:39Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. is one of the key things. I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it?

1:14:01Peter Diamandis:It really has, Peter. My daughter was five. My husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic that is one that I am mission-driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50 % of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs. No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing. No, silent killer. They just don't wake up in the morning. They don't wake up. And so, you know, AI, this is our mission to advance science, to try to help to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we're actually finding that 88 % of people coming in have detectable coronary disease.

1:14:40Peter Diamandis:But Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23 % of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone. And this is the plaque that we must intervene with, with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations. So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body, genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. you can know, and it's your obligation to know. So check it out at fountainlife.com slash Peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health.

1:15:19All right, back to the episode. All right, mates, let's jump into data centers and space. And for that, we're pleased to bring a friend on. Philip Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of StarCloud, a startup building space-based data center. StarCloud has raised about 200 million with its last round over a billion dollars. Famously, Philip's company launched StarCloud One, the first NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit. And apparently, Philip, you've trained your first LLM in space. StarCloud launched in November of 2025 on Falcon 9. Welcome, Philip. Pleasure to have you. Thanks so much for having me. It's a huge honor.

1:15:58I've been a long-time fan, so very privileged to be here. Awesome.

1:16:02Dave Blundin:It's mutual. It's mutual. Yeah, I mean, a lot of stories we want to talk about in data centers and space to wrap up today's episode. But let's start with a little bit about StarCloud. Tell us about the company, your vision. Where are you guys? What have you done with the H100? And yeah, let's go there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we started about two and a half years ago in January 2024. We're a team of about 20 engineers based in Redmond, Washington, actually right down the road from the Starlink manufacturing facility. So about half our team came from SpaceX and the rest are from the data center companies up here.

1:16:37So AWS and Azure and the others. And then, yeah, so we launched our first spacecraft, StarCloud One, in November last year. I had actually five GPUs, two from ARM and three from NVIDIA. But the most important one, as you mentioned, was the NVIDIA H100. And so with that, we were the first to train a model in space. We trained NanoGPT from Andre Carpathy, which is a very tiny model, but it still counts. Totally counts. And then we actually were the first to run a version of Gemini in space. So we ran Gemma, which is the deep minds cut down version of Gemma, Gemini. And then we've done a few other things.

1:17:14So now we're doing much more kind of useful workloads. So we've just been doing hypod inference on SAR data, synthetic aperture radar data in collaboration with various DAW entities. And also we actually just played Doom. We ran Doom on the space on Star Cloud Run. As one does. A little latency there, probably. And before we get into it, I just want to say, you guys have been ahead of this trend more than most. So thank you for your support. I know Alex is often being vocal about his support. And Dave gave me a shout out early on. And Peter, I know in the interview with Elon, you are also very supportive.

1:17:55So I really appreciate it. Yeah, well, you know, you're building the Dyson swarm, and this is important for our great-great-grandchildren, for all of us.

1:18:04Peter Diamandis:Philip, just speaking for myself, I want there to be multiple Dyson swarms. We can't have a solar system scale monopoly. Agreed. Maybe a matchyoshka swarm so we can have swarms inside swarms inside swarms. There's Jupiter and Saturn. Plenty of atoms left to disassemble. So, Philip, give us a sense of where you are right now in terms of StarCloud 1. But where do you go next? Yeah. So, we've got three launches booked next year. We're launching StarCloud 2 in January. It's about 100 times the power generation of StarCloud 1. We'll have by far the largest commercial deployable radiator in space. and so yeah that's going to have a whole bunch of H100s also flying the BlackRock chip from Nvidia and also some other interesting things like some Bitcoin mining ASICs and also AWS Outpost which is an on-premises server blade so we can run like an instance of VC2 on orbit which is useful for the OW customers and then as soon as possible we'll be launching a much larger spacecraft what we're calling star cloud three it's a uh 200 kilowatt three ton spacecraft which will fit on the uh starlink the starship heads dispenser form factor actually i can if you guys can see this i can even show you we've got it welded up a version of it welded on the on the ceiling the chassis just so you get a sense so this is this this is the the length of the chassis of it so it's about six meters long and with this we'll have huge hundred meters deployables hanging off the side of that how much power are you generating for that to power that that's 200 kilowatts um and we can two tons you said three tons yeah three tons okay yeah and we can fit about 50 of them per starship so we're talking about um uh about 10 megawatts of new of new compute capacity per starship launch and yeah we're hoping to be launching very frequently on Starship.

1:20:05I mean, they're building just absolutely enormous capacity, as I'm sure you're all aware. These two Starship gigafactories are designed to produce something like three Starships a day. So hopefully there'll be capacity for us to launch. And obviously, you know, we're looking at some other launch papers as well, but that's the primary one. So you have to ask the elephant in the room, which is when you're going in to pitch for investors and they say, hey, but there is, you know uh you know elon and his mega plans and google's far behind and are you picking a niche in this area that you're going to be competitive in yeah it's a great question um so the the main niche we're going after is to be more like an energy and infrastructure play than like our own cloud and so for example we've got an agreement with crusoe um where we we essentially say to them hey, we have a box and that box has power calling and connectivity.

1:20:58And we'll work with you on whatever chip architecture you like. And you can sell to whichever customers you like for whatever price you like. And you just pay us a fee. And the same way that you would pay a rental fee to somebody like Equinix, you pay that kind of rental fee to us and you finance the chips. So that's kind of the approach we're thinking. I think in the early days, at least it looks like SpaceX is primarily going to be serving their own, you know, cursor, Grok and XAI workloads. and in the more medium term, we'll be providing a cloud service to folks like Anthropic. I think it's probably a bit further out that they're looking at being just a pure infrastructure provider, though I think actually Elon did mention something about that relatively recently, but that's the idea.

1:21:42I mean, so in general, it's a good point because, of course, we're going to have a higher cost base than SpaceX because they own the launch. So long as we have a lower cost base than all of the other hyperscalers, I think we're in a reasonable position. You know, lots of, if we have a lower cost base than OpenAI, for example, they're going to need to figure out a space solution. And either they pay, you know, XAI to run workloads on SpaceX's satellites. In OpenAI's case, I think that sounds unlikely. Or they start building their own satellites. Right. Yeah. Or they start building their own satellites, and it's possible.

1:22:20But, I mean, they're going to be way, way far behind. Well, the last option is they'll look around, you know, in sort of two, three years as Starship Cadence ramps up and they're going to be like, OK, we're going to get left behind if we don't get on top of this. And they'll be like, OK, who's the most advanced in the market? You know, maybe besides SpaceX and at that point, I think we'll have a very significant lead over anybody perhaps besides SpaceX. Interesting. Dave, Alex, you want to jump in? I've got two questions. OK, so. OK. One was two years ago. You know, we didn't have data centers and space in our bingo cards at all.

1:22:52So what had you... Hold on. A year ago, some of us did. Some of us did. Some of us did. And definitely the mainstream did not. I know, Alex, you've been talking about Dyson Swarm since you were probably like five years old. But what has you jumped to that and say, we're going to do that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we actually started off by doing, well, we were initially just looking at space-based solar. So in mid-2023, I actually just randomly on a weekend took a trip down to Starbase, Texas, like even before the first launch. So not as many people were looking at it back then. And I was just blown away by the scale of what they were building.

1:23:29In my head, I was like, okay, all of the concepts from sci-fi that I remember reading about, Asimov was talking about space-based solar in the 40s even, are going to come true. It's just a matter of a timeline now. And Philip, if I could, space-based solar power satellites for beaming energy down to the ground? Yes, exactly. So huge, huge solar panels in space and then either using infrared or microwave to beam power down. The main problem, and we spent several months on the math, essentially, on the breakeven. We wanted to know, OK, what is the breakeven launch cost at which space-based solar makes sense?

1:24:09And we came to a number around sort of$50 a kilo where that would make sense. And initially we thought, okay, that's kind of good enough. Starship will get there at some point. But then, and, you know, we started working on that. But then we were like, okay, well, the problem with space-based solar is you lose 90 or 95 % of the energy in transmission from space to ground. And we were looking around and saying, okay, once we get the power down, what are we going to be using it for? And even two years ago, most new energy projects being built, particularly in the U.S., were being built primarily to power data centers.

1:24:41So the thinking was, okay, well, either directly or indirectly, that power is going to be going into data centers. And so if we instead can find a cheap way to get the data center to space, let's rerun all those calculations to know what would the breakeven launch cost need to be that that business would make sense versus terrestrial. So we rerun those numbers. We came to a launch cost break, even around$500 a kilo if we had a cheap way to get the data sent in space. And then that became the basis of a white paper that we put out in summer 2024. And then that essentially became the basis. Wow, that's great.

1:25:15That's a great story. I mean, and it's an interesting entrepreneurial story for all the entrepreneurs listening. Right. It's like you're going down one road and then all of a sudden you see a massive opportunity, especially we can go deep enough to look at it because the idea of space solar power satellites has been around since the, God, since the 70s. Gerard K. O 'Neill at Space Studies Institute, you know, looked at his solution was to build them on the moon and then fly them to Earth orbit where the launch costs obviously are de minimis. I'm sure that will happen. I'm sure that will happen.

1:25:48Yeah. Second question is what are the couple of biggest bottlenecks you're facing right now? we are actually very constrained on launch by now um as everybody is um we're we're so constrained that we're trying to book now on relativity space's first launch in january all right i'm really excited about that i think that would be super good to have a have a have a launch on there and for those we've covered relativity space in a podcast ago this is eric schmidt's company where he's CEO. He bought it from Tim and Jordan when it missed the financing. And Relativity Space is about the size of New Glenn, half the size of Starship.

1:26:33Dave Blundin:But if you're building toward the Pez dispenser, actually, that's a problem. That's really interesting. How's that going to work out? Yeah, it is a problem. I think we're going to have to have two form factors. I mean, And the primary one we're working on right now is for PES. But I think we're going to need a form factor that will fit on. Also, Stoke Space is the only one which has a reusable upstage or the only one that right now is seriously working on a reusable upstage. So we're also looking at a Stoke launch vehicle form factor. But to be frank, the relativity one is maybe just to take a step back.

1:27:09The business has two phases. is the first phase is while launch cost is relatively high, we're launching on Falcon 9 and others. We're primarily serving edge and cloud, providing edge and cloud services for other spacecraft, particularly DOW and Earth observation constellations. And then on a sort of three to four year timeframe as Starship ramps up cadence and production, that's when we switch over to competing with all terrestrial data centers on energy cost. But in the, yeah, so all of these, when i say we're launch constrained right now i'm even talking about for the first business we've got three launches booked for next year but if you want to book anything for 2028 on falcon 9 there's just nothing available wow the government the government's just plomped down 20 launches which has bumped everything back um and so yeah unless you can get some priority and we're going through various channels to try and get some priority on that but so this is gpus GPUs for use of processing in space.

1:28:09Yes, correct. So we will receive, for instance, raw imagery, hyperspectral or SAR or other types of satellite sensing data. We will, instead of having to wait for a ground station and downlink enormous amounts of data, we can process all of that on the edge. And actually, this is one of the demonstrations we've just done, is process a whole bunch of SAR data, identify the coordinates of a tank, and then just downlink the coordinates of that tank. And rather than having to, you know, it could take three days to get enough ground station passes to get 100 gigabytes of SAR data off a satellite. Rather than doing that, we can get all of that, receive all that data optically in space, process it on orbit, and then just downlink the insight.

1:28:49That's the use case we're building towards right now.

1:28:52Peter Diamandis:I'm curious, Philip. So the premise there is presumably bandwidth is scarce, scarcer maybe than launch. So you have to do a lot of edge inference in Leo or wherever you're doing this. I'd love to ask you sort of a similar question that I asked Will Marshall of Planet in a previous pod episode. Let's project out 10 to 20 years, well past the current bottleneck in heavy lift or heavy launch capability. What do you think, as the founder and CEO of one of the incumbent Dyson swarms, plural, What do you think the Dyson swarm or Dyson swarms of, call it 20 years from now, look like? Does it look like LEO?

1:29:35Peter Diamandis:Does it look like sun synchronous orbit? Does it look like the moon? Does it look like Dyson swarm around the sun? Paint a picture for us what 20 years from now the Dyson swarm or swarms look like. That's a good question. I hope within 20 years we've started putting significant amounts of compute in a sun orbit. probably starting with the Lagrange points, although you probably don't want to clog them up too much, but even just a distinct sun orbit that, you know, trails Earth or is in front of Earth. Because certainly you could fit about 10 terawatts of compute in the Dawn Dust sun-synchronous orbit, and then you're back to flying in orbits which have an eclipse, you know, sort of 45 minutes of every 90-minute eclipse, that then drives the cost up significantly because you need batteries and all these other things.

1:30:31Scarcity of real estate.

1:30:33Peter Diamandis:SSO is going to get crowded. That's – you're one of the few people, Philip, I hear talking – this is like overpopulation on Mars, talking about SSO getting crowded due to the SSO Dyson swarm and then overflowing back to other orbits. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Well, because there's only one SSO orbit that is very rare and beautiful orbit, the dawn dust is a synchronous orbit, which flies over the Terminator line. I mean, 10 terawatts is a lot of compute. That's like 20 times the entire US power grid, and probably in 20 years. My expectation roughly is that in 10 years, we might hit a point where most new compute capacity is being deployed in space.

1:31:14If you ask me, what is the total percentage of compute in space at that point? it's still probably less than 5%. In the same way, you know, right now, most, in certain parts of the world, at least, you know, Norway or whatever, most new cars coming from production line are electric. But if you want to know what is the percentage of the fleet which is electric, it's like 4 % still. And it just takes a long time to replace all of the capacity that we're building on Earth terrestrially right now. So in 10 years, I would say most new compute capacity will be being built in space. In 20 years, I would be surprised if more than half of all computers in space in 20 years even.

1:31:52But beyond that, certainly there'll come a point, and it's probably more like a 50-year timeframe, where 99 % of all computers in space.

1:32:00Peter Diamandis:I also just have to ask a second elephant in an increasingly crowded room. if lift over the next few years if heavy launch is the main bottleneck have have you is there some plan in a back room somewhere for you either to build or buy your own vertically integrated heavy launch provider if that's the main constraint um we are in quite serious discussions to partner with uh various launch providers probably shouldn't go too much down that yeah it's early days and And, you know, if SpaceX can provide the capacity, we'll be very happy customers of SpaceX. You know, if not, then we'll need to figure out something.

1:32:43If you ask me, do I think SpaceX has a monopoly in launch in five years? The answer is yes. In 10 years, the answer is no. And we'll talk about Rocket Lab's purchase of uranium in a moment. And in fact, what I'd love to do is jump into a few stories, Philip, and have you comment alongside the mates here. um yeah the yeah the the first story is a recent conversation by elon about uh basically earth to uh or space to earth telephony um so let's uh let's jump into into that so i'm gonna play a short video this is a video clip uh of elon speaking with the at the all-in summit and And let's talk about it afterwards.

1:33:30So the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years.

1:33:36Dave Blundin:And then we also need to pull the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel, we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones. And then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to keep high bandwidth connectivity. But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone. so a fascinating story vertical integration again the whole stack spacex owns it launch satellite spectrum and increasingly compute so direct to phone um you know is a interesting product it's going to be space-based internet to everybody on the planet uh thoughts on this it's going to you know we're going to see the you know for investors we're going to see the telecom industry getting disrupted.

1:34:31Yeah. And he didn't mention it here. Yeah. To a point on vertical integration, he didn't mention it here. And I think he's talking about working with phone providers. It would not surprise me at all if they either buy or start manufacturing their own phones as well. I don't know. What was your read of that? My read was he was talking about working with phone providers and not talking about building their own phone. But at some point, I would be surprised if they don't think about building their own phone. Well, you know, it's been it's been rumored. The Tesla phone's been rumored for a long time.

1:35:05And Elon famously does not work well with others. He tends to buy them or blow past them. So did you see recently the possible acquisition of T-Mobile? Yeah, the rumors are out there and also with charter communications. I mean, Starlink is the most unbelievable business. Starlink is going to produce hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow in the next sort of five to ten years. You know, they're going to have direct sale. They're going to have unbelievable bandwidth on almost, you know, unless you're really in the middle of Manhattan, I think Starlink will be the best option for most people.

1:35:41I can't see a world where on Starlink revenues alone, SpaceX isn't the most valuable company in the world. We've been projecting$10 trillion by 2030 in terms of valuation and scaling towards$100 trillion. I'd absolutely back up. Dave, what's your thoughts on this?

1:36:02Dave Blundin:Well, my question actually is if we have direct satellite phone connectivity downloading videos, and that implies tens or even hundreds of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit. And then data centers are going to want that same space. So is that actually going to survive the escalating needs of AI? Because if you figure, as you said, five to ten years from now, almost all computers going into space, that's also a lot of very high-value use case for that same LEO. Yeah. Yeah, they're a slightly different orbit because the Starlink satellites, they fly around 460 kilometers, I think it is now, but they are in a, I think it's a 50-degree inclination.

1:36:47So they're not going over the poles. They're mainly going up to just midway through Canada, and they're flying as low as they can. Actually, with the AI satellites, you want to fly them as high as you can almost because even in this daundust sun synchronous orbit, if you're flying at 600 kilometers altitude, you still have, there's like a month of the year when you have a 10 % window, which is blacked out. The ideal altitude to fly is actually 1 ,200 kilometers. That's the lowest you can fly where you don't have any blackout throughout the year. So I think all of it, yeah, Yeah, between 400 and 500 kilometers is going to get extremely crowded.

1:37:35I think where the AI satellites fly will get very crowded, but it'll be for a different use case. I don't think they're going to be competing for the same real estate, essentially.

1:37:45Dave Blundin:Are you going to run into Kessler effect problems if you go that high? I mean, at scale, you know, we're talking. Yeah. uh the main reason people don't want to fly that high right now is actually radiation from the van allen radiation dot do you mean because there's less drag if you have any collision there the debris is going to stay up for longer yeah for millions of years yeah yeah well even even at a thousand kilometers you're probably most stuff is going to deorbit within about 50 years so which is not great i mean but it's not uh for example i don't know if you know about In 1970, the U.S.

1:38:23government dispersed 400 million needles at about 3 ,000 kilometers altitude because they wanted to bounce radio frequency off them, which is insane. So think about that today. It was like an artificial ionosphere. Yeah, it was the most insane thing ever. Irresponsible. Yeah. You can't imagine it being done today. But actually, every single one of those needles is now deorbited, which people don't realize. because people think that if you have quite a large satellite, it will stay up in 3 ,000 kilometers for quite a long time. But things which are much smaller and don't have their own propulsion, because of the way the sun and moon and all of the solar wind interact together, every so often they get closer to the Earth and they get dragged in and dragged in and dragged in.

1:39:12The Kessler effect is something we really need to pay attention to, but it's not as drastic as I think a lot of people sometimes.

1:39:20Dave Blundin:That's good news. Salim, you had a question. Wait, what about cooling? I mean, cooling and radiation. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Salim. No, no, no, no, no. I was going to ask that exact question. Oh, were you? You? Oh, bam. Yeah, we were talking about this. I forget, you know, Philip, we were talking either in Riyadh or at A360. I forget where, but you had this all-aluminum cooling, and I was like, wow, that'll be incredible if that works. But now it sounds like you're going to move to liquid cooling or some kind of a liquid cycling process. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's liquid through aluminum. So, yeah, that design is the same as it was in Riyadh, I think, that we spoke.

1:39:57Exactly. So it's a very large, low-cost, low-mass deployable radiator. So radiators we know work because the International Space Station has been doing it for 20 years. The problem with the ISS radiator is it is both expensive and heavy. And so the core... It's a government project. What else do you expect? Expensive, heavy, and late. So the core IP of our company is making this radiator cheap and light. It's not a new physics problem. It's a manufacturing and engineering problem. So our radiator design, and we've got it working, it's fabricated and gone through TVAC and everything, is our radiator design is 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator and about 100 times less cost.

1:40:45Yeah, about 100 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator. So I'm excited. That will fly in January, and it will be a big mass, and by far the largest commercial deployable radiator. I wanted to double-click on something you said. Did you say over time 95 % of the compute we use will be done in space? 99.9%, I think, over time. wow but that's that that's that's on alex's dyson swarm time that's right okay so moussa-san so philip moussa-san uh just came out with a statement saying he disagrees with the thesis of orbital compute because energy is only seven percent of the cost compared to everything else uh where do you come out on that what's your answer to him um i did a post about this this morning because uh people kept tweeting at me so i was like okay well he also sold all of his nvidia stock in 2019 so he's not always right um no i mean he is right that energy is a very small proportion energy and infrastructure though is actually quite well uh yeah i mean it depends on right now chip cost is very high and so that is um by far the dominant cost but but if you if If you include energy and infrastructure, you're talking about at least 30 % of the cost.

1:42:06The main problem is if you even, you know, to build a new energy project terrestrially, you're looking at like a five to 10 year long lead time on just the permitting of that. Yeah. And so the main problem is we can deploy this stuff extremely rapidly. So even if we were break even on energy and infrastructure, it would still make sense to do this. But, you know, we're looking at doing this about 10 times cheaper on both energy and infrastructure. When I say infrastructure, what I mean is we don't need batteries, cooling towers, big chillers, backup power. All we need is a dirt-cheap radiator.

1:42:42Our radiator is really dirt-cheap. And then a lot of the other infrastructure costs are gone. It's only then the launch cost is the additional piece we have. But that, as I say, is very rapidly trending towards a much lower launch cost.

1:42:56Peter Diamandis:All right, let's move to the— um i am uh elon has this great quote something like optimist is the von neumann probe and i kind of agree with him like if you can get 100 000 optimized to the surface to the lunar surface and get them to build an optimist factory on the lunar surface uh you know then we're off to the races like then you have this insane exponential curve in terms of development and pace of development. Hyper-experimental. Yeah, absolutely hyper-experimental, yeah. So I do think we'll have mass drivers on the moon, and I think they'll probably come sooner than most people. Well, if it was 20 years, I think that would, if it was less than 20 years, that would be maybe surprising to me.

1:44:08If it was more than 20 years, I'd also be a bit surprised, I think, yeah, around that time. All right, let's move to our last... Philip, I apologize.

1:44:15Dave Blundin:I apologize. I have one of the senior execs from State Street Bank waiting for me outside the door here and I'm going to love watching this podcast because all of my questions are in Alex and Salim's heads, but I can't wait to hear your answers. I'm super excited about what you're doing now. Congratulations. All right, Dave. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. See you very soon again in our next pod recording, but let's move to our last story on the docket here. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium, creating yet another fully integrated space powerhouse. So Rocket Lab, for those of you who don't know, is a company started by Peter Beck.

1:44:50Actually, Sir Peter Beck. It's a$64 billion company now. Kudos to them. I mean, Peter had no background in launch, and he built arguably the second tier provider for launch after SpaceX. They have their Electron launcher. It's a smaller size launcher, but it's launched 91 times. It's got a very high reliability at this point. They're building their next vehicle called the Neutron. It's about half the size of Falcon 9, and it's planned for a first launch by the end of this year. Like Falcon 9, it's got a first stage, which is reusable. And they're acquiring Iridium. I know Iridium well. It was playing in the big Leos in the early 90s when it got its license and started.

1:45:34It started commercial service in November of 1997. And it's a 66 satellite constellation orbiting at about 780 kilometers. A fun story. I don't know if you know this, Alex. It was originally called Iridium because it originally had 77 satellites, which is the atomic number for Iridium. When they change it to 66 satellites, they did not change the name to Dysporosium, which is atomic number 66. A good marketing move there. I don't think this is...

1:46:06Peter Diamandis:Also, Iridium, I think, is a little bit more stable as a nuclide. Yeah, and it sounds a lot better than dysporosium. So what makes Iridium interesting is it's got 10.5 megahertz of bandwidth at L-band. That's globally coordinated. So they go through the ITU and they get, importantly for our viewers here, you can get 10.5 megahertz in the U.S., but can you get in every country around the world? And that's what makes it a prize. So spectrum is the prize and vertical integration here is becoming the winning structure for the new space economy. So owning launch and manufacturing, they build, you know, at Rocket Lab, they build their own satellites as well.

1:46:52And getting spectrum and operations is a winning combination. So they're playing on the SpaceX handbook. Pretty extraordinary. Thoughts for you, Philip? Yeah, I mean, it's a very smart move, I think. And it's particularly smart because, yeah, I think there's been quite a bit of commentary people saying, you know, he's not trying to compete directly with SpaceX with this. And if he was, it probably wouldn't be a smarter move. he's really carving out a niche. And the other thing is his share price has gone to an insane multiple of his revenue. And he's capitalizing on that because I'm pretty sure all of this is going to be in Rocket Lab stock.

1:47:36And so, yeah, it makes sense to start paying for cash generative profitable companies in Rocket Lab stock when you're trading at a however many hundred X revenue multiple that they're trading at.

1:47:51Peter Diamandis:I have to ask Philip a question just about the spectrum side. There are a bunch of obvious questions I could be asking about vertical integration and does spectrum and Leo compute want to inevitably own or be owned by heavy launch capability. But I just want to focus on spectrum. So to the extent part of the Iridium Rocket Lab story is the acquisition of RF spectrum, I have to ask you, do you think radio has a future or will we find ourselves five to 10 years from now where it's all optical frequency, direct laser links, and radio has approximately no future? It's a great question. I would lean more towards the second of those two options.

1:48:36I wouldn't say radio has no future. It's useful because it's cheaper because you don't need gimbaled, you know, things. But laser is where everything's going. We've got three laser terminals on our second satellite launching in January with, you know, gimbaled lasers. We've actually just signed a contract with SpaceX to, for the next 25 of our satellites, we'll have two Starlink, they call it laser, plug and play laser terminals on our satellite, and then one SDA compliant laser that can connect with the government satellites. So, yeah, lasers are the future for space comms. And it's also unregulated, which makes it amazing.

1:49:17All right, guys, I apologize. I've got a hard out here as well. Philip, a pleasure and excited to watch Star Cloud 2 and Star Cloud 3 make it to orbit. Thank you for joining us. Salim, are you coming home eventually? I am. I'll be here for a few more days and then I'll be back. All right. And Alex, how about you? What's your travel schedule looking like?

1:49:40Peter Diamandis:well i don't know i'd love to visit leo or sun synchronous orbit sometime soon philip we should chat we should we should and peter i think you're going to be in paris in a week so i might see you there i think i may be there virtually oh no i see i see wait where am i i know i'm in i'm in i'm in calgary calling the cattle black yeah calgary germany and greece yes okay love you guys uh again thanks peter thank you thank you alex Take care, guys.

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