The Trillion Dollar AI Reset: Advertising & Gaming is Next w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #170

27:57What's going on in China and Taiwan? on. Um, so I think for me, the for me, the hard part is when something's a million times, uh, you know, assume is a hundred X or a hundred thousand X. I mean, I, you end up with a failure of imagination where you can't conceive of the types of things you might be able to do. Right? Uh, and our immediate thing is to automate what we're doing now. And that's not the right answer. Yeah. Because you end up with the problem of when they first put TV out, you took radio announcers and put them on TV reading the same scripts. And you're not leveraging the capability in a real way.

28:32It takes time to kind of get to grips with the imagination that's possible. So you kind of have to wait till we get there and then go now, what do we do? I know one thing, Peter, when you were out here two weeks ago, I guess, spending time with Alex was in her gross. There's just a handful of people that you can find that have got their head wrapped around this. So if you talk to people at random, 99 .9 % of them are under reacting more than that, 99 .99 % are under reacting. And you find a few people like Alex that are thinking it through. And if you can surround yourself with as many of those as you can find, it really, really helps a lot.

29:10Just to pick on the framework here that David Sax put together, it's exact same three dimensions that I used to think about scale. I think a million X in four years, four to five years is the right answer. But I also think that the algorithm dimension nobody really knows. And if anything, it's understated. But we are all surprised in the last few months about inference time, computer, test time, chain of thought reasoning, being far more powerful as a scaling factor and trying to build new scaling laws around. How do we even think about inference time? Because when you, when David talks about the chip's getting faster, he's thinking about the GPUs, and just the standard 3 to 4 X every year.

29:51But the inference time chips are actually improving far, far faster. It's a much easier problem. But that's turning out to be a key factor in the intelligence of the overall system. So I think that the chips will outperform what he just said and the algorithms will way up perform what he just said because of his innovations. When I look at the factors driving this, it is compute its data sets. And we haven't talked about synthetic data hitting this. algorithms, money coming in, and then the number of actual human meat bodies getting into the game here is increasing. More and more people are getting into the AI game.

30:28Something funny to happen, I was having a conversation, I think it was with Chatship PT, you might have been Gemini 2 .5, and I would say, okay, let's look into the future. I was trying to use it as a conversational partner to predict where things are going. and I said, make some predictions. And I said, listen, if we're going to see a centuries worth of progress in the next 10 years, what you just predicted is extraordinarily linear. And it goes, you're right, let me go a little bit bolder. So you've got actually pushed the... So I think this is where the answer will lie. When we see these types of predictions, we'll use an AI to go, you write out that current and tell me what it's going to look like.

31:08Because it'll do probably a better job than us because we're limited in some other ways. We have all our cognitive biases that limit our ability to imagine. We're an AI in theory should suffer from much less of that. Yeah, this is I think that's a really important topic. Because I think right now, AI as a brainstorming partner is hobbled because the models that you love brainstorming with, the fouros and the Gemini 2 .5s, they have about a 30 second lag and that kind of takes the buzz out of it. Then the models that are really fun to interact with, It's like the sesame demo and all of that are super engaging, but they're only like a 7B or 30B kind of caliber model.

31:46And so they're not a really good brainstorming partner. All of that will be stitched together within the next three months. So when you have an idea in the morning, Peter, you're gonna immediately go to that super engaging, two trillion to 10 trillion parameter caliber model, and there's no going back from there. Once you start down that path, you're gonna love it. I mean, three months. Did you say three months? Three months, yeah. Well, ChatGPT is sort of the on the phone app does a pretty damn good job and I have conversations with it. So I do like 20 minutes of red light in the morning and my, you know, conversations during that red light time when my ChatGPT bot is extraordinary.

32:22All right, let's go to Eric Schmidt here who was giving a presentation and said AI is underhyped. Let's take a listen. I'm here to tell you that I honestly believe that the AI revolution is underhyped. And here's why. The arrival of this new intelligence will profoundly change our country and the world in ways we cannot fully understand. Many people think that the demand of energy part that our industry takes will go from 3 % to 99 % of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030.

33:07It gives you a sense of the scale that we're talking. These things are industrial at a scale. I have never seen in my life. So first off, under hyped versus spot on. How do you guys feel about that? And then we should talk about the whole energy of it all. Dave, you know, one of my most cherished lifetime memories, actually, Peter, is you sitting down with Eric Schmidt. I think it was a day 360, you know, just a few years ago. You guys must have rift for maybe two hours straight, just with arm tears on my side. One night, yeah. Oh my God. You know, Eric is not only is he absolutely brilliant, but he has access to all this information.

33:42So, you know, when is he ever going to be wrong? When has he ever been wrong before? You know, of course, he's he's absolutely right. What's amazing to me about what Eric is saying there is on some kind of, you know, congressional testimony or whatever. He's always pointing to the energy because he knows that's the one thing go to get through everybody's thick head. But there's so many other more important and urgent, like what about the fabs? You know, like, we got to get these fabs up and running on shore like yesterday. That's the more urgent, bigger topic than just the raw energy. But he knows that they won't get, they won't understand that.

34:12So when he has to say, you know, hey, we need 29 gigawatts of new power because at least it'll, everyone it'll be able to grok it and it'll make progress. Yeah, Selim. I don't really think that added this. I think those are two great insights. I think this will be a really great push for renewables and low cost energy in all sorts of ways. But at the same time, you've got the White House basically taking all the constraints off of coal and oil and natural gas and drilling. Because when I look, I mean, I kind of understand why in terms of AI, because when I look at how long it's gonna take to get Gen 4 nuclear and fusion online, we're talking decades.

35:01It's like Amazon signed a contract with X Energy for a Gen 4, I think it was a Gen 4 plant, sufficient plant. And I'm like, oh, is it gonna be on, in the next two or three years, like 2040. Yeah, but I think the, you have to remember, the cost of fossil fuels is way high these days compared to solar, right? Like, so all this extra usage will be coming from renewables in some way. I go back to my example of the guy building a gigawatt wind farm in the outskirts of Kazakhstan because the wind house down a particular valley in a ridiculously consistent basis, and they just plug an AI data center there.

35:45So you can do that kind of leveraging of low cost far away capability that you never get in the... Or to Iceland, right? You can put the data center anywhere you want. Yeah, where the idea is. I think when I remember talking to Ramesh about the energy stuff, he said, we will never go back to oil and gas as fondly as people want because the cost curve is just too high. Can I just drill into that just a little bit? You can drill into the oil. Yes, yes. In the 2016 it became cheaper to create a fossil, a solar generation facility than fossil fuels. And since then almost all energy generation has been solar.

36:28In 2019 a more important inflection point was it, which is it became cheaper to build and run a solar facility than to just run the oil gas. Yeah, right? So the so the cap of op -ex and cap -ex of solar is now less than the op -ex of fossil fuels So we don't need government policy. We don't need any of this stuff The pure market will now drive it to just going fully down a Renewable's root the problem is that the amount of that we need is just so huge that we need to get much more quickly to The the SMRs and other Yeah, it's also we need to you know get rid of the delays due to regulations and permitting.

37:09I mean, yeah, this is that what's going to slay us like if we can if we can make permitting like super super fast and this is where AI can support it. But but if I go back to my earlier point, right, if we put SMR in in far off of distant remote areas of the US or Alaska or God knows where, you lend up with capability to generate energy, because then you can just plug in a data center next to it. And you're in great shape. So I think we'll see a ton of that. I don't think the right laboratories that much of a big deal right now. I think it's just the sheer amount that we need that we have to figure out.

37:46Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the abundance summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire abundance summit online by going to exponentialmastery .com. That's exponentialmastery .com. All right, so MasterCard unveils agent pay, agenteic payment technology to power commerce in the age of AI.

38:26So it's not just MasterCard, it's gonna be all the credit cards. I think there's a very near future where I speak and stuff shows up on my doorstep. I don't think about it, it just magically happens. In fact, I'll take it a step further. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, you know, Celine, I really love that shirt and it knows I need a shirt. So just, you know, asks your AI where you got that shirt and then it just delivers to me magically the next day. I think I'm trying to see how you got there from this. Well, I think we crush advertising and I think we crush the ability to select payment methods.

39:12I think your AI is just doing all this stuff automatically for you. Bill Grossen, I were talking earlier today, Perrata, you're a good friend about this exact topic of advertising will get crushed. What do you mean exactly there? Because Google has $300 billion of advertising revenue. You're saying that that's going to get crushed. But that's exactly, actually, Richard Socher, our mutual friend, was saying that in their tests, the revenue per session of an AI dialogue versus a Google search is about one tenth to 100. And so where does that put Google if they start? You know, when you do a gook search now, the top thing is the AI answer and then the ads start below that.

39:54So that's already got to be cannibalizing the revenue. So it puts Google in a really tough spot, trying to figure out do we cannibalize our own ad revenue. But you're exactly right. The future belongs to chatting with your trusted agent and your trusted agent making good suggestions for you and then saying, yeah, just go out and buy that or just go ahead and sign up for that. Yeah, well, we've mentioned this before, but I think the holy grail here is your your Jarvis equivalent, right? Where your agent will kind of act on your behalf and is bound to you with your preferences habits, etc Then you can put a lot of trust in and just let it go to town and see what happens and and have a feedback loop So it just weeks it that seems a no brainer to me I just spent the most unbelievable amount of time dealing with Flight tickets and logistics and sea changes.

40:39I mean, it was just it was just bullshit Eric, I was on this panel of the future of AI working thing with Eric Brunelson and a few others. And they called it white -colored drudgery. There's a ton of that that's going on and I think this is where we'll be able to have huge impact with AI. Yeah, we should keep tracking this thread because trust, you know, when do you trust AI, when you not trust it? This is just a subset. But it's a good, it's an important one. Hey, my credit card is a pretty important thing. Do I trust it? Self -driving obviously is even more trust. Then you've got life decisions.

41:11What do I leave to my kids? Do I buy that house? Do I get a new roof? Like those decisions are also definitely trust decisions. So we should track a lot changes week to week. We should track what people trust, what people don't trust. Because God knows the AI is going to be incredibly convincing. And persuasion. I think one of the superpowers AI will have is its ability and command over language. right? So like an amazing politician who's able to take you from wherever you were and sway your point of view. So MasterCard wants to use agent pay to become my default payment system. So, Liam, you were talking about a Bitcoin in this earlier today.

41:54You want to share some thoughts? Well, I think here where we've been talking about crypto's payment mechanisms, right? And you've got You've got this spectrum of stuff that's really hard to mine. Bitcoin is not that easy to do payments on. And then you get, or gold say, if you want to use the old analogie, then you have like bank vaults and jewelry. That's not that easy to transact. And then you get to bank accounts. And then you get to credit card. And you have this spectrum of the smaller, the transaction, the less security you need. And therefore you can make the usability much easier, et cetera.

42:29What's happened with crypto is along with things like the Lightning work network on Bitcoin protocols now the payments are really really easy and I think we're going to see crypto type payments scale very very fast, especially with the digital. the Fiat currencies moving over to the crypto world. We're gonna see incredible things happen there. And I think that'll be the biggest trigger for usage of blockchains and so on, for handling all of that stuff. There's a startup and I'm on the advisory board of that is trying to figure this out because one of the biggest problems with trade globally, separate from all the tariffs stuff, is that big countries don't like big chunks of foreign reserves leaving their shores.

43:19So they make it really difficult to put capital controls in place and it makes it really hard. Yeah, there's this famous story of GE selling a hundred million worth of jet engines to China and they took and received 150 million worth of frozen chickens as payment. And the 50 million, because I have to deal with all these chickens, that's so how the hence the margin. But it turns out that type of transaction is rampant in big companies because China is like we don't want a hundred million dollars leaving our shores. And so this is going to a combination of crypto plus some of these payment rails is going to change the game with some of these big transactions.

43:59And on the smaller side, AI plus some of these will make things really radically much easier. I love it. Digital chickens. And so here's another one, Dave, I think you added this one. And Vitya acquires Gretel to power. Next gen AI, tell us about this story. Yeah, I think this is important because we talked last time about the Core -Weave IPO, which is holding up just fine. Is that the bell weather to the markets opening? M &A has been very quiet. Now you're starting to see some deal flow. And that all ties back to the IPO markets opening up. The last three years have been the most dead in the history of the country in terms of the VIPOs.

44:36So if that comes roaring back, that'll unlock a lot. So this is a good one to track here. But what you're seeing here is in video recognizing that synthetic data is incredibly strategic. And we talked about Richard Socher's, got these 10 areas of AI, some of which run unbounded. And others are throttled or hobbled by some constraint. But math is unbounded, coding is unbounded, why? Because you can generate a near infinite amount of synthetic data, which means the AI can continue to learn. And then you can build really easy e -vows. Like did the AI do something useful or is it buggy? Doesn't not work?

45:13So the math is provable. The code is debuggable automatically. And those areas require synthetic data. But you look across the other areas like biotech and everything else. The synthetic data is the constraint. Because the AI can run wild to the extent that it can generate synthetic data. So I think in video being in the middle of the hot seat Realizes oh my god, what a great opportunity to create a some kind of a moat. Let's pick up Greggle And let's build out a synthetic data competency as part of our overall like a while we're top of the world We need to think about how to defend our position on top of the world So that's why they picked up Greggle nice.

45:52Yeah, I think this is a really great strategic thing He saw zoom doing the same thing when it's market cap went soaring high They started buying up a bunch of stuff leveraging the currency while it was high Yeah, as an investment theme, you know, synthetic data is very different in each domain. Obviously the full cell, Singillator, synthetic data there in biotech is going to be very different than in math. So it's a great repeatable investment theme if you can find really really smart teams because I think in video could easily acquire 10 more companies doing. Are you investing at LinkXPV and synthetic data?

46:24Yeah, we have we have data CBO, which is a co -invest with Mark Warrenburg, the chairman at MIT. they do column -wise, so numerical column -wise synthetic data, so things like actuarial or whatever. But again, if you had physical world synthetic data, like simulators for physical objects, driving data, those are all investable, we'll do any synthetic data company we can find if it has a great team. Fantastic. All right, here's one to eye at. Clienter Perkin leads $130 million around in coin -based founders anti -aging startup. You limit. Let me break this down. So Brian Armstrong and Blake Buyers, both are friends.

47:10You can have Brian on this moonshots podcast sometime next month. They're both passionate about longevity. And what we've seen is a number of billionaires investing and something called epigenetic reprogramming. So what is that? So as I like to remind people, you get 3 .2 billion letters from your mom, 3 .2 billion letters from your dad. That's your genome, about 22 ,000 genes. And you have that same software when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100. And so the question is, if you're running the same software, why do you look different? Why don't you have a six pack at, you know, age 100 that you had when you were 18?

47:52And it turns out it's not the genes you have. It's your epigenome, epiv from the Greek word for above. It's which genes, it's your control system. It's which genes are on and which genes are off. And as you get older, the genes that should be on get silenced, to get turned off, the genes that should be off get turned on. And there's a whole bunch of issues, folks like George Church, David Sinclair, have been pioneering this. And epigenetic reprogramming is, can we turn back the clock and set your epigenome to an earlier state? And the data appears to be not only yes, but hell yes. And it's probably one of the hottest areas of age reversal work and longevity.

48:43So I just find it fascinating that that Brian is investing here. We've seen Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner invest in alto slabs Sam Altman invested in retro with Joe Betts LaCroy same areas epigenically programming. So, you know Very exciting and it should be noted that a lot of this is now made possible because of AI Oh, also. Because the ability to actually process all the data from the experiments and decide what transcription factors to use, you know, we are 40 trillion human cells running about 2 to 5 billion chemical reactions per second, and just trying to understand the amount of data is really hard.

49:34And so when I visited both Brian and Blake at new limit and they're very proud, the majority of their team are all AI first technologists. You know, they're not lab geeks. So how many thoughts here? I think just, you know, these, I saw AI metals get more sophisticated, the ability to apply them. that number blows, I never stopped shaking my head when you say that number of 2 .5 billion things per chemical processes per second. That may be like that's across the body, but there's some incredible number, just per cell, that's per cell, right? That's just unbelievable. I just don't believe in cells, right?

50:18Yeah, it's just mind -boggling how the complexity of what goes on in there. So it's going to be amazing to see what's possible going for it. Well, definitely not my area of expertise, but I remember clearly I took AP bio in high school and then I got to MIT I said yeah, not not doing that anymore because all we're doing is memorizing random You know crebs cycles There's no way this is actually gonna gonna work. There must be billions of times more things going on That we're memorizing here. So true. So true All right, here's one you know, I have two 13 soon to be 14 year old boys is Selim, you have one and Roblox is part of their, if not daily diet, weekly diet, and I found this amazing.

51:05So Roblox averaging up to 43 % of Netflix users with 97 .8 million average daily active users, 7 .2 billion hours, it's just exploded onto, we can see this rapid growth of the gaming world. Dave, did your boys all sort of go deep into the gaming world? Well, it's interesting. I wouldn't say they were big time gamers, but if you look at the amount of time they spent on interactive media, including Fortnite and some video games, much, much higher than passive media like movies and Star Trek or whatever. So, that's just the trend line. But yeah, at AI, on top of video games, and it's so incredibly engaging, there's no way people are going to go back and watch passive media again.

51:57And I think it's about, I mean, it still really hasn't hit, right? So if you're in Minecraft or in Roblox, the amount of AI -generated, you know, reality and the amount of AI interaction with you, we're going to see a lot of advancement in the gaming world in the next few years. Yeah, you know, the other thing is gaming is dominated by young boys. and largely misses the girls for whatever reason, but it definitely misses older people. The new super engaging AI voices actually tend to cover everybody. And so it's gonna be a lot broader appeals. So any numbers you see in this world are gonna go up tremendously just by covering the rest of humanity.

52:42Also, a lot of Mr. Beast now, I think is the most recognized person on the planet, which is shocking. I think that might be among stars or some other qualifier there, but it's an incredible stat. But one of the secrets to Mr. Beast's incredible success is internationalization of all content. You know, when you see Mr. Beast in any jurisdiction, any country, any language, his voice is that language and his lips move perfectly or well for that language. So you wouldn't even know that it wasn't shot for you in, you know, in the Congo. So he mastered that using AI and that got him a lot of the footprint.

53:23Same thing applies here to internationalizing the language, but also the content and the media making it a cultural fit for every jurisdiction. What struck me about this was almost all of that increment is mobile stuff. So they're doing it everywhere. That's crazy. Yeah. Amazing. All right. Let's move on here. Let's talk about what's going on in the space world. The first news is that Amazon, this is Jeff Bezos, launches the first launch of Project Coupier, its first batch of internet satellites. So we've seen head -to -head Elon and Bezos sort of like marching up the curve and space. So Amazon launched 27 satellites of their global internet.

54:10This ultimately will be thousands of satellites in orbit. I find it interesting they used an Atlas 5 so of course Jeff has something called blue origin which is building rockets today. It's launching Suborbital flights, but it did get one of its first new Glenn vehicles to orbit But I think he's feeling pressure to get Cooper up and running At the same time that Starlink is now probably close to 8 ,000 9 ,000 satellites So they're buying launches from ULA instead of using his own launch vehicle. It's going to be interesting to have these two Internet constellations in orbit operating. Here's a question I have.

54:56Have you seen Peter any kind of estimate as to once you got high functioning Internet over space, which we kind of have just what are there now? How much will move to that versus terrestrial Internet? Yeah, it's good question. You still have you still have time delays, but one of our next articles coming up Which we'll talk about which is quantum teleportation would get rid of time delays and so if you add quantum teleportation on satellite constellations Yeah, it's instantaneous and global. I mean it starts to get pretty freaky You know, we're going to start, you know, we'll have, I think probably 30, 40 ,000 comm satellites in orbit.

55:44We'll have a constellation around the moon. We'll have a constellation around Mars. All of those will be cross -linked by laser. And so you'll have an interplanetary internet up and operating very shortly. Vin Serf has been talking about that for a while. In fact, he's designed the communication protocol for that. He has indeed. And it's all playing out. Here's the second space article that SpaceX has asked increase their rate of starship launches. So starship, of course, is the fully reusable version. It will replace Falcon 9, the most successful launch vehicle in all of human history. And Elon has said as soon as starship is operational, he will shut down the Falcon 9 factory.

56:32and we've seen, you know, permission for five launches a year, they're asking for 25 launches per year out of Bokachika, which is starbase. And, you know, he's gotten a lot of criticism for the failures of Starship. You know, it still has not had a fully successful mission. But, oh my God, what he's been able to pull off is nothing short of extraordinary. And I hate it when he has this amazing launch, you know, So the mechzilla captures the booster, which is like the engineering feet of the decade if not the century. Century, yeah. And then, and Starship doesn't make it to a landing. And of course, the front page articles are SpaceX fails again.

57:19Yeah. Crazy. We focus on badges. But the one thing bugged me, really bugged me about this particular article's Peter, It was that if the FA had him allowing five and then now they're allowing 25, why do they care? Why does it? Do you have to get approval for the number of launches? This makes no sense. In environmental impact, they're, okay. You're eventually trying to make sure that, and I hate to say this, you know, that they're not killing the number of turtles or that the impact of what you get on the beach. But once you've done a few, which he has, you know that. environmental impact, there should be no, they should have nothing to say about you do 10 more, 20 more or 15.

58:03They don't want unbridled unrestricted operations. That's hilarious because I get it. All right. You know, you know, the map as well as I do, it's hilarious. Yeah. You did your 11 year penance their Peter on with zero G. I did my 11 year penance on, you know, it's like the FAA is not happy until you're not happy. I do wonder a lot whenever you see a starship blows up or whatever that a lot of the backlash is actually political You know people are sure our pissed off and you know And actually a lot of Elon support base was you know very green energy Tesla oriented and so now they're all pissed off But I think I think he's doing He's doing what he thinks is absolutely best for the world.

58:46Yeah regardless of the cost I mean this is Starship will get us back to the moon It's the only vehicle to get us there. The NASA government projects, I don't think, will end up getting to the moon. I think you're just too expensive and too risky. A starship will get us to the moon. Starship will set orbital fuel depots. Starship will get us to Mars. It's an incredibly well designed vehicle. And he just needs to continually iterate it. People don't realize that when airplanes begin test flights, Every test flight is a small iteration and airplanes may have hundreds of test flights in their test flight program before they get certified as safe for use.

59:34So we need to expect that Starship will have hundreds of test flights, each one of them getting more data and demonstrating increasing margins and safety until it's like, Yep, this is going to be great to operate, just like autonomous cars. But unfortunately, these incremental test flights are very visible and when they go wrong, you know, New York times is here to talk about it. I mean, it's explicit that they run dozens and dozens of experiments per flight because that gives them the maximum rate of learning, right? Yeah, of course. And they're exactly, they're changing the margins on and the material type.

1:00:13they're changing, you know, how they stage, they're changing, you know, their, their reentry characteristics. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a cynolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below.

1:00:52Alright, let's get back to the episode. Alright, let's get to this fun article here, reader from the BBC, quantum teleportation is here. Quantum teleportation is the instant transfer of quantum information, not matter between two points. It uses quantum entanglement where two particles stay connected even miles apart. So, the first real -world test worked over 30 kilometers of standard fiber optic cable carrying internet traffic. So, this is the idea that if, you know, I remember years ago, all of the Quant traders moved their fiber optic nodes very close to the financial centers, right? Because of course nanoseconds matter to them.

1:01:43Yep. Yep. So I think they're going to be using quantum teleportation here for instant communication capability. If we end up using it for stock prices, I'll be very disappointed. But your plants are right now. Yeah. Look, the amazing thing is that this is happening. I think the reality check is this will take quite a while to commercialize and get reliable and for kind of real world applications. But the fact that they're able to do is mind -boggling. Yeah. It's fun to think about. Well, why do we think it'll take a while to become real at scale other than everything takes a while to be? where the Blackberry founders have given a huge chunk of money and they had broken up quantum kind of Research in the three chunks one was the pure computation the second was Communication and third was networking and you have to rebuild the entire stack of how you do it for each of those So there's a whole bunch of innovation that has to happen and engineering that has to happen for all of those three segments to have reliable communications and teleportations, certainly at scale.

1:02:54So it'll take a while to get there. They've been going at this for, I think, like close to 30 years, and they're now getting to this point. So I think it'll be a little while longer. But when it happens, holy moly. Yeah, and the nice thing is it's over standard fiber optics, right? It's not new equipment. We're not needing to build out a new network. What, here's another fun article in the realm of sort of future forward space. Electron dance breakthroughs, scientists uncover clues to practical superconductors. Researchers discovered superconductivity, varies at the atomic scale with an individual unit cells of iron based materials.

1:03:39I won't read the rest, but you know So we've been talking about one of the major benefits that AI will give us is major breakthroughs in material sciences. And super conductivity would be a huge deal because we can generate, I mean, at the extreme, you can put solar cells around the planet. And if it's nighttime here in the US, you could have solar being generated in Europe and and having a superconductive cable back to the US and you basically get no loss. No transmission, no transmission loss, right? Which is about 30 % or something? I depend on the distance of course. But it's a huge amount.

1:04:24And so this would be very huge. I remember Shine McNeil is one of our GSP singularity students in 2010 or 2011 saying he figures we're about a decade away from understanding superconductivity and getting to room temperatures, superconductivity at the lab level. And so this sounds like we're coming close to that. Well, if it's a decade out, we're going to have Gen3, efficient and fusion. And those are very small reactors so they can be sprinkled around. So they not matter on that level. There's a big race between this and distributed energy systems that makes it less relevant. Yeah, that's right.

1:05:03All right, let's talk one of our favorite subjects. At least it's a favorite subject for Sleeman. I actually, Dave, I don't know. Are you like a big Bitcoin believer? I know our third fraternity brother is. I'm pretty sure. Well, I was on the board of my Christrategy back in the days. I've been a shareholder for many, many years. So I wouldn't say I was ever a Bitcoin direct, you know, early adopter, but like Sailor is dragged. Well, let me ask the question. You know, do you own Bitcoin? Yeah, and that Christrategy, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you own MicroStrategy, but not Bitcoin directly. Now, not directly.

1:05:37Okay. Mostly because I'd lose the keys and, you know, well, very enough. I can make some introductions. So here is Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaking about the US holding Bitcoin. Let's take a listen. But I think it's clear at this point that, you know, Bitcoin is a better form of money than gold. It is provably scarce, just like gold, but it's more portable and divisible. So you can actually use, it has higher utility, I would say. And it was the best performing asset of the last 10 years. And so for store of value, I think it's going to be important for governments to hold this over time.

1:06:17It may not, it might start with being 1 % of their reserves, but I think over time it'll, it'll come to be equal to a greater than gold reserves.

1:06:27Okay. way in here. I think this is mind -boggling to me. You know, I spoke at, so let me kind of give my reaction in a couple of ways. I spoke at a conference of a hundred of the top partners of one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. And when I asked them, how many of you understand the Byzantine generals problem? One put up their hand, right? And you're like, like this thing is going to eat your lunch in terms of trust and liability, which is essentially what you sell. And you don't understand the core innovation that's taking place in it, which really is unbelievable to me. When micro -strategy is put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, every CFO in the goddamn world should be looking at that and saying, I need to put something in there.

1:07:18It's unbelievably responsible if you're the Treasury Secretary of some country not to put Bitcoin as a reserve thing. This should be happening in every country in the world. One of the things we've noticed before, where I've commented before, it's fascinating seeing the amount of my investment portfolio growing because of Bitcoin, not because I'm getting more Bitcoin, because it's just getting more valuable. This is like a responsible, financially responsible to the extreme level. I'll just give one other piece of this, which was I was talking to a a major money management firm in one of the G7 countries.

1:07:59And they're like, yeah, we don't allow our wealth manager, wealth advisors to transact in Bitcoin at all. They're not allowed to advise it to their clients because they deem it too uncertain and too risky. And you're like, look at the goddamn value. Over time, you're, you're, you're, I've got, I've got a better, they're scared of the legal liability. If they are thinking, and I'm looking, look, saying, do you realize the liability if you don't recommend that? Yeah, during the course of our conversation here, Bitcoin is now at 96 ,450. It's gone up 15 -hour bucks. During the course of our conversation.

1:08:35Well, let's try and drive it up by talking about it more. I'll give you another case study. I'm the chairman and majority or controlling shareholders of two companies, about 1 ,000 employees. One of them has about 50 million in cash. just sitting there in cash. The other has 125 million in cash, ever quote, public company. 125 million in cash and making, you know, a lot of cash every quarter. I gave both CEOs green light, put any amount of that you want into Bitcoin and in borrow and you, what Mike Sailor did, neither reacted or acted on it. I don't want to interfere otherwise I'll be, you know, I'll be called.

1:09:12But it's an engine like, like, well, you know, they're both great. great leadership teams that I want to get. Yeah, I mean, the same thing. Seleme at X Prize, we were holding a large amount of capital and it was like, yes. I know. I told you both on my board, I need you to help convince the other old tier, old foe board members. Excuse me if you're listening, guys, you're brilliant. I love you. But can we please put our treasury to Bitcoin? And an easy thing to do there would be to take a small fraction of it. And this let it do one cycle around. Yeah, small fraction like 80%. Yeah. Well, it makes Mike Stale a little more impressive that he, you know, without any rule, you know, now you have a role model, without any role model.

1:10:05Yeah. You know, this is the part that drives me nuts. Now that we have a role model, right? If you're a CFO of a public company, what the hell are you doing? Yeah. You're doing what you've always done because that's the least risky you can't get blamed for doing that. And the only, so listen, this is the same thing in all technology companies. It is the founder led, you know, exponential tech AI first companies that are going to slay everybody else. And so when Michael Seller, you know, again, by way of background, Michael was a fraternity brother with Dave Blending to myself at MIT at Fated Alta Kye on fraternity.

1:10:53And when you're when you're a sailor, you can say we are doing this. And he has a very small board and he basically sat them down, gave them homework, and got them to back him. and he's just been at it. So the first week of May, he actually sells equity and buys another 180 million of Bitcoin. So today, very impressive, Micro Strategies owns basically a half a million Bitcoin, which is about 2 .8 % of all the Bitcoin in circulation worth $52 .8 billion. Michael owns about 17 ,000 more Bitcoin than I do. How are you doing, Will? You know, not only did he have to do exactly what you said, but he had to go over to Mike Willins of Fidelity, another MIT alum and say, hey, I need to custody this somewhere.

1:11:55Can Fidelity build out an entire business unit to custody Bitcoin and Mike, you know, to his credit, Mike Willins built it out at Fidelity. That's a lot of difficult work that's now been done for you. But pioneering, it was very hard for a lot of reasons, including that one. You can't just keep the keys in your shoebox at the office headquarters. You've got to have some kind of custom in. You've got a multi -sig protocols and all sorts of stuff. So I just checked. You know, the market cap of micro strategies at close today was 105 .4 billion while holding 52 .8 billion of coins. And you know, the value it's being given for his mindset and what he does is extraordinary.

1:12:44It is. Funny. I was sitting down with my mom who's in her 80s going through her estate and she had the spreadsheet she put together and there's this line item with this huge number in it. I was like, what the hell is that? She said, oh, you know, remember when you worked at MicroStrategy when you were like in your 20s? I was like, yeah, she said, I bought some MicroStrategy back then. I was like, wait, you're still holding that? And she said, yeah, well, I don't know how to sell it. So I didn't know. Go mom. That is so great. That is fantastic. Well, I think that's our last story for today, but you know, it's so much fun.

1:13:26Are you guys having as much of a blast as I am? Oh God, I look forward to this all week. It's really a great checkpoint where we can kind of go, okay, what happened? Bring some stars slides in a play and just take a checkpoint. I find it, it's a really great cadence to plus all the viewers. I hear that by the way from a few the folks watching. They were like, it's really great because we can kind of every week or two stop in and see what's going on. We feel like we're caught up. Yeah. I mean, that's the goal here. And so, you know, in the, if you're on YouTube and the comments below, tell us what else you'd like us to cover.

1:14:01You know, you can happily tell me how much more brilliant Dave is and Sleem is and I am. That's fine. But so it's, it's fun. So when we say WTF just happened in tech, well, There you get a slice of it. We'll see you guys in a week or two when enough stuff starts mounting when we say okay We got to get the the bad back together again Awesome, right Sillin where you were in conversation guys where you know you back in New York? I'm back in New York for like three days and then I go to Italy for three days It's just it's just it's just a busy time right now. You're insane. I love you for it And Dave, you're back in Cambridge at headquarters.

1:14:46I'm in Cambridge and I'll tell you one thing Peter, I love every time I talk to Daniela Russo over at CSAIL or Alex Wissner -Groes or Alexander Amini over at Liquid AI, I can say, hey, we've got this WTF podcast coming up, what's on your mind? They're like, yes. It's just such a good way to keep the dialogue. I love it. So I want you guys piling in your best stories, those secret stories. You've got Alex Weasner Gross as a super weapon there and Selene you've got an entire EXO community So bring him in and see you guys very soon. Thanks for your time. Always a pleasant Great conversation guys.

1:15:22Thank you everybody. Thanks for listening to moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world every week I put out two blogs a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals and things that I'm learning the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmandis .com slash subscribe. That's dmandis .com slash subscribe. See you next week on moonshots.