Artemis II Recap, Work vs Leisure, AI Backlash | Krste Asanović, Peter Diamandis, Balachandar Ramamurthy

27:19Anyway, NASA and its contractors have struggled with delays. We talked about this. Everything starts with the premise that NASA should not do anything that's unsafe. But there's no question that we need to move faster, said Senator Jerry Moran, chairman of a subcommittee that set funding levels for the agency. So there's these trade-offs here. Keeping the next Artemis mission on schedule will be a major test for Jared Isaacman, former guest of the show, who's aiming to ensure the agency returns an American crew to the lunar surface before China while starting to build a permanent base there. Isaacman in February rolled out new plans to accelerate the return of U.S.

27:56astronauts to the moon's surface. Officials said the approach resembles the Apollo program in the 1960s. officials in the 1960s when a stepping stone approach built up confidence in the systems needed for constructing the historic Apollo 11 landing in 1969. Under the revised plan, Artemis III will no longer feature a landing on the moon as the agency had previously hoped. The agency also aims to move faster with the SLS rockets, in part by jettisoning an upgrade to the vehicle that had been in the works. We're not going to turn every rocket into a work of art. We're going to increase launch rate.

28:31We're going to do it in a logical evolutionary way, Isaacman said in February. And this ties to his experience riding aboard SpaceX and building a company with Shift 4. And you can imagine that he is pretty in favor of iterative design. And so when you see something like Artemis 2, very successful, the inclination should be run it back immediately. and start adding little tweaks constantly. So the Artemis 3 mission next year is supposed to help set up NASA and its contractor to attempt one or more visits to the moon in 2028. So that's Artemis 4 and 5. NASA's inspector general said in a recent report that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have run into delays developing spacecraft for Artemis missions.

29:18Each company has been working on in-space transfers of super cold propellants to power lunar flights, fueling operations that are still largely unproven. And so that is a very, very complex and new technology that the entire space community is clearly working on. The in-space refueling is sort of critical to actually getting to the moon in a meaningful way, not just sort of ripping it up there and then figuring out how to get back and just blasting back. To set up a full lunar economy, you need to be doing tons and tons of refueling operations, which are obviously incredibly complex. A NASA safety panel separately raised questions about how quickly SpaceX's human lander, based on its Starship vehicle, would be ready.

30:02A landing operation of astronauts with the Starship lander within the next few years appears daunting and to the panel probably not achievable, the group said in a report released earlier this year. The companies have key tests coming up that will inform their lunar work in vehicles. SpaceX next month plans to launch an upgraded version of Starship rocket while Blue Origin is working towards launching a cargo lander to the moon with his new Glenn rocket. So all of this has like the backdrop of the SpaceX IPO. And you have to imagine that even if it was incredibly cost intensive, we're in this weird dynamic with SpaceX where the CapEx requirements of something like this and, you know, sending a rocket to the moon are probably less than Colossus 5 or some crazy data center.

30:45And so you could be in this interesting situation where Elon is incentivized to move a lot faster, probably not with humans on board, but get even just a basic Optimus robot up there. Get a lunar lander up there. Just continue to deliver payloads because it just shows so many more milestones. And as you go public, I think it becomes more difficult to stay focused on this 30-year mission. Part of, like, the value of actually sending humans to space is entirely, like, kind of marketing and just to prove that it's possible. Yeah. Like, you would think that, you would hope that a lot of this is, like, it's just very cool.

31:27It's very inspiring. Yeah. I feel like it's important. But at the same time, you would think that NASA should just be optimizing for how do we get as much mass as possible up to the, you know, whether it's space or the moon, et cetera. and just basically leaning a lot more into drones and going more for volume versus these sort of like high risk, high cost. Yeah. At the same time, I mean, we'll see where the humanoid robots go, but there is no there's no current substitute for the versatility of having a human astronaut in a spacesuit. They're being able to I mean, we talked to the folks from Flyer Fly and they were sort of digging up moon dust and analyzing it.

32:11things open up when you can get a guy out there with a jackhammer, right? You got to just get a human to be able to, you know, do so many more, like, flexible build outs and move equipment around. Like, clearly there's current leverage that you get from having a human there, at least for the time being. Although you can do a lot with drones and robots. Well, so let's, there are a few more reactions to the Artemis landing. Trung Fan, I had a post, did that go away? What else is here? Jared Isaacman dropped out. There's a little bit of a story about Jared Isaacman because he was personally on scene for the splashdown of the Artemis II crew.

32:54Eric Doherty has a video here of them talking to the astronauts. And there's a little bit of history on him. Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with$10 ,000 his grandfather gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship waiting to welcome four astronauts home from the moon. That basement company is now shift four payments. It processes 200 billion a year in credit card transactions. About a third of all restaurant hotels and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it as CEO. 100 % of firearms retailers? Probably, yeah. Yeah, he's carved that out perfectly.

33:29He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for U.S. Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over$100 million. He has over 8 ,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter jet that tops 1 ,500 miles per hour, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record.

34:09I didn't realize he held the world record for, what is that, transatlantic, transcontinental? I don't know, circling the globe. In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian space flight, four people with no astronaut training, three days orbiting the Earth, 250 million raised for St. Jude's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft. I didn't realize he'd been to space twice. I thought he'd only been once. That's crazy. He ran it back, held onto by a 12-foot cable in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside of the government space agency.

34:46That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, further than ever any human had been since the Apollo crew in 1972. And so there's some more facts about Jared Heisman there. But I had a wild proposal, which was to make April 10th a national holiday celebrating Artemis II. Is this the biggest achievement NASA has ever done? No, not compared to landing on the moon. But I think it symbolizes a very important turn in our capacity as a country to do bold and impressive things. And there are currently no federal holidays in April. And I think people would enjoy it. And it's hard to think of anything with broader support than this mission.

35:29There are so many interesting projects happening. A lot of them, even electric cars, have pushed back from different people. And there's like so many things that are controversial. And this was one story that I just saw continually cut through the noise and see support. Yeah, three-day weekends have not been very controversial. Yeah, yeah. Because nobody sees a three-day weekend on the horizon and is, you know, slamming their computer into their desk. Not at all. And so I was thinking back to the benefits of more federal holidays, more national holidays. And I was reminded of what we talked about last week regarding Alex Tabarrok's piece in Marginal Revolution.

36:11So he compared improvements in productivity that came during the Industrial Revolution to expected improvements in productivity from the AI revolution. And so if you look back between 1870 and today, the hours of work in the United States fell by about 40%. Americans used to work 3 ,000 hours per year, and now they work about 1 ,800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening? Hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we literally were doing more with less because of productivity increases. And so he frames this around AI. He says, so if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution.

37:04It's not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example. And I thought April 10th would be an interesting place to start. And so it is still too early. I mean, Tyler, you were talking about like, is AI causing unemployment?

37:44There's been a lot of hiring freezes, a lot of AI tool deployment. but we're not really seeing replacement yet. It seems hard like on a macro level to really definitively say that like AI is causing a huge effect on the labor market. Yeah. But the only thing that seems definitive is that companies are willing to lay off people to help fund their AI build outs. Right. And you could also argue that those people like probably were on the chopping block anyways. But so far that's been happening. And so it is still a little early to net out all the effects of, is this going to be more Jevons Paradox type effect, where the competitive dynamic is that you have humans and AI at your disposal.

38:32You have a token budget and a human capital budget, and I have a human capital budget and a token budget. And in order to actually compete and win, we want to deploy both as aggressively as possible. And so the game theoretic Nash equilibrium is that we both employ a lot of people and use a lot of AI. And we do both of our products get better and we continue to compete with each other. That's certainly one possible outcome. But there's also, you know, there are, you know, a real risk of true labor replacement effects. And so taking a leap of faith here and adding federal holiday a bit ahead of the curve feels like the type of action that America needs to cool tempers during a time of rising unrest, as seen over the weekend in San Francisco, which I'm sure you all saw.

39:21There were a variety of attacks. Sam Altman posted a blog post covering a Molotov cocktail that was thrown at his house. Then there was a shooting outside. Friday morning, early hours. He said 3.45 a.m. in the morning. He said, thankfully, it bounced off the house and no one got hurt. And I saw another article that said that the suspect is in custody.

39:46And Sam goes on to sort of restate what he believes. He says, working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for him. AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped, and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI, and we must figure out how to make it happen. And then he also says it will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified. We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, perhaps ever, maybe bigger than the Industrial Revolution.

40:25And so you would expect the life and the existence of the American populace to change over that period of time. And we have a duty to make it as smooth as possible. And he says, we have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model. We urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future. AI has to be democratized. Power cannot be too concentrated. George Hots actually had an interesting rebuttal to Sam Altman's post, sort of re-arguing for open source, which is something that a lot of people have not been arguing for lately, but it was sort of interesting to see him continue to push it.

41:11Was it just about open source or was it about sharing research? He was saying that you don't have an obligation to open source the weights of a model that cost a billion dollars to train. He's not arguing for that. But he is saying that you should open source the tricks, the research ideas. Basically publish the research papers again and empower a broader community. and of course there's a lot of there's a lot of competitive dynamics there but that is something that could potentially happen via regulation or something or happen just just due to you know a just a competitive dynamic like there are other labs out there that don't have as much compute and might realize that they they have great researchers and maybe they want to open source more there's there are a lot of different ways this could play out so he says I do not think it's right that a few labs few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future and so there's been a bunch of a bunch of back and forth about the the the attacks and what's driving them and how how risky the rhetoric has been I think in general it's it's it's It's a very tough situation because you don't want to just spark more controversy and more discussion around this stuff.

42:34You mostly want to move towards more security and more positive action. Yeah, and of course the notable, it's been shared widely at this point, but the notable, one thing that was notable about Friday, the attacker from Friday is just they were sharing all of the, if anyone, all the AI Doom material. They were clearly consuming it, sort of caught up in it. And yeah, it's very, very dark. Anjane Mitha, formerly of Andrews and Horowitz, out there with a new fund, AMP Public, said, time is running out for technology leaders to show they care about public benefit above all else. Slow down your layoffs, reinvest in re-education, mentor the next generation.

43:15We are all on team humanity. And I think that's a good message. And so as the AI race continues to heat up in America, geopolitical dynamics have consistently acted as a binding constraint, limiting the viability of proposals set forth by AI lab leaders. And so we've seen this at Davos with various lab leaders saying, well, we would agree to a slowdown if we could all agree. And then in the Bernie Sanders, the data center ban, and And all of this feels very intractable with the backdrop of geopolitical competition. If you don't have buy-in from all the different countries, you wind up just falling behind another country and you have the same dynamic again.

44:00And so that piece of the discussion has sort of fallen by the wayside because it's so difficult to argue if you're running a private corporation in America and you're like, I want to make foreign policy now, that's a really tall order. But fortunately, I think people are starting to at least investigate what the path towards some coalition between different countries might look like. And Sebastian Maliby, author of The Infinity Machine and former guest of the show, published an op-ed in the New York Times outlining one possible solution to the US-China dynamic. And so we can go through this and try and understand Sebastian's points because he actually went to China and talked to lab leads there to try and get their side of the story and what they might be open to in terms of collaboration.

44:54So he says in 2022, the Biden administration tried to arrest China's development of artificial intelligence by denying it cutting edge semiconductors. This was the CHIPS Act, which at the time I was very in favor of, but of course the policies have all evolved and there are much more complex situations with the entire semiconductor supply chain and how fast the technology is advancing. So President Trump has relaxed that policy a bit without a clear plan to replace it, but the chip export controls have failed. And so he dives into how chips are actually getting to China. China's tech sector is too sophisticated to be stopped from building powerful AI.

45:37In pursuing an impossible objective, the United States is missing an opportunity to try for one that sounds fanciful, but which, after a recent reporting trip to China, I believe is more realistic. America should negotiate with China on a global pact on AI safety, which would impose universal limits on a technology that can do much good, but in the wrong hands would do much harm. The premise of the export restrictions was that the United States would be able to successfully block China's access to powerful AI chips. The premium chip sets used in AI data centers are the size of skateboards and can't be smuggled in a simple suitcase.

46:13And it's hard to put them to use without hands-on support from the chip maker's engineering teams. But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their AI models and chips located in other countries. They were using cloud instances and neoclouds in other countries. And this is always a question of, even if you stop the flow of chips into the country, can you set up a holding company that allocates some reviews? Yeah, and this was a question last year of like, wait, how is Singapore placing that many billions of dollars? And Malaysia was another one that was, and even in the Middle East, there were always questions about, okay, well, if the Middle East gets chips, are they going to be able to, you know, have Chinese companies as clients remotely?

46:56And there were discussions of folks basically putting training data on hard drives or model weights on hard drives and just flying them from one country to another, it's very, very hard to actually contain the movement of the critical pieces of the AI value chain. So he says, a Chinese model builder needs only to rent capacity on an AI data center in one of China's Southeast Asian neighbors, like you mentioned. Concealing the model's Chinese origin is straightforward. Partly thanks to this loophole. He says, let's see. Partly thanks to this loophole, China has rolled out a series of excellent AI models.

47:35China's ability to skirt U.S. controls will not change, even if the Senate follows the House in passing a bill to restrict China's access to outside data centers, which is the next domino to fall in the chip ban and chip control project. China is learning how to do without cutting edge chips by stacking less powerful chips together. and Huawei, the 910B, 910C, the Huawei Ascend chips seem to be less powerful, but if they can actually manufacture them at scale, they can wind up marshalling the same or similar compute. Power being less of a constraint. Exactly. It helps as well. Three Gorges Dam and other nuclear power plants and all sorts of different initiatives that they've done.

48:17They have a ton of solar. They have a lot of energy. So its model builders also take full advantage of a process known as distillation. Every time a US lab produces a cutting-edge model, Chinese rivals quickly reverse engineer its capabilities and build a copycat version. The follower has the advantage, he says. American AI scientists used to say that competitors being able to fast-follow would not matter. An intelligent explosion was approaching. The argument went. As AI systems would soon become capable enough to write upgrades to their own code, AI would create better AI. Better AI would create even better AI.

48:50recursive self-improvement would drive performance skyward. The nation that just reached this so-called singularity first would be the winner of the AI race, so more the AI race than winning the AI future messaging. Even if the fast follower were just a few months behind the leader, three and a half years after the Biden administration chip controls, AI is generating code to upgrade itself, the promised feedback loop has started. But the accelerating power of the leading models won't determine who wins the AI race. It's AI deployment that will matter. To transform economies and armies, AI must be embedded into the business processes and weapons systems.

49:29The raw power of the cutting edge models must be turned into applications, he says. The upshot is that China and the United States are roughly level in the AI contest. Top Chinese models may be a few months behind American ones and the relative position on military applications is difficult to ascertain as so much is classified. But on industrial applications, China seems to be leading. U.S. sanctioned companies such as Huawei and Hikvision are rolling out AI systems that perform maintenance checks on high speed trains, managing mining operations, scanning water samples to assess pollution and more.

50:04At Huawei's campus near Shenzhen, he recently took a ride in an autonomous car, a device in the passenger seat massaged my back, and the steering was immaculate. Tyler, do you generally agree with most of these takes here? No. Okay. What do you think is wrong? To start, I think Chinese labs are farther behind. Okay. The only reason that they're close behind is because of distillation. Distillation. I also think you can solve distillation. He's saying that the chip export ban is not working. Yeah, also. But I feel like them being behind is proof that it is working. And he's also saying, you know, the labs want to get to recursive self-improvement.

50:44We're starting to see early signs of that. and so I feel like there's some kind of inconsistency. I mean also just on the chip stuff like we're clearly not like policing it as hard as we could. We could be policing it way harder, right? I remember it was like Super Micro. We saw those videos where they had smuggled in the boxes and it was like extreme. You had the hair dryer. Yeah, it's like if we really wanted to solve this issue like we for sure could. Let's check in with Super Micro's stock. it's up 17 % the last five days. Wow. But like very clearly, I think among like the leading labs in the US, you are seeing some kind of like takeoff, but like among them, right?

51:26It's like very much recursive thing. Yep. The models improve the harness, which improves the next model. Like I think this thing is actually true. Like you're not seeing open source labs like kind of keep up, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was very, very remarkable watching like DeepSeek not accelerate in the same way that I think a lot of people expected. I mean like like when is kind of what DeepSeek what people thought DeepSeek would be and models are good but again like I think most of the reason that they're good is just because of distillation. Yeah it's clearly like they have good researchers right.

52:01Tingshua is like a great university. Yeah but I think like generally I think people are too bullish currently on Chinese AI. Yeah, there are too many secrets that are still locked up in US labs. Yeah, I mean, even if it's like, okay, at some level, like AI, if you're super AGI-pilled, it's all about the compute, which means it's all about capital. US has better capital markets. How much is it about secrets versus just raw scale? I don't know. Access to compute. Yeah, it's interesting. Well, let's continue. So, Sebastian Maliby writes in the New York Times, fans of chip controls continue to insist that even a modest slowing of China's AI advance is worth pursuing.

52:40If China is a formidable adversary, imagine how much more formidable it might be if the chip controls were lifted. But the controls are failing to deliver the prize of a China with limited AI, so it's worth considering their cost. My China trip persuaded me that the cost is too high. The Biden administration made a strategic choice to prioritize the slowing of China rather than addressing other worries. The alternative would have been to say, China, the alternative would have been to say to China, this would be the Biden administration to the Chinese Communist Party, you are a tech superpower.

53:14We are a tech superpower. Let's work together to make sure AI doesn't fall into the hands of rogue states and terrorists. The goal would have been an AI equivalent of the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, a regime that would require all countries using AI to sign up for safeguards on it. The Biden team didn't think China would collaborate on something like that. But over a dozen conversations with AI leaders in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou made it clear to me that China's elite does care about AI safety. And this is something we dug into previously, Tyler, looking at the statements from AI leaders in China and the Communist Party directly.

53:56It did seem like they were not like, you know, wildly accelerationist. Was that generally your takeaway? If you're comparing the statements of the actual CCP to the government, the United States government, the CCP definitely looks more pro-safety than the U.S. government does. Groups within the U.S. are certainly much more safety-pilled than China is generally. Totally. But the pushback against that was always that, okay, well, you are encouraged to be pro-safety when you don't have the lead because you're just like, slow down the fast one, right? And so that could be the dynamic. But if the rhetoric is true, if Sebastian Maliby's reporting is true, then there is an opportunity for some sort of accord that could be good if that's, you know, indeed a critical path to the good ending.

54:53And that's sort of what happens in AI 2027. You know, the good ending is, is like a geopolitical sort of come to Jesus moment where everyone decides to, you know, rein things in. Is that your read on it? Yes, but, you know, there's two paths, right? There's two paths, yeah. It's like a choose your own adventure. Yeah, it's a choose your own adventure. But the good path requires something like this. Yeah, yeah. There's like a slowdown and everyone agrees. Yeah, yeah. So he says he visited a prominent tech company that builds and distributes an AI foundation model. So I imagine that's DeepSeek or Alibaba or some other big Chinese company.

55:34But he says, for now, that model is open source, meaning that users can download and modify it at will. If a user prompts the AI to conduct cyber attacks, there's nothing anyone can do to stop that person. Except for the fact that it might be deeper in the training data and in the model behavior, that even though it's open source, it might not be completely turnkey, but it does pose a risk. And he says, the chief executive of this company made a striking admission. As AI becomes more powerful, it would be crazy to continue making it open source, he said. That's the exact opposite of the George Hoth position, interestingly.

56:11You wouldn't open source a nuclear weapon, he added. During my trip, the controversy surrounding the advanced model OpenClaw illustrated the rising concern for AI safety. Throngs of ordinary Chinese downloaded the digital assistant eager to experiment with a capable AI agent. The enthusiasm apparently confirmed that China loves innovation more than it fears it, but researchers and industry leaders told me they were appalled. It makes your computer naked, an eminent business school professor told me. Soon after that, China's leaders firmly discouraged the use of OpenClaw on government systems and warned citizens that the agent might wreak havoc on their data.

56:45For now, China's instinct to race for powerful AI overwhelms any caution. This is a rational response to a US administration that is equally determined to put speed ahead of safety. But if a US leader went to China and offered to scrap chip controls in exchange for collaboration on AI non-proliferation, there would at least be some chance of the proposal succeeding. This presumes that US-Chinese dialogue is even possible, but the West should not succumb to the self-fulfilling fatalism. At times during the Cold War, the United States pursued its interests by switching from coordination to, from confrontation to detent.

57:21The nuclear non-proliferation treaty came just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now is a good time to recall that history. And so I thought that was an interesting sort of contrarian take at a time when the general consensus has been continue to push forward on the chip controls, maybe go deeper in the supply chain. There's always been a more complex discussion. He doesn't mention Taiwan, which is a whole other complex issue. But it was sort of a reminder of a potential collaboration that I think is maybe worth considering. So everyone is still in the early stages of working through the situation.

58:02But the reporting here just generally shows that there might be more opportunity for collaboration than many people previously thought. So I like that. AI 2027, which has been shockingly accurate to date, has mid-2026 China wakes up. They say, in China, the CCP is starting to feel the AGI. Chip export controls and lack of government support have left China under-resourced compared to the West by smuggling banned Taiwanese chips, buying older chips and producing domestic chips about three years behind the U.S.-Taiwanese frontier. China has managed to maintain about 12 % of the world's AI-relevant compute, but the older technology is harder to work with and supply is a constant headache.

58:42A few standouts like DeepScent do very impressive work with limited compute, but the compute deficit limits what they can achieve without government support, and they are about six months behind the best open-brain models. Of course, they're using... Yeah, they mash up all of these. So DeepMind plus OpenAI, and then they do Tencent plus DeepSeek and stuff. The general secretary had long dreamed of doubling down on real-world physical manufacturing and avoiding American post-industrial decadence. He viewed software companies with suspicion, but hawks in the CCP warned that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored, so he finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid.

59:23He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research, creating an immediate information sharing mechanism for AI companies. Again, that's like an advantage that they could. And to date, it seems like they do have, which is like there is a very real incentive to just share everything at the moment. Or not everything, but at least more than what our labs are doing. It will escalate over the course of a year until all the best researchers merge into a DeepScent-led collective where they share algorithmic insights, data sense, and compute resources with each other. A centralized development zone is created at the Tianwan power plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the world, to house a new mega data center for DeepScent, along with highly secure living and office spaces to which researchers will eventually relocate.

1:00:12and to close it out but China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models the Chinese intelligence agencies among the best in the world double down on their plans to steal open brains weights this is much more complex operation than their constant low level poaching of algorithmic secrets the weights are a multi terabyte file stored on a highly secure server their cyber force think they can pull it off with the help of their spies perhaps only once and again goes on and on and on So we'll see. We'll see if they if they wake up. I'm not I'm not at all convinced that there's going to be any type of like effective multinational collaboration, especially just given what's going on in the Middle East.

1:00:55Yeah, it's chaotic time. Well, if you want to know how much your government taxes paid for across everything that the U.S. government spends, if you paid taxes in America this year, Riley Walls has launched a website for you, taxwrapped.com. It's Spotify wrapped, but for your taxes. You can see what the government did with your money. and it's a very fun one-off website, a drop, because even when you open it on desktop, it renders like it's an iPhone app. It's like entirely mobile first. I think that's an interesting trend is if you're doing one of these, just make it work on the phone because that is the end point for all of these things.

1:01:41So you can type in exactly how much you paid, whether you're a W2 employee or 1099, how much you, if you have dependents or children, and then it will walk you through every segment. I'm going to do an example for someone that made$100 ,000 in 2025. If you want the team to do it, they can actually click through it. Okay, do it. Can you pull up taxwrapped.com? We can actually click through this. So put in$100 ,000,$100 ,000 big ones. There you go. and then do single, do W2 on the left, and then just do no children. Wow, it's over. So you pay$21 ,000 in taxes, $6 ,700 goes towards income security, and I think I filled out the same one here, so you can see.

1:02:35Let's see. So that's going to Social Security, Housing Assistance, Federal Employee Retirement and Disability. $5 ,000 to Health. So that's Medicare, Health Care Services. I think people might be surprised that defense is so low. I feel like defense has always been large. John, I would say there are a lot of people in this country that would look at the$3 ,812 and be very upset about that. Of course. But the size of the U.S. military, the size of the defense budget has always been so big. It's felt like the number one expenditure category. But it is, in fact, not next to Social Security and Medicare and health care services.

1:03:26but the military is significant obviously uh and riley on the next slide puts up uh pull it up again about the uh the government deficit you're gonna want to see this uh so the so the government spent more than it made last year seven trillion spent 5.5 trillion in revenue government strategy is literally we're gonna burn money for a while but we're gonna make it up with scale. Basically. And maybe inflation. Who knows? It's a tricky situation. So the deficit was 1.5 trillion last year. And that overspending, it goes on the national credit card, which has been racking up debt since 2001. It's now about to cross$40 trillion, which is about$114 ,000 per person.

1:04:13That is not something to be fist bumping about. I think I was listening to Tyler Cowen this weekend and he said, I think it was him, he was like, well, you know, if you're actually, if you're really AGI pilled, right, the deficit should be way bigger. Yes. Yes. There's like all these sorts of things. Yeah. I think it's actually, we were riffing on that with Dylan Patel the first time he came on, we were saying like, yeah, like, uh, so it's not a black pill. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, government spending went up like extremely AGI pilled position. If GDP starts growing significantly, sort of the opposite of this treaty scenario, which is certainly what I I hope happens.

1:04:43But yeah, George Hots also posted some other blog posts last night about this idea of making everyone a billionaire, creating a$1 billion bill and printing 300 something, 360 million of them, giving everyone one. Everyone is a billionaire then. And he's making jokes about like, obviously that wouldn't work. but the impact would be to destroy the dollar and go back to the gold standard, which is something he's a fan of these days. Anyway, the person who pays$100 ,000, who makes$100 ,000, is paying almost$3 ,000 in interest payments on the debt, $430 on transportation, $350 on government operations, $260 on natural resources.

1:05:31There's some, on agriculture, $76 goes towards researching agriculture. There's international affairs. And spaceflight and research science is$71 out of that$100 ,000 a year paycheck. It's an interesting project, and we're big fans of Riley Walls over here. So go check it out. There are a bunch of other posts in the timeline before we bring in our first guest of the show. Did Tyler Cowen talk about how we're growing like half a point? Oh, the GDP number? I'm sure he linked to it. You've got to ask him if that's good. but it could be better could be better well um let's uh let's move over to something else in the timeline um uh andrew reed has a funny post here wow 12 000 likes it's like apple built little ejection seats for your airpods when you drop your case on the ground that is like extremely real right jordy wouldn't know anything about that he's not an airpod enjoyer but when the airpods hit the ground, they truly explode everywhere.

1:06:34I got to experience that before I was enlightened. You were enlightened? Before I went wired. Yeah. They really do go flying. People really, this really resonated with people, 12 ,000 people liking this. Lulu says, this is the real reason they're called AirPods. Yeah, they get some air. Clouseau Investments is joking about, uh-oh, physical delivery of crude. Dear client, this notice is to inform you that your account carried an open long position in WTI crude oil futures. As a result, pursuant to NYMEX rule 200.01, a physical delivery obligation has been designed to your account. So get ready to receive 2 ,000 barrels in Cushing, Oklahoma.

1:07:18This is an April Fool's joke. Meet me at Tank Farm 7, Bay 14. No. So this is an April fool's joke. This is not real. But I believe this has happened in the past. I think didn't oil go negative at some point during COVID? And there was something that was going on there with the potential risk that certain traders would have to take delivery that created this weird economic incentive because there's a cost to take delivery. And if you're not set up for it, you could be in a weird position, but it is a very, very bizarre situation and never been a crazier time to be an oil trader. I'm sure the commodity markets are absolutely wild these days.

1:08:02There's an interesting narrative violation. After decades of slumping sales, vinyl records are making a comeback. And so we can pull up this chart. Vinyl, of course, was booming in the 70s and the 80s and then fell off precipitously from 1984 until 1990 when, of course, the cassette tape and the compact disc, the CD, took off like a rocket. And so cassettes had their moment in the late 80s and early 90s. The CD dominated the 90s and 2000s. Then quickly, digital downloads starts spiking in the 2005-2010 period, followed by the massive rise of streaming, which has come to dominate nearly every category.

1:08:49But vinyl is making a comeback, and for 2025 generated$1 billion of revenue for U.S. recorded music revenues, which is more than CDs, more than three times as much as CDs, and more than digital downloads. Even more than digital downloads. Yeah, that is people aren't paying for ninety nine cents a song anymore. You will own nothing and be happy except vinyl. You will own a lot of vinyl and I think you'll be very happy with it. I think that there's a chance. I mean, we've been joking about, you know, pressing the show onto vinyl and the the new acquired FM homepage is all vinyl themed. Vinyl has this because it's like the first stored music medium.

1:09:32It's the oldest. so it will stick around maybe the longest, whereas CDs and cassettes just don't have... It's like if you're going to go retro, just go full retro and go with vinyl instead of going half retro and saying, oh, we're doing a CD. Let's throw a CD on. Set the mood. It doesn't quite do it. It doesn't quite do it. 8-track was really short. 8-track in the precursor to the cassette tape, sort of big in the late 70s and then fell off. Did you ever have a cassette era? I had a cassette era. I would get books on tape literally books on tape you were using cassettes because it was the normal thing to do I imagine, right?

1:10:12I was using them sort of ironically no I remember I had a Star Wars book that was on tape and I would put it in the tape player and I would listen to it a book on tape was great and I was never super it was the most satisfying medium like throwing a cassette into a car. Yeah. And I remember I had to do a lot of reading over the summer for school and audio books have always been easier for me to process. So you go and you find the cassette version of it, the audio book version of it, and you listen to that and then you, you know, you retain way more if I'm an auditory learner. It was a good time.

1:10:52Well, it's so insane to me that vinyl is more than 10 % of streaming revenue. I really, yeah, the vinyl is really big. Who's there's got to be like a vinyl billion our law? I mean certainly collectors But I don't know I think there is something special about even if you just like even if you don't have a record player You might say I want to support that artist So I'm gonna buy the highest tier like I believe the Taylor Swift drops come like they she also sells vinyl and You you get it and you don't necessarily listen to it But you have it as like a memento and it's almost like an artifact that you put on your desk or in your house or you might frame it.

1:11:31You might not really listen to it. Yeah, Benioff sent us some Metallica vinyl. Yeah, we have a Metallica vinyl. We still got to get a record player. But anyway, without further ado, we have our first guest in the waiting room. Follow Remo Murthy from Critical Loop, the CEO working to accelerate grid access using autonomous control, storage, and flexible generation for industrial and mission-critical power needs. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. Great to talk to you guys. Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on. Since this is your first time on the show, would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

1:12:03Yeah. Of myself, I'm an engineer by training, and I founded this company a few years ago. And I worked at SpaceX for 12 years before that. Overnight success. So much soundboard, sorry. I'll stop and let you talk. We're just having fun. SpaceX for 12 years. What decade was that exactly? That was like from prior to sending the first Dragon capsule to the space station through flying human space flight. I kind of left the efforts to make Falcon 9 suitable to fly humans. And then decided to turn my attention to the electricity grid because I think it's that important, you know? Yeah, unpacked. You said the grid.

1:12:46What was the term that you used? Yeah, just the electricity grid is pretty important. to take manufacturing. I mean, everybody talks about data centers, right? But let's take just the power that you and I use, the power that's required to manufacture. All that stuff needs a reliable source of cost-effective power. And right now, kind of the condition that people have is like, you know, companies are going to the utility and waiting for multiple years to get the power they need. And so we decided to start this company with this vision of how can you get the power that you need quicker, right? Like, how can you better utilize?

1:13:25You know, the crazy thing is, since you guys seem to like stats, the grid is pretty underutilized, as we look at it, right? It's like less than 50 % utilized. Sorry, give us the stat. You have to wait for the stat, and then you play it somewhere. I got over. You said it was underutilized. I got kind of excited. Yeah, I was excited. Yeah, I mean, it's always exciting to find something underutilized and figure out how to make it more, you know, better utilized. And the way to do that is to throw energy storage at the edge, close to where, you know, the industrial customer is consuming, sometimes some generation as well, right?

1:14:03So basically we can take this like multi-year wait time and instead make that, you know, months and maybe even days, right? So that's kind of what Critical Root is about. Okay, so maybe let's, I get the general idea, But you're saying putting storage at the edge so that you can take power during off-peak times and store it to kind of like smooth out demand? Is that generally the approach? Yeah, exactly. So when you look at the history of grid infrastructure, right, it's always built historically to the worst possible condition. Like the hottest day of the year when everybody's going full blast on ACs, also running their peak AI training loads, et cetera, right?

1:14:45It's designed for the peak. And so the paradigm that we're trying to work towards is like, you know, what if you could, you know, what if instead of overbuilding the grid to support that peak, what if you could take some of the storage and some generation at the edge and offset like basically the upgrades you would have otherwise made for millions and millions of dollars, right? For a fewer million dollars. So basically, yeah, exactly as Jordy said, you're switching to more local sources of power. You're either storing or generating power more locally. And to do that requires pretty sophisticated orchestration to do that seamlessly.

1:15:24And that's what Triple Loops is about. So do you see this as like the, do you want to jump straight to like the gigawatt mega projects? Or is there actually more opportunity with like smaller scale? I remember seeing like, wasn't Colossus 2 originally like a washing machine factory or something like that? Like there's a lot of industrial like buildings that make things and they draw a lot of power and they probably only operate nine to five or maybe they have a night shift. But for something like that, they could put a battery installation, be absorbing power from the grid when usage is low, and then deploying that during peak hours without straining the grid.

1:16:06Is that the general thesis? Yeah, that's the general concept. There's a massive middle here, right, as you point out. And a lot of our referrals of customers come from commercial real estate, right, where people are signing up to a facility. Then they're going to throw some machines there to do some cool stuff. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wow, we have to wait five years for the power. That's a problem. And so by then deploying this energy storage at the edge and this orchestration layer that Critical Loop has created, you have the ability to identify when there's capacity on the grid, use power from the grid.

1:16:40When there's not capacity, store that in batteries, use generation, traverse that gap. And so, like, you know, our customers range from, you know, everything from like ports, airports, critical infrastructure, logistics, hubs. It's the whole range. And I mean, that's not to say we won't one day take on some of these gigawatt things because it's the same operating system, if you will. Yeah, totally. Talk about the technologies that are actually like augmenting power generation on site. because you always hear the story about the hospital has a one megawatt diesel generator on site or something in case there's a blackout.

1:17:22And it feels like we're moving more towards battery banks. But what are you actually seeing in terms of various technologies that are going through scale up on the manufacturing side, becoming more economical? We've talked to a lot of nuclear founders who are sort of saying, in 2030, you'll be able to have a one megawatt nuclear reactor. That seems farther out. But where is demand right now? Yeah. So I think your most efficient source of generation is always going to be sort of the centralized one. And the challenge has to do with how you distribute it. And so that's why battery capacity is like the cost of batteries generally coming down and the power conversion technology advancing more.

1:18:05You have this ability to store and dispatch battery power, like AC or DC eventually, right, to serve whatever machines that are at the site. And so that also allows you to save money on the generation. Like, you know, imagine like doing a bunch of fuel drops. If you can avoid that, you might use the battery. So, I mean, we also, I mean, the cool thing about our systems is that, you know, we run sites where there's like propane generation and batteries. that allows you under i mean generators are in super high demand right and it's because centers and whatnot this a lot what our technology allows is like you can use like more commonly available generators and use the batteries to do the peak power so uh i mean reactors i mean i'm a huge fan of smrs too and like one day we're gonna you know make all these things work together and like you know who owns the management of the grid of the edge that's kind of what we're excited about Yeah.

1:19:01Matthew in the chat is talking about how you're placing the cells on on semi trucks as well. So they're they're they're mobile. Is that is that? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. So when you look at this general problem, right, it's dynamic in nature, right? Like a big logistics facility moves in. All of a sudden, they're like, we're going to add robotics to this site. Right. And then but that problem might change as time progresses, where the utility pulls out a transformer eventually. Right. And so you can think of like the maximum return on investment way to run this business is like you're able to physically relocate these assets, batteries or generation to new sites or the life of these assets.

1:19:41And that's kind of this modular and relocatable approach is kind of fundamental to how we think about it. What did you do to earn the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal? That's the first time someone's asked me this question. But yeah, I certified Falcon 9 for human spaceflight. So I made it to fly astronauts and I was the chief engineer for the first flight of Bob and Doug, the astronauts who lost space. That's amazing. I love it. What was your reaction to the Artemis 2 mission? Oh, yeah, I was excited, man. Like, I mean, funnily enough, I worked on that project, too, in 2007 and my first job.

1:20:24Yeah. So I worked on the Orion capsule. So it's a long time coming and I was excited to see it. And I'm really hopeful that lots more cool things will fly in space in the next year. Why did you put Nutella? Why did you put so much Nutella on board? Why not continue on your space journey? You seem like you'd be on the potentially path to going to space. Yeah. Well, you know, I enjoy a good challenge. So to me, the next most complex machine or, you know, maybe even more complicated machine than a rocket was the electricity grid. And then how do you fix this thing? Which is like, you know, there's so many regulatory aspects and like, you know, industrial and utility plashing.

1:21:15And like, how do you make this machine work? And to me, that's fundamental. that's not to say that I won't be interested in space again I call it my hobby now tell us about the round I want to hit the gong we closed the$26 million round

1:21:33from who? Conifer Infrastructure Partners in Hanover led the round they're really seasoned operators in the realm of energy and we're super excited to partner with them it was great to meet you Great to meet you. Thank you so much. Very interesting career. Yeah. Excited to follow the company. And very important work. Cheers, guys. Good talking to you. Goodbye. Up next, we have the chief architect from Sci-Fi announcing a massive fundraising to scale risk-vCPUs and AI intellectual property. If we have some time. Yes. Oh, we're ready. I think our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

1:22:15How are you doing? Hi, doing okay? You hear me fine? Yeah, we can hear you fine. Thanks so much for taking the time. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company. So, yeah, I'm Chris Durasanovich. So I was a professor at UC Berkeley. We developed RISC-V, which is an open standard instruction set. We then, a couple of my graduate students, we set up a company, Sci-5, to commercialize RISC-V. and we just completed our Series G round to go work on data center CPUs. That's amazing. How long have you been actually working on the company? I mean, Series G, it seems like there's been a whole sequence of events.

1:22:56Can you take me through a few of the milestones that unlocked growth and sort of where the company is today? Yeah, so we founded the company in 2015, so it's been almost 11 years now. Overnight success. when we uh first started the company we thought we'd be doing custom silicon but then when we started talking to customers you know get out there and into the trenches and talk to customers they all wanted risk 5 ip like designs they could use in their own silicon yeah and so we pivoted a little at that point started making ip for them and you know risk 5 the ecosystem has grown over that 10-year period and so initially a lot of our designs were smaller lower-end embedded processes and then we sort of over the years grew, you know, going through the various rounds of funding as we grew the product portfolio, we added more higher end processes and processes specialized for doing AI kind of tasks as well, what we call our intelligence line.

1:23:51And then this last funding round really signals we're getting back to very high performance CPUs that sit next to GPUs and data centers. Yeah. So, like, help me understand if I have this correct. You know, AI is very GPU intensive, but the GPUs need to be filled with data that needs to be processed through a CPU. If you're doing some sort of reinforcement learning environment, you might need to spin up a piece of software, and that requires a CPU. And so even though we are in a GPU crunch, we are also in a CPU crunch. And so more and more companies and hyperscalers are developing their own CPUs, and GPU companies like NVIDIA are also doing this, where they have a CPU that is designed to work directly with the GPU to make sure that the workloads are as efficient as possible.

1:24:42And so you're able to license your intellectual property to make those CPUs more efficient, more effective. Is that roughly correct? Yeah, that's roughly correct. So one way to think about it is AI, the last few years, has been focused on building those models, getting that working. Now they're being applied at massive scale. And if you have an AI coder, if it's going 30 times faster than a human, you need to compile stuff 30 times faster. So it's putting that load on the regular compute. And that can be the bottleneck, not the GPU side. It's getting the work done on the CPU side as well can be the bottleneck.

1:25:21So if you're not doing, it sounds like you're not fabbing chips. yourself. So the raise seems very significant. It's large. Is this mostly to hire talented researchers to advance the designs? Like what is the use of funds? Yeah. So the very high performance processes take a significant engineering investment. You know, very large teams working for a long time. You're working at the very edge of high performance core design. We're working at the uppermost tier there. And so it's very expensive to need the talent. You need a lot of work, a lot of modeling, a lot of development. So it's quite a labor intensive process to get those designs.

1:26:09And then this is why an IP company makes sense. A lot of companies are focused on the more system aspects. They just want to have a very high performance CPU you can drop in. For example, you may design an airplane, but you get the engines from Rolls-Royce. Similar kind of model here. You want to design a high-performance system, but you want to get your CPUs from a good source like Sci-Fi. So those CPU companies that will actually go and, once they license your technology, go and produce the chips with some fab, are you forward-deploying folks into their organization? Is there some sort of, do they just come to you and they just want a design document and then they're all good?

1:26:49Or how collaborative is that process? No, so that's part of this. Some of the folks involved in the financing are some of these lead customers as well and partners. They view it as a collaborative development. We have to work way ahead of time to figure out, like I use the airplane analogy, like do you have the right kind of engine for the kinds of planes you want to build? You don't just put in the catalog and say, pick one of these three we built previously. We have to understand where the customers are going, what their needs are. And one of the benefits of sci-fi technology, we make our cores quite customizable.

1:27:20So for different customers, we can adapt and configure it to their needs, to their workloads. And so we have to work with them ahead of time to understand what they're going to try to do. And so we can plan our products appropriately. How are the design trade-offs changing around custom CPUs and just custom silicon in general? Is it just all about performance versus, you know, like flops per watt? or price to produce the actual chips? What are the key levers that companies are most interested in pulling these days? And how has it changed? Well, you know, if you look at the overall picture, it's just classic business ROI.

1:27:59Like, if I make this silicon, am I going to make more money by saving on, you know, cost of ownership, power, whatever those other things are? And also, can I offer a capability that brings me customers? Yeah. That's going to increase my top line. So it's just a classic business decision of buy versus build. And what you'll see is the big companies will be buying some chips. They'll be designing their own chips. Depends on the application and domain. In each case, they're making their own ROI judgment on what's the right thing to do, buy or build. How do you think about depreciation or just the lifetime of a chip?

1:28:34There was a big discussion over will GPUs burn out over six years? and at the same time, a lot of people have computers that have one CPU that they've been using happily for 20 years. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a trend or a change in the lifetime of CPUs that are going to be used for AI workloads in data centers running very aggressively, probably 24-7 for years. Are we seeing these chips burn out faster or is that a sort of surmountable hurdle? well there is a there's one technical problem which is the chips are literally burning out faster just because of the spinal geometries um you know wires move and melt and so we're dealing with aging failures like we haven't before but um at the business side of things i think companies trading off a bunch of things one is it's hard to get new silicon you see all the shortages the fabs can only make so much silicon ai is sucking up all the all the capacity in terms of new production.

1:29:35But the incentive to build new silicon is that I have a limited power budget. So if I want to do more, I can't just get more power from PG &E or whoever. I need to go make more efficient systems. So sometimes I'll swap out those racks for a new rack that's 2x, 3x, more power efficient. I can do more with the same power budget. So it's sort of capability cap on some of these companies. They just need to replace the silicon if they want to grow their capabilities. Yeah. Zooming out, do you think that the tech community, the AI community is doing a good job of using all different process nodes effectively?

1:30:12There's been so much focus on the leading edge, TSMC, two nanometer, three nanometer, the really advanced nodes. There is a lot of lagging edge capacity out there, at least it felt like there was. I don't know if there's, do you think that there's low hanging fruit there that we might see the AI industry or the tech community start figuring out a way to get more out of in the future? Well, I think for the large data centers, probably not. I think, again, these power constraints, you want the most advanced technology. However, as AI gets pushed out and permeates all these applications out in the real world, I think those trailing nodes will be used for, you know, intelligent doorbells, you know, robots.

1:30:52There's lots of places where they're good enough. And also, there's some applications where you're interfacing with higher voltages, where you're working with non-volatile memories that are not available in advanced nodes. And so those older technologies definitely have a place, but probably more in the edge AI space. Before you go, tell us about the round. How much did you raise? So we raised$400 million.

1:31:21Who participated? Our lead was Atreides was the lead. We had some other notable names, including NVIDIA, participated in the funding. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain it to us. We appreciate you and good meeting you. We'll talk to you soon. Okay, thanks. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Up next, we have Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE. He's an entrepreneur, a futurist, and is known for incentivizing breakthrough technologies. We're very excited to be joined by Peter Diamandis. How are you, Peter? What's going on? Hey, guys. Long time coming.

1:31:58Long time coming. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Everyone's very excited. Thank you. Good applause. Lots of applause. Lots of applause. I would love to start with just your temperature check on how technology is progressing, how you're feeling. I saw you in the fabulous AI doc. I think you did a great job of articulating some of your view of how technology is progressing over the next few years. But when someone comes to you and they see things moving so quickly, they might have some anxiety. What are you returning to? What are the ground truths that you start with?

1:32:39Really important point. I mean, first of all, it is overwhelming. I mean, I spend at least half my week consuming, trying to understand what's going on. basically trying to interpret it and project where things are going and teach about it in my Moonshots podcast, whatever I'm doing. And I think one of the questions is if you're in a state of fear or overwhelm, that's the worst place to be facing the future from. And it's really your ability to feel like AI and all this technology is happening for you instead of to you. It's the difference between success and failure today. So I think one of the things I've spoken about and I've written about is the coming age of abundance, where every single human on the planet has access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education that they want.

1:33:25And I think we're most definitely heading that way at a rapid speed. And the question is, we have got to reinvent society, which has been very different and has been, you know, our current society is based on the industrial revolution and not the AI revolution. So there's going to be a lot of rewiring the social contract, what, how people, you know, uh, get purpose in their life. And, uh, it's going to be a bumpy road for the next two to six years, but on the backside of that, it's going to be extraordinary. Yeah, I agree. Um, I, I, I do enjoy your podcast. I was wondering, um, it feels like, uh, you go way back with Elon Musk.

1:34:07How did you first meet? What have you learned from him? I'm very interested about that relationship because you've done so many interviews with him over the times. Like, how do you think he's changed as a leader? What have you learned from him? Yeah, what's that journey been like? Yeah, so we met in 2000. I was running a top secret private robot mission to the moon called Blastoff. It was fun. It was with Idealab and Bill Gross, the CEO. I'd hired a team out of NASA. We had bought two launch vehicles. We were building robots to go and land, private the other moon, do the first pay-per-view back then.

1:34:44No way. No way. You're kidding me. Pay-per-view. Okay, so I don't know if you caught earlier, but we were talking about this. I was saying, like, I think there's a world where NASA could make certain parts of the mission pay-per-view. Of course, you can release the replay if you want to watch live. It's so thrilling. Pay up. I love that. Yeah, it was funny because my biggest cost was not the rockets. We bought a Taurus. We bought a Dinepur from Russia for these vehicles. Our biggest cost back then was Akamai. It was the cost of distributing the signals to all the users. Anyway, it was under wraps.

1:35:23And then it hit the dot-com apocalypse in April 2001. And I'm introduced to Elon as someone who might fund our private moon mission. You could just so you just sold PayPal to eBay. And he didn't do that. Ended up joining our board at XPRIZE and was part of that adventure for our first private space flight. But I met Elon just when he was deciding what he was going to do next after after PayPal. And it was, you know, energy in the world and rockets. And, you know, he's extraordinary. One of the most brilliant people on the planet. And he went from basically reading college and graduate textbooks in aerospace to building now a predominant mechanism by which humanity gets into space forever, it looks like.

1:36:13And what I've seen continuously is he actually implements everything he says he's going to do. It may not be in the time frame he says he's going to do it, but ultimately he's consistently delivered on all of his visions. and a lot of people get wrong i think the fact that he's um uh he's in it for the money or for domination i think consistently what he's done he's just looking to solve problems yeah and uh and try and accelerate manny's potential yeah going i was sort of grappling with that uh his post about the mass driver on the moon and i was working backwards with a couple ai models trying to understand like what is a reasonable time frame on this we talked to a lot of investors who are very pro-elon and and i mean elon didn't give a time frame but everyone was saying like okay this is 10 20 30 years out that's really far and and i and i was processing and i was like yeah maybe it is but i still think that there's a benefit to having a leader in technology that is actually talking about something 20 years away or 30 years away and i was yeah i mean the idea of mass drivers on the moon goes back to the 80s there was a guy named gerard k o 'neill at princeton university who had the space studies institute and he actually built the first mass drivers on earth right demonstrating the ability to accelerate to lunar escape velocity and it was always thought that we're what was he driving at what was he driving at the time just rocks basically yeah i know it's basically just a car just a shuttle a carrier that would accelerate in the vacuum of the moon to a lunar state velocity.

1:37:51But his original idea was we're going to mine the moon for nickel and iron and oxygen and silicates and build solar power satellites in Earth orbit. The idea was we build satellites in orbit that gather the sun's energy and team it down to Earth. Not sure it made full sense because solar was demonetizing at a very rapid rate. But the idea of building data centers on the moon, or at least the components for it, launching into Earth orbit could make sense. But of course, that's next after doing it from the ground. So, I mean, Elon's terawatt in Earth orbit based upon ground-based future Starlink satellites, it's an insane number of satellites.

1:38:38It's like, you know, I think it's a launch, a Starship launch every hour, get that capability up there. Which, if you think about airplane operations, that's nothing. But for rocket operations today, it's two point. You know, it's a launch every 2.3 days on Falcon. Yeah. But that, I mean, that ramp was unbelievable to watch. You've seen the time lapse of Falcon launches from Florida. And it starts with just one. And then it doubles. and you can see the exponential growth. And so it doesn't seem that crazy, especially with the new landing infrastructure where you catch it and immediately put it on another one.

1:39:17Like, yeah, it's going to be years. It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of effort, but it certainly doesn't break the laws of physics, as Elon likes to say. Yeah, I mean, the fun thing is watching the entire evolution of humanity's journey into space go from government programs to private companies, right? So in 1996, under the arch in St. Louis, I announced a$10 million prize for private space flight. And this was when, you know, we just had the shuttle era that was coming to an end. And it was always government astronauts, government programs. But could we flip it to commercial? And, you know, I thought suborbital flights would be the lowest hanging fruit.

1:39:58and of course Elon and Bezos have come along and just decimated, not in a bad way, but way overcome suborbital flights to now get into orbit on a regular basis. And we're going to see commercial flights to the moon. Apollo, what we just saw with Artemis 2 was going around the moon and coming back to Earth. We'll see Starship offering seats on flights like that eventually to the lunar surface. and it's the beginning of it's a it's the early 1500s of europe coming to america uh and that's an exciting time well in in that future what do you think the role of government space exploration or scientific research is because when i think about the the helicopter that landed on mars like it's really hard to underwrite that as a investor but i love it Because now we have a new data point on how that works.

1:40:56And if there is some gain from that, every private space company can take whatever the learnings are and immediately start commercializing them and competing to figure out, OK, is there an economy here? Is there a business? Well, that is the role for government. It's going to be, I mean, there's like four epic science missions that NASA has planned over the next few years, right, with nuclear-powered inter-solar system transporters and going to Europa. And I think ultimately, NASA is going to be funding these science missions. and when they say funding the science missions, they're going to be giving those missions to the money to private companies to go and do that work on behalf of that, on behalf of the government.

1:41:43Yeah. Where else are you seeing promise? We're in this weird moment where we're seeing incredible growth in the power of artificial intelligence, but it's not curing cancer yet. The best case scenario is that it's going to make all of our cybersecurity systems way more safe because we're going to go and find all the bugs, patch every hole, and we're going to navigate that system so that the white hat hackers have the tools longer than the black hat hackers before they get to them. And that is good. That's a positive externality, but that's not the same as curing cancer or abundant food. What is the next domino?

1:42:22We cured obesity and John's like, I guess we did. I'm moving the goalposts. I'm moving the But yeah. Isn't that amazing? Because we always forget how far we've come. And we just sort of like say, okay, show me some other miracle, please. Because that's what it was yesterday. I think what people don't realize, and I wrote a paper with my moonshot mate, Alex Wiesner-Gross, who's our resident genius, called Solve Everything. And I think what's really exciting, what's coming in the very near future, is the fact that these AGI and ASI systems are going to solve math. math, they've already effectively solved math, but comes next is physics and chemistry, biology, material sciences.

1:43:01And so we're about to see this extraordinary golden era of scientific discoveries that are going to occur at a rate far beyond anything else, right? Scientific breakthroughs, Nobel Prizes came at a rate of the number of geniuses on the planet, but we've now increase number of genius individual equivalents by billion fold and so we're going to end up with a situation where uh you know we get room temperature superconducting and we've got you know substrates that allow us to pull carbon in the atmosphere or eliminate at a rate like never before or you know allow us to reach much escape velocity so i had kevin will from open ai on stage with me at my abundance summit this year and kevin used to be the officer at open ai he's now head of science at open ai and what an incredible position to have where you're using these models to solve physics and then all the breakthroughs that come out of there so people talk about the revenues that are going to come from large language model the energetic systems that the frontier labs are creating i think what they're not talking about is the massive revenue that comes out of the breakthroughs that these that these companies are able to create if you've solve longevity what's that worth yeah i i want to talk about longevity but first you mentioned desalination i've always been extremely interested in in uh water desalination uh because i live in california and there's always been this debate over where the colorado river goes and and what and uh you know what the opportunity in arizona and nevada is if california could desalinate the ocean and wouldn't need to pull so much water from the more central parts of America.

1:44:48You could wind up with more green areas and more farmland potentially in desert areas. But I'm wondering, is desalination, is it a material science problem, a physics problem, a science problem, or is it permitting or marshalling the resources or just economics? Like, what do you think is interesting? Because that feels like such an amazing technology if we can unlock it in any reasonable amount of time. I think it's all of those in some degree. You know, I run, I don't run, I'm now executive chairman of the XPRIZE. Amazing work, Nusha Ansari runs XPRIZE. And we've launched about$600 million in large-scale incentive prizes.

1:45:30They've driven about$30 billion in R &D. And the largest prize we have going on right now is a desalination XPRIZE. It's funded out of Abu Dhabi by the president of Abu Dhabi. Yeah. And it's asking basically to increase the energy efficiency of desalination. It's also asking one of the challenges with desalination is when you pull the water out and put the saline back, it's got impact on the environment. Yeah. So you have to be able to, you know, to ameliorate that impact. And so we're going to see additional breakthroughs. It's going to be material science. It's going to be energy and physics that are driving that.

1:46:07Yeah. But the other thing that's going on is the idea of atmospheric capture of water, right? There's quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. We call it rain when it falls on us. But there's technologies now coming online at scale that for the majority of all countries on the planet, you can extract water from the atmosphere. So I think the water issue we saw by desal, by atmospheric capture, and by actually AI looking at efficiency of water utilization, because we overuse it in some places and not in others. And then it's going to be recycling of water. So, you know, as I wrote in my first book, Abundance of the Future is Better Than You Think, back in 2012, technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant.

1:46:56right we talk about water wars and water scarcity there's plenty of water on the planet the challenge is you know 97 is salt two percent is ice and we fight over you know less than one percent of the water in the fresh water wow uh what do you think needs to change around the narrative of of energy does does it do different new energy projects have a narrative problem because it feels like nuclear where the technology has been around for so long we're we're close to breakthroughs here. We talk to founders all the time that are building in nuclear, but it feels like there's still some nervousness and anxiety about actually rolling that out.

1:47:33Solar is a whole different question, but how have you grappled with the trade-offs between the technology, the government, and just popular responses to the idea of a nuclear renaissance? Yeah. So energy first is the single innermost loop. It's the most important thing we've got going on. We've seen chips as the gating factor for a lot of AI. It's no longer chips. It's now strictly energy, which is why Elon's looking at data centers in orbit. But in the near term, I think this is not investment advice, but I'm investing more in energy companies than I am in AI companies these days because how fundamental it is.

1:48:17Nuclear, the challenges were stuck in the nuclear paradigm from 30 years ago with gen one and gen two fusion fission plants which were not safe and we saw Fukushima we saw Three Mile Island we saw all these these disasters but the new generation plants are in fact safe and you know they're coming small modular reactors are coming fusion is coming and we need everything we need all of them but at this point you know I'm fond of saying I would put a nuclear power source in my backyard. I love it. They're safe enough, right? And so, I mean, there's also, communities need to understand this, that there's a direct correlation between the amount of energy you have in your community and the GDP of your community, the health of your community, the intelligence and education levels of your community.

1:49:08Energy scales all of these things. And so you should want access to the most energy you could possibly have in your country, in your city, in your country. How do you think about the aesthetics of technology and the impact of aesthetics? Because it feels like Elon has been very, very deliberate in the way he designs the cyber cab and the way he announces these. And the future should look like the future. It certainly looks futuristic. Maybe there's a little cyberpunk edge there sometimes. But we were talking about this with data centers that, you know, there's a lot of things around power, but that's solvable.

1:49:47But the aesthetics is another piece. So, you know, people are more likely to, you know, drive by a cell phone tower that's dressed up like a tree and not think about it, as opposed to if they just see something that's, you know, very machinic. And I'm wondering how you process that as does that need to be more of a first class consideration for technology? if they're working on mega projects? So first off, I think one of the things that's interesting is we're going to start to repurpose the energy plants that are already there, right? It's a little coal plant. Yeah. The coal plant already has got permitting to some degree.

1:50:20It's got all of the supply chain coming into it as the power lines coming out of it. So what you're going to probably see is the coal plant used to have a coal-fired boiler. You're now going to pull out coal segment of it and put in a fusion device to boil the water there instead. So you're going to maintain the same footprints. You're just going to actually replace the engine with something that's more powerful and is cleaner, which I think is an important thing to realize. That's one of the transitions that's going to occur. And yeah, I think making things beautiful needs a little more attention and you can get there.

1:50:59And I think one of the things that AI can do if you ask it is how do you beautify something that might otherwise look just hideous. Yeah. Let's talk about longevity. How big of a deal do you see GLP-1s? It feels like we've been dealing with an obesity crisis for so long. It's still really early to see a jump in life expectancy. But if there was one horse I had to bet on as a new technology that enabled life extension, it would probably be GLP-1s. But how have you been processing that boom relative to other next-gen solutions that might be coming down the pipe in five or ten years? Well, I spend about half of my time in AI and half my time in longevity.

1:51:44I've written a few books there. I have a large venture fund investing in tech. I'm building companies in the space. And you're right, GLP-1 by the longevity health community is considered really the very first longevity drug. and part of it is we know that if you are metabolically unhealthy if you're carrying too much visceral fat if you're carrying too much fat on your body that um that that shortens your life and so glp1s enable you hopefully to change your diets your your habits but what's coming so yes it's the first and we're seeing generation two generation three generation four glp1 drugs coming online right now, which will enable you to keep the weight off and also maintain muscle, which is the downside of the original earlier versions of the GLP-1 drugs.

1:52:34But what's coming on the back of that are a whole set of new longevity therapeutics. So one of my friends, David Sinclair, not sure if you've had him on the show. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, he's amazing, and you definitely must. That'd be amazing. David's one of the most, you know, one of the great geniuses in the longevity space as is uh is george church yeah and and david has for the first time ever uh we see a age reversal technology going into human trials it's his osk trial that's being done by life biosciences full disclosure i'm an investor advisor to the company but uh they demonstrated uh that three of the four yamanaka factors i won't go into detail there are able to reverse the age of cells and they did this work first in mice then they evolved it to primates which were very similar to humans and demonstrating that in the your your eyes in particular for a couple of different conditions macular degeneration and nion disease that you can reverse the age of of your visual system.

1:53:44And now this month, they're going into humans. So it's the first time. And because it's an age reversal technology, while it's being tested in the eye, the concept is that it will work on all organs in the body. And we're heading towards a world in which hopefully we'll be able to take a therapy and knock back your functional age by 20, 30 years. And another XPRIZE, you know, the DESAL was the largest at$119 million. The next largest is, we call it the HealthSpan XPRIZE. It's$101 million XPRIZE. It's$101 million because Elon had funded a $100 million prize for carbon capture. And the sponsor of this one wanted to be bigger than Elon.

1:54:31That's great. I love a competition like that. I said, okay, you toss in the extra million bucks, so we'll do that. So this is a prize asking teams to come up with a longevity therapy that I can give to you in less than a year. It reverses your functional age by 20 years in cognition, muscle, and immune, which means you've got the cognitive function you had 20 years earlier. You've got the muscular function, ability to build muscle, maintain muscles. You had 20 years younger, and immune function you had 20 years younger. You got John's attention now. imagine imagine if you had the mind of a nine-year-old many people have said i have the mind of a tyler over there could be living the life of a two-year-old we take him back 20 years but yeah of course this is more relevant so it's um it's exciting me over 700 teams competing for this yeah i will have a winner by 2030.

1:55:32So there's this idea that, you know, Rick Kurzweil has been a dear friend, my mentor, I started Singularity University with him. And he talks about something called longevity escape velocity. And he says, we're going to reach longevity escape velocity by 2033. What is that? Well, it's the idea that at some point for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for greater than a year. And at that point, you know, where's the limitation? So David's doing amazing work in that area. There are others that are backed by Retro, that's backed by Sam Altman, and another one backed by Brian Armstrong.

1:56:13And all of these are working towards reversing aging, not slowing and stopping, but reversing aging. The thing that stands out to me about where you're spending time is the the the revenue ramps and ai have been unbelievable but they also have been unbelievable in the glp1 space when you look at novo's revenue scaling to tens of billions of dollars eli lily tens of billions of dollars right and so um yeah it almost feels like there's there's there could be quite a quite a lot more people going after opportunities um there is all all of these things are I mean the greatest wealth is your health and in communities of ultra high wealth individuals I say what would you pay for an extra 30 years of health?

1:57:04It is like everything. Everything. So if I could just do a quick plug, my book comes out tomorrow it's called We Are His Guide

1:57:16A Survival Guide to the Age of Abundance I wrote Abundance in 2012. This is a follow-on book. Yeah. And it talks about how we've seen abundance across the board in everything. We've also seen some negative, Ellen, some abundance, too much carbon, too much microplastics, too much depression, all those things. But the single thing that people need more than anything else is the mindset to intercept what's coming. Right? Feeling like AI is happening for you, not to you. Yeah. Having the agency and agility to utilize these technologies because we're, you know, as Elon says, about to hit a hypersonic tsunami that's going to change everything.

1:57:59Yeah. What I would love to know, like, you know, looking back through the last few decades, there's been so much sci fi and like futurism that just turned out to be pretty, pretty accurate. And that makes me wonder, who should we be paying most attention to today? Futurists, authors that are writing sci-fi on a go-forward basis. So let me let me riff off that one second. One of my biggest concerns is that most of Hollywood's content has been so negative about the future. Right. We've got Ex Machina, Terminator, Black Mirror, and they're just painting this, you know, negative future of killer robots and insane AIs.

1:58:51and if that's the future that you see why would you ever want to live there right and it's causing fear fear about job loss is one part but fear about you know these technologies that we can't control because that's what we see in the movies and so a month ago i teamed with mark benioff at salesforce google uh kathy wood at arc invest uh rod roddenberry the son of the creator of star trek and we launched something called the future vision x prize people go to futurevisionxprize.com you got an x prize for everything i do i do and so and so what is it we're asking teams uh to deliver a three-minute trailer yeah uh that shows a hopeful compelling vision of the future and we're going to make the winner's movie so we're going to create an engine of positive storytelling because when i was growing up way before you guys were born it was star trek was basically what inspired me to do everything I've ever done.

1:59:50You know, I'm 28 companies in inspired by Star Trek. And it showed this hopeful vision of the future. And so we're lacking those. Having said that, Hail Mary was pretty damn good. It was great. Yeah. No, I know. I thought it nailed that perfectly. Last question for me, reflecting on the work of Ray Kurzweil, what do you think, it feels like his predictions have held up incredibly well, incredibly well. I mean, to nail the Turing test date within a year, if not exactly to the day, basically, you can quibble on all these things, but it feels remarkably accurate. What do you think enabled him to predict and project the future so accurately?

2:00:33I mean, he did it by the math. He was looking at doubling rates. He actually looked back in time to look at what was happening and what were the doubling rates. He calls it, you know, Moore's law is a certain part of it. It's basically integrated circuits. But he has something called the law of accelerating returns, and he applies it to everything. And so what's interesting is what is he predicting next? Right. So longevity escape velocity by 2033 and high bandwidth brain computer interface, BCI, you know, being able to connect your neocortex, your 100 billion neurons of your brain to the cloud, you know, by 2035.

2:01:123035. I mean, these are extraordinary futures coming our way. It's like we're speed running every science fiction movie ever made. It's wild. This is why we need more positive science fiction today. Yeah, we do. Absolutely do. Well, yeah. I mean, I've always had this, this, uh, this take that like, even in the dystopian sci-fi movies, they usually wind up having good endings where the humans overcome the negative potential ending and wind up victorious. And I think that's something that's really important to remember is that even if you wind up temporarily threatened by some negative sci-fi scenario, you can in fact use human agency to overcome it and be inspired not by the Terminator, but Sarah Connor, maybe narrowly, and fight back against whatever negativity, whatever negative outcomes are happening, because we've been through this time and time again with climate change and so many other, you know, you know, car accidents.

2:02:13And we fought through that and we invented new seatbelts and new cars and new lane, you know, we're still here. We're still here. We're overcoming. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to finally have you on and yeah, come back on soon. Excited for the launch tomorrow. Yeah. Thank you. Everyone listening, go find the book. I'm sure it's available. Everywhere books are sold, as we are gods. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Great stuff, Peter. Have a good one. Goodbye. Well, there is some massive news out of the Cowboy State Daily. Cowboystatedaily.com says, so the Safari Club's big game trophy collection is going to hit the auction block.

2:02:58So if you're into collecting taxidermy, Ultradome, this is very important. The Safari Club restaurant's big game trophy collection that took more than 50 years to grow into a world class taxidermy display is packing up to be sold. An auction company specializing in big game animals mounts will big game animal mounts will arrive next week to pack up the massive collection that gave the Safari Club restaurant its name. The restaurant was founded in the early 1980s by Jim Mills in Hot Spring State Park in Thermopolis and was a tourist hotspot and the place to go in the Bighorn Basin. Mills' collection had already been growing for years before the restaurant opened and was then shared with tens of thousands of customers over decades.

2:03:39We're so proud of my dad who created this safari lodge. The collection is the culmination of his life's passion. The inventory has not even been done yet on the extensive collection to determine how many pieces are heading to auction. The mounts range from an ordinary moose to an extraordinary specimen, such as the two antelope locked in an eternal battle. Dad was able to hunt and fish and follow his passions since the 1960s. The hotel and safari club represented my parents' travels over the years. It's sad to see the end of an era. And so if you're in the taxidermy world, you're going to want to pay attention to this.

2:04:11This is a very important story. Anything else? Attorney General Ken Paxton of the great state of Texas has launched an investigation into Lululemon over the potential presence of toxic, quote unquote, forever chemicals in active wear. I'm sort of surprised that. That they would call out one company in particular because there are thousands of companies. And so, yeah, of course, Lululemon is one of the largest retailers. Is there particularly an opportunity for outdoor voices? We've talked to the founder about sort of like Ty Haney about revitalizing that brand, switching things up. I don't know.

2:04:52I mean, try to find like breathable active wear. Yeah, without microplastics. without, but that could be a business opportunity for someone. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of brands. There's a wave of brands that are using natural fibers, cotton, wool, things like that. They're not as like quote unquote performant in a lot of different ways, but likely healthier. But, but yeah, again, it feels like, it feels like somewhat unfair to launch an investigation into a single company when I think this is. Also it's unclear if there are any like broad FDA rules or broad broad, like federal, like what are they bumping up against?

2:05:32Because as I, as I, at least to my knowledge, there's no like major rule around, around microplastics, forever chemicals, not there shouldn't be. Yeah. Like how about you, how about you launch an investigation into the company that makes the forever chemicals? I'm in the forever chemical business and business is booming or it has been i mean well there there are plenty of um sure uh this is a good place to end it uh if you want to if you want to if you're in florida and you want to signal to other drivers on the road that you're ready to rumble why not get a ufc license plate the ufc it doesn't just go on the bottom it actually goes before the the letter so you can only have five letters is your license plate technically ufc abc one two like is it is it are those letters included i would imagine you have to select an available plate that's just five characters and you could not get a plate that's just normal but the same five characters so those five characters have to be available but uh wouldn't it wouldn't absolutely uh wild choice uh really really silly uh as a ufc fan uh even if I did live in Florida, I think it'd be tough to get behind this.

2:06:53You'd stick to the bumper sticker. I'm sure there's a handful of people out there that this made their day, and I'm happy about that. Anyway, thank you for watching TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and we will be off tomorrow, but we will be back Wednesday at 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you then. Goodbye. We love you. Goodbye. Poll STEPam

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