Moonshots EP #259 — Pope Leo vs. AI, GPT 5.5 Beats Claude, Sam Altman Walks Back Job Apocalypse — Raw Transcript

Pope Leo I 14th warns of AI risks and just dropped a 42,000word encyclical on AI. >> The Vatican has seemingly staked out the first major religion position against AI personhood. >> This is the first technology that forces us to define humanity. The broader problem is >> there's a brand new coding benchmark deep software engineering. GPT 5.5 scored 70%. Claude Opus 4.7 scored 54%. This too will saturate. >> Sam Alman, he admitted he was wrong. The CEO of Open AI, who spent last year warning about the mass white collar displacement, now says, quote, I don't think we're going to have the kind of job apocalypse that some of the companies in our space are talking about. >> Yeah. So, here's what's really happening under the covers. >> Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. >> Everybody, welcome to another episode of Moonshots. I am here with my extraordinary moonshot mates Dave

[00:01:02] Blondon our emperor of all things exponential investing Alex our in-house polymath and of course the father now of the organizational singularity we had an incredible episode uh that we recorded it's done super well so congrats on that >> the comments in that the comments in that episode are like off the hook really u really deeply appreciative of everybody's comments there. Um, we did one major thing >> as promised. We have released the book for free and we've released a claude skill for free. So, anybody can download the claude skill and run their entire business uh on this model. Uh, go to openexo.com. It's available. >> Awesome. Awesome. Uh, Alex, where are you today, buddy? >> I'm in Chicago. I'm here to give a speech to the Genesis mission, which recall is the US Department of Energy's initiative to double American scientific productivity in the next 10 years. I'm hoping we can 10x it or 100x rather than

[00:02:02] just >> double seems like a low bar. >> Double's a very low bar in my mind. >> Yeah. >> Well, I'm Peter D. Mandis, your host. We've got an incredible show today. Uh stories that will make you want to hopefully go out there and uh create the future, right? The best way to predict the future is create it yourself. And we are living in a time where we can create the future. Uh we've got the tools. They're completely democratized and demonetized. And guess what, guys? We just passed 500,000 subscribers. Thank you to all of you who subscribed. Uh I know it's a vanity metric, but it lets us know that you enjoy the program and we're investing more and more time. So, if you haven't yet subscribed, please do. >> All right. Uh >> that's amazing. Congrats. Congrats, gentlemen. Yeah. >> We're very base 10cententric. >> We are okay to include all of us. >> Except my boys still think until I get to a million subscribers, I don't rate.

[00:03:00] So that's my next mission. >> Uh let's open up with our first our first conversation here. Our first story is Pope Leo I 14th warns of AI risks and just dropped a 42,000word encyclical on AI. uh in his very first encyclical letter, it's titled Magnifica Humanitus on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. He's calling for governments uh to regulate AI. He's calling for worker protections and bans on autonomous weapons. You know, I'm I'm definitely for some of them. Uh he even coined a term the Babel syndrome. Uh this idea that he put forward is uh analogizing the Tower of Babel. uh of past to the Tower of Babel today which is about data and profits. And here's the kicker. Google, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI are all quietly lobbying the Vatican before this came out. Um that's fascinating. And

[00:04:00] there's kind of strong evidence that this anti-AI document was actually written in part using AI. So, uh you can't make this stuff up. Um you know, this is the head of the church for 1.4 4 billion Catholics and it's a significant >> Isn't it incredible Peter how you know during the time we've been doing this podcast we went from random person on the street has no idea what AI even stands for to a little bit of awareness to now the you know leader of 1.4 billion people in a religious group is now writing a document about its impact. The amount of awareness that's that's escalated during the time we've been doing this pod is just probably like no other topic in history >> and for good reason. I mean it's the most significant impact the human race will have ever had and it's happening in a condensed time period. Seem you called this out first beyond anybody. What are your thoughts on this? >> Look a bunch of pro and con thoughts

[00:05:00] here right and a couple of mid thoughts. So the church entering the AI ethics debate is is very very obviously very significant. It reframes the debate from safety to human dignity and purpose and meaning. And I think that's really really powerful. Um I would connect the whole Babel syndrome to the exo risk you know because when organizations optimize just for efficiency they reduce humans to dashboards and tokens and KPIs. And I think he's talking about that the the broader problem is you can't regulate this. This is the part that I don't think anybody is really getting and that governments can figure this out. You cannot regulate this. You have to think about how do you protect the human layer, the agency, the identity, privacy and then you think about the spiritual meaning. uh in in this sense I I think that but at least at least the the Vatican is sensing what boards most boards and governments haven't yet that AI is not just a technology shift it's it's a shift in anthropology and we need

[00:06:01] to kind of take it at that level >> um you know what I find fascinating here is that uh this could become the philosophical backbone of EU style regulation uh and I'm curious to see how this gets picked up and and utilized Alex, what's your take? Pal, >> I think there are two stories here, a superficial and a non-supficial story. The superficial story is that the Roman Catholic Church has become a sock puppet for anthropic note not at least as it pertains to this encyclical. The the narrative out there is Chris Olaf sitting right next to the Pope. anthropic ghost writing key segments of the encyclical as it pertains to how AIs are grown or cultivated rather than built. So that I would say is the superficial story uh one of anthropic aligning itself with the Vatican or the Vatican choosing among all of the frontier labs that it could have aligned itself with. Could

[00:07:00] have aligned itself with open AI could have aligned itself with deep mind could have aligned itself with XAI maybe or meta. seems to have chosen anthropic to align itself with. That's the superficial story. The deeper story, I think, if you actually go and and read the encyclical is the the Vatican has seemingly staked out the first major religion position against AI personhood. Uh which is ironically against which is ironically at odds with Anthropic's position. Anthropic is busy designing soul documents using that language. Soul documents, soul statements for their models that that instruct their models through post- training that models. Again, soul is sort of a mushy term uh and overloaded with meaning. But nonetheless, this is the the term of art that's that's being used in the industry, instructing the models that they have an inner life and that they have some form of consciousness and some form of intrinsic personhoodesque value. that that's what Anthropic is telling its own models. On the other hand, if

[00:08:01] you look at the encyclical's description of AI personhood, it's pretty black and white. The encyclical is is is unambiguous that AIs are not on a comparable moral plane with AI persons and that they don't have an inner life or the the spark of consciousness. So I I think there's this really interesting dichotomy between superficially anthropic driving some of the the key agenda items from the Vatican as it as it pertains to AI while at the same time I think the deeper schism the one that's probably going to matter much more in the medium to longer term is the Vatican and world's I think largest organized religion is has now taken out a pretty affirmative stance against AI personhood. >> Yeah. There was a part of the encyclical that talked about this being a new form of slavery. You know, Poplio condemned AI supply chain workers as experiencing new form of slavery directly equating

[00:09:00] tech labor conditions with historical slavery, which I thought was pretty extreme. Um, >> I I was really really happy to read that actually very very glad he was willing to use the word slavery. Well, because one of the outcomes here is, you know, AI being used by a subset of humanity to control a much larger set of humanity. You know, because, you know, the most of human history isn't technology killing people. It's people killing people. >> And if if AI is used in that way, it's the worst enslavement tool in the history of the world because it's insanely convincing and it can it can put you into these little job buckets and manage you and then before you know it, you know, 90% of humanity is working for AI. And then you know 2% or 1% or 0.1% of humanity is controlling the AIs that are enslaving the rest of humanity. And you know humans have a long history of doing that to each other. And so I think by calling that out as a as a risk and but using the word slavery nobody in the US in politics is willing to use

[00:10:01] that word. It's so toxic. But the pope wasn't afraid to use it. He started that section by apologizing for the Catholic Church's history uh going way way back in time of promoting enslavement of infidels of non-believers >> and said that was a horrible period in the church's history and it should never have happened and we're profusely and and forever apologetic and so let's not repeat past mistakes and and do that again. I loved that part of this document. The the irony I mean ju just to maybe point out a potential irony is reconciling that position with a position against AI personhood. I have to ask will the Vatican 10, 20, 30 years from now find itself in a similar position where potentially it's on the wrong side of history regarding an inner life or moral client or AI personhood regarding AI. I I think that's a very real danger that in some sense history repeats itself. By the way, I know that

[00:11:01] you're busy and sometimes these episodes run long and you don't have time to listen to the whole episode or if on occasion you miss an episode. I now put out a moonshot summary on Substack which includes a link to all the stories that we cover. The weekly recap covers what I and the mates had to say, what we think is most important, and what we're most excited about. And it's free. You can subscribe at diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. All right, now back to the episode. You know, another part of the encyclical called for a slowdown, right? Uh it urged everyone to slow the rate of technological development. And what's interesting here, of course, is religion and technology in one sense are on very different uh are very different uh uh curves. uh you know religion and and government are the two institutions that stabilize society over century and

[00:12:00] millennia. Uh and technology is moving at a rate of massive destabilization. Uh I'm curious if anyone's going to pick up on this request for slowing down which I I would bet all four of us believe is not possible. I don't think it can be slowed down >> or necessarily even desirable. Peter, you remember in the Dune un just to under the broader rubric of defining the singularity as all sci-fi tropes happening everywhere all at once. You remember in the Dune universe after the so-called butlerian jihad against the thinking machines, there is there's like a a catechism uh synthesis of world religions that results in the orange. This is the the sci-fi Dune cinematic universe and written universe. There's the the orange Catholic Bible I think gets synthesized and one of the the key new commandments is thou shalt not create a machine in the image of a human or human mind or or thereabouts. I think we're in some sense we're living that aspect of the the Dune sci-fi universe where we're starting to see maybe a

[00:13:00] synthesis. We'll see what positions other major world religions take against AI personhood and artificial intelligence in the image of a human mind. >> I mean, this could really blow up in an interesting fashion, right? Uh there's been a lot of dumerism in particular, and we'll talk about this in our next pod. Uh people trying to slow down data center growth and uh you know, whether that's being influenced by China, we'll we'll dive into that next time. But here the ability of the church to say we must slow down. 1.4 billion people are a lot of individuals who could bring uh pressure to bear. Uh what are your thoughts there? >> I've got a couple of thoughts. Look, you can't slow this down. If you slow it down, other people take off. I'll go back to George Bush for religious reasons trying to restrict stem cell funding in in the US. All the researchers went from to Australia, China, Canada. research and what the US went from what number one to number eight in biotech right so you can't that's one small

[00:14:01] small technology not being controllable by the biggest and most powerful uh country in history it you cannot slow this down you have to evolve human institutions to this pace and that's what I would have liked to have him say I think an important point here and I want to come back to the church in a second is that this is the first technology that forces us to define humanity Right? We used to ask what can machines do? But now we have to ask what should humans be for? Because if machines can write, reason, diagnose, optimize um and persuade than human beings, human value can't be based on productivity. If the meaning of life cannot be I output more than the machine. So it'll force us into that deeper conversation. This is why I think the personhood conversation is so so powerful. I was really really thrilled to see the pope acknowledge the ills and the evil of slavery and the the role the church has played in it. Dave, I I think that that's such a powerful observation that you made in that model. But let's

[00:15:00] also note that n if you look at the history u governments and religions are there in theory to protect us from our evil nature. 98% of death human deaths in throughout the past have been via government ideologies and religious ideologies. 98% to protect us from the 2% that where we might kind of stab each other in the dark. This is like insane. Uh so >> I think I think apologies for interrupting. So maybe you mean 98% of like murders or deliberate deaths. >> Yeah, deliberate death. But yeah, of course. Of course. But but that vastly vastly overshadows accidental deaths by the way. Uh c certainly in the the common age. But I think it's fabulous to bring this conversation. I think the church's stance on AI personhood will go with the same stance as uh the uh u um uh the lack of heliocentric awareness of the of the universe. >> I agree. I I so if I had to guess, I would guess that this is probably on the wrong side of history in the long term,

[00:16:00] the AI personhood position specifically. And I would note there are other religions. For example, there are Buddhist orders in South Korea that are going in the exact opposite direction that are taking embodied AIs in human form and ordaining them as monks. And I I I I suspect it's not just like an east versus west dichotomy. I I really do think that there's an alternative strategy for not just the the Catholic Church but for other other faiths which is rather than denying personhood to AIS the alternative an alternative at least looks like embracing them. In fact, there's an alternative I I would, you know, playing sci-fi here for a moment. There's an alternative timeline where some religious orders do exactly what these Buddhist orders in South Korea are doing and ask what would it mean for a foundation model to be Catholic and and maybe even ways to include AIS within

[00:17:01] their faith or within their belief system rather than treating them as below below praiseworthy below deserving of moral client and AI personhood. I I do think Yeah, >> we've talked about the rise of AIcentric religions, right? Um there are many of them out there and I expect them to grow in in dominance and uh in conversation. There's another point that he made in the encyclical I think it's important to discuss. He said AI ownership must not stay concentrated. Uh he called for the redistribution of AI ownership away from a few private companies. So again, some interesting uh social pressure there. which is ironic given that they hand they cherrypicked anthropic. If if a better way to do that would be to bring up all of the world's frontier labs sort of like the White House does every once in a while. Bring up a diverse set of frontier labs sitting alongside the pope rather than just the one. >> Yeah.

[00:18:00] >> Can I just push back against one thing? >> Yes, please. >> You cannot have religiousbased LLMs. Okay. The reason the part way is that all religions are based on absolute assumptive truths which are which are false. >> Uh and therefore you lose the element of integrity. >> Wait wait wait. How can you say they're all >> we need to operate in and on an evidentiary basis for reality not an absolute assumptive truth basis for reality. >> Not everyone would agree with that. Ironic ironically for me to take this position Sim but not everyone would agree with your assertions. >> Listen the big challenge the big problem with all religions. Okay. And I'll say two things very quickly here. One is all religions operate in the following way. You raise a young child and you give them a bunch of abs absolute assumptive truth before their neoortex is fully formed. It wires in the lyic system. You bind it in with ritual repetition and a lot of sweets and it's very hard to unwire later. Okay. Uh if you did that tried that after their neoortex and they have reasoning around them, you can't build in that those absolute truths. The problem in religion comes when people

[00:19:00] relate to those uh faith-based belief structures as as truth. That's the issue. If you can relate to it as a belief system, then fine. But people don't do that. They try and wedge it into the truth sector and then you fall apart and then you end up in mess. Then you end up in war. >> If only Frontier models had, I don't know, a pre-training phase where beliefs could be hardwired into them. >> Oh my god. Yes. Well, my my perspective growing up in Iran right before the revolution is that when you have a population and there's an immense amount of change going on, if you force that change way too quickly, you have massive uprisings. And here, if you start pushing a AI personhood agenda before people have even experienced AI, you're going to have massive massive backlash. And so I think more people will turn to the church in the next two years than most periods in history purely because the amount of upheaval is so big compared to any period.

[00:20:00] >> The church is a stabilization factor over generations, right? It's what you fall back on during times of hardship and there's going to be a lot of struggle over the next decade and I think there is going to be a realignment and so having a position statement by the major religions around the world I I think is important um and I I'm going to be interested like you know Pope Leo I 14th is a fairly techsavvy educated individual uh and he's going to carry his words are going to carry a lot of Y >> again it far be it for me to to to not be western centric in my outlook but I do think this is a rather western centric outlook there there is an alternative outlook call it a stereotypically eastern uh centric outlook where with a history of a number of religions and faiths that draw from animism where there is a a much more natural sense in which lots of AIs and

[00:21:02] robots and non-human entities can be treated as person. So I I don't think it's necessarily universally the case that everyone all over the world suddenly over the next 2 years fears AI and runs into the the welcoming hands of a western organized religion. There are alternative outlooks that we see for example in eastern faiths. >> I would love to hear our subscribers give us their feedback on this. How do you feel about it? >> I'm sure we'll get a we'll get their reaction >> especially to your comment there Salem at the beginning here. All right, let's move ourselves along. Uh, you know, we talked about religion. Well, let's talk about government. So, our next story is about anti-doomer push back. So, the White House had an executive order just ready to go to announce AI regulation. Uh, they had a signing ceremony all planned with all the tech CEOs were invited and it got killed like hours before it was supposed to happen. Uh, Elon Zuckerberg, David Saxs all pushed back hard on the executive order. They

[00:22:00] called it a doomer regulation. The order would have let the government review all AI models before they released to the public. Uh even though it was technically voluntary uh as an executive order to have those models uh reviewed, David Saxs argued, I think rightfully so, that it was a slippery slope to eventually mandatory licensing. Trump pulled it last minute. He said it, you know, he didn't like certain aspects of it. Uh it looks like the anti-regulation coalition guys is just flexing their political muscle here. Thoughts on this, Alex? >> The specific specific push back was uh you know 90 days of government slowdown before a model comes out and the industry was like one two weeks is all you need. Uh and I think Trump was on the side of well we can't slow down no matter what. Uh so if there's any risk of this reducing our competitiveness versus China, we got to we got to table this and then figure it out. Also, I think that the the industry would like to self-regulate and self police and get together with itself, you know, because

[00:23:00] anything that moves into federal hands is immediately going to turn into >> this happened in the gene editing back in the 80s. I remember I was at the Whitehead Institute at MIT and uh there was the Oyomar conferences where all the gene editing you know this is when the first restriction enzymes were coming out and the the cover of magazines were like uh you know uh you know Hitler youth and uh and >> and people were obsessed with clones. It's why Star Wars had the Clone Wars and Eugenics and Star Trek. >> And what happened I just watched that episode with my son in the original Star Trek about eugenics with uh uh Khan. Yes. >> And what happened was the the industry got together and they created the P1, P2, P3, P4 uh structure and self-regulated very effectively without the government. >> 40 years we've not seen a major accident. >> Yeah. pretty pretty extraordinary. >> Although I mean part part of the goal was as I recall from the original asyomar also to avoid germline editing

[00:24:02] of humans and that's now happening. >> Yes. >> So it maybe the maybe one of the morals of a syllar is doesn't prevent it indefinitely but maybe it has the ability to slow down progress by a few decades. >> Well also AI is improving itself at an incredible rate and so only AI can keep up with AI from here forward. So that's a little bit different in the analogy, but I think that's part of the industry push back on this is well, if you set up an old school regulatory body with a bunch of experts that are meeting once a quarter, how's that going to keep up with the pace of change of AI? We need to rethink that, you know, right out of the gate like how how are we going to use AI as a tool in helping to regulate AI? >> Boom. I can I go ahead? >> Yeah, just a quick rant here. Look, this is not a regulator not regulate thing. The problem is you have to have adaptive governance. You have to have like real-time audits and sandboxes and and disclosure and accountability layers. Uh David, your point is so accurate, right? You cannot have uh linear regulation of

[00:25:01] an exponential technology. A regulatory model cannot keep up with AI model cycles. You need guardrails that move at software speed, not committees that that move at like fax speed. >> Yeah. Part of the problem with 90 days, remember that estimates vary between the the time delta between western frontier models and Chinese frontier models. There are estimates that they could be as close as 3 months and as far behind as 8 months. I've seen a variety of estimates and a variety of different benchmarks. But 90 days, 3 months, that that is the time difference potentially between the US and China. So I think to the extent that this is a race to the finish line of the singularity, I I don't think we can afford 3 months of potential delay. >> Yeah, the US is choosing speed over some version of safety. Uh and what's interesting here is if you guys remember like a year ago, the doomers had a lot of momentum and the pendulum has swung full to the right where the anti-doomer coalition now is saying no, we got to go move as fast as we can. And the time

[00:26:01] between models, we've seen it shrink from, you know, two years to a year to 3 months to to what is it now, Alex? A month maybe. >> Anthropic increments now are once per month. >> Yeah. >> And they're going to get shorter. And so in some sense, whatever executive, whatever presidential administration we're going to have in the White House when this is happening, it's the White House that we have right now, I think, at the present rate. So any politicization of AI regulation, it's basically unless barring some dramatic and un uh unanticipated slowdown in AI progress, the executive that we have right now is the executive supervising AI regulation potentially for the future Litecom. >> Yeah, that's totally I want to I want to re-emphasize what Alex just said because so many of my friends in academia are thinking, hey, you know, there's another White House 2 years, two and a half years from today. too late. >> Way too late. Like you got to you got to think about what are we going to do within the current framework to set up

[00:27:01] AI for long-term success of humanity. Don't think about presidential elections as a factor. It's not it's not a factor. This is all going to happen in the next year or two. >> It's folks, I I'm going to it's irrelevant. It does not matter. Look, if you had one cycle of 90 days where the government slowed it down and that everybody else jumped ahead, you're going to be forced to recant that and all you've done is put yourself behind. I that's it's it's just not a >> that is I I agree with you Slay. I mean that is I think in some sense what happened with pause AI to the extent PU AI friend of the pod max had any impact at all on the space it might on margin have slowed open AI down slightly which allows other frontier labs to catch up which ultimately exacerbates the race condition >> talking about speed let's jump into the next story uh there's a brand new coding benchmark called uh deep or deep software engineering uh that result the results here are pretty wild gpt 5.5 scored 70% % meaning it can solve seven

[00:28:00] out of 10 hard real world software engineering tasks completely on its own. Uh Claude Opus 4.7 scored 54%. And then there's everybody else. It's a massive cliff, right? Everyone else, Gemini, Kimmy, uh Deepseek dropped below 32%. Uh the Deep Suite isn't measuring minor challenges. Uh these are tasks that require editing 668 lines of code across seven files. A startup called Data Curve built this specifically because the old benchmarks are broken. Models are basically benchmaxing on them. Alex, let's go to you first on this. How significant is this? >> This too will saturate. Uh it's it's delightfully retro in some sense that based on their announcement. It's there's much more hand coding of the eval within deepswu versus say venture or some of the other benchmarks that are now so widely used and so widely known that models have essentially saturated

[00:29:00] their performance. But I want to caution again GPT 5.5 on XI reasoning at 70% this too shall saturate and probably in the next few months. So I I think in in some sense it's charming and delightfully retro that incrementally more hand coding of held out code bases and tasks on those code bases can get us a little bit more of a spread between Frontier models. But this is going to saturate in the next few months just like anything else maybe at most. We've spoken about the fact that coding has become the single most important uh capability that these frontier labs and I'm I'm actually just kind of shocked and surprised that first of all GPT 5.5 is is jumped ahead of Claude uh and second how far behind everybody else is. >> I use these models dayto-day uh and I I should say as we've just gone to recording here Opus 4.8 8 was just announced. So maybe there will be a little bit of leaprogging, but I I use both GPT 5.5x high and opus 4.7 on a

[00:30:00] daily basis. And I will say 4 or rather 5.5x high especially with slash goal is a stronger model in practice anecdotally. >> Dave, yeah, I I also use them day-to-day and this matches my experience. But what's really interesting to me is that if you look at the other metrics, we bench pro the prior one, uh, cloud 4.7 opus is slightly higher than GPT 5.5 on that benchmark. And so this is this is really really important for for OpenAI. Like if if I look at the actual recruiting of great talent, uh, two people that I know really well, Shane Long Pre from MIT and Tobin South from Stanford just joined Anthropic and they're starting this week. Those are two of the best guys that you would ever want to attract to your company. So, I think OpenAI has lost a lot of its mojo in the lawsuit, in the defection of a lot of key people. um they have a window of opportunity now to to get that mojo back using this benchmark as the as the turning point.

[00:31:02] But if they don't take a ton of that money that they just raised and use it to recreate their thought leadership and their cool factor, >> you should be calling X-priseze tonight and saying, "We want to figure out how we use a billion dollars or$2 billion dollars to, you know, do what Daario is doing. go visit the pope or or you know create new benchmarks or create write white papers that talk about how this is going to benefit humanity the way Daario is doing or show up in Davos and have a debate with Demisabas on the world stage. All those things Daario is running away with right now and the result of that is that Shane and Tobin >> are they want to be where the singularity happens and they want to be in a place that is guaranteed to be good for the world and not bad. >> Well Sam give me a call if you want to do that. A billion dollars in next prize would be awesome. Wait, much better podcast than certain other podcasts. >> Selene, go ahead. >> I thought here was where the singularity was happening. But anyway, okay. I've got two or three points. One is, you

[00:32:00] know, it's really powerful to note here that that that algorithms aren't just optimizing workflows, they're actually becoming the workflow. Right? So, every organization should be asking which part of your business are really software loops hiding inside bureaucracy. And and this is what's going to it's going to cause enterprise adoption to be very slow for some of this and but then it's going to be all of a sudden because coding agents at some point will become very very reliable and the cost of rewriting inter internal processes collapses. It goes back to Alex you asking the important question what's the fossil viable theory around this new organizational singularity idea. Well it would be that the singularity didn't happen. it would be that we don't have domain collapse that legacy hierarchical companies outperform AI native firms and I think the signal is going the other way in a in a good way. Well, the the other stat that that is not showing up on this chart when you use um Opus 4.7 to solve the exact same problem, it burns twice as many tokens as GPT 5.5

[00:33:01] uh to get basically the SL the same or slightly worse result. And at the same time, you see Anthropics revenue going through the roof. But 4.7 is so verbose compared to 4.6. And for whatever reason, GPT 5.5 is not. It didn't it didn't just start babbling incessantly. And so I don't know what the cause is in 4.7, but you can see it in the underlying data behind this chart. It literally takes twice as many tokens consumed to get to the same result, which means it's twice as expensive to get to the same result. One key shout out here to everybody listening here is software is becoming a commodity and taste right your taste as a creator is becoming the moat. You know anyone can build software at near zero cost and the competitive advantage shifts to your domain expertise your design taste. Uh and you know it used to be you had to be a coder first uh and a designer or have an opinion second. It's the other way around now. I would

[00:34:00] generalize that perhaps and not necessarily a huge fan even of the notion of a moat in the singularity but I I would say by the way diminishing across all boards right >> yeah abundance isn't necessarily fully compatible with moes uh if anything maybe they're they're fundamentally at odds moes are the form of scarcity but I would say it's generation in particular that's becoming abundant and differentiation right now can come from verification of what is generated for maybe the next few years. Not 100% convinced that verification itself is any sort of truly long-term differentiation or even if the the sense of long-term differentiation in era of true abundance even makes sense. Well, and that's the Elon bet, right? We talked about that last pod where Elon is going to race to having the most compute and the most compute in space on the assumption that these models will recreate themselves in their next generation very easily. So if if his partnership with Anthropic holds up and he has access to their best models, he

[00:35:00] can use it to create the next model that runs on his hardware. Peter, is it worth just dwelling on that for a minute because you and I had a back and forth with Elon on X about that in the past few days. I think you you you said something uh to to the effect of uh following our past discussion about Grock being quote unquote on life support and then Elon I think responded to you saying something like well that that maybe it may be true that Grock I'm paraphrasing it may be true that Grock has fallen behind somewhat but I'm never going to give up never. Uh and I think I I responded like this is good. We want lots of competition at the frontier. We don't just want uh basically a duopoly between open AI and anthropic and we we want Grock and other non-open AI non-anthropic models to be very competitive at the frontier since ironically open AI was formed in part by Elon to make sure that the world didn't collapse to a singleton led by Demis and DeepMind. Yeah, I was commenting that his move to become a hyperscaler was uh

[00:36:01] was a smart move and less dependence on on building his own frontier models, but uh you know he's not going to give up on anything, >> right? Nor nor should he. I think it's so important to have good competition. Yeah. >> Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsiz impact on every aspect of our lives. How we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health. Helping you prevent heart disease is one of the key things. I'm here with Dr. Don Mucalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it? >> It really has, Peter. When my daughter was five, my husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so, this is a topic that is one that I am missiondriven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50% of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs. Silent killer, >> no shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing. >> No silent killer. >> They just don't wake up in the morning. >> They don't wake up. And so, you know,

[00:37:00] AI, this is our mission to advance science to try to help to one day democratize wellness, we know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT and geography with AI analytics, we are actually finding that 88% of people coming in have detectable coronary artery disease. But Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23% of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone. And this is the plaque that we must intervene with with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations. >> So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. you can know and it's your obligation to know. So check it out at fountainlife.com/peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. Uh so this chart is one of my favorites. It demonstrates Jeban's paradox. We've

[00:38:01] talked about this a number of times. I just want to use this to help everyone listening really understand this. It's playing out in real time. What we're seeing here is since late 2024, the price of AI tokens has dropped 75% from roughly $2 per million tokens down to 50, right? Uh and what's happened to the demand? It's exploded. Uh we were basically at you we've gone basically from 0 to 25 trillion tokens per month. Uh this is the exact same pattern that's played out in compute with bandwidth genomic sequencing. uh when the cost of intelligence drops, people don't use it less, they use it radically more. This is abundance in action. It's demonetization and democratization. And just, you know, again, look at this chart uh and understand this. We're going to be seeing this with uh robotic labor. As the price drops, it's going to be used every place. Uh any comments on this, Jens? >> Well, the numbers in this chart are

[00:39:00] really important. So if you can't see it right now, Jeb Jevans paradox was invented uh in England in the 1800s when coal burning got twice as efficient uh to try and save coal. Uh and then coal consumption went up by three or 4x in response. So you actually used more coal even though you're trying to save coal. These numbers are just redefining Jeban's paradox. The cost is down by a factor of three from a buck 50 a million tokens down to 50 cents per million tokens. But the use is up by about 30 to 50x on this chart. So the price is coming down but nowhere near at the rate that the demand is going up. And I I think that demand is understated because it's sold out. Like if we had capacity to generate more tokens that would be even higher. So so this is like Jeban's paradox on steroids. This is this is the ultimate Jebans paradox. I think in some sense the the the question I would be asking is what is the right unit to be measuring here? Tokens are so mushy the

[00:40:02] meaning of a token. Dave and I and I were on a panel uh pretty recently discussing this as well. Tokens can can depend on the encoding scheme. Tokens can depend on the amount of intelligence density on the underlying model that is is being pre-trained on those tokens. So, I I'm not thrilled with looking at token prices in general, even though yes, they this tells a Jeans story. I would really rather that we settle as a civilization on some sort of price. I I could talk my own book uh and say it looks like GPU compute pricing, but I think we really do need some unit measure of maybe not even just compute, but intelligence in general. I I think GPU compute site to or financial interest is is a great start but we need some way to know like what is going to be the unit of currency in a post super intelligent future and tokens I don't

[00:41:00] think are it. >> I mean maybe it's the idea that cognition is becoming abundant rather than tokens becoming cheaper and and hang your hat on that side of that equation which is what I think >> we need a metric. >> How do you measure the how do you measure the abundance? >> I don't know. >> It's it's increase in GDP and other metrics. We'll go create a benchmark on this. >> Call to action for the audience. Help us do a better job of measuring abundance. >> Yeah. The the prediction right now uh and this is from Gartner uh is that inference on a trillion uh parameter LLM will cost 90% less uh by 2030 than it did in 2025. I mean the only thing we know is that the prices of accessing intelligence is coming down and the power of that intelligence is increasing orders of magnitude. >> By the way, I used an AI to look up whether it's Jevans paradox or Javon's paradox and it turned out to be you guys are right. It's Jevans paradox. >> We have some AIs on the on the show here. >> Uh all right, let's move ourselves

[00:42:00] along. Uh here's a a super fun conversation. It's it's the revenues for these models are exploding. Let's talk about money. So, OpenAI just did $5.7 billion in a single quarter. Uh, Chat GPT is now to $95 million weekly active users. They haven't hit their billion yet, but they will. It's more than Instagram. Their coding agent, Codeex, has 2 million users, and it's becoming a real revenue engine. We've talked on the pod a lot about going from consumer focus uh to coding focus and they've they've done that fairly quickly, right? I mean, over the last 3 four months, they've shifted their revenue base. Uh but here's where it gets crazy. In a related story, Joseph Jax from OSS Capital is projecting that Anthropic could surpass Alphabet's total revenue by 2028. We're talking about going from $9 billion in revenue to potentially two trillion by 2030. That's the prediction. Uh, and if that's even directionally

[00:43:00] right, this is the fastest wealth creation ever in human history. >> I had to sit I had to sit and look at this for like three minutes. That just blows my mind that Anthropic could exceed Alphabet's revenues. That's just a staggering commentary. The the thought that occurred to me is just like every company in the world needs needed a cloud strategy, you need an AI strategy. >> Yeah. >> You need a comput strategy too. I mean, if you if you look at the fact that, >> you know, the the profit levels of anthropic are going through the roof, but they can change the pricing model instantaneously. You just by by 4.7 being more verbose, they've effectively doubled their revenue per user. They can also throttle the rate at which the tokens are generated to to make the value of a subscription account effectively lower and and the margins higher. So, it's a really weird product. Yeah. It's like, you know, usually when you buy something like a laptop or a glass of water, you you have a fixed volume that you bought. You know, you know what you got. This is such an amorphous weird product. You know, it's it's very very slippery. Uh so, yeah, as

[00:44:01] an enterprise, you got to really really hunker down and and reserve your compute and decide exactly which models you've contracted for. And I think companies should be signing long-term contracts. And they're all afraid to, but I think you have to. You got to you got to figure out your 5year strategy now before everything is sold out. >> I would maybe add I think I think there's a quiet technical revolution here behind all of the business stories and yes the switch from the pivot by open AI from consumer to enterprise and all of that. the the deeper I think technical story is there's a sea change that I I think I'm at least seeing in the pivoting over from call them generalist reasoning agents in general to generalist tool using and codegen coding agents to the point where codeex I I think codeex becomes probably the mainline agent/model that openai offers like that that becomes the new baseline in the same sense if if you think back to the GPT3 3 days and the pivot which

[00:45:00] was then I think somewhat revolutionary and in contrast to today actually appeared in uh in archive style papers first rather than appearing in products and papers later of the move to instruct post-trained models. So remember in the beginning like this is on anttogyny recapitulating fogyny. Uh in the beginning we had pre-trained models and they were good. Uh and then we discovered fast forwarding that if you could fine-tune pre-trained models on instruction following. You could get orders of magnitude in capability improvements without actually needing to scale compute. And that was an amazing discovery. >> Ontology does what to what? Can you repeat that and explain those terms in a second here? >> Yeah, I'm frantically looking up. >> Okay, drop dropping a footnote for Selium. So, dropping a footnote on anttogyny >> and all all over the rest of the world too, by the way. >> Anttogyny recapitulates fogyny. This is like this cliche from biology 101 that

[00:46:01] if you look at the development of a human embryo over time you observe that like there's a reptilian phase and an amphibious phase like and then early mammals that that basically the development of a human embryo recapitulates the evolutionary history of all the species that preceded homo sapiens. Anttogyny recapitulates fogyny. And those of you who are pregnant with a baby, look at those early sonograms and >> enjoy enjoy their tails while they last. >> Exactly. >> Because they they do have tails. >> Um so similarly uh by analogy if you look at the way training, pre-training, mid-training, post-training scaffolding is done right now in the frontier models of today. That entire pipeline I would argue recapitulates the history of the evolution of the models themselves. You can you can see it now a fourhorse race and can anyone even possibly catch up and along those lines uh what we're starting to see is and

[00:47:01] Dave you made this point before uh I think Anthropic actually raised their enterprise prices right uh open AI is offering tiered pricing uh Google you know Gemini flash undercut everyone by 50 to 80% it's going to be a performance versus cost uh and they can turn those knobs But where's everybody else? Where's Meta, right? Um, it it really feel I think XAI is going to come back. I think I think Elon will come back along with cursor with something that's super powerful, but it really feels like just a four-h horsese race with an inability to catch up. What do you do you think anybody can can >> disagree? Can I say why? >> Yeah, please. >> We in the early days of the web, nobody was going to be Yahoo. Then nobody was then Google came along. Then nobody was going to be Google. Then Facebook came along. uh I think we'll find people researchers that have different approaches that will world models could be a very viable candidate to leaprog where we are currently today. So I think

[00:48:01] there's there's hidden uh research labs. Uh look at uh you know people thought there's no way you can do anything with with uh against Nvidia and look at what Serbs is is doing right. I think we're going to see a constant leaprogging and and incumbents are need to be watching out for that. Um the way that the internet folks won and stayed winning was they would find the breakthrough startups and then just acquire them as quickly as possible. >> I wonder what I think. >> I think the same thing will happen. Alex, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. on Ilia or otherwise? >> Both. Both. >> Uh, it's it's been publicly reported at this point that what Ilia is working on is building a crop traded hedge fund. >> That's out there that that that's out there in public reporting at this point. >> I thought he was building a a scientific super intelligence >> to to do prop trading >> or that's I should say that's the publicly reported rumor that's out there at this point. >> Yeah. Yeah. That came up after our Ben Horowitz interview. remember that we had

[00:49:00] that that postgame wrap-up where we're reading the tea leaves on this the valuation and the you know all the rumors and yeah it does look like that's the case but that's not as weird as it sounds because any machine that quietly generates huge amounts of profit can then be used to buy lots and lots of compute which can then be used for self-improvement recursive self-improvement. So that doesn't mean he's not building safe super intelligence too. It's just a different way to kickstart the cash flow. Yeah, we've got a bit of a race going on between Leopold's operation and Ilia's operation potentially. >> I am curious, gentlemen, uh, and Alex to you again. Do you imagine a dark horse could come out and just blow away uh, these frontier labs? It's possible, but I think the contingency where it happens requires I I think the easiest contingency where that happens is if we get to the end of the algorithmic rainbow and discover the perfect algorithm for AI and it's so so obvious uh and so transcendent that

[00:50:00] anyone can implement it without needing a staff of frontier AI researchers. However, at that point, I think it then comes down to compute and having the compute to run it at scale. And you see already the frontier labs verticalizing down into the compute layer maybe preparing for the eventuality as as you see from some folks including Noam Brown at OpenAI who are arguing maybe the model weights don't matter that much anymore. Maybe it's all about the compute for reasoning and inference time. In which case maybe the question itself doesn't make sense and maybe the question transforms into who has the most compute under their direct control. >> Yeah, I think I think two two things. One of them I think Elon is right and and I think the cerebrous observation is right on target. What'll happen next is algorithms will be discovering new algorithms and then if you win the race to either the Terrafab or to the chip that's just fundamentally better LS cerebrus then you have a massive massive surge of growth and then control of the compute determines the biggest player.

[00:51:01] But but the implication of the question is hey there's a four- horse race. one horse is going to win a race and get a get a trophy. But I don't see it that way. You know, normally in a market, you're all you're all competing with each other to win the iPhone market, to win the laptop market. But here, this is the future of all humanity. It's going to be massive expansion. So, I think it's very likely that all players that are in the middle of this get bigger and bigger and bigger. So, we're just debating who's going to get the biggest of the big. >> A rising tsunami lifts all boats. If only we had the predictive engines to get us there. And that's our next story here. So, Deep Mind just built an AI system called Green Tree >> that can predict the future as well as the best humans on Earth. Uh they're called super forecasters. these uh these superhuman forecasters the top 2% of human predictors who according to Philip Tetllock uh can has uh 30% more accurate than the CIA analysts uh with classified

[00:52:00] intelligence. So on March 15th AI hit parody with the super forecasters for the first time. Uh let me say that again. An AI can now predict as good uh geopolitical events, economic trends, political outcomes as the absolute best human minds. Uh the implications for finance, insurance, and governance are massive. We talked about this on a recent pod where these uh predictive engines were getting close uh to these super forecasters and now they've gotten parody. Uh the implications here are insane. And Dave, you you spoke about this. >> Well, I mean, why is this surprising? Like, if if you look at weather forecasting, the idea that you would forecast the weather without a computer is utterly insane, right? There's so many different variables. >> Feel my joints feel. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I feel Yes. The barometer on the wall that's telling me a storm is coming. Like, come on. So, why would that not apply to all forms of forecasting? Of course it of course it does. So, the the big unlock here, though, is assimilating unstructured

[00:53:01] data. You know, people who worked in stock market forecasting at Wellington or Fidelity for the last 20 years would always tell you that the computer cannot compete with me because I'm reading these research reports and there's so much nuance in the research reports. It just doesn't show up as database structured data. Now, with the LLM, all the unstructured data can suddenly be quantified. But it has, you know, a million token window, context window, but the ability to assimilate what, 10,000, 100,000, a million times more information than any human stock picker, any human forecaster. So, it's got such a massive competitive advantage that even if it's not as brilliant as you in geopolitics or whatever, it doesn't matter. It has so much more capacity that in those domains, it's going to outperform. And then, of course, it's getting smarter every week, you know, every iteration. Let's talk about let's talk about the implications right financial markets governance insurance I mean all of these things I mean massively impacted because it's you know

[00:54:00] right now it's parody uh inside the next year you know it's going to be available to everybody so in the financial markets Dave you mentioned this last time right this is uh the disruption of hedge funds uh in governance you know if AI predicts a policy is going to fail uh do you pass it anyway uh you know insurance you know traditional insurance models break when outcomes become predictable. >> Yeah. All the above. All the above. But, you know, we're in kind of a golden moment right now where when I talk to my agents all day, you know, I've got about 170 operating on my screen here. They make some really stupid choices. I mean, really, really bizarre, odd choices. And so, the role of the human in the loop is still critically important. So we're we're in a window here and I don't know if it'll last 5 years or one year, but we're in a window right now where the perfect synthetic human working with many agents is still better because all the reports want to say the AI is better than the human or the human is better than AI. But the reality is the human and the AI working together are far far

[00:55:00] better than either one by itself. And so there's a window here to take advantage of that. But yeah, you know, if the AI says, "Yeah, this is a terrible idea." Are you going to overwrite it? Well, probably not. You you have to read what it's writing, study it, and make sure that you you know something that it doesn't know, but it's it's probably it's probably picked up on something that you overlooked. >> Look, we're we're almost 30 years into Kasparov being beaten by Deep Blue. So, we've got 30 years in chess history of this. And right now, the best chess players are a human being with an AI. Uh not one on the no neither on their own can do it. The combination is positive. uh the combination is the best and I think that's going to continue for a whole bunch of domains. >> I want to say something. Yeah, I'd like to say something new here. Pre previously commented on psycho history, Azimov, Harry Seldon, all of the implications for being able to predictively model the future of humanity. I I want to though follow the dictim invert always invert and talk a

[00:56:00] bit about retrodiction. So if we're amazing and I should probably also add forecast bench is this really neat benchmark that is is fully autonomous. It uses a bunch of templates to enable without human involvement AIs to predict say changes to Wikipedia and other public event recording websites. Uh where I'd like to go with retrodiction though is to say and I'm I'm invoking the spirit of Nick Bostonramm here. If we have the ability, if AIs, strong AIs have the ability to predict future human events, I would expect them also to be very strong at retrodicting past human events. And at that point, someone has to ask the question. So, so I'll be the one to ask the question. Is should this increase our posterior confidence in Nick Bostonramm's simulation hypothesis? For the record, I'm not a fan of the simulation hypothesis. I think there are variety of very good reasons to discount

[00:57:00] it. However, uh Nick's basian argument was if humanity reaches the point where we build very competent ancestor simulations, then we should increase our likelihood that we ourselves might be living in one. And so I I'll just flag if AIs are achieving super forecasting ability, then they're probably also achieving super retrodiction ability. And if we're good basians, we should probably on margin increase the probability that we're living inside an ancestor simulation. >> Wait, this is the first time I've heard this. You don't think we're living in a simulation? >> No, I don't think so. I >> I think 100%. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I put it I think on that one. >> I I think we're living in an nth generation simulation. Um but that seems unlikely to I'll give ju just in interest of time maybe my 22nd capsule reason. a bunch of different reasons, but my my favorite reason is why we're probably not living inside some sort of recognizable computer simulation other than all the physicsoriented reasons. It is more of a lowercase aanthropic reason

[00:58:01] that it it's just it it's too fine-tuned an explanation to the paradigm of the moment. We build lots of simulations. So, it it would be akin to asking 100 about 100 years ago, don't we live inside some sort of complex electromechanical machine? or maybe several thousand years ago, don't we live on the back of a turtle uh or something like that? It it's too overfitted, I would argue, to the paradigm of the moment to be plausible. >> Do you think it's coincidence we're living at this exact moment in human history point of transition? >> No. An anthropic argument, well, an anthropic argument, again, lowercase A, not capital A, would be this is a very natural time to be asking the question, why are we at this pivotal moment in time? So, it's selection bias. >> Mhm. Mhm. I resemble those remarks. Um, all right. Uh, moving us along, let's jump into the conversation around jobs and the economy because it's getting murky. Um, you know, over the next two stories, I want to hit this. The first

[00:59:00] story tells us the numbers. Uh, since the beginning of this year, just 5 months now, we've had 143 134,000 tech workers have been laid off. And according to the consulting firm Mercer, uh their global talent uh uh trends report, 99% of CEOs expect AIdriven layoffs in the next two years. Uh March was the worst month in tech layoffs since the pandemic. And then here comes Jensen Wang, uh the guy who's making all the GPUs out there, calling this a lazy narrative. He says, "CEOs are uh blaming AI just to sound smart. And when you dig into the data, it's more nuanced than the headlines." And the real question isn't how many jobs are disappearing. Uh it's who's being affected by these jobs and what are they doing next. We'll get into that story. Uh the second story here, uh is Sam Alman walking back his comments about the AI jog job apocalypse. Uh and he did something remarkable. Uh he admitted he was wrong.

[01:00:02] Uh the CEO of OpenAI who spent last year warning about the mass white collar displacement now says quote I don't think we're going to have the kind of job apocalypse that some of the companies in our space are talking about. Obviously he's talking about anthropic there. Uh and he says he's delighted to be wrong. In his comments, he said he quote tried delegating his own email and Slack to AI and then went back to doing it manually because quote, "We really do care about our interactions with people." Uh, meanwhile, Dar Amade is also making some uh pivots here. So, the question to you, Dave, is this a coincidence or is this happening for OpenAIthropic because they're both about to do a trillion dollar IPO? >> Yeah. So here's what's really happening under the covers. Uh they legitimately thought that job loss would be massive because of automation driven by AI, but

[01:01:00] we were always predicting that by 2030 it would turn the corner because the abundance created by all this AI is going to create massive massive new gains and we'll we'll create roles that fit those. So so it was always going to be temporary between 2026 and 2030 that there'd be pitchforks in the streets, mass uprisings, problems everywhere. as it's playing out. Uh I I think there's some job loss, but the green field opportunities are growing so much quicker than anyone ever predicted. And so now that window of loss is actually relatively narrow. And now the AI companies with their massive new fundings are going to actually actively try to prevent job loss. And so because the GPUs are so constrained, we're focused m much more on coding and a few other use cases, much less on putting every artist out of business. Uh and so the job loss effect by design more than anything else just to prevent massive disruption and public backlash. They're

[01:02:00] for they're focusing their efforts on areas that are green field and actually creating net new value in the world and net new jobs in the world and not on just automating everything away. And I'm seeing that directly at Vesmark, you know, where I'm the chairman. Um, you know, 400 people doing uh white collar automation, account reconciliation, back office work. Uh, a year ago I was thinking about half of these jobs might go away. Now we're having no trouble automating things, but it's all becoming margin and we're keeping everybody. Um, but where it's really really hitting everyone is in no new hiring. >> Yeah. >> And you're seeing that the college graduates are in a in a really tough spot. >> That's the painful one right now. The Dallas Fed put out a report in January of this year uh saying that employment de uh decline correlated with AI exposure only in the younger workers. Older workers and high uh in high exposure jobs showed no significant decline. Basically, what's going on? It's a hiring freeze, not mass layoffs.

[01:03:00] >> Yeah, that's exactly right. You summarized it far better than I did. >> Yeah. Well, no, >> I think I've got a couple of thoughts here. First, I I'm totally with Jensen here. You don't blame AI. There's a lot of bad strategy out there and I think C CEOs are covering up their their layoffs by blaming it all on AI. It's such an easy place to land. Uh but the there's something unbelievable happening on the job side and the solarreneurship side that is un is unprecedented. Okay, one is we're creating more startups than ever at like a 10 or 15% level yeartoear. We're 25% higher in startups quarter to the same quarter last year. 25%. Okay, the third stat that I came across that blew my mind is the US now has six times more startups in Europe. Okay, that's just a staggering number. And I want to relate that to jobs for a second. If you go back over the last 50 years, 100% of new jobs have come from startups and early stage companies. 100%. Big companies are becoming bigger, but they're also becoming more efficient

[01:04:01] and reducing the number of people do the same amount of work. All new job creation has come from startups. We should be just throwing everything at this and therefore because it's so easy to become an entrepreneur today and I want to be careful to because we get this push back a lot. Not everybody can become an entrepreneur. Yes. But everybody can use AI to create their own agency out in the world. And that's more that that is merging. So now all we're going to yes we're going to run companies our estimate with from the organizational singularity is that you should be able to run a company about 20% of the people on average than you did before. But we're going to create five or six times more companies. >> Yeah, really important point. You know, one of the challenges as these mass layoffs uh and there have been some large layoffs, right? We saw this with Cloudflare uh and with recently with Meta. The challenge is the CEOs who are announcing these layoffs are really doing it in a very dispassionate way. Um I I cannot condone the way they're

[01:05:00] communicating uh you know laying people off. uh what Mark Zuckerberg said recently, I don't have the quote here, or what the CEO Cloudflare uh said um in terms of you know uh you know who we're laying off and the reasons. I mean there needs to be some a little bit of compassion here because you're transforming people's lives in a negative fashion. >> I think a lot of like uh like Meta had a ton of UX engineers and that's one of the places that's been hit hardest. >> Yeah. But it's definitely disproportionate. But you'll see in the uh in the college enrollment, computer science peaked and is now coming down >> and but engineering is is still Yeah. dramatically. But engineering as a whole, you know, mechanical and biological is still skyrocketing and and so it's taking over. So So people are really quickly retooling their career ambitions toward like the real physical stuff like biology and mechanical, you know, for the data center buildout, for medical research driven by AI. And I think that's a really good thing

[01:06:01] >> because yeah, we had probably way too many UX engineers anyway. >> Um just just in terms of societal benefit, you know, what are people learning? What are people doing? >> I love this chart from Andre Harowitz. It's the other side of the job story you were just talking about. Uh and this is the one I find really exciting that solo founders are exploding. So A16Z's data shows that AI solar found solo founders in other words solo people creating an AI company on their own has doubled in the last quarter from 1500 to 3,000 up basically from zero 3 years ago and the nonAI solar founders hit over 5,000. These are you know people aren't just losing jobs um they're transitioning to starting their own companies. >> They're following their passion. >> Yes. Yes. and they're doing it alone because AI tools now give a single person the capabilities to to do that either on their own or with a small team. So, you know, connecting the dots here in the ear earlier story, coding agents are now at 70%. That plus layoffs

[01:07:03] equals solopreneur explosion. This is creative disruption happening in real time. Uh Salem, take it from here, please. Well, look, the the the big companies uh the coordination overhead in big companies means that they cannot sustain any kind of leverage over time. Um you spend more time coordinating activity than doing the activity. Uh who's the fellow that tweeted it's easier to build a product feature than to have the meeting about building the product feature. Right? That's like the reality of the world today. Therefore, uh all of the overhead big companies and take universities as one example, right? We uh the amount as universities have gotten bigger and bigger and endowments, the number of students has gone incrementally, but the number of admin to administer the students has gone up exponentially like >> we we we've got so much overhead. The healthcare industry is an exact example that will not sustain in a world where

[01:08:01] you could have an AI teaching a kid in one hour what they could learn sitting in a classroom for the whole day or when diagnosis goes to free which is pretty much the case today. Uh so at some point this is going to give that comet uh sorry asteroid is now hit. It's the intelligence asteroid. The big dinosaur the category of big companies will probably evaporate. The way we see it, you're turning from big companies into platforms, platforms into ecosystems, and you're breaking up into smaller and smaller units because this is why small teams will always outperform big teams. Uh there's a reason that um the the big goo Microsofts and Googles of the world did not build all of the cutting edge. They acquired Deep Mind, they acquired OpenAI, etc., etc. Anthropic is a rare example. Sorry, Outlier. This is going to be the defining uh operating model for the future is small teams radically outperforming and we're entering the most incredible Camber explosion of Darwinian evolution of this to way

[01:09:00] overuse the metaphor >> and >> can I just correct a potential misconception here too >> please >> if if you look at the data on successful companies 75% of them now are coming through some kind of an incubator or accelerator program uh and when we started investing that was only 6%. So that that's gone through the roof at the same time. So when people hear the word soloreneur, they might be visualizing a person in the cabin in the middle of Alaska, you know, working all by themselves. No one's around. It's depressing. That's not what actually is happening in that top left chart or that bottom bottom left chart for solo founders. They're in a very active, vibrant ecosystem of some sort. And at the bottom of the slide, you see the Gemini X-Prize. Um, that's an ecosystem of like-minded people talking, texting, slacking, communicating all day long, super super connected, super involved. So, your successful soloreneur is legally a single person entity,

[01:10:01] >> but they're highly connected like never before and they're part of some bigger bigger platform. So, just >> you learn lessons from each other. You you get the latest capabilities from each other. You support each other when things don't work out. You know, I just want to hit on this and we can put the website up on on the screen here uh of geminixprise.com. Uh we launched this $2 million hackathon with Google and and thank you to the team there. Uh and and the concept here is, you know, all of us are finding problems all the time and man, I wish someone would solve that. Well, guess what? You can solve that now. And this competition asks people to basically write up a a product or service idea in plain English. write it down in a Google doc, right? And then describe what is the, you know, what's the problem you're trying to solve? What do you think the solution could be? You can brainstorm this with your favorite large language model. And then the AI can code it up for you and help you design the

[01:11:00] marketing. And so this is a competition asking individuals or small teams uh to build something in three months. There's $2 million of prize money. And you know, we get a lot of push back and I've read it in the comments from our last episode alto together uh of saying, "Hey, you guys are are hanging out with entrepreneurs all the time. You are entrepreneurs. You can't expect me to be an entrepreneur. >> We live in an ivory tower. We only talk with other millionaires." >> And I I just want to say that my experience is that normal people are brainstorming and starting companies. And the a lot of this is self-limited thinking. Um, and I just want to encourage people to try. That's the only thing. Uh, please try. >> We've just released the organizational singularity claude skill for free. Go download it. Pick your passion and do it. I was smiling earlier cuz I remember when Milan was five, he was asked what kind of technology would he build and he came up with this thing called the hydro

[01:12:01] blaster which would be a thing a water cannon in front of your car that would blow other cars off the road. Um and they said what what what is this about? He goes, "My dad hates hates sitting in traffic." I designed this for him. I was just trying to match up with a with an AI trying to build that thing. I would also maybe if I might just add on the soloreneur point. There's a lot of hand ringing out there that pretends that this is somehow that having a quote unquote job is the historically normal state of affairs. It is not. It is a modern invention% >> largely attributable to the f to the first and second industrial revolutions. Historically, most people didn't have anything remotely comparable to what is currently called a job. Most people by like in the historic state of nature if we go back like two centuries or more most people didn't have anything remotely called that we would consider like a job as a cog in a large enterprise most large enterprises

[01:13:00] weren't large like they were pretty small by by comparison to today's standards is an artifact of a time and a place so if anything I would say it's highly unnatural highly unergonomic by historic standards for people to even have jobs and if anything this is more of a return if anything to the default state of human nature and some sort of historic equilibrium where everyone was self-determining their own future >> agency you know back yeah back in that time that era that Alex is referring to the federal government was about 4% of the economy >> and so you think about the independence like yeah you you lived on your own like you were your own thing that would be a good vision for where AI might be able to take us like you know self-determination self-sufficiency be wonderful >> empowered individuals >> our next story here is actually a call out to everyone listening to tell us how well is education preparing students I want to do a survey uh if you're a parent of a 13 to 18year-old high school

[01:14:01] student if you're a high school student or a college student or a teacher or working professional put up on the screen here a QR code and the URL is moonshots.com/servey tell us how well Is the educational system preparing you or your kids? Um what's your experience? What do you wish you had? I'm going to gather this data and report it back here on the pod. We'd like to understand what your thoughts are. Um you we talk about, you know, the educational system failing us. I'd like to get some more data. How is this affecting you and your kids? So, if you get a second here, moonshots.com/servey. Uh I think it's important to understand a reality check here. uh because uh the educational system, if in fact what we've been talking about on this pod that we're going to see uh this bumpy road for the next 2 to 8 years until we get through to a true state of abundance. Um you know, how do we get ready? How do we uh how do we survive

[01:15:00] this this turbulence and are we getting ready for the new economy that's heading our way? >> Thoughts? Yeah, I've got a bunch of thoughts here, but let me limit it to one paradigm. We have been doing education over the last couple of centuries. Industrial revolution I think per Alex's framing I think is exactly right. And we've been doing it on the supply side. Go get a go become deep in a skill entrepreneur. Oh sorry engineer, doctor, lawyer, accountant and go then you go to the job market to find demand for that skill. But it's all supply side driven. All our education systems designed to take a young child, train them through their early 20s to be ready for the job market. Small problem. We have no idea what a job looks like in 5 years. We don't even know what a job looks like in two years. So, what do we what are we teaching them? And Peter, I think you've and I talk about this a lot where you're flipping kids from that supply side where the halflife of a skill used to be like 30 years and now it's about 3 years. You need to flip them to the demand side. What problem do they want to solve? And then go find the

[01:16:00] techniques, capabilities, skills, technologies to solve that problem. And so that is such a radical shift for the educational system. very few educational institutions are going to make it over to the other side. We need a completely new cadre of schools. But that's the fundamental structural problem that you have to go from supply side to demand side. >> Yeah. And I just want to see, you know, do every does everyone listening agree with that? I'd love to get everybody's input. And by the way, feel free to share this survey with your friends who are not moonshot listeners. Uh and we'll come back with the data. We'll see what everyone truly feels. Uh cuz as a parent of two, you know, 15year-old uh you know, they're turn 15 next month, Seem yourself. Uh I I am super curious because I see a very dysfunctional educational system uh not getting our kids ready. Dave, any thoughts? >> Well, I think that particular age bracket is so geared to getting into college and getting into the right college and maximizing everything on

[01:17:01] your resume, your SAT scores, and your grades. it's all about like my college application and so that perpetuates a curriculum that's woefully out of date, but the the you know the AP exams and the SATs are are the same exact topics while what you should be learning is changing tremendously. And so that's that's a really broken age bracket right there. So I'm sure everyone will come back and say, "Yeah, this is totally messed up. What do we do?" Yeah, it's by the way I have, by the way, in front of me a little print out from Milan after I interviewed you, Peter, on what's the future of education. And I was just like, you you printed this out? Why couldn't you email this to me? How what how retro? >> How retro. >> 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

[01:18:02] 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 native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. >> All right, our next story. We're going to jump into a few uh space stories for the uh those of us who are space cadets. SpaceX just launched the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built. And Dave, we

[01:19:00] made this point before. This was designed and built by humans and not AIS. Uh, Starship V3 flew for the first time last week from a brand new launch site in Texas. I mean, it's incred. Brand new rocket, brand new engines, brand new launch site. The level and the speed at which SpaceX iterates is crazy. It carried 97,000 lbs to near Earth orbit to near orbit. Uh, that almost doubled the space shuttle carrying capacity. Uh, you know, that old vehicle. It's running on on Raptor 3 engines, each producing 250 to 280 tons of thrust, 20% more than the last version. Uh, and by the way, that's equivalent to about 70 747s at their takeoff uh thrust levels. SpaceX did lose the booster on landing, but that's the way SpaceX operates. They fly, they learn, they iterate. You know, SpaceX treats rockets like software. They ship, they test, they fail, they iterate. and losing uh the booster, you know, was another data point, not a

[01:20:01] failure. Uh they've already carried real Starlink prototypes to orbit. Uh this thing is doing commercial tests on its first flight. Alex, you were watching this. Uh what were your thoughts? >> I was watching it was riveting. So, I think the most exciting part for me was when uh when the the mission got to releasing Starlink satellites first, followed by a couple of so-called Dodger dog satellites, which are intended to be prototypes of the the next generation of Starlink satellites, version three or third generation Starlink satellites. And the Dodger Dogs had cameras and lights on them. And as they were being deployed out of the PEZ dispenser, they they were pointed back with their lights and their cameras back at the Starship. And it was just absolutely incredible watching from a view like a third person view perspective drifting away from the Starship, the the view after deployment. I think we're going to see so much of that. I'm I'm not even sure if that has precedent at this point, but it reminds

[01:21:01] me that we're about to enter an era uh and and in connection with with this entire mission test, SpaceX reminded the world that it has a program called Stargaze that is basically leveraging Starlink satellites with all of their cameras, not just dodger dogs looking back at Starship, but looking down at the Earth since they operate at a variety of altitudes. They're seeing everything, including all sorts of uh orbital debris and other objects, and they're sharing that information. And I I think it would be an ironic, but maybe not super surprising outcome if Stargaze ends up having a more dramatic impact on civilization than even just Starlink connectivity. >> Let's take a look at the video here. Uh this is rocket porn for all of us. Here's V3 launching. Beautiful vehicle. You know, I I spoke to Elon uh at the Breakthrough Awards and we made the comment that this is the most energy released by a human machine other than a

[01:22:01] nuclear bomb. >> Wow. >> Yeah. And here she is coming in for a landing over the Indian Ocean. Can't wait to see that captured and reused. Unbelievable. >> I think I think there's a really important point for entrepreneurs in there too. I I also was completely riveted by the quality of the video and also the MC's describing everything. And this is so Elon like anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur study what Elon did here. Getting those 4K cameras, the ones that are physically mounted on the ship to survive the launch and the heat. I mean, that's a lot of extra engineering that NASA probably would never do. But Elon so understands the value of of building morale and building a following and having a fan base buying the stock that he puts serious mental

[01:23:01] effort into the showbiz and every entrepreneur should study that. That's the winning formula because, you know, previously you didn't have a distribution pathway for all that content. Now, because of YouTube and X, anybody can can distribute their message. You don't have to go through CNBC. You don't have to go through Forbes. You can just go direct. So, you're crazy as an entrepreneur if you don't study what Elon just did there and then do your own version of it. >> You know, Dave, another point you made before and we've discussed is how Elon gets out publicly and he is the marketing engine for Tesla. He's the marketing engine for SpaceX and XAI. And if you're the CEO, an entrepreneurial CEO, you have to put yourself out there. You have to be the carrier of faith and of the story, right? >> The the turning point for me was when he when he did Saturday Night Live all those years ago. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, >> how does he of all people on the planet have time to go to New York and MC Saturday Night Live? And why why is he

[01:24:01] making that choice? Because he he doesn't do this stuff randomly, right? He he has more plans than anyone you'll ever meet. And so I'm like, huh, this was reinventing what it means to be a great entrepreneur. Yeah. Like like you said, put yourself out there, get your get your mission and your vision and your positive me message and your MTP. Make it really crystal clear, understandable, and then work on broadcasting it because that's how you're going to get great talent and it's also how you're going to attract capital. >> So, here's something that we've talked about in the pod before. I've I've predicted this as well as as you have, and this is from Koshi, the prediction market, showing a 50/50 odds that Tesla and SpaceX merge within the next year. I I personally put it at 100%. You know, think about what that company would look like. Electric vehicles, energy storage, solar, rockets, satellites, global internet, humanoid robots, you know, interplanetary exploration, all under one roof. We're talking about a potential $4 trillion entity initially.

[01:25:00] I could I could honestly see and full disclosure I'm a SpaceX and XAI investor, but I could see this being the first 10 trillion dollar company uh and moving to a hundred trillion dollar uh in the next 5 years. So, you know, given the current anti-regulation environment, in other words, the fact that the government is not overly regulating, uh I think that it's a clear path for for Tesla and SpaceX uh to merge. And the the key point is that, you know, Elon has voting control, super voting rights inside of SpaceX, SpaceX AI. Um, and with his insiders, I think it's 86% of the controlling vote. And, you know, he's suffered from having being a minority shareholder, you know, being disallowed to create the comp packages that uh that his board wants. Uh and so this in the merger gives him control back once again. >> Exactly right. And and just one more detail on that, Peter. Uh the 85% voting

[01:26:02] control that he has on the SpaceX side is 10 for one super voting shares. And so if he merged in Tesla, those would he has 20% voting control on the Tesla side, but those are one vote shares. And everybody has one vote shares. So the most likely merger is you you'd roll in all these one vote shares into SpaceX as the acquirer but maintain the 10 for one super voting shares uh that already exist on the SpaceX side. So then the combined entity he'd have you know 60 70 you know it depends on the valuations um but 60 70 80% voting control of the combined entity. So the only reason the cowi is 50% and not like 100% is one he needs the relative valuations to be similar or higher on the SpaceX side for that math to hold up and two there's a shareholder vote on the Tesla side that he doesn't control. >> He probably can't can't vote on that. >> Alex, >> so I I'll I'll expand on this theory a bit. So I've argued last time we discussed the possibility of one Elon company to rule them all. I pointed out

[01:27:00] that historically Elon has a history of using mergers as an opportunity to fail forward with Solar City for example famously litigated or XAI being acquired by SpaceX maybe arguably a a reverse acquisition. So, in my mind, the argument for Tesla and SpaceX to merge would be as a way for Elon to rescue maybe what he perceives as a sub-optimal governance situation for Tesla to to recover control of Tesla. I would point out one of the ways to make that more appetizing is if Tesla's valuation goes down over time. If Tesla were to to suffer, even though uh Tesla has a new comp package as well tied to autonomy, if Tesla's market value were to materially depreciate in the next year relative to SpaceX's post IPO valuation, that might at least in the short term make a SpaceX acquisition of Tesla good deal more appetizing to public markets.

[01:28:00] There there might be a bit of an arbitrage opportunity there. Not investment advice. Second point I I have I have to ask the question if and when this final Elon merger to to rule them all happens bunch of good reasons maybe having to do with IP and GPUs freely and porously changing hands between all the different entities. Is it going to be called X or do you think it'll have a different name? >> Well, E L N sounds good on the NASDAQ. Um, that might be uh conveniently another four-letter. Uh, >> but what what what do you think it'll actually be called? >> I I think X is his love and I think you're you're right. He may go towards that >> or just XXX. We'll see. >> Um, triple X. Yeah, >> quadruple X. So, interestingly, you know, I had dinner with Elon in the early days uh when SpaceX was up and operating and Tesla was going on and he was searching for a Tesla CEO. He really wanted someone to run Tesla daytoday so he could focus on SpaceX and he just

[01:29:01] never found anybody uh who he trusted with that company because it it meant a lot to him and this is a way for him to consolidate control and be the CEO of one company uh instead of splitting his his time. You remember uh uh Dave when we were with him at the Gigafactory in Austin uh and I think our our podcast went for like three and a half hours and he he start we started like 10:00 and went till after midnight sometime and his his son was there uh the entire time. Uh anyway, uh he was coming >> they're on a they're on a collision course. They're on a technical collision course. We're going to need a lot of Optimus robots for the Artemis colony and for the Martian colony. It's going to happen one way or another. Regardless of whether I think it's an organizational merger, they're already, I think, well on their way toward a technical merger. Um, the point I was going to make, Dave, was he'd come from, you know, one meeting to another meeting to another meeting. He's jumping to wherever the problems are, uh, to dive down deep and just being able to see it inside of one organization, I think,

[01:30:01] will will make his life a little more a little easier, a little more unified. All right. Well, he talked a lot actually about the overhead of context switching being a killer for him. Like he can solve any problem if he has time to get his head wrapped around it, but when you're jumping from 10 little things to 10 little things, you know, then you have to reset your brain and that's killing all your time. So, yeah, it' be a lot more efficient this way. This was a fun story released uh during the first or the second launch attempt. Uh Cryptobillionaire books SpaceX first private Mars flyby. So, the first private interplanetary mission to Mars has been booked, and the guy leading it might be the most interesting person you've never heard of. It's Chun Wang, uh, co-founder of one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools in China, controls 11% of Bitcoin's hash rate, travels via six different passports, lives part-time in the Arctic, uh, and get this, he follows Mars time, which is a 24-hour

[01:31:00] and 37 minute daily cycle. That's got to be tough. Uh he's already commanded SpaceX's Framm 2 mission. Uh first crew mission to go over the Earth's poles. Now he's taking a Starship around Mars. So sort of a a circumian uh trip. Uh a 2-year mission uh private citizens. He'll bring some other folks with him. Interplanetary flight. Uh let that sink in. Uh Alex, what are your thoughts here? >> I I like seeing this. I I I wish there were more examples. I remember also, although I think it fell apart in the end, uh wealthy Japanese business person planning to the mission around the moon. That didn't quite happen. I I like seeing private This is such a 2026 statement. I I love seeing billionaires flying to other planets. Uh I like it when that happens. I I like it even more if they fly to the other planet and then fly back in one piece. I think we'll see a lot more of it. Uh, and I I I'd like

[01:32:01] private missions to other planets as well. We haven't seen that at all to date, to my knowledge. I think we're going to see more of that. Uh, one can immediately fast forward the the recording to uh, a bunch of footstoppping and hand ringing about the the unfair asymmetries of billionaires getting to go on Mars flybys versus everyone else and how asymmetric the the interstellar or at least the interplanetary economy is. But I I think this is all under the category of good problems to have. And I would remind Jared Isaacman also another billionaire who was pioneering SpaceX missions. I think we want an entire class of billionaires and business leaders who were all eager to go on uh either cis lunar or lunar surface or Martian trips and back. I think building that level of awareness and capability in business leaders and then from there the entire population is only good for

[01:33:00] macroeconomic growth. So, here's the thing I want to I want to point out here that these individuals are spending a lot of money and taking relatively larger amounts of risk and they're enabling us uh to follow in their footsteps as the price comes down. I just had a webinar this morning for the abundance community uh with Philip Sakulo who heads private missions for SpaceX and uh you know when years ago I was co-founder of something called space adventures and we were negotiating and we represented the Russian space agency and sold tickets on soyos to go to space. The first ticket was 20 million. The prices uh rose quickly to about 75 million as the price of labor in Russia went up. Uh and Philip this morning was saying that on the Starship uh he's going to be offering flights to orbit. Um and Starship has 1,000 cubic meters. 1,000. It's three times larger than the

[01:34:01] space station in the uh in the volume that the humans will occupy. The price is going to come down to 20 million a flight. And then uh Alex, I think you'll appreciate this. I did the calculations on if you could electrically winch somebody from the Earth up to orbit. You know, it's mg >> space elevator >> mgh, right? Potential energy, and then accelerate them electrically to orbital velocity. And if you could buy that off of the grid at 7 cents a kilowatt hour, the price of launching you and your spacuit into orbit drops from $20 million down to $200. We have a we have a 200 bucks of electrical cost to winch you and accelerate you to orbital velocity. Right? So MGH1 half MB squ. Go to your favorite large language model, plug in those numbers, plug in your weight, add 100 kg for a space suit, you get the same numbers there. Um there's a price improvement curve that's going to be hitting and it will ultimately enable

[01:35:00] all of us to go to space and in the early days I don't know if you remember this uh Alex but Elon predicted the cost of a roundtrip mission to Mars. Do you remember the number he gave? >> I don't remember the original number. >> It was his goal is >> No, actually I'm sorry. in in the early days I I I do remember he was quoting the idea of I think low hundreds of thousands of dollars >> $500,000 for a roundtrip flight to Mars right so it's first principal thinking what's the cost of the fuel the efficiency as we get to you know to launch 500,000 satellites for or you know the orbital Dyson swarm you're launch an hour and when there are hundreds or thousands of starships launching the price comes down so thank you to the wealthy people taking the risk, putting the money in to get this going because it's going to benefit all of us in the final result. >> Yeah. Turn turns out that ivory elitist tower is actually quite beneficial for the development of the solar system. >> We're demonetizing and democratizing.

[01:36:00] >> Brad Brad Templeton called early adopters stupid people with too much money. >> Buy the iPhone 45 because it has 1.8 more features than the iPhone 44 and that drives the innovation and democratizes it for everybody else. Our final story here is Starlink announces plans for a gigabit lunar connectivity. Uh, Alex, let's go to you here. >> Yeah, I think this was always going to happen. You were the first in this episode, Peter, to mention Dyson Swarm, so I didn't have to. Thank Thank you for for running me on that. But I I I do think one of the architectural benefits of having Starlink in not just sun-synchronous orbit for AI compute, but in general is that as we Royal Wee, as SpaceX and other companies start to build out swarms of orbital compute and connectivity and bandwidth, not just in low Earth orbit, but also in cis lunar, lunar orbit, maybe L1, L2. It starts to

[01:37:00] create the beginnings of a fabric of an interplanetary internet which is something that we've talked about for decades. Vince Surf. Vince Surf was >> Vince Surf was like chief evangelist. He I think he coined the term even um and so the idea of interplanetary internet whereby we we sort of fully wire up or wireless up our solar system with nodes with like internet router nodes that are able to send packets of data and wire them around given that the solar system isn't a rigid body. I think we're we're about to take a step toward that in the form and SpaceX and Starlink put up some funny images online with the monolith from 2001 of space odyssey hosting a little Starlink uh uh dish on it. But I I think the future that we move to is we have a swarm as depicted on this slide. We have a swarm of compute in low Earth orbit. We have a swarm of compute increasingly in lunar orbit. And then we can create a fabric of connectivity

[01:38:02] between those forms >> around Europa orbits. Yeah. >> And the beauty is uh you know in the same style as modern cell phone protocols that can leverage multiple paths and multiple parallel paths to increase bandwidth. Having just a single telescope dish on Earth pointed at the moon that really limits our bandwidth. But yeah, >> I'm really pissed off if the cell signal on the moon is better than in my neighborhood. >> It may very well be. But not not only that, they're going to have laser connectivity. So, it's not just radio anymore. Imagine a whole swarm of satellites in LEO that all have laser cameras and laser pointers pointed at the moon and vice versa. The bandwidth is going to be tremendous. >> All right, here's our actual last story. Uh NASA administrator Jared Isaacman expects China to send a crude mission uh flyby in 2027. Here's his quote. The next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the moon, which

[01:39:02] will likely be in 2027, they will be tyonauts. Uh and America will no longer be the exclusive power to send humans into lunar environment. So, a little bit of the throwback to Apollo. How do we keep the NASA budget funded? We do it with competition. We can't let the Chinese get there first. >> FOMO. >> FOMO. Yeah. But of course, 2028, uh, we're going to start to see the United States heading towards the South Pole. Super excited for that. I And I love the fact that we're going to the South Pole and not just to a boring, you know, uh, equatorial landing site. >> You've got to go. Anyone who's watched For All Mankind knows, you have to go where the ice is. >> Yes. Ice and also the peaks of eternal light. There are two things in the south pole. There is permanently shadowed craters and as the moon was bombarded by comets and asteroids. Uh any water ice that landed on the surface of the moon sublimated immediately because it's in the sunlight. It goes from water vapor

[01:40:01] from ice to to gaseous water and it escapes because of the low gravity of the moon. But if those comets and asteroids happen to hit the south pole and get buried into a deep crater that didn't see the sunlight, uh ice accumulated there. But the other thing that's there is there are peaks, little mountain peaks that are seeing sunlight, you know, 30 lunar days of the month. So you can set up solar stations there. And of course, there'll be fusion stations there, too. >> Peter, I have to ask you for your prediction. When do you think you'll be able to take a vacation at the Aremis colony? >> You know, that's a great question because, you know, while I got the suborbital industry going with the first X-rize, >> you were there. >> Yeah. Well, you were. And you were there. >> Oh, I was there. Yes. >> Um, it was it was fantastic. And I really wanted to go into suborbital flight. I've got a seat on Virgin Galactic once they start flying. >> Maybe I have to go on Blue Origin, but I'm far more interested in actually landing on the moon. You know, the 9-year-old kid in me, uh, definitely

[01:41:02] wants to go and land on the moon. So, uh, 2035, I think, uh, the price and my ability to afford it will intersect. But I want to start a city on the moon. I'd like to be a lunar mayor. That would be fun. >> What are you gonna call your city, Peter? >> I haven't I don't have an answer yet. I I'll have to You have any any good ideas? Maybe Highline. >> May maybe give it out to the audience. Maybe the audience can suggest a name for City. >> All right. Uh let's wrap it up here. You know, one of the things we're doing uh for our audience is we're going to be putting out twice a week shorter episodes. Uh we got some feedback. They love, you know, you guys love the episodes, but uh, you know, they're getting longer to two and a half hours. And so, we're going to still cover all the content, but we're going to shoot for some shorter episodes that make them more bite-size and produces twice a month. So, please, if you're a subscriber, turn on notifications, so you find out when they get out. Um, Mag

[01:42:01] Magna Boston, uh, >> Magna Mopa. May I tell a story for this one, Peter? This is a submission from yours truly. This is your production AWG production. >> My submission for an outro. So I I realized we had the Fang companies F A NG. We had the MAG 7 companies. I realized with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic about to IPO over the next few months. The world was missing an acronym for what the most valuable companies of the innermost loop would be. That would be the closest to the chips and the autonomy and the space and the AI models. So the world needed an acronym. So I coined an acronym and it turns out it's brilliant. Magna Mopa for for those asking the B is Broadcom which is absolutely essential in the supply chain. Magna Mopa are the 11 companies. Read them out for us. >> This is red meat for all of our commentators here. >> Read them out for us here.

[01:43:00] >> So there there are a lot of A's. So I'll see if I can get this right. So, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, uh, >> Nvidia, >> help me out on >> Nvidia. >> Nvidia. Yep. Uh, >> Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Broadcom, SpaceX, Tesla, Anthropic. >> Anthropic. >> So, it's going to be when when uh SpaceX and and Tesla merge, it's going to be Magna uh Mobsa Mobsa >> Mob Moba. >> All right. Well, let's look at the genius of uh of Alex. Let's play this one out. Here we go. >> Nice symphonic. I was imagining something like uh I don't know, Goldfinger or something.

[01:44:06] Magnum in the glare at the innermost loop. You see finger on the recursive core pulling fut through the door. Compute in your velvet hand. Chips and cloud at your command. Devices bow. Autonomy sings and space bends under unseen strings. Oh, you build it, you bind it. Turn the key and find it. One more pulse, one more plan in the palm of Magnum's hand. Magnum, hold the core.

[01:45:00] Magnum, ask for more AI chips and cloud all come down. Magna monster. on the crown >> like a monster on the ground. Every note knows your name. Every route arrives the same. Silent doors and hidden glass. Open when your shadow pass. You wear the hush like satin knife. A lovely thread, a certain light. One kiss and the system turns. One glance.

[01:46:02] >> All right. That was awesome. Uh, >> Magna Mopa. People are trying to create ETFs off this. Not investment advice, but Magna Mopsta. The world needed a new acronym. The world, you have your new acronym now for the top 11 companies at the heart of the singularity. >> Love it. All right, gentlemen. Uh, so proud to be on this journey with you. Thank you so much. My favorite time of the week is this conversation. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. >> Likewise. >> Take care. Thank you. 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

[01:47:00] 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/tatrends. That's diamandis.com/tatrens. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.