Assessment note: [[2026-08-29-moonshots-ep284-nvidia-96b-quarter-openai-chip]].

Transcript: "NVIDIA's $96.2B Quarter, China's 200,000 Fake Accounts, & OpenAI's New Chip | EP #284"

Nvidia just booked $96.2 billion in revenue in a single quarter. >> Isn't that a closed loop circular economy? Couldn't that collapse? Every economy is circular in nature. To the extent there is an elephant in this particular room, that would be the ex safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts. We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. These posts contain claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. >> Shocked. Shocked. I say that there are foreign influence operations attempting to suppress American AI data center deployment. Shocked. >> The difficult part is we have really no easy defense against it. >> Open AI released the first performances of their chip Jalapino. OpenAI is no longer just a customer of Nvidia. They're becoming a chip designer. >> Inference is moving off of Nvidia for sure. This is the first 2x of a 100x performance gains. >> We're in such a crazy future where I could imagine a world where say an open

[00:01:00] AI compute cloud hosts an anthropic model and open AAI and anthropic win at the same time. >> Now that's a moonshot ladies and gentlemen. >> Welcome to Moonshots everyone. Your number one podcast on all things AI and exponential. Your front row seat to the incredible accelerating singularity. I hope you can feel it like we all do. You know, guys, we just recorded two days ago and it feels like a lifetime ago. >> I can't believe it. >> Isn't it? >> I mean, every story we're going through today is is new information in the last two days. It's crazy. >> It is like the >> It's the podcasting singularity. Peter, >> it really is. Well, guys, I'm here with my incredible uh my original four moonshot magnificent mates, Alex Weer Gross, our in-house ASI. And you know the question, Alex, is are you real? Well, if people come to the Moonshots live event, uh they'll have a chance to evaluate your flesh and bloodness. Uh

[00:02:00] >> maybe that's the one question that I get. >> Alex, >> that's the one. >> Everyone can copy you, Peter, and pinch my cheeks. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Uh Dave Blondon, our empressario of AI investing. And and Dave, you're going to be running a session on AI investing at Moonshots Live, which is going to be very good. >> And Sel is our global globe trotder. Our Where's Waldo? You're back from uh from Brazil. >> I'm back uh 36 hours in Brazil and back. I've probably got one of the worst carbon footprints anywhere right now. >> Are you leaving tomorrow for like Japan >> No, I'm here for a few days. Um uh and then I've got an overnight next week. It's not so bad. All right. >> We should make you be be like Bill Gates and buy carbon offsets for all the all the emissions from your flight. That would cost >> I'll plant a tree in every airport uh uh front lawn that I get to. >> Uh I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and optimism provocator. So much happening in the last two days. You know, we've reviewed 200 plus stories. I get a

[00:03:01] download from my AI and from Alex, my other AI every day. Uh we've narrowed it down to about 15 today that are fun. I I would categorize these stories as provocative um like massively impactful and bizarre. That's sort of my my summary. You know, our missions all at once. >> All at once. Yeah, for sure. Our mission here is keep you optimistic and ready for the supersonic tsunami that is heading our way. If you're new to moonshots, welcome. A pleasure to have you. You know, our mission here is keep you informed of what just happened and where things are going. If you're a regular, a fellow moonshot, welcome back. Uh let me share a slide here because I want to invite people to two specific elements here. Um the first is we're going to be having a moonshots AMA uh over Zoom. We're inviting all of you our listeners to join us. We're going to be doing it twice in September. Uh once in the morning so that people in Europe

[00:04:01] and Asia can easily join. Once in the evening so people in the east coast and in the US can join. Uh we want to we want to meet you. Uh you know we don't get a chance to answer all your questions. So uh you're going to have a shot at you know grilling Alex Dave See and myself on this. So >> I love these units too because we get to we get to hear what what's on everybody's mind. It's never obvious to me what people are thinking because there's so much impact from all this change and but it it affects different people differently. So it's really nice to get a sample of what's going through everybody's brain. >> Yeah, for sure. And you know, you can tell us whether you, you know, whether you want it once a week, twice a week, continuous in Alex's living room. Uh, and also on the screen here, our new X handle, uh, is moonshots_pod. So, please follow us on X as well. You know, we're putting up our clips. We're putting up the full podcast as a chance for you to have it on your feed instead of just on YouTube. So, uh, shall we get

[00:05:01] into it, gentlemen? >> Absolutely. >> All right. a lot to cover today. So, I'm going to open with a few AI stories as we normally do. Uh, so Nvidia is on fire. Nvidia just booked 96.2 billion in revenue in a single quarter. I mean, this is more than the GDP of of the majority of the countries on the planet. Up 106% year-over-year with guidance for the current quarter of another 10% higher, 108 billion. For context, that is more than a billion dollars per day. Crazy. >> You know, further Jensen's guidance for 2028 is 70% growth against Wall Street's consensus of 44%. You know, Jensen called the Frontier Labs quote, "The first generation of startups that needed tens of billions of dollars of compute to get to their product." Crazy. Um, in related news, Elon Musk is making some bold predictions about SpaceX revenues. We've heard him in the past say that he's going to in the last earnings call

[00:06:01] he's going to reach a trillion dollars in revenue by 2030 potentially 2029. Now yesterday Elon tweeted that he may well reach 3.5 trillion in revenue in 2033. You know uh by reference the company today with the highest revenue is Amazon at $828 billion just to give it some context for Elon's 3.5 trillion. Uh Dave let me go to you first. you know, is is Nvidia's revenue growth sustainable or is this just, you know, the peak here? What do you think about that? >> Actually, it's a really interesting two forks in the road here. Nvidia has a lot of vulnerabilities and it'll come up later in the pod, but at the same time, they're going to be sold out for as far as the I can see no matter what. So, I think that everyone's got to use Nvidia for training neural nets. It's the it's, you know, 90% of the revenue, 95% of the profits. And, you know, these revenues are not just revenues. These are 80 to 85% gross margin revenues. The profitability of this company has never been seen before on the face of the

[00:07:01] earth. >> And to the extent but but everybody's vulnerable too, you know, because all the major companies, all the magnumobstas are starting to overlap so much in what they do. >> So the biggest vulnerability at Nvidia by far is TSMC is still their one and only manufacturer of everything they sell. I mean, have you ever seen >> I'm amazed they haven't vertically integrated or haven't tried to like Elon is. >> Well, I mean, but they're they're it's tricky because if they were to try and build their own fabs, they'd have to do it very quietly and sneakily because they cannot piss off TSMC. You know, they're about a third of TSMC's manufacturing goes to Nvidia, you know, and another third roughly goes to Apple and the the whole rest of the world gets the other third. But you can't you can't rock that boat, uh, you know, casually. You have to do it very sneakily. Um, and you know, as Alex has said on many podcasts, there's new physics and new new uh technology is going to come through AI imminently, which could disrupt the entire manufacturing supply chain, how chips are made, what they're

[00:08:00] made of. And so there's just so much change coming. So, so Nvidia is making all kinds of moves to shore up its position while it's on top of the world. Uh, and and you know, you almost can't spend the money fast enough at the rate that it's coming in. I mean, you know, I was talking talking to my kids about, well, with so many of our portfolio companies, I I'll meet with them weekly and they'll say, "Oh, I had a meeting with a manufacturer in Vermont. I had a meeting with this, you know, with JP Morgan." Like, why are you meeting with anyone anyone other than Jensen or one of the other Magnum Mobster companies or one of their satellites? Like, it's insane. The amount of money pouring through just that funnel dwarfs the entire rest of the economy. and and your success and failure is intimately tied to just that one thing and everything else is just a distraction. So, you know, Jensen is is he's pouring out money in checks of 5 billion here, 12 billion there, 20 billion there and and if you're if you're not in that flow of conversations, you're not in the most relevant conversation in the world in

[00:09:01] the history. >> One second. Let me let me call him one second. I need some more capital. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, if you can't get Jensen, just get one of his E staff. There's only what 20 25 people in that list. Talk to them. >> Alex, what do you make of this? >> Yeah, I'd be the last person to suggest that this is one big wash trade uh circular financing scheme, but I I do wonder but but but but I I do wonder the extent to which the financial markets have fully priced in Nvidia's financing of their customers. I I guess that's that to the extent there is an elephant in this particular room that would be it and I I think it would be it would sure be swell as a participant in the financial markets to have clearer distinction between how much of this demand is Nvidia financed demand or not. If it turns out that a disproportionate amount of this demand is directly or indirectly backstopped or financed or

[00:10:02] credited by Nvidia through one or more intermediaries, then I I think that starts to look a little bit too bubbly, which I I'm not thrilled with at all. I'd like to see no hiccups in this singularity. I I would not like to discover 2 to 3 years from now that some of uh some or a large portion of all of this demand at the infra layer was being artificially propped up through financial engineering. I think that would be like a highly sub-optimal outcome. I I still think even if it turned out that some quantum of the demand, the exploding demand that we're seeing is being artificially inflated through financial engineering, I my my forecast, this is not an investment advice, but my forecast is, you know, at most a mini winter as it were because I think compute is fundamentally substituting for real estate and human labor and other raw inputs as the fundamental substrate for human civil

[00:11:01] ization. But I when I see nosebleleed growth numbers like this and I see a bunch of other headlines, Nvidia financing a bunch of data center deployments, I I have just like in full transparency, I have a little bit of a tickle at this point in the back of my mind how much of this is financial engineering. >> Nice. Hey, See, are you seeing the same videos on X that I am like from Ray Dallio and other financial leaders saying, you know, I'm out of the markets. You know, this is, you know, our the PE ratios are off the charts and, you know, there's this level of of fear-mongering in the in the financial markets. At the same time, you're seeing this massive growth and and there's like where do you go? You know, do you stay fully in? Do you jump out? How do you think about it? This is this is a classic dilemma, right? You got to hedge your bets in this model. I think Alex makes a really great point. The circular revenue is very concerning. Um I love the way you say it, Alex. It would be

[00:12:00] swell if it wasn't it was all ticky boots. >> I don't want this to be financial. I don't want this to be a bubble. I really don't need bubbles. >> I totally understand it. It would be really bad if the whole thing collapsed and then we were in a in a dead period for a period of time and that just slows civilization down dramatically and that would be a bad thing. you're better off having steady uh regular growth where the market has time to self-correct in the new structures and we don't have that right now. Things are kind of going vertical. But from what there's a couple of things happening that I found interesting. One is what's clear is Nvidia is trying to move out of just being a chip company to trying to become like literally an operating system for the whole of intelligence. Right? I thought the hugging face acquisition was super smart. >> And so that's just that's a still a rumor, right? But >> do we know Yes, if if it's it's uh alleged, shall we say, right? But this is this reminds me of being as clever as Microsoft uh buying GitHub, right? Um and can I tell

[00:13:00] a quick story about this? >> Of course. >> Um so Microsoft tries to acquire GitHub, which was less than 10 years old for $7.5 billion. Okay. The CFO and freak and the corp dev people start freaking out going, "The company has barely any assets. It has barely any workforce. it has barely any intellectual property. What the hell are we buying here? Right? What do I put on the balance sheet? And they were literally trying to kill the transaction until Satya said, "Listen, we're buying 30 million developers loyalty because that's how many people use GitHub at the time." Uh and and so we overrode that and and they got it done. Uh now as we move into this AI world, GitHub turned out to be one of the smartest things they could have ever have done because it gave them uh access into all of that open-source thinking and access to all of that stuff. The same thing is happening if this acquisition happens. You're buying the community and that's a very classic exo play to do this. To your broader point, Peter, about are we in a bubble, etc. I think there's some macro things happening that are much more concerning.

[00:14:01] for example, we're printing money like it's going out of style and I think that has a bigger chance of collapsing the markets than anything else. What's happening with the bond markets and Japan and stuff is absolutely insane uh in terms of the circular chaos in the fiat currency world, but that's a different discussion. >> Yeah. So, let me let me jump to the uh SpaceX story of Elon projecting 3.5 trillion by 2033. Um Dave and Alex, love your your points on this. Well, >> well, I mean, for starters, you you said it up front. No company in the history of the world has ever gotten to a trillion. >> Yeah. >> In revenue, and that includes massive massive companies like Amazon and Walmart, uh 3.5 trillion. But, you know, Elon's always been right before. He's often been wrong by a couple years in the timeline, but not not because of anything other than barriers that didn't need to exist. You know, engineering mistakes, regulatory barriers, whatever. So he always says look this is the native size of the opportunity and this

[00:15:01] is the best case timeline and then the size always turns out to be right and the timeline is off by a couple years because of unforeseen delays. So I have no reason to believe he's wrong about the 3.5 trillion but the scale of that relative to anything in history is just it's just mind-boggling. >> Alex, >> yeah I I think Elon tends to like to move in three-dimensional ways. So again, without this being misconstrued as any sort of investment advice, I think there is a path to that, but I think it's a highly nonlinear multi-dimensional path. I I think the most obvious path to get there is one, SpaceX and Tesla merge sometime in the next sometime in the next year or two. And that gives SpaceX, the new SpaceX, not the old SpaceX, Optimus revenue. I think Optimus alone, not financial advice, could be a multi-t trillion dollar per year business. And then the cloud, uh SpaceX offering hyperscaler services, which last I checked were the

[00:16:02] majority of its revenue growth in the past few months, could continue to grow its hyperscaler business both terrestrially, which is where it is now, and soon the Dyson swarm. I think the Dyson swarm alone could probably generate trillions of dollars in revenue. I I think Starlink probably I in the face of Optimus and the Dyson swarm. I think Starlink probably ends up being rounding error. I think cars are rounding error. I think applications which interestingly in the SpaceX S1 SpaceX went on and on and on about uh digital optimists and applications and the service economy maybe seems unlikely. I I think the core strength of Elon's ecosystem is less application layer and more physical infrastructure. So if they just totally dominate robots and uh orbital data center infra, I I think that's probably a few trillion dollars. >> I mean SpaceX is my largest financial

[00:17:01] bet right now, full disclosure. And I think about it as a way of, you know, if you're if you're investing in OpenAI or Anthropic, it's a, you know, a single layer bet. You're betting on the models. Um, but SpaceX is everything. It's it's ultimately chips and data centers and models and comms and infrastructure and launch and you get a chance to bet on all of them. Um, you know, I think the biggest risk is just Elon being around long enough to implement his his vision. So, I know he's probably walking around with an army of guards. When I when I see him on occasion, uh, it doesn't look that way. So, I I hope he's got the proper protection. For our listeners here, Dave, you know, the question of how do they, you know, we're not a financial show, but, you know, we're throwing around massive numbers here. And how do you, you know, how do you think about playing this this market? Um, staying in it, doubling down,

[00:18:01] hedging against it. What's your, >> you know, it's it's actually, I think in some senses getting easier to understand because everything that's going on, you know, you can you can start to understand it from just two things. AI training and AI inference. And you know what what Elon is putting into space is purely inference. you know, all the satellites, all the revenue is going to be from Starlink, which is about connecting AI generated video and other AI generated content to everybody on the planet, but also the AI data centers are going to dwarf everything that Elon's launched so far. It's just inference time data center in space. But that's inference only. You know, the the training time is a very different beast. That's where Nvidia is just going to kill it because for training time, you need all the GPUs to be coherent in one location like Tennessee. you know, you need 100 thousand and ultimately a million and then, you know, probably several million NVIDIA GPUs to be in this kind of very tight all collect cluster that can that can train the next generation of models. But at inference time, it can be spread all over the world, all over space. And so those are

[00:19:00] very very different emerging market. Even the chips are going to be very different for those two markets. And then everything else kind of falls out from that. You're like, well, what's sustainable and investable? Robotics is is sustainable, investable, but only if you have great AI at designing robots. You know, the idea that you can build a better robotics company without great inference time models that are specific to manufacturing to design, you'll never sustain it. So then you start to see all these great investments in all these vertical markets like drug discovery and robotics, but they're all also built around proprietary inference time models that are very good at that use case. Mhm. So all everything else looks like it's going to like SAS software and everything. It's going to be undisrupted for a while, but that's a choice that Elon and Daario have made to not disrupt all those voters and kind of leave it alone. And so you like Alex was saying earlier, it looks a lot like the AI economy is a circular economy where Jensen is putting money into data centers. The data centers are buying the chips that's providing inference to the

[00:20:01] vertical use case companies. Isn't that a closed loop circular economy? Couldn't that collapse? But to me, it looks more like imagine there's a civilization on Alpha Centauri and they've discovered super intelligence. What are they going to do? They're going to they're going to build this massive valuable economy within themselves. Are they going to trade with Earth? They're not going to give a rat's ass about Earth. It's too far away. It's so slow. And that's exactly what's happening in the new AI economy. So, every economy is circular in nature. You know, dollars just move in a circle. you know, euros move in a circle. So now the circle is tightening up to being this new economy only cares about itself and cares very little about the legacy economy. And so you know I talked to my brother you know over at Bestark who works with Fidelity and America prize and UBS and his initial reaction a year ago was like you know AI will not really have hit until I see it show up at Fidelity. Now he's like, you know what, it doesn't care. It literally doesn't care when it's discovering new medicines and new physics. And you know, we already

[00:21:00] mentioned that OMPic and Mangaro are bigger than all of AI inference combined, just just one drug discovery. So if it comes up with five or 10 more drug discoveries, which it inevitably will very soon, the amount of revenue flowing back into the AI economy from just that will dwarf the legacy world. I have a I have a similar metaphor that may that I think about right when you look at the internet in the introduction of the internet in the early days when Google started uh AdSense and Adwords and whatever people are like yeah um um it's this thing that will add create some value but little by little it sucked up all the revenue in the entire advertising industry almost completely and I think of AI in a similar way it starts off kind of being a little bit cir circular but little by little it sucks up more and more uh interest uh in the whole economy. Um something big happened with uh um the legal firm uh can't remember the name that they just

[00:22:01] bought. They just figure out how to buy this. You look at Google buying Spirit Airlines data, right? Little by little we're going to find ways where AI is going to start sucking up all of the data in other industries to use in powerful ways and then create business models around that. So I I look at it from that perspective. But in general that I think the approach your the way you think about it is also very accurate. >> Well there are these meta signals these high level you know kind of orthogonal signals like if I ask somebody who's an entrepreneur uh do you know how to train a foundation model? Do you know how to fine-tune one? Uh do you listen to the Moonshots podcast? Every single one of them goes up 10, 20, 100x in value in some cases, you know, up to a thousandx returns on those deals. No losers yet. Zero. 0.00 failures. So I don't need to be a rocket scientist to say like and then somebody says, "Well, I'm not really I'm I'm more of an application layer guy and you know I'm more of a vibe coder guy." Like okay, lots of losers in that bucket. So it's like like just do you really understand what's

[00:23:01] going on? Do you listen to Alex and what he's about to say? If yes, you will succeed. >> Alex, >> close us out on this one. Alex, >> I I think the I I think there's probably an important just on the financial engineering and circular economy side. I think there are perhaps two different forms of circular economy one can have. So in one form of circular economy, you have company A selling goods to company B and company B buying or selling goods back to company A. Call it an income statement based circular economy. and in balance like yeah you don't want circular or wash trades uh that are overly engineered to inflate revenue there either but maybe call that a slightly from a bubble perspective slightly more healthful form of circular economy then maybe there's a slightly in this context less healthful form of circularity which would be company A is using not its income statement but its balance sheet in the form of private credit loans etc to finance the purchase

[00:24:03] of by company B of company A's goods and right now as just a again not financial advice but as a shareholder of the entire market via lowcost broad index funds I don't feel like I have tremendous visibility into which of those two forms of circularity we're seeing at the very heart of the innermost loop and I would love more clarity this episode is sponsored by Google for startups think about this for a second you now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's startup technical guide for generative media gives you complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMinds models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below. All right, I'm going to move us on to our next uh two stories that are coming out of China in the world of video production. The first story is the roll

[00:25:00] out of Juan 3.0 by Alibaba. Juan 3 is capable of generating 30-cond single pass videos from documents, spreadsheets, slides, and web pages. I wonder what kind of a video you get out of a a spreadsheet. Uh, their API runs between 5 cents to 20 cents per second of generated video. That's something like 20K to 60K for a 90-minute film, right? These prices are beginning to collapse. Uh this is one day after announcing their largest ever private follow-on offering by a Hong Kong listed company at 10.2 billion. Clearly they're engineering uh their stock price. So that's Juan 3.0 is the first story. The second story comes from Runway's co-founder who reports that video generation now represents roughly 70% of all AI token consumption in China driven by short form content and robotics. And it's the you know it's growing faster than claude code grew in the US. Uh the framing here is that

[00:26:02] America is LLM pill large language model pled and China is world model pill. And the implications of that are that the two superpowers are fundamentally having different priorities. So America is building large language models, China is building world models. The language models predict the next token. The world models are predicting the next state of reality. So uh you know these these large these world models are particularly going to be important besides for video generation also for robotics autonomous driving physics simulations and videogen. Uh so Alex go to you first on this uh your thoughts on 3 and the 70% you know video token consumption. Crazy. >> I I agree with the sentiment. I think it's striking and I have a unified field theory that would explain it. My unified field theory is that American AI labs are revenue maxing and Chinese AI labs are not. So when Open AI tried tried to

[00:27:02] to be in the video gen business, they ended up abandoning it because Anthropic ran away with their lunch by revenue per token maxing with codegen which is call it a more LLM shaped use case for their compute. the Chinese labs really I mean yes they're generating revenue yes they're IPOing yes they're growing quickly but really they're not revenue maxing they're giving away model weights for free you don't revenue max by giving your model weights away for free so if you're not in the business of maximizing revenue per token then you might as well be spending tokens on video versus more economically productive applications that that's my unified field theory for why you see so much world model inference in China and relatively little by comparison from American Labs. American labs are too busy doing more economically productive applications. >> Alex, which one gets us to AGI faster? >> Um, well, it's a trick question because I think we hit AGI no later than summer of 2020 with LLM. With LLM, we didn't

[00:28:02] have good video models, >> which progresses us from AGI towards ASI faster world. >> We already have ASI. Trick question again. I I I don't buy the premise, Peter. I don't buy the premise that we don't already have super intelligence. You could ask like an adjacent question which is which uh in the long term whatever is left of the long term which advances the capability frontier most effectively world models >> or text based models >> so moved to ask that question. >> Okay. So I'll ask myself that question that the answer is I I think in the end omnimodal models are the best. I I see like Fable 5 is so strong and yet its visual capabilities and visual reasoning capabilities are so weak and I think that in the medium-term which is like 6 to 12 months I think that's an impairment that hopefully Anthropic is busy repairing with M&A activities but I I think they're on a collision trajectory and whether we get diffusion transformers at the end of the day or

[00:29:00] some sort of hybrid model that hybridizes the best of vision and video and audio with autogress aggressive textbased gen. I think they have to combine one way or another. >> Mhm. Dave, any thoughts? >> I Yeah, big time. And you're going to have to shut me up on this topic, so just fair warning. But um everything Alex said is dead right, of course. Uh but I think there's a story within the story there where look, the Chinese uh they don't have the ability to sell Kimmy or Quen into the enterprise use case because nobody knows if they can trust it. And video is perfectly profitable. It's a it's a fantastic way to take your maybe not trustworthy model, get it to market and generate huge amounts of revenue and huge value, but I don't think that world models versus, you know, language models, you know, which is going to recursively self-improve first. I think it's just purely about smarter engineers with plenty of cash and lots of training chips, uh, working on the problem. That's the race. And so, the Chinese are

[00:30:00] brilliant by going after video because they can just launch it on the world. It's a global product. No one's worried about security in that use case and it just generates tons of revenue. But remember, OpenAI was ahead of them and decided not to invest in it anymore because the enterprise use case is so much more valuable. So America's taking kind of the highbrow road. You know, let's solve real business problems, cure real diseases. It's more profitable. It, you know, maximizes revenue per token. So it's better in that sense anyway. But at the end of the day, it's all about that revenue pouring back into more and more training chips that turn into, you know, better and bigger, you know, 10 trillion and then 20 trillion parameter models that then get distilled. And so that's what's kicking off RSI. And I'll tell you what else, Demis was the first guy to really think this through, but he couldn't act on it at Google. It's too bureaucratic. Daario took it and he's the first guy that said, "We don't care about consumer movies, videos, whatever. We care about a model that can improve itself through better code and better

[00:31:00] training ideas. That's all we're going to focus on. If we can productize that at the same time, great. But at the end of the day, that's going to recursively self-improve first, and that's what's going to get ahead ahead of everybody else. And the Chinese believe the same exact thing. >> I miss Sora, by the way. It was so much fun with my kids. >> It was fun. >> Uh, >> I think Sora will be back, Peter. I of course gone for long. >> Yeah. See, um, what do you think about the idea of of 70% of the tokens being spent on on video out of China? Is there an implication there for us? >> Well, I think there's there's a couple of things going on here. I I think Dave nailed it what what he with what he said in terms of are you going for RSI or are you going for kind of like world models, right? And what's happening right now is you've got the US optimizing around software engineers and and knowledge work. uh and China is optimizing and heading towards manufacturing and commerce and media and and to some extent some of the machines like the robots etc. eventually you're going to

[00:32:01] converge, right? The winning systems, you're going to have uh language and vision and and uh all of this memory uh uh strung together. Um the future, if I think about the future of AI, AGI, ASI, it's where you hit the physical world that you're going to make the biggest difference, right? Rob, uh humanoid robots or other form robots. Cough, cough. Um, I think the intelligence that can model and then manipulate the world and act inside the world is going to win. In that case, I think where China's heading may have a slightly better advantage. But if we get um Anthropic or one of these guys to RSI, then I think Dave is correct. That kind of trumps everything and that'll be the inner loop that just swallows a whole bunch of other stuff. So, you could go either way here. >> You know, we had a conversation uh last week with ImmOD. And by the way to all our listeners, Immad sent his regrets. He was supposed to be here at last minute travel. Uh where he made the

[00:33:02] point, I think very importantly that AI is one of the most persuasive agents out there. The ability to understand a person and persuade a person and videogen combined with AI is a very powerful force and it's a force for spreading culture. And so the question becomes, you know, with China about to become, if they're not already, the dominant world producer of video content, right, in any language, on any per on any, you know, topic. Um, you know, what are the implications of that? >> Oh my god, they're they're huge. They're crazy. My youngest son, Jack, actually told me this morning that he he turned off Instagram. He just deleted it from his phone. >> And all the kids had already gotten rid of Tik Tok. But the the suggestion engine is so good and it just sucks you in and before you know it an hour of doom scrolling has gone by and you're like oh my god what am I doing here? >> But you know the Chinese you heard Alvin Grlin on the podcast say that you know

[00:34:00] in China they banned everything. You can't show blood in a in a video. You can't show blood in a in a video game. The blood comes out green. like, okay, well, if they're allowed to ban that level of detail, they're going to control all of these actions and try and prevent their children from being sucked into the vortex. Meanwhile, they're perfectly happy to sell it to every other country in the world and generate that revenue. But I I got to imagine the CCP is sitting there saying, "Wow, these guys are just suckers. We can launch any AI generated influence machine on any country, completely change the national opinion and turn the dials here from from Beijing and they don't seem to be able to do anything about it. They've all got free speech and whatever and they can't they can't protect themselves at all. >> But these these AI agents are so good. I mean, they're going to get smarter and smarter and smarter and user specific. That's the new thing. >> Dave, that brings us to the to the next story outside of China. Um, and it's an extremely important story for America uh to hear loud and clear and especially

[00:35:01] for any parents listening. So, China is tightening restrictions on AI companions amid concerns that users are developing emotional dependence on virtual partners. Uh, they're going to in, you know, prohibit AI companion services for minors and restrict the use for adults. So the regulations come out of policy makers as they grapple with the loneliness epidemic that's there, you know, alongside falling marriage rates, right? The one child policy really devastated China. Um, and the concern here is that people are forming emotional bonds with AIS that substitute for human relations and the substitution is accelerating and it's a demographic crisis. You know, we've already pointed on the pod that much of the world is now below the 2.1 children per family required to sustain a country's population. You know, worst among them are South Korea. That's down to 0.75 children per family. South Korea is evaporating. Singapore is at, you know, roughly one child per family, as is

[00:36:01] Ukraine, and China's at one child per family still even after they removed that that that uh ban. So, you know, China's becoming the first regulated uh first country to regulate against AI companions. You know, my bet is Japan, Singapore, Korea is going to follow closely. And this raises the question for every country, not just China. You know, what happens to society when the easiest emotional connection you can make is to your AI and not to another human. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> It's crazy. You know, Peter, do you remember Boris Zelman from MIT? >> Bio biology. He was actually uh his dad was in charge of food science at General Foods. He invented the c coffee crystal. >> Okay. >> Um but you know he was like you know what we all know that smoking is addictive now. And then smoking took over the entire country then took over the world and then we said oh my god this is killing everybody. And then we stopped and then we did the same with junk food. you know, junk food is so but he could develop a food at General Foods that was so delicious, a French fry

[00:37:01] coating that is so delicious that you just cannot physically resist it and then the whole country is, you know, diabetes. >> Um, so we do this habitually and we react to it like 10, 20, 30 years later and then we correct it reactively. >> But if we start rolling out addictive AI, uh, and and then we say, well, the government will wake up when there's a crisis, but that crisis is when a whole generation of kids is wrecked. >> Yeah. Yeah, but you cannot afford the 20-year delay with this particular topic. >> I mean, the the you know, the shout out to parents is please be careful. Um, you know, you form normal social relationships in your teens. Uh, Salem, you're a father of a 15-year-old. How do you think about this? you know, if you step back, um, the right regulatory structure is probably some level of transparency and consent and figuring out what is the types of harm that could be done and then mitigating them, right? Um, trying to having a government decide what

[00:38:00] relationships are authentic or not is going to be very tricky because which is this is what's happening right now. Um we've got we're gone from regulating from what AI says in the China case to saying regulating how attached are you to become to it, right? Um and so this is a totally new regulatory frontier. Social media was very very addictive because an algorithm as Dave points out can learn your intimate habits and without you realizing uh totally capture you and that's really really bad. All the kids are completely addicted to social media today and banning it outright is pretty much the only problem, the only way because all their neoortexes are forming at a time when they're getting totally addicted to stuff and it's going to ruin them structurally for a long time and then you need a lot of um kind of fixes to that. The the the broader picture though I don't know how to think about that like we are we are uh we are dropping on the child care or the childbearing side. so dramatically that this is a huge

[00:39:03] structural challenge for civilization, right? How do you navigate that is going to be really really tough. There's also other issues in all this. The privacy issue, right? Your companion AI is going to know so much more intimacy about you than you do. That's kind of and then there's the b there's the benefit side. there are some really solid benefits around loneliness, disability, elderly companions, um, uh, therapeutics, uh, and and and coaching, social skills, right? So, you can't just you shouldn't just categorize the whole thing as pathological. It's the standard problem we have with any technology is how do you extract the promise without the peril? >> Yeah. >> And that's the challenge for regulatory across the board. >> Alex, I'd love your views here, Pel. >> Yeah. I have a bit of perhaps a contrarian perspective on this. I I think the Chinese Communist Party is actually going to do an about face sometime in the next year or two or three and decide that they actually love AI companions. And the reason is it's

[00:40:00] another method for party control. If you can make sure that all of these AI companions go through all of your ideological filters and become a little bit more like a CCP version of Neil Stevenson's A Young Lady's Illustrated Primmer and a little bit less like some sort of distractant, I I think the party, this is a prediction, I think the party decides actually having everyone or maybe not everyone but a sizable fraction of the youth of China deeply engaged with party deeply controlled AI companions is actually from the party's perspective net helpful not net harmful and I I think so my forecast here would be that once the CCP has decided that it has a way to steer the country's youth via AI companions it will decide no actually we like these AI companions after all >> but bring it home Alex what do you think about here in the US and AI companions

[00:41:01] >> the there US states that are already trying to regulate these things out of existence and trying to to ban romantic relationships between America's youth and AI. I'd like to think that in this country we enjoy enough freedoms that they won't succeed. Uh I'm just reminded again one of my operational definitions of the singularity is every sci-fi trope everywhere all at once. And I I can't shake out of my head the famous uh from Futurama, don't date robots. I I I think I I think different countries will react in different ways and my forecast for the US is you may see individual states maybe it'll be a federalist issue where some states ban them and some states don't question mark as to whether we end up with a national policy on romance with AI companions but if I had to bet my bet is that at least in some places in the US AI companionship including romantic companionship including robotic romantic companionship will be legal.

[00:42:01] That's my bet. >> Yeah, we're going to talk at the end of this pod a story about robotic sex partners just to spice it up. >> The the place to watch on this is Japan because they tend to be much more tolerant of this type of stuff. There's already a case where a Japanese woman is marrying an AI uh and they're like, "Okay, go." Uh so we'll see this play out, I think, there first. Well, South Korea is South Korea is is super high-tech >> and a very early adopter of everything without a lot of regulation and they have all kinds of the lowest birth rate in the world. Uh one of the highest suicide rates in the world just all kinds of issues. >> Yeah. Maybe two two >> two points. One, I have difficult time getting myself worked up over collapse of human population. I I think we're so many decades at this point past the limits of growth which I I view as like nonsensical propaganda at at this point. The world we like humanity would be fine

[00:43:01] uh barring some total disaster. Uh we have a carrying capacity in the tens of billions if we use just the earth that we have correctly. We can also survive with an enormous amount of AI and automation with fewer people. So I I one area where I perhaps differ from Elon sort of uh virolently pro-atalist policy. I I think the world is going to be fine regardless of whether we have more people on margin or fewer people on margin. We're going to have so much AI in the solar system. I I just I don't think it's going to be a major X- risk at all. >> Yeah. >> I got to say something here. >> Please go ahead. >> Um uh in a rare moment I'm 100% aligned with you, Alex. I don't >> This is a rare moment. >> I think that it's here and there you and I have opposing points, but this one I'm absolutely 100% with you on this is this is uh trying to worry about how many kids we're going to have. It's going to end up however it ends up. >> Listen, the the the challenge is to a country like South Korea, it's it's

[00:44:01] sublimating. It's evaporating. Uh and if all of a sudden, you know, the population is dropping smaller and smaller, you're losing the culture there. And that's that's the issue. And I hate it when people I'm giving a presentation on longevity and people say, "Oh my god, can the world sustain, you know, uh people enough people when it when people are growing to 150 years old?" It's like, uh, you know, look at the actual numbers. Um, for sure we need people to >> I also don't I I it's an interesting point. I I don't think we lose culture if population on the margin not like catastrophic nuclear war but on the margin if population goes down if if these cultures are centuries old when populations were smaller I think it follows reasonably that if the population on margin halves the culture will still be there in one form or another but the reality is we're going to have so much again AI the AI is being trained off of our culture anyway

[00:45:00] >> all right moving us along this is a story, Alex, that uh that you fed me and and it's a fun it's a fun one. So, our next story is about a company called Flock Safety. It's one of the fastest growing public safety tech companies in the US. Flock was founded back in 2017. What is that, 9 years ago? And its core product is a network of AI powered license plate reading cameras used by the police department, neighborhoods, schools, and businesses to identify vehicles associated with crimes and missing persons. The company has further expanded its platforms to include video cameras, shotgun and audio detection, mobile surveillance trailers, drones, and software that ties all these feeds together. Flock says its systems are used by more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, generating over 20 billion vehicle scans per month. So, let me show a video here uh that Alex provided me. This is out of San Diego uh where Darth Vader is is testifying on

[00:46:00] behalf of Flock. Take a look at this. >> The Emperor is a fan of Flock and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium. Because we all know that the flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers. They are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums. And we need this. I need this so I can stalk my exgirlfriend. >> Okay. So, uh, Alex, let's go to you first on this one. >> I think this honestly I think this is the face of AI at the municipal level at this point. We we talk all of the time about the implications of AI for enterprise use cases, for transformative scientific and technological discoveries, but I I think many people when they start to think about how AI is

[00:47:00] transforming everyday life in in many communities, I I I worry and I I think that some of their earliest interactions won't be with driverless cars. They'll be with cameras that are tracking license plates. And in many communities around the country, I I read stories about people who are chopping down AI cameras from Flock or other companies because they feel that somehow they're being surveiled by their police department. You read stories about police departments federating their surveillance data to enable new forms of tracking. Uh on the the odd case, I I think this is what Darth Vader was gesturing at perhaps. uh you read stories of police and other first responders using their access to these AI cameras to stalk uh ex partners. And so I I I think flock in in some ways has become the petri dish for uh either surveillance or what um you know an old friend Dave Brin might call surveillance

[00:48:00] of who gets to see whom inside the panopticon that AI enables. In China, it's pretty obvious that the party gets to look through the cameras at everyone else. In the US, we're we're grappling with this right now. If we put smart cameras everywhere that can look at every public space and then they're all federated, so you can track movements of cars, who gets to look at the data? And I So, I think Darth Vader testifying before the the city of San Diego. I think this is like a very American moment when we have the Empire testifying on behalf of surveillance and not surveillance. Salem, you and I have, you know, talked about the loss of privacy a lot. Uh, and you know, the fact that people assume they have privacy, they want privacy, but I think that's pretty much a myth at this point. What are your thoughts on flock? >> I have a lot of thoughts here and I think this is a very, very dangerous moment. Um, I've gone to see a bunch of rock rush concerts lately, but let me quote Pink Floyd here. This is another

[00:49:01] brick in the wall, >> right? This is a huge that's Pink Floyd flipping over to show some level of thing. But there's a huge structural pattern because now we've transitioned from find this suspect to find me people who behave like suspects and that's a very very different animal. Pattern matching now becomes essentially free meaning surveillance stops being constrained by manpower at all. Right? And so civil liberties were were kind of protected to some level by the friction because following everybody was just too expensive. And now that's gone. The cost of following everybody has gone to zero. So this is a big uh structural problem in terms of you already have cases where uh police officers are using this technology to track their partners uh to track for ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends and stuff. Um, you've already had people literally dying because they were banned for they got tagged with the wrong license plates because the flock read it wrong. This is

[00:50:01] a massive issue with completely wipes out our civil liberties in some ways. And you got to be really careful as to how and the problem is technologies eliminated the cost of mass surveillance now. Okay. And the constitution does not update when transaction costs go to zero. This is a very very big moment. I think I like the way Alex frames it. This puts this whole thing in a petri dish to bring up to this level of conversation. We need to have this kind of conversation at a constitutional level to say how do we want to be how do we want to operate in this environment. Now we are very close now to essentially where the Chinese have CCP mandating it and they just operate that way because that's what it is. But essentially we're in the same place here. It's just done by corporations and by unwarranted uh um fairly rogue police forces and surveillance systems. So it's a very very delicate moment. I don't think it ends well. >> Uh you know I want to just strongman this a moment. You know this is not just

[00:51:01] CCP. This is also uh the Emirates for example. I was just having conversation with with Jamie Justice who heads our our life sciences at X-Prise. And she was saying she went out for a run. She's a prolific runner. Oh my god. getting up at like 6:00 a.m., but she went out for a run at like 10 p.m. at night in the streets of Dubai and she felt she would never do that in the US and she felt completely safe. I mean, so you're trading some level of civil liberties, you know, I there's always a trade like when you go through uh you know, customs at the airport and you're no longer waiting in giant lines because you know, facial detection puts you through instantly. Uh I'll make that trade. I will happily make that trade to save myself time and I'll make the trade as well on increased safety for my kids. So the question is do we put this at an individual vote or is this society saying we we you know value safety over privacy? >> I just have to remind of the the Ben Franklin quote they who can give up

[00:52:01] essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. >> Yes. Yes, I'm with you. This is this is very very dangerous. I have I have a I have I have a personal experience here. I once came into the US and they took me aside and said, "Sorry, you have to miss your flight because um there's an Afghan warlord by the name Sully Mismile wanted by the FBI for poppy trading." And I'm like, "What?" And they're like, "We have good news and bad news." I'm like, "Okay, good news, you're you know, Vice President Yahoo. It's pretty clear. You speak at all these conferences. We're pretty clear you're not an Afghan warlord." I'm like, "Ph, glad to hear that. What's the bad news?" The bad news is we're not allowed to make that judgment call. We have to check the Washington. It'll take a few hours. Have a seat. >> Don't you wish you wish? >> Yeah. And it took like it took like a few years to get that cleared up. And so I said to them, "Does that mean every sel gets stopped like this?" And they said, "Sir, you have no idea when Juan Rodriguez commits a misdemeanor, it means we have to take aside every Juan Rodriguez." And this is where you could

[00:53:02] get the benefits of test technology because it can disamiguate and names resolve at the name level very quickly with technology. On the bad side, the negative consequences and accidental consequences like innocent until proven guilty habius corpus is essentially gone now in the US. This is a really really bad place. So I don't know how this resolves. Uh but I think the Ben Finequin quote should be sitting on the front desk tattooed in front of everybody for the next 10 years to solve this. It's a very big problem >> as an Afghan warlord from now on the >> you can't you can't alleged alleged alleged Afghan warlord nothing was ever proven. Uh but this this is a real this is a real problem. And you know I got to a point and I have to say something. The folks that I've ever encountered at the US uh immigration border have never ever been anything short of beautifully professional and constructive. That's been my experience. Like unbelievably proper, appropriate, etc. Um but for a

[00:54:02] few times I'm like uh guys they're like, "Yeah, we know you're not the Afghan ruler, but have a seat. We got to check. We we just have to go through this process." >> Might have shaved your hair. >> Yeah. It got to a point where I was almost on a firstname basis as some of the immigration folks that are just traveling so much and they're like, "Oh, Mr. Ismail, have a seat. We have to do an identity check." Having gone through the same border 15 times, they they know me, etc. But this is one of the issues that we have to resolve and it causes massive problems. If you get caught on the wrong side of that, >> it can go very badly for quite a while. We resolve it, right? Can try and fix the systems, etc. It's a really, really difficult problem. And we can use technology in very powerful constructive ways, but we really risk losing a lot of civil liberties here cuz especially if you have an a an environment or a government that's not friendly towards you in the in the UAE, they have a benevolent dictatorship, right? And as long as it stays benevolent and they're about as benevolent as you could possibly imagine there, that why that's

[00:55:00] why there's so much incredible safety. Nobody the minute you step out of line they they take you out very quickly and therefore everybody feels incredibly safe and it's a fabulous thing but the problem with benevolent dictatorships is they typically don't stay benevolent very long uh and that's a structural problem right the solution >> we have to really figure out >> sorry we have one we have to figure out human governance now at a level that we've never had to deal with before this is for me one of the singularities right how do you uh construct regulatory frameworks can have any hope of keeping up with the pace of technology. >> Sorry, Alex. What one of the solutions that has been proposed, I know David Brin and and others have advocated for this is give everyone access to these surveillance capabilities. Allow the civilians to to do the same license plate tracking that first responders and police have. Let everyone track everyone. If it's a public space, make it a public resource. >> That's right. And and I'm a huge fan of EFF and the work that they do there.

[00:56:01] They've highlighted some of these things. For example, in Russia, which is a bit of a wild west, where a policeman will come and break your headlight and then give you a ticket and extract corrupt bribes from you. The the Russians were the first to adopt dashboard cameras. Do you remember that meteorite that hit in a decade ago? And there was like 200 live videos of this meteorite getting hit. So, somebody asked the question, why the hell how the hell do we have 200? How many people had live time to whip out their cell phone cameras and track this thing real time? It wasn't that. It's just that the Russians have learned they better have a dashboard camera to prevent against uh police uh dodgy police extortion. So, they all have dashboard cameras to to for for their own safety. Uh and that tracked all those those things. So that you can see in that case the citizenry is starting to point the camera the other way and we need a ton more of that and I think Alex's point is really important. Everybody should have access to these systems so that you can see what's going on.

[00:57:00] >> Amazing. All right, let me move us along here. Some fun news on the uh on my personal front or my ex-priseze front. So, as you guys may know, we put out a call for optimistic, hopeful visions of the future. Uh, this is the Future of Vision X-P Prize. We had over 5,000 teams registered. Uh, 2,550 video trailer submissions. It was amazing. It blew us away. Largest film competition ever. And we're down to the final 50. And we're asking for you to help us vote. So, uh, you can go to my tweet on this at Peter Dmandis, my X-prise handle, or you can go to this link down below, uh, vote.futurevisionexprize.com, and you'll be served up two videos at a time, and the question is, which future do you prefer? You vote on one, then you'll be served up the next two, and we're doing essentially an ELO bubble sort here. Uh, and we're going to be

[00:58:00] bringing the top five of these uh, to the Moonshots Live uh, summit here. So, uh, just a quick reminder, guys, on September the 25th, uh, you're going to have a chance to meet all the Moonshot mates. Alex, Emod, Dave, and Sele will all be there. Uh, and we'll be doing a, uh, Moonshot's live, uh, broadcast from there. Uh, and we have incredible speakers. Uh, we're going to have Palmer Lucky is going to be there talking about, you know, his entrepreneurial journey. Our mission there is help you, you know, discover your purpose, discover your moonshot. Uh we're going to have Astroteller there helping you shape your moonshot. Uh how do you build a moonshot organization? Ben Lamb, the creator of Colossal, which has gone from 0 to10 billion valuation for years. Uh Kathy Wood, Neil Degrass Tyson, Neil Stevenson, an incredible author. Uh gentlemen, uh what? So let's go each of you. So See, what are you going to be talking about at Moonshots? Uh I'll be

[00:59:00] talking about my normal stuff which is how does humanity cope with all of this but specifically I'll be talking about the organizational singularity and how do you when a world is changing this fast how do you build organizational structures that are resilient for this new world but I but I cannot wait to interact with all the other folks and you know I think of this thing as AI is great in the virtual we're great in the virtual as a podcast but we're much more fun in the physical where where we can kind gauge and kind of check each other out. I can't wait to meet a lot of our fans. Um, I've had so many comments from people. My whole community wants to come. So, we've got a whole issue around how do we get tickets and allocate that. It's going to be one of the funnest days ever. I can't wait for this. Uh, I think we may have to do something like this quarterly, by the way, just to keep >> Oh my god, I love this. Or daily or real time as Alex would talk about. Just get in one big room and and hell with everything else. >> Yeah, this is live. Live. >> Yes, >> live. 247. And Alex, you're going to be

[01:00:00] on uh we have, by the way, through the day an incredible program with uh with the mates and then the evening uh each of the mates is going to be spending an hour with you. So, Alex, what are you going to be doing uh during your hour with all our guests? >> Well, I think the question is what are the questions? >> I think the agenda calls for an AMA. So, I'm extremely curious to hear what the questions are and uh do my best to dispel any myths that I might be biological. >> And Dave, you're going to be doing a deep dive in AI investing. Talk more, please. >> Well, I'm anticipating we're moving into this red pill, blue pill world where you can choose to be oblivious to all of this and be happy living it out without being aware of it, or you can choose to be in the middle of it. I'm anticipating every attendee of this event has decided to take the red pill and be in the middle of it. And so then they're going to be asking, okay, what do I do career-wise? What do I invest in? What are the scarce constraints of the future? You know, what how do I interact with these 11 magnum mobstick companies? You know, are they going to crush me or

[01:01:00] are they going to be my friend? All of those questions are going to come up with this gang. And I want to be prepared to answer every single one of of those lifeanging I have a spe I have a specific question I want to ask Neil Stevenson. >> Yeah. >> Which is, you know, if you went back 10 20 years and he's writing doing all these amazing novels, uh, you had some sense of what a glimmer of what the future might hold, right? In a world that we live in today where it's so hard to predict where things are going in 3 months, forget 3 years or 30 years, how do you build the models that give you viable future narratives? And that's the question I've got for you. >> You know, I spent the day with Neil Stevenson, one of the most extraordinary science fiction writers, right? He wrote Diamond Age, Young Ladies, illustrator, Primmer over Snow Crash. Wow. >> Snow Crash, Seven Eaves. He wrote that over 30 years ago, and I just reread it and it's perfect. I mean, it's so good. >> It's so good. It is held over 30 years, >> right? Predict going. Yeah. It's it's

[01:02:01] >> Yeah, because you know we should ask him to be a guest, Peter, because it would be really great to get his, >> you know, he's not he's brilliant. He's not really a live stage kind of guy, but I'd love to have him a guest. If anyone could open him up on a on a live environment, it would be us. That would be fantastic. You know, one of his other themes that I think is incredibly relevant over 30 years is if if you look at the world leaders today, they're overwhelmingly really, really old. And if you survey young people and say, 'D do you aspire to be president someday? No. Absolutely positively not. And so like, okay, in Neil's books, society worldwide cuts the other direction. It's not like I'm in this country. I'm trapped in this country. I live in this country. People actually in the age of AI cut in the other direction where people all over the world are like-minded on a topic and they bond through global communication, through Starlink and through AI across countries, which could be a great sign for for future global peace. So, I'd

[01:03:00] love to talk to Neil about that. >> We're also going to have Rod Rodenberry there, the the son of Gene Rodenberry. Star Trek is an underlying theme at Moonshots Live 2026. Yeah, Alex, >> I I think in some ways, ju just on the sci-fi note and Neil Stevenson, I I think in some ways it was easier, ironically, 30 years ago to write sci-fi that was predictive than it was in the decade or two after that. that Peter Teal and others have made the point or suggested that the 90s might have been a local optimum in terms of clarity on the future because we had the economy booming, we had the dotcom boom, we had the internet hitting consumers and so if if you imagine that history isn't sort of a monotonic exponential or at least consumer and broad populist perception of the history isn't like a smooth exponential but es and flows and has booms and busts then a moment of peak clarity would come during a boom. when you're able to sort of see above the tree line and see where we're going. And then when you're in a local bust, you

[01:04:02] you lose the forest for the trees and you lose clarity. So by that metric that would also have I I think the the happy side effect of explaining why golden age science fiction from call it the the 50s or so postworld war II era sci-fi was also a local moment of clarity when you could see rockets and you could see vision based energy too cheap to meter and and so by by that metric then I would say it's not that surprising that so much amazing sci-fi was written in the '90s from Neil from Charlie St from others >> Robert Heinline. Yeah. >> Yes. Amazing. Uh so everybody, we've got 200 seats left. This is an event of 1500 people, uh creators and builders, entrepreneurs. It's going to be a power networking event for you to meet your next co-founder, for you to meet investors. Uh so join us. You can go to moonshots.com to apply. Uh I expect we're going to be closing out all the seats in the next two weeks. So don't delay. Join us for the inaugural Moonshots live event. It's uh all day on

[01:05:02] the 25th of September. uh starts registration starts at 7:00. At 8:00 you have a chance to have photos with all the Moonshot mates. Uh then we go into the program from 9:00 a.m. till 6 and then there's a party that evening and an incredible unconference. And we have a super special event. I can't announce it yet. It's it's I'm so excited about this the evening before the evening of Thursday the 24th. I'll let you know as soon as I can, but it's incredible. I have one more quick thing to say about this. >> Um, you know, when we did our week-long singularity executive programs, the funnest session ever for everybody universally was the unconference. Yeah. >> Right. And for folks that don't know, what you do is you put up a set of rooms and a bit of a timeline. People get up and say, "I'm going to talk about uh AI and biotech." And they put up a thing and they somebody else gets up and says, "I'm going to talk about this." And they put up a little poster. and you go wherever you feel like going. Uh, and

[01:06:00] it's turns out to be the most incredibly engaging sessions you can ever have. And so if you ever get a chance to participate in an unconference, go do it. But an unconference of this crowd will be absolutely epic. This is something I'm excited to meet all of our so our our >> listen because we've got you look at the comments we have. We have some really really smart um followers and commentators. It'll be unbelievable. Unbelievable. It'll be amazing. Nice and swarm. >> Yes, for sure. >> This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-ompiles code for each task. Blitzy

[01:07:02] 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, moving us along. Uh we're going to jump into the stories around jobs. um actually have three stories around jobs. The first story is an article this week in the Washington Post reported an analysis that predicted the job apocalypse is unlikely to happen. So again, I've been saying for a while this has been really murky. You have half the community out there saying we're going to lose all the jobs. The other half saying no, we have job growth. So the

[01:08:00] Washington Post argues that historically technology transitions from the loom to the automobile to the internet consistently created more jobs than they destroyed. And we've had that conversation on the pod here many times. You know, it displaces specific tasks uh rather than entire occupations while creating new categories of work that were never previously even conceived of. The thesis of the Washington Post uh article is AI is not replacing jobs. It is replacing tasks within jobs and the people who learn to use AI become more productive not less employed. So that's the first story. Let me go on to the second one. Uh and we'll stop there and then then sele I know you have a particular story you're going to cover here. So the second the second story uh comes out of Goldman Sachs which this week warned that professional services firms consulting law accounting face an existential risk as AI capabilities improve faster than their partners can adapt creating a dangerous skill gap where junior staff trained on AI

[01:09:01] outperform senior partners who refuse to use it. The skills gap is not between the educated uneducated. It between the AI fluent and the AI resistant and the AI fluent are increasingly the juniors and not the partners. So uh Selma I'm going to go to you first and you can call for your slide whenever you want as well. >> Yeah. Two or three things. First you know let's all uh and urge everybody you know to please be evidentiary and datadriven in your orientation for how you view the world, right? Um there are people that doomsday Bill Gates yesterday was it that came out and said oh my god all the jobs two days ago >> two days ago okay and let me just call out here I'm a massive fan of Bill Gates and his philanthropy but as a futurist somewhat of a dismal track record he missed the internet he missed mobile and commenting about the future of work I don't think is the right thing to do in area like this um the and by the way this is true of of I find of of Ray

[01:10:02] Dalio or Larry Frink or um um um uh the other folks that do commentation the Pikid Yuval Harrari they tend to be unbelievably great at framing the past somewhat questionable on the future right because many of the time they don't really understand exponential which is a whole thing and so you really have to be careful around all of this if you look at say the the uh Goldman Sachs or the professional services firm uh conversation deeply disagree why because as the world gets more volatile companies are going to need more help than less because that volatility will require a lot of help which is what we're seeing. You'll have to change your business model from selling hours to selling outcomes which is starting to happen but I don't think that's uh that big of a deal. Um the the a bigger thing I think is the jobs question and I would love if we could throw up the slide right here. Uh so um uh principal financial group uh friend of the pod

[01:11:01] they bunch of them watch us on a regular basis uh did a survey and to give you a sense principal financial group helps uh small businesses with u health health plan benefit plan retirement etc at the small business level formemes they have 130,000 customers right this is a big big company with a great cross-section across the entire country and frankly around the world. Uh here is what they are seeing. They did a survey across a very meaningful representative sample here and what they found was uh only 4% of the companies anticipate that AI will reduce staffing and wages. 31% expected this is small to mediumsiz enterprises expect increase >> which is the majority of the workforce by the way >> which is the majority of the workforce. And let's note a very very um important factoid. Over the last 50 60 years, 100% of job growth has come from small to mediumsiz companies. Big companies

[01:12:01] getting bigger but also getting more efficient. Net value job creation zero. 100% job growth has come from small to mediumsiz companies. So this is the demographic to track if you're interested in the future of work. And 31% expect increasing staffing and increasing wages, right? um 10% uh say they don't use AI. Uh last year it was 19% and now it's down to 10%. Okay. Um uh of the people that have reduced staff only 1.4% attributed those to AI or automation. Okay. This is so inverse. >> This is so fantastic. >> It's so inverted to the current BS tropes of radical unemployment that we see there. It's unbelievable. So, please people look at the data, right? Look at this uh uh stuff. We can get you the full report if you're interested. Uh and look at the staffing trends just in the last few months. 52% have increased

[01:13:00] staff, 30% have maintained it, and only 12% over the last 3 months of reduced staff. So, this is very, very recent and a great projector of where things are going. It's completely opposite to the the oh my god, jobs are everything is going to take all the jobs. And this is where to track the future in actual reality. >> Love it. A great optimism story. Uh Dave or Alex, you want to jump in? >> Uh I think we've come full circle actually in in the sense that remember when we were talking to Elon, you know, he was predicting great social unrest with unprecedented abundance going on concurrently. >> Yes. >> And and what the labs have now decided is well look, if I if I automate everybody's job and they're all unemployed, I need to give them a new sense of purpose. What's their new sense of purpose? Well, that job I used to have gave me a sense of purpose. like why did we take it away in the first place? So now what they're doing is saying look we don't need to displace everybody's job just for the sake of automating everything. We're going to leave everybody alone while we work on incredible new breakthroughs and and we have infinite soldout tokens anyway. So

[01:14:00] we don't need to disrupt all these voters and and so that's the way it's going to play out. But I'll tell you, when I was a kid, we were the first people that we knew to get a PC, an Apple 2. >> Mh. >> And begged and pleaded, my brother and I begged and pleaded our parents to get this this Apple 2. And it was life-changing for me. But I I showed my dad like, "Hey, there's a word processor called Superscribe, and you don't have to be handwriting all your notes anymore." He was like, "You know what? I'm I'm in my 40s. I've been doing it this way my whole life. I don't need to be a computer person." And so he finished out his entire career at GE not being a computer person like huh this and I can kind of forgive him for that because the the you know the PCs would break all the time. The printer was a nightmare like okay it was hard. This is not hard to do relatively speaking and it rewards builders and creators and visionaries regardless of their technical skills. You you you are absolutely empowered by this. So you're crazy not to get on the bandwagon, but AI is going to allow you to not do it.

[01:15:00] You know, we're actually making the door open to not get on the bandwagon. I get the question a lot, okay, as AI is automating lots of stuff, what will human be human beings be doing, right? And the best kind of metaphor I've come up with is if you went back a 100 years and you're looking at accounting, people are doing double entry bookkeeping in big ledgers, credit over here, debit over there in pencil with a big eraser and a whole set of uh tabular columns and lots of ledgers. uh as we moved to automation, we had calculators and slide rules that help you do the tabulation faster, but we're still doing the t entries by hand. Today, we have accounting software that does read your bank account, does all the entries automatically, okay? And the human being has lifted above the loop, not in the loop. The human being is above the loop and is categorizing the transactions looking for problems categorizing vendors and types of income coming in figuring out reconciliation gaps looking at the loop process flows and it's much more value added to be there than doing the rote double entry whatever this is

[01:16:00] what we see happening Eric Brunson calls this white collar drudgery there's a huge amount of stuff happening in big companies it's a lot of massaging of information taking stuff from this sales report putting it over here etc etc and all of that will be taken out where you can do really curatorial judgment thinking work and and applying experience to it rather than doing the actual work itself and people miss that and I'll go back to my specific experience writing the first book was three years of hell just horrible because you had no help sec >> well no the the first book I was partly with you but but it was just you had to write every line and check every line yourself etc right second book Peter that you and it together fully. Um, it was 2 and 1/2 years, but even more hell because you kept having to think how much of the first book do you bring over, etc., etc. And by the way, it was an absolute joy working with you. So, don't you dare say anything like that. And the third part, but this third book has been 6 months of unadulterated joy

[01:17:00] because I can say, "Oh, um, Bill Gates just said this or Satya Nadella said this. Look through the book. Tell me as a developmental editor where we should put inserts, etc. Scan the things." And it's absolute pure fun. And people forget how much more fun it is when something's doing all of that cognitive uh BS stuff that everybody had to think about. And now you can do pure uh thinking judgment. You can be much much more creative. And this is the heart of what it comes down to. It all of this automation and AI enablement and cognitive abundance allows us to be deeply deeply deeply creative. And that is the most fulfilling place you can be as a human being. >> Beautifully said. Let me let me hop on Dave on Dave on your point. Uh, and I'm sure everybody listening here at the pod is using AI and uh and uh enjoying these conversations, but if you have someone in your life who isn't, I I think the most important thing to realize is you have access to the most patient, most capable teacher on the planet, right? Pick your favorite model and ask it just

[01:18:00] to begin at zero. You know, I don't understand this. I just heard this term. help me, you know, create a curriculum for me to go from not understanding AI to fundamentally being able to use it. And I think at a minimum, spend 30 minutes a day in conversation with your favorite model. Um, it's that easy. It's free. It's everywhere on your phone. There's no reason not to dive in. You know, there's, you know, human cognitive, uh, you know, uh, challenges typically prevent a person from jumping to something they don't understand. But it is never been easier in the world. Um, Alex or Dave, do you want to close us out on this one? >> Yeah, I'll just comment. I I think the original impetus for the story was actually from friend of the pot Eric Brinson, as you mentioned, Sem. I I think there are many people in this economy who don't realize that not only do they have permission to be high agency, but we're now in a regime where high agency and agency in general is one

[01:19:00] of the few human traits that is actively rewarded in an era of super intelligence. People think agency is something I I suspect, this is my my theory of the case. I think too much of the human economy, at least in the American economy, the one I'm most familiar with, think agency is something exhibited by superheroes in movies in Hollywood and don't realize that the shackles are off. Anyone can exhibit high agency empowered by super intelligence now, not just in the cinema. And that to the contrary, this is one of the few things left that can actually yield extreme vertical mobility. So if you're listening and you're not, you know, to to Dave's point, you're not fully availing yourself of super intelligence to accomplish superhuman feats, I encourage you to start now because I think there's a window of time and I don't know how long it's going to last. Maybe only a handful of years. Do it now. Otherwise,

[01:20:02] do it never. >> Yeah. Wow. I want you to reflect on that. Society will reward agency in this world of AI automation. That's such a great point because the more you are a self-starter and have the gumption to go ahead and do this and build something with it, the more that you'll be rewarded. Absolutely love it. >> Alex Alex said extreme upward mobility. We'll use that as a theme at the Moonshot Summit, but the data behind what he just said is it's like nothing you've ever seen before. like the gap is getting wider and wider but the the rate of upward mobility that's possible has never been seen before. >> How's it possible to be depressed if you anybody watches this is my question. >> Yeah, I mean it's such an amazing time and I love your story. Thank you for sharing that data. It's a it's data. It's data driven optimism is what it is for >> that. Do you mean that or the Afghan warlord thing? >> You mean this one? Okay. >> All right. >> You too can be an Afghan warlord. Everyone can be an Afghan warlord. There's agency of a different kind. There's hope for everyone.

[01:21:00] >> Let's jump into the world of data centers, chips, and compute. Uh two breaking stories uh this week. Uh the first comes out of the global affairs team at X. Let me share a slide and then we'll talk about this. What does it mean? Um and uh and you know, is this data absolutely 100%. So this is what was posted on X uh by the global affairs team at X. It says, quote, "The ex safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations. We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others include AI generated cartoons that depicted data

[01:22:00] center operations enriching them operators enriching themselves at the public expense. And here we're showing one of those cartoons. Uh and you know we've talked about this. You know what's causing this 75% you know not in my backyard sentiment. you know, where people would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a data center. It seems completely illogical. Um, the second story is one I want to put front and center. It comes out of Quincy, Washington, where the data centers have had extraordinary positive civic impact. This story reported on CNN says, "Data centers helped resurrect Quincy, Washington, where the poverty rate fell from 29.4% to 6.2%. tech tax revenue funded a new high school, hospital, library, police and fire stations while residents property taxes their rates decreased. This is a story about the tech industry uh succeeding and and and bluntly this is

[01:23:00] the story that the tech industry needs to be telling and needs to be making happen. So uh gentlemen, your thoughts on this? >> Shocked. Shocked I say that there are foreign influence operations attempting to suppress American AI data center deployment. Shocked >> Selene or Dave >> standard SCOPS you you'd expect to see this happen. The the difficult part is we have really no easy defense against it. And the problem I say and I mentioned this a couple of podcasts ago is that the people in the US are very very narrative driven rather than evidence- driven. That's the problem. Um, I mean, I don't know what the US is doing in China, but you know, it's the numbers here, the numbers here are crazy, right? So, we'll we'll we've talked about this before. Uh, if if you or someone you know is against data centers, please dig and look at the numbers. Water is not an issue. energy,

[01:24:01] these data centers. You know, the right policy is is the county says, "Okay, you can build here, but generate your own power or subsidize, you know, community power so it's cheaper." And for God's sakes, to the hyperscalers, invest in the schools, invest in the libraries. I don't libraries are this anymore, but in invest in the community. That's the right way to do it. Take a fraction of the cost and make everybody's life there better. >> But Peter, you're you're gesturing at I think something interesting. libraries. The libraries remember the digital divide and concerns that some areas might be left behind with less compute. And now we're seeing whether as a result of foreign influence ops or or other political factors, the exact opposite where all of these regions that could in principle be economically uplifted and energetically uplifted and compute uplifted are worried their hand ringing that they might be suffering from too much compute. How much the tide has turned. >> Amazing. Well, every now and then there's a story where we just absolutely positively need to get to the truth and

[01:25:02] you know that we saw this during that co outbreak where it's like look this is this is a medical thing. What's the actual truth do the masks work? Does I mechan work? You know we need absolute truth and instead we got politics. You know we got an a Republican opinion and a Democrat opinion and then now Fouch's on trial. Like come on man this is We need the absolute truth on this story. Like are the Chinese is it the policy of the CCP to disrupt American opinion on data centers, slow down our construction of AI, bypass us in AI, and then control the world by winning the race to RSI? Is that their plan? Or if you talk to Alvin Gralin, he's like they don't even think vaguely that way. They're just trying to have a better life for themselves and improve their own progress. They don't could care less about trying to invade the US with with false stories. Which is the true story? I don't actually know. But we absolutely don't. We don't need politics on this. We need to know what

[01:26:00] is actually going on. >> Well, what what's actually going on is data centers are not the enemy. >> They're an economic engine that can revive a community >> uh that's been left behind. I mean, that's the reality. I you know, it's like please come here. >> Yeah. Dave, didn't so there's no doubt that you're right about that, Peter. Data centers are one of the best things we can pos they are the best thing we can possibly be doing right now. 100% true. And if the CCP loses that battle, they'll move on to some societal AI like it's it's corrupting your children, stop building it or something like that. So we we need to know they will they'll keep coming back with false story after false story if that's their policy and it's we're so vulnerable to it. So I just like they'll they'll hypothetically maybe come up with some sort of infinitely scrollable streaming video app that that will become insanely popular on mobile phones and >> addictive to all the kids. >> Just speaking hypothetically >> I I think American companies are doing a great job at that already. Um but that's

[01:27:02] a different story. All right, let's let's let's move on. So, OpenAI released the first new performances of their chip Jalapeno. Uh, it's a custom inference chip developed with Broadcom. Uh, reporting 1.5 to 1.9x more AI work per watt and up to 3.6x lower endtoend latency as compared to Nvidia's GB200s and GB300's. Halleluino runs on 700 watts uh against the GB300 that runs at 1400 watts, half the power, 1.5 times the peak power uh token rate per kilowatt. Uh performance here uh you know the significance here is that OpenAI is not is no longer just a customer of Nvidia. They're becoming a chip designer. And I I saw a great interview where Jensen was being asked by the reporter, you know, how do you feel about your largest customer competing with you now? So I I think this is what we're going to see everybody doing. Everybody's moving up and down the stack. They want

[01:28:01] independence. >> Yeah, there's no doubt inference is moving off of Nvidia for sure. And you know the 100x performance gain, this is the first 2x of 100x performance gains. That does not mean Nvidia has a problem though because training is staying on Nvidia and training is infinitely sold out just like inferences. But there's an enormous you know 90% of the compute is inference time. So there's an enormous new industry for inference only emerging. The other side of the story is that, you know, this was just an idea at OpenAI just a few months ago and now it's a production chip. So, so that shows you how short the cycle time on innovation is becoming with AI assistance. >> Yeah, Alex, >> a few thoughts on this. Maybe the most startling statistic that OpenAI put out regarding Jalapeno was the throughput per second per user. So tokens per second per user increase that they got on Jalapeno not just on their frontier models but on their open source models like you remember GPTO OSS they got they claim almost a 54x throughput increase

[01:29:03] hosting GPTOSS versus what they obliquely refer to I guess as their as the existing best presumably a reference to some NVIDIA architecture that's so startling uh open PN And where is Broadcom in this? Because obviously the only way that OpenAI and and it was public information that they worked with Broadcom on this, but presumably the only way OpenAI using their own AI to achieve a tape out so quickly is in conjunction with a Broadcom closed PN. This is so startling and potentially such a huge throughput increase. It makes me scratch my head and wonder whether Open AI, remember how we've talked in past about those who can't compete compute, whether OpenAI might actually do this to themselves, even though they are competitive with Anthropic. They're one of the the two top tier frontier firms left. whether they might actually choose to become a

[01:30:00] hyperscaler themselves with their own chips inhouse. I it's like crazy future would be a heck of a plot twist. But I I this has me wondering if if they have such amazing balance of prefill of the prompt uh with uh me otherwise memory bandwidth uh limited decoding for LLMs whether OpenAI wants the optionality in a year or two of saying hey market in addition to our own models we're going to we're going to respond to the competitive threat of Chinese openweight models and other openweight models by surprise. Open AAI offers its own cloud. We'll call it OpenAI compute. It'll be hosted on OpenAI chips and we'll still make money just like Elon is. He's he's making money handoverfist hosting everyone else's models including anthropic. I I think we're in such a crazy future where I could imagine a world where say an open AI compute cloud hosts an anthropic model and OpenAI and Anthropic win at the same time.

[01:31:03] >> Love it. >> I have a Wow. Okay. I have a question for you guys. >> Yeah. >> One of the things that was mentioned was that the the Nvidia's CUDA uh moat may be dead in this next few coming years. How big of a deal is that? Because CUDA seem to be their moat, right? >> Yeah. Know Cuda. So it just it's important to be clear like CUDA is still the dominant mode for AI researchers who are working on new training. >> Take a second and explain what CUDA is for those who don't know. >> Yeah. So kuda. So all the all the AI researchers in the world move to Python and PyTorch to do the because you can iterate your ideas so much more quickly in that environment and then to run it at scale you're like well here's my code just run. The only way to say just run is the CUDA layer translates your PyTorch right into Nvidia micro kernels runs at blazing fast speeds. uh Nvidia invested a lot of time, human time, coding that up, pre-AI coding and it became so pervasive that when AI took off, only Nvidia chips could be used for

[01:32:00] all this training and research because it it would have been a nightmare to try and port all these mantle algorithms to AMD or to some other vendor. And so that's that's why Nvidia is the most powerful company in the world or most valuable company in the world today is specifically because of that brilliant early support of AI researchers when nobody else cared about them. Uh so now everyone's like well but now I can vibe code anything in like a microscond. Why is the CUDA thing still a moat? And at inference time it's not. You know your inference algorithms are so easy to port to AMD or Intel that you you just you don't care about CUDA. you can vibe up your own solution. But for the advanced researchers, they still overwhelmingly use CUDA. Uh and and then you know, Nvidia realized that CUDA can't last forever. So they went and bought Melanox to create massive high-speed interconnect. So now their big moat is look, if you want to run a 100,000 or a million GPUs in one coherent cluster, you still got to go with Nvidia only. So I think Jensen's smart enough to know that like your moat is only good until

[01:33:00] the next moat. And so he's moving the moat very intelligently and and he has a huge amount of capital to keep moving with it. But CUDA as the inference time mode is already dead. CUDA as the training time mode is probably limited lifespan. But that's okay because the interconnect is the new mode. >> All right, let's turn to Apple. So, Apple's new Mac Studio pairs the M5 Ultra with up to 512 GB of unified memory, giving a desktop Mac enough memory to run some of the largest open AI models available locally on your desktop. Apple unveiled also the M6, its first chip manufactured at the 2nmter process. So, finally, Apple is in the AI game now pushing local AI as an alternative to AI in the cloud. Uh, Seem, you wanted to talk about this one. your thoughts? >> Well, just such an easy and obvious thing for Apple to do, right? You would have been they would if they hadn't done this, they would have been the stupidest company in history and they're not that dumb. Uh the UN five 512 gig unified

[01:34:02] memory puts a massive amount of intelligence under your desk. So, this really changes the economics from paying per token perpetually to buying a capital asset and then using it continuously, right? especially that Apple's gone to the extra level of starting to lease its equipment out to people. So, this is really a big deal. I think the big winners here are comp law firms, healthcare companies that have HIPPA issues and can't put their stuff on the cloud. Everything can much more stuff can now be doing done on prem. And I think this is going to be a for medium-siz healthcare firms that can't afford a private cloud and and doing all that really really a big deal. And I think this is a such a natural advantage for Apple to go down this path. So you get the four of these Mac studios clustered together. Now you've got like a small private data center. Like that's a pretty big deal. Even Dave would go full out for that >> rather than agents. >> I mean I look I'm at the end of my rope

[01:35:01] with Apple. I mean like >> I nobody has changed my life more that I've never met than Steve Jobs. And the Apple 2 that I got when I was a kid totally changed my life. And then when they came out with Mac OS based on Linux, changed my life again. It's it's absolutely the greatest company I've ever seen. But they have totally missed the boat. And it's just embarrassing that a company with that much cash flow has no AI strategy. Like they they don't even deserve to be a Mag 7 company anymore. It's just pathetic. So if the best they can do in the age of AI is add a bunch more RAM to a machine that they already had, I mean, what the hell, man? And I mean I I'm not saying this is a great thing that they came out with, but it's like 0.01% of what they should have done by now in AI. >> I total okay, I'm okay with all of that, but but it's obvious they should have done it. At least they did this, right? >> The irony is the irony is even deeper. So if if you look at the ancestry of how

[01:36:01] unified memory architecture came about and the the neural engine inside the M series, you can trace the lineage back to the Apple car. It was the Apple car was the reason why Apple first introduced the Apple car that never happened. Why Apple introduced the neural engine with access to this huge unified memory addressable space. So I I almost think like Apple's interaction with AI is almost a history of hardware that's too good for the software and or conversely software that just isn't worthy of the hardware. Apple had the early unified matmal acceleration built into a unified addressing space. Apple had the TSMC connection. Apple had the raw transistor throughput to basically be Nvidia and then some. And they fumbled it. They had Siri before everyone else. They had audio interaction. All of these various forms and Apple software fumbled the ball. And I can only hope that under

[01:37:02] John Turnis that Apple is going to decide it really does, you know, Tim Cook used to always say and before Tim Steve Jobs that they want it to be hardware plus software plus services and it just seems to me like Apple's hardware at least to the consumer side is incredible. Their services are also not that bad, but they're so fumbling and and so underutilizing still infamously their amazing hardware with their software. And you know, to to John, if if you're listening and you're looking for guidance on what Apple should be doing in this new era under your C CEOship, please, please, please just like take your amazing hardware and unleash it with much better software that integrates AI natively. >> So, yes, hire Alex as a consultant first and foremost. I don't need it. >> Well, well, do it. You'll do it because you need it, not because Alex maybe for charity. For charity. >> But also, the world needs it. Like Apple is the one brand

[01:38:00] >> that you can trust >> with your information. It's the one and only brand. And here we are in the age of AI. Everyone's confused. It's incredibly powerful. Like, it would change the world. >> Such a different world if Steve Jobs had not made his stupid health decisions and, you know, not treated his his cancer. You know, Dave, I met I met Steve once. I had a one-word conversation with him. >> So, I was having an ex-priseze an ex-priseze meeting. Larry Paige, uh, co-founder of Google, was on my board, and he hosted us for an evening dinner. And, uh, Loren Powell Jobs, his wife, was there and and Steve was there in the back of the room and we were talking about the latest X-P prizes and the ones that were just won. And, and afterward, I had to go meet my hero over here. And Steve is in the back of the room with his arms folded the entire time like this, looking kind of pissed off. And I walked over, introduced myself, and I said, "Steve, it's a real pleasure to meet you." And he like, he like, you know, barely nods his head. And then I said, "You don't want to be here, do

[01:39:00] you?" And he goes, "Nope." And that was the entire conversation. >> I I've got a story. So, um, a couple of months before the big, uh, iPhone announcement in 2007, uh, Jerry Yang put together a an offsite, a full day offsite with all of Yahoo's vice presidents. And Steve Jobs came in to do a keynote, right? So, at a kind of a handshake, hello. And Steve Jobs looks at the audience and he goes, there were like 300 people in the room, right? And he's like, you have 300 vice presidents. He's like, "I think I see the problem with Yahoo right there." So, like the fact that he had that much organizational overhead, he was just couldn't couldn't cope with that. My claim to fame is I have a whole bunch of MacBooks that were signed by Waznjak. >> Oh, wow. >> Cuz I I did a 90-minute debate with him on stage a few years ago. >> How old are you? >> Yeah, >> that one's about that was that's a few years old. I had to I had to I had him

[01:40:01] sign about four or five of them, guarding them jealously. >> Yeah. You got to preserve those in some kind of >> got to preserve got to preserve those. Um and I gave a couple away to my community cuz they were so thrilled with that episode. It was a great conversation. Steve Waznjak is famous for coming out with all of this technology gives us the opportunity to do tinkering and just playing around and that's the heart of all creativity is just playing around with technology to seeing what comes up and he was really doubling down on that. It was a great conversation, but that that memory of Steve Jobs looking at 300 vice presidents going, I see, you think I see what's wrong with your company has never left me. >> Oh my god. >> It's funny. The very first share of stock I ever bought was Apple. And I I you know, we tend to overthink things. Like all I had to do is just hold it. >> I should still have that stock today. >> I'm going to move us into the world of abundance. Two stories on energy and one on water. Uh again you know our mission here is to deliver you datadriven optimism why the world is getting

[01:41:01] better. So uh let's hit energy first. Again two stories here. The first story uh is about uranium enrichment uh to meet the growing needs of our advanced gen 4 fision plants and the coming SMR small modular reactor power plants. So historically in the US conventional reactor fuel in the form of uranium 238 has been enriched to about 3 to 5%. This week, a commercial startup, again a startup here, called Actonide said it has demonstrated the ability to enrich natural uranium into high assay lowenriched uranium or halo up to a purity of 15.38% five times the traditional purity previously achieved by you know all the government labs. So a startup is enriching uranium to this level and that's for me a remarkable story. So, every SMR company, and we had that incredible podcast with Rome Nom on the future of energy. If you haven't seen it, please go see it. Every SMR company says their reactors will be coming

[01:42:01] online in 2030, but none of them have the fuel and this could well be the solution. Um, Alex, any thoughts on this story? >> Yeah, a number of thoughts. I I think something went wrong right after World War II. That's that's my best guess. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, so 80 years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was eventually formed in the wake of the Manhattan Project. And I I think something just got screwed up with regard to how nuclear physics and advanced physics in general was handled in the postw World War II era. And the government probably because of the bomb, the the government granted itself under the guise of mixed civilian military leadership, the Atomic Energy Commission. I think something governance-wise got fumbled and I think 80 years on after the end of World War II, we're finally starting to shake off the quasi governmental monopoly on nuclear physics. And I think I I suspect

[01:43:03] there has been so much progress in an alternative history, you know, sort of for all mankind style where if in the aftermath of World War II, if the Atomic Energy Commission had either been organized differently or we just had a totally different governance structure for advanced physics after the war, we would have advanced so much more quickly. And I I think startups like Actonide that are producing Halo, I think these are the tip of the iceberg for all of the economic growth and technological growth that can now be unleashed now 80 years after World War II. All of these shackles that we put on our our own society perhaps with the best of intentions are finally slowly atrophying away. And just a a narrow point on the technology here. So >> please >> this is nonobvious in many cases uranium enrichment in this country to the extent we do it at all and aren't just

[01:44:01] importing enriched uranium from say Russia uh the the technology that in many cases is being used to enrich uranium in this country is Manhattan project level technology that has not been materially improved since World War II. It's using uranium hexafflloride gas and centrifuges when we have much better technology. There are alternative ways to enrich uranium. For example, the uh the term is a calatron. This was technology that we've known in principle how to make since the Manhattan project. Rather than using centrifuges, spinning uranium compound uh compounds in gaseous form and then later having to compress the gaseous uranium molecules down to solid pellets or other solid forms that could be used in reactors. We could instead be using magnets, electromagnetic magnetics and vacuum systems and power electronics controls. We have 80 years of advances in power

[01:45:00] electronics that by and large are not being used and have not been used to enrich uranium either because we're scared of doing it or because we've handcuffed ourselves in terms of our being able to do it. So I I I think I think we should expect to see now that the shackles are starting to come off in a limited fashion from the postw World War II era, we're going to start to see 80 years of chip advances and Moors law advances finally being applied back to this basically World War II era technology and I think it'll create an energy boom. >> Well, I hope so. I think uh from a venture capitalist point of view, you would never in a million years have invested in this when the regulatory cost of getting a nuclear reactor up and running is going to be a billion dollars anyway. So you can see how the dysfunction ripples through. You start with government dysfunction and then the venture capitalists are like well given that that's dysfunctional I won't invest in these innovations. So then the whole value chain just doesn't go anywhere. >> But now the SMR companies are being funded by venture capitalists and they

[01:46:00] are going public. Uh let's jump a little bit about solar. Uh I'm going to show this chart here. Uh this is a chart that comes from Ember, the global energy think tank. Uh they shared this data showing China's increasing energy generation both in solar and in nuclear. So monthly solar generation in China has exploded eightfold 800% over the past 6 years growing from 20 terowatts per month in 2020 to about 160 terowatts per month in mid 2026. At the same time, nuclear power in China has increased by at least 50% while the US nuclear uh power gen has basically remained flat. Uh need to remember that the AI race is not just about chips. It's also about the cost of energy to run those chips. You know, the US is building its whole data center power gen based on natural gas, which is like six bucks per million British thermal units, while China is is basically getting this for near zero marginal cost from uh from solar. And I

[01:47:03] mean, I I think the abundant story here is it is possible um to really create a massive amount of energy from from solar. you know the numbers if you talk to your local model it's like there's 8,000 times more energy that hits the surface of the earth than we consume as a species. So being able to double triple or 10x that is well within within reach. Um See, you want to jump in first? >> A bunch of things to say here. First of all, if you look at the difference between that red and blue curve, it's it's completely a copy of our old linear versus exponential curves, right? linears like this and exponential curves up and we're on the wrong side of that equation. Uh this is linear intuition confronting an exponential curve. The the problem is solar keeps getting underestimated because people look at install capacity today rather than the vertical slope of the deployment curve. And that's the nightmare. Uh and and people can't get their heads around this. This is such a a a kind of a an

[01:48:02] old tired story that we should just get past because China's advantage is not like a magical solar panel. It's the whole industrial system optimized around manufacturing, the supply chain, the permitting, the deployment. And in the US, the big challenge is the interconnection with the grid, the transmission, the permitting speed, right? And so you need all these different you need nuclear, you need solar, you need all of this. But battery technology makes this a killer opportunity because you can add a solar panel today rather than wait 15 years for some gigawatt scale energy project. And so this is a massive opportunity that's being left behind. If I was the US I'd put a Manhattan type project into perovsky and new solar capabilities photonics have some huge opportunities there and this when you have energy abundance as I think we've all pointed out that becomes a multiplier in every other exponential technology. So this is such a no-brainer and it really kind of it's very dismaying to see the GDP

[01:49:00] challenge here. >> The GDP of a country is directly proportional to the amount of energy they create. And Alex that you know the point you made about you know nuclear being frozen it it's very clear here we have not changed nuclear in you know you know decades. We've still been producing >> a half century something again I I think in the fullness of time maybe 10 years from now we'll have a better understanding of what happened during the 20th century that got screwed up after World War II. But I I think several things on the governance side especially as they relate to nuclear physics just in in the wake of World War II. We went on the wrong path and my hope is that it gets corrected. >> Yeah. Uh Dave, do you want to make a comment on this one? Well, I'll only make one comment, which is, you know, on that chart, the US is way behind in solar. All those US panels are made in China. >> It's much worse than it looks. >> Yeah. All right. Our next story is about water. Uh the weather modification startup called Rain Maker says that 10 drones uh that flew over Alaska's Kenai

[01:50:02] Peninsula generated an estimated 19 million gallons of additional rainfall in just 3 hours uh using what they call a glacioenic cloud seating. So, you know, ultimately weather modification is no longer theoretical. It's here. Applications for this kind of technology include drought relief, agriculture, wildfire prevention, and water security. Uh, just for reference, um, you can look it up. There's 3.4 quadrillion gallons of water in the atmosphere. And atmosphere capture is now a thing making it in the clouds or capturing it on the ground. So this is the abundance thesis that predicts that water becomes massively abundant when technology to create it becomes cheap. And you know 10 drones creating 19 million gallons of water in 3 hours is is pretty damn cheap. Alex >> and the the the drone part the UAV part I think is especially novel. So imagine a near-term future where we we achieve our weather control grid. Not

[01:51:00] necessarily. When I always go through the mental exercise of how if I had to build a global weather control system, how would I do it? I think the easiest way to do it is probably with reflectors either terrestrially cheaper or in in LEO a little bit more expensive. But this points the way I think to a third path for global weather control, which is cloud seeding. Imagine a swarm, a fleet of drones in the style of rain makaker drones that are continuously in flight, probably solar powered so they can be permanently aloft and they are just dispensing on an asneeded basis but under the control of of some centralized AI algorithm the particulates the the nuclei needed for either snow or rain at all informed by a global weather AI model. We could in principle I think with some further development of of rainmakers technology and similar technologies we could have total weather control and that would be from a natural

[01:52:01] disaster perspective. Imagine being able to divert hurricanes >> or disperse hurricanes before they form. >> Yeah. Dis disperse with with precipitation on the water instead of on land or tornadoes, other extreme weather events. Not to mention giving good weather to the places that want it and are willing to trade it. could have a global weather trade where regions trade each other for precipitation. There are so many possibilities that are unlocked by the confluence of AI, drones, and weather modification. And now finally, we're we're about to start this era of geoengineering. I think >> love it. I can see the business model for rain maker. It's like you you know different cities bid on where the drones go. >> Rain rain arbitrage. We could have a global market for rain. Uh, Salem, >> rain becomes programmable. For for me, the big breakthrough is not that they made rain, which we've been able to do for a while now, but it's the fact that they could prove how much additional rain they made that I think is really interesting because it then unlocks a

[01:53:01] huge amount of stuff. Weather, the challenge is weather typically doesn't respect weather boundaries. So trying to figure out if you're downstream of somebody that seated a bunch of clouds and now you're not getting the rain and they're getting it is going to create some interesting tensions around that. But this is exactly the type of abundance technology, right? Allows you to scale something really powerful. And I think there's a there's a there's a wonderful future. The business models around geoengineering, as Alex puts it, are pretty pretty rampant. You could do some really interesting stuff. I mean crop management, all sorts of thing become capable. It's reminding me of one of the more creative singularity solutions that we ever saw was um at Singularity University, one of the summer students, I think his name was Simon Daniels, had this idea of putting platforms in the ocean that would spray up waterway, take ocean water and spray it up to block the sun from hitting the earth and slowing down global warming that way. and his business model to said that was to do it along flight paths

[01:54:00] where you could spray up water in the in the shape of a Nike logo and sell that advertising. Um, and so you sell do it in the shape of certain patterns that pays for the whole system at the same time you lower the temperature into a controllable way. And there's lots of people that say, "Oh my god, geoengineering is a bad thing. We don't know the after effects." And the counterpoint is well we've already been geoengineering the world for 100 years in a horrible uncontrolled unmeasurable way and it's causing massive damage. Look at the disaster in Nepal that's happening right now. It's a complete tragedy goes out to all >> and nothing anybody could do in that sense and you could avoid a lot of that and so I think we it's incumbent upon us to use technology to navigate this stuff because you do it consciously rather than unconsciously and that's the powerful point. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm

[01:55:01] here today with an extraordinary physician, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Don Mucalem. Dawn, let's talk about cancer. Uh, you know, I know from the member database that we've have at Fountain are members who come in who think they're healthy. It turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about. >> That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected. >> Yeah. You know, it's interesting. People, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And and if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed and you can know. And so when members come through found, how do they detect cancers?

[01:56:00] >> So we're doing full body MRI and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very very important. And these are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering. But the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research, and work hard to democratize wellness. >> Yeah. So, at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to know. So, check out Fountain Life. You can go to fountainlife.com/peter to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning at stage one when it is curable before it gets to stage three or stage four in your world of hurt. All right, let's move into the world of health. Uh a couple of stories here. First off, uh this week the FDA approved a drug called uh let me pronounce this properly. Duracanisib. Duraxen rasib. It's the first RAS inhibitor for metastatic pancreatic

[01:57:00] adnocarcinoma attacking the RA family of proteins that drives tumor growth in most patients with the disease. So pancreatic cancer I mean is really considered almost a death sentence. It's the most lethal least treatable cancer for humans in history. uh in uh previously treated metastatic cancer uh durasib nearly doubled median survival from 6.7 to 13.2 months. It also tripled tumor response rates from 11% to 32%. And while this isn't a cure and you know just getting an extra 7 months doesn't sound like a lot. That's an additional 7 months for science to continue to make more breakthroughs. I mean that's the way I think about this is like longevity escape velocity. Your goal is to live long enough to get a breakthrough to the another side. It's also worth noting that RA mutations drive about 30% of all human cancers. So a drug that inhibits these proteins may also be useful for other cancers as

[01:58:00] well. Uh and you know we've heard this said so many times by Daario, by Demis, by many others. You know the goal is to cure all these diseases including cancer in this next decade. Alex, do you have a take on this one? >> Yeah. So, a couple of items. One, I point out remarkably this is a daily oral tablet. Pretty incredible. Secondly, I'd point out I I was doing some research on the the full uh lineage as it were for duren rasib involved in the development of this drug. So, I think this is actually finger to the wind. I think this is probably slashh hopefully one of the last generation of pancreatic cancer medications that almost precedes the AI wave. Uh and I I would expect lots of new targets, lots of new approaches to emerge from both the alphafold 3 style of uh protein folding problem and

[01:59:01] structural biology being solved as well as virtual cell models. As far as I can tell, Drax and Rasib used neither of these in its design. It was like good old-fashioned drug design, but I think we're about to see a whole wave of AIdriven drugs that take it from its current response rate to, you know, near 100% using AI. And I I think that's to be celebrated. I also want to celebrate the FDA in approving this relatively quickly. FDA noted that they approved this I think 60 90 days something like this prior to the due date which for historic FDA speeds is actually pretty remarkable speed. Yeah. So we're seeing a much more I think responsive FDA that now starts to care about basian versus frequentist statistics that cares about INDs quite a bit more it seems uh that's interested in lowering the number of clinical trials in exemplary cases.

[02:00:00] Hopefully, this is I I think a baby step towards a future where AI solves 5,000 diseases and then we have a regulatory apparatus in the form of an FDA that is able to metabolize all of those innovations and turn them into cures. >> Amen. Amen to that. Uh let me move to our second story in the health corner here. Uh this is published in nature communications and it comes from an international research team uh out of University of Nottingham who developed a biomimetic gel capable of repairing and regrowing damaged tooth enamel. So this is fluoridefree treatment uses lab engineered proteins that mimic the natural processes of enamel formation during infancy. So as you might know you know tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body and it doesn't regenerate. So until now, the only thing you could do was replace enamel with, you know, a synthetic filling would eventually fail, you know. So biomedic gel is an elastin-like protein matrix designed to mimic the

[02:01:01] natural protein scaffolding that organizes enamel during tooth development. The treatment didn't just make something that looks like enamel. It regenerated layers and restored hardness, stiffness, water resistance, friction properties resistant to brushing, chewing, acid exposure in labs. The gel acts like a scaffolding that pulls calcium and phosphate from the surrounding environment and directs them into properly organizing minerals rather than merely depositing an amorphous coating. It's true enamel. I mean, for me, this is huge. You know, related oral disease affects, you know, half the population. It's estimated at a half a trillion dollars per year in associated costs. You know, to put this in perspective, this is still XVivo. It's still done using extracted human teeth and it's being done, you know, effectively in the test tube of the petri dish. Uh, but it's going to be moving to human testing very quickly. And as someone who's had poor dental health and poor dental genetics all my life, I couldn't be more excited about

[02:02:01] this, especially for my kids. Um, Salem, do you want to jump on this? just fantastic. For me, the the big thing is showing that the future of of medicine is not like repairing broken bits. It's convincing the body to rebuild them and finding the mechanisms and pathways, right? Uh and so this is uh really really powerful stuff. It'll completely change dentistry. >> Yeah. >> Uh this completely >> people undervalue their oral health so much, right? The mouth is a direct corridor to the brain and to the heart. You know, you need to be careful about your oral health. Alex, >> regenerative medicine. There's been a future. We've been waiting for stuff like this to happen for a long time. It's great to see it finally kind of actually come into being. >> Alex, did you dig into this story, too? >> I I did. I mean, I think these results actually started bubbling up last year first. I I'm incredibly interested in uh materials engineering of human body, human dental enamel included. But I I

[02:03:01] think this was an AMA question that we got in the the last pod episode. people asking, yeah, like where's all the innovation? Well, I I think the story um uh which again like first started seeing this uh last year um I I think this is just one data point in a larger manifold of just applying good old-fashioned material science to the problem of human teeth. uh and if if you can help to to shape and engineer the pathways through which tooth enamel grows, I have to think that similar biioaterial discoveries and inventions will also be helpful for bone regrowth for a variety of other key biomeaterials for regenerative medicine. And again looking at this the research behind this I saw approximately no AI that that's always my sniff test like how if and if and how AI was used in this research and if it wasn't used as appears to be the case here there was approximately no AI as I

[02:04:00] can see then take this but multiply it by many orders of magnitude the sort of progress I'd expect to see in a few years in this area. >> Dave how's your oral health? Uh, it's fine. But, you know, I get I get really excited about, you know, that Madna story we had recently where >> they had a melanoma vaccine that works really well. Stock went way up. But what was exciting is that it's a platform that applies >> to virtually any other cancer. And so, when Alex says, "Yeah, these weren't done with AI." I'm like, "Well, they're really cool, but they're one-offs. I can't wait for the repeatable. Like, I can grow a tooth. I can grow an arm. I can grow an ear. I can grow anything now." And so then then you get into true scalable regenerative medicine. I feel like that's very very soon. >> And by the way, by by the way, the work on or on limb regrowth is is making amazing progress. >> Yeah. All right. >> I think Dave, you're also touching on an interesting almost like a singularity flavored technological deflation story, which is if there's no AI in it, like to

[02:05:00] first order, what's the point? Uh either infu either infuse it with AI and make it scalable so that you can #solve everything scale it up by a thousandx or or just don't do it and do something else that's higher leverage >> not to discourage people from regenerative medicine >> sell your data to Dennis and Dennis will AI what you just invented >> that's perfect >> all right finally let's jump into space and robotic stories so the two first stories are from the Elon universe uh deote this week reported about the potential lunar economy they put a financial figure of 566 billion in cumulative economic value by 2050. I could not expect a low lower ball than that number from uh uh from Deote. You know the biggest early markets being infrastructure costs, transportation, power, comms, mobility, construction, life support. They cite SpaceX as the biggest winner because of the central

[02:06:01] role that Starship will play. You know clearly they are not taking into account Alex manufacturing star mind on the moon to fuel earth's >> Disaphab pedophab is MIA. >> Yeah. So you know just to put the numbers on it cuz you know that number you know half a trillion of lunar economy may sound large but it's a minuscule estimate. So Elon previously stated his plans uh for Star Mine started with about 100 to 200 gawatts per year of orbital AI compute launched from Earth and then moving to manufacturing AI satellites on the moon for launch with a mass driver. He estimates that we could yield as much as a 100 terowatts per year of orbital compute uh based on lunar production which would generate and and wait for it an absurdly large amount of lunar economy. Wait for it the estimate if you're building a 100 terowatts per year of orbital compute the economy would be

[02:07:00] two quadrillion dollar per year of gross revenue. I mean, I I I like >> I mean, I don't know, maybe Planetar is is maybe too small, >> two quadrillion dollars. I mean, now we're now we're talking a a good economy. >> Um, but uh, you know, you know, Sem, you deal with like the Deoites and the Mckenzies and so these guys are so conservative in their numbers all the time. I mean, >> crazy. Yeah, because there a there a lot of them are accountants, so they're scared of being called out for anything vaguely approaching a real estimate. Uh b they uh they want to make sure their numbers are defensible to the nth degree. So no speculation at all. Whereas by definition, you're speculating. So might might as well speculate to some level of honesty. This is the same type of pattern we've seen before. By the way, one of these big four, I won't say which one to protect the innocent here, uh, put out an AI an outentic AI report saying this is the

[02:08:03] future of AI agents, etc. So, I excitedly read it thinking I'd get some in gloomerings that would give me some sense of it. Except when I looked deeper into it, the data they were using was 2 and a half years old. Okay? And how with 2 and 1/2 year old data you're going to come up with anything about the agentic world when everything happened in the last 6 months? It's like how how do you but they have so many checks and balances and um and re internal review systems that that dilute everybody's thinking careful you can't say that da da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d that by the time it comes out it's been whitewashed so many times it's mean >> lawyers and and and cross reference checkers of even more cautious people and and then nothing it's nothing realistic gets put out in general I typically say take any of their estimates and multiply it by 10 or 20 times Huh. Dave, what's your thought? >> We had the Deote AI team in here in the office the other day. They're very, very good actually. But they were Yeah, they were also saying the same thing about

[02:09:00] the accounting side. So So Liam, you're confirmed from inside Deote. Um, yeah, quadrillions of dollars. That's what Elon was talking about. I I believe it because uh the gravity well is the key. You know, Peter, you talk about this a lot, but everyone's like, "Why would I bother manufacturing that on the moon? What's the point? You know, I can just make it here." Like, no, no, it's the gravity. Well, >> you start building power plants based on just lunar minerals and >> all of a sudden you're like, this is so much more efficient. Plus, you know, there's no worry about pollution and stuff like that. >> Yeah, lunar regalith is silicon. What's that used for? Oh, okay. Power generation, aluminum, nickel, iron, and oxygen. I mean, it's like the perfect materials for building Dyson swarms. Alex, I've got to feed it to you to sort of uplevel this vision here. Well, the the moon may not be a harsh mistress. She may be a wealthy mistress at this point. I I I do think the pedophab is the killer app for the moon. I I don't think it's tourism. I don't think it's transporter infra or comms.

[02:10:03] >> The Apollo program was sort of infamously, arguably a successor to the Manhattan project. And I I think to the extent that the the full history of the Apollo program is already fully understood and and in the public record, I think a relative failure. I I would love to see the moon reach its full economic potential. And I I just don't think that is going to happen anyway other than full private development. And right now it does appear that the critical path is mining chips, fabbing data centers on the moon. It's not rods from God. It's not uh deploying US NASA astronauts to the moon. That's all well and good and everything. And friend of the pod Jared is I I think doing an amazing job of reinvigorating the case on the government side for vision reactors on the moon and all of that. But I I think in the fullness of time even that just ends up being a rounding

[02:11:01] error compared to data center deployment and mining on the moon. Unless I don't know unless 2001 of space odyssey happens and we discover some monoliths on the moon in which case that's the killer optab or the exop on the moon is it's really interesting to game it out because when you when you look at the fab construction process you know a lot of the components in there are just routine aluminum routine you know just construction there are a few really critical pieces that you can still make on earth and launch them and it'll be just a tiny fraction of the total cost but you know once you start manufacturing chips on the moon, the solar panels on the moon. I mean, it's just exponential takeoff from there. And you know, the technology is just not that far away. >> The problem is that these guys are not looking at uh what the you can't ask what the lunar economy is today. You have to say what industries become unlocked when the cost of moving mass off the earth drops by an order or two of magnitude. And that's the imagination gap.

[02:12:00] >> Yeah. And and I just want to say a shout out to Jared Isaacman who's a friend of the pod and you know what an extraordinary administrator. I could not be more proud. I said it during our podcast with him. I've known I think all the administrators pretty well over the last 40 50 years or 40 years. Uh and uh he is by far the best most eloquent most visionary most business-minded. Um, and he is an accelerationist and if anybody's going to support humanity, uh, you know, moving beyond the bounds of Earth, uh, it's it's him. >> Peter, like, every time the CCP sponsors an influence op to deter American terrestrial data centers, the lunar pedophab gets its wings. >> Yeah. All right. Our second Elon story comes from Tesla. The company announced it's expanded its rollout of cyber cabs in Texas. Uh they just registered 79 Model Y's for the robo taxi service. Um and this is starting to look more, you know, less like an experiment and more like a

[02:13:01] real fleet. In Las Vegas alone, Tesla recently said it's going to be deploying 2500 vehicles in the next year. It's Cyber Cab. Uh Tesla's official long-term milestone is to reach a million robo taxis in commercial operations as soon as possible. And if you do the estimates, uh, that's probably about a hundred billion dollars of revenue in ride share revenue for Tesla. Let's take a look at a quick video here just to remind people how cool, uh, the cyber cab is. Um, I have to say, you know, I I love Google, but you know, Whimo's new vehicle is kind of clunky. This is pretty beautiful. This is Elon at the original Cyber Cab roll out. I love those doors. >> Way cooler than I thought. >> Yeah, those are uh those are three

[02:14:02] Commodores or four Commodores. Pretty cool. >> Yeah, such a great design. >> It's a beautiful design. it and in gold is like it's perfect. >> It really is. At the Gigafactory, remember they had that one that was all exploded out so you could see inside all the parts. It's just a beautiful beautiful design and it doesn't have that many moving parts, you know, so you can see how they're going to manufacture them at an incredible scale. >> Yeah. Uh >> you know, just a just for a consu from a consumer point of view, all my friends that are driving the new full self-driving uh Model Y's are like, "Oh my god, this is life-changing. I literally go anywhere FSD and the wait list right now is about 3 months for a Model Y but 3 months from today the fully engaging you want to talk to it all the time AI will be everywhere. So, you might want to get on that wait list because you're going to want to be talking to your AI and continuing your dialogue with your

[02:15:00] >> roof, >> you know, uh it's going to be amazing. And, you know, for if there are entrepreneurs out there when the cyber cap comes out, you know, buy a hundred of them, put them out to work and we'll have a fleet of cyber cabs generating revenue for you. I think that's going to be an incredible business. I I I will say I I love my Tesla Model Y 2026 Juniper Launch Series Edition. It it is life-changing. The FSD is incredible. The the manufacturing quality of the car is incredible. I can't wait for Cyber Cabs and robo taxis in general to come to Boston. I'll beat the drum once more for the broken Whimo's theory of if a city can't accommodate robo taxis, then it is not equipped for the singularity. And hopefully someone from the city of Boston is listening to this and scratching their head and wondering just what is doing with Boston and why Boston doesn't have proper Whimo support. If if you're scratching your head and you're in a position of authority, call Dave or call me. We'd love to figure this out.

[02:16:02] >> Yeah. The same thing when Uber was made when Uber was made illegal in France. I was like, "Okay, if you're an entrepreneur, don't move to France." It's it's like these are telltale signs of what cities are on the singularity curve and which are not. >> Yeah. >> See, >> um uh I'm actually having to sell my beloved 10-year-old Tesla Model S to get a Model Y because I need the FSD. >> Uh I'll send a photograph of it in for our next pod just so everybody can see I totally love my car. But this is a big big deal. I think for a couple of reasons. One is uh there's three things here. One is that this changes from purchasing a car to autonomous revenue miles. Uh what's the cost per autonomous revenue per mile, right? And if you can do it at a decent safety adjusted cost, this is actually massive. The uh the fleet growth will lower weight times which will improve the US user extreme

[02:17:00] experience which will uh increase the rise. It generates more data which will create that inner loop that Alex is talking about. So I think there's some really amazing downstream benefits from all of this. It totally changes again insurance and and cleaning up and charging all sorts of I think you'll turn gas stations into autonomous car cleaning depots. That kind of thing will start to happen. Um but uh for me the big one is I made a bet. I got up on stage 10 years ago and I said, "My kid will never get a driver's license and I've got just about a year for this cyber cab to roll out to get out there before before he he may get one anyway just to get away from the parents, but he wouldn't have to." And then I'll be proven correct. So important not to lose your credibility as a futurist. >> Yeah. You know, the this abundant story here is the poorest people in the planet will be driven around by electric autonomous vehicles. Yes, >> it will be the cheapest mode of transportation. >> And think about the elderly, right? And people that can't get around easily and

[02:18:01] all and and and and it's just the market suddenly becomes so magical delivering huge capability to segments of the population that can't do it today. Huge. >> Yeah. I'm going to put up this uh image here. I I I love it. Just comparing uh Cyber Cab and and Whimo. Uh and you know I I have to say I don't know how Whimo is going to compete when Cyber Cab rolls out. You know first of all CyberCap is eight cameras. Again Elon made the point that if humans can just drive with one or two eyes you should be able to have a car do it with just cameras and uh compared to the LAR and radars and 13 cameras that uh that the Whimo has. And I think the point with the brains on this image is CyberCab is is massively AIdriven. Um yeah, I could not agree more. >> It's going to be a big fight um to this. By the way, didn't um Tesla acknowledge

[02:19:00] that cameras aren't enough in this? >> No, I don't think so. Tesla does use for short range, it uses ultrasound, but everyone uses ultrasound. It does not use LAR. Uh I I think there's sort of an interesting maybe speaking prospectively not financial advice epitap in so far as Luminar the LAR provider declared bankruptcy uh half a year ago at at this point but I if I had to bet again not investment advice I think the market abhores monopolies and I think there's probably room for at least a handful of competing five or 10 of them there will be many of these around competing beating themselves up and lowering throwing the price across the b across >> and we all win. >> Yeah. I introduced Austin Russell, the the CEO of Luminar before it went out of business to Elon at a party and uh and I watched them duke it out on whether LAR was important. Anyway, it was a it was a fun show and Elon was like, "No way. Not interested. Not going to go there." All right, our final story. Uh it's a little

[02:20:02] bit of a bizarre one but expected uh in the direction in the world of robotics. A company called Somnia Lab has built a robot for intimacy and the internet has lost its mind. It's called Model L. Maybe L for love. It's 5 foot n inches, 44 pound robot with 24 degrees of freedom with the warmth simulation, touch response, and preference memory designed for human robot sexual encounters. Okay, it's finally here, guys. So, real humans wear motion capture suits. I'm going to show you a video of that in a moment to record 165 intimate actions that were fed into the model. Somnia Lab is taking $300 deposits for delivery in late 2027. What makes the model L more interesting than a sophisticated sex doll is the attempt to combine physical embodiment, persistent AI memory, and personalization. Somnia says the robot is intended to remember conversations

[02:21:00] and preferences across encounters, learn a user's rhythms, can't make this stuff up, and communication style. Uh, the body is made from lightweight carbon fiber with modular skin and structural components designed to be serviced and upgraded. Customers will be able to customize the face, the makeup, the eyes, the skin appearance, and the body silhouette. So, I guess this is a story around uh abundance of intimacy. Let's take a look at this. >> This was inevitable. Peter, I'm waiting for you to say fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques. >> No, I'm not going to go there. >> Not yet. >> Let's watch this video. This is a video of the motion capture uh being done to train the AI models here. with cheesy music to boot. We >> We We've hit a We've hit a new high here. This is incredible. >> One has to admire the the low degree of

[02:22:01] freedom. Like that was a pretty simple face. I think we were seeing that was a that was a human in a mocap suit, right? >> It was. It was. >> That was low quality in every way from the music to the video to everything. >> A robot porn video. Oh my god. You know, you combine this with the uh conversation we had earlier about AI girlfriends and boyfriends, right? And the human, you know, relationship is cooked. >> You think I mean I I go back and forth. Is there going to be an app store for for moap movements or is this just going to be pre-training or post-raining data for a foundation model that knows about everything? >> I want to see the job ad for that one. >> I have a couple of comments on this one. >> Please. So the first thing is you know this type of embodied AI has really a pretty difficult data problem right because you can scrape the internet for text there's no internet scale data set or physical human interaction all >> you talking about internet are you looking at hold on hold on hold on in terms of the the physical movement etc

[02:23:02] so the the what I love more than anything here is the economic approach right you you crowdsource the You do crowdfunding of the early thing, get early customer and then use the customer demand to finance the hardware and generate the interaction data as you scale the product. This is like a pretty classic EXO flywheel. So I thought that was you got a new career out of you. You got it all inside. >> Now I'll give a hot take hot take on the hot sheets which is I I don't actually think this is that promising as an approach. There is an abundance of evidence at this point that you can do a great job either pre-training or post-training robots for more call them economically productive applications just from watching videos without any need for human mocap at all. So, if I had to guess, my guess is this is like a very 2026 story with people mocapping sex maneuvers from like manually, but it doesn't scale nearly as well as just

[02:24:00] pre-training off of internet video is my guess. >> Okay, circle of trust here. How many have you ordered, guys? >> I won't tell anybody. Oh my god. >> We we need guests and panelists that are in their like 20s for that. >> Oh my god. Dave, any any closing thoughts on this topic? >> None whatsoever, actually, as it turns out. First time in my life. Nothing to add. Sorry. Speechless. >> My god. All right, everybody. Uh, I want to say that's a wrap, but we do have a closing video. Um, if you have outro music videos, please send them to mediadmandis.com. We love sharing them. We love the creativity of our community. >> And we'll see you guys in four weeks to the day. >> Yes. at Moonshots live in LA se the evening of September 24th and all day on September 25th. >> You can go to moonshots.com to uh to apply. It is by application. Uh and it's going to be an amazing community for you to network with and spend the day with

[02:25:01] all five of us. The you know the moonshots quintent will be there. Uh you get a chance to grill Alex uh Sem and uh and of course Dave. It's going to be it's going to be awesome. All right, let's play this video by Ellen uh Vamman. Thank you, Ellen, for your submission. Heat.

[02:26:18] Nice heroic music, gentlemen. >> It's the Lord of the Rings in space mashup. I never knew I wanted. >> H That was fun, guys. Really loved it. A lot of fascinating stories and definitely one bizarre one. >> Until we see you again twice next week for another episode recording. >> Be well. >> Can't wait. We'll try and sleep in the middle. God help us all. >> Live long and prospire as they say. >> Likewise. All right. Take care, folks.