The AI Wealth Gap: Why 40x Deflation Changes Everything w/ Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross | EP #208

29:19So now these are the absolute best models in the world and they're all coming from China. But the fact that you can train it, $4.6 million to train it is within the budget of almost any company. And it's not 10x, it's more like 30, 40x cheaper than what it took for OpenAI and Anthropic to build their original models. And so part of it is you're drafting off their innovations, which is why those companies stopped open sourcing. But, you know, you can grab these weights, you can grab this open source and you can build on top of it. And so just be careful there's no spyware or anything in there. But, you know, I checked and I'm using it and it seems to be OK.

29:56But do your own spot checking. But this is a huge deal in terms of the power that somebody wants to play with the guts of one of these things. the amount you can get done on a limited budget just skyrocketed. You know what I found most significant? There's been a conversation going on. We heard Eric Schmidt talk about this, that it's the U.S. financial markets and their efficiency that are allowing these hyperscalers to raise billions of dollars to do what they do. But if all of a sudden the cost of training a trillion parameter model is$5 million, you don't need efficient capital markets. That money is available from a lot of locations.

30:36Isn't that wild? I mean, you're so right. I mean, just think about that. I don't know if anyone appreciates what you just said. The implications are massive, just absolutely massive. Alex, what's your take on this? Yeah, a few takes. One, as Sam and others have pointed out, there is hyper deflation going on right now on both the training and inference side for AI. So Sam's number is 40x year-over-year hyper deflation. So on the one hand, I'm not surprised. Wait, wait, wait, wait. One second. 40 times? 40x hyper deflation year-over-year on the cost. In cost of intelligence per unit of intelligence.

31:15That's insane. That's a big. Yes. That's. So this is, I mean, I think that's where it comes from. 20 times faster than Moore's law. Yes. This is why I speak of like the innermost loop as a catchphrase. Because if we can see sustained 40x year-over-year hyper deflation and cost of intelligence, everything else is going to get dragged down. The price of everything else, rather, is going to get dragged inevitably down with that. So this is the nuclear core, if you will, that's going to pull down the cost of everything else. And because the demand is growing like 1 ,000x a year, that's just what just stuff has the capital expenditure.

31:54Yeah, pick your analogy. you pick? Yeah. Well, when you walk around academia or corporate boardrooms, you find deniers everywhere. I mean, just absolutely everywhere. And a huge amount of the denial is, well, I tried this yesterday. It was hard. It didn't work. So therefore, we're nowhere near AI. When you talk about 40x hyper deflation, deniers are saying, well, look, the evidence is that as we scale these things, they're getting decreasing improvements in intelligence. So I don't think there's anything, you know, 40X for two years in a row, two back-to-back 40Xs, it's not going to do much. Like, that's a really, really risky position to take, dude.

32:32Because there is significant upslope in the data, and you don't know what 40X is going to do. But if you had to bet, is 40X going to be mind-blowing, or is 40X going to be not much of an improvement? You're crazy to take the position that it's going to be a little bit of an improvement. Crazy, especially back-to-back 40x's. Yeah, no, I think we're going to start to see grand challenges in math, science, engineering, medicine start to fall over the next two to three years thanks to that. So can I take the other side of this? Yeah, because I will beat the crap out of you. Let's do it. No, I think if you look at the demonetization curves over history with other stuff like solar energy, cost of compute, etc., you would almost expect this because you want to see that curve go in this direction.

33:1940x is like way faster than I thought. But I remember, I'll give you the macro counter example. I remember when the Google car first came out, all the car manufacturers said, well, that's bullshit. The cost of that lithium ion battery is too expensive. It's never going to work. And they all ignored it. And then literally over the decade, the cost of lithium ion batteries dropped 90%. That's what Elon banked on for building the Tesla was the bank on the cost of the batteries dropping. And he was right. And all the car makers and all the broad, the typical mind of folks. So there's a powerful lesson here is always watch for those deflationary curves and go where the curve is pointing you.

33:58What's surprising is the world's most powerful technology, right? By far. You know, if I had gone back five years and described what an AI model could do today and how much would you charge for it per day or per month, I would have guessed millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars and would never have meant you know expected it'd be free i mean it's effectively free dog food and kind of go this is where the curve's going let's expect this at this point and see if we we get it right yeah yeah i'm constantly running around the office and saying guys you know within these virtual areas like computing and ai it's really hard to visualize 40x but if we made imagine we had a factory that makes widgets or cars and we 40x our production year over year, everybody in the office would be going crazy.

34:44You'd see like 40 times more stuff coming out the door. It would be obvious to you. That's what's happening. And you have to really stretch your brain around the implications of this. There's a great quote on the demonetization and the fact that the energy guys all got it wrong and whatever. This is that same issue, right? And to Alex's point of the inner loop, if you roll this out to the broader kind of macro of things that we do, you should expect a 40x drop in the cost of healthcare and in food production and everything over time as this bites, correct? Yeah, I agree. Assuming intelligence can solve the problem.

35:19It was a great quote from like Gordon Moore, and I'm going to botch it, I don't have the exact numbers. He said, you know, if cars had improved at the same rate as Moore's law, you know, Rolls-Rolls would get like a million miles per gallon and you'd throw it away because is so cheap at the end of your trip. Yeah, the stat I heard was that if the top speed of a car, and if we all evolved at the same speed, we'd have a car today that went faster than the speed of light. Yes. All right. I want to jump into this next article, especially coming back from a week in Italy and Spain. The story headline here is Brussels to loosen GDPR rules to enable and feed the AI boom.

36:02So, you know, really important conversation. There was a lot of concern, angst when I was meeting with CEOs, consulting companies, investors in Europe, in Italy and in Spain, right? The GDP of Italy, about$2.7 trillion, about the size of New York. The GDP of Spain, about$1.7 trillion, the size of Florida. But serious concern about, can they compete? And this is one of the biggest issues that's keeping them from competing, ability to access data. Salim, what's been your experience here? You know, this is part of the problem with overregulation is you just slow this down. The cost of compliance for stuff like GDPR has proven to be a ridiculous thing.

36:55And this is a function of the historical issue with Europe. And to be fair, it's not just mindset here, although there is a far point. There's just a bunch of historical legacy that's really important. I'll give you a specific example. after World War II, the German constitution added a clause saying no media organization could cover the whole country so that you can never have another rise. And that prevented a regional player from covering the country. And then Google came along and rolled up the whole thing. Right. And so they've got structural issues going back in history and you have to figure out how to undo some of those.

37:28And that's a really, really hard thing to do. They're doing kind of the best they can in a difficult environment, but it's just a massive problem. I mean, for the longest time, I mean, you and I remember this at Singularity University, right? They, you know, Europe in general prided itself on having the strictest privacy laws out there. And a lot of that simply meant that, okay, we're going to exclude everybody from Europe in a US product or service. I think what's interesting is that the data is showing that venture funding in Europe dropped, you know, up to 30 % as a result of this. and that the AI models in Europe have been 6 to 12 months slower to market than the United States.

38:08And the compliance burden, so get this. So there is an AI audit that's required before you put out a product. And those audits on average cost 260 ,000 euros and take 8 to 15 months, right, delaying 40 % of projects. So imagine that. And so you have to actually prove during your compliance audit that, you know, they review the data sets, the model transparency, bias, you know, documentation, safety standards. So some third party is auditing you and just putting sand in the gears. Now, I understand why people want that to some degree, but you're trading that against your economy. It's been really interesting.

38:51If I think about my grandparents, you know, like my grandparents assumed that there was no structure in the world. is chaos and you know the military protects us but other than that it's just a zoo and then when you look at the generations if i talk to my kids they assume that there's some rational thing out there that's thinking through these issues but the reason we know there isn't they assume there are adults in the room you know is that a strange thing when all of a sudden you say oh my god i'm the adult in the room it's it's really really freakish when you hit that yeah it's why i'm i'm hoping for a benevolent superintelligence to actually be the adult in the room someday.

39:28Yeah, we need Mo Gaudet's thinking, move as quickly to AI running the world as possible. That should speed up Alex's inner loop considerably. Alex, any thoughts on here, the GDPR rules being changed? Maybe just a broad comment that under the current construct, it's up to individual sovereign countries to define the parameters of how much they want to participate in the superintelligence explosion and maybe just leave it at that. Yeah. I mean, the conversation I had with a lot of the leaders in the tech industry in Italy and Spain is, okay, if you guys are interested in playing this, you need to build out your energy sources, identify where you're going to set up your data centers.

40:10And I think the timeframe, and I'm curious what you guys think about this, I think the timeframe for the make those decisions and implement those decisions is the next five years. I mean, I think the next five years are going to set the objective for the next century. More like five months than five years. I think it's a little bit shorter than five years. Okay. I was being generous because you can't do anything in five months, which is a big concern. And we can talk about that in the US even when we get to the conversation on energy. This is my chance for a rant. And I want to share something that we found when Salim and Dave and I were at FI9.

40:47So I'm on the board at FII, and it's the Future Investment Initiative. And one of the things they do every year is they do something called the Priority Global Survey. And this is a survey that they do in 32 countries. They have over 60 ,000 respondents. And it represents, you know, three quarters or two thirds of the world's population. and you know we've had some criticism on this pod that we're you know not focused on the reality in different parts of the world so i want to i want to discuss the reality what are people seeing and feeling outside of you know silicon valley outside of boston so here's some of the data and i'd love to discuss with you guys because the data is is important and it's it's concerning.

41:38So they surveyed and asked the question about what are your top concerns? And we see this across the global South and the global North. So the number one concern globally is cost of living by far. Can we afford to live in this world? And tied very closely to that is unemployment. Will I get a job? Which if I get a job, will it pay me enough to live? And then the third concern is poverty and social inequities. I mean, this is what two thirds of the world is feeling right now. Here's the next chart and we can look at it by region, Africa, Asia, Europe, MENA, North America, Oceania, and South Africa, South America.

42:23And here we see, you know, Africa is number one concern is unemployment. The rest of the world, it's the cost of living. It's just expensive to live. And we talk about, you know, a future abundance. We talk about demonetization. But this is the reality of what people are feeling. What are your thoughts here? Salim, you want to jump in first? Yeah, I mean, look, this is an extrapolation of the basic nature of human reality. We've been living in fear since the beginning of time, right? In the cave-dwelling days, you were worried that a hyena would come and steal your baby at night. Now we're worried about jobs.

43:02The idea, I think we need to flip over completely to a UBI type structure to navigate the world going forward, because the concept of a job is going away. I mean, think about the idea that all of our education systems are designed to take a young child, train them through their early 20s to be ready for a job market, that we have no idea what a job looks like in five years. So this may be the thing that breaks the educational model, and it breaks all the other models into a totally new reality where most of the mechanisms for subsistence, like education, health care, etc., are basically free. Take that 40x curve, apply it to some of these domains.

43:39That's, for me, the incredible opportunity. So I'd flip this into the massive opportunities there, but people aren't seeing what's going on, and therefore they get stuck in this. I got it, but it's not evenly distributed yet. This is the reality that people are feeling right now. They're feeling fear about, can I get a job and can I afford to live? It's a very real concern. I think this is our job as leaders and podcasters and message conveyors to show that. Like take Amjad, you know, little developer out of Jordan, boom, builds a multi-billion dollar company. Take Vitalik, take Elon, coming from nothing to building global paradigm changing things just from mindset.

44:17mindset and therefore now the the inner loop i'm going to go back to that again is just literally mindset and entrepreneurship and peter you talk about this all the time i flip this around and see the opportunity in this i'll give you a little snapshot on on what a big part of the world looks like one of our summer interns uh her she's from iran her parents are still in iran and you know i grew up as a young child in iran and she said that her parents spend one third of their annual income on their iPhone and data plan. And like, whoa. But she's like, look, you can't live without information. And actually, the currency is no good.

44:51So everything's Bitcoin. So how are you going to manage your Bitcoin without an iPhone? So you got a third of your income going into your phone and your data plan. And all that money funnels out of the country and lands in, like you said, Silicon Valley and Boston. And so that wealth disparity, you know, just from the phone, And then you add AI as a layer on top of that, and the gap is going to get really, really wide. So that's the reality of a huge fraction of the world's population, though. I hear you. I don't know if you want to add anything, Alex, on this, but this is one of my biggest concerns.

45:28This data for me is worrisome. I'm clear that we are going to get to an abundant future. Maybe it's a decade out. you know, we're going to have a continuous demonetization and all kinds of, you know, uplifting of healthcare and education by AI. But I think in the next two to seven years, that's what really concerns me, right? Where if people are, if young men are not getting jobs, and if people are losing their jobs as a result of this, before we sort of flip the economics into an abundance model, you know, the question is, how do we help people believe in a hopeful and compelling future because if they don't believe it's a hopeful and compelling future, they're going to believe what they see from Hollywood, which is dystopian AIs and killer robots.

46:15I think you've hit the crux of it, right? How do we get narratives out there that demonstrate that future and do it fast and overcome the fact that people are 10x more likely to listen to fewer stories than stories of a positive future? And that has to be overcome. Therefore, you need 10 times more stories on the positive side. A hundred percent. People worldwide are really worried. One of the positive, consistent pieces of feedback I get about this podcast is the fact that we're relentlessly optimistic about the future. Why? Because technology is a major driver of progress in the world and may be the only major driver of progress.

46:50And now that's moving exponentially. Do you guys remember what we were talking about before we hit record on this pod? The idea that it would be amazing to bring together a community of builders and coders and entrepreneurs to work on uplifting humanity in the near term. You know, I think we should do that. I think we should pull together this moonshot community and see if they want to discuss how do we make the world a better place, right? How do we build moonshots that really uplift mindset but help address unemployment, cost of living in the near term? I mean, Elon's built an incredible community towards going to Mars.

47:37Satoshi created an incredible community on Bitcoin and crypto. Yeah, I'm talking about do we organize a meetup of the moonshot listeners? Do we pull folks together and talk about solving grand challenges together? I spend a lot of time with college undergrads and seniors, and they would flock to that mission like you wouldn't believe. You'd get incredible talent coming to that mission. You know, when they're in their early 20s, mid-20s before scar tissue of life has accumulated too much, they are all in on that. And so you'd get really, really smart people working on it. I mean, bring together the builders, the visionaries, you know, the folks who want to really build.

48:20You know, I like to say that the world's biggest problem is the world's biggest business opportunities. Want to be a billionaire, help a billion people. I mean, that's the conversation. You know, and I know none of us have extra time to actually pull an event together. But if folks listening to this podcast. I think it's mandatory because the only way you're going to change the world is to have people shift their mindset, come to listen to stuff like this. and that actually activated and go do something. So imagine we did an event, brought everybody together, talked about things, and then people actually activated online, formed teams, and went off and did stuff.

48:52And then we tracked that over time. That would be kind of pretty cool. All right. I mean, so here's, you know, Alex, are you in on that? I think it's a benchmark problem. I think it's less about events and less about teams and more about just rigorously defining benchmarks for all of these problems. How about a benchmark for cost of living that then the world and this 40X year-over-year hyper deflation of intelligence can optimize towards. Same with crime and delinquency and healthcare, cost of healthcare. We're going to be drowning in humanoid robots that are generalist in terms of their capabilities in the next few years.

49:29We'll talk about benchmarks. We'll talk about the benchmarks then at this. So, I mean, if you guys are in, and my feeling is, you know, none of us have time to put an event together, But if there's interest in the community, so to everyone listening, this is what we talked about earlier. If you have an interest in joining us at some kind of a moonshot gathering, a moonshot summit, whatever it is, if we can get enough of you, let's say a thousand who say, yes, we want to do this, and you want to spend time with the moonshot mates, then we'll pull this together. Here's what I'm proposing. we'll set up an email.

50:10Let's call it moonshots at diamandis.com. If you're interested in this idea of a moonshot summit to bring everybody together, talk about these world's biggest problems, talk about the benchmarks, talk about the moonshots required, send us an email. And if we can get a thousand people who say they want to be in on this, then we'll pull it together. We'll bring together moonshot mates. We'll bring together sort of the most exciting CEOs and moonshot engineers and have an epic two-day event. I think two days is the right length for this. Can I riff on this for a second? Yeah. If you take Hans Rosling's work, which showed that over the last 100 years, we dropped the cost of electricity, transportation, telecommunication by thousands of times each, right?

50:59And then you say, okay, we want benchmarks that in the next two, three years drop those by a thousand times each if you extrapolate the 40x. That then gives you the target to go after to the benchmark comment that Alex made. And then you basically bring in the SAGE engine to say, okay, what policy changes do you need to make if technology can reach this? How do you get this implemented? You could bring that together and make that a showcase for the world in a very powerful way. I think it would be incredible. I really would love to get everybody together and have that conversation and really ignite a passion and interest among entrepreneurs to focus on this because there's real challenges out there in the world.

51:44All right, so here's the deal. If a thousand of you who are listening want to join us, let's say sometime next fall, then send us an email, moonshots at diamandis.com. And if there's enough interest, we'll pull this together. All right, let's get back. There's a lot more to cover. All right. Our next segment here is data centers, energy, and space. So multiple data centers are reaching one gigawatt in 2026. You know, we're tiling the world in data centers. Anthropic and Amazon, XAI, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI Stargate. Alex, what's the story here? Well, I think the trillion-dollar question, Peter, is will we see a peak in the amount of coherent power needed for coherent training runs of large frontier models?

52:40If we do, one could imagine as incredible as it may sound looking at this curve where everything's going up and to the right in terms of total facility power, we might actually see a peak maybe in a few gigawatts sometime over the next few years and then decline. if there are algorithmic innovations that enable us to do distributed training runs rather than needing one large power-intensive coherent supercluster to do it, tiling the earth could look like tiling the earth with relatively lower power density compute. Totally imaginable. On the other hand, if this looks a little bit more, I spoke earlier about AGI being essentially, as it turns out, compression of information.

53:22If it turns out that there are further phase changes that we can achieve by compressing more and more and more with larger and larger facilities, then maybe eventually in extremists, we end up in sort of, as I've spoken about on the pod previously, maybe more of a black hole, desktop black hole computer regime where we're just building these incredibly power dense facilities to train more and more and more. Again, I could go either way on this, but I think that's like the trillion dollar question. Will this peak or not? Besides peak data centers, the question is, are we going to see peak energy?

53:55That's a question for you, Alex. So the U.S. government, Brookfield and Cameco, have launched an$80 billion partnership to build nuclear reactors. You know, as I researched this, what I found frustrating is the timeframe for building out these nuclear reactors is still, you know, an order of five years to 10 years. Alex, what are you seeing here? Yeah, I've gotten probably quite a bit surprising amount of feedback from the community and the audience reminding me that I shouldn't ignore existing Generation 3 plus nuclear reactors in favor of SMRs and fusion reactors. So I want to make sure I just nail this point.

54:41There are right now at least six AP1000s. These are made by Westinghouse, which ironically went bankrupt in 2017, building a couple of these in Georgia and South Carolina. And now it's hot again because superintelligence is hungry for power. And now it's incredibly valuable. They cost maybe about$7 billion to build. So$80 billion partnership to build these, maybe build 10 reactors all across the U.S. This is going to be a very big deal. And critically, unlike SMRs, where there may be only two or three and they're relatively emerging technologies, this is, by comparison, a relatively mature format for nuclear power.

55:23And I think when we talk about the bridge to power for superintelligence from nat gas to nuclear fission to nuclear fusion with solar sprinkled and solar plus battery sprinkled throughout, I think Generation 3 plus reactors like the AP1000 have a very important role to play. So Alex, let me ask you. I said it to appease the audience that I'm not ignoring Generation 3 plus. No, but I think that's really important. These AP1000s are 1.1 gigawatt power plants. You know, when Eric Schmidt was testifying in front of Congress, he said we need 92 gigawatts by 2030. So this particular deal might put 10 of these 1.1 gigawatt data centers on the map, but they're not going to be coming online until into the early mid-2030s.

56:13So the question is, how do we build out an additional 90 gigawatts in the next four years? Where is that going to come from? Yeah, I think the deal structure behind this is worth understanding, too, because it generalizes to solar and to, you know, to fusion and everything else. So what's happening here is a company, Westinghouse, that got bought by Toshiba. So this is part of America deindustrializing very stupidly for decades. Toshiba buys Westinghouse. Westinghouse tries to build nuclear facilities. The government is so bureaucratic and so onerous that it goes bankrupt. So then in 2017, the private equity guys come in, Brookfield led, and say, OK, we have very smart business school majors here.

56:55We'll try and revive this thing. And the timing is 2017, right when the transformer comes out. So the timing turns out to be perfect. So now what's happening is the private equity firms and the econ majors from all these schools are going to the government and saying, give us 10, 20, 30 billion dollars in loans, guaranteed loans. and we'll use that to build these facilities. And then if they're successful, we make a huge profit. And if they fail, we're right off the loan. So there's not a lot of downside. Many, many, many econ majors and business people should be shifting into this area because the government is open for business now.

57:32But that's the structure. You go to the government, you get the loan, you build the next big thing. The next big thing, if it succeeds, you get the profit, you get the margin and the government subsidizes it. It's a golden era because a lot of people, you know, when I'm lecturing on campus, all the AI people, all the computer science people, they know exactly what they want to do. But then all the econ majors and business majors, like, how do I get in this? How do I get in this? This is how you get in this. The flow of capital is in the – it's going to be$1.2 trillion a year by 2030 coming just into data center construction and power for it.

58:05There's nothing even close in the history of the world to that scale of money movement. So just inject yourself right into it. Building out the railroads, right, building out the telecom networks, those were significant, just not these dollar figures because inflation. I have a clarifying question to ask here. In our last part, we talked about the fact that the U.S. is building 5 ,000 data centers, 10x more than anybody else. Is that inconsistent with the amount of energy available? We have 5 ,000. energy. No, it's today. It's the data centers we have today of all types, not just AI data centers or 5 ,000 more, you know, cumulatively more than the rest of the world combined.

58:43To me, this is one of the few things that's easy to predict. You know, everything is changing so quickly, but the chip fabs are exactly what they are. We're building them at a certain rate. Every chip is going to get used. The chips have a certain power consumption. That's very calculable that you can assume that they're all going to get flat out sold out, but we can't make any more of them than 20 million GPUs this year, and then it'll expand at some rate. So working back from that, you can exactly predict the flow of capital required to build out this entire infrastructure. We're entering the olden age of category three nuclear reactors 20 years to date.

59:21Three plus. Three plus, fair enough. And for what it's worth, for those who are looking at this on YouTube, the visual format, the form factor of these plants actually looks like some sort of hybrid between what you're seeing here with the conventional older generation cooling towers and the newer SMRs. You could be forgiven for mistaking it for a normal building. One of the issues here is the U.S. public with the old, the original Gen 1 and Gen 2, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, being worried about these plants, not in the backyard, but the The three plus are fail-safe nuclear systems that, again, I'm happy to have in my backyard.

1:00:03We've got to change the narrative and we've got to accelerate this. Even companies that are bringing back online previous nuclear power plants, it's taking five years plus to get them online. The timelines are just too long. And Dave, the point you're making is even with this, we're like one-tenth of the rate that we're really needing. Therefore, this is a guaranteed boom. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code.

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1:01:23Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. All right, let's jump into a conversation on robotics and in particular robot drones. So China just broke the world record on the number of flying drones. 16 ,000 AI-powered drones flying together, controlled by a smart AI system. Let's take a look at the video.

1:02:01So if you were watching, you saw a beautiful drone show in the sky. If you were listening, you heard some music, but here's one of the interesting concepts. Imagine being able to have 16 ,000 drones up in the sky, you can actually create a giant TV screen and watch a television program or a movie across an entire city. What's the significance of this for you, Dave? Oh, big time. I think that people visualize robots in human-eyed form, you know, just because that's what's in the movies, constructing buildings and cleaning your yard and whatever. But I think the swarm version of it is actually just as big a deal, if not bigger.

1:02:42And it's been very hard for the Hollywood studios to create swarm visual effects. So they don't use them much in sci-fi and therefore people don't really think about them. But, and then when you look at a flock of birds or a bunch of bees, they're actually not coordinated. You know, they're a little coordinated, but they're not really coordinated. The AI version of it, as you saw in that video, is perfectly down to the millimeter coordinated. And it's a very effective way to do things like construction, yard work, you know, cleaning your gutters, whatever, because, you know, you can, you can put 50 drones in if you need to pick up something heavy, you can put two in if it's light.

1:03:19So it's very, very flexible. So I think that, you know, it's going to be a big, big part of taking AI and making it affect the physical world much more than people are currently predicting. Because if you look at our podcast, we must've had 50 videos on different humanoids dancing and fighting and whatever. But I really feel like the drone part of it or the interactive thousands of drone part of it is way underappreciated as a real world thing to do right now. I still love the episode last time, last week, about a mosquito killing drone, just flying around and zapping mosquitoes in your backyard.

1:03:53You know, drones are becoming the front line for the warfare in Ukraine. I mean, it is already. I mean, that war is being prosecuted by half a million drones on either side. It's not a men thing. It's just drones killing each other and drones killing men. And those drones are being, to a large degree, being manufactured in Ukraine. And one of the things that's interesting is when the war is finally over, you know, God and the leadership of countries willing, Ukraine as a nation is going to be sort of Europe's drone manufacturing capital. They're already the world's best army. because they've had to be.

1:04:32And just as a corollary, bringing it back to the U.S., there's 10 ,000 drones a month crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. And I keep telling government people this, that drone technology beats wall technology. What the hell are we doing?

1:04:49Oh my God. There's probably a good slogan there someplace. Okay. Here's a fun article. Elon Musk, Tesla might unveil a flying car. So we've been talking about this is the next generation roadster. God knows what it's going to be charged. And this is not a Model Y mass production. I remember being backstage with Elon when he had funded the Global Learning Prize. and we're backstage talking about Tesla before we're going out and talk about the guy's level of intensity, right? He's like worried he was launching, it was a Falcon 9 launch that night with going to the largest payloads. He was concerned about center of mass issues and vibration issues.

1:05:38And then he was concerned about whether Tesla could in fact survive the next quarter this is like 2017, 2018. And I said, well, are you going to put out the next Roadster? He goes, man, oh man, nothing matters other than Model Y and the Model 3. He said, that's our mass production car. And so he was always looking at that. But here we are. And I think the interesting conversation here is, will this Roadster include jet or rocket propulsion from SpaceX that will give it the ability to hover or hop, right? That's what people believe will be materializing. Any thoughts here? I'd like to point out a historical irony, if I may.

1:06:24There was a lot of hand-wringing about eight years ago, circa 2017, about how we were promised flying cars and instead only got 140 characters. But if you play the tape forward, as it were, the 140 characters was Twitter that became X, that became XAI. And that's now the integrated technical and capital structure that's poised to give us a flying car. So a bit of historic irony that actually maybe in some sense the 140 characters actually gave us a flying car after all. That's such a great connect. Elon's gone on record saying by the end of the year there will be an unforgettable demo. So excited to see what that looked like.

1:07:05Like, I mean, the current gossip is that SpaceX is going to provide cold gas thrusters, right? It's propulsion systems that might allow the car to sort of hop or hover. Are you serious? Yes. Yeah, seriously. So imagine you have like, you know, you have 30 seconds of hovering time. And over the coin until you recharge them. So, I mean, interestingly, you could be recharging these thrusters by just compressing air. as you're driving along. Who knows? Well, I'll tell you, the highways were originally designed to go 100, 120 miles an hour, but then turned out to be way too dangerous. But if you added that cold thruster to the car and it has accident avoidance built into it, its ability to jump and hover over an accident scene is incredibly valuable.

1:07:55Well, I'm curious how high it can hover. I'm guessing we're talking about like a foot. I think once you get out of ground effect, you're not going to have much hovering capability. You guys have heard me talk about this before, but I just spent the last four days commuting from cities into JFK or Gorillaz in Sao Paulo. This cannot arrive fast enough for my taste. And if Tesla is able to unlock this world the way it unlocked electric cars, massive. Okay, okay. Let's point out right now, these are not eVTOLs. These are not quote unquote flying cars. These are, at best, short, hopping, hovering cars.

1:08:33So we still have Joby and Archer Aviation, Ehang, and all kinds of other companies out of China that will be multi-copter electric transport vehicles. So Archer has the contract for here in LA for the 2020 Olympics. So that will be fun. But I think this is more of a fun, you know, the kid with all the toys wants a flying or hovering car. Well, part of the brilliance of Elon, too, is that car companies will spend something like 7 % of revenue on marketing. And he spends zero. But he takes that money and does cool, cool things that are far more valuable than marketing. And so it actually is net profitable for the underlying companies to pursue these crazy interesting science projects, some of which turn into real products and keeps the market cap high.

1:09:25But it also replaces the marketing budget brilliantly. And a lot of people should be copying. Like, what can I do to be inspirational and cool and use that to drive people to my product, to my company, to my team, to my mission? Yeah, it also motivates the team, right? People want to come work at the coolest places. It helps recruiting. You get the best people. It all works. It's just Elon has invented the formula and perfected it. I think Steve Jobs kind of invented it. But Elon has taken it to the next level. And everyone should just be studying. Whether you like Elon or not, study it. It clearly works.

1:09:56It's the right plan. All right. I love this. I guess it was a tweet. So Elon on how to prevent global warming, quote, a large solar powered AI satellite constellation that would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reaches the Earth. So, Salim, we've talked about this at the XPRIZE for ages. I call this a solar sunshade, being able to have something out maybe at the Lagrange point that's able to reflect a quarter of 1 % of the sunlight impinging on the Earth. And basically sort of a thermometer to titrate solar flux on the planet. The challenge with this is that it's a tragedy of the commons.

1:10:40There are going to be some countries like Russia that wants global warming because it opens up the waterways north of their country. Others that it's decimating their agriculture like Africa and parts of Europe. And no one can take action. Salim, what are your thoughts here? Yeah, there's an old story called the Pinatubo effect. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in the early 90s, the ash covered the whole atmosphere for a while. and a drop global temperature by two degrees. And one of the thoughts I've been thinking over the years is there's like about seven majorly threatened areas with sea levels rising, the Washington, D.C., River Delta, Bangladesh, little country, Florida, et cetera.

1:11:24And I thought they would actually just start launching up rockets without telling anybody to do something like this because they have existential threat. They're going to do it. And the cost is not that heavy. But this gives you a computable capability and you can calibrate it much more effectively. Yeah, this is reversible is the most important thing, right? That's right. That's really huge. It's geoscale engineering. Alex, you probably thought of this at length. And by the way, just to point that out, people complain, oh my God, you can't go around geoengineering. And the response is, we have been geoengineering by default by throwing up all this carbon.

1:11:56We have to figure out technological ways of doing it. The COP23 and all that stuff, nation states will not solve this. Good point. The idea of a global weather grid is one of the biggest ideas I'd like to push forward that I haven't seen either the political will or the technical will to push forward. It doesn't even need to necessarily be a sunshade per se. It could be as simple as satellites via microwave heating or some other mechanism increasing the local cloud cover in some areas, reducing it in others. that could be enough to solve a broader problem than just global warming, which is weather control.

1:12:34Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could steer hurricanes in one direction versus another direction or mitigate storms? I think this is, from a technical perspective, doubly so in the era of AI, when we can have planetary-scale weather models, including more recent strong ones out of DeepMind, that can solve this problem. It's more, I think, a political problem of just deciding that we want as a planet to do it. Well, it's an insurance problem, too. oops, we steered the hurricane in the wrong direction. Right. It'll be a social problem, less a technical problem. It'll be a heyday for conspiracy theorists.

1:13:11But it's inevitable. I mean, a topic like that, you have to have global consensus, and that's always been impossible, but it's inevitable that we need to get over that hurdle in the next few years, not 20 years, because there are many of these topics coming up concurrently, this is a really good one to force the agenda. But these things are all global. And so if there's no mechanism for global consensus, we're screwed as a world. So we have to get over that hurdle. We don't get to Kardashev type one civilization status without a global weather control grid. It's as simple as that. All right. Here's the next article.

1:13:47This is a fun one. This is Blue Origin Lands Glenn Rocket Booster. For the first time, we see a video here of what we're used to seeing SpaceX with Falcon 9 do, but this is a Blue Origin vehicle. So Blue Origin launched a mission to Mars called the Escapade. Congratulations to Jeff Bezos. And the booster touched down on the recovery ship called Jacqueline, which Jeff named after his mom. How's that? Hey, mom, I got a gift for you. I'm naming the recovery ship after you. So this is a big deal for me. This is doubling our chance of getting humanity out into space, not being overly dependent on SpaceX, which is still, by the way, launching over 90 plus percent of the America's spacecraft and something like probably 70 percent of the world's launches right now.

1:14:42Any thoughts on this one, guys? I just think it's great that we have a second capability aside from SpaceX. I think it's good for the world. Yeah, and Jeff's been spending about a billion dollars of his Amazon stock per year to fund this. It moved a lot slower. I used to bug him about why isn't he going faster, but hey, he's here now, which is great. And of course, they're going to be using, Blue Origin's going to be using their own booster now to launch their competition to Starlink, which is already being deployed. Alex, anything you want to add here? Yeah, I think having multiple reusable railroads, if you will, to orbit is, I think, exactly the sort of space race we want to find ourselves in.

1:15:27And I think if we're going to colonize and develop the solar system, we're going to need multiple routes to orbit. Yeah, it was nice to see Elon congratulate Jeff on this. Of course, Starship puts all of these other launch vehicles to shame. You know, Elon very famously said once Starship is up and operating, he'll shut down the Falcon 9 line. And it will outcompete Blue Origin and Rocket Labs and everything else. It'll be the big sucking sound. Can I double down on that just for a second? Sure. I think it's so awesome that he tweeted the congrats because it just shows that they're all focused on the bigger picture.

1:16:05This is not about competition. This is about solving the problem. And I think that's just fantastic. Yeah, agreed. All right. Talking about the opposite end of the spectrum, this just made me mad. But, you know, it's the conversation we had earlier coming out of FII. People are concerned. So labor unions in Boston are fighting Waymo. So the Boston unions formed a labor united against Waymo. And the approach here is they're going to force Waymos to put a human safety driver in the right seat or in the car in the left seat. Guys knows. We've seen this before. Right. When when France made Uber illegal, lots of places were fighting to retain, you know, these unions in place.

1:16:53Dave and Alex, you live in Boston. How do you feel about this? Well, it's a little disconcerting that our tech hubs, you know, the best and biggest tech hubs in the country are also the most dysfunctional governmentally in terms of like this. This is utterly insane. Right. And it's obvious to anyone involved in it. But the populist uprisings are going to be all over the place on all kinds of topics. We've seen the picketers outside the front of open AI, you know, and so this is going to happen all over the place. But if the governments of those regions don't get on top of it and put some kind of rational system together, then people are just going to leave.

1:17:30You know, like Waymo will go elsewhere and it is already going elsewhere. And that's just going to be really bad for our Silicon Valley and for Boston and for New York. You know, it's just they've got to figure it out. Alex, you can't add that.

1:18:11social cohesion while at the same time radically accelerating technologies. We haven't cracked that yet. Maybe social cohesion tech needs its own benchmark, and if we solve that, there's almost an optimal trajectory where we get our acceleration and our social cohesion at the same time, but we haven't cracked the social cohesion part of that, and I'd love to solve that. Sure. I mean, we can talk about that at the summit if it comes together, but here's the deal. I mean, People are worried for their jobs. Number one, I mean, that's it. It's survival. I need to feed my kids. I need to be able to afford my home.

1:18:45And this is going to take it away from me. How can you possibly do that? And until we up-level our capability to provide people that safety net, whether it's universal basic income, which I'm much more interested in universal basic services, right? Anyway, Salim, you were going to say? Yeah, I want to grandstand just for a little bit. One of the things we noticed after the EXO book came out was you're going to see this massive let out full type stuff against new technology, right? Because people would much rather be comfortable than happy. And we actually focused on this. So we solved this, what I call the immune system problem.

1:19:24We created a 10 week engagement with big companies that solves the cracks this in big companies. We've done it 100 times. We even have a nonprofit that does this in the public sector where you need to change it, where regulatory and this type of construct is the immune system. It takes 16 weeks, but it works. We've done it a bunch of times. So anybody facing this, just give us a call. We'll show you how to do it. We found a way of hacking cultural scale in defined environments. Just ping me at salim at openexo.com, and we'll show you how to do it. We've open sourced the methodology to doing it.

1:19:54Because, you know, a few years ago when the book came out, with all of this technology, if we don't solve the cultural resistance to this, it doesn't matter what the breakthroughs are. We're still going to be fighting this political problem. And the next level we were going after is how do you solve the immune system problem in an institution like healthcare, journalism, or education? They each have their unique immune systems. I mean, we're going to see this across every industry as white-collar AI, you know, superintelligence comes in, humanoid robots come in. This is just a small peak at what's going to be coming.

1:20:27We've got to solve it now. All right, let's go into our final segment here, which for me is one of the more important and exciting ones, which is what's going on in the world of science. And I'm going to start this conversation with a video clip from Salm Altman on his thoughts about GPT-6 and the science leap that's coming. If GPT-3 was like the first moment where you saw like a glimmer of something that felt like the spiritual Turing test getting passed, GPT-5 is the first moment where you see a glimmer of AI doing new science. It's like very tiny things, but here and there, someone's posting like, oh, it figured this thing out, or oh, it came up with this new idea, or oh, it was like a useful collaborator on this paper.

1:21:10And there is a chance that GPT-6 will be a GPT-3 to 4-like leap that happened for kind of Turing test-like stuff for science, where 5 has these tiny glimmers and 6 can really do it. All right, Alex, let's open up with you. Yeah, I've gone on record as saying I think we're going to see many, if not most, grand challenges in math, science, engineering, and medicine start to fall to AI over the next three maximum years. So I think this is very much on my anticipated trajectory. Science is going to get solved, and all of its disciplines are going to get solved, and AI is going to do it. And I, for one, am super excited about finding myself in a future, near-term, Star Trek-type future, where it turns out that centuries of human capital, or the equivalent of centuries of human capital, just get solved overnight at bulk, at scale, by AI.

1:22:05Yeah. Love it. I think the amount of patents being filed, the number Nobel Prize winning science being done is going to skyrocket. You can actually see there's an interesting chart I saw where if you look at patent filings post-Chat GPT, there's like just exponential growth immediately thereafter where it's an aid to humans. But all of a sudden, if it's autonomously doing the science in sort of closed loop cycles, it's amazing. Dave? Yeah, those are two things really worth tracking. The AI-generated patents and also the agent-to-agent transactions, part of which are licensing the patents. But that whole agent-to-agent intellectual exchange world is starting to really take off.

1:22:53And you can just track it by transaction count and see the shape of the exponent. That'll be something we'll track really closely. Salim. This justifies why I didn't pay attention during my physics degree. Oh, my God. Well, look, if history is consistent, GPT-6 and Gemini 3 will be about the same. You know, they're just leapfrogging each other. And Gemini 3 from Google is within a week, we think. Yeah. So we have to carve out probably, you know, a big chunk, maybe a full day just studying its capabilities. And we will. And we will. But when GPT-3 comes, I'm sorry, when Gemini 3 comes out, expect us to go live with an analysis of it as soon thereafter as possible.

1:23:37Seeing a lot, right? We just saw OpenAI chat or GPT 5.1s come out. Miramirati's company has just gone from like nine or 10 billion valuation to 50 billion valuation. There's a lot frothing right now. All right, let's move on to the next one. And Zuckerberg and Chan bet AI can cure all diseases. Zuckerberg believes AI could make cures much sooner while empowering scientists to take risks. So the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to boost compute 10X by 2028, shifting all science work under their Biohub brand. So this is great. I love that. I mean, they've had an interest in medicine and biology for some time, but now they're doubling down and focusing.

1:24:27Alex, let's go to you first. Yeah, so you'll remember when CZI launched in 2016, the goal was to cure all disease or most disease by the end of the 21st century. And now the messaging has radically changed. Now the messaging is we're going to have generative AI-based virtual cells and presumably virtual organs and virtual organisms built on top of those, enabling AIs to search intervention space for cure-est-all disease. So now I think the subtext is you don't have to wait until necessarily the end of the 21st century to cure all disease. This could happen in the next five years, call it 2030.

1:25:04And I think all of the timelines, not just CZI, but other nonprofits that are working on AI for broad spectrum sort of generalist cure-all diseases have similar timelines. You see similar messaging out of Anthropic as well. 2030 cure-all disease with AI. Yeah, we saw that from Demis Asabis within a decade, cure all disease. So we're seeing a huge amount of talent, compute, and capital going towards that goal, which is good news for everybody. What I loved about this is that to Alex's inner loop point, that instead of working on specific cures, they're just focusing on just generating more compute and making it available to everybody.

1:25:45I think that's great. Yeah, sometimes it's, in my experience, sometimes it's easier to solve the more general problem than the more specific problem. It may perversely end up being the case. It's easier to just cure all diseases with AI than to cure artisanally diseases one by one. Yeah, I mean, that's the concept around age reversal. So if you didn't have the disease when you were in your 20s and 30s, but it develops when you're 40s or 50s, how do you turn back your epigenetic clock so that your cells are younger and thereby not expressing the disease since you didn't express it in an earlier state of your biology?

1:26:21All right. Next one in this area, and this is a conversation about one of the first real what people are calling longevity therapies. So the US government has slashes a price on GLP-1 drugs and we're finding that GLP-1 drugs are lowering the risk of repeat strokes. So, you know, one of the challenges has been GLP-1 drugs have been expensive and they are sort of a go-to for most physicians if someone has a particular, especially obesity-related or, you know, diet-related issues. Here we see TrumpRx.gov looking at bringing this down to$149 per month, which would be pretty amazing. We also find that the GLP-1 drugs in particular are able to cut the incidence of strokes by as much as a half in a three-month period of time.

1:27:23Who wants to jump in? I'll comment on this one. I mean, it's so exciting. I guess the elephant in the room is the outstanding question in biology. Why are GLP-1 class drugs so seemingly miraculous? Why are they able to treat so many different forms of biological dysfunction, not just the metabolic issues that they were originally intended for? Putting the question of biology and mechanism aside, I think when we talk about universal basic services and abundance of healthcare, I think this is the beginnings of that. I think offering for$150 odd per month to US persons who need it, GLP-1 class drugs, that starts to look like universally basically abundant healthspan drugs.

1:28:12And I think it's a major step in the right direction. I want to put out the warning again, just because I'm in this world, right? GLP-1 drugs are not a panacea. If you are obese and using these drugs, it's important to use them as a means to change the way you eat, to change your diet, change your habits. Because if you stop the drug during this period of time, you're losing weight. You're also losing muscle. And you need to be exercising throughout this process. And if you stop taking the GLP, what happens is you gain the fat back, but you don't gain the muscle back. And that's a problem. Sarcopenia is a true issue as we're getting older.

1:28:57Your muscle is your longevity organ. Super important to have that realization. Make sure you keep exercising, muscle building while you're using a GLP-1. I just love all the side effect benefits we're seeing without even realizing it. I think That's so great. Edison launches Cosmos, the AI scientist. So this is this seemed like a really a big deal to me. Alex, do you want to walk us through it? Sure. So this is another scaffolding-based approach to agentic science. This came out of Edison, as mentioned. And I think this is almost a preview of the age we're about to find ourselves in. Maybe we're a few months in at this point of bulk discovery.

1:29:44It'll look a little bit like if folks remember AlphaFold3, where essentially almost overnight, a large chunk of structural biology was more or less solved. It's going to look a little bit like that, except much, much broader, where with this particular agentic AI researcher, there were discoveries across a number of different subfields of biology, not just structural biology. So we'll see, as was published in this paper, discoveries relating to potentially helpful for Alzheimer's, some other factors. But the core technical advance here that is claimed is effective increases in context length. That's the key.

1:30:23So the frontier models right now have context lengths in the millions, usually, of tokens. But if you wanted to develop the world's strongest AI scientist, ideally, naively, you'd want a model that has a context length in maybe the trillions of tokens so that you could, in principle, feed it the entire Internet and every paper ever published and then just ask it, what's the solution? What's the solution to Alzheimer's? So the approach that Edison adopted here was a little bit more practical than some sort of algorithmic advance that advanced the context window to trillions of tokens from millions and was focused on more knowledge graphs and other scaffolding techniques to achieve effective context lengths that are much larger.

1:31:10But the end result is still essentially the same. You put as much information, as much scientific literature into the context window as you practically can. And then you crank it and you ask for discoveries and discoveries and innovations pop out. And I think one can imagine near-term future where we can just scale our way, scaling law style, to major discoveries across all of the important biological subfields. Yeah, here's one of the metrics they threw out. It completes four to six months of expert human research in 12 hours and can read 1 ,500 papers and run 42 ,000 lines of code per experiment.

1:31:47And yeah, it's almost brute force-like research. Would you say that? It's brute force, but it's also... What happens when you take all the millions of research papers that have been written in the past where people missed findings and not run them through? And we find incredible things. Yeah, not just the papers, but the raw test results that are in like digital form. Yeah. Just the incredible amount of information this can assimilate. Because when I look at my biology friends, talking to them last night, actually, and they're all like, well, you know, these things always take a lot longer than you think.

1:32:18Like, how do you get so cynical at a young age? This is a completely new approach. It's brand new greenfield territory. And if I look at what they actually have been doing for the last three years, they try and tease apart a single chemical reaction or a single test. And then they run it through MATLAB or Mathematica to try and tease apart. And then they draw these plots that say, well, you know, we have statistical p-tests here that have significance just barely. And it's like, what a waste of time, man. All these are interacting. And if you take the neural net approach and you just bombard it with raw information, it's really good in these multiple things going on concurrently.

1:32:56Try to find the conclusion without having to tease apart every single element. It's a brand new way to do things. And it could do anything. It could be mind-blowingly capable and quick. You don't know because it's a new thing in the world. So, you know, put all that cynicism behind you and think about, like, the rate of improvement that might be possible and just embrace it. Yeah. All right. Our final article here, one for a fun conversation. Genetically engineered babies are banned, but tech titans are making one anyway. All right. So, you know, this is worth the conversation. So there's a few companies that are being now funded that are building CRISPR capability for embryo editing.

1:33:42So Wall Street Journal reported one out of San Francisco called Preventive. That's backed with Sam. I mean, Sam is backing an incredible number of companies, right? So a CRISPR company, a brain-computer interface company, and amongst probably dozens of others. There's another company called Manhattan Genomics that was just covered in Wired. And so this, in my mind, it's a regime change, right? We're going from selection to alteration. So IVF clinics already allow you to screen your embryo, right? You can fertilize a number of embryos and then you can do single cell sequencing and find out which of those embryos are safest to implant.

1:34:25but you can't edit your embryo. That is verboten under FDA rules. The FDA is blocking any of that. They won't even support any research in that area, let alone allow it to be done commercially. So these companies are beginning to look outside the US. Where can they go and do it? There's some conversation that this is happening in or will be happening in the UAE. What do you guys think? I remember Raymond McCauley getting up and saying, look, the human genome is essentially software and we have, you know, 50 trillion cells in the human body. Essentially, the human being is now a software engineering problem.

1:35:05And when you can edit the embryo, you're basically starting it from scratch. It seems inevitable to me. And again, the normal thing. The question is, what do you want to design for is the big question. Yeah. I mean, we give our babies the best we can, right? It's like you start genetic engineering when you pick your spouse, right? Are they successful? Are they intelligent? Do they look good? And that's the first step that you take. Can I just go back? This is the old really important point. We used to talk about the shift from film photography to digital photography and all the implications of that.

1:35:40Essentially, we've gone from breeding and genetic evolution to a digital model, which just accelerates the whole thing. You know, and then when the baby's born, just one more other thing, you know, you give it the best healthcare you can, the best education you can, the best clothing you can. You're giving your child the best you possibly can. So the question is, why not start with the best genetic stack? And it's, you know, the fear is the whole eugenics conversation. Alex, over to you. A couple of comments. The first one of the elephants in the room, the movie Gattaca, arguably one of the best cinematic depictions of germline editing of human babies, or at least germline selection, I should say.

1:36:24I have to watch that one again. It's an amazing movie. Many view it as a dystopian future. I think if you look at it the right way, it's arguably a more utopian future in the sense that we get space colonization. there's a space X type movie that that is named Gattaca in the movie. And also we get healthy babies. But the second point is, is more historical that the Asilomar guidelines that, that were arguably the inception of, of many of these bands, soft and hard against germline editing. Those are 1975. There's a historic argument that Asilomar was actually triggered by the Watergate scandal.

1:37:04Really? Yeah. There was a concern at the time. Some historians argue that the Silomar guidelines were originally proposed, or at least motivated in part because Watergate was fresh in everyone's mind. And there was a concern by scientists that if there were, if there was recombinant DNA experimentation that was not very well advertised or not forthright, according to some sort of public guidelines, that something bad would happen to the scientific community in whatever form. This is one historic argument that Watergate helped to precipitate 1975 Asilomar guidelines. I remember I was in grad school.

1:37:43I was doing my joint MIT med school degree at the Whitehead Institute on recombinant DNA, right? The first restriction enzymes had come out that allowed you to edit DNA in a somewhat precise fashion, nothing compared to what we have now with CRISPR. And the headlines of the magazines, the cover stories were designer babies. And there was so much fear. And that was, God knows, 40 years ago. We're 50 years on from Asilomar. Yeah. 50 years this year on from Asilomar. And I actually had to go back after I saw the story and look to check to see, is there even at least in the US, a single federal statute that bans germline editing?

1:38:28And I couldn't find one. which is a little bit surprising. There's a patchwork of federal and state laws and regs that certainly deter germline editing, but not a single one that actually bans it. So, I wouldn't be surprised if in the near-term future, we find a generational conversation about whether germline editing should, in fact, be allowed. And we have to remember, right, in 2018, there was a Chinese scientist, He Jianqi, who did this kind of CRISPR editing. He was trying to target the CCR5 cell surface receptor that would prevent a child from getting HIV. And the guy was just decimated in China, in the press, condemned by the world.

1:39:13Yeah. They arrested him. So that put a kibosh on this idea. Seriously, you know. Well, these are really complicated topics and they all need thought leaders. But the number, like just in this podcast alone between fusion and AI breakthroughs and driverless cars in Boston and now this, they all need thought leaders. So that the number of people that need to rise to the occasion and say, here's what we should do. Here's an idea. You know, ethical, trustworthy people who know what they're talking about. The need for that is backlogged so deep now. And this is just one of those topics. I'll put it here to Hank Greeley, who's been working on bioethics for a very long time.

1:39:52You know, the long-term effects of this are really, really consequential. One of my biggest concerns is that Hollywood is decimating our future, right? I mean, this is my pet rant. You know, every movie out there is dystopian genetics, dystopian killer robots and AI systems. I mean, no wonder that people fear the future. if in fact the only futures they see in TV series and movies are one that they don't want for themselves and their kids. All you see this and you immediately go to this negative vision of the future, which is pervasive in society. We need to retool that. We need to reset that.

1:40:33We need more Star Trek in our lives. Maybe Peter, you're giving a call for action to yourself to start a new Hollywood studio, this time powered by AI, that paints a much more optimistic future. Be the change agent. There is, well, I can't say much about it yet, but there is a project in works that unveil. The fundamental problem is human nature is so fear-based, per my earlier comment today, and so you're fighting against that. The way to solve for this is to give those embryos psychedelics and solve this right now. Oh, God, no. That's the way to solve for this. We're going to reduce the size of their amygdalas.

1:41:11So they reduce their... Yeah, I'm serious. You edit it out. You don't need an amygdala. You know, it's funny about this whole storyline is that the birth rate in Korea now is 0.7 per couple, 0.7 children per couple. Crazy. Like one topic is editing your baby. The other one is like, well, no one's having any babies at all. Like, so doesn't that seem like a more urgent issue? A harder problem, harder bit problem. Oh my God. All right. So we're going to, we're going to wrap this episode. I'll remind folks, if you're interested in the idea of the Moonshotmates pulling together a couple of day amazing event in the fall of next year, send us an email, moonshots at diamandis.com.

1:41:54Let us know you're interested. And we're going to try and get to a thousand people interested. If we can get there, then we'll pull the trigger and we'll make that happen. Salim, you have something you wanted to mention? We have our next 10X Shift workshop happening on November 19th. So we'll be talking about immune systems and organizations and giving people directions on how to build the exos. So come join for that. It's 100 bucks. People love it. It's limited seats. So come and join. Amazing. Dave and Alex, any closing thoughts today before I play our outro music today from Adam822, which is amazing.

1:42:33I love the fact that our subscribers are sending us their musicals. It's awesome. They're so good as well. They're so good. It's blowing my mind. Yeah. I have a closing thought, which is we're closing out our best venture fund year by far. I mean, just crazy what's happened this year. you know portfolio gained about 12 billion dollars of value the companies uh within the year most of those ideas come from alex so i wanted to throw a shout out to alex for the the the vision but you know one of the themes in this podcast has been that all these topics you know if you look at what elon's been able to do like should we have a satellite at the lagrange point you know shadowing the earth by 0.01 or something like that if your track record of being right is perfect or very, very good, then you actually get to say, here's the answer, guys.

1:43:23And people will flock to it just because your track record is right. And I think Alex is right on that cusp now of just, and that's why he's a little cautious on the podcast sometimes too, because he doesn't know. He actually says he doesn't know. Unlike me, I just say something anyway. But Alex is really, really, his vision for what will and won't work is just becoming so honed and so beautiful. So I really wanted to thank you for the gangbuster year we've had. Yeah, thanks, Alex. Alex, a closing call from you. Yeah, in addition to thank you, Dave, for the very kind comments, I'll just say I spend substantially all of my time thinking about how we solve the hardest problems on Earth with AI.

1:44:01So if folks listening are interested in connecting to talk about problems they have or the hardest problems on Earth they want to see solved with AI, definitely feel free to reach out. amazing all right guys uh this is uh label unbelievable episode i'm gonna have to listen to this at least three times i know i do too and we listen we read your comments so uh first off please subscribe tell your friends uh one of the things i was so uh heart-filled about when i was in mexico city when i was in italy when i was in spain when salim was in brazil were all of our fans there telling folks that they share the episode.

1:44:40So thank you for listening. We do love the comments. If you have questions, I really want to do some AMA episodes with our subscribers. So drop them in the comments. Our team will aggregate them. And this is a piece of music labeled, All Right, Folks, From the Moonshots to Math, The WTF Just Happened Crew by Adam822. All right, Let's enjoy.

1:45:33Dave's bouncing like a kid with toys, filling the mic with startup noise. It's the Moonshots crew changing the game. X-Prize dreamers know their name from A.I. to Rockets and Maps Unsolved. They're building futures deeply involved. Yeah, Peter shouts amazing. That's our cue.

1:45:59That's the WTF Just Happen crew. And that is amazing. That was amazing. Unbelievable. Thank you, Adam. If you've got a piece of outro music, send it over to us. And if it's amazing as that, we'll go ahead and play it. Gentlemen, happy Saturday. And wishing you guys... What's left of it? I mean, Jesus. Listen, I was up at 3.30 this morning prepping for this episode. Just so much to cover. and we still have another episode we'll record later this week. We need to essentially make this a full-time thing because the world is happening so fast that we just can, I mean, just trying to process this episode is going to take hours and hours.

1:46:46All right, guys. Love my time with you as with each other. Be well. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from human-odd robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more, there's no fluff. Only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this reports for you.

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