Tech Leaders on Bitcoin, AI, and the New Global Power Shift w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #172

29:49But in the other event where it's all concentrated, you'll be very glad you didn't waste a millisecond between now and 2030. I think there's two different things here, right? One is exponential opportunities if you move fast, which I 100 % agree with. Okay. But the other part of winner take all, I will disagree and let's see who's right over the next little while. Well, we will see. It's going to play out over the next two to four years. I mean, why do you think the entire AI leadership of our nation and the financial leadership of our nation showed up in Saudi Arabia for a week, everybody, not just a few people, there was a significant enough meeting and a purpose of that meeting to say you had to be there.

30:40And I think this was, I think, we'll draw a line from last week to consequences that will be dominant for decades. Yeah, I mean, I cannot tell you how unnatural an act it is for a Saudi Arabia and to wake up one morning and invest in core weave or cerebrus. Like, that doesn't happen. It's like, because we have to plan nearby. No, no, no, no, no, no. There's clearly like a really intentional and intelligent awareness of where the bottlenecks are. And those investments are turning out to be brilliant, by the way, but like chip design, Saudi, what's the connection there? Well, the connection there is that's the bottleneck to self -improving AI.

31:23We can go on about this for a while. When I was meeting with minister of Dulal -Swaha, you know, he said something which really stuck with me. He says, every week, I have a meeting with MBS to talk about AI. It is his number one item on this agenda. And it should be. I mean, it drives me nuts that it's not the number one item on every senator and congressman's agenda here and how it impacts help and how it picks education. It's so transformative. All right. Let's go to this news clip from Mark Andrewson on Google and Open AI Visions. Let's take a listen to Mark. Kind of a little company, kind of big company thing.

32:05And I think that's repeating itself. And I think one of the ways to think about what's happening right now is OpenAI is kind of growing up to become Google. And Google is kind of reinventing itself to be OpenAI. And so there's like a similar thing there. I think that's fascinating, right? So OpenAI is going into the search business and wants to dominate. And of course, Google has been in the search business, and it really needs to go Gemini first for this next few years. That's true, huh? What do you think about that, Selin? I think it's a very eloquent as usual for Mark. The thing that I find fascinating is Gemini is probably the best model out there for general use.

32:42Yet, OpenAI just continues to soar in adoption. Yeah, it's like when my middle schoolers are like, all they talk about is chat and OpenAI. It's like, seriously, they've captured OpenAI. And let's talk about the relative value. So we have Google at $2 trillion, and open AI at $300 billion, just $300 billion. Dave, how do you think about the relative value? Well, in video, $3 .3 trillion today. So in video, it's almost 2x Google. Oh my god, that's crazy. Yeah, and I tell you that there's some real interesting quantities in there, because Google is losing search. There's no doubt about it. You can only debate the rate, but it's moving.

33:22And then Google's in a good position to capture a lot of that, but that much lower value per impression. So really cannibalizes their revenue machine. On the other hand, YouTube and video content are killing it, and they benefit tremendously from synthetic video creation and also ad optimization using AI. And so those tailwinds are very strong for Google. So you've got the core dying at the same time. The new things are growing like crazy. Then with in GCP, the Google's Cloud, they have the TPU 7, the new TPUs that have this incredible weight stationary systolic array design, which allows them to be much more efficient than Nvidia at running these core AI processes.

34:07I could go on for hours about it, but I'm telling you, this is like, this is the future of AI chips, and they've got it, and they've got it ahead of the curve. And so it's going to be completely sold out, and they're going to redirect it into the GCP and use it within their own internal use cases. And I don't know that it'll ever end up not being sold out before they can even manufacture it. So then you're like, okay, Nvidia's in a race with Google over who controls the AI chip stack that no one's even talking about yet. And it's all bottlenecked at what's TSMC willing to make for who and why.

34:40And Elon Musk now has a huge voice in that because he's part of the, it's like a draw, this is gonna be the best TV series ever. Obviously, it's so popular, baby. It's Silicon Valley, so popular. And of course, the whole Taiwan, China of it all, puts this incredibly crazy, you know, so what is China said they want to own Taiwan by 2028? Yeah, yeah. Crazy. Yeah, and I think the federal estimate, they don't talk about it much, is that you have to make the assumption that no access to chips from Taiwan by December 20, 27, which is nowhere near enough time to get the US FADs up and running. So how's that going to play out?

35:19They need to hold us 100 % for sure that if China takes Taiwan, the fabs won't be operating for China. Yeah, they will destroy them. They will shut them down. All right, let's go to our next article here. This one does my heart well, having been in the pharma -related industry. So FDA announces completion of first AI -assisted scientific review pilot and aggressive agency -wide AI rollout. So here's the FDA commissioner, Martin McCarrie. FDA is rolling out a Gen -AI tool across all centers by June 30th to speed up scientific review for new therapies. I mean, one of the incredibly crazy hardships of our world is what's the problem with the development in UDROGS, it's the regulatory slowdown.

36:16It's the fact that we take sometimes years to make it happen. And the FDA, an FDA employee who approves a drug that then has, you know, kills some patients, has disastrous results. But what we don't do is we don't value all the lives lost for not approving a drug. Right, it's just a flip situation. This is the safety versus efficacy problem, which is structural here. But I think the fact that they're using AI for a bunch of stuff is amazing. I think it's great. I think it's the beginning. I mean, we should be rolling this out across all agencies and we've discussed this before. or, right? So AI can help streamline all agencies and all approval processes.

37:09And it's going to be great. In the future, people are going to look back and say, really, humans did this? Seriously? How long did it take? Like decades? Yeah, it took decades. Yeah, I'm looking for the administration to make real structural change that lasts beyond just one administration. Yeah. And I think one of the greatest assets we have as a country is 50 different states that can try 50 different ideas. so that if you're stuck somewhere, you can try somewhere else. And we're way under utilizing that core strength that we have. So one of the best things you can do is say, look, let's push, let's deregulate like crazy and push a lot of this into 50 different shots on goal.

37:50Even if we make mistakes, we'll be far better off as a country if we have chances for entrepreneurs to move forward in many different places. You're spot on there Dave and here's an example for the last decade, the FDA under previous administrations were shutting down all stem cell clinics in the US. And so what happened was if you wanted access to stem cells or a sort of an advanced experimental therapy, you would leave the US, you'd go to the Caribbean, you'd go to Mexico, you'd go to Costa Rica, Panama for these treatments. and the problem is you're in a location that doesn't have advanced medical capabilities if something goes wrong.

38:34Well, this year, in fact, this month, we're about to see new regulation in Florida. Specifically, I know this because of Fountain Life has two centers, soon three centers in Florida, and Florida is about to pass legislation allowing for stem cell treatments to occur in state. So you're going to have the data finally and people who will just stay there, be near their physicians, take the treatments, collect the data accurately, and then learn. Yeah. All right, let's move on to our next subject here. And this one's on core we've gave. Lead us here. Read the article and let's talk about it. Well, we talked about this being a bell weather for the whole IPO market opening up again.

39:19And I think Corrie is above 70 bucks now, which is great. It's up 40, 50 percent from the IPO price. Then so far the investors are all happy. I'm sure the eye banks all over Wall Street are saying, hey, we're open for business. For those who don't know, talk to us about what Corrie does. So, you know, Cornwall, it's a bill weather for AI. It's a data center company. The thing that makes it a little weird to people is they borrowed a huge amount of money. They have an enormous amount of debt, which they used to buy in video chips. One of their investors is in video. They finance the data centers with the value of the chips.

39:58And the reason that's controversial is because nobody knows how quickly they'll depreciate. I think the current logic is we're going to be compute bound for years. Like every thing that can compute is going to be an incredible demand, in my opinion, forever hereafter for humanity. We'll look at this early wave of sort of computation from 1970 to 2020 as kind of the test ground, where sometimes we use the chips a lot of time. They're lying all over our office here, not processing anything. But starting around now and forever hereafter, they're all going to be doing AI all the time. So anything that can compute is going to be in huge demand.

40:37And so I think that, you know, core weave will go up in value if that theory is true. Compute tronium, baby. Compute tronium. It's for those who haven't read enough science fiction, aren't science fiction geeks. Compute tronium is what AI eventually turns all matter in the universe into. So compute all the time everywhere. where the article here from CNBC says, core we beats on revenue reports more than 40 % growth in the first earnings after the IPO. So we've been waiting for some red hot IPOs to move the financial markets really to break open the log jam because we haven't had many companies going public or even that many acquisitions.

41:18So for the venture business, Dave, as the head of our partnership with LinkXPV, this is amazing news. It is amazing news and it was also, the companies that are in the pipeline behind this are much less risky. So I was worried about this being the bell weather because it should go up, but it'd be with all that debt. You know, if it goes bad, it goes really bad. And that would shut down the markets again. So I'm really glad to see it went well. But the ones that are in the pipeline, They're almost all either chip companies or vertical use case companies and they just can't they're so so low risk such high return So this is good once that once the pipeline fills up and we have five six seven more IPOs Then I think the the train will be rolling.

42:06I hope so All right, here's another one from Bloomberg Next slide here Microsoft layoffs hit coders hardest with AI costs on the rise so engineers make 40 % of the total layoffs as AI begins to take over parts of their work. Not a surprise. Dave, how do you think about this? Well, it's like right in my wheelhouse. So, you know, we've all been telling people for a long time now that almost any white color, coding, or other job, it's not going to exist in 2030. And so there's a line between today and 2030 and very few people are doing enough planning to get ready for it. Just to be humane to your employee base, you should have some kind of plan in place.

42:54And I had some real frustrating conversations this week with a couple of our companies. Because they're all using Blitzy. Blitzy is supposed to be an opportunity to learn with long form, you know, an AI that writes 3 million lines of code in a single night. That is incredibly world -changing. And then the reports I got back are, hey, it had some bugs. I'm like, oh my god, you completely missed the point. Look at the rate of improvement. Look what it's going to do by the end of the year. Can you slow it down? I love Blitzy. It's one of our investments for disclosure in LinkXBV. But if you wanted to replicate another company, right?

43:28So one of the biggest challenges right now is the ability of AI to basically go in and replicate a SaaS business to just basically stand up competition. Where would you bring Blitzie in to do something like that? Blitzie, in its current form, if you have any legacy code base, 5, 10, 20 million lines of code, and you say, hey, I want you to rebuild this entire product to make it faster, better, and run on the cloud. That's their sweet spot right now. That's not the real point. The future and the rate of improvement of the AI, not just to write code, but to build entire plans, like project plans.

44:17It's on this crazy, crazy upslope. And so then if you look just a few months in the future, then Blitzy can come in and say, well, look, here's Greenfield opportunity. I've wanted to write a piece of software that does something that has been burning a whole in my pocket for years. But it was too expensive. Can I do it now? Yeah, not only can you do it, you can do it in like a night or a week. A lot of people right now use Salesforce .com or Outlook to do things that they've kind of bastardized to their actual use case. It sort of works, but it's not exactly what they wanted, but it's good enough.

44:49Now you can just vibe code or blitty code your way to a perfect solution for exactly what you were really after originally. And so that creates this whole long tail of really, really good high quality software that does what you actually wanted. You know, you're kind of dream Peter of like, I get on stage, I've got all this IT around me, I've got avatars I'm talking to. Why am I talking to an IT person? Why can't I just talk to the AI? That is imminent. That's a good example of the kind of stuff you can suddenly build because the cost per line of code is down a thousand or a million X. That's what Blitzie's enabling.

45:24I just want to walk into a business meeting where I've got a presentation on my computer and have all the AV work and all I want. You know, it's our favorite joke that drops in, right? AI is easy, but AV is really hard. Currency bread template. Something to struck me, David, as you're talking about this, this means we can finally retire all those old cobalt systems. Yeah, yeah, no, this is, I mean, the world runs on legacy cobalt and nobody wants to touch and nobody knows how to maintain. We can essentially rewrite those for the modern world. No, the CEO of State Street Bank was telling me that they have all the Navi counting for all the mutual funds in the country is done on PL1 code on mainframes.

46:06Why? It's like $300 million a year of maintenance for that tech stack. Why? Well, because it's a billion dollars to rewrite it, and I don't want to eat that cost in any given quarter, it'll kill my bonus. Wow. Well, you bring that billion dollars down by a factor of 10 or 100, and they're like, oh, now I'll do it easily, because it fits within my bonus cycle. It's just that simple. That's the exact same. I'll just end on this particular article from Bloomberg here on AI. I used to like, hang my kids, like you got to learn a code, got to learn a code. And now you need to learn to vibe code, and you need to learn to think in a way that's concrete, you can describe to your AI.

46:51I mean, everybody's going to be a coder. Everyone's going to have this ability, and it's pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I'm so glad you said that because I'm working on a memo right now that I'm going to send out to all the CEOs that says, look, guys, be humane here. Some subset of your people are going to be masters of AI. And then another subset are going to get crushed. Come up with some plan for the people that are going to get crushed so that it's humane. But, and then for the people that are going to be masters of AI, free up half or two -thirds of their time so they can start the 10 ,000 hours of learning that they need to do to get on top of this wave.

47:30What you're doing right now by turning a blind eye to it is you're doing all of them by not giving the time to become masters of AI, not learn to use things like blitzie and cursor. Yes. And let them play. Let them play. Yeah. But you know, you can't just, you know, allow that. It's not going to happen naturally. You got to have a plan. You know, in one of our clients, they had to lay off like a third of their call centers because they automated it all and they gave them an internal one year UBI and said go to whatever you want for your here's the truck money play and and their employees absolutely loved it and something like 95 % got a job very quickly.

48:09I would say here's a UBI, use it to come up with new business ideas that our company could utilize. I mean, that would have been equally good. The other point you made, I think, is really, really important because if anyone does choose to take our advice, telling them to go play with cursor and do some vibe coding is not good enough. That you have to get them into that. But there's a new mindset related to creativity that allows you to use the AI to do something productive that goes way beyond just vibe coding. We haven't fully specified that skill set, but we know it involves creativity, we know it involves vision, we know it involves knowing how to use the tools and what the tools do well and don't do well.

48:52But it's way beyond just saying, hey guys, play with cursor a little bit, okay, now you're an AI person. So, take a step further, buddy. What would you recommend? I would say that we, you know, the three of us kind of specify what we're learning about that skill set who's succeeding who's failing and then codify it into actual programs like I suggest you use this product you do this training program you tried and build this thing and just put it out on a website or put it out in this podcast as a roadmap that they can follow. I love that. I love the people who choose to follow it end up being masters of AI.

49:25It'll evolve over time, but it's not as hard. It's intimidating to everybody. No one's trying even though it's not that hard to actually. You know, what if we have a dedicated podcast episode just to that? I love that. Like just go. So I have a little quote one session. Peter will talk less talk to Nick and the team about this. Sure. We just have one dedicated session running through and saying, here's how you build your own future and envisioning and hear some tools and let's run through some sample lease cases. Yeah, got a brand, like a badge of honor. People love these alternate to a university badges of achievement.

50:01We give it one of those. This reminds me of when electricity was first entering the factory ecosystems and people were hesitant to bring in electrical systems and they would finally see a electrical motor running some part of a factory and they would learn from that then they'd put into a different part of the factory very slow. It's very slow. Can I give a quick anecdote here? Of course. The worst example of this was in the 1600s when a Scottish guy discovered that the definitive cure for scurvy, which was a vitamin C deficiency disease. you lost your teeth, it was horrible, was eating lemons or oranges.

50:49Okay? So you figured that out. And he tells the Navy, the British Navy. British Navy refuses to believe him for 50 years. It's such a simple thing could do this thing. They then take 50 years to deploy throughout the Navy. They take 50 more years to go, oh, maybe we should tell them, merchant Navy. They take the merchant Navy another 50 years. And between known cure and full deployment was 264 years. Okay, and 40 % of sailors or thousands of sailors are dying every week. It's a test of how bad we are as we use humans are so. Adapting are so, so true things, right? Luckily, that's shrunk a lot.

51:29And most of that is down to, I think down to 17 years, most of it being longitudinal, testing for known cure to disease. But I think this is the cultural issues that we have in adapting to things. My biggest insight about human beings ever is they much rather be comfortable than happy Well, sad. All right, this is a story from the intern. Let's see this summer. So I'll lean on him. Well, learn a lot from that, but I'll lean on him to come up with this. Like, OK, he's high school coming into college. And so what's the perfect roadmap for it's staying ahead of this curve? From your perspective, we can weave that into our plan for fantastic.

52:06Let's do it. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. And could actually save your life, or the life of someone that you love. Company's called Fountain Life. And it's company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day, when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician and they burn into your room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on.

52:39And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full -body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI -nabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexascan, a grail blood cancer test, A full executive blood workup, it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable.

53:26You're going to find out eventually. Mice will find out when you can take action. Fountain life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife .com -peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people who reached out to us for fountain life memberships. If you go to fountainlife .com -peter will put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans.

54:19Go to fountainlife .com, backslash, Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. Our next story here is from NPR, which I guess still exists for the moment. I won't go into that, but the story is, family shows AI video of slain victim as an impact statement, possible legal first. So what does this mean? AI was used to create a video of a victim speaking at his perpetrator sentencing, and it says slain victim. So I guess the victim is dead. For the first time, AI was used in a US courtroom for a victim impact statement.

54:57legal experts see this use of AI as powerful and ethically acceptable, fascinating. I'm just fascinating to see how AI is going to play into different parts of our ecosystems or regulatory and social worlds. Any comments on this? I'm surprised they allowed it also. So that's a really a forward thinking to allow that. But I guess it's the voice of the victim. And if you can simulate it to get some semblance of reality, why not? Well, the why not is because the defense will then say, well, if you're using AI testimony, I'm going to produce AI. I mean, it's going to be like, wait, this deep fake versus deep fake now.

55:46It's a very slippery slope. I assume in this case, it was, you know, the judge and everybody wanted the outcome to to be, you know, they must have been pretty obvious. They were worried the jury wouldn't see it that way. So having the victim talk on their own behalf is gonna get you the outcome that they want. But again, that opens Pandora's box like crazy. All right. Dave, I would love if you would cover this one. So specialized AI systems deliver breakthrough results, domain adoptive pre -training, adoptive pre -training. What is this all about? Well, preface this by saying, one of the listeners last time posted, I love this podcast.

56:30This is amazing. It's just like the all -in podcast for Geeks. Perfect. That's the highest compliment I think I've ever gotten. Yeah, except we're dealing with the apologize. We're dealing with the real news that matters, right? This is the stuff that's impacting our lives for the long run. So yeah, this is called domain adaptive pre -training. So the way this evolved is I was actually two weekends ago trying to design a circuit, a neural network circuit as usual. And I said, I wonder if Gemini is any good at designing circuits and it was terrible. And so I talked to Alex with their growth. So you know, the hygienist, our mutual hygienist friend.

57:08And he said, hey, have you heard of this thing from Nvidia? They took an open source model, in this case, Lama 2, a couple years ago. And they retrained it to be a circuit designer. And so I pulled up the paper and I'm looking at it and I'm like, well, let's try this thing. So apparently it's like an order of magnitude better at circuit design than the raw model is because it's been retrained to be a circuit designer on specific circuits. But the reason I wanted to bring it up is because in this particular case, the cost of training it to do that specific task, task dramatically better was only a 1 % increase in the overall training cost.

57:49And so this matters a lot to upcoming startups because the new Lama 4 model, the 2 trillion parameter model, is a massive, massive investment by Meta that is free open source here it is. And the tools to then retrain it to do things like drug discovery or self -driving or chip design or speak some obscure language. Those tools are open source online. There's a whole cookbook in this paper on how you can do it yourself. And a lot of the companies that I look at, a lot of the teams, even the high school teams, they're afraid to retrain. They're just putting rappers around the core models. And they're using the models all day.

58:29You know, they're talking to either GPT or Gemini all day long, but they never occurs to them to go and retrain it and make it on order magnitude better at some specific task. So this really addresses, I don't know if you remember, their whole badge, that's their good. So let me get the straight. So you take one of the generalised models in this case, Lama, and then you give it a training set for that, a very specific niche use case, and then at very, very low cost, you get unbelievable outcome. That's exactly right. And it's a gift one step in there where you first you distill it, make it smaller, much faster, don't lose any of its capability within your domain, but through a way a lot of the irrelevant capabilities because it's been trained on 15 trillion tokens every language every conceivable and you're just trying to use it to either do math or to do chip design or to just speak Swahili and so there's a lot of overhead that you can strip out so the distillation process can shrink it by a factor of 10 to 100 make it much faster and then you can build it back up again with new data that's specific to that domain.

59:28So it's called domain adaptive pre -training, it makes total sense given what you're doing and very, very few people are trying to do it, even though it's so straightforward. It's just a cookbook laid out for you by Nvidia. Here's how you do it. And I did notice that after Nvidia did this, they went completely dark and internal on it, which tells you how well it works. They're using it internally to do a lot of new chips. But it's like, this is so good. You can't just throw this out there anymore. You know, it's just, we don't know how many of these are out there, these hacks, these improvements.

1:00:01So we're going to see one in a moment. Let's go there. In fact, this is an article that I read. I just thought it was extraordinary. It's news from DeepMind. Google DeepMind introduces AlphaEvolve, a coding agent for algorithm discovery. So here's what we learned from DeepMind in Alphabet Company. So AlphaEvolve uses Gemini AI and evaluators to evolve high performance code. So in doing this, they were able to improve Gemini's training speed by 23%, which is massive and improved GPU performance by 32 .5%. So we're talking about new models that allow an AI to self -improve, to improve their own algorithms.

1:00:56I mean, we're seeing really the knee of the curve in this self -referential, self -improving AI future that really drives us in a super -exponential towards digital superintelligence. I mean, it's all happening right here right now. Yeah, there's a cool video out of Sam Altman over at Sequoia's office this last week. And one of the questions he got from the crowd is, hey, is coding just another capability within all the open AI capabilities that you're working on? Or is it somehow special and isolated and you work on it more? And he said, oh, no, it's definitely special. It's very, very special.

1:01:40It's special because we use it internally and then he bites his tongue and he says, let's move on to the next question. I asked Alex, was there a gross about that? And he's like, yeah, that's the third time I've seen that. That the problem with talking about self -improvement inside these big foundation model companies is it attracts all the dystopians and then all the regulators come right after that. Yeah. But it's really obvious that that the reason they care so much about this use case is because the thing is gonna improve itself and that's gonna accelerate 32 .5 % GPU performance and this is just like generation one of this thing, right?

1:02:17Yeah, that's unbelievable. Yeah It's not just, I mean, when I say it's a super exponential, it really is, we've gone from 2X every two years to 10X a year, to 100X a year, to something beyond that in terms of the improvements that we're seeing, and it's not slowing down. I mean, there are no physical limits right now that we can see. Here's another one from Meta, Meta's Fair, shares new research to achieve advanced machine intelligence. So a number of things announced from Meta this week, Open Molecules 2025, it's a massive data set enabling breakthroughs in molecular discovery with large atomic system simulations.

1:03:02So I love this stuff. This is where we can discover new materials and we can discover new drugs and drug interactions. This is humans designing with atomic legosets. And then universal model for atoms, another item, another model out of meta. A foundational machine learning model for accurately predicting atomic interaction to cross -diverse materials. Again, you know, Sleem Univ discussed this. Material science is at the fundamental core of everything. Material science is going to drive energy. It's going to drive environmental breakthroughs. going to drive space exploration, it's going to drive all of these things.

1:03:46Well, there's this amazing thing of going from atoms to bits, right? And then once you can use bits to then affect atoms, you end up with this incredible feedback loop. And if we can actually manipulate the physical world with these advanced AI models, then holy moly. Yeah, it's crazy. I don't know. Did I tell you Peter Alexander Kiesling, you know, our friend brother, much younger, is now one of the top quantum computing guys in the country. And you know, quantum computing is good for two things that we know of. One of them is cracking cryptography. But the other one is simulating biological systems.

1:04:24The hell were you guys doing in this frat?

1:04:29What's God's name? What was in the water? Actually, MIT has just become a ridiculous place. It's since we were there. the concentration of entrepreneurs is just unbelievable today. So I'm not surprised. But I think that we should follow up on how that interacts with this, because the AI gets faster and faster and faster, but it needs that simulator in order to keep it on track. And so if you can take the whole drug discovery thing or the whole molecule discovery thing, and then the simulator is actually quantum computer based. Well, this is what Jack Hittery is doing at Sandbox AQ, right? They're basically using, you know, super fast AI models to run quantum equations and being able to model things in a way that is understandable on a quantum basis but doing it with conventional AI.

1:05:24And, you know, I don't think we've seen anything yet coming out of quantum compared to what we're going to see over the next few years. I don't know if you've ever watched 3 blue one brown, unbelievable videos on all things science, math, technical. It's just the most incredible explanations of everything. Like the transformer AI explanation is epically great. Would you text me that? I would love to probably watch it with my boys. That would be great. The quantum computing explanation, kidn't do it. It's just you cannot fathom quantum computing what it does well and what it doesn't do well in an hour or two.

1:06:07Well, it's it. So, Liam, you want to share our favorite conversation about quantum computing? Sure. 10 years ago Steve Jervitzon spoke at Singularity University and we asked him in the Q &A. the amount of computation that these things can do is off the hook. Where is all this computation coming from? And he goes, well, we have a consensus answer amongst the top quantum physicists in the world, but you're not going to like it. We're like, what? Just tell us. And he's like, okay, seems the current consensus is that we're doing the computation and parallel universes and bringing the answer back. And at which point everybody's brains exploded and we're like, okay, he goes, I told you you wouldn't like it.

1:06:50So that was, that was like 10 years ago. By the way, that's true. It's still it's still the consensus. Well, this is the point. Last year you had Helmut Hartmut Nevin. Hartmut Nevin had a heart of pedals quantum computing lab. And I said to him in the Q &A, hey Steve Jefferson said this 10 years ago, now we have 10 years more data experiments, thousands of been teams of New York, you know, what's the consensus? And he goes, you're not going to like it, but it's the same. In fact, he said, the existence of a quantum computer may be evidence that we're living in a multiverse. In which case, you know, everyone just goes, okay, come on.

1:07:28Before that scares everyone away, we really got to get key slang on the pod for a little bit. But the reason there's lots and lots of hope and enthusiasm around this is because we're very close to an AI quantum compiler where you can just say, just like you do with Gemini is say, hey, here's something I want to do. Does it fit quantum or not? And it'll actually tell you and also then compile what you were saying into the actual quantum code. And so then the usability for a startup or for just a weekend hacker. And also the quantum computers are on the cloud. It's not like you need to go and get the items on your bits.

1:08:04Hey, it's just another login on the cloud. So it's really pretty practical and exciting and coming soon. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synthetic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested I did check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below.

1:08:41All right, let's get back to the episode. I'm always looking for tipping points. When do we know things are hitting an inflection point and accelerating and things are changing? And this article I think New York Times is one of them. So, quote, top priority from Pope Leo, warned the world of the AI threat. So Pope Leo the 14th warned that AI poses serious risk to human dignity, justice, and labor, and considers that AI must be developed, quote, for the good of all, and calls for ethical use. And it's not his commentary, but the fact that this is in New York Times article and that the Pope is focusing on AI in the first month of his, you know, people leadership, if that's the right terminology.

1:09:31So that's pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I think it's great because you know there's a billion Catholics all over the world including my wife and The under reaction is rampant and when you get somebody as renowned as the Pope saying okay here are the priorities It's very similar to a much smaller scale, but Joe and the president of northeastern and the commencement address last year said AI will affect every one of you no matter what you may majored in you must do AI Yeah, and he's the only university president I heard say that means like wow thank god So now now you've got that well thank god again you got the Pope Giving you Up that this is coming and hopefully that'll create some motion It's it's great to see them getting in front of this you know as opposed to waiting through a hundred years to acknowledge the earth goes around the Sun This is at least a much more and I got a good bit a couple times I've been with the Vatican the last few years Peter you've been there a couple of times as well, is they've been way, way more up to speed with what's happening in technology than I ever would have given them incredible.

1:10:35Yeah, we had great sessions on regenerative medicine and longevity there. And I was pretty impressed the topics were allowed. But I think it's going to be interesting if an AI claims to be conscious, or conscious, right? And see what the reaction is then. Yeah. Yeah, maybe they'll let women, maybe they'll let women to actually become free someday and then AI will follow after that. Well, just another note on this was, you know, the last Pope had this defining quality, which was tenderness. Yes. One of the most extraordinary, humble, wonderful men you could ever meet. And usually when they vote in a new Pope, they go the other way.

1:11:18And it's amazing to see them continuing the same path in this new Pope. So it's great to see. You know, by the way, one of the most extraordinary things you can do with the large language models is take very dense and complicated information like the Bible and make it understandable to you. You know, and the Bible and the Bible is in every large language model out there in detail. So I mean talk about Bible study. I think there's no better Bible study than a conversation with your favorite. Can I give you the retro version of this? Sure. In the 1500s there was a Swedish monk who's called Swedenborg.

1:11:59Okay. Okay. And he was a psychic. And what he did was he basically realized that this decided that the Bible was a set of coded rules and he had to kind of apply these filters. So one of the rules that he applied was any verse that has water in it is truth. Any verse that has fire in it is false and you should just check it out. And he basically rewrote the Bible based on like these rules that they divined. And when you read the resulting text, it's unbelievably beautiful. So this is like a new version of that I think applied with me say, AI can help us interpret some of this stuff. Amazing. All right, let's turn to other exponential news beyond AI.

1:12:40This is a story that I love. This came out from Archer, Archer Aviation. I've had them on my stage at the abundance summit. Archer is a new official air taxi provider for LA28 Olympics. And here is the tweet, or extremely prior to announce that Archer is the official air taxi provider for the LA28 Olympics and the Paralympic Games and Team USA. So I've been saying this for a bit now. That is the target deadline. So Archer is beginning operation. It's built manufacturing plants. We also have in the US, Joe B aviation, and we have beta. These are sort of the flying cars. And I've had this conversation.

1:13:23They're officially called EV tolls. Electric vertical takeoff or landing. And that name just rolls off the tongue and hits the floor. I think flying taxis or flying cars is better. And the 28 Olympics is when manufacturing, operations, FAA, regulations, all need to be in place. You know, I fly my airplane out of Santa Monica Airport here, which the runway has been shortened from 5 ,000 feet to 3 ,000 feet. Eventually, it's supposed to be closed down in 2028. And hopefully, what will happen is it will become a vertiport for these to take off in land. So if I want to go to Malibu or want to go to a Dodger game downtown LA or Santa Barbara, I can hop in and avoid the 405, which is like, you know, hell on earth.

1:14:15If there was one breakthrough, I've been waiting for forever in a day. It's this one because this will open up and enable so many things. Just consider how many amazing little plots of land or hype on the side of a mountain that you can't get to, right? and now become accessible to geographic arbitrage, right? I mean, I've talked about, you know, go buy island real estate off the coast that doesn't have easy access, but it is beautiful. And just set up EV tall service. A lot of islands out here on the east coast, Peter. So again, a lot of really nice islands out here. Actually, I look at a bunch of them every day.

1:14:55All right, well, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, I think the you know the barrier is safety obviously, but the safety you know each of those electric motors is completely independent and So the power safety is gonna be I think pretty doable and then the air to air like it's all AI control David, you know, yeah, I think it's more infrastructure because you need specialized gates you need specialized Charger to deal with this all that stuff Yeah, but the safety is definitely I think I I think my real point there is there absolutely no barriers to this and it's all regulatory. So having this for forcing function deadline is going to put the man down.

1:15:37I think it's great for people working on it. It's going to happen. Yeah. That's really exciting actually to have a deadline. It is. And I mean, it's the number one driver, I think, and super excited to hear this announcement. I spent two hours yesterday trying to get home from County Airport. And two hours last week trying to get to South Pollo Airport. So God help us get this thing going faster. The alternative is helicopters which are damn dangerous. Yeah, yeah, they truly are. All right, let's move on. Next subject here is longevity. One of my favorite subjects. When I hit on a couple of articles and subjects here, Dave, you are there.

1:16:13Saleem, you are someplace on Earth, even though you're a director of the Exporize Foundation. So the big news here is in November 2023 in Riyadh. Once again, this is Saudi Arabia putting their money behind advancements. We announced the $101 million health span expires. This is an expires directed at trying to add a minimum of 10 years, a goal of 20 years of additional health in immune cognition and muscle. And for the first time what we're doing is we're providing milestone awards to help teams make progress. We've had 623 teams register for this X -Pri super proud of that. And last week, Dave and I, you and I were sitting together, we awarded 40 of the teams with $250 ,000, totaling 10 million in this milestone, one award ceremony.

1:17:11And pretty amazing teams. I think we had winners from 12, 14 countries from Australia to China throughout Europe, the US, much of Asia. What do you think of it, Dave? Well, right out of the gate, it's amazing how you've, you know, the original X -Prize that you conceived of was trivial to measure compared to what you're doing now. And but the impact of this is so incredibly massive. So in terms of the ex -price overall mission, it's just the best idea ever, to try and make it a measurable, manageable prize must have been incredibly hard. And so congratulations on that. This is clearly working.

1:17:54Thank you, and Gene. I got to pass the congrats on to my partner in crime, Dr. Jamie Justice, who is the executive director of this competition. Yannick Salty's helped me find her. And she's been running it, working with an incredible scientific advisory board, Mechmut Khan, the CEO of Evolution, which think of it as health and evolution. I'm invested in a whole bunch of different technologies here and I advise different companies. So I am conflict and carnate, but I'm outside, be clear, I'm not involved in any team selections, any team judging. I'm a bystander watching and rooting for a winner here sooner rather than later.

1:18:37I think it's awesome. This is the biggest public prize ever given in the history of humanity. Yeah, right. It is. And it's just compared to Elon. We just award Elon $100 million prize. And this one's $101 million prize specifically. So who would be bigger than Elon's ex -price? Yeah, the other thing that jumped out at me on Monday down in New York is the original ex -price, $10 million prize. And I think maybe $100 million of effort to win the $10 million $10 ,000 return. So then the carbon removal prize was kind of the opposite of that huge prize for me, Elon Musk's coffers and somebody actually made a lot of money on it.

1:19:19This one is back to the original mission, which is that's a force multiplier, $101 million price. The number on stage was some massive amount of effort has gone into winning these stages. I think it's exactly the opposite. is the overall leverage that the prizes are delivering now, right? Yeah, 30x. So we've generated, we've launched about $550 million of prize purses and we're close to $10 billion and R &D spend cumulably by all the teams over the last 30 years to do this. And it's a great idea. And if you go to xprice .org, folks can see about all the xprises. is one of my favorite ones as well going on right now is the Wildfire Prize.

1:20:04I did a moonshots podcast with Palmer Lucky, which was super fun. The CEO of Anderl and Palmer was the first person to register in this wildfire prize. I've seen his technology going after it, and it's amazing. Super excited for that. All right, let's go to a related article on Injeviti. A lot of people are concerned that if we extend the human health span, so in the United States, average life expectancy, how long your heart is ticking is about 79 years old, is when the average age of death, average health expectancy, how long your healthy is 63? So there's this 16 year gap between when you stop being healthy and when you die, and it's just miserable for a multitude of reasons.

1:20:59And so people say, well, if you extend the lifespan and lifespan to 100, 120, are we gonna have an overpopulation issue? Well, it's just the opposite. So I use this article to bring this conversation to us. Turkey declares 2025 as the year of family to curb declining birth rates. So this article just popped out in 2024. The birth rate in Turkey was 1 .48. Children per family, you need 2 .1 children to replace your existing population. But Turkey is doing pretty well compared to other countries. So I went and used my favorite LLMs to come up with who are the top 10 lowest birth rate countries? And they're not insignificant countries.

1:21:47So check this out South Korea has 0 .72 children per woman South Korea is Sublimating it's vaporizing. It's going away right Hong Kong 0 .8 Palao 0 .8 Singapore 0 .9 Puerto Rico 0 .9 Taiwan 1 .1 China 1 .16 Spain 1 .19 Italy 1 .2 Ukraine 1 .22 children per family It's a problem. Elon's been very vocal about this. I have as well. The biggest issue is not overpopulation. The old population bomb theory isn't playing out. As we create increased abundance, the opposite is true. It's a underpopulation issue. Yeah. I mean, the South Korea one is not saying that the birth rate is three times less than it needs to be to maintain their population.

1:22:42That's really ridiculous. So what does a country do? It starts offering massive benefits for incentives, having children. Dave, any thoughts on this? Yeah, I read up on the incentives and they're not even close to covering the cost of raising a child. No one's reacting to the incentive. So I also haven't modeled out how the declining birth rate and the increasing longevity, is there a dip and then a climb or is it smooth? And would it be worth trying to, it's hard to predict the longevity curve, but it'd be worth trying to map that out. But one thing I can say is there's a perception in the US that the China is trying to beat us in AI and China is trying to take over the world and China's Gonna use it but actually what's what's driving China's Incredibly fast push into AI and robotics is A ridiculous demographic time bomb that hit Japan and they have the exact same problem times Much worse coming in China.

1:23:36It's survival. It's a fundamental survival By the way, the other side of the equation is India, right? With 1 .41 billion people, the majority of which are an absolute, you know, bottom of the pyramid, they need AI and robotics for education, for healthcare. They can't survive as a nation without this. Are you seeing that, Selim? I have to go a bit to get cheek on this. I was in India and I introduced two random people together and they knew five people in common that I introduced to other random people together and they knew 10 people in common. And I've convinced that India has like 50 ,000 people in CGI to simulate a one -hap.

1:24:19Everybody knows everybody. It's insane. I've not lived in Bombay since I was 10 years old and I can go to a party and I will know five people. And it's ridiculous. Anyway, but the broader point I think is dead on that the opportunity for robotics for elderly care and education and healthcare in general, they're such so little of it. It's like a water in a desert. Any little thing is going to totally change the landscape. I'm super excited by the potential there. You know what I mean? Robotics, your folks, the thing is incredible. Yeah, it's a good segue into Elon updates, but one of the things I'm excited about in the direction things are going, you know, globalization is kind of falling apart in a big way actually.

1:25:03But globalization was almost entirely driven by cheap labor. Now with the direction things are going, robotics doesn't happen naturally in the US because you can always do something very cheaply with Philippine or Indian labor. But if that becomes less true, then we have to invest in robotics, which in the long run is a much, much smarter direction for the world to go. And so that should kickstart investment in the category because the technology, the vision systems, the tactile systems, all of that is solved now. And it was a couple years ago. Let's put the numbers on the table here. The minimum wage in California today is $20 an hour.

1:25:43The projection, I was just with Cyrus Seguiri. We do a monthly exponential mastermind for the abundance members. And Cyrus gave one yesterday on humanoid robotics and flying cars and spaceships. And we're talking about this. The projected price per hour for operating a humanoid robot is going to be a dollar an hour. At a base cost, it's 40 cents an hour, but at maintenance and electricity, everything else on insurance, it's a buck an hour. And this arbitrage between a dollar an hour for a GPT -5 level, GROC -4 level, humanoid robot, the operates 24 -7 compared to a teenager from California. you know, there's just no comparison.

1:26:29Incana happened until the until the world boss become conscious and start demanding equal rights and equal. Well, it's like if we have robots doing all of our drudgery work, they're not going to be happy about that. Let's go on. We actually added a special section this week on Elon company updates because there's a lot of them and we'll wrap up with this segment today. But I think it's important, Elon still is our moonshot mate, just really driving extraordinary progress, and how he does this, while everything else he does, right? He's in Doge in the news all the time, but still he's operating for other crazy moonshot companies.

1:27:16Five, if you want to, yeah, five. All right, so let's talk about three of them here. The first is Elon in Saudi Arabia. He was by Trump side the entire time. Let's listen to a conversation about Elon announcing robotaxies and Starlink in Saudi Arabia. Here we go. My prediction actually for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be tens of billions. Potentially we could have an economy ten times the size of the current global economy where no one wants for anything. Sometimes in AI they talk about universal basic income. I think it's actually going to be universal high income. Where anyone can have any goods or services that they want.

1:28:11It would be very exciting to have autonomous vehicles here in the kingdom. And I'd also like to thank the kingdom for approving Starlink for maritime and aviation use. So there he is with Minister of Dual -AuSwaha, who has been sort of a key point of contact. making sort of announcements on robotics. I'm going to be amazed if we don't see Optimus manufactured in Saudi Arabia as well. Here's the next article. SpaceX deploys 28 additional satellites. Now there are 7 ,135 Starlink satellites in orbit. The FCC has approved 12 ,000 of the Gen 1 and 7 ,500 of the Gen 1. but SpaceX has proposed expanding the constellation to 42 ,000 satellites.

1:29:07That's either 42 because of Douglas Adams or it's 420 ,000 because Elon likes 420. I don't know, but hey, let's pause there. What do you think about Elon's company in Saudi? Well, like you said, it has the ability to manage five concurrent megacompans. plus Doge. It's a case study and a role model for how you use one AI assistance and then two integrators. You know, people who are incredibly like -minded finish your own sentences but are entirely focused on operations. Very similar to Google in the early days. And so I try and encourage everyone I bump into to study Elon very, very closely like at the individual actions level and take the part you want to take but replicate a lot of it and it clearly is a path to success.

1:29:58The part I love is where he every week he has what five companies so he goes one day a week to each one and says what problem do you need me to help solve? And then so you're solving a problem a week, 50 problems a year per company. Amazing. Yeah. You guys really wanted to go exactly but but there's never been a point in history where the tech titans have hung out with the politicians and world leaders. There's a world of lifetime world first. I don't know if anyone's really appreciated the magnitude of that. I love your guys opinion on Tesla, right? So Tesla has taken a massive beating because of Elon in the government in Doge in particular.

1:30:39And I tweeted, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, that the value of Tesla is not in the car sales. It's in the RoboTaxi and in Optimus. which are trillion dollar opportunities. How do you guys feel about Tesla stock? To me, this one's really, really obvious. So we all live through the Apple cycle where Apple was the greatest company and then able to slight crazy, then Apple products didn't work at all. And it was torture, like our actual daily lives turned into this hell of needing to migrate to Sonner to a PC and then Steve Jobs came back and magically life is great again. It's a very real thing, but you just have to track the talent.

1:31:23So if Steve Jobs comes back, it's not Steve alone. He brings this incredible wave of talent. And inspiration. And inspiration. Yeah. So if Elon can attract that talent to Tesla still, it'll become a great robotics company. It's cheap. If you look at LinkedIn and you see that Elon's so distracted, he's not working on the recruiting. I mean, actually, it's a car company. Yeah. So, yeah. I've, you know, in the early years of Tesla, when he was about to run out of money every quarter, it was like hard to put money into it. And so lots of us didn't put money into it. And then early as a SpaceX, the Rockers were crashing, so you didn't put money into it.

1:32:10earlier years of Starlink, you're like, how is this gonna work? And so the lesson that people have learned over the years is don't ever bet against Elon. His manic focus, his engineering ability, his ability to distill key problems and just go after them and solve them. The cluster approach to use it a grok with to solve the things, is this like legendary stuff that's gonna go down for centuries in terms of somebody making massive turning points? So I think the opportunity for Tesla to totally turn around with robot axes, but also note that there are all these million cars are carrying around energy.

1:32:49Yes. That is a huge marginal, marginal impact on things, right? There's that. There's the fact that you could integrate that with Starlink, with solar panels, with other stuff. Then you bring in the humanoid robots. right? And now things like so I think this is a monster opportunity to buy a stock that will never be lower than it is now. Yeah I agree with you. So we think about Elon's companies, we think about SpaceX of course and Tesla and X and X AI and Neuralink and people forget about the fact that he still has the boring company.

1:33:36I remember the tweet, he's going from Hawthorne to Beverly Hills to his home. He's going from SpaceX headquarters to his home and the 405 is jammed and he goes, this is insane. There needs to be a better way and he tweets, I'm going to start tunneling under LA. And that's him, right? When he has a crazy idea, and he goes, yep, that's what I do. It's going to be a boring company. I'll call it the boring company. But let's watch this video. For the first time ever, the boring company has continuously mined in a zero people in tunnel configuration. There's no one in the machine, which is simultaneously advancing forward and erecting a ring in order to building a tunnel behind it.

1:34:20each full ring weighs 24 ,000 pounds. So you can see here in this video, basically a completely automated process of drilling, extracting the earth and building a tunnel behind. I was, you know, in my conversations with Palmer Lucky, Palmer was saying that while we are, or we have a space force and air force and army that eventually there will be an underground force as well as tunnel technology gets more advanced. An underground force. Yeah, crazy. I think the boring company has the greatest name for a company in history. I agree. So that's the articles for this week. Pretty intense guys. I can't wait for us to get together again.

1:35:13And if you've been watching this episode of Munchatz and WTF just happened in tech, our mission here is deliver to you and contextualize the most important news in the tech world that's impacting every company, every industry, every parent, every aspect of our lives. Please subscribe. Give us your feedback. Tell us what articles you enjoyed listening to, what you want to listen to next. Tell me, you know, do you like Dave better or Celine better? and who else would you like on this podcast? Yes. Can I do a small plug? Yeah, of course. We did an EXO workshop last year for 100 bucks. It sold out.

1:35:51People said it was one of the best workshops they ever had. We're doing another one on May 20th. So anybody interested? What's been covered in that workshop on May 20th, which is my birthday by the way? It's how do you build an EXO? It's how do you build an EXO? So Peter, you should drop in for 30 seconds. Say happy. We can say happy birthday to you. Send me in. I'll get you the details. But we cover how do you build an EXO and people loved it? So we're gonna just keep doing that every month roughly. Our last one sold out, so it'll be great. Amazing, an EXO is an exponential organization that's performing 10X compared to your competition.

1:36:25Selim and I have written extraordinary a book on the subject, check it out, but more importantly, go sign up for Selim's workshop. We'll put it in the notes below, but where do people go to? just go to openexo .com you'll see a link to it, but it will put it below the link in the notes. Dave, what are you excited about for the coming weeks and months? Well, that comment in the last week's podcast about the geeky version of All -in. I really, if people are commenting on this podcast too, entertaining you, sure, that's fine, but we really actually want to do things and say things that help you map out your life and change your direction.

1:37:06And so if you're suggesting guests or suggesting topics or whatever, keep it actionable. And really be honest with yourself, like did anything I heard here today impact the way I'm going to spend the next week. And so we can really focus on those things. Because I do see only podcasts I know of where we cover not just the technical aspects, but also the societal, the economic macroeconomic. And I don't know of any other place that does that well. So if we can keep bringing in more of that to this, as can become the kind of forum for. I think the umbrella premise is so simple, right? Technology is a major driver of progress in the world.

1:37:41As Rick Kurzweil says, it may be the only major driver of progress in the world. And so these breakthroughs that are happening at an increased frequency become more and more material to how our lives are going to be lived. And please note that between Selim, Dave, myself, and our entire research teams, we're scouting everything that's going on in humanoid robotics, in space, in AI, in Bitcoin, in 3D printing, and we're doing the work. It's why I'm bold. But beautiful. And we got versus two. If there's a complicated topic that you really want to understand, we can either figure it out or farm it out and then bring it back to you.

1:38:21Yeah, anyway, give us your feedback. We love doing this. And guys, I love having you as my moonshot mates. See you guys soon. Take care guys. Everybody, thanks for listening to moonshots. This is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmandis .com slash subscribe. That's dmandis .com slash subscribe.

1:38:58See you next week on moonshots.