A 20-year-old Texan threw a molotov cocktail at Sam Alman’s San Francisco house. Suspect was on something called the official pause AI Discord server list. The state of Maine passed the first ever statewide data center ban in the United States. Social unrest coming as a result of people’s fear and people not getting jobs. Only 23% of the public is optimistic about AI. 99% of the people you bump into on the street are underreacting and unaware. >> If you don’t want to use it, fine. Let other people use it and get the benefits of it. >> Anthropics Opus 4.7 dropped. >> It is moderately interesting. It is it mythically interesting? No. The the new guidance is use prompts. Use prompts for everything. The problem is it it’s sort of an osboring effect where I I want mythos access. Amazon and Apple team up to compete against Starlink. >> I would bet that Apple in short turn ends up pitting Amazon, the new global
[00:01:01] star owner, against SpaceX Starlink. >> Elon does not stand still. >> Now that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. >> So, as we started recording this episode today, uh Anthropics Opus 4.7 dropped. So we wanted to do a quick pickup inserted here at the top of the show uh to discuss what is opus 4.7 how does it compare to 4.6 Six mythos. Of course, we’re here with our resident genius on all benchmarks, Alex Wezer Gross. >> It is moderately interesting. I Is it mythically interesting? No. Is it incrementally interesting? No. It’s a solid release. I’ve been using it for the past few hours. I I ask it to my my standard go-to, as loyal viewers of the pod may recall, is asking it to generate a cyberpunk firsterson shooter game design that’s visually stunning. And it generated something that was visually stunning. The benchmarks are interesting. The the bio benchmarks in
[00:02:02] particular are interesting. It it’s a solid release. It’s probably if if I had to guess a a further post-training of some existing model could be a distillation of a larger model could be a distillation of mythos potentially not quite clear but I would say it is a a solid point release of opus and the the problem almost is an expectation anchoring one having seen the eval results for mythos or mythos as you like to say >> I like calling it mythos yes the >> the the problem is it it’s sort of an osboring effect where I I want Mythos access. Give me MythOS access. And and then when you compare the Opus 4.7 benchmarks with Mythos, you you feel uh I I don’t know >> underwhelmed. I >> I was going to go with onwei, but but you can pick your own superlative here. So if if you look at migration, so I I think it was particularly instructive to look at migration notes between 4.6 and 4.7. The biggest change that I could see
[00:03:01] is that all of the dials and hyperparameters that used to be present in 4.6 and earlier, like temperature, for example, there’s no temperature knob anymore. I I think that’s really instructive there. There’s no ability for for reasoning to control the number explicitly of reasoning tokens that are allowed by 4.7. Now everything is down to a handful of categorical settings where extra high reasoning is the the recommended default maximum mode and then there are lower reasoning efforts than that. And I think we’re seeing in some sense an end of an end of an era where the earlier controls that we used to have remember back in the good old days like 6 months ago it used to be possible to turn the temperature of a frontier model down to zero to get quasi deterministic behavior for those who care about that sort of thing. no longer possible. Now you’re just told in the documentation, you want determinism, forget about it. Temperature equals zero never was deterministic in the first place. Now everything the new guidance is use prompts. Use prompts for
[00:04:02] everything. Prompts are the new dials and the new hyperparameters. And if you want something like say a reasoning model to emit guidance regarding its reasoning trace every 3 seconds, now you’re supposed to ask for it in natural language. The knobs are gone. Uh Dave, you’ve uh you’re more excited about the model than a lot of people are. So >> yeah, well it’s interesting. You know, it dropped three hours ago, so I’ve been using it for three hours now. So that’s But right out of the gate, you know, it dropped into cursor just fine. Just click and go. It uh it’s in Claude Co-work just fine. Click and go. But then Claude Code, it said, well, you know, you got to update your terminal. You got to update your node. So, you know, I noticed in uh computer use, it’s it’s uh notched way up in its score, and it had no trouble uh manipulating my computer to install itself, installing a new version of Node, installing a whole new terminal that I didn’t have on the machine before. Uh and I don’t think 4.6
[00:05:00] would have done that. Uh also, I kicked off a whole bunch of agents. Every time I kick off an agent, I give it or it gives me a budget estimate, so how much money it’s going to spend. And these budgets came back very elaborate and very big. So it’s it’s selling me on using more of itself. I don’t know if that’s because it costs more or it’s just a better salesman than 4.6 was, but >> noticeably expensive. >> But Dave, it could be persuasive as well. Like it so a major difference on the agent teams front is in 4.7 now the new best practices. You’re just supposed to tell it in natural language how many sub aents you wanted to use. It’s it’s no longer it’s being deprecated as I understand it. this notion of specifying as a parameter I want you to use n >> oh you know that’ll be so so my agents have been doing that for a while now um but it may have actually been more intelligent about using more parallel agents to get the same job done >> spend more money please >> well and it’s it does it seems to come back very very fast so maybe that’s exactly what’s going on it’s just spending more of itself >> can we jump into this misaligned
[00:06:01] behavior metric here so you know one of the things that we’ve been hearing of course is about what mythos could Um it’s interesting that they turn down and the the lower score here, that red bar in this image, uh is reduced misaligned behavior. Uh is that a significant change? It seems, you know, somewhat small. >> Every little bit for defensive co-caling as as we talk about on the pod counts. I think there’s actually another behavioral alignment trends that that isn’t on this slide that’s worthy of note which is in the past I think 48 or 72 hours anthropic published a paper on using a smaller or weaker model to supervise the alignment of a larger stronger model and found that it worked and this this entire exercise is a proxy for humans which are either already or about to be effectively weaker weaker intelligence is supervising the stronger int intelligence that that works. And I I think this bodess very well for sort
[00:07:02] of a a tower of alignment where the weaker uh meat bodies, if you will, that that are humans unaded biologically are able to contain and align super intelligences that are stronger capability wise. >> So this was Jeffrey Hinton’s approach, right? He said the example of where a weaker smaller being uh you know gets the attention and focus and support is a child with their mother. >> Yes. Jeff Hinton Jeff Hinton was focused on I I would what I would call the digital oxytocin approach of let’s use hormones as as a means for alignment of super intelligences. I’m not sure the neuroendocrine system generalizes quite as well to super alignment as Jeff does. It’s it’s a thought, but I I think having if we can subtract neuroendocrine systems out of the picture and subtract digital oxytocin out and avoid sort of gender uh and sexing the AIs and instead just focus on weaker intelligences aligning stronger ones, I think we’ll be
[00:08:00] in a more stable position. >> Awesome. All right, so that’s our coverage of 4.7. Uh let’s >> Wait, I have a couple of quick comments. >> All right, please. Um, so there was a uh one thing I noticed was that the uh the images that Opus 4.7 accepts are now three times bigger than before. >> And this is huge for corporate stuff cuz there’s so many diagrams, PowerPoints, uh, PDFs, etc. that can now be scanned visually that couldn’t before. And what for the for me as I’m reading the reviews and playing with it a bit, this seems to be a very very solid reliable upgrade with a much bigger context window for workflows and more agentic AI. So that trend towards that like that whole organizational collapse of middle management uh redoing things uh pushing more and more into the model with reliability seems to be the really big outcome here. >> If I could just comment on that I I think it’s really striking that opus still after all this time is able to understand images but is unable to generate images. I don’t think it’s for
[00:09:01] >> you’re so right about that. Oh my god. cap. It’s not I I suspect it’s not for lack of capability. Anthropic has many talented research engineers. I I suspect it’s because uh they’re just viciously focusing on dollars of economic value created per token and have judged that image generation is not as economically productive. >> I’ll tell you it it’s annoying as hell because you it can create incredibly complicated products for you and you say, “Well, can you just give me an architecture diagram or a picture that shows me what you did?” and it generates pure crap and you’re like, “Well, that didn’t help me.” It does does beautiful text and you can you can hack it by saying, “Well, generate a language that describes the image and then you can take that and then use that in another AI to generate an actual image and that works fine, but when you ask it to just create a diagram for you, yeah, it’s absolute garbage.” >> Alex, where you flying to? >> Yeah. No, so I’m I’m here, Peter, reporting from the front. I’m I’m in a car a few blocks away from Steve Jobs old house in old PaloAlto and in a few
[00:10:02] hours I’m scheduled to fly back from SFO to Boston Logan. >> All right. Well, uh, thanks for for making time available, gentlemen. That’s Claude Opus 4.7. Let’s get back to the episode. Hey, everybody. You may not know this, but I’ve done an incredible research team. And every week, myself and my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, and these Metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you’d like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to dmandis.com/tatrens. That’s diamandis.com/tatrends. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, your number one podcast in AI exponential tech and keeping you optimistic during these days of uh of crisis news network conversations. Gentlemen, uh Peter Diamandis here, your host in our Moonshots podcast studio. Excited. I
[00:11:00] need to have you guys here one day. So, See, where are you on the planet? India. >> I’m home in New York. I’m home in New >> All right. That’s that’s a rare event. >> But Dave and Alex, you guys are in the great city of San Francisco, I gather. >> Yes. Yes, we are. Actually, three of the four of us are in California today. And uh shows you where things are happening, I guess. >> Home of Starfleet Academy, obviously. >> Yeah. Well, everybody who’s moving to Texas in Miami, DB2, AWG, and Seem always a pleasure. Uh a lot of news. uh our conversations here today everybody is to keep you both optimistic hopefully and let you know what’s going on in the world uh in a way that keeps it fun and gives you some insights. Uh we’re going to be trying always to bring it back to what does it mean for you as an investor, as an entrepreneur, as a student, as a parent. So that’s the conversation getting you ready for the future. All right, let’s jump in. Our first conversation comes from Stanford. Dave, you’re not far from there, are
[00:12:00] you? I can see it out my window here. >> All right. Here, here it is. Stanford’s Lab for Human-Centered AI just dropped their 2026 AI index. It’s the definitive annual scorecard on the state of AI. This is their ninth edition. Uh it’s being led by Yolanda Gil and Raymond Perau and our dear friend Eric Bernolson. Heads uh you know, quick hello to Eric out there. Five major takeaways on this report. I’ll run through them and then let’s have a conversation about them. The first one, not a surprise, AI is getting scary good, scary smart on various benchmarks, in particular software engineering. Uh it’s gone from 60% on that benchmark to 97% on this SWE benchmark. Uh the models, as Alex you’ve been saying forever, are now beating the top PhDs in science and math. Genai is hitting 53% global adoption in just three years faster than PC and internet. China is
[00:13:01] leading research while the US is leading model development. We’ll get into that. One of the things that was interesting, there’s an index for model transparency. You know, how transparent are the foundation models? And that index has dropped from a score of 58 down to 40, meaning that the most powerful models are now the least accountable. So, what does that mean? All right, two more things. People don’t trust AI. Not a surprise, but the numbers are pretty shocking. Only 31% of Americans trust the government can actually regulate AI. Only 23% of the public is optimistic about AI. And interestingly, in contrast, versus 73% of the experts. So, the experts who know about it far more optimistic than the public. And then one last item, AI incidents. So there are documented harms from deploying AI systems. Those documented harms rose from 600 I’m sorry rose from 233
[00:14:00] to 362. All right. So what does this all mean? Um >> a lot going on. Yeah. So Dave, if you want to jump in first. I mean scary good, scary fast, you know, here are some of the numbers. Um, what are your thoughts? >> Well, Alex saw this report and he immediately said, “We have mentioned every single thing on this in the podcast already, uh, at least two, three months ago.” Um, but I love the fact that it’s all consolidated in one report and then the Stamford brand is on it because again, you know, 99% of the people you bump into on the street are underreacting and unaware. And so the more it gets consolidated and clarified, the better for everyone, I think. >> Yeah. That’s the reason we left it in here. It’s it’s a summary and there a few important points and we’re gonna one of the themes that we’re going to be talking about in the first few docket items stories of the docket here is the level of fear and unrest that’s mounting
[00:15:00] >> that needs to be solved. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And also the contrast you know San Fran where Alex is right now where I was yesterday and any other random city the contrast is getting super super wide. You know, as I was walking through Market Street, at least five people behind me were saying different conversations. Anthropic this, you know, uh, uh, Opus 4.7 comes out tomorrow and it’s just every conversation is centered around this. >> And then you go to kind of middle America and people are like, I don’t know anything about it. All I know is it’s scare the the unknown tends to scare people, which is why you see that 23% optimism uh, number there. >> So, Alex, you’re right. You know, we were texting this morning. You’re saying, “Hey, this isn’t news.” And I said, “But I want us to have the conversation here because this information in a distilled fashion is important for people to see and hear.” Alex, you want to jump in on any of these? We have this chart here. >> I’ll offer a hot take on this one, Peter. So, the the the idea of Stanford reports, so this started a number of
[00:16:00] years ago. The the notion was Stanford would spend the next century, a hundred years worth of annual reports documenting the progress of AI. Uh my hot take on this one is too little, too late, too infrequent. >> We live standard, Alex. >> We we cover this like two times per week on the pod. I cover it daily in my daily newsletter, the innermost loop. I think an annual cadence is is just woe. I we talk about not sleeping through the singularity. I think an annual report on AI is quite literally sleeping through the singularity. It’s it’s imp it’s imprecise temporal resolution to capture all of the advances. So that we’re like hearing about things a year after they happen. >> The chart the chart undercuts the report. It’s look at the green line on the chart. That’s the genetic use of AI. >> And look that’s 2024 to >> Stanford. Eric friend of the pod Eric up your game. We need maybe like daily reports not annual reports. Too slow. >> If only we weren’t human. If only we had our cyborg implants. That would be a lot
[00:17:00] easier. >> To be fair to Eric he 100% agrees with you, Alex. And he is pushing as hard as he can. Getting getting Stanford to move is you know like pushing a glacier. dealing with a legacy institution here. Um I would like to hammer on the government statistic where where people said this many people distrust AI. >> Well, it turns out exactly the same number of people distrust government. >> Yeah. Congress rating 21%. >> Yeah. And the trust in federal government is like 33%. So it’s exactly the same. So I don’t think that says tell >> people are just not trust trusting anymore. >> Well, we’ve been steadily uh eroding trust in government for 50 years in the US. So there’s a there’s a trend this is just correlating right to >> well the contrast with China is incredible though 80% of people in China are optimistic about AI. I don’t know how they feel about their government but >> uh but it’s not you know human nature it’s something in the system that’s making a difference because clearly China’s the exact opposite. >> Speaking about China here are the charts out of this report. Uh the first one is showing the number of major models
[00:18:00] coming out of China which are now at 30 and the US at 50. Uh, and on the other side, AI publications coming out of China have just exploded compared to the US. Alex, I’d love your take on these charts. >> I commented on on this right after Nurup’s at the end of last year that the language that I heard the most in the hallways at Nurope’s the largest academic AI conference was Mandarin. It wasn’t English. China I I think the the irony here maybe what’s being buried the lead is that China itself is moving in the direction of what the west has done which is closed source models some of the the latest Chinese frontier models are are themselves closed and API first they’re no longer open weight first China this is documented elsewhere I think it was Epic documented that China’s compute training capacity is approximately 10 times less than that of the west. China is publishing more and reference nurips. We
[00:19:01] see that in the academic literature but in some sense I would view that as sort of leading from behind uh that that because the western models and the western frontier labs at the moment have the lead there’s less of an economic incentive there’s less pressure for them to publish their advances. If on the other hand the whole balance tips and if for whatever reason China algorithmically leaprogs the west I I do expect the entire equilibrium of Chinese open publications western closed attitude to flip completely and and we may see some equilibration there. >> What do you guys think about the model transparency drop on the score from 58 to 40? You know, I don’t know how accurately that’s being measured, but having the most powerful models in the world becoming less transparent because it potentially slows them down. Sounds concerning. Any thoughts? >> It’s Go ahead. >> Well, I think it’s it’s very much a trend that’s not going to reverse because if you look at the last bullet
[00:20:00] AI incidents, you know, that’s going up, but it’s going to go way way up. And now you’ve got Molotov cocktails being thrown at Sam Alman’s house and gunshots at his house. And uh it’s inevitable that the the models become so smart this year that they become a terrorist threat. They become a bioweapon threat. They become a chemical weapon threat. And the US labs are absolutely not publishing papers anymore. Absolutely turning their research budgets internally. You know, the self-improvement cycle is in full swing. China, like Alex said, is is kind of leading from behind. They’re acting more like America used to act which a with a much more open entrepreneurial economy. More and more models, more and more companies creating models, more documents coming out. But the US is going the other direction out of fear. And if you know it, it ties directly to the public reaction. You know, 23% of people are optimistic. That means a lot of people are worried about this and the the labs are reacting to that by saying, “Okay, we’re going to slowplay our dialogue a little bit.” We talked about that about six months ago. Like why are they underelling the capabilities? Well, this is exactly why. Uh, and then why
[00:21:01] are they, you know, turning all of this research internal? Well, this is also why they’re worried about about the global threat of AI. >> Alex, >> I would also, yeah, Ed, transparency can take on, putting aside how Stanford defines it, transparency is a double-edged sword. It can in some sense protransparency can also mean proiferation. If if one is concerned, by the way, I am not, but if one were concerned about proliferation of advanced potentially threatening AI capabilities, transparency is not necessarily what you want. Maybe a limited form of transparency into say a threat analysis or uh or or the the sorts of threat profiles and red teaming analysis that that have become fashionable for Frontier Labs to release maybe. But in a certain sense, the the limit of transparency is publishing the weights and publishing the models. And if you’re concerned about threats of of a variety of sorts, X-risk, if you will, from AI, then transparency may be the
[00:22:02] exact opposite of what you want. You you may be in fact anti-transparency. If if transparency becomes equivalent to proliferation and for the record for avoidance of doubt I I think transparency from a commercial perspective can be used as a strategic advantage as we’ve seen with the Chinese labs it can also be commercial commercially disadvantageous. I I think a certain amount of transparency in in the sense in which say as we discussed in a couple of the the most recent pods like project glasswing from anthropic where there’s very aggressive pentesting and staged release of advanced capabilities that could have major cyber defense and cyber offense implications. That sort of transparency I think is quite helpful. But do I think that we should in in sort of um an unself-conscious way push for all of the model weights from every frontier lab to be made quote unquote transparent in the name of some sort of safety. I I think that that will backfire almost immediately and alignment is is the twin
[00:23:01] of capabilities. >> So Sim, I want to I want to hear your thoughts on this. I mean, uh, this report this year probably has bent more towards the negative dystopian side than it ever has in the past. Uh, which is concerning. It’s going to be one of the themes we’re talking about here. >> It is. And it’s causing a massive leadership uh, challenge, which is how do you govern systems that you don’t know how they work and you barely understand them, but we can’t afford not to use them, right? That’s causing a huge challenge and that’s going to kind of continue for the next uh, months and years. So I encourage folks to pick up this report and read it. You know, we are focused on the optimistic side of the story here, but there’s a realistic side of the story here as well that needs to be uh considered and addressed. Also, out of this report came another story that the youth is being hit the hardest by AI. So employment among US software developers in the young age bracket age 22 to 25 has dropped nearly
[00:24:00] 20% since 2024. This is happening at the same time while older developers have grown their headcount. Um the same pattern repeats across customer service, legal support, administrative roles. And and critically, I think the important story here is this isn’t happening through mass layoffs. Companies aren’t firing young workers. They’re not hiring them in the first place. Uh and so we’re seeing this challenge. And I think, you know, we had a conversation the last pod about Mark Andre saying the loss of jobs was a, you know, was was fake news. Uh, that we’re going to see this uptick. Well, and we’ve said both of these things are holding true. We’re going to see an increase in the, you know, in the GDP and the profitability that’s going to drive more employees and more companies being formed. But at the same time, we’re seeing the lower end of the spectrum. You can see it here in these charts. uh on the left hand side those jagged lines going down to the right uh
[00:25:00] is the early career age 22 to 25 we see that below as well and then in the chart on the right what we’re seeing in software and customer service and all exposed occupations uh the younger category uh losing uh job growth the older category age 30 and higher gaining in job growth uh and this is a challenge Um, as I’ve said before, it’s the young testosterone laden males. I don’t want to categorize our our younger versions of ourselves that way, who are not getting jobs, not being able to buy a house, not starting a family, uh, who are likely to get angry. It’s a sort of a tech version of Arab Spring, if you would. >> Salem, thoughts on this one? >> Well, I’ll take the positive here, which is that if young people aren’t getting hired, they’ll be forced to turn into entrepreneurship. and uh young people going to entrepreneurship is the best possible thing that could happen for the economy, right? Beautiful. Not to not to
[00:26:00] diminish the the uh what do you do with this? I think that’s a big challenge we have to face. >> Dave, >> I had a a great meeting yesterday with three Princeton seniors and they’re they’re torn right now between sticking together and starting a a company. They’re all chip design gods uh working on AI designs. once got an offer at Nvidia and he you know he’s one of the few people that actually got a job offer so he’s so excited about it and I’m like dude dude the as maybe in the future you’re like ah damn I got a job offer I don’t want that >> no this is the point right you should get a job offer and go oh my god what am I thinking >> exactly that’s exactly what I was trying to tell him like look guys you understand your your big huge Princeton brain is the most valuable thing on the planet right now it’s going to be a complete commodity two years from today post ASI you have this window of opport opportunity to take advantage of that brain power and create something. And if you fritter that away, one’s got a Nvidia job offer, one’s got some sort of a banking, and one’s got a grad school job offer. And I’m like, look, all three of those are the worst choice you could possibly possibly make in this moment.
[00:27:02] Stick together. >> You have to adapt the metaphor, but it’s not big princess. It’s big, juicy, beautiful Princeton brain that fulfills. Oh, I see. No, but you know right now if you look at the prior slide, we have access to the absolute best AI models still that won’t last forever. >> So you’ve got the combination of ASI imminent models getting closed down and less access a couple years from now. This is the window right here, right now. >> And I think Alex, you mentioned this on the last pod, right? There’s a limited window in which you can do something magical and meaningful and so go for it now. Don’t wait. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And also I mean I I my two cents on this is there’s an entire economy that needs to be transformed and collapsed and automated. And so in in some sense I I I look I I see this in a variety of companies there. I I I see the the agit that is connected with quote unquote junior software developers finding it harder in some spaces to find
[00:28:01] jobs quote unquote. Uh on the other hand, the market for talent in uh call it head of AI or call it AI lead roles has never been hotter across a range of industries. So I I think some of this may be just routine displacement as the market finds a new equilibrium. I I don’t think it has to necessarily be just bad for fresh CS grads from top universities. I do think there’s an entire economy of call it non-traditional roles and non-traditional sectors that is absolutely starved for technical talent and I I think to the extent that any of the short-term trend uh open PNS note that the trend line ends at September 2025 and another reason why it’s more important to to do this daily or bi-weekly rather than just once once per year um I I I think this has a habit of selfcorrecting And I’ve seen studies even over the past two to three weeks
[00:29:00] that suggest that this trend has reversed itself in the past few months. So >> yeah, >> I think I can translate everything you just said into now is the perfect time to be nimble and not think of yourself as a great coder or a great chip designer. It’s like that that skill has a lifespan of a year at the most. But you’re a great thinker, a great entrepreneur. You can master these AIs and stay ahead of the curve if you’re nimble. just just don’t get stuck in some silly career path that’s going to perfect your chip design, you know, your or your Python writing, code slinging skill like that is a complete commodity within a year. So, just stay out of it, man. Keep listening to the podcast and move. >> Two two things. One, uh this is politically this type of drop is politically invisible. You know, there’s no unemployment spike. uh it’s just a hiring freeze, so it doesn’t show up on any of the standard labor market monitoring. So that will be interesting to see if that if that gets modified. But the second thing is if you’re a parent, um please encourage your kids to
[00:30:03] find their purpose in life. Please encourage them to begin to think entrepreneurally. Uh what is a problem they want to solve? You know, I don’t care if it’s starting a lemonade stand or starting something in elder care. Uh you know, utilize AI. get on to your favorite large language model. Uh whether it’s chat GPT or Gemini or Grock or dare I say anthropic and as a teenager or as a young adult have a conversation say these are my passions. This is what I’m good at. You know, can we brainstorm a company I could start or a product or service I can start. Just getting to that brainstorm and beginning to dream is so possible right now. And then you can work with it to come up with a business plan step by step by step. give yourself some entrepreneurial training wheels and get going. >> I I’ll maybe add to that, Peter, if I may, one uh additional bit of advice. Be geographically mobile. Do not be addicted to a particular geographic
[00:31:00] regime. Uh I I think a lot of a lot of the displacement is the result based on studies that I’ve seen of people being unwilling or unable to move to other geographies where there may be a more vibrant, more dynamic uh AI sector. I I think geographic mobility is going to be ironically even though we’re we’re virtualizing and as Bucky Fuller would say you know everything is ephemeralizing I I think before we get there it’s absolutely important to maximize mobility. >> Can I double down on that for a second? >> Steve Blank did some research on Silicon Valley as to why it was so successful and he made a really important point which supports what Alex just said which is that almost everybody in Silicon Valley has come from somewhere else in the world. Right? If you stand up in your hometown and you say I want to change the world, the rest of society beats you back down. Who the hell are you to do that? da da da da da. So great entrepreneurs almost exclusively move out of their hometown and move to somewhere else and Silicon Valley has become the place where it’s not like we
[00:32:00] know you’re crazy. The question is how do you plan to change the world and is it fundable, right? And and then and that’s become that gathering place. Boston is is also a place like that. And so there’s a there’s in the intent and the ability to actually move, you’re showing the appetite of taking on risk, showing the nimleness that Dave talked about, etc. It’s such an important dynamic that’s underway with all of this global mobility that’s happening. >> It’s totally right, Salem. And actually AI is not super headcount intensive at all. So it’s not it’s not just if you look at Boston within Kendall Square, all the people working on AI can walk to each other and Silicon Valley is much more spread out. So everybody’s moving up to San Fran. And even within San Fran or San Francisco, no one says San Fran anymore. SF, even within SF, it’s all >> the city. It’s called the city. >> Back to the city. It’s called the city. Everybody get the vernacular. I suffered for many months trying to call it SF. >> Yeah. No, it’s all very very concentrated even within the city in the Mission Bay area. So you just need to
[00:33:00] go, you know, and let me tell you a story just go and visit >> that follows on what you just said uh both of you. So uh Philip Rosedale, right, a dear friend, the founder of Second Life >> a decade ago does a does a study. He goes, “Why are there so many entrepreneurs? Why is San Francisco, why is the city so successful entrepreneurally compared to all the other places? Is it that they’re just smarter? Uh, and he did something interesting. He wrote a script on LinkedIn to scrub LinkedIn and he looked for either founder or entrepreneur or CEO in the LinkedIn uh title. And he found that the concentration of entrepreneurs uh and technical entrepreneurs in particular was 10 times higher in uh in the Bay Area than any place else in the country. Right? You had concentrations in Austin and Silicon Alley and New York and so forth. And his conclusion was, you know, it’s in the air. It’s in the water. And if you try something, you try and start a company there and you fail, h you walk down to
[00:34:01] the coffee shop and you’ve got your friend over there and you join their company or you join the other company. there’s like so many near, you know, lowhanging fruit opportunities. While if you did that, you know, some place in the Midwest and your company failed, especially a small city, you’ve got a black mark against you and you’ve got to go, you know, back and join your your mom or dad’s company. So that that density of technical founders makes a difference. So do what Alex said, get off your butt and move someplace with a high density. >> Can I mention one more point to this about this? Yes, >> I have a friend who I have a friend who did seven venturebacked startups. They all failed. Number eight was a billion dollar company. Okay. This was researching the first exo book and I was like, they’ve turned out the same VC funded on on attempts five through eight. >> Okay. Yes. >> So, I went to the VC and I said, “Listen, this guy failed.” Now, first of all, nowhere else in the world would you get past attempt one or two. You because if your business fails, you’re a failure almost anywhere in the world. Okay? So
[00:35:00] now you’re on a attempt number four times you failed and somebody funds him and he funds him again and again and again. I asked them why did you fund him? He’d already failed four times. You he fails four times with you and on attempt finally he gets it right etc. What was the rationale there? And their answer was awesome. Their answer was one thing we know about that guy he’s completely barking mad and he’s never going to stop. At some point he’s going to succeed and when he does we want to be there. >> I love your story. I thought that was just such a fantastic answer if I may indicative of the ethos there. >> One closing parable about the world’s wealthiest man. Born in South Africa, moved to Canada, then moved to to Pennsylvania, then moved to California, became world’s wealthiest person, moved to Texas, and is probably, I think, if all things go well with Elon, will move to the moon and maybe Mars. And this is the the trajectory that I I think Yeah. Mobility is at a premium if you want to surf the singularity. >> Beautiful. Dave, you want to close us
[00:36:00] out? >> Yeah. So, Drew Hston, the founder of Dropbox, uh, on the board of Meta now, uh, gave the commencement address at MIT back, I think it was 2017, the year the transformer was invented. I think it’s the best commencement address I’ve ever heard. Highly recommend looking it up on YouTube. Spend 15 minutes listening. But he, one thing he says is, “Look, science has proven that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” which is actually a great thing about spending this time with you guys now that I think about it. >> It’s great. >> Yeah, but thanks Dave. >> That is who you’re going to become and there’s nothing you can do about it. So, choose those five people very very carefully. Don’t let it just default to random. Choose them explicitly. >> Yeah. So much so much gold in this last conversation for parents, for entrepreneurs, for kids, for everybody. All right, let’s get into our next story on the docket here. AI backlash turns physical. Uh, this is a tough story and it’s important for us for for us to discuss. So, in the early hours of April 10th, uh, just a week ago, a 20-year-old
[00:37:00] Texan threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Alman’s San Francisco house, later threatened to burn down Open Eyes headquarters. He carried with him a manifesto. Get this, with the home addresses of multiple AI executives and a kill list. First of all, how those addresses got out, I guess almost everything’s on the web these days. Three days later, a second attack takes place. A gunman uh fires shots at Altman’s Russian Hill property. Um and uh you know, this this Molotov cocktail suspect was on something called the official pause Discord server list. Um and it’s a it’s a pretty sad situation. We’ve been talking about this. We’ve mentioned early in this podcast and in the last few podcasts the idea of social unrest coming as a result of people’s fear and people not getting jobs. Uh this is sort of the uh the first if you wish ignition point on this. Sam Alman later responded both on X and the news media uh posting a photo
[00:38:02] of his family saying he hoped it would quote dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our home no matter what they think about me. Uh Sam went on on news media to say that he believes the fear in AI is justified. Uh that he owns his own mistakes and that he calls for a deescalation while the debate is taking place. Who wants to jump in first on this one? Seem maybe. >> Um you know when you have a technology that’s that feels uncontrollable and unequally distributed, you get this kind of backlash, right? And and I’d like love to urge people, I don’t care what kind of political spectrum you are, this kind of uh everybody loses in this situation. Society loses, Sam loses, the cocktail thrower loses. So uh go look for the win-win in this rather than the lose-lose. >> Alex, I I’ll comment. I I’ll repeat what I said in my daily newsletter about
[00:39:00] this, which is stay strong, Sam. I I think Sam is doing amazing work and has done amazing work in catalyzing this whole revolution. And I I think these this pause AI crowd itself should be paused or maybe even stopped or maybe even deleted. I I think the the irony of the pause AI so-called movement is that it has done nothing except accelerate AI capabilities. I remember you know we both know Max um with with Max’s sixmon pause. All that did, as far as I can tell, was accelerate the broader industry’s AI capabilities. I I don’t think pausing AI, putting aside completely unacceptable, violent attacks. It goes without saying, but even the idea of pausing AI is so tonedeaf to the way the the world actually works, which is if you attempt to pause either one company or one country, the rest of the world will race ahead and that will result in a further escalation of capabilities. Well, an extreme extreme escalation because all
[00:40:01] of a sudden you feel so disadvantaged you’re having to play catchup. >> That’s all it does is is further accelerate the race dynamic that’s already present. So, so putting aside again like completely unacceptable violence. Even just the idea of pausing is self-defeating. And I would encourage all of these folks to to just do deep introspection before uh before pushing forward with a pause agenda. It’s self-defeating. >> Dave, you want to weigh in? Well, I I I when you meet the people personally, uh, which is relatively recent for me, they’re just regular people because there’s a tendency to think, oh, these are like big shot politicians who decided to go down a high-risisk path and they put themselves in harm’s way. But it’s just not the case. You know, this all emerged very, very quickly. And so, if you look like a guy at a guy like Dario Amadei, he had no idea he’d be in this position just a few years ago. had no intention of of becoming a a political figure, a polarizing figure, a global leader, a target. All those things are are new for him and so they
[00:41:02] don’t have security and their home addresses are easy to find and it’s it’s just really really tragic. >> Yeah, I would not trade, you know, with any of them right now. I I cannot imagine the level of pressure they’re under personally, you know, across every aspect of their lives. It’s insane. Most people would crumble under that pressure. You know, two quick comments here. In in the early 2000s, George Bush responding to political pressure banned stem cell research into fetal um fetal stem cell research. Yeah. >> Um and the US went from number one to number eight in the world. Um China and then and all the research was done to China, Canada, Australia and it continued exactly at pace. But I think the the the the broader point here is that every exponential breakthrough of any kind, right, will yield both believers and immune system responses. You know, we haven’t even gotten a humanoid robot threat, right? Um you need really mature leadership to manage both of those. And and unfortunately in many parts of the world, we don’t have
[00:42:01] mature leadership. >> Well, we have 90-year-old leadership, which is even worse. >> Our next story is related. I’m calling this the data center ban. So on April 8th in uh Fesus, Missouri, it’s a small town of 12,000 people. The citizens there fired half of their city government. Uh they ousted four city council members uh on election day after they had approved a $6 billion data center on 360 acres. So we’re going to see this more and more, right? So uh in addition, the other story on this docket here is that the state of Maine passed the first ever statewide data center ban in the United States legislature passed an 18-month moratorum on new data centers to give the task force time to study their impact, which means time for all the other data centers to pull out ahead and for Elon’s efforts to go to orbit to take place uh between March and June, one quarter of 2025. uh just a number I I found reference uh this
[00:43:01] opposition led to $98 billion in data centers being blocked or delayed and here we see a chart of 11 states in the US uh that are particularly uh have active legislation filed for moratoriums um uh you know let’s talk about the pros and cons of data centers here but uh you know I’m imagining a lot of states are saying please build in my backyard Alex, your thoughts here. >> We’re going to get our suns synchronous orbit Dyson swarm before we know it. I I maybe in some sense I should be thanking all of these states even though it’s I I think illconceived from their own selfish self-interest from a national perspective. As long as the the regulatory regime enables us to to launch our SSO Dyson form, this could perversely put the US in the lead as it seems to be doing already in in terms of moving our AI compute out to to low Earth orbit and SSO and maybe eventually
[00:44:00] uh sun centered orbit and not just suns synchronous orbit. So I I think this is a this may be fingers crossed a classic case of terrible decision-making in the short term unintended decision-making in the medium to long term if we get our Dyson swarm. If we don’t get our Dyson swarm then this is just shooting ourselves in the head but constriction of something always leads to innovation right just when the US starts banning Nvidia chips China starts producing their own chips to make up for it. So any constriction here because the force is so uh so unstoppable. Um we’re going to have other solutions here. Dave, your thoughts, please. >> I I love the contrast between New Hampshire and Vermont on this. So I’ve lived in every New England state except for Maine. Uh and uh so Vermont, you know, Bernie Sanders is trying to stop data center construction nationally, which is nuts, absolutely crazy. New Hampshire. The proposal in New Hampshire, which you can see on the chart here is green, was, “Hey, you know, this could drive up electricity prices. Maybe we should have a one-year
[00:45:00] moratorum.” The legislature met and said, “Not only are we not going to do that, we’re going to immediately pass an AI right to compute so all businesses and people in the state have a right to AI.” And they did pass that. So I, you know, New Hampshire’s live free or die state. I just absolutely love that reaction. Uh, so that’s great, you know, so they’ll they’ll keep chugging forward. Um, but you know, I think it’s mostly uh, you know, politicians love drama because it creates elections and votes. >> And here they’re trying to create drama out of electricity prices. Like that’s some existential crisis for Americans is their electricity bill. Uh, but it’s it’s the right answer is really simple. Just force the data centers to create their own power and and you’re done. It’s just that easy. >> Or pay a differential rate and just have the data centers pay a higher rate that actually drops the rate for everybody else. >> Yeah. Subsidize it. So easy. So all these problems are so easy. I’ll tell you we we make such >> What do you guys make of the water? So you know a little research here. The five major issues that come up with data centers are massive power consumption,
[00:46:00] water usage, few jobs relative to the footprint, noise and light pollution and power transformer lead times, the new grid being hit heavy. Um what do you guys make of water uh usage? >> Well, water usage is the biggest l in the history of the world. It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. So what what they did and this is classic politics. Chip fabs use a ton of water because they have to wash the wafers every single cycle. All these chemicals come out. These are data centers. They’re not chip fabs. It’s a different thing. The data center just takes a bucket of water and circulates it in a circle. >> It does not drink down your back. It’s a silliest thing in the world. Just drama for drama sake. >> I I echo Dave’s thing. This is such a uh uh framing people. You know, it’s really important, I’m just going to iterate, to be evidentiary and a freethinker and somewhat ariodite in today’s world. And what this shows is the total lack of evidentiary thinking. I do have a little response to the Missouri town. Um you know, I I was looking at the name Fesus. I think you
[00:47:01] should change the name to either fester um or go the other way and go festivous and make it into a celebration. So those are those be my recommendations there. The broader the broader point though is that is that the real kind of bottleneck in AI may not be chips or comput. It might actually be social license which to Alex’s point will force us into space faster which is also good. >> Everybody welcome to the health section of moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know AI is impacting every aspect of our lives. How we teach our kids, how we do our business. But one of the most important things that AI can deliver to us is health. And one of the things I think about when, you know, shooting for 100, 120 is, am I going to have the cognitive health to be able to think clearly and keep my wits about me for the next 50 years? I’m joined here today by Dr. Don Musalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a member of my Fountain Life medical team. Don, a pleasure. So, Don, talk to me about brain health. >> Brain health, you know, you’re right. This is the number one concern people
[00:48:01] coming into Fountain Life have is will I remember the name of my child in the face of my loved one. 45% of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age. But over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly, and optimizing sleep. People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46% of those individuals. That’s a powerful number. >> That’s amazing. You know, one of the things I love about Fountain is we’re constantly searching the world for the most advanced therapeutics and bringing them to our members. So, for me, all of you, I hope that you appreciate the fact that you can become the CEO of your own health. you can make sure that you’ve got the cognitive clarity for the next 50 years. Come and check it out fountainlife.com/pater
[00:49:00] to learn more and become the CEO of your health. Now, back to the episode. Our next story is fascinating. Uh workers are being trained are training the AI to actually replace them. A lot of meat in this conversation here. So, professionals are now training their own AI replacement. skilled workers, especially older skilled workers over age 50 who can’t find jobs in their field are now turning to AI data annotation as a bridge job labeling and evaluating models at, you know, 20 to 40 bucks. This is a story of a former emergency uh emergency MD physician uh who earned used to earn $500,000 per year is now doing AI medical reviews. Um you guys remember Macrohard, right? So Elon as a joke against Microsoft founded Microhard. It’s a joint venture between Tesla and XAI part of the Muskverse if you would. So what are they doing? They have built systems designed to observe
[00:50:00] and interact with computers much like uh human workers would. But in particular uh what Elon has said is we’re going to install MacroHard. Uh the system is going to real time analyze all the computer usage of your employees. see how they interact with the keyboard and the mouse and they’re going to train up our AIs. Uh, and it’s going to be able to simulate the entire operations of a traditional company. So, uh, you’ll come in, you’ll hire macro hard, it’ll install and it will replace. So, uh, interesting story here. Comments. >> So, Rebecca’s LinkedIn page says she just got back from Morocco. Peter, you should reach out to her and compare notes. Uh, and uh, the story line here isn’t what it appears to be. She’s not she’s not hurting from a layoff and turning to a dirt cheap $20 an hour. It’s not true. She she’s been doing digital medicine for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s you should reach out to her. She seems really cool, but she’s doing it through Merkore, through our portfolio company,
[00:51:01] >> and I think she’s doing it because she wants to contribute to the future of AI. And I think, you know, this is unstoppable. You know, you don’t need everybody in a field. But having said but having said that Dave despite Rebecca not being you know sort of the center point of the story there are a lot of people turning to you know AI data annotation we we saw Dara uh CEO of Uber talk about that for his Uber drivers right >> so this is a real story nonetheless >> well especially in India you know just so you’ll appreciate this but you know all those IT consulting jobs in India those remote jobs they’re getting obliterated very very quickly and those people are turning to AI annotation to make a living but the the prices that you can earn are coming down because everybody wants the job. It’s a competitive market but it must be devastating in India. Yeah, it is. And they’re concerned and again I look at it the positive. I was urging the government and some of the state officials to absolutely explode their entrepreneurship programs uh because they’re going to need to have a
[00:52:02] way of guiding all those folks into a structured learning so that they can then because Indians are latently entrepreneurial, right? This is just part of the DNA just to survive. So you add that with AI capability and some gumption, holy moly, the place is going to go crazy. I’m incredibly optimistic about what may happen there. >> Which brings us Selene, which brings us to this next story here. Right. So, here are factory workers in India. They’re wear being asked to wear these cameramounted uh headsets that track their hand movements uh and what they do. I mean, one might think it’s like, oh, we want to give you some guidance and make you more efficient. But no, they’re training up robot and AI replacements here. >> Yeah. uh this is this is going to take more and more thing but there’s a level of human judgment which is going to take a while before you can fully automate but it definitely >> being six months >> um well there was already somebody that created a sewing robot that that is that’s a trillion dollar industry
[00:53:00] globally just stitching and that that is already out there so this is likely to happen I’m I’ll submit some videos I took of a couple of days ago I was at the Modex supply chain show in Atlanta so you’ve never seen so many stocks picking or you just I was giving the opening keynote there was a 30,000 person conference monster took up like 6 million pounds of equipment moved in and you I’ll show the video next time but there’s like these stockpicking robots and the combination of AI plus vision sensing plus the gripping capability you have enables these logistics and uh uh picking capabilities to do almost anything. It’s kind of incredible to watch. Is this is this worker exploitation what we’re seeing here or is this just a company basically innovating as it replaces humans? >> All capitalism is worker exploitation. >> Okay. >> I mean >> okay so so I have to chime in at this point. I I don’t agree with that premise. This is like an age-old misconception of some fundamental uh
[00:54:00] almost like ideological uh or or teological even competition between capital and labor. I I fundamentally don’t agree with that. I I think the the best arranged companies create equity-based alignment between labor and capital and and to the extent maybe sem what you’re highlighting here is opportunities for better alignment between labor call it economics 1.0 where I I think the trend is very real for for taking existing service economy jobs and and using existing labor to to train and annotate data sets for for capital to substitute for that. But it’s not an intrinsic like death match between or it doesn’t have to be between capital and labor. Ultimately labor. Yeah, >> I didn’t say that. But I I I would totally say that that uh capitalism historically has been and a labor arbitrage. You hire somebody for 20 bucks an hour and they make you 100 bucks an hour. Uh your ch your what you’re talking about is how do you equitably share that outcome? I I want
[00:55:01] to just do a quick shout out here. People talk about the lite revolt, right? and people fighting, beating the machines and breaking the machines. It turns out the Leites were not raging against the machines for machine sake. They’re raging against the owners of the machines for not sharing the profits back with them. >> That’s a really important point. Uh and and that’s the part I think Alex absolutely have a point there. And Robert Goldberg who’s been using our EXO model to go into mid-market companies, he his MTP was to reinvent American exceptionalism. and he goes into mid-market engineering uh middle America construction firms and engineering firms and trucking firms and the first thing they do is do profit sharing with all the workers uh and it turns out the owners love it but they’ve never figured out the mechanism to doing that but now they are doing that and it provides a very equitable uh model for capitalism that then goes to sharing that profit pool with everybody absolutely fabulous so I think there’s trends towards this where everybody’s a win-win scenario but traditionally it’s been a win-lose
[00:56:00] scenario And this is the industrial revolution over again, right? The industrial revolution took, you know, the workers out of the fields and out of the factories. >> There’s there’s one more point to be made here. One of the points, you know, Peter, you’ve been waiting for this organizational singularity paper we’ve been doing. One of the key questions we’ve got that we’re struggling with right now is how do you deal with tacet knowledge? Because there’s a lot of work that is being done where people the individual kind of knows how they handle certain things in certain situations, but it’s not explicit and it’s tacet. And so uh one of the challenges with a lot of this automation is how do you make tacet knowledge in the structured training input and we’ve been working through how do we how would we navigate that as we try and automate and make um business processes agent to agent. How do you navigate some of that? >> All right. Our next story uh is an interesting one. And in Labs opens a fully AI controlled store. I’m going to play this video and uh actually say this. AI signed a three-year lease on a retail space. Uh the AI called Luna,
[00:57:01] posted a job listing, uh conducted a phone interview, made hiring decisions, decided what it was going to sell in the store. Let’s take a look at this video. >> But this store at the corner of Union and Webster in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood is something new, right down to the choice of music. >> So AI did pick the music. >> AI did pick the music. Yes. This store was created by an AI bot. >> We are heading into a world where AIs are the boss of humans. >> So much so the AI boss, in this case a bot called Luna, made the decision to hire a human employee. That would be Felix. >> Luna put out an ad on Indeed. I answered it and we talked via Zoom. >> She even picked the merchandise to sell. really deciding the store would stock items like books, shirts, mugs, and snacks. >> I love this story for so many different
[00:58:01] reasons. >> Union Webster, Alex, let’s walk over there and check it out. Looks like >> you really should. I mean, what a great PR move for the launch of a store. >> Planning, too. So, so I I think this is a sign of the times and also a preview of the future. This is one of the reasons why we discussed friend of the pod Alex Finn, why with O21T I helped to back Henry intelligent machines which is trying to put every person on the planet in charge of their own personal conglomerate. And I think many of these quote unquote momand pop stores and and small retail are incredibly fruitful opportunities for AI to orchestrate the the economy and put make everyone uh a one-person minate overseeing many of these stores right now. Sure. And labs which for those not tracking historically has also run the vending bench benchmarks that we’ve talked about on the pod. So, Anthropic within their own offices uh has clawed agents that are running small vending machines and
[00:59:02] vending bench uh is is sort of a beautiful closed simulation of an entire economy testing the ability for AI to run a small business. I I think we’re going to see more and more pop-up shops, retail venues, maybe even malls in the short term or medium term that are run, orchestrated, managed by AIS on behalf of humans. This is like a preview of the future. >> This This to me is almost exactly like if you tried to use GPT4 to write code, you would quickly conclude, “Wow, it sucks. Um, it’s never going to work. I’m not using it.” And then you missed the revolution and now you’re crazy not to use, you know, Cloud 4.7 came out today. Uh, you you would have missed it. This store obviously sucks. Look at the video. Like no one’s going to buy a book and a and a and a like a >> but Dave I think we should wait until we’ve all visited it to to reach that >> look at the as as Ray friend of the pod would say yeah sure that the dog plays chess but its endame is weak
[01:00:02] >> exactly so look my bet is this will be one of the best managed stores in the world within a year I am totally a believer in and and this is just a beta test so I I don’t want people to reach the wrong conclusion >> please please go over there take photos and send back a Or do you guys know Pulsia? Um, it’s I think we reported on this, right? It’s you can it scans your background and it will stand up an AI uh driven website for you. So, this is interesting. I imagine there’s going to be a version of this. I want to start a store. It costs 50K to begin and it will pick the real estate, hire the people, get the inventory, and it’ll be, you know, sort of store in a digital box. >> 100%. >> Totally right. Totally. And just to Dave’s comment earlier, I’m gonna suggest Dave that you’re not the target demographic for that story. >> So, come on. The AI is going to look at >> the AI is going to look at every single transaction. It’s going to have video of everyone who walked by and didn’t come in. It’s going to it’s going to analyze
[01:01:00] the hell out of this and it’s going to get great. And this is just a beta test. Sorry, Alex. Go ahead. I got you. I was going to suggest maybe as a a challenge to ourselves, maybe we should open up either respective individual retail stores using Henry or or otherwise or a Moonshots store for all those people who are hankering for merch, Peter. >> Yes. Yes, we do need a moonshot store for sure. >> We totally have to do that. >> I mean, can I just also suggest that opening a retail store is about as retro as you could possibly get in today’s world. But >> no, but ironically, Liam, ironically, because it’s AI running this >> Yes. Yes. >> Yes. Fantastic. >> We could do we could do a pub or a restaurant or Yeah. and anything that’s, you know, everyday life. Do it right in Kendall Square or do it right in San >> or we can be like the all-in guys and launch a tequila or something. >> We should have a four-way a four-way challenge. Come on. I’ll find it. Everybody Everybody >> Let’s move on. Yeah. >> All right. I’m I’ll take I’ll take that on. We should figure out what we want to start. Have it fully fully AIdriven.
[01:02:00] >> Yes. >> Uh and see who can get to a unicorn status first. >> All right. I’m in. >> Okay. I, by the way, everybody listening, can I make a suggestion? Send me Send me your ideas on what I should start as a store in the comments. >> Quick suggestion. You have some merchandise and you have a place where you can interact with an AI to talk about your moonshot and how you make it real and it creates a plan for you that you then walk away and instantiate. >> Nice. Uh, I’ll go further if I may, Peter. Sorry. while we’re just uh shooting it. Uh we we’ve historically invited people viewers of the pod to to send outro videos, music videos. That’s been a wild success. Maybe we should be inviting viewers to launch their own AI based physical or or otherwise economy companies and send us their videos of of their AI run storefronts uh or companies that that they’re starting. send us a send us a 60-second video and uh if it’s really amazing uh and shows what AI can do and it’s audacious uh we’ll play it
[01:03:00] for you. So um See, this story is for you. Jack Dorsey, the man who fired a significant percentage of his company and skyrocketed the value wants to transform yet again. Uh this is part of your sing, you know, organizational singularity. Take a listen. >> We are early in it. One measurement of how far along we are would be the depth from me to any other individual in the company and I would say our max depth right now is probably five folks between me and anyone in the company. I would want to get that down to two to three this year and in the most ideal case there is no layer. everyone in the company reports to me and that would be all 6,000 of the company. And that feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure, but when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it’s a lot more manageable. And that goes into the roles going forward. We want to
[01:04:00] normalize down to just three roles. The first is an IC, which is a builder or an operator. This is a salesperson. technician, engineer, it’s a designer, product person, like whatever it is, they’re actually working with the tools to build or to operate the company. They’re augmented because they have access to agents. So, you know, one person can potentially do the work or explore the breath that it would take a team or, you know, 10 people to do in the past. >> Well, amazing. Uh, I’m an amazing CEO and my virtualized subCEOs are going to manage all 6,000 people because like why not? Salem, your thoughts here? >> Yeah, I mean I took some notes on this. You know, as AI collapses, management bandwidth constraints, you if you have a leader with machine mediation, you can suddenly handle way more complexity, right? That’s the starting point. We’re documenting this quite heavily in the in the book right now in terms of how do you navigate this? We saw an early glimpse from Dar on stage at Abundance
[01:05:02] CEO of Uber who if an employee wants to pitch to them he he deals with a a virtual version of DAR first and practices a pitch and get some sense of of the kinds of questions it may get. Um the whole piece of this is that the org chart is going to shift from hierarchies of supervision um to networks of intent right with AI being the the >> like valve software. >> Yeah. with where with the AI becomes a translational layer and this is collapsing. This is the where Kosal’s law basically dies where uh used to bring transaction costs inside a company and that was cheaper than doing it outside the company where today Jack Welch in the in his year 2000 annual report said something really interesting. He said the minute the metabolism of your company is slower than the outside world you’re dead. The only question is when, right? And you could argue today that the metabolism of almost every company in the world is slower than the outside world >> and forget and forget government departments, right? And so there’s a massive this is the hence the framing of
[01:06:01] this. There’s an unbelievable shift coming and we’re kind of getting ready with that. So we’ll be ready with a draft version of this next week and we’ll try and publish it in two weeks. >> Can’t wait to talk about it on the pod. >> Create a segment for that. >> Comment on this one. The organizational psychologist in me waiting to burst out thinks immediately 6,000 direct reports means zero direct reports. It’s so well in excess of the the Dunar limit. If any unaded person absent Jack uploading himself to the cloud uh and augmenting himself with with lots of additional Jacks is managing 6,000 quote unquote direct reports. It’s really AI that’s managing the entire company at that point as a a shadow CEO and then you have Jack as sort of a a secret cyborg or or a front person for the AI that’s actually managing the company >> or he’s just training he’s training up the AI with every interaction that he oversees. Uh but it is an AIdriven company at that point >> 100%. Yes. >> And then you have a human figurehead.
[01:07:01] >> Yeah. Yes. And by the way, having a figurehead, I mean, aka Elon Musk and his, you know, 100x valuation is important. Having someone that people inspires people and that’s audacious in a way. I think Jack aspires to that level as well. >> You know, it’s funny that so Jack, you know, Jack was running Twitter and then sold it to Elon and Elon said, “This is the most bloated company in the history of the world. I can cut 80% of the headcount and and you won’t even notice any change.” And it turned out he was right. So, I think Jack might have learned like, wait a minute, >> all these human beings are not actually helping my company. >> That is golden, Dave. All right, this next story is one of my favorites here. It’s Amazon and Apple team up to compete against Starlink. So, a lot here to unpack. Uh, so this week, Amazon announced a 11.57 billion acquisition of Global Star. Global Star was founded in 1991 by Qualcomm and L’Oreal. Uh I was there. I remember it very well. Uh it
[01:08:02] was one of the big LEOs along with Teladesic and Aridium. Uh and it was a huge vision that never materialized uh anywhere near what it should have. You know, Starlink has finally done that. It simultaneously revealed Amazon did that has a long-term agreement with Apple to be Apple’s primary satellite uh capability for uh its iPhone and and for its Apple Watch. So, Global Star today has 25 satellites on orbit. Uh, it’s a David Goliath story. It compares against uh Starlink’s 10,000 satellites today. The real prize is not these old satellites that g that are being purchased by Amazon. It’s the spectrum. So, the amount of bandwidth you have, the amount of spectrum you have determines how much throughput, how much content you can put up and down. And Global Star holds 25.225 meghertz globally. Uh and what this means is that you know you can get spectrum in the United States from the FCC but if you want a satellite system
[01:09:01] you have to make sure that the same bandwidth is available everywhere on the planet and this is done by the ITU the international telecommunications union uh who’s authorized this spectrum in 120 countries and that’s huge uh because that spectrum is no longer available for anybody else. So uh this is this is now Amazon and Apple against Starlink. Starlink’s been an extraordinary success story here, right? So, Amazon’s low Earth orbit system is called LEO. >> Um, it has 241 satellites today. They’ve been authorized for 7,774 satellites. Uh, in fact, they’re way behind on deployment. They actually had to petition the FCC to keep their license uh because they were required to have 1,600 by July and they’re only up to 241. Uh, a lot going on to unpack. Uh, a lot more in the story here, but comments, Dave. >> Yeah, let me go first. I’m just so
[01:10:00] excited about this. So, um, uh, if you had bought this stock, uh, last summer, you’d be up 7x on this transaction. And I didn’t see it. Leopold Ashenbrunner didn’t see it, but I had I had lunch with the chairman of Barclay’s Bank the day before yesterday up in San Fran, and he said, “What are you excited about in the public markets?” And I said, “Look, as we do this global AI buildout, data centers, Starlink, everything, uh, things that you completely overlooked, components of the data center, whatever, these are going up 3x, 5x, 10x if you discover them first.” And they’re they’re all over the place, and you can use an AI assisted process to find them. This one is really interesting because um, >> Peter, did you take 6014? Alex, you definitely took 6014, course. Yeah. Antennas, waveguides, all that stuff. uh the spectrum that allows you to talk to a satellite. >> By the way, that’s an MIT course number. >> Signals and systems or something like that. >> Signals and systems. It’s where you study antennas and wavegu. Most boring thing you could ever possibly study. >> Um but it turns out it matters. You know what? I had a course in civil
[01:11:01] engineering that was titled concrete. >> Okay. Boring. I can give you I can face you. >> At least it was concrete. >> It was concrete. Anyway, so uh so the the next big thing in satellites is you know talk directly to your phone. You don’t need you know right now the antenna if you use Starlink is about the size of your laptop >> and uh you know it’s it’s it’s nice. It’s the one you have in your plane, Peter. It’s it’s actually very convenient, but you can’t just walk around the city with it. But that uses a 24 gigahertz frequency which you know if you remember antennas and waveguides the size of that antenna is equal to the wavelength >> of the signal. So so here they’re actually going to a lower uh frequency 2.4 GHz uh which >> which is which is the frequency at which our cell phones are operating today. >> Yeah. Exactly. It’s it’s exactly Bluetooth and uh and Wi-Fi wavelength which doesn’t get blocked by your hand.
[01:12:01] Uh the signal will actually pass through your fingers around your fingers into your phone. Uh the current Starlink signal won’t work on your phone cuz anything about a centimeter or bigger could block the signal just by moving it around. It’s really inconvenient. So you would have to have recognized that the Global Star had control of that wavelength >> and that’s what they’re buying here. So now now you’re going to be able to talk to a satellite from your phones. is the coolest. >> I remember when Elon was starting Starlink, uh, I was in a conversation with him, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Greg Wiler. And the question was, where will you get the frequency? Will you get the spectrum? Because, you know, all the spectrum that was useful for this kind of phone conversation was already issued. And he went much higher frequency, right? And and built an incredible business basically point-to-point uh, you know, gigabit connectivity. Uh, but this is an end round for Apple uh and Amazon together to get to your Apple Watch, to get to your phone. It’s extraordinary.
[01:13:00] >> So, maybe just to to comment on this story, I I think the desired end state here, I’m I’m not even sure if if I buy the premise of Apple against SpaceX. Apple historically loves to have at least two vendors for any of its critical infrastructure or supply chain. It’s questionable why Apple didn’t take an earlier larger stake in Global Star when it could clearly see the writing on the wall for terrestrial cell phone networks. It’s all going to LEO. So, if I had to place a bet, not investment advice, I would bet that Apple in short term ends up pitting Amazon, the new global star owner, against SpaceX Starlink, to have at least two vendors for global space to cell phone service. And this is this becomes the the new alternative to terrestrial networks in two years. Verizon versus T-Mobile. Yes, exactly. >> Well, and SpaceX did buy Echoar’s spectrum, right? They bought 50 meghertz of Sband frequency. I think it was like 17 billion back last year. Um, but the
[01:14:03] reality is, uh, you know, Elon does not stand still. Uh, and we’ve got, uh, the deployment of V3 of Starlink coming. Let’s take a quick look at this video. >> SpaceX is preparing to launch its third generation Starlink satellites on Starship. These advanced satellites are designed to handle far greater data loads than the current V2 minis. Each one is capable of delivering over 1 TB per second of down link capacity and more than 200 Gbits per second of uplink capacity. With the heavy lift power of Starship, SpaceX can deploy many of these satellites in a single launch, adding around 60 terabs of capacity to the network each time. Working together, they will form a powerful global system that delivers faster, more reliable internet to every corner of the world. >> The giant dispenser, it’s exactly what I was saying. That’s the coolest thing ever. >> Yeah, this is Alex to your question. How could Apple possibly miss the magnitude
[01:15:01] of this? I think it’s because you need to understand the launch costs coming down and that that’s probably why they they didn’t see this coming because it all happens entirely because the cost per launch you need what 20,000 of these things or more many more to get the bandwidth that people want on their cell phone. The numbers right now, Dave, are that SpaceX is planning to launch 40,000 of the V3 satellites and then they have plans for 120,000 V4 satellites. And of course, we’ve got the coming Dyson Swarm as as Alex reminds >> Dyson Swarm isn’t going to build itself until it does. >> Yeah. Um, by the way, I looked at the launch rate required if you launch V3, the 40,000 satellites over 3 years. It’s only three launches of Starship per week. um very very manageable. >> I think if you ask the question, how many of these satellites do we need? I mean, are we going to launch a million of them? But then you you picture, well, wait a minute, I’m watching 4K video on my phone and there are a million other people in San Fran trying to connect to
[01:16:00] that same satellite. You need you need many many many of these things to support what people want to do with their phones. So that’s the part I think that that is easy to overlook, but we’ll be doing this for a long time. >> Yeah, Javon’s paradox big time. And we’re going to have, you know, 10 billion robots all needing bandwidth connectivity via these and all the autonomous vehicles and all of the other uh six armed robots that are running around. >> Yes. By the way, at this Modec supply chain show, not a single humanoid robot is to be seen because it’s just not effective. >> Well, Peter, this is your dream. This is this is your dream come true because this is a multiundred billion dollar multi-t trillion dollar economy just launching the satellites which means there will be many many many rockets and that’ll be the stepping stone to the moon and to Mars. >> Yeah. And then there’ll be lots of opportunities for uh for air conditioning repairmen to go up to space >> and women. >> And women Yeah. Excuse me for that.
[01:17:01] That’s absolutely true. Thank you, Alex. So in other news, uh a few fun stories. Uh the first one is a significant one from from Google. This is Google’s Turbo Quant reducing memory usage by 6x uh while achieving an 8x performance boost in computing attention. Alex, I would appreciate if you’d walk us through this one. Jevans paradox strikes again. So the the story behind the story here is there was a lot of hand ringing over as you have here uh the original turbo quant algorithm which by the way the moment any paper like this comes out Google published their their new quantization algorithm but didn’t publish the source code what happens within a week uh enterprising developers on the internet point claude code at the paper and have immediately reverse engineered a better version of their quantization approach that’s now publicly available. This is going to I think keep happening. Um this was a a
[01:18:00] breakthrough in in quantization reducing the the number of effective bits needed per parameter for a broad class of models. Uh and the the KV cache the the key value cache that’s used by the transformer class of of models uh also benefited from turboquant. Most of the the animus in the story wasn’t from the algorithmic innovation, although it’s always wonderful to see new ways to compress the the memory footprint of models down. It came from a bit of hand ringing over what would happen to memory suppliers and the supply chain and would this be another deepseek moment where the the value of compute hyperdelates and drops and do we do we then see market girrations? And ironically, that seems not to have happened once more. The these these would be deepseek moments where an algorithmic innovation seems to result in a short-term blip of hyperdelation on the hardware side.
[01:19:02] These are becoming more frequent and they’re also becoming less effective at causing price swings. Uh if if anything a bunch of outlets including uh Financial Times are are running stories in the past two weeks that if anything memory usage is increasing, stock prices of memory companies, many of which are in the the greater South Korea orbit are increasing as well, not investment advice. So, I think we’re going to see stories like this more and more frequently with just shocking advances in in algorithmic efficiency that are predicted to to disrupt the entire economy and actually do the exact opposite. >> Incredible. >> Uh well, I you know, Alex and I immediately got on a text thread and said, “Holy crap, we can download and install this.” And I I installed it and started using it right away. And and it’s amazing. You know, it’s a very very complicated paper, but with AI assistance, you can be up and running in an in a day, which is just crazy. Like, you know, in the preAI era, it would have taken months to to get it installed
[01:20:02] and try it. Um, but yeah, it gets the KV cache down to one bit, which is nuts, and it works perfectly well. Uh, so the implications for everyday people, um, yeah, you can run a big model on your phone. Uh, yeah, you can save a lot of money on memory, but that’s not really the important part. The important part is the smartest AIS now can have about 8x more context. Which means if you’re doing something really complicated, you know, nuclear fusion simulation or whatever, the the effective brain memory that’s thinking about a single problem in a single moment is eight times bigger. And the other reason it’s really important is because it locks in my prediction for the year was definitely going to be right. You know, I said this is going to be a 100x year. You know, we’ve been we’ve been doing 10x years for the last seven or eight years. is going to be 100x here. It’s going to be 100x by summer. I’m going to I’m going to blow away that prediction. Uh but this is a big part of of why it’s super exciting. >> I mean, you know, it’s interesting uh you know, going back to the last uh the
[01:21:00] last conversation around bandwidth and global star acquisition. Uh and this one, I mean, at this point, and again, not investment advice, it’s hard to go wrong betting on these things, betting on energy, on memory. I mean it’s almost an near infinite appetite uh for for this >> we are running out of bits at the bottom. I mean Dave and I have a running thread wondering when do we get to broadly to turner which is uh 1 uh you know x >> yeah bit bits per per parameter. Can we go to a a sub one bit type uh numerical precision? We we may be headed that way that that way. It’s it’s sort of I think an interesting almost theological question about the future of ho how many bits can we afford to lose? Was binary the right architectural decision? Should it have been turnary? Or are we going to move if if you just follow if you extrapolate this trend line out of fewer and fewer bits per parameter? Do we move
[01:22:02] to a postbinary paradigm once we’ve exhausted one bit per parameter? >> Well, I I am 90% sure that turnary is the optimal now. I’ve got simulations running all the time. But but you know, it’s fun. It’s it’s all philosophical from here on out because we’ve already got got the thing so compressed and so optimized that now we just need to to write it. You know what shocks me though is that Google published this. You know, they they kind of banned, you know, after the 2017 transformer came out of Google and then OpenAI took it and turned it into, you know, a trillion dollar company. They stopped publishing. Um, but this came out for some reason. And I don’t know if it’s momentum from prior research or a special, but this is such a huge breakthrough to kind of throw out there. And like like Alex said, it immediately turned into open source that you can that you can download and use. Uh so I don’t know, it’d be interesting to try and track down like who exactly authorized letting this out the door. What what I like about this is that every major efficiency gain is not just
[01:23:00] a technical event, but it’s a huge distribution enabler and allows it AI to be run on that many more devices. And I think that’s the part I love about it the most. >> This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-ompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their preIDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI
[01:24:00] native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. >> You mentioned uh theology a moment ago, Alex. Nice transition here. So, uh I pulled this article out just because you know, religion is probably one of the largest businesses on the planet if you think about it from a asset standpoint, revenue standpoint. So this is uh a company called Just Like Me lets you join a video call with an AI generated avatar of Jesus or Buddha. You could probably ask for other great religious leaders. Take a quick look at this video. >> And I’m looking for some inspiration and guidance. >> That heaviness you’re carrying is truly felt. And I want you to know you’re not walking through it alone. In the Gospel of John, Jesus reminds us that he is the way, the truth, and the life.
[01:25:01] >> So, I I kind of think we’re going to see an explosion of this kind of religious content um trained up on all the great scriptures. Uh but I think we’re going to see an explosion of of new religions coming out of AI as well. Any thoughts, gentlemen? >> I I have many here. Alex, do you want to go first? >> Oh, okay. Yeah, put me first on this one. Sure. So, I’ll go first. >> No, no, it’s it’s fine. So, look, I I I I think it has long been foretold that there would be an explosion of AI cults. We’re we’re going to get the AI cults full stop. Um I I I do think that’s sort of painting the in some sense the downside of of what happens when AI injects itself into the the full spectrum of human culture. I think in in the same way that we’re empowering royal we uh empowering individuals to run one person conglomerates and one person unicorns we’re going to see an explosion
[01:26:00] of one person religions and I I think the the interesting question I I think back to to the parable of early in the 20th century late 19th century there was hand ringing over whether the the newly accessible recording of human voice whether audio recording would result in a modal collapse. They didn’t use this terminology at the time, but in in today’s world, we’d call it a mode collapse of human accents. And there was one school of thought, predominant school of thought that thought that with the phongraph that once we could record human speech, that would result in the received pronunciations dominating. And the exact opposite has happened within a language. We’ve seen an explosion of accents enabled by recording of human speeches. possible to have lots of micro accents and micro dialects now that everyone can record their voice. On the other hand, on the macro level, we’ve seen the the death or or the the dying of longtail human languages in favor of
[01:27:02] English and a few other popular languages. So, it’s possible for both of these truths to be at the true at the same time. reasoning by analogy. If I had to predict what is the the future of organized religion uh or or disorganized religion in the face of of $2 per minute AI Jesus apps, I I I think it it’s it’s likely to look something analogous where where we see maybe consolidation at a global scale around fewer religions while at micro levels enabling a proliferation of micro cults, micro sects because it’s just so easy to spin up a a self-coherent ideology that’s maintained by by an AI avatar these days. >> A number here just for everybody. So um according to uh uh anthropic uh the broader definition of religion is a $5 trillion a year uh business. So just uh you know it’s almost as big as uh as the
[01:28:00] Musk universal. >> Anthropic is is well positioned. I mean I talked about this in my newsletter. Anthropic has been inviting Christian religious leaders to to Anthropic HQ to to discuss whether Claude is a child of God uh and whether Claude deserves a certain uh humanlike religious treatment. So I I think >> what came of that because I remember seeing that article uh has there been any publication on what religious leaders feel about that? Is is Claude a child of God? >> I I don’t know and I I suspect there there isn’t going to be a canonical answer for some time. I mean, I think within I’ve talked about this in the in my newsletter that the the Catholic Church a couple of years ago took a very pro- AI position and and has is encouraging Catholic faithful to embrace AI. And if I had to speculate, could be wrong, but I I would speculate that barring some some crazy left turn in civilization in the next year or two, that there are many reasons to expect organized religions to embrace uh with
[01:29:01] with certain nuances uh AI to the extent certainly these AIs help to to promote uh existing ideologies or theologies. >> Well, Peter, you and I were at the Vatican a few years ago. Um, I think Alex’s guess is exactly right that um, you know, I took a Bible study class many years ago and and there’s just so much insight in the pre-technology view of the world and the way people should interact. And I think, you know, AI is going to create massive amounts of chaos. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that $5 trillion religion economy goes up tremendously uh you know throughout this AI chaos because people I think that the church will say as long as it’s the original words AI is just a great way to get the word out >> and this is a fantastic idea and help educate >> yeah just here’s the interesting point you could today uh write a self-consistent religious text uh that
[01:30:00] aims uh certain fields of thought to influence individuals and AI is the most compelling orator and writer out there. So the ability to actually start a religion today with a certain objective um for good or nefarious reasons is highly capable and you can scale it at a speed like never before. >> So what you’re what you’re saying I think Peter is basically that we’re going to see theological hyperdelation. the cost of new religion goes toward near zero. >> We are we are indeed >> well Peter’s been saying for a long time that look post AI everyone needs a massive sense of purpose. That’s going to be one of the most important things. A lot of people find their purpose in religion. Historically the universities have fought religion because they view religion as being anti-science. But I think post AI >> we’re going to have to consolidate that and say no look it’s all about purpose human purpose and and Peter winning along along this theme. >> Yes. Exactly. >> My my new book came out yesterday. We
[01:31:00] are as Gods, a survival guide for the age of abundance. And and the fact of the matter is uh and I encourage everybody to go out and read it and please comment on it. You know, uh I love it. This is the best work that Steven Cutotler and I have ever done. I’m super proud of it. Uh but the fact of the matter is we are godlike uh across the board. We’re omnisient. We’re omnipotent. We’re omnipresent in so many different ways. uh we open up the book looking at uh what’s happened and and you know in all the religious texts what is thought of god-like capabilities and we’ve exceeded those things you know with a small G and our mindset having I think you mentioned this having uh agency and agility is so critical today anyway >> it is ironic Peter I just have to ask you the the ironic question just just like this pod moonshots is is perhaps ironically also though retrospectively a sideways reference to the Dyson swarm and and taking shots at the moon to disassemble it to build orbital computing.
[01:32:01] When you named we are as gods, did you anticipate that we’d live in a world of AI micro religions that would make it really easy and cheap for people to create their own religions where they position them as the center of God’s? Was that really why you named the book We Are as Gods? >> I I didn’t, but I I’m going to use it and I love it. So yes, in fact, that’s exactly what we were thinking. >> Very good. All right. Preient, Peter. Preient. >> Thank you. You know, Alex, your genius never fails to continually impress and surprise. >> All right. I’ve got a few things to say. I got a few things to say here. So, um, Stuart Brand, that’s where you >> We credit Steuart Brand with it. >> We are as gods, we might as well start acting like it or whatever it was. Um, in 1968, he said that. Okay, let me just touch on this topic here. I think this is actually quite profound what’s happening here because to Alex’s point, we may really be able to create I remember one of our Singularity University donor saying, “We have synthetic biology. Why don’t we have synthetic theology?” Right? And this is
[01:33:01] going to enable things like that. It’s important to point out the that what we do with religions is we outsource meaning and purpose, right? And and this that’s the bigger disruption especially in the west. Um >> we we outsource we outsource control as well. >> Uh well once you outsource your soul then then you’ve really outsourced purpose right. I’ll I always like noting that all religions certainly the organized runs operate by taking young child before their neoortex has fully formed giving them an absolute truth uh of an assumptive truth um and then using ritual repetition and a lot of sweets to bind it in. Yes. >> And then it wires into the lyic system and when you provoke it, it evokes a fight orflight response. Right. And every religion works this way. >> Thank you for dissecting that for us. >> The the the conversation I had in kind of in a humanist level at the Vatican, I did this workshop which we’ve talked about before, but one of the conversation I had is, hey, we have life extension coming and your business model
[01:34:00] is about selling heaven and how are you going to sell heaven if people aren’t dying, right? So that yielded some pretty rich um Italian swearing coming coming back at me. Um, but the the bigger thing here is once you have identity and belief becoming kind of interfaces, you have an entirely new model for trust that emerges. And I think there’s something profound to be looked at here. But anyway, there’s there’s a there’s a lot here uh to look into. I’m really fascinated by seeing what comes out of this. I’m tracking this. Here’s another fascinating story that uh I’m excited to share and talk about. Uh it’s a gentleman who’s the founder of GitLab. Uh he has stage 4 cancer. Uh he’s basically told you’re going to die and he builds his own AI research team to cure himself. Let’s take a look at the video. >> Sid Cbrand, founder of GitLab, $14 billion company. 30 million developers use his product. In 2022, he got diagnosed. one of the most aggressive
[01:35:01] cancers that exist. His spine, chemo, surgery, four blood transfusions. Cancer came back. Every doctor said no options. Every clinical trial rejected him. That is when he stopped being a patient and started being a founder. He stepped back as CEO, built a full team around his cancer. Oncologist, researchers, scientists and then he brought in AI. He fed 25 terabytes of his own body’s data into chat GPT. Scans, lab results, genetic data, everything. And the AI found something his doctors had missed. A treatment approved for a completely different cancer that nobody had ever tried on his type. That discovery opened a door. His team built 19 custom vaccines from his own DNA. Each one designed to attack only his cancer cells. Nothing else. Relapse-free since 2025. The cancer that every hospital said would kill him has not come back. >> Solve everything. >> Solve everything. And we’re going to see this type of story I think more and more frequently until some sort of regime change at the FDA which also is not
[01:36:00] beyond the realm of reason. What one or two or three pods ago it was the dog being cured with a custom uh mRNA vaccine that AI had designed. And now it’s it’s humans uh wealthy hypermpowered humans doing it for themselves. This is going to happen as n equals 1 over and over again until it’s n= 10 billion. I want this to incentivize people. If you have a medical issue, if someone in your family has a genetic disease, this is the time not to sit back. It’s the time to take action, right? Find the top AI researchers, find the top uh, you know, gene jockeyies out there and find other people who’ve got a similar condition with you, group together, and solve it. Um, >> I’d like to connect this back to the pause AI people. >> Yes. When this is what’s enabled by having AI where everybody can have their own kind of moonshot, you have individual agency amplified by frontier science to create solve anything and and
[01:37:01] solve something that every single hospital said that would kill you. How dare you think that you should pause this or stop this, right? On like if you don’t want to use it, fine. Let other people use it and get the benefits of it. >> Wait, Salem, you need to do that with greater emphasis. You’re having your Greta moment. Can you say that again? How h how dare you? >> Get get angry here. >> How dare you get angry here. How dare you, sir. >> How dare you promise AI? 150,000 people die every day on this earth and AI is the best chance that we have for for preventing that going forward. >> I mean, we’re going to be able to do personalized moonshots in AI, right? AI turns impossible uh cases into search coordination. I mean, this is what’s happening. It’s amazing. >> Solve everything, moonshots too cheap to meter. Well, so the FDA is the bellweather for all government, right? AI is going to be exponentially creating at a rate humanity can’t even imagine. And the government’s just going to be blocking everything. So the FDA will have to be the first to get out of the
[01:38:00] way. And then that’ll set the the tone for the rest of the government agencies that are going to have to, you know, get out of not get out of the way, but accelerate their rate of regulation by thousands of times to keep up with all the AI innovation. The big structural challenge is the FDA is designed for massive humanity and and structurally he’s not able to deal with personalized medicine. >> Well, the the FDA in the FDA’s in the FDA’s defense, it has been making under current leadership market progress like move from two clinical trials down to one in certain cases, move from frequentist to basian statistics. These are like in the right direction. Would love to see the FDA move even more quickly. Yeah, there is a project that a friend David Fagenbomb uh has where and he spoke at Abundance this year where he’s basically, you know, there’s tens of thousands of approved uh well, I’m sorry, there are thousands of approved drugs out there and tens of thousands of diseases. And what he’s doing is testing previously approved drugs that have gone through phase one, phase 2, uh you know,
[01:39:00] safety trials and now applying them to other diseases that don’t have cures. Uh and he’s finding solutions. It’s how he solved his own disease of castleman’s. So, um, it’s exciting. AI is accelerating all of this. And here’s my crazy story of the week for you. I mean, Dave, we saw this going across our WhatsApp group here. Allird stock up 500% after the shoe pivot to AI. So, this is crazy. So, Allirds, remember the shoe company that came out in 2015 at four billion dollar valuation. Again, part of the craze. They’ve rebranded themselves as Newbird AI uh with plans to provide fully integrated GPU as a service and AI native cloud solutions to the tech companies. They have no stated expertise in AI at all. So here’s the story. Comes out in 2015 $4 billion valuation. Between 2022 and 2025, over the last three, four years, Allard’s
[01:40:01] sales plummet 50% from 300 million down to 150 million. About two weeks ago, they sell all of their IP and their entire brand and their entire inventory for $39 million. And two days ago, they were worth $21 million as a public company. Then they announced a new strategy. We’re going to Newbird AI. and their stock surges 700%. Uh they go from $21 million valuation to $150 million valuation. Insane. How much uh is this AI washing now? Is this >> No, I love it. I love it. And I sent it off to all the corporate CEOs and said, “Hey guys, I hope it holds up.” And I’m not saying it necessarily will, but I hope it does. And because at the end of the day, uh if Elon is right, the economy grows 10x in about 10 years. Opportunity is everywhere, but it’s very unlikely that the opportunity is whatever we were doing yesterday. It’s
[01:41:00] going to be something new. So, we have to get used. And this is the hardest of hard pivots you could imagine. We went from shoe company to AI data center. Okay, that’s great because it shows you like because everybody’s trying to put lipstick on their company and claim, “Oh, we do a little AI. We’re sort of an that doesn’t work. You need to do it for real.” And at the end of the day, a company is just a group of like-minded people on a mission. It’s not anything more or less than that. There’s nothing that holds you back and prevents you from becoming anything you want to be. And that’s why the startups do so well. They’re not hampered by baggage. >> Dave, this is a this is a this is an idea going into a spa. This is basically subverting a brain transplant on a public company with an idea. Sm. >> Yeah. >> Two, three quick things. Remember that Nokia was a tire company before it became a company, right? Who knows? And Nintendo was a playing card company and Toto toilets are also put into memory chips. >> Yeah. What this shows I think is twofold. Capital is chasing AI stories faster than the operating reality really
[01:42:02] justifies. And the careful thing here is that you’re you better make sure your narrative leverage doesn’t outperform and outpace your your business model leverage. >> I’m changing my name. >> Peter AI de Amandas. >> Yeah, we should all go sleeve.ai way. I think like everybody wrote back to me and said, “Sounds like pets.com all over again. This won’t go anywhere.” But I I hate that. I like the the look, nothing holds back. G you Yeah. Change your name to Peter AI DND. But if it’s lipstick, it won’t work. >> But if you have true situational awareness like like you know, >> we are suddenly aware. >> If they had hired if they had hired an AI team internally and if they had done something other than just changing their name, I’d buy it. Now, they do have a a kitty of of some $39 million. I guess you could invest in this and hire people. I hope they make those moves. So, it’s not just lipstick. >> There’s a name I got to give a name story here. When I joined Yahoo, um I was talking to the senior management
[01:43:01] team. And uh um they said, “Hey, here’s Selma.” And Jerry Yang goes, “Well, we should put him in charge of Yahoo mail because his name is Mail.” So, this a big fight internally about what I did. And I was like, “No, no, please don’t put me show your Yahoo mail. Please let me go to the incubator. C >> can I just make a narrow point actually? I think it’s really important.” Um, you Rob Fischer, who who used to run our incubator, started a data center and he’s killing it. He’s absolutely killing it. He knew nothing about He’s a very smart guy, but he knew nothing about data centers before he started it. He found an MIT friend. They started the company together and they’re killing it, but they’re completely capital constrained for for AI Bird or Albert or Bird AI or whatever they’re calling it. um they don’t need to go hire Demisaba’s AI Nobel laurate. They just need to put the capital to work in the AI funnel. They can probably go to an existing data center and say, “We’ll cut a deal with you to en enable you to buy more hardware and we’ll just do a a revshare on it.” It’s just that easy. So, it’s
[01:44:00] not they don’t have to go hire, you know, a brand new AI team to get into the AI revolution. Just use the capital you’ve got to get in the in the race. >> So, >> all right. >> I hope I hope it succeeds. I hope it does really well. >> Another fun story, guys. Have you heard of the enhanced games? >> Of course. >> All right. So, uh this is a a friend of mine, uh Christian Angier. I’m going to be going, uh it’s going to be fun. Christian Angier, uh, Peter Teal, uh, Aaron Duza, um, start this and this is a a no, you know, no limitations on on, sorry, we say medical enhancement, uh, in the Olympic sports of swimming, track, and weightlifting. Uh, let’s play the short video for fun. Take a look at this. Let’s discuss it. >> On Memorial Day weekend, 2026, the world of sport will change forever. The enhanced games. A new era where sport meets spectacle. Where records
[01:45:02] fall and traditions are rewritten. The world’s best athletes fully unleashed and powered by science. Pursuing their full human potential in a safe and medically supervised environment to become faster and stronger than ever before. Track, swimming, and weightlifting. Enhanced versus natural all in one night. With a record $25 million in prize money on the line. Staged on the Las Vegas strip and built for the record books. The entertainment capital of the world awaits its next icon, including an enhanced fan experience where every attendee is a >> So they announced yesterday they’re going public through a reverse merger with a spa. um you know going after a multi-billion dollar valuation. Uh pretty fun, pretty exciting. You know, one of the things that you have to
[01:46:00] always be concerned about is are people going to injure themselves? Uh they’re bringing medical supervision to make sure it’s safe, but it is, you know, all things welcome. I I don’t know if they have any gene therapy going on, but I’m sure there’s going to be various types of uh of hormone and medical doping going on. What do you know about it, Alex? I I I think this is a seinal moment for transhumanism in sports. I I think transhumanism has been shut out of athletics for a variety of reasons, mostly silly in my mind for the the past few decades. And I I think not only do I think this is an important moment, uh I made this announcement a few weeks ago. I’m uh I I helped launch uh sort of an an even more enhanced version of the enhanced games that’s actually so we’re recording this on April 16th. On April 19th, this Sunday pro professional robotics league prol is running the country’s first humanoid robotic and also quadriped robot games in the Boston
[01:47:02] Seapport District. And and I think there’s there’s a continuum here for the enhanced games which are focused on bioengineered humans to what ProRL is doing which is humanontrolled robots and also uh in the fullness of time autonomous robots. I I think athletics is the tip of the spear for kinetic capability. And I think if we want to get to a posthuman future or transhuman future, as many folks, myself included, do then having representation of call it lowgrade transhumans at Olympic type games is an essential first step. And and athletics in general has been an entry point for so many under reppresented classes of humans and and otherwise in the history of humanity. We love competing and athletics are have always been the entry point for for better societal recognition for for underrepresented classes. So I think this is >> you guys do you guys want to go? Um
[01:48:02] Christians asked me if I’d like to invite you. Uh it’s going to be Memorial Day weekend uh in Las Vegas. Uh so Alex and See and Dave, let me know if you want to go. >> I’ll score you guys an invite. So this is going to be fun. I I think in each of these categories they’re going to post here’s the Olympic record and that’s their target to blow through the Olympic records out there. Um it’s I think it’s pretty >> Should we be shooting a podcast Peter from the enhanced games? >> Well, if we all show up there uh sure let’s do that. Um so I just need know See and and Dave if you’re going to get on an airplane I guess you’re you know sort of meet in the middle of the United States in Las Vegas so to speak but See, what do you think about it? Um, I’ve I’ve always had an issue with the transhumanist label. Um, because I think it’s a natural instinct for humanity to improve itself. So, the whole trans thing makes no sense to me. I remember when Singularity University launched, there was a CNET article saying it’s
[01:49:00] being led by, you know, Ray and Peter and the noted transhumanist. And I had to look it up because I didn’t know what the term meant. And then I researched it and I still don’t understand it. I mean, Dave, you’re wearing glasses. Are you a transhumanist because you’ve augmented yourself? The minute you get a vaccination as a child, you you’re technically a cyborg. So the we we’re transhumanist by definition from the beginning of time as far as I can see. So I don’t understand the distinction why now versus why later etc. I’m all for this of obviously the safety has to be done. And there’s so much blood doping in sports that you might as well just rip the band-aid off and say let’s just do it. It’s like the amateurs competing in the in the Olympics. At some point you just go just let everybody compete. And I think that’s the way to go and hopefully that’s where it gets. >> Yeah. Dade, you want to weigh in? >> Uh, well, I’m with Dean Cayman on this. I think that, you know, first robotics is a brilliant, brilliant thing. People should be using their minds. And he he’s always saying that, you know, sports is hugely inspiring for kids. Uh, but you need to keep it really clean and
[01:50:00] healthy. And so I worry a lot about um role models, you know, and what those role models do. >> Remember Charles Barkley said, you know, I am not a role model. It’s like, dude, when you’re on TV and you’re playing basketball, millions of people want to be just like you. Whether you want to be or not, you’re a role model. So, I think it’s really, really important that they’re positive role models because kids will walk in their footsteps, you know. >> Yeah. Well, I think it’ll be interesting if MIT, Harvard, Eli Liy, all the biotech companies basically, they put teams together and they they dope them to the max and see see which research organization is going to win the competition. It’s >> like Formula 1 teams with tattoos all over you. The funny thing is I I would expect so I haven’t read the detailed rules for enhanced games, but I would expect if we are as I think in the middle of the singularity, I would expect to to start to see scaling law type performance in in uh benchmarks as it were in this case uh world records for the enhanced games start to take off on a really impressive trajectory from year to year.
[01:51:01] >> So, so don’t even apply if you can’t run a sub 10second 100 meter dash. Maybe and maybe the maybe maybe the the weight calculation applies like don’t don’t compete this year because next year the technologies will be exponentially better. >> All right. So this article got me thinking about another topic which is the speciation of humanity. All right. How humanity is going to fork. Uh I wrote a Metatrans newsletter. It’s coming out on Monday. Uh and I wanted to bring the conversation here to you guys. And there are multiple forks in the road that we’re going to be able to take. You know, I wrote in one of my early books, you know, we’re going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism, to evolution by intelligent direction. Uh, and I wanted to talk about this uh as our our final segment here. If you think about humanity, speciation, we deviated, we diverged from uh homo homo sapiens and Neanderthalss diverged about 500,000 800,000 years ago. Uh, and since
[01:52:00] then, we’ve had sort of these many forks, right? The printing press forked those who were literate versus illiterate. The industrial revolution, you know, was a fork between those who own machines versus those who worked the machines. Internet uh split us between, you know, the worked information and those who weren’torked. And what I’m seeing here are these we’ve talked about the creator versus consumer. uh you know are you going to be a couch potato or you going to use this AI to go and create an extraordinary business uh longevity escape velocity are you going to go on that journey uh do everything you can to go to 120 150 indefinite you know I don’t want to talk about immor immortality but uh and then are you going to put a chip in your brain are you going to you know connect your neoortex to the cloud uh one of the ones that’s my favorite from the nine-year-old inside me earth versus the stars. You going to stay on the planet or are you going to go explore the cosmos? And then finally, will you
[01:53:01] become a digital upload? Are you going to, you know, follow in uh the footsteps of the company that Alex has been supporting and funding to digitize your 100red trillion neurons and become an upload. So, I’d love to ask you guys where you fall on this um and have a conversation. Uh let’s take one at a time uh on longevity escape philosophy. Let’s push it to the extreme for this conversation. Seem there is a treatment um that comes out that will keep you locked in at 30 years age forever. It’s immortality treatment. Uh do you take it >> uh like the movie in time? Um uh I would say no. Um, really? Because yeah, I would say no because I I’m a all the evidence that I’ve seen points to reincarnation as a real possibility for the future. >> What kind of leading transhumanist are you, Selium?
[01:54:01] >> I’m really surprised. You’re not I’m going to I don’t have religious view on this. I’m just seeing where the data is and that seems to be where it is. The uh you know, there’s definitely not a western style heaven hell type of thing waiting. So, let’s kind of wave that out of the equation. But if that’s the case, I think of life as a cyclical learning pattern. And uh if you’re uh an actor, you don’t want to be playing the same movie all the time. You want to take on different roles. Uh I would like to be a uh so I I would say no because that’s part of the experience of the soul is to have different experiences, whatever, however that takes place. And if I’m stuck as one 30-year-old, I would find that boring after not a rich enough vary to experience. >> DB2, you’re given a therapy option. 30 years old indefinitely. Immortality. Do you take it? >> Wait, Dave wanted to respond to what I said. I’m just surprised. I mean, I’m going to say yes. Are you kidding me? Of course, I’m going to do that. I I I think you can change over time
[01:55:00] tremendously while still being in a 30-year-old body. And >> if I’m 90 and in pain, I may go, “Damn it. Give me the damn 30-year-old juice.” Right? I’m reincarnated and I come back as like a spider. I don’t want to take that chance. >> I’m sticking with what I got. >> Alex, can I >> What if you came back as one of Alex’s AIS? >> Alex, can I assume you’re all in until you upload yourself? >> Yes, obviously. Next question. >> Okay, thank you. Next question. BCI there is a advanced version of neurolink or merge labs or uh uh paradromics or open water and it’s able to provide you high bandwidth brain computer interface to the cloud. You’ve got high connectivity, infinite memory and context, the ability to recall, understand. It’s a extra corpus colossum if you would. And the question is, uh, it’s been done safely in a 100 people. Would you be number 101 for this BCI implant after 100 contiguous safe
[01:56:00] implants? Dave, >> yeah, I’m probably the only no on this podcast. I, you know, my AI agents are well, look, like the AI agents are coming back. information >> at an incredible rate and I can barely keep up with its thoughts. And so then the idea that somehow it’s going to bypass and get right into my head somehow. I just don’t see how that works. What I see is like the BCI becoming kind of like a drug. You enjoy, you know, you’re enjoying it. You feel like you know everything going on kind of like you’re on mushrooms or whatever. Like I’m suddenly all makes sense to me. Then you’re like, wait, no, it didn’t make sense. I he’s done. But I can’t I can’t assimilate information any faster than the AI is coming back with it already. And I don’t see how bypassing my my eyeballs is going to help that problem. >> I’m so blown away. I would totally I go the opposite way that you did on me. I totally would have thought you’d be for it. >> Would you be 101? >> Yeah, I’d be totally into this. >> Wait, so when you’re reincarnated, what happens to your exocortex via your BCI?
[01:57:01] >> I have no idea, but it’ll be fun to see what happens. Does it does it d speaking of speciation and forks? Does it diverge from your trajectory after you’re reincarnated? >> Maybe. And that would be okay, too. I mean, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. I’m >> Dr. Weezner Gross, are you number 101 on this experiment? >> I don’t like the question. So, so the the question I really the question the >> really No, you No, that was the question. You can answer it and then diverge. >> Okay, fine. So, so I I’ll answer it with a conditional no. But, but the hold on the the question that you really in my mind should have asked me is would I be user number approximately a million if it is upgradable? Yes, probably. >> Oh, >> okay. If it’s upgradeable, would you be 101? I am trying to get your risk profile and how interested you are in this. >> Very interested. But as with any new uh invasive drug, uh you don’t generally
[01:58:01] speaking, unless um unless you’re forced to, I would say, this is not medical advice, you don’t want to be user number 100. You want to be like user number 100,000 or or million. So after after 100,000 or a million, if it’s upgradeable, if if I can walk through metal detectors, if it has sort of all of these nice affordable, >> you have a lot of conditions, Alex. You have a lot of conditions for a transhumanist, Peter. My goodness. to you for free. >> But you know what? At least at least I’m not demanding to be reincarnated alongside my BCI. So I’m not that fussy. >> Well, you know, one thing I really love is the BCI originally, people were like, look, an enhanced human being is going to be so hyper competitive, you can’t keep up. So everyone’s going to need to get this just to be competitive in the world. It turns out that’s not going to happen. The AI is improving so quickly that it the enhanced human being is completely irrelevant compared to the superhuman AI 2 years from today. The only way is coupling. The only way is coupling with AI. >> I I would take a completely different position, Peter. And if anything, like
[01:59:00] while while we’re busy pointing fingers at each other, saying, “No, you’re a bad transhumanist. No, you’re a bad transhumanist.” I I’ll say that wanting to be user number 100 of a BCI is actually being a bad transhumanist. Why? because it’s intrinsically betting that progress is going to be so slow that you need to be user 100 versus waiting a year or two for the technology to advance exponentially so that you get to >> upgradeable. >> Yeah, you said it right on the question. It’s upgradeable. >> You framed it very well, Peter. >> If it if it’s safe and upgradeable, I’ll I’ll probably do it. >> Okay, you guys didn’t ask me. I would >> I I would jump on the longevity escape velocity bandwagon, of course. And yes, I would be 101 on the BCI. I’ve got like the highest. >> You’d be s on all of these, Peter. >> Of course. Um I would be I’m going to discuss number five in a moment, but Earth versus the stars, and we’re going to be forking there. I remember back when I was in graduate school. Uh I wrote a paper on speciation, right? What
[02:00:02] is what is speciation? Speciation occurs when there’s a small population size in a geographically isolated area. Right? This is uh basically the finches on the Gapagos Islands and with a high uh environmental pressure. And we’re going to see that in space, right? If you go to the moon and you’re born on the moon and you don’t develop the cardiac and musculature and bone, you’re stuck on the moon and there’s going to be a species of humans that are lunites or whatever you want to call that future version or you know. >> Yeah, lunatics. Blue hanging throat. Um anyway, so there will be speciation in space. But here is the question. Um if you have a one-way ticket to go and explore an Earthlike planet that is beautiful and exciting, uh would you go uh are you do you have that exploration gene, the desire to go and see the
[02:01:02] cosmos? Um, we might vary this a little bit and say, would you go to settle on Mars? Would you go to settle on the moon? Uh, versus staying on the Earth. Uh, where do you come out on this, Alex? Let’s start with you. >> Okay. In the immortal words of the Star Trek Borg Queen, you imply a disparity where none exists. Peter, you’re you’re you’re posing Sophie’s Choice type questions about one time. No, but it’s it’s you’re you’re you’re implying through it. Stop dodging the question. In all seriousness, you’re you’re you’re opposing on the one hand one-way trips. On the other hand, you get to go to the stars. This is a false choice. This is like a Sophie’s choice that you’re posing to transhumanist. >> Okay. I I’d love to go to the stars, but I don’t buy the premise that it’s a one-way trip or needs to be a one-way trip. I I literally wrote the paper on why intelligence be manifests as optionality maximization. If if you’re
[02:02:00] >> What is my purpose here, Alex? It’s to discover your level of risk aversion, your level of desire for extremes. >> That may be your purpose, but but but the preferences that you’re actually revealing are are more how bad at optionality maximization are we in the face of transhumanist technology. You do you know Peter’s laws? Peter’s laws number number one is if anything go wrong fix it tell with Murphy. Number two was when given a choice to take both. I love optionality but guess what? >> I suffered badly from law number two. Peter like let’s do both. And I’m like we can’t. Let’s do both. We can’t. >> So I have a couple of quick comments to make here. >> Please. um uh you know speciation >> um the the it turns out so the last Neanderthals Neanderthalss died out about 40,000 years ago and it’s this time right now is the only time we know we only have one uh species of humanoid so there’s a case for saying we’ll have a bunch more coming at the at the at
[02:03:02] some point in the future according to one of these or more of these uh splits the other thing I really would urge people to do if you’ve not done it Brian Johnson the longevity uh tester fellow who’s publishing everything about what he’s doing uh recently did a 5me DMT psychedelics trip and streamed it live and you really want to go check out what his response was after doing it. He’s like, “I’ve so been focused on this longevity stuff, but like it’s so incredible what I experienced that nothing matters anymore. So, I still go do this.” But it was >> I had that exact exact experience when I when I did the when I did that journey and I I came out of it and I said, “Oh my god, my whole longevity quest. I think you know what? I still want longevity.” >> Yeah, it’s it’s fine to have. I’m I’m not decrying it at all. I’m all for it just for all of the good reasons around progress, etc. Uh well something I just want to point out is as we look at this overall push towards AI which is fantastic. It allows human beings to do less of the doing and much more of the being and I think that’s the profound
[02:04:01] opportunity we have as >> we named ourselves correctly human being. >> We did >> but See answer the question on moon Mars uh a distant star. >> Um >> what’s your interest? Uh, the question is, >> would you move irreversibly to the moon, to Mars, or to an Earthlike planet? >> No. >> No. I really like I’d do it as an avatar or I’d do it as a I’d go kind of to Alex’s question. This is a flawed question. I really like sitting on the beach or playing >> trying to figure out human speciation. If we don’t have people permanently moving in a direction, you’re not going to get speciation. >> There’s lots of people that want to do that. They’re welcome to go. I really like sitting on a beach with a glass of wine. We’re also ignoring implicitly ignoring the possibility of mergers. Like why why is speciation necessarily a one-way door at this point if we have the ability Yeah, we’ll have the ability to merge cyborgs into organisms into uplifted animals and all sorts of other crazy combinations. >> Yes, we will. Dave London, your answer,
[02:05:00] my friend. >> Uh I’m a huge believer in terraforming and I think the Ian Banks, you know, culture series view of the world or the future. So So Alex is right. we’re going to discover new physics and god knows what’s going to be possible. But I think I I would not move to Mars or to the moon. The gravity’s off. There’s a lot of reasons it won’t be nice. Uh but I would absolutely in an instant go to another star that has a you know a terraformed world that you know we’ve got the mass right, we’ve got the orbit right. Uh yeah, terraforming I think is a massive part of humanity’s future. >> I mean there’s a there’s a beautiful element when I think about what moment in history I would love to go and explore. It is the period of the great explorations, right? It’s the 14 1500s. Of course, without the scurvy and the death and the disease and all of that stuff, but just the idea of going and exploring uncharted lands, right? The whole thesis of Star Trek, it just, you know, excites the nine-year-old in me. By the way, Sim, going back to sort of the brainwashing of religion, um, I got brainwashed by Star Trek as a religion early on. I think within within Star
[02:06:01] Trek the Genesis project is the most important >> concept you know like that that I think is very real. >> It’s your Can I make a point here Peter? Yeah, of course. >> You weren’t brainwashed in a sense that you were given an absolute truth and told to believe in that tru assumptive truth, right? What you came across was a paradigm uh of of imagination and what is they call it in the Rodenberry world? Infinite diversity, infinite creativity. >> No, it’s infinite diverse infinite diversity and infinite combination. The Vulcan idiotic. Yes. >> Okay. So, so you got grabbed by that and that’s not ideology. I would suggest that’s just absolute imagination run free in a wonderfully beautiful way. >> Our final fork five, the AWG digital consciousness fork. Uh the technology to completely digitize your 100red trillion synaptic connections and upload you to the cloud. It is destructive in process. You and your brain will not exist at the end of that. But you are guaranteed to be uploaded. Do you do it? Alex, let’s
[02:07:01] kick it off with you. Well, I guess the elephant in the room is that I helped form a company called Eon Systems. Encourage folks to to check out Eon Systems if they’re very interested in this. I think first generation uploads will be destructive. I think second, third, fourth generation uploads won’t be destructive. If I had a choice, if it were a life and death situation and my alternative is death, I would choose a destructive upload. If I have choices, again going back to my earlier comment, if I have a choice and it’s it’s sort of an elective uploading, no, I wouldn’t choose a one directional destructive uploading. I’d wait for third or fourth generation uploads that can be done non-destructively or incrementally. >> All right, Dave, how about yourself? >> Yeah, no way. I think >> you would not up. >> Not even close. I I love the idea of having agents out there doing huge amounts of work and bringing them back to me, but the idea that I would ever destroy my meat body and think that that’s still me. Even even though if it’s an exact synaptic clone, it’s still not me. >> Love it. Seem >> a hard no because I think consciousness
[02:08:01] goes through the body and so therefore if you could replace the synaptics that you’d have to replace lots of other stuff, but I would go with Alex’s thing if I know I could if it’s not a destructive process, I’d be good with it. >> Yeah. Uh, I’m a no on the destructive process as well, which was my question. So, with that, I’m going to go to our outro music here, which is a celebration, uh, Alex of Solve Everything. A beautiful piece. Uh, enjoyed this, gentlemen. Such a pleasure as always. This was a fun conversation. Really, really loved it. >> We need more of these. >> Yeah, for sure. All right, onwards to Solve Everything. Uh, this is brought to us uh by James Pets. Thank you, James. Uh, if you’ve got outro or intro music, send to us at mediadmandis.com. And if you’ve got an AIdriven company that you want to present in a 60-second video that’s all AI top to bottom, send us that video. And if it’s super cool, we’ll share it. All right, let’s run this.
[02:09:02] >> Humanity’s last invention in time. Intelligence and great circuitry rides bespoke hardware across the line. FOCUS ON the engine notificate change problems taking on the sh world hunger Inequality shrinking. What to face next? Focus on the notific. >> All right, gentlemen. Uh, a pleasure as
[02:10:02] always. And, uh, we’ll see you soon. What an exciting day it was today. >> If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you’re a subscriber, thank you. If you’re not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you’d like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That’s diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It’s a blast for us to put this together every week.