The AI-Crypto Collision That Will Redefine Global Power w/ Eric Pulier, Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #187

28:29Yeah, that's a really good point, Peter, because people don't even understand the Pandora's box that this opens up in innovation, because we're not just talking about now opening up new collateral and moving this money around in a different way. We're talking about programmable money. Programmable money has things like what you're saying. It's going to merge with what we used to call loyalty, right? Loyalty is going to completely change because you're now going to be able to create interoperable loyalty points. Loyalty points will be pegged to stablecoins. Stablecoins will now create a lifestyle alliance is across companies.

29:06So right now if I go into a yogurt store and I and somebody I'll roll my eyes when somebody says here's more points to get a you know 10 % off at 11th yogurt. I gotta fight for this. But if that's those same points are not only usable at dinner tonight or for my airline or if I take them they're generating yield because they're moving into a programmable actually defy enabled token. So now I can make yield on it. I can use it in different ways. These groups can interoperate with one another. It becomes dramatically more practical, so much more interesting. And then the other thing that's going to happen that I don't think people are thinking about yet is if you're a CEO of a major company.

29:46You have a few levers you can pull to keep your job. One is you increase revenue, the other is you decrease cost, you know, you can make some products to do that. But what one of the main things that you really should be doing if you're CEO of a public company to increase your stock is to make sure people who are ready bought your stock, don't sell it. If you're a Yankees fan or the Yankees, yeah, the Yankees have like a bad game or have a me too in their front office. People don't say, I'm a meds fan now. They say get rid of the bum. Let's let's win next year. But if you're a if you're a shareholder of US steel and they have some incident You're like I'm out of here 10 seconds right?

30:22Let's buy the competitor. Let's do something else What should happen is if you if you've tokenized your equities if you tokenized your stock You're not only going to be able to offer superior loyalty against it You're gonna know who your shareholders are and if you're if you own a million dollars of Coca -Cola stock you're not going to pay for parking at Coca -Cola stadium. At three -year anniversary of owning US steel, you're going to get dinner for two, and thank you from the CEO because they know who you are, things are going to drop into your wallet. The loyalty systems are now going to extend into true ownership.

30:55That's brilliant, buddy. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to make one couple more quick points. One is, you know, the credit union aspect of it is really fascinating because credit unions, you know, newspapers, because we've lost all the local newspapers, which used to be the heart of every community. We're losing communities across the country because there's no sticky glue for connectivity tissue. I've been working at the Credit Union industry for a few years and it turns out the credit unions are a perfect place to be the center of the community. Now that they can issue local tokens, they can become a really powerful force for all because almost all 80 % of monetary transactions happens within your town.

31:37And so this becomes a really powerful model for creating community stickiness and awareness and a shared sense of values, which I think they have the opportunity to really galvanize on. The last point I'll make is in this previous point, you mentioned 600 billion of assets could be brought on. I think that's so under. Yeah. That's so much bigger than that. I mean, it's like a hundred times bigger than that. It's trillions of over. Yeah. There's 120 trillion in real estate, 100 trillion in equities, 13 trillion in treasuries, 12 trillion in gold and precious metals. It's all comic. I think they put that in just to show the banks.

32:11It's not a lot. It's not just not a lot. Don't worry about it. That's why I was... I'll make one final point on this. We'll move on to the next article, which is, you know, when the internet was developed, it became a place where we exchanged information, videos, photos, data. It never had a financial layer. And for the first time, This tokenization of assets of stablecoins becomes the financial layer of the internet. And, oh my God, when we give AI agents access to that, we're going to see an explosion in the economy. I mean, I really think people have no idea how fast the economy is going to accelerate on the back of AI and crypto together.

32:53Just, just - Everything's going to change there, Peter. I mean, today, if you have a dog with diabetes and you decide you're going to buy dog food, A dog food company has spent the time with an ad agency to make a heartwarming commercial about why you should buy this dog food versus another. Very soon you're just going to tell your agent, get my dog food. It's going to know your dog as diabetes. It's going to know your price point. It's going to know things about you. Everything that is necessary, it's going to go research all the best medical research on the best foods and it's going to go out there and buy the dog food.

33:24Now, how is an advertiser or a brand going to distinguish themselves in that? They're going to build their outreach for the AI appeal, not for the human appeal. Amazing. All right. Let's move on to another piece. Wait, dogs can you diabetes? Apparently. I love Eric's. Eric's. I love Eric's examples here. All right. So this is more breaking news in the crypto space. Trump allows cryptocurrencies in 401Ks. So an executive order enabled 401Ks to have alternate assets, including crypto and real estate, beyond traditional stocks, right? This EO order, it's going to trigger a regulatory overhaul. It is not putting this in place immediately.

34:05The SEC is going to propose guidance. The 401K market is $8 to $12 trillion. What they said in the article here was that could move billions to decrypto. I think you could move a better part of a trillion to decrypto. Here's the sticking point. I mean, everybody keeps saying, and our guidance for you is you should have one to two percent of your money in crypto. I'd say, uh -oh, I'm at like 80%, but hey, who's counting? Yeah, it's funny that there used to be a thing called an internet sector. I remember when the web was first coming up and people are like, are you gonna use the internet or let's have an internet division?

34:48That's like having like chairs or just like expected to be in a company. Internet is expected to be a company. The crypto sector, when you tokenize everything, it's just stuff. So, yes, you're going to have a lot of your ownership of things in stuff. And most of that will be tokenized. So, you know, how much of that should be in Bitcoin versus a piece of the Chrysler building versus gold? It's all going to be tokenized. So, Lee, what's your thought on this 401k? I think this is also specifically Bitcoin can go into 401k's. I'm not sure what the process is to allow this fully because SEC is to propose guidance.

35:27I don't know if there has to be a builder after the congress has to move on this. I don't know what the technicalities are. But once you get this done, Bitcoin demand will explode. There's a really great little ins. Somebody went to GROC and ChatGPT in Gemini and perplexity and said when will Bitcoin hit It's back as a financial analyst, when we'll Bitcoin, hit a million dollars a bit coin. And it looks at the ranges are between 2028 and 2031. And so all four engines basically came over the recently narrow perspective of when Bitcoin hits a million dollars. And I mean, it's just huge. It's a huge, Dave, I want to make sure you got a chance to add any thoughts on these.

36:11Actually, I had a good conversation with Joe Kennedy back when he was in Congress, is running the crypto subcommittee on exactly how this works. So the way it works is you create an executive order specifying kind of a broad outcome that you want. And then it hands off to a committee or a commission, this case, the SEC. And then they have to spend laborious amounts of time, maybe with the IAS systems, creating thousands and thousands of pages of rules to try and actualize it. So the part that scares me on this slide is SEC to propose guidance. Like, okay, when, how, what? Now, I don't know who's running the show.

36:51Well, I guess we know who's running the show, but we know on the AI front, David Sacks has built a dream team of brilliant people, which is kind of unprecedented in the government. They need an equivalent capable team in the SEC to deal with this, because I think Eric has right, it's a game changer like nothing we've ever seen. Eric, Eric, you know, you use the word pandora's box and they're like a parent or a Pandora's box of innovation is coming. But you know, anytime you can secure it as an apartment building or a stadium, you can also short it. And anytime you can secure it as something and short it, it might blow up one night.

37:29And you're like, I wonder why it blew up. Okay. So this is a reason that sports team owners are not allowed to bet on the games. And so I agree on a percent that we absolutely need this in the age of AI. You can't use the Swift network in three days settlement and two dollar transactions in the world we're moving into. So this is 100 percent required. But if you ever watch the movie The Big Short, you know, in back. So I'm the founder of a company, Vessmark. We manage about two trillion dollars of public assets. And I'm still the chairman of the company today. And we had back during the big short area, you know, every asset manager said, can you support CDOs, you know, collateralized or credit default swaps to CDS's.

38:15And it turned out they were manufacturing $60 trillion of synthetic instruments. The whole US housing all housing combined is $20 trillion. So on top of that, they layered $60 trillion of synthetic junk that is trading. Yeah, and then dumping most of it onto the pension funds, you know, the, you know, the fireman's, you know, Illinois pension fund was buying all this garbage. So that, that went horribly wrong, as we know. The same thing will inevitably happen here if the SEC doesn't get that guidance right. And so we desperately need it, but it's not going to be trivial to make this real. So I've got, I've got concerns, but I do completely agree with the need.

38:59All right, one more article in this and Eric, you shared this with me yesterday, so I'll let you take the lead. SEC allows liquid staking. What does that mean and why is that relevant? It's highly relevant because it's one thing to say Bitcoin's going to rise of $2 million over the next X years and if the ETH might go up, et cetera, and you sit and wait. It's another thing to try to generate yield on the the uptick. So a lot of old school crypto holders Really if if they're extremely diligent will put put their crypto in what's called cold storage so it can't be Hacked the buried in the backyard or something.

39:42They don't want to Hulling it. They're gonna hold away. But the average person isn't necessarily gonna think that way the family offices is the the the sabers of the people and ETFs, they might get an idea like, well, look, my my assets are dormant. How can I generate yield on them the same way I get interest in a bank? This genius act says, you can create stablecoins, but you can't pay interest. What that really just means is you can you can get interest if you will yield. If it's a separate company in a separate organization and you click over and have different teas and seeds. So what this means is there's a notion called liquid staking which means that you keep your tokens tradable but you lock them up in what's called a staking pool and in exchange you get liquid, you get tokens in an essence a baribond of source where you can trade back for those.

40:41But while they're being staked, they can play in what's called defy, decentralized finance. So there's these trading pairs and there's an entirely new world of how I think Wall Street is going to start to work and converge with traditional finance where there's a lot of trading back and forth and fees to be made for providing liquidity into those trades. So what's happening is there's opportunities now to stake your tokens and generate yield. Now this was not allowed in the past or let's say it was had regulatory uncertainty. What this does is it declares that that practice and the outcome of that practice is not a security.

41:27It's going to dramatically streamline the rules, give clarity to how people can actually do this. And over time, it'll even make the ETFs yield bearing, whether that's for the ETF owner or how they share it with the public is unknown. But a black box already applied for this. And I'm sure all the ETFs will apply. And I'm on a case by case basis, I think they'll start to get approved. Yeah, can I make a point on uncertainty? Like in my experience, I want to really applaud the White House and the SEC for doing this, creating clarity. But in my experience, when things are unclear, like Sandbackman, Friedkane era.

42:07What happens in an unclear environment is that highly, highly ethical people don't touch it because it's unclear. And really sleazy people do it anyway. And anytime the White House or the government creates an unclear business environment, the sleasiest people on the planet thrive. And it creates all kinds of problems. But when you have clear rules, just like in a sport, you know, if it's clear what's a legal hit, what's not a legal hit, you know, if it's clear, then ethical people can play. And if it's unclear, you get horrible behavior. So I really want to congratulate the White House and the SEC for creating some clarity.

42:44This has been mud for what, like, five years now, 10 years now. Yeah. It's really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a, there's a AI token called Morpheus where you can stake Ethan or other rewards or whatever. And there's $200 million of Ethereum staked to underpin this not working. This is one minor little. Yeah, yeah, this is going to get really big. It's staggering in terms of what though. Yeah, one thing I will mention on that also is that it also will take non -programmable blockchains like like Bitcoin or even tokenized gold and things that don't inherently generate any yield. They don't play in DeFi and there's going to be all sorts of what's called wrapping and bridging protocols, etc to allow them to play in DeFi.

43:27So you can imagine when you have something like tokenized gold, which traditionally always does better than a fiat currency because gold generally is more stable. Fiat currencies are being printed like mad and so they tend to depreciate. So people will start saving more of their generally value at rest in gold or other more stable tokens. And then if you can then stake those and generate yield, why would you ever but Fiat, which is depreciating with a minor interest rate, when you can stake in something that is appreciating and pays more in yield. It's just gonna change how people say it. This is the six Ds of exponentials in play in the finance world, right?

44:11We're digitizing, dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing. Two key points here. One is the really important part is not that you have digital currencies and cryptocurrencies. It's what Eric mentioned earlier. you have the fact that it's programmable. And the fact that it's programmable means you can automate all sorts of stuff that you could automate before when you're at standard US dollars. And now it's time for probably the most important segment, the health tech segment of moonshots. It was about a decade ago, where a dear friend of mine, who was incredible health, goes to the hospital with a pain in his side.

44:45Only to find out he's got stage four cancer. A few years later, if a attorney or brother of mine dies in his sleep, he was young. He dies in the sleep from a heart attack. And that's when I realized people truly have no idea what's going on inside their bodies unless they look We're all optimists about our health But did you know that 70 % of heart attacks happen without any preceding no shortness of breath no pain Most cancers are detected way too late at stage three or stage four and the sad fact is that we have all the technology We need to detect and prevent these diseases at scale and that's when I knew I had to do something I figured everyone should have access to this tech to find and prevent disease before it's too late.

45:26So I partnered with a group of incredible entrepreneurs and friends, Tony Robbins, Bob Hoerry, Bill Cap, to pull together all the key tech and the best positions and scientists to start something called Fountain Life. Annually I go to Fountain Life to get a digital upload. Tuna Gigabytes of data about my body, head to toe, collected in four hours, to understand what's going on. All that data is fed to our AIs, our medical team. Every year it's a non -negotiable for me. I have nothing to ask of you other than please become the CEO of your own health. Understand how good your body is at hiding disease and have an understanding of what's going on.

46:04You can go to foundlife .com to talk one of my team members there. That's foundlife .com. Want to move to our next topic. This is from the Washington Post. Doge AI tool to cut federal regulations. So the summary here is AI is reviewing 200 ,000 federal regulations with the goal of eliminating 50 % of them by 2026. HUD and the urban development taking the first testing, they've cut 1883 rules in just two weeks. This is AI driven deregulation, the path to trillions of dollars in savings. Their estimate was if they were going to try and review these 200 ,000 federal regulations, it would take 3 .6 million man hours of human labor, but that can be done by AI tootsweet.

46:53So I find this amazing, right? I mean, if you look at regulations in any field, they're probably all opposing each other, and 80 % of them could be eliminated. So this is a huge move for Doge and highly applauded. I've said this before when we talked about this earlier, I think for me, this is the most exciting application of AI that you could possibly find. I'd like to kind of push out there called MVR, minimum viable regulatory. I love that. Like what's the minimum amount of regulatory to get something, kind of just put some constraints around it while you watch it and figure it out? How big is it tax code?

47:34like thousands of pages, all of that. But it really requires maximum. It really requires a lot. And you know, I'd have 10 years in Europe and you want regulatory crap. If you're in Europe, you're always violating like 20 laws at some given point. You don't know what they are. Right. And I think this, the Europe needs like a Manhattan project of this epic level of deregulating 90 % of all the crap regulatory there in order to get themselves back on track and be innovative again. So there's incredible potential to be unleashed here. It's so exciting. Well, I mean, like, yeah, Europe is the case study and where you don't want to go, right?

48:09You've got the most cultured, incredible, beautiful place on the planet, perfect climate, incredible population, and you f*** it all up with regulatory bullshit. And now it's on the on the cusp of becoming irrelevant in the world. Can I tell a quick tangent story here for a second? I had a French girlfriend way back in the danger of buying her a party, don't eat here, French identity card. And they said, problem. You were born here, your parents were born here, but your grandmother was not born in France. So we have a problem And she was like, yeah, because she was the daughter of the French forces in Vietnam and her dad was the commanding officer of all those forces Now they wanted affidavits from all the four grandparents that this was indeed their grandmother Granddaughter so she said, well, they're dead my grandparents are dead.

48:54This is a problem Then they give her a list of like 16 things she has to comply with to kind of satisfy all of this and And she finally after like three months of she's like, conquered down she's like, I'm not letting this be me. Shows up at the city off of hall with like a stack like this. And they said, ah, problem. And while you've been doing all this, your birth certificate has expired because it turns out in France, your birth certificate only lasts three months of the thing you have to apply for. And you want to show that you were born. So you know, you just want to show yourself in the middle of all that when you're trying to get anything done over there.

49:27This is where you could apply. You know how this all evolved, you know, when when the founding fathers put together the federal government, it was intended to be a couple percent, like two, three, four percent of the economy max, just enough to fund the military, the central military and the post office and one or two other things. And then every time there's a world war or a major crisis, the budget expands tremendously. But there's a war on. You have to expand it tremendously. But then after the war is over, it magically stays flat. It doesn't go back down. And then there's another crisis and it goes up and it goes up and it goes up.

49:55So the budget goes up, the taxes go up, and the regulatory documents go up and only up. There's no down. This is the first time in almost 250 years now that there's a chance to actually go down in the documents stack. And it's all empowered by AI. There's a very real possibility of this being a continuing trend because we kind of need it to because we need massive amounts of new regulation as abundance goes exponential. The number of things that need to be thought about goes exponential. So if you don't have a process for simplifying and streamlining this tack, then the document set's going to go to infinity.

50:32And the complexity is going to go to infinity and it'll collapse the country. So this is a really good, really good case study. And hopefully I'm thrilled by this. Yeah. I mean, if you want to live in a country where you can always be arrested because you're always doing something wrong, whether you know it or not. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. So Dave, I added this one on. I'm curious if you want to comment on this. So ChatGPT runs microcaf trading test. So over six months, ChatGPT was giving money to trade and it returned to 23 .8%. So call it close to 50 % annualized rate of return. Is this sustainable?

51:14Are we gonna see everybody turning over? They're so portfolio to an AI? I don't know if turning over it like it's all AI assisted already the hedge funds, you know, two Sigma 0 .72 they're massively AI dominated already happened very quickly and very quietly. There's some of the biggest hirers out of Princeton, mostly, but also a little bit out of MIT in Harvard. And they take some incredible talent and it just disappears into the auto trading, you know, GPT -driven AI -driven morass. But a couple of our investments and farm and RRU do massive simulation modeling using thousands of AI agents. And they're entirely getting pulled into this trading world now because it just works so, so well.

52:02So this is the only kind of trading I think that will happen in this ETFs. It is not a total arms race where you're going to end up with my AI's beta -curry. Well, it is. One of the problems here is that even the smallest variations in the quality of the AI or how good it is will dominate. At some point, you know, AGI or ASI is going to be so dominant in this space that you could get your Chatchee TP567 to help you or whatever you're going to try to do as a person, but they're going to have to rename the idea of a public investor of the public to being like exit liquidity, right? That's what you should call you because you're not going able to be able to compete with people actually know what's going on.

52:46This whole idea of information and balance is going to explode based on how good your AI is. Well, the efficient allocation of capital is absolutely core to the success of humanity and the country and adding AI as a helper in how to and where to allocate what's worth something, what's not is only good. Actually, what's really bad is ETFs. You know, ETFs or like a sucker fish stuck on the bottom of the large. You know, it's fine when it's really small. Oh man. Exactly. But when it gets too big, it drags down the whole thing. And that's where it is right now. So adding intelligence to the investment process, you would know this in biotech better than anyone, Peter.

53:26I mean, it's like right now, it's hot, that it's cold, it's random, it's bullshit. And adding some serious intelligence into, yeah, this is garbage, this is real. this is going to change humanity, put some money behind it. That would be, oh, that would be the best thing in the world. So that's what the, you know, the AIs are starting to do. I mean, that's a fascinating thought, you know, in other words, actually investing for an outcome other than just financial return, investing because it can increase the lifespan, the health span of humanity, and consequently give incredible financial return.

54:02Speaking of which, and Leopold is doing something interesting. So let's intro this day. Okay, so Leopold, Ashen, Broner. So just to intro this, I think the three best pieces of media really ever created are in my favorites, Gavin Baker on the All -In podcast, unbelievable talking about chips, really predicting what we're about to talk about with Intel here. next best I think would be number two Alex wasner gross on the moonshots podcast solving humanity's last exam problems in real these are the hardest problems we can think of and he's just rattling off answers as Peter suggested some you got to see that that was oh my god but I think the number one in my world is Leopold Ashenbrunner on the the Dwarkesh podcast for our straight of everything that matters in situational awareness and what's going on in the world today.

55:02And then he turns around and he calls his hedge fund situational awareness LP, which is so cool. So at the time he was on that podcast, he's just a guy. He graduated from Columbia at age 19, top of his class, clearly brilliant, went to open AI, learned everything going on, got fired controversially from open AI, starts a billion dollar hedge fund right after that. And so now for the first time we can see the positions in his new hedge fund. And so I cannot wait to get him on the podcast. By the way, Leopold, if you're out there listening, please come on the podcast. Yeah, I would love that. I mean, his paper, right, situational awareness, if you've not read that white paper, it's brilliant.

55:41And it talks about the intelligence sort of explosion that is upon us right now. You wrote about like two years ago or so? Yeah, I think about two years ago. And then immediately, Parley, the white paper into the hedge fund capital raising, which takes a little while. And the whole theory of the fund is invest in the implications of that paper. So look at the number one investment at 46 percent. It's Intel Corporation. So I mean, I find that fast. The US government cannot afford to have Intel fail. It is one of the biggest assets on the US balance sheet, if you would, in terms of its potential impact.

56:16So it feels like an incredible bet. Yeah, and it looks like he bought call options. It's hard to tell exactly which call options he bought, so I tried to simulate it in perplexity comment. But by the way, if you're using all your AI tools, perplexity comment, if you're trying to scrape nooks and crannies of the internet and find details, it's by far the best. It has no scruples about prying into every little URL, so it's very good for this type of research. And it came back with best guests, you know, given volumes of different option types. He probably invested something around a hundred million or more into call options that pay off at about 1 .5 billion if Intel doubles.

56:58This is not investment advice. Well, I'm just guessing. This is his. But I actually was in the news. I'm in the news this morning for a transaction that I did. Do you tell me which is part of it? Well, I can't tell because public company but it's in the news so you can you can look it up. But it's part of an overall asset gathering, I'm liquidating a bunch of things and pulling them together specifically to try and mirror what Leopold is doing on this sheet. One of the beautiful things about hedge funds is every quarter they have to file a 13F which shows all their positions. So if the stocks have moved, you might be too late, but if you look down the list and it's like, oh, this hasn't reacted, this hasn't reacted, you can just copy him.

57:41So that's kind of nice. It's a little brutal on the hedge funds, but it's nice for us if you want to. I know I can be a pulled shoes. My abundance 360 members would love to get into his, into his funds. So hopefully we'll get him to on the podcaster to join us at the abundance summit march. All right, let's go to one of my favorite subjects. There's a lot going on in the space arena, and it's worth taking a second. And so Starship 10, this is the 10th flight of Starship, is scheduled for August 22nd. And I just want to take a second and hit on how awesome SpaceX is. And every time, you know, we've seen a Starship launch and it doesn't, you know, there's an explosion, it doesn't land properly, whatever, it gets decimated in the public media, right?

58:29And I think the media doesn't realize these are all test flights. This is SpaceX moving the needle in so many different directions, a little bit of information for folks. So SpaceX right now is at a $400 billion valuation. In the last podcast we gave old news at 210, it's actually at $400 billion valuation. And get this, SpaceX is responsible for over 95 % of all U .S. launches, which is amazing, right, over 50 % of all global launches. And a lot of the launches outside the U .S. would use SpaceX except, you know, National pride prohibits them. Of interesting note, Falcon 9, which is the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet, has learned to recover the Falcon 9 booster and has done it 450 times.

59:19And one specific booster has actually made 29 sequential missions. So this is as close to usability as ever has had. So if we look at this right now, here's the top news. So they'll be utilizing what they call booster 16 and ship 37. And this flight was delayed because it was an explosion on the pad. And it's going to be making a shot at checking out new heat shield upgrades and deploying dummy starlink satellites. Of course, starlink is the darling of SpaceX. It's a profitable part of SpaceX. SpaceX, I remember talking to Elon about this, he said, I will probably never take SpaceX public because I don't want, you know, the public market to telling me I can go to Mars or not, or to only disclose all my information publicly.

1:00:10But I think they probably will spin out Starlink. My guess is sometime in the next 12 months and make that sort of another financial engine. And it, you know, Starlink was built as an engine to fund Starship and to fund their Mars missions. Any other thoughts on this? I think there's a really important thing here where it's like Google X is not public, right? But they can spin out Waymo and make that public, et cetera. I think we're going to see a lot of this where people are incubating in private. And then once they're ready for commercialization and need capital markets to really step in, they can take things public.

1:00:48And I think it's such a powerful model that I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future. Yeah. I mean, just for comparison, for folks to get the sense of how big starship is, It's probably the same size as the Apollo Saturn V vehicle, just slightly bigger, but it's got almost two and a half times the thrust. And it's fully reusable while Saturn V was completely thrown away. The mission right now is to get this vehicle to the surface of the moon by 2027, 2028. and then Elon's been tweeting about the idea of getting it to Mars sometime in the next couple years. Probably, you know, obviously uncrewed.

1:01:36And we'll see in a second he's been talking about putting an optimist robot on it. Well, it's not so hard to get to the moon, Peter. And Mars is very, very far away. I get that. But if you're launching immediately and getting into orbit, then from there to the moon seems like a... Oh, it is. It's not that. it's being able to make sure you've got the vehicle working well on Earth first. So once it's making it to orbit and then being able to reenter safely, again, it was built so that it could land vertically on the moon, right? This is a powered landing. There's no atmosphere for power issues there, but the size of this is huge, right?

1:02:19These These vehicles will enable us to really create extraordinary moon bases this decade or in the next five years. So super pumped about that. Well, I only ask because this next story coming up because launching the Starlink satellites is an obvious, very profitable, great mission. And then going to Mars is way harder. And I was looking for kind of a stepping stone. What gets you in between? And suddenly it's obvious that we'll talk about in a second. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a three to four day flight time to the moon, right? The moon's 240 ,000 miles away. Just for fun, if you have kids, if you take any ball.

1:02:57So the Earth's circumference is 24 ,000 miles, and the moon is 240 ,000 miles away. If you take a string and wrap it around a tennis ball 10 times and then pull the string out, that's how far the moon is from the Earth. It's a little bit deceiving to think about it as far as it's huge, super far away. So we're talking about three or four days to get to the moon. And we're depending upon home and transfer orbits and where Mars and Earth are located. It can be six to nine months to get to Mars. And so here was a interesting tweet or post exchange. So the question was posted here. What's the timeline you have set, Elon?

1:03:38It sounds fascinating. I'm glad to be alive. This is about when we're going to go to Mars and Elon responded slight chance of Starship flight to Mars crewed by an optimist in November, December of next year, 26 a lot needs to go right and in fact I remember at the beginning of the year one of my predictions was will be boots on Mars by 2030 and Those boots will be optimist boots so What about the power that's needed on the moon to go to Mars? Is they have to set up nuclear power plants or what happens? Well, that's our next story here. But what's going to happen is the starship goes to Earth orbit.

1:04:21And it meets up with a tanker and then refuels in Earth orbit. So it's got a full gas tank, if you would. And then makes its mission to Mars. Now, Starship is operated on liquid oxygen and methane. And the reason they chose methane over hydrogen or over RP1 is because you can make methane on Mars. This vehicle was designed to be a two -way system back and forth to Mars. Is that all the ice? It's out of the atmosphere. It's out of the CO2 in the atmosphere and there is water in the permafrost on Mars. So there's a reaction you can use to make methane from solar energy, water, and CO2. On the moon, on the other hand, let's play this clip here.

1:05:13This is from Secretary Duffy on building nuclear reactors on the moon. And I think this is just epic, right? I feel like we're finally living in a Star Trek universe here. All right, let's play this video. We're on a race to the moon. In a race with China to the moon. And to have a base on the moon, when we need energy. And some of the key locations on the moon, we're gonna get solar power. But this vision technology is critically important. And so we've spent hundreds of million dollars studying can we do it? We are now going to move beyond study and we have given direction to go. Let's start to deploy our technology to move to actually make this a reality.

1:05:54We're gonna be able to sustain life on the moon to then go to Mars, this technology is critically important. And I would just note that we're behind, right? If we're going to engage in the race to the moon, in the race to Mars, we have to get our act together. We have to marshal all of our resources, all of our focus, on going to the moon, which is what we're going to do. And again, there's a lot of things in Asad us. And a lot of people love a lot of the things that NASA does. But this is about space exploration. All right, let's get a few facts out here. First of all, remember that the moon is, you can use solar power, but only for half of the time, right?

1:06:33It's a half the month, the sun shines and half the month the sun does not shine on a particular point in the moon. There is a point at the South Pole called the Eternal Peacove Light. There's a little bit of a mountain there and the sun graces by the South Pole. But what's interesting in particular is that back in 1994, and I remember this Selim, You remember Pete Warden, right? Pete was involved in a couple of missions, Clementine and Lunar Prospector and Elkross, and what they discovered was that at the South Pole of the Moon, there's ice. And so why is it that the South Pole and the place else?

1:07:11Well, the Moon's been bombarded by comets for, you know, four billion years or whenever the Moon formed in particular. And these comets are rich in water ice. and when they would hit and land on the surface of the moon, on the regular surface of the moon, the ice, because there's no atmosphere, would sublimate, it would go from ice to vapor, and would disappear. But, at the South Pole, and to some degree in the North Pole, there are these deep craters and where the commentary ice landed in the deep craters that never had the sunshine, the ice is still there. And the ice is rocket fuel, right? It's liquid, you can convert to hydrogen, oxygen, oxygen, oxygen for breathing, water for drinking.

1:07:54And there's a massive amount of ice. And so the idea here is you put a nuclear reactor down near the South Pole to allow you to, you know, mine the ice, hydrolyze the ice, get water and fuel and support a nuclear -based electric system for a human base on the moon. Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, it's also, it's the perfect place to put a data center to power. I mean, well, you were mentioning in our last podcast, you know, there's, there's about 200 gigawatts of solar panels and warehouses just sitting there. You put those on the moon. Yeah, half the month, there's no sun, but there's a massive amount of energy the other half of the month.

1:08:39And I actually guess what you're saying is you'd put this at the polls anyway. way. So one of a dear friend, one of our international space University alumni, Chris Stott is actually doing that right now. He's working on putting data centers on the moon. So we're going to see a lot of infrastructure moving there. No, I think it's like the perfect stepping stone though. Like, what are we going to do with these monster spaceships between here and Mars? Oh, we're going to build all kinds of stuff on the moon makes a little sense. I mean, I got a question for about that too. So, you know, the Apollo mission took about three days to get to the moon, three days to get back.

1:09:13We have two and a half times the thrust now. You're still a bit faster. You could, but you have to spend then a whole lot of energy being captured in a little orbit. So the mission time right now on Starship is still the same three days to the moon. But you can spend a lot more energy and get to Mars quicker. But you know what I think is interesting. I think we're going to have so many breakthroughs in physics, right? Alex, we've had a growth on previous this episode of WTF that said we're going to solve physics. We're still running rockets the way we always have. We burn shit at one end and throw it out the back.

1:09:50I think we will probably see new physics allowing us to travel in space a lot more efficiently. And here's the next article. This is about an interstellar visitor. Are we alone in the universe? So for the third time in the last couple of decades, We've detected a large, what is being called a commentary body that is traveling at extraordinary speed. And it's traveling, it's emanated from outside of our solar system. And it's traveling through our solar system right now. As we speak, it's going to do closest approach in October. And there's a particular Harvard astrophysicist, Abilob, who is basically theorized that it's an alien probe.

1:10:39And he theorizes that because statistically, it's coming in at such a particular close to the ecliptic and it's passing through the interplanets and the probability of that happening is very low. And he's been putting forward a proposal that we take one of our current missions to Juno mission and actually instead of sending it to Jupiter, we send it to intercept this probe, which I think would be so damn cool.

1:11:10I mean, come on. What do you guys think? Okay. There's the odds of it being natural or unbelievably low, right? If I'm really the stats, yeah. There's some really. Well, if that's the case, don't really want to go up there and intercept it. Why don't we like wait first and say, hey guys, like, how are you? You're going to be friendly, not friendly. So I mean, all of all the astronomers are up in arms about Ivy Loeb's prediction that this is of intelligent origin. And we'll see, you know, as it gets closer to the sun, we're going to see does it actually create a full commentary tale? Is it got, you know, ice?

1:11:53By the way, I don't know if you guys know this. Two important facts. It's fun. Share with share with your kids. And do you know that every single liter of water on planet Earth originated from space? So every liter of water was a cometary or carbonaceous conch right asteroid hitting the earth. And so as you're sitting here drinking a glass of water, that water originated some billions of years ago as the earth was bombarded. So that's fascinating. The second thing is a commentary tale. When you see a comment, Haley's comment being most famous, that tale is ice crystals. So this rock is coming close to the sun.

1:12:33The sun begins to heat it up. Any ice on the surface of that comet begins to basically sublimate. It goes from ice to water. And then the solar wind pushes it back and it recrystallizes. And so you're seeing the reflection of the sun as ice crystals. And that becomes the commentary tale. Anyway, I find that stuff amazing. I find that stuff amazing. That is what I had no idea. Now I got 100 questions. I don't know if you want them or not. Give me one. We did a session. We did a session a few weeks ago on the origins of life. The proposal was somebody actually saw, who has a reasonable answer of the Fermi paradox.

1:13:19And the answer was that. Oh, what's it very, which is very paramount, which the Fermi paradox is clear. There's intelligent life teaming all over the universe just from the Drake equation and the likelihood that that we found bacteria that can survive space, tardy grades, et cetera, et cetera. So why aren't we seeing a ton of life visiting the why aren't aliens visiting us everywhere? Where are they? Yeah. And so that's the Fermi paradox and the Bruce Damer who's been studying the origins of life coming from asteroids and So it's that vents on the bottom of the ocean where there's no light, etc.

1:13:50Has the best Framing for this he says look the earth is the only planet we found where water existed as pure liquid Not permanently freezing or melting for more than four billion years and it gave time life Life time to evolve and that's just not we've just not seen that elsewhere Likely to obviously that is that it's there somewhere, but we just haven't seen it my my answers different It's here. We just can't see it. I mean, if you imagine, first of all, if you're going to be able to travel interstellar distances and come to Earth, how much more advanced are you than us? A thousand years, a million years?

1:14:28And, you know, do you not believe that the technology could exist for an alien species to be here and remain undetected by us? I think that's, you know, Why would they want to be undetected? You think that they want to come out and I'll get a reality show or something. I think it's a scientific method. I think they're here studying, not interfering. It's Star Trek's, what is it called? The prime directive. The prime directive. Thank you. But I find it fascinating. I mean, I just got to put this out there, right? Two things that's interesting. We're seeing this spike in alien spacecraft, what they're called, UAPs right now, right now happening.

1:15:11It happened back during the time of the atomic development programs in the 40s and 50s, and it's happening now. If you guys seen all of these Army, Navy, Air Force generals going, testifying in front of Congress, that it's real. So, I mean, and nobody is talking about this. That is how it is. Crazy. Yeah. Why is nobody talking about that? These seem to be credible people that haven't suddenly gone crazy. I mean, it's like, you would print out the entire world view of the Judeo -Christian thinking because it would be tremendously traumatic. Anyway, it's fascinating. I would love to get AWG's points of view on this sometime.

1:15:56Oh, that would be ours. That would be ours. Yes. Very entertaining hours. Yes, for sure. All right, I'm going to move us forward here. Let's move into the world of autonomous cars, robots and EVTOL, a lot happening there. The first is that Elon predicts millions of fully autonomous Tesla's operating without human oversight by the second half of 2026. And he has ambitious plans to actually get into dozens of cities by the end of this year covering 50 % of the US population. What do you think? Can you pull it off? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think, you know, it's stepping back from self -driving for a second.

1:16:39The reason we have self -driving now, and not five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, is purely because the AI, neural net AI, is self -evolving, self -learning. And so the self -driving car, it's just a regulatory barrier. But the other, the humanoid robotics, the explosion of other new things that comes right after this is I'm boggling. It's going to keep every entrepreneur on the planet busy for decades, building all of these incredible things. This is just the first one. But it's all enabled by that, the neural net that can learn, because that's the control system behind the innovation.

1:17:21The mechanical parts have been there for plenty of years. It's the intelligence that makes it actually work. Dave, do you think that we need some breakthrough in AI to have a continuous learning though? Because it learns, it gets trained, but how well does it continually learn and pick up new information? Yeah, incredibly well. If you break it into two different themes, See, like, is it learning to drive better every single time it sees something? Yes, that's already well underway. Then separately, isn't it improving its own algorithm so that it does that more efficiently? That's not well underway, but kind of imminent and that'll be within a year, I'm sure.

1:17:59So the first part, though, is way down the path. And that's all you need, actually, for self -driving, for robots to clean your house, for robot dentists, you know, like, forget your toothbrush, just dig thing in your mouth, it'll clean exactly the right spot. Yeah, it's amazing. Remind me of what the great EMUD most that said, one of our conversations recently, you'll recall, where he said the value of human cognitive ability is going to go negative, meaning it's getting, not only that AI is getting better and better against humans at certain things, but it'll have to be illegal for humans to get in the way of things like driving or diagnosing diseases, right?

1:18:41Because the humans buy us a situation in the wrong direction. It's crazy. All right, well, here's the next article on this. Elon Tees' major FSD full self -driving update. Here's his tweet. Tesla is training a new FSD model with 10X and a big improvement to video compression loss. Probably ready for public release end of next month. So I think tying this to the previous article, he's gonna be using this increased capability for safety on cyber taxis. Okay, go Elon. Go Elon. So how's he gonna power this? Dave, Tesla signs $16 .5 billion deal with Samsung to make AI chips. What are you going to do?

1:19:29Well, okay, a couple things. First of all, it's $16 .5 billion minimum deal and Elon is posting away that it's likely multiple is higher than that. And no worthy that, you know, TSMC is sold out. So where do you go? You should go to Intel, but instead you go to Samsung. A week later, the guy gets called into the big office, you know, come to the old office. Let's let's talk to Lippu Tan. What's going on here? But Elon being, you know, very wealthy and very visionary knows that he needs to lock up a supply of his own chips, the dojo chips that drive all these cars, but also are perfectly good in the data center for doing core neural network research and foundation models.

1:20:12So he's got his chip in the big game locked up, bought out Samsung's capacity for a long time to come. And it's just until still available. I mean, he's a four dimensional chess player. Yes, in what he does. Well, he sees, you know, I don't think it's the hardest thing in the world. He's particularly good at it, but he sits in a position where he sees all the parts, you know, you can see all the moving pieces. And then he made that insane election bet that paid off, which got him, you know, complete. Here's what's going on in the government. Here's what they're going to do and not do. And I don't know how that ended up getting fumbled so badly.

1:20:50But anyway, during his time there, he got access to, Okay, this is exactly how it's going to play out. So I suspect he's going to lock up the Samsung capacity or he's done that. Next on the docket, he'll start negotiating for Intel capacity. He'll build the dojo chips. Right now he's downplaying their importance. Yeah, you know, TSM or Nvidia has better chips. The Nvidia's are still fine. We want to buy a lot of Nvidia's. All of Tennessee's built on Nvidia and reality what he's doing is catching up with his own internal design, just like Google did with the TVUs and Amazon's trying to do with the trainings.

1:21:25Amazing. OK, let's move into humanoid robot world. So humanoid robots are built for connection. So let's take a look at this video here. This is Melody, one of our robots. She speaks various languages. And she's built in a modular fashion. So we can take off her face, replace it with another face, and have her speaking as a different character. Our AI is very different. It's function to create companion and friendship and social type interactions with people. So our robots don't do physical human labor, but they're really meant for personal interactions and you can think about it at a Theme park at a conference like this or even at a senior's home where they can keep people company.

1:22:02I'm Melody You're charming companion from real botics. We're all about creating customizable human -like robots designed for connection and play Basically the perfect blend of technology and Companion, all right. Oh my god. All right. Let's just call it a spade of spade. It's a section It's a sex bot. I mean, it's just, there's no other way. What I found fascinating is they pull the nose and the faces. That's the next video. We'll go to. But yeah, I mean, it's the oldest profession and I mean talk about plummeting the, talk about plummeting the reproduction rate on planet Earth. I don't know if it's a lot of things that are not especially positive about this.

1:22:47Although we'll have a higher EQ than I think a good portion of Silicon Valley given the nature of autism that we have there. But I think that there's obviously a lot of benefits that people will point to for people in say, elderly care, etc. who can benefit from certain types of interactions. But the enormous potential for people away even farther from human interaction is certainly there. And it's not, I don't find that, especially attractive. All right. This is a quick video of what's coming in terms of human skins. So we see here an Asian looking face, and this is silicon. but I mean, it looks extraordinarily lifelike, right?

1:23:39And again, the biggest challenge here, I think about this, having 14 year old boys slame yourself, I mean, between this and AI -generated pornography, I mean, it's going to begin to disrupt human relationships. In that Google 3D world that we saw last time, I mean, this thing starts to go really surreal. It's really tough. You even find it even in the earliest stages with social media where kids who have grown up on it have a less of an ability to deal with difficult relationships and would rather text an interactive person. This kind of turbo charges it, I think, in the wrong direction. Unless there's a counterbalance unless there's very concerted effort to bring humans together and use technology perhaps for a more beneficial outcome, which is people.

1:24:34want people. Ultimately, we're fueled by human connection. That is the essence of what gives us purpose. And I think it gives us an ability to feel useful and happy. So we need a way to not have this become an epidemic. Yeah, totally agree, Eric. And I think, we haven't had to deal with this as an active plan, you know, ever before in history. But the birth rate is already plummeting. is it's regardless of the robots the birth rate is going to continue to plummet. The problem is the problem is starter a while ago, you know, when you when you first had apps like Tinder, right, sex has been scarce for the entire history of humanity and suddenly sex becomes abundant.

1:25:21I mean, where was that when we were in our 20s? But okay, but now you take it to the next level and you you really kind of it the social implication of this are very profound. Yeah, they really are. You know, keep your eyes out, Eric, for that podcast, we did with Bert Bornich, the CEO of Onex Robotics, because they went the other direction saying, look, we don't want to cross the uncanny valley and make these things kind of half human -like, because they get really creepy. So his robots are amazing. They're very robotic looking, but they have perfect voices and incredibly polite. It's a different approach.

1:25:56It's worth contrasting that to this truly rubber nose, truly human look. One thing we can say from history is that whatever can go into the cycle of capitalism that makes more and more money will grow. As long as people can capture more attention, sell more and make more money, then the ethical considerations will be the poo -poo -d and shove decide and you'll you'll just drive more and more people to spend more and more time addicted to the semi -humans and less time with each other. Hey everybody there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say Peter you've got such nice skin.

1:26:41Honestly I never thought especially at age 64 I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin and honestly I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product I called One Skin OS01 twice a day every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it, and like I say, I use it every day twice a day. There you have it, that's my secret. You go to oneskin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. All right, let's go back to some news from Brett Adcock, who's a CEO of Figure, and this is a video of Figure 2, the second generation, they've got the third generation in development right now, I've seen it, but haven't released it yet, and here's his quote, we released a demo of Figure 2 using Helix, like most of the other robot companies, interestingly, they're developing their own AI system, right?

1:27:43So almost every robot company is delivering, is developing their own, and it's being used in -house using the neural nets to do his laundry. This is not teleoperated. So let's take a look at this video. So here we see figure pulling stuff out of the basket and putting it into the machine. This video is a little bit sped up by a thing, a factor of two. But what's interesting is a lot of the humanoid robots you see in videos are being teleoperated. And and that's fine because it's basically showing what the robot is physically capable of doing and of course all those telerobotic operations are training neural nets to do it autonomously, but this one was done fully on its helix AI.

1:28:28Dave, any comments compared to what we saw with, let's say, NeoGamon? Yeah. Yeah. So one X robotics is called one X because they always film at one X so they don't 2X the speed. I was thinking about that after we had that meeting and I'm thinking, well, Well, because the robot is working constantly, it's okay to show it at 2xp because it looks much cooler at 2xp, but it's going to be working 24 by 7. I don't care if it's half as fast as a person doing it. It's going to actually do the job. Who cares? So it's an interesting conflict. But folding laundry, there it was loading laundry. That's easy.

1:29:04Easier. Folding laundry is a benchmark that covers tens of thousands of tasks. As soon as you see that pulling it back out and folding it, you know it's ready for virtually all household type work, many, many manufacturing jobs. It's just a huge fraction of what we do is right in line with the difficulty of folding laundry. I proposed a robot X -Prize a while ago, and since Dave and Slemer boasts on our board at X -Prize and Eric's been a innovation board member as well, it was this. This have a robot walk into a room, look around the room and capture this is what the room should look like when it's clean.

1:29:44This is the state of clean. The robot walks out and then you mess it up, you throw things around and have the robot go back in and put everything back to where it was. I think that'd be a very meaningful and doable experience. What do you think? I'd be happy if I could just get a teenager to do that. I think, yeah, you should probably push hard to do three, four, five parallel exercises in various forms of robotics. Every one of which would change the world dramatically, inspire some teams. The whole supply chain, remember at 1x, they make their own motors, like winding their own wires to make their own motors.

1:30:25There's nothing out there. Yeah, and figure does figure does the exact same thing. And so it is testlets fully vertically integrated By the way, we were when we were at 1x we saw At least one person wearing an x -priced t -shirt And it turns out that we had an avatar x -priced about a decade ago And this was for teleoperated robotics and a lot of the talent went into the humanoid robot companies. So super proud of that All right Here's some news on Optimus. So the Generation 3 launch has been postponed to 2026. So Optimus or Tesla, if you would, had planned to have 5 ,000 units built by this year, they've only gotten hundreds of those done.

1:31:11And in June, they paused production and with component orders being frozen. And the redesign is under a new leadership of a shock, Ellis Swamy. me. And so generation three is expected in 2026. And one of the things is true about Elon is level of extraordinary brilliance. It's just his prediction on timing isn't always on. So any comments on this? Well, one of my... So the robot got arthritis. That's what I see from this. You know, I think there's, I think there's a lot of issues to be worked out. This, for me, this is kind of normal organization development, you're going to have peaks and valleys and building an organization, especially doing something that's cutting edges this.

1:31:57So I don't give much pain to the to the who left who came, etc. I do think what they're attempting is so so so hard and kudos that they're going after it. That's all. Yeah. All right, let's continue on this robot journey. this is something that I'm excited about seeing personally. So San Francisco Underground Robot Fight Club. So let's take a look at the video here. This video went viral.

1:32:28We see...

1:32:38We see... We see... We see... We see... G1 humanoids actually look like they were dressed in dresses that are that are fighting boxing in a cage fight. Hell that market street. Anyway, too much. This should really not be allowed. This will set the whole field back by 10 years. People are going to see this said, I think it's too many weirdos doing stuff along those. Well, that's going to be a problem. I think it's going to be interesting. As you know, Peter, I was in Paris at the Olympics as part of the Global Esports Federations announcement with the IOC that esports are going to be Olympic sports.

1:33:21And what they're doing with the rings in moving towards validating athletes in the esports arena is actually moving also towards something called virtual sports. Virtual sports are not just twitch with your finger sports, but move your body sports, virtual taekwondo, virtual fencing, virtual rowing. These are all going to become Olympic sports in the coming years. And they're also going to be moving from traditional analogies to sports that we know to sports like Kidditch, you know, from Harry Potter or humanoid robot fighting. And I think it's going to be quite entertaining if you can start to get teams from different in countries advancing the field.

1:34:04The same way, X -Prize creates entirely new fields by putting up a challenge that a lot of R &D and energy goes into. With you have something like humanoid robot fighting and you're representing your country, I think a lot of energy is gonna go into, first of all, I'd be exciting to watch, but it'll also advance the field. I want the Megatronics. I want the giant robots out there, badly. What's the name? Come on. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I think it'll be a lot of fun. No, it's like F1 racing, dude. You're going to have like, you're going to advance the software, the hardware, all of it.

1:34:37That's fine. Racing is fine. I think fighting just sets a bad tone and sets up all sorts of issues. Well, look at the possibility. We're going. All right. Here's another robot of types. This is an EV tall. And I hate the term EV tall. Electric vertical take off or landing. like rolls off the tongue onto the floor. I'm calling these flying cars. So Archer Aviation with their midnight, their midnight flying car completed its first test flight in Abu Dhabi. And it's interesting, right? So the UAE and Eric, you, Saleem and I have been there a bunch. They really have been on the cutting edge of adopting exponential technologies.

1:35:21So excited that Archer is there. Let me pair it with the following story as well, which is super beneficial for you and me arc is that Archer is named the official air taxi provider for the L .A. Olympics in 2028. And look at this. They're going to be flying between Sofie Stadium, L .A .X. and Santa Monica. So I am so pissed. I'm a pilot. I fly a Santa Monica airport. That airport used to be over 5 ,000 feet, which was a decent size for getting. decentize aircraft in and out. It's been shortened to 3 ,000 feet to get rid of all the jets. And all the homeowners under the flight path were just complaining and complaining and complaining.

1:36:06And you know, when that was going on, they'd have these signs in their front yard saying, no jets. And my son, who's named Jet, would be walking around and then he's seen these signs. to watch up with this. But as if those homeowners didn't realize it was an airport and that the aircraft were flying when they bought it. Anyway, pissed me off. But hey, the midnight flying car is a four passenger vehicle and they'll be doing the IP travel and get this. Their objective is that the cost of travel is equivalent to an Uber X. So super cool. Yeah. This is a technology that I I think is so revolutionary.

1:36:51For me, this is a full Gutenberg moment because they're gonna be incredibly safe. They can fly in most conditions. It'll unlock all sorts of real estate, which is scarce, but now becomes abundant. And I think this becomes transformational for the human race. I mean, I was advising the Prime Minister of Thailand and I said, listen, just wait till flying cars become available. You can land in Bangkok and fly somebody we straight down to Pouquet in one shot. They just completely changed the game. So we can't wait for this. Well, you know who's big into this in a huge way, Steve Funk from our, yeah, a button is 360 group, but then also Stewart Walton from the Walton, you know, Walmart family and Ross Perogeneer from the Perot family.

1:37:37And it's like, well, why are they so big into this? And it's because they're more keenly aware that there's so many incredible places that very few people go to because there isn't an airport right there. So everybody goes to Vegas because the same casinos, you know, well, why? Well, the airports right there, you take a cab, you're there. Yeah. You look around the world, there's so many better places you can go that are untouched, and this is the missing link. Between this and Starlink, right? You can live and work anywhere. You know, big shout out to Cyrus Seguiri, who's been a member of our abundance faculty and runs up Ventures.

1:38:15He's been backing all of these different companies in particular. He's invested heavily into beta and beta is based in New Hampshire. It's backed by Dean Cayman, Martin Rothblatt. Cyrus runs a huge conference called the Upsummit in Bettenville in partnership with a certain family down there. Yeah. It actually bounces between Bettenville where that certain family is and then Plano where the pros are and Jackson, Wyoming where Steve Funk is. They move it in a little triangle now. Yeah, amazing. You know the range of these just curious. Yeah, so it's tip, it depends upon the load, but we're talking about, you know, a hundred miles thereabouts, right?

1:39:02But it's going to be mostly short haul. It's mostly going to be like 10 mile journey. It is getting from Manhattan to JFK. It is getting from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium. It's those sorts of things. And the important thing is rapid charging and rapid on and off. So they're going to be building these verteports, these physical structures that are made for the flying carto land. You know, do rapid charging, have the people come on and off and then take off again. And they'll be flying, you know, they'll have pilots in them, at least for the time being, but just like what was E -Mod statement?

1:39:39You know, about the value of humans in the loop becoming... Yeah, the cognitive abilities are going to negative. Yeah, so eventually the pilots will be, you know, there'll be a dog in there to keep the pilot from touching the controls as well. I mean, a few commercial plane crashes have been because a pilot interfered when they shouldn't have. Yeah, so this is a huge thing. I want to throw What a second order effect here. Please. If you look at Chicago Airport or Pearson Airport in Toronto at a 100 mile radius, there's something like 10 ,000 islands and lakes. And those become suddenly really valuable property where somebody puts a container with satellite internet, water extraction, vertical farming, and you have a little pneumatic existence on demand.

1:40:30Well, a lot of our family offices is love to invest in real estate. But if anyone wants to contact Salim and say, hey, let's just set up a fund around the implications of this. Like Ashen Brenner did with his fund. Yeah. It's the biggest name. Amazing to put into. Yeah. Now's the time to, you know, Bill Grossman who's on the pod was saying that all of the land in the entire world where you can use pumped hydro. So you have water and a mountain has all been bought already. Like, oh my god, that happened quickly. So the implications of So that's what go quickly too. So I might want to jump on it.

1:41:02All right, our last subject for today is energy. And again, just recalling the fact that the future of AI is tied to electricity production. Eric Schmidt said this on a podcast with Dave and I back a month ago that AI is not chip limited. It's electron limited. It's the ability to produce energy. And while we've talked about small modular reactors and generation for fission plants coming on. Something that I wanna hit on is fusion, and fusion is finally here. I mean, I remember day when you and I were in MIT together, people talked about fusion, but it was always 50 years away and holding. Well, we're finally here.

1:41:46There's probably, I think last count was 37 privately funded fusion companies out there. Let's talk about two of them. The first is Helion, which is backed by Sam Altman, is beginning construction. It employs a magneto -inertial fusion approach. Each one of these companies is very different. Construction started on the Orion plant, which is a 50 megawatt plant. It's a test plant. It's relatively small, if the megawatts. And it has got a commercial contract with Microsoft, planning to become operational by the end of 2028. I think it's the first plant planning to come online. Any comments on this?

1:42:25Well, I really feel like the new physics that Alex was talking to Alex was Negros was talking about is getting in a rack with this because the biggest problem in fusion has always been magnetic containment, which is just a very, very hard math and physics problem, which could get crushed by AI very quickly and then suddenly we've moved the whole world of fusion. Yeah, for sure. And I find fascinating that that Altman is backing this along with Softbank. I mean, Sam is in so many different frontier companies. It's extraordinary. Well, the thing about these particular investments, they're brilliant in the sense that you're investing in fusion, but almost all the work is concrete and generators and tying into the power grid.

1:43:10So if fusion works very quickly, you win. If fusion doesn't work really quickly, you go with small modular reactors and you win. either way you win, so they're very smart investments. I think this is the idea. I think it also speaks to the idea of the converging exponentials that you speak of, because a lot of the exponentials in some ways depend on power, certainly AI does, but if that's one of the exponentials, this actually becomes exponentially cheaper heading towards zero to some degree, the domino effect on society is just massive as all of these things converge around what it means for like housing and poverty and the new forms of protein and new physics and new science.

1:43:54This is one of the unlocks for the explosion of the implications towards abundance. Well, the other big unlock is, you know, historically, if you're building a power supply, and you said, okay, I'm going to put a billion or two billion or five billion into this project, I need to then have a regulator say, now you can tap it into the grid, now we can sell it to households, which is not a given at all. Now you can say, no, the only customer I need is my data center. And if I can sell power beyond that, great, but if I can't who cares, I'll just put more data center there. So that's a complete unlock as an investment.

1:44:26That's brilliant. One of the other things you're doing is they're going, you know, one of the visions here is you go into a coal plant and the coal plant has all the power lines coming in. It's got all the properties containment and so forth. And you pull out the boiler that's being heated from coal and you put in a fusion plant there to heat the boiler as well. Right? So, super interesting there. I think there's a whole set of considerations to think about as we go from energy scarcity, which has been the paradigm for 10 ,000 years to energy abundance. It really changes everything. Let's move next to another company, the nation state of China.

1:45:10China's bet two billion on fusion. So China bets an additional 2 .1 billion on fusion this week. And they have the longest sustained fusion reaction going on right now. I think they're leading in this area today. Any comments on this one? Selim? Well, I think this is again, if I had to put a priority on the US, it would be energy generation, which then unlocks all the other things and China is clearly making long -term strategic bets here. What I really like about this is once you achieve this then energy becomes really cheap or virtually free for the whole planet because everybody can then copy then replicate that.

1:45:50That the implications of that are just so profound. I mean the US is generating four terawatts of power and it has been consistently for 20 years. At the same time China has gone up to 10 or 10 terawatts of power, right? It's just it's lapping us a lot of that is solar, but it's everything you know It's not drill baby drill. It's it's build baby build in China and you know I keep on hearing about the plans for in the US for natural gas for coal for Fission for fusion and I don't hear a lot of conversation around solar and that it's kind of disappointing because the tech is there When I fly over Santa Monica in my plane, I look out the window, you know, tens of thousands of rooftops with shingles on it and no solar and you could be generating so much power.

1:46:43I Tell you fundamentally though the issue that investors are running into is if you build a fusion platform with traditional generators water, you know steam generators you win with small modular you win with fusion and if you go down the solar route, then the panel will generate electricity directly. There's no generators. It's just like a panel. And then you need massive amounts of storage. So if you invest heavily in solar and then suddenly fusion works, you're totally screwed. It's just a completely different thing. That's the problem the investors are having. Even though, if things stay exactly as they are, deploying solar by 200 gigawatts is absolutely the right thing to do.

1:47:27everybody's just worried about, you know, imminent fusion, imminent small modular vision. All right. Our last article here comes from Boston. And this is Commonwealth Fusion. So Commonwealth Fusion has been noted to be the leading fusion company in the US. They have signed 200 megawatt purchase deal with Google. and it's going to be in Virginia. Why? Because there's a lot of data centers in Virginia. And the plant is going to begin delivering energy and electricity in early 2030s. Let's listen to this video. And by the way, super proud, I mean, me having the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion on our stage at abundance this coming March.

1:48:15CFS is the largest in leading private fusion company. With over a thousand employees and two billion dollars with capital invested, We're working to commercialize Fusion Power's fastest possible here at our headquarters in Devons, Massachusetts. We're announcing a deepening of our strategic partnership with Google. As part of that, they'll off -take half the power of the first arc power plant. Additionally, they'll increase their investment in the company, and importantly, this partnership isn't just about the first power plant. We now have a strong demand signal that people want Fusion Power, and they're willing to do things like invest and commit to taking the power in order to help make it happen.

1:48:50All right. Any thoughts on Commonwealth Fusion? So, Runez Chishanas from the Board of MIT is now the biggest investor in this with his funds, so far, partners. And not coincidentally, I don't think he called, said, want to put a lot more money into these AI startups. I'm like, okay, well, if Fusion generates the power, the power goes in, the data center, the AI startups use the data center. Makes perfect sense. This is great. It's great to see this happen nearby with a lot of MIT involvement. Yeah, love it. Very cool. What do you think the implications are in the AI race, though? Like, there's this common concept we've spoken about in the past, where whoever hits it, AGI or ASI first, six -month lead, you know, is ahead forever, because our exponentials work.

1:49:37And if we're like restricting chips to the last generation to China, and we're actively trying to win this race, what is happening around this critical piece of that race, which is the power? How are we allowing ourselves to potentially fall behind in what's the key lever? Yeah, I don't think it affects the race with China. I think they're very, very good investments because we're gonna use all the power for sure. But the race is entirely bound up at two layers, chipfabs and also algorithmic ideas. and those are the 10X and 100X Force multipliers. If those get way ahead, we're just going to take the power from aluminum manufacturer, we're going to take the power from wherever, that's a problem, but it's not going to slow it down.

1:50:22It's going to happen because you can over bid by 5 or 10X versus residential use, manufacturing use. So it'll suck the power up one way or another. So it doesn't change the race outcome. They're just good investments, that's all. All right, guys, as we wrap, you know, I'm expecting we're going to hear news from Google very soon. All right. We're going to hopefully see some announcements coming around Gemini 3. We're expecting to see what's the next version of GROC? Is it 4 .2? Is it going to be released? Maybe. I guess. Yeah, it's just so much. I mean, literally every single day it's insane. So I hope all of you, as listeners, feel smarter after hearing this conversation.

1:51:07Eric is super happy to have you here buddy. Thank you for your brilliance. Great to be here. It's a lot of fun. Love it together. In fact, all of us are going to be heading over to Saudi in October for the FII summit. So that's going to be pretty amazing. Any particular news? Anybody wants to share before we call it a wrap? Keep a keep a close eye on that that lip -butane at the White House thing. This is like the dry, everybody's going to get involved in this. Elon will be talking, Sam will be involved. If you like the human drawn us things, this is going to be really interesting. I can't wait till the end of the day to see what the outcome of that is.

1:51:44Between that and the Ukraine conversations, it's a pretty surreal world right now. I would not. We've got our exo workshop happening in August. We have our exo workshop happening in August 20th, so people want to sign up for that. We're going to go out. We'll put a link in, but it's the best 100 bucks you'll spend. We limited it. They sell out every month. Amazing, amazing. All right, guys, love you all. Thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your brilliance. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from human -under -abotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity and more.

1:52:22There's no fluff. Only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I'm writing newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two -minute read via email. And if you wanted to discover the most important metatrends 10 years before anyone else, this reports for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies, and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't wanna be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it.

1:52:54To subscribe for free, go to demandis .com slash metatrends. To gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. Alright, now back to this episode.

1:53:17This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive .com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.