Moonshots EP 143: The New Administration Means Major Change for Crypto, AI & Tech w/ Salim Ismail

Summary

A wide-ranging “tech news roundup” format episode with Salim Ismail covering the incoming Trump administration’s likely tech impact. Both hosts offer predictions: Ismail expects grand bargains on China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine, crypto-enabled UBI schemes, and housing code deregulation for disaster areas. Diamandis predicts moon landing within 2 years, biotech deregulation, food regulation reform (RFK/HHS), energy independence push, and the US becoming a “crypto-first country.”

The space segment covers SpaceX’s 7th Starship flight — booster successfully caught by Mechazilla chopsticks but the upper stage broke up due to fuel leak on reentry. Blue Origin’s New Glenn also launched that week. Diamandis shares a thought experiment: the raw energy cost to winch a person to orbit is only ~$150 at grid electricity rates, underscoring how inefficient chemical rockets remain.

The AI/robotics segment focuses on two CES 2025 announcements: NVIDIA’s Cosmos platform for training autonomous vehicles and robots (positioned as a democratization play for high school and college students), and NVIDIA’s Project Digits — a Grace Blackwell desktop AI supercomputer at $3,000 delivering 1,000x laptop performance for local AI training. Both hosts agree this shifts the bottleneck from compute to data quality. The conversation touches humanoid robots reaching scale (possibly 100+ companies now), the Uber/Uber Eats terms-of-service lawsuit debacle (12-year-old daughter’s Uber Eats click invalidated parents’ injury lawsuit), and unintended legal/social consequences of robotics integration into daily life.

Bias/Sponsor Notes

Standard Diamandis format with embedded Viome ad read (portfolio company) positioned as editorial content. Both hosts are Abundance/Singularity ecosystem insiders with commercial interest in the optimistic framing of all technologies discussed. Predictions skew heavily toward “everything will be great” with minimal counterpoint on administration risks, crypto volatility, or robotics safety concerns. Ismail’s UBI-via-crypto prediction is speculative with no policy mechanism cited.