Apple’s AI Crisis & ChatGPT’s World Domination w/ Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #162

Apple's top executive calls AI crisis ugly and embarrassing. I've tweeted this a dozen times. Siri sucks so bad.

Saleem, stand up for Apple, because I'm not going to.

Dave Blunden, you run an extraordinary incubator and you see hundreds of AI entrepreneurs and you back how many companies per year?

Well, Normally it'd be 10. Now it's about 30.

OpenAI is raising money at this insanely high valuation.

The AI revolution totally justifies price.

Technology delivers a domain, any domain, from scarcity to abundance.

There are two ways to make a fortune as a foundation model company, but one of them, which I think Sam and Elon both realize is displacing Google and being a direct consumer brand.

Now that's a moonshot.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. And a special episode of WTF just happened in tech. I'm here, of course, with my dear friend Salim Ismail, the head of Exponential Organization, an extraordinary friend on the forefront of all things exponential. I'm also here with a new friend, actually an old friend new to this podcast, and that's Dave Blunden. Dave and I go back to our college days at mit. We were roommates at Theta Delta Chi. It was a heck of a set of rooms there. It was myself, Dave and Michael Saylor. And while I went off to medical school, Dave graduates and starts a company called Datasage, which is like the first neural net company exits for a billion dollars, goes on to build 20 plus companies, and in particular something called Link XPV, a venture fund that's been investing in AI companies coming at MIT and Harvard with an incredible success story. I know, Dave, how many unicorns you've had, but I think I've lost count. Anyway, good to have you on the. On the pod, Dave.

Oh, awesome to be here, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Salim, you just landed. Where'd you come from?

I was three days in Helsinki, three days in London, and managed to get back without too many too much damage.

Do you know where you are right now, by the way?

I'm back in New York City, so I'm safe at home.

All right, you started to say three days in Helsinki. I was going to say three days in hell. Sinking. Right, got it. Well, it sounds like your travel back were pretty insane. Anyway, we've got New York, Boston and la, and there's a lot that's been going on in the AI world, and I wanted to really dive into it because I feel like the pace of insanity is accelerating and it's kind of hard to keep track. But our job is sort of make this digestible and fun. And I'm going to start with something that continues to blow me away, and that is the fact that OpenAI is raising money at this insanely high valuation, even when there's this debate about whether it's going to remain a nonprofit or a for profit, when there are lawsuits flying left and right. But man, oh man, I love their product and so do my kids and my wife. Dave, what do you make of this?

Well, I don't know, Peter, you in or out at 300 billion? You tell me. I think the challenge on this one is that the AI revolution totally justifies the price. But nobody knows if foundation models are going to be winners. Deep SEQ disrupted the market. You saw what happened to Nvidia stock that day. And so it's a free for all right now. It's very much like the Internet was back in the early days where things haven't settled down yet. It's not obvious whether you can bet on any given part of the AI economy, but you know that the whole thing is going to have $20 trillion of impact in just a couple years. So this is either really cheap or really expensive, depending on whether it's the winner or not. Or a winner or not.

Well, that's what makes you a successful venture capitalist, is figuring that part out. Celine, same question to you. Are you in or out at 300 billion dol?

Personally, I'd be out. But there's two things here. One is there's a massive competition and there seems to be a talent drain at OpenAI, etc. Etc. And on the other side, maybe MASA and SoftBank are seeing things that we don't see and it's. It's risky to bet against Masa. Historically, he makes counterintuitive bets for has been done for real and is more right than wrong. Yeah, we could take it both ways. Me personally, I'm out of 300 billion.

Okay. Yeah.

What about WeWork?

Exactly. And you have to imagine that Microsoft has inside news, but I mean, Microsoft's the biggest beneficiary of OpenAI because they get access to everything across the board. I am curious about, you know, I think the estimate we had at the Abundance Summit, Dave, was a billion dollars a day being invested in AI at this moment in time.

Yeah, it's amazing how everybody's leapfrogging each other too. You know, Deep Seek disrupted everything and now Gemini is on top of the benchmarks all of a sudden and it just keeps leapfrogging Back and forth, depends who released most recently. But the underlying trend there is the rate of improvement is beyond anything anyone expected. So the total size of the pie is bigger and faster than anyone would have estimated a year ago. And so, you know, the, the pessimist scenario here is, yeah, Ilya Sutskever isn't afraid of OpenAI. Mira Moradi is clearly not afraid of OpenAI. So if you've got all of your former co founders starting new foundation model companies, doesn't that scare you a little bit? Yeah. Then you know, there's a counterargument. In the counter market, if you have 40 billion of which you're marking half of it to compute, there is a capital wins the race kind of argument you could make here too, where look, if you're ahead in the capital raising, you're just ahead.

What's interesting is Mira, I think her founding valuation was like 3 or 4 billion and Ilya's founding valuation was like 9 billion. I mean, that's pretty damn good. As an entrepreneur, it's like.

Wow, Ilya is actually at 30 billion.

Oh, 30 billion, great.

Which is just fantastic. I mean it's just shocking. Shockingly big number. But you know, investors are risk adjusted return machines. And when the upside, even if it's a, you know, medium to low probability of winning the race, but the upside is in the trillions, then it's still an intelligent bet. So there is that factor too.

Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year I was joined on Stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity blockchain, Basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponential mastery dot com. That's exponential mastery dot com. I'm curious, Salim. Can OpenAI go public with all of the overhang it has with the nonprofit debate and with the lawsuits that are in place?

If you can raise this much money in the private markets, why would you even think about going public? Right? You could stay private for a long time and wait for that. Typically people go public because they want to raise money, etc. If you have no problem raising money, then why go public? You see that across the board, there's, there's Almost no public AI companies. Over 10 million of revenue. You either have the really, really big ones or nothing.

Well, Peter, you usually have access to everything. Did you See the pitch deck on this one? Did it talk about identity pathways?

I didn't, nor would I have the capacity to get into it. What we haven't talked about as well that just happened was the merger of X&Xai, which I did see. Right. I'm an investor in Xai and that was a pretty spectacular move. Any thoughts on that one?

I mean, a really easy way to block off his downside and just merge it in. Right. And the combination of AI plus the massive data set is incredible.

Yeah, I have a, I think a very firm opinion on this one. So that there are two ways to make a fortune as a foundation model company, but one of them, which I think Sam and Elon both realize is displacing Google and being a direct consumer brand. And in that model, you know, Google's worth a couple trillion dollars. It's $300 billion a year of almost pure cash flow. And so you don't have to be the best AI model forever if all of the consumers go to you as the first place they go on the Internet. And clearly people are moving at an incredible rate toward ChatGPT or Grok as the first place they go on the Internet. So I think Anthropic isn't playing that game and perplexity is. But you know, I didn't see the deck on this one either. But one of the first things that probably was in the deck is, look, here's Google, here's where people are going here, here are the horses in the race. Now Elon's got all the Twitter data. He's made that clear over and over and over again. And you know, up to date, real time information is a big part of what people search and ask about, you know, sports scores and, you know, all the stuff that's in the news today. And I think they're uniquely positioned to win that race regardless of the underpinnings of, you know, foundation models. So that would make those very, very good bets regardless of, of core AI.

If you're a Hex AI shareholder, you should be very happy.

Yeah, no, I am. But you have to believe that OpenAI is going to become a multi trillion dollar company to invest 40 billion at that valuation. I mean, you don't invest unless you've got a 10x upside for a company like this.

Yeah, well, I'll give you one. Yeah, good. Well, when one counter exactly. Like if SoftBank makes many, many, many, many ecosystem investments in addition to its core platform investments. So the other way you could make money, even if this is illiquid for many years to come, but it's the centerpiece of an entire ecosystem. You can basically land any venture deal you want. And because to me, what's really obvious right now, just as an investor, is that the use case the vertical applications is the best investment time I've ever seen by such a wide margin. For sure, every one of those boats is rising with the tide. So it is possible that the rationale here is not about trying to get a 10x on this deal. Maybe just breaking even or 2x on this deal is a great outcome, but you get 20, 30, 40 other investments that are in an ecosystem you can easily make up for it while you're not losing money on this either.

Yeah, I would guess SoftBank and Microsoft wants to see all the application layers sitting on top of OpenAI. Dave, you're seeing. Listen, for those who don't know, you run an extraordinary incubator basically on the campus of mit like a block from mit and you see hundreds of AI entrepreneurs through the year and you back how many companies per year at Link XPV?

Well normally it'd be 10, now it's about 30. Everything's three times faster than bigger than I've seen before.

Crazy. So how are they thinking about. How are those entrepreneurs thinking about OpenAI versus Anthropic versus Grok? So what's the feeling? Do they have a favorite?

No, they don't. They're all multi API. They all use all of them in parallel, especially the code generation companies, but all of them use everything. The debate they have is do we want an open source llama 3 or deepseek and we want to run it on our own hardware or do we want to be API dependent? The problem with being API dependent is if it's slow or OpenAI. You saw what happened with usage this past week. It can get overloaded and that could be bad for your user experience. So they like to have an open source model running in their own universe just as a control point. But every one of them is using everything because you see how they leapfrog each other. You can't afford to be tied to one and then find out for one use case one of them leapfrog the others.

This is the part I struggle with with this particular investment is that the foundational model space has been commoditized already. There's several out there that are nearly as good as each other and therefore it's really hard to make a really one bet in in favor ecosystem approach or access to some weird applications. It would be the only way of rationalizing this.

You just got back from Europe, Salim. So what's the buzz there? How does you know what was it like in Helsinki, in London and wherever the hell you are? I mean, it's like, is it. Is. Do they view the US as dominant? Are they. Is Mistral their darling? How do you think about it from a European standpoint?

I think we're seeing what I'm hearing there. And I was in a whole bunch of conversations over there, I saw two things. One is kind of incredible what's coming out of the US both technologically and politically, which we don't need to get into. But the second part was that there are so many amazing cracks at the pinata coming from China and India, open source type of deep SEQ equivalents, that this whole thing is moving faster than anybody possibly could have believed.

India? What's coming from India?

Well, what they're doing in India is they're actually applying it in hacked ways. You know, I put out a. We did a talk a couple of weeks ago, Peter and I said that I saw a startup that had a full AI doctor coming out in the next, like towards the end of this year. And I got three pings, two from India saying we've already got a fully fledged AI doctor live and running. Here's the link. I was like, whoa. So I think the application side of it, they're actually using some of these models very aggressively, probably with local use cases, but it's starting to get. Because why? Because the democratization and the cost of access is so low. You can try it for lots of things.

India desperately needs it. Right. With 1.41 billion people, the only way they survive and they know this is by demonetizing education and healthcare using AI. Let's go to our next story. And this paints the picture of the universe that you're living in, Dave. And full disclosure, I'm a partner with Dave in Link Exponential Ventures. But here's the headline, if you're listening to this versus watching it on YouTube, Mercur, AI recruiting startup founded by a 21 year old, raises $100 million. So Dave, let's tell the story of Mercur because it's crazy. This is. And by the way, this is one of two, $2 billion success stories in the portfolio, right?

Yeah. And I've researched that. That has happened according to ChatGPT. Maybe not totally reliable, but it's happened about 5, 6 times in the history of the world. And now you've got two that I.

Know define what happened Five or six times. Say it again.

Reaching a multibillion dollar valuation in under two years from founding day.

Nice.

Which, you know, when you think about that, that's crazy, right? You know, people work a lifetime to get nowhere near that target. So, so it's, it makes sense that it's extremely rare, but I suspect in two years we'll have, you know, multiples of that in terms of case studies to point to. So this is one of the first, it's a real bellwether. But you know, every team I meet now is like, yeah, I know Merkor, I know it really, really well. It's an inspiration, I love it. So the story has definitely gotten around the startup community. But the thing that makes this story exceptional relative to the other mega successes is that Brendan Puti, the CEO, just turned 21 recently. And you know, that's sign of the times. I mean when, when you look at startups over history, the gating factor to getting to huge valuation quickly usually means you need to learn something, you need to do something that takes time. Usually that's managing hundreds of people. You can't just be 20, 21 years old, wake up and be a great manager of a team of a thousand. But now with AI as your workforce or your workforce multiplier, you can get there with, you know, 15, 20 people, which is well within the comfort zone of a great 21 year old leader. Yeah, that takes a lot of the time to market out of the equation. And so you know, you know, we, people have been predicting this for a while. They just didn't really believe their own predictions until now. They see it. But there's going to be a company with two or three people that reaches a multi billion dollar valuation sometime very soon.

Yeah, we've been saying that for a while. Sleem, right, the, the one or two person unicorn.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's happening and it's going to happen at an increasing pace.

Let me share two data points that I find fascinating that come from you, Dave, so you can expand on them. One is that I think it's like 70, 75% of incoming MIT freshmen want to start a company before they graduate, which is pretty extraordinary. And the second is that the average, that the, if you look at a histogram of the age at which a founder started a VC backed billion dollar unicorn, it used to be early mid-30s when they started. Now there's a huge peak in the 20 to 23 year old category. So Dave, what's happening there?

Well, you know, I think the reality is that 20 to 24 year olds have always had that in them, but they were hobbled. You know, everything is about unhobbling these days. So you know what was holding them back? Because you're obviously your peak iq, you know, if you look at Nobel prize winning research, it's done very early in life, so your IQ is absolutely peaked. You have that capability. What holds you back? Yeah, credibility has always held you back. You know the, the, the incubator environment. Incubators and accelerators now account for the vast majority of successful startups. And you know, when we started doing this it was maybe 7% of companies went through any kind of accelerator program. Now it's the vast majority and they way outperform the ones that are not in an incubator or an accelerator. And so why is that? Well, the incubators and accelerators are all about providing everything that a 20, 22 year old, 24 year old founder hasn't learned to do yet. So we do, you know, for our companies here in this office, we do the accounting, we do the big data, we do the networking, we do the legal and incorporation. Two weeks ago I bought an apartment building across the street from MIT that can hold sixteens, four bedroom or six bedrooms, 60 units, four bedrooms each. And that was actually based on this Mercur story I was telling our team here. Look, these guys went up in value from the day we invested. They went up $20 million a week in valuation. So if I could go to Brendan and say, hey Brendan, I can save you a week looking for a place to live for your team that pays for the building by itself. So I just wrote the five and a half million dollar check and said get, get the building, let's start populating it. So yeah, it's just all about those unhobblings. So now you have capital, you have support, and now with your AI workforce, you have the mast, the workforce that you need to get to these targets. And I was teaching at MIT this morning actually and I was telling the students it's foundations of AI ventures. So it's all about creating these companies. But I say look guys, right now you just got to sprint. Don't overthink things. Look at Merkor, look at what they built. It's just really, really clear that there are many, many other mercures to be built in parallel markets. Don't ever think it just run like hell.

But by the way, you should take a second and tell people, what does Mercury do?

That's a good point. Didn't even mention that. So Mercur discovered that you can interview people all over the world with an AI face and voice far more effectively than an HR department can interview them, especially for technical jobs. But it's growing out rapidly from there and you can imagine that the customers, the biggest customers are Meta is the biggest. And then the other AI forward companies like a Tesla type are right behind that. And you can imagine if you went to a bank like bank of America and said, hey, I want to use AI to interview all your future hires, they're going to vomit. Right. Because they're a bank and their HR department is going to go, no, I.

Don'T know why they're going to go out of business.

Exactly, exactly. But if you're better, you just embrace it and you run with it. And they love it.

Yeah.

Salim, I think there's one more thing that's going on with these, the young founders. You know, when I was building computing systems originally, the Internet wave came along and there was. You had to be kind of young enough to be native in Internet speak and HTML and all the protocols to be able to get your head around it. Whereas people like me had to unlearn a whole bunch of stuff and relearn new ideas. We saw the same thing with blockchain, where you know, there's some bylaw that you have to be under 25 to program a blockchain. Right. It's literally. And you skew younger because you just getting your head around it requires a huge amount of effort if you've been around for a while. And then. Whereas if you're young enough, you go, oh, there's this thing, this is what it's capable. I just start using it. I think these AI systems are very much the same where you have the benefit of youth. You don't have to unlearn 10 years of a previous paradigm. You can lock onto this new thing and move quickly with it. So I think there's something about that in there also.

Yeah, it's being everyone. Yeah. Being a digital native, we try and get everyone to read the Future is faster than you think because it really makes that point. And also Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, which makes the point that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, born the exact same year, that can't be coincidence. Right. And it's not because they're both 21 when the PC starts to come out. And at age 21, you're old enough to start a company, but you're young enough that you're not trapped by all the baggage, you know, all the like oh, I'm halfway done with my law degree or whatever. Yeah, right kids, whatever it is. Yeah.

Here's our, here's our next story from Fortune. Says 1 million users sign up for ChatGPT in 60 minutes after a viral image generation feature is unveiled. And you know, for about two days every single person was pumping these out on, on, on X. I, I mean, like, don't these people have a life? I mean, this is what's going to get them to sign up.

This is their life. You got to get to that, Peter.

I guess this is me.

This is why you have to be digitally native today.

This is me and Palmer lucky in the image here. I can tell, I can tell Palmer because he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he's got a mullet, but I don't know that that's me. At least it's not my self image of me, but what the heck.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I, I think we promised everybody that something would blow your mind in AI every single month from here forward until we hit the singularity and then of course thereafter, every single minute. And this is a, this is a good example of it. And one of the first companies we incubated to our course advisor, I sold it to the Washington Post, Don Graham. And so as part of that deal, I ended up consulting to him right as he was trying to save the Washington Post from the Internet. And it was a really tragic but fun, you know, year because there's no way you were going to save the Washington Post from the Internet. It was, it was a relentless onslaught and mainstream media was pretty much doomed because the Internet was taking the audience and so now kind of living that all over again. Every time something like this happens, the eyeballs came from something else. But people love to interact and engage and create a lot more than they like to be passive and watch a movie or watch a TV show. And that's where it's coming from. It's coming out of there and it's going here. And so, you know, this particular thing will come and go, but because something else overrode it, that's even more interesting. But those are going to keep coming out at light speed now and it's going to take the audience away. It's a massive industry that's just going to move to interactive AI driven things. But you know, the number one use case for AI is companionship and that's only going up from here. We can talk about that.

I saw a note on X from Elon saying he expects short video movies are going to be becoming dominant very shortly. And then IMOD posted full motion picture length next year. And so I think it's going to be interesting right, when you go to some new version of Netflix where it's got this massive amount of films that are being crowdsourced and crowd voted up and the level of creativity. We've seen the decimation of Hollywood a few times. I think we're going to see yet another wave of disruption coming.

Yeah. Did you play with Sesame at all? The super, super empathetic AI voices? Just been out a few weeks.

I've played with them on ChatGPT. I've played with the unhinged version of Grok, which is kind of insane. If you've not played with it, I recommend not doing it around your kids. So, no, I haven't. But I think empathy is solved. Salim, we've had that conversation. These AIs are far more empathic than any human I know.

Yeah. I mean you could mimic empathy and get 99.9% of the way there and we're easily there.

Yeah, yeah.

I think when you, when you listen to the super, super engaging voices, they're not married to the, to the best LLM content yet. And that'll come out within the next, I'm going to guess within the next month to two months. It's a little bit technically challenging to put the two things together because to get super sympathetic, you have to run very, very quickly and to get the best possible answer, you have to run a trillion, 2 trillion kind of parameter model. And so that'll all come together. It's just inference, time, compute bound right now. But that'll come together very, very soon. But when you hear those voices, you're like, oh my God, this is just so captivating. I can't believe it. And so the Sesame website got so overloaded with people playing with it that it was up to millions of concurrent users and then you couldn't get in. I think it's back to it's settled down now. You can play with it. If you want to check it out@sesame.com.

Here'S the next article from TechCrunch. It said Earth's AI algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored. And this is the story of abundance. This is the key point I was trying to make in the book now, God, 13 years ago that everything's there, we just haven't found it or got it in a usable form yet. AI discovers copper, gold, silver and in regions overlooked in Australia, combining historical, geological data and custom Drilling. I mean, we've talked about this Saleem a number of times, haven't we?

We have. I mean, the data point I used to use before was in the last 20 years, about 40% of all oil and gas deposits have been discovered using. Using digital, searching new sensors. Right. So therefore that's just going to go to other areas. This was a matter of time. It's fantastic to see it. I think it's such a great example of democratization and demonetization. And Right. Hits right to the core of your abundance thesis, that technology delivers a domain, any domain, from scarcity to abundance. Yeah.

Do you know anything about the sensors they use to discover this? Because this story was new to me.

I don't. But I'll tell you, there's a great story I wrote about in. It was probably in bold. It was.

This is the Gold Corp. McEwen.

John McEwen. Yeah, yeah. No, it's. Yeah, it's Rob McEwen. He owned a large gold mine and he gathered all of his engineers and geologists together one day and he said, show me where to find the next 6 million ounces of gold. And they basically said, huh, I have no idea. And he goes, you're fired. Right. And then what he did was something very unusual. He took all of his geological data, which, for a mining company that's usually kept in a safe and the web wasn't up. Then he put it on DVDs and he announced a Gold Corp mining competition. I forget how much it was. I think it was a half a million dollars.

It was half a million dollars for whoever could find the next 6 million.

Yeah. And so anybody who wanted could write to him. And he sent them a CD ROM of all their mining data, like all the secret stuff. Right. And what was amazing, he had hundreds of teams enter and the winning team, there were two teams that won. One was in, I think Australia, and I think the other one was in Russia. And they never visited. Yeah, they never visited the mine. And they found the next 6 million ounces of gold by looking at the data. You know, the answer is in the data.

His market cap went from 50 million to 3 billion at a cost of a half a million just by breaking conventions. It's such an incredible story. And the way they did it was they saw patterns in the, in the data. This is, oh, we mine nickel. And when we see that pattern, it typically indicates a deposit over here. And so they use this, the kind of the pattern recognition you might have for nickel or some of these other metals. And they Applied it to gold. And the gold people always had their own way and never looked at the nickel data. Right. And so that's why cross mapping. They thought this is where we think you'll find a bunch. And they found it.

Yeah.

I remember the original question was how big should I have the gold processing facility? And as people were saying, we don't know how much gold there is now there. And he's like, what am I paying you for?

Yeah, Rob is now reminds me, Rob's a trustee or important member of the X Prize, one of our benefactors. So it's been fun to get to know him and his wife Cheryl. Yeah, Dave, you were saying.

Oh, that reminds me a lot of the original thesis of the Avatar X Prize where the whole goal was, hey, you don't have to go places to do things because why would you go places? You've got high def cameras, you know, anywhere. And then in this particular case the data is going to be, not visual anyway. It's going to be some kind of, you know, out of Iband sensor. So what's the advantage of going to Australia to look and it makes no sense. Just stay where you are, get the data to come to you. So it's a good, a good early use case that proves the point.

I should also note for our beloved listeners that both Dave and Salim are members of my board of directors. The X Prize, which is, which is fun. I get to see you once a quarter at those meetings. Next on. Okay, hang on.

Just getting to inspire teams to work on the hardest problems in the world is about as fun a job as you could ever get. So this is an awesome thing.

It is. It really.

Yeah.

So got to love this next title here. Apple's top executive calls AI crisis ugly and embarrassing. So. Oh my God, it's about time, guys. I mean, listen how I've tweeted this a dozen times. Siri sucks so bad. It's like it really pisses me off.

Oh God. Honestly, stand up for Apple because I'm not going to. No, no.

It's the standard big company innovators dilemma. If you're a big company, it just takes forever to roll out features, right? And you have to go through control frameworks and system setting, integration testing, privacy testing. My favorite story around this is at Yahoo. When I was running their incubator, it typically took Yahoo but eight months to roll out a new feature because you, you code the feature and then you had all this testing, brand testing, all this other stuff. 100 teams would look at it and send it back to you. And then Zuckerberg comes along and says to his developers, if you think your feature is ready, go take it live on the site. Here you go. And you better be right because it'll cost you a job if you take down the site. And the developers were so excited, they were rolling out a feature a week and totally blew past Yahoo, MySpace and everybody else. And so this is, I think the difficulty at Apple, which is the control framework of keep being careful and cautious in a big company. Totally takes out the ability. If you're on the consumer Internet, the two characteristics you better have are speed and risk.

Well, I feel like I'm living, living, I'm living a repeat movie here. And I hate to say it, but I mean I loved my original Mac, you know. I'm sure you did too, Peter. And then after Steve Jobs got booted, it got so bad that you just literally had to move over to a PC and it was torture or a sun at the time but. And you hated every minute of it, but you just couldn't live on the Mac anymore. It was such a piece of crap post Steve Jobs. And then the Newton came out and it's like the whole company was basically bankrupt. Then Steve Jobs comes back and then the next wave of Macs, you know, that were Linux based were just unbelievable, like out of nowhere. And it's, it's the cult of personality. This is the thing that Elon Musk has, has mastered. Now you just have to be a cool leader online that people want to work for to get the critical talent that you need to stay on the cutting edge.

And so you need a through line, you need a through line of a vision. One of the things I learned years ago is the best movies in the world have a single director and a single writer and they have a clear vision and they execute on it. The movies that are crap are the ones that have gone through 15 revisions and there's third director and it's a mess, right? So if anything, Jobs was the orchestra conductor that had a very clear vision on this. The problem is he.

In Apple's defense, in Apple's defense, this is about as hard a thing as a big company could ever face is when do you integrate some cutting edge new thing when you don't know how long it's going to be around, even if like might only be a week before it's, before it's out of date by the time you've implemented it. So the speed of the development of AI as Dave referenced earlier, makes it unbelievably. Hard as to. When do you place your chips?

Well, that's something. It's pathetic. But putting that aside, this is what makes America work and what makes it great is the constant turnover of talent. Because. Because at the end of the day, startups have no chance whatsoever against huge companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, except for the fact that this happens. And, and so that engine of turnover is actually very, very healthy. You know, I hate to see the dysfunction in my devices, but, you know, it does keep the startups moving and it's just the nature of talent.

Can we talk about your worst iPhone Siri moments? I mean, mine that really pisses me off is like, I'll text Kristen and her name is right there. That's who I'm texting. You can spell the name. It's K R I, S T E N. And it will spell her name three different ways in the course of the text. It's like, no, no, it's right there and it spells my name P I, T E R. It's like, honestly, I mean, what, what I mean consistently spells it with an I in there. It's like, stop it. I don't know.

Can't comment as I use an Android.

Ah, okay.

Well, that's my wife. I mean, I'm saying effing Apple like 10 times a day. She hears it. It's just a litany of things. But the thing is, you know, I'm not price sensitive. I'm ultra time sensitive and I need things to work. And that used to be Apple's brand, right? You know, it's. And now it's, you know, we make money on every song, we make money on every movie you download. We got like, okay, but what's the core mission, guys? I mean, just make it the out of the box experience. That's perfect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, here's another fun story from Fox News. Texas private schools use a new AI tutor rockets the top 2% in the country. And I actually know this story. Price McKenzie, who runs this school, is a friend. She's been a member of my Abundance360 membership. And she's built this school in the Texas ecosystem, serving a lot of the families out of Tesla and SpaceX. And the adjoining story here, which I think is fascinating, is we just saw that, that Beijing made a proclamation that in September of 2025, right, this coming fall, primary and secondary schools will baseline AI as part of their educational program. And then Estonia did the same. And I'm pissed that we still think of AI as shackles for our kids or cheating for our kids versus a jetpack. So yeah, thoughts here. I mean, I mean, Dave, you have three amazing kids. You have been mentoring them in AI. Four amazing kids. Yeah, mentoring them in AI. Talk about this, would you?

Yep. Yeah. You know, I don't know if you remember, but Mira Wilczek, one of our partners here, wrote an entire book with GPT2 which is incredible when you think about it in hindsight, took it to Davos in 2019 and showed all the world leaders on stage. I wrote an entire book using AI. Get ready for what's coming. She might as well have finished the presentation by saying buy Nvidia stock and try and get invested in OpenAI if you can. All the world leaders were like, I don't care. I don't know what you just said. I'm just like, oh my God, talk about being asleep at the wheel. But the kids are all over it now. I was really kind of, because of what we do, I had all four of my kids go through MIT's you know, success 191 introduction to deep Learning, which anyone can take online. So I had them all go through it early. So, you know, our, my, my wife is the best wife ever. Unbelievably supportive of all of this, you know, happy to lend the kids to any of these AI missions. But now when you talk to that, when you talk to the kids they're like, yeah, it's crystal clear that education is, is completely going to go to AI. And you know what? I, what I can ask the AI today, even with today's technology, any of my classes, anything that the teacher says is already in there. And it's much more efficient for me to talk to AI, to get the same lesson. So they're going through the motions, you know, trying to get through it as quickly as they can, knowing full well they're they're going to switch over to all time or full time AI based learning from here forward.

Salim.

This plus previous this plus the previous slide about Apple X reminds me of and the 21 year old discussion reminds me of my favorite commentary here from Douglas Adams who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and he said anything in the world when you're born, we call that normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's called a career. And anything invented after you're 35 years old is just bad, just bad for the world. It's a great glimpse of human nature to see stuff and just not get it. Unless you're below that age where, where it's native to you.

Yeah. I'll be really interested to see how this plays out because the data is going to be crystal clear that this is a better way to learn. The kids are going to be clamoring for it. Meanwhile, you have all these teachers unions and I've been talking to the governor here in Massachusetts. We have a phenomenal governor, Mora Healey. She's brilliant. It's going to be a challenge for her though because it's one of the biggest unions and you know, they're not going to want to lose their jobs.

That is the immune system.

Yeah. So Salim, you know, your son and My son, my two sons are all, they're all 13, they're middle school. How do you think about this?

Well, what I'm seeing is the school allows them to use ChatGPT and, but theoretically not for homework. What I see him doing is looking up a math problem, looking it up on AI and look, coming back, looking it up over here, coming back. And frankly he watches how the AI solves it and he learns from it and then he does it and, and how much more different from real life. I mean that is the way in which we learn. We watch a master at it and we mimic it and you get the concepts in your head and then you do you grounded by repetition. I think that's just a standard pattern. It's just that, you know, if you go back in history, learning and education was one to one. You had your tutor, you were an apprentice to a master, you had your guru if you're in India. And then we turned it into a one to many where we had one teacher and many students. Right. And, and then with the Internet we turned it again many to many where one many students can have many teachers. But now we have, we've blown open the supply side and the teaching can be any one AI could teach, blow the socks off almost any teacher in the world. And that is going to change the game. And there's going to be some countries and some education systems that take advantage of that. And we're going to go for from push based education where you try and get kids into a classroom and you're trying to cram algebra into them, into pull based learning systems where you take on a project, you pick an MTP and you pull down the learning you need for the tasks you're trying to do. And I think as we make that transition, it's just really painful for the legacy systems.

Yeah. I think the teachers. Yeah. Are going to be a major issue. I mean, I went into my kids in new school because they took them out of the old school school really to get him into a school that was much more progressive in learning and philosophy and I think leadership skills. And the realization I've had is if you allow your kids to use AI in middle school to solve middle school problems, it's meaningless. But you could give your middle school kids college problems and have them use AI and learn to use these tools to do extraordinary things that they never thought they could do. It drives confidence, it drives sort of up leveling of their ambitions. And I think that's really what we need to get to. Dave. Sorry, what are you going to say?

Well, I mean, there was a period of time where everyone at MIT needed to learn to use the slide rule and obviously became absolutely stupid at some point. We're in that moment. It's just happening way too quickly for people to adapt. But you know, I can't tell you how many middle school and high school students that never would have written code are now vibe coding with lovable or replit or cursor and loving it. And vibe coding is just flat out fun. But you're creating the exact same stuff that a Python developer or a C developer would have done last year. And that is just great for the kids. But when you look at the underlying curriculum that they have to go through and in middle school and high school, like that curriculum hasn't been updated since Isaac Newton. The world has invented like seriously, that, that is the exact calculus and, and you know, the chemistry. Yeah, we added a little bit of quantum to it, but I mean it's basically, it's basically the same chemistry, same biology, but human knowledge has grown what, you know, a billion X. Is this the right thing to learn just because there's an SAT or, or an AP test for it? That's why we're going to learn this. That's just nutty.

And you'll never use it again and you'll never, you know, I just looked at a friend of mine when my cousin's sons were is taking his SATs and I flipped open the book to look at, you know, his acts and sats. And I'm looking at the questions or asking, I'm like, this is crazy when you know, I knew this stuff and I would never use it again for the rest of my life.

Well, no, I mean what you, what you do need to know has grown so much in that same time frame. You don't have time to cram useless stuff into your brain in today's day and age. And so you're doing a. The education process is doing this massive disservice by occupying all the time.

Yes, agreed. Salim.

Yeah, yeah. That realization of what, you're not going to use this stuff when you leave. Unfortunately that hit me in the middle of university because I went through this co op program and I would be going out to work every four months and I did a couple of work terms that controlled data, helping design some large scale chip boards, etc. And come back to school and then listening to some lecture where something is orbiting a light, a star at X number of light years of radius and what's the orbital pathway? And you're like, I am never going to use this. Please let me get out of it. And I barely got my dupe. Agree.

Oh my gosh.

Lord help us.

It's about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself, about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease, any. These things are all going on all the time. And you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because, you know, health is a new wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri, and we, you know, don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body, to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what foods should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements. And viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important.

Right?

And so a product I use every day, twice a day, is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team linked to those in the show. Notes down below, please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. So let me, let's turn the subject to coding because I've seen a number of people out there, you know, IMOD on the abundance stage said this a number of years ago. You know, in five years, there's going to be no more coders. And so learning to code traditionally, right, people are saying, is now dead. Don't teach your kids to code. Dave, what do you think about that?

Yeah, it's amazing how the head of the curve, actually, I think, I think this is a common thing in your, in your network, Peter, is that if, if everyone going back to Ray Kurzweil said exactly what they said, five or 10 years later, they would be Jensen Huang. But because they're such great forward thinkers, they're always ahead of the curve. Ahmad was exactly right. And it's all happening, you know, faster than anyone would have anticipated. And we're in a transition point right now where if you want to build industrial strength software, you still need to code, but you know, it's going to be game over within, you know, certainly within 2025. And then everything will move to Vibe coding. But the, the good bet right now is to build whatever comes easily through Vibe coding. Don't even look at the code. If it doesn't do what you want it to do, just wait. Because as soon as you get in there and try and debug it, one of our companies, blitzy here writes 3 million lines of code in a single night. So 3 million lines of code, that'd be $300 million worth of R and D that would have taken you three years if you had $300 million lying around and you got it in a single night. And if you say, well, it doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, let me start debugging it. How did you debug 3 million lines of code? You did. So what you do instead is you just keep talking to it and fix the modules you can through voice, and then just wait a couple months and the rest will get fixed too. And that's where we are.

That is insane. All right, our next story is dominance of Gemini. So Gemini 2.5 Pro is the most powerful model yet and free. So I love this. First of all, I love Google. I've had a long love affair with Google just because Larry and Sergey and Eric early on and they were big supporters of the X Prize. So I'm super biased about it in that regard. And you know, I still go back to the fact that, you know, Google really led the charge in AI to a huge degree, you know, with their, with their papers, on attention and on the early work that they did. And they chose not to release their AI code early because they felt like society wasn't ready for it. But when OpenAI released ChatGPT and the world was like, oh, OpenAI, it forced them to take action. We've had that conversation before, Salim. I like the fact that they're still up there and leading the charge. Thoughts? Salim, how do you feel about all this?

I think this is what Dave talked about earlier in the leapfrogging. All these models just going to step past each other in different ways. I was kind of blown away by how good 2.5 was. It was, it's really, really impressive, all these different domains as well. So really, really happy to see it. And it gives, you know, the Larry and Sergey I understand, came back to kind of drive the initiatives here. Yeah, it talks. It gives you the sense of why a founder led initiative is such an important, important thing. You bring that energy of that original vision and the drive and the passion and then everybody gets motivated. So I think it's a bunch of different commentaries here, but I thought the model was fantastic.

Yeah, it's funny. I've got Gemini 2.5, Anthropic, ChatGPT and Grok open always on my Chrome tabs. And I'm just, it's interesting what I use for what? Anyway, Dave, what are you thinking here?

Well, first of all, I gotta say one of the best things that ever happened in the Nobel Prize world is Dennis Hasabis got a Nobel Prize and then Jeffrey Hinton, who I've loved since 1988, I guess 86, because he invented back propagation. But they had to really stretch the definitions of the Nobel Prizes to give two guys, AI guys prizes in chemistry and physics. But it was the right. The right two recipients. So Dennis is bidding on huge props.

To the Nobel committee for doing this. That, that took a big leap. And I really, really respect them for stepping out of their comfort zone.

Well, they're going to have a real.

Think about their comfort zone.

They're going to have a challenge going forward. Right. Because almost every single major discovery is going to come on the back of AI algorithms.

Well, that's why it's so brilliant that they cracked open the door here because, you know, they're just, they're just early on recognizing that that's the way it innovations are still huge benefits for mankind. So the fact that it came from an AI person and not from somebody who toiled away in a chemistry lab for many years is. That's totally fine. Because they just, they just like, Salim, you're dead right. It was incredibly gutsy of them to give out those two prizes.

There's. I have fun. You know, I was just in Helsinki. I have a lot of fun with the Nordics because they always complain about it's hard to compete with German engineering. And. And I'm like, okay, give me one Internet innovation that has come from Germany ever. And there's never one. And yet you look at Scandinavia and you've got php, Skype, you name it came from that.

And one of my favorites that I know, I don't know any others.

There'S a bunch of them, Spotify. The list just goes on and on. But one of my favorite stories, as I was doing a session with the co. The in Copenhagen at Neil Bohr's house where they did the Copenhagen interpretation. And I was talking to the head of the Carlsberg Foundation. He gave me this amazing story. In the 1830s, the master brewer at Carlsberg Brewery invented the yeast that didn't get you sick for that. Up to then when you drank beer, you got sick. And so the lawyers got all excited saying, wow, we'll patent this. We'll make a ton of money by licensing this yeast to other people. And the brewer is super upset because he was a beer fan. So he made 140 copies of this yeast and sent it out to the 140 major breweries around the world without telling the lawyers. It was the first great example of open source. He open sourced the beer and 10 years later, the amount of beer drunk in the world had risen 10x.

Wow.

This is a great example. Have you checked out humanity's last exam? It's the hardest.

I was about to ask you. Tell us about it, because that feels like the measuring stick we need to be paying attention to.

Oh, my God. So Gemini is up close to about 20% on that test, which is nutty. You ought to splice in a couple example questions from that test. You could never answer even a single one of them. These are the hardest questions in every field of human endeavor, you know, including math and physics and everything else. But just the domain knowledge to understand what the question's asking you is off the charts, you know, for any normal human being. And this model is close to 20%.

Does it solve the ability for men and women to understand each other's thoughts?

Yeah, no, that's. That's out of range. I want to ask you what you think of Llama, though. You know, Llama four will be out before too long. So to me, the Gemini 2.5 release is just leapfrogging, but it's exactly what you'd expect. Every time there's a release from any of the big guys, it leapfrogs everyone else for a little while. And so I think that what's interesting to me is that the team at Google has to be very, very cautious with safety and security and privacy, and they have that new paper out and everything. The team at OpenAI is fundamentally Microsoft's bet, in addition to being OpenAI, and they'll leapfrog this, I'm sure. But then Mark Zuckerberg to me, is. I got to tell you a story, actually. So Mark Zuckerberg is the sort of founder leader, still in control, driving AI, you know, with open source. And we. We just invested in a Harvard team yesterday and signed the deal in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room. Got some great pictures of it. And they're so. They're trying to walk right in their footsteps, but it was super fun. But. But what do you guys think? You know, do you think Mark will then keep up with these guys or not?

I think the great aspect here is the fact that Open source will. We have a section in the book, in the exo book called Open Beats Closed. And we've seen over time, throughout history that open models be closed models. And we're at that point now because there's just so many more eyes and attention that can go to it and evolve it very quickly. I'm super excited about what we're going to see in llama 4.

And so Elon is the other sort of founder, originator guy in the race. Do you think he'll. If you had to pick on one, pick one. Everyone has their specific advantages. So you got four choices and maybe there are others too. Maybe Deep Seq is a fifth choice. But which one would you bet on?

I tend to bet on Grok. I just think he's got an unlimited checkbook and he's got a massive amount of data coming from X and from Tesla and from humanoid robots.

Yeah, Celine, I think bet for what purpose? Do you mean betting on building the best next model or lasting over time?

Good question. How about just the humanities last exam benchmark? Who has the highest score two years from today?

Oh, I think it's going to be an unknown entrant. Yeah, I think something's going to come out of the blue.

You heard it here first folks at.

The UK because we've seen that throughout history. You know, we thought nobody was ever going to beat Yahoo and then Google came along, blew that past and then Facebook came along, blew past that. OpenAI comes along out of nowhere and blows past everybody else. So I think that's the pattern that we've seen throughout history. You'd be hard pressed to bet against the unknown entrant.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you one thing. Elon was, was. Elon was very, very early to recognize that who gets the chips is a huge factor in that question. And so he put himself in a position now where he has a lot of control over who first of all, what gets manufactured at TSMC and Intel, a lot of control over that. And then who gets the supply? He has a lot of control over that. So that is a pretty important.

And who gets access to such a forward thinker, gets access to transformers and electricity and the entire supply chain for getting intelligence out the door. You know, I miss the idea of testing a human IQ on this. You know, we were measuring human IQ and then we had, you know, GPT03 or 01 with 120. We haven't seen any new IQ data coming out. I'm looking forward to that. All right, here's another one. OpenAI and Microsoft now back Anthropics Master control Program. Who wants to take this on? Dave, do you want to give us a quick 101 on MCP?

Well, MCP is basically, you know how with, with ChatGPT you can do almost anything. You ask it to do something on your laptop and it says, well I can't control Your laptop. But here's some code that would do it like, well, what do I do with that? Well, you know, open, open the terminal session, paste it. Like, I'm not doing that. So, you know, then they come out with Operator. The problem with Operator is it can like delete everything on your, on your laptop. And so Dario Amade is actually the God of this. So he's, he is an incredible forward thinker in terms of how to get productivity while still having safety and security. And so somewhere in there he said, well here mcp, this is going to be an open standard, make it free to the world. But it's a way that the AI can access controls like your laptop, but also information that may be, you know, other agents or it may be just stuff out on the Internet that helps the AI serve your purpose. And it's a simple protocol that enables all this. And, you know, it's really pretty brilliant. I think it might be very much, very similar to HTML where HTML was not super complicated, but it just flat out worked and we're still using it today. And you know, here we all have the Internet, what a game changer. So MCP is very much like that kind of breakthrough in terms of having the AI empowered to help you without wrecking everything.

But I love the fact that both OpenAI and Microsoft have, have backed that. You know, it's part of the, the sort of open ethos.

Yeah.

All right, let's go to our next, our next item here.

Just a quick shout out if you go back to that story, Peter, is what I loved was this was based on OAuth, which was a pretty protocol for sharing identity across websites. And something that people should look into is the Internet Identity Workshop where all the folks working on identity systems at ebay, Yahoo, all get together and they go to kind of go, how do we handle cross site identity? And etc. And OAUTH was a protocol that emerged out of that. So this is literally the community, practitioners getting together to create a protocol. And what I'd love to see with this MCP is you're still seeing the same thing happen again is the practitioners in the space are getting together to say, how do we do this in a, in an appropriate and responsible way. So I'm really, really happy to see that.

Yeah, I'm not 100% convinced that the other guys adopting it is them being altruistic and saying, yeah, great investment. I think it might be more of a, hey, we, let's make sure we're close to this.

There's definitely that you know it's the 40th anniversary of the IIW workshop, the Internet Identity Workshop, which is an unconference that's been going for 20 years where all these things. It's amazing to see these folks getting together and trying to figure out the walk and tackle problems of interoperability at that level.

Nice.

Just a shout out for them.

All right. Speaking about the importance of safety, Google releases a paper on AGI safety by 2030. 30 and what could possibly go wrong. So I don't know if you had a chance to see the paper. I took a look at it and it talks about a wide range of areas. I was with Eric Schmidt down in Miami at the FII Miami Summit. I had a conversation that was super critical and he said the biggest concern isn't the upside, of course, it's the downside. And the biggest concern isn't us versus China. There is concerns there, we can get to that if you want. But it's everybody against the dystopian user. It's the person who uses AI to cause havoc. The number one example they use is a bioweapon that gets produced because in fact that technology has gotten easier and easier. And Eric said we need something like a Three Mile island disaster, something that makes global news but doesn't actually hurt anybody and scares everybody so that we adopt reasonable guidelines.

That's funny. I interviewed Sam Altman at MIT@IA two years ago next week actually and we talked about, well, he said proactively, actually the worst thing that could happen in AI is, is if we get into some kind of a hyper competitive all out race, you know, maybe an arms race with a foreign nation or something like that where nobody feels like we have the ability to slow down and think we have to move full speed because otherwise somebody else is going to bypass us. But that would be terrible. That'd be awful. But thankfully nut's not happening right now and we can take our time and think about it and sure, I have to dig up that recording actually because like, oh well, here we are two years later.

That is the case. Right now everybody is all out. A billion dollars a day being spent in AI is the latest estimate. Again, and it's unconstrained. There's no velocity knob, it's all tilt to 11 and no on, off, switch.

I have a tangential question to this topic that I'd like to ask Dave. I think from not about this paper because I think the approach taken by the paper, paper is perfectly thoughtful and so on. I struggle hugely when. How do you clearly define AGI. And Dave, do you have or have you seen a decent definition of AGI.

Well, I mean, I've seen some actually really good definitions that are crystal clear, but then everyone disagrees whether that's AGI or not. And I'm like, well, let's just turn out, who cares? So Demis Hassabis has a really, really good one where if you said, take all the information up till about 1910 and then try and have an artificial Einstein, discover relativity, given that data, if it can do that, then, you know, you're over the threshold. That's a great benchmark. Let's code it up. Then someone will say, well, that's not ag. It doesn't have empathy. Like, okay, well that's, that's perfectly legit as a complaint. But, you know, it's really clear that the AGI was originally defined and everybody agreed it's the Turing test for like 50 years, right?

Yeah.

And so I think it's crazy to change the definition right at the finish slide.

Oh, my God. The Turing Test was classically defined, was passed a long time ago, and no one noticed and no one cared.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're there. We're exactly there. Yeah. So. So from here forward, Richard Socher has, has really great thinking about the different types of intelligence going forward, the 10 pathways that he's carved out. He promised us that book he's supposed to write. I don't know where that is, but it's really well thought out, you know, thought process. So from here forward, it's not about like, do we really care whether it's equal to a human when it's doing superhuman protein folding, superhuman cell simulations? And do we really want to make an AI that acts like a human anyway? Isn't that the disaster scenario? Can we just make it not self aware, but super capable in all these areas that help humanity? It's a very doable thing. Why don't we just do that and then everyone will be happy.

Yeah. Okay, I'm with you.

I'm going to move off the subject of AI for a moment and move to one of my favorite, which is flying cars and share a short video. So the title here, and this is from the South China Morning Post. China clears first flying taxis for commercial takeoff. So here we go. Let's take a look here. Those of you who have been with me for a while have probably seen a very variation of this vehicle. It looks like Ehang from China, one of the very first to be produced. I remember when Martine rothblatt purchased like 100 of these vehicles for use in delivering lungs in the United States. And then she went and backed beta in the US So, Saleem, you and I have chatted about flying cars a lot.

I mean flying, for f sakes, why can't we have these yesterday? It's so much easier to fly a car than to drive a car autonomously. We've got so many less constraints. I make a controversial comment that Kobe Bryant would be alive today if we declared autonomous flying cars 20 years ago, 10 years ago. The technology is there, it's regulatory, it's infrastructure. Because you have to have dedicated gates at airports, you have to have special fueling mechanisms, all that stuff, stuff licensing, you know, it takes a long time to unfortunately, just for human beings to get all that stuff into place. This is where an authoritative government like China can get it done quickly because they can just look through it and say, make it happen.

Yeah.

And etc. I think it's a game changer. I can't wait for it to happen. I think we should have done it ages ago. Just airport commutes are just a disaster.

How long were you in line to get to JFK?

Oh, there was a 30 minute. It's like lax on a bad day, right? It's like 30 minute delay at 1:00am in the morning. Some, some they were doing something and God knows nobody. My car was stuck forever getting. Coming to pick me up. It just doesn't make any sense that we can't break through that stupid barrier. At least for airport runs, you know, price is not an issue. People pay a fortune. Just.

Well, there's.

There's a dozen well funded EVTOls. Electrical takeoff, landing. Right.

If I was the Trump administration and you got that one thing done, you would get so much like visual publicity from people flying around.

They're flying cars. The Jetsons have arrived. Yeah, sure. I mean, they are. They're coming. You know, we've got Archer Aviation and Joby. Both are probably the two biggest ones in the United States. And the plan right now, as far as I know, is when the Olympics are coming in a few years here in la, to have them up and operational. You know, the problem is, I mean, the old adage, the FAA is not happy until you're not happy.

Right.

Okay, well, you know that better than anybody.

Yeah. And so we had, you know, we have drone delivery as well, which is finally broken through. We have, you know, wing, which is part of Alphabet and zipline, and they're making, you know, millions of deliveries now. Where Drones are flying basically autonomously. So funny. I don't know if you remember hearing the CEO of Wing talking about this, that these little drones flying now, they're operational in Dallas and they'll move to other cities. They have to get a part 135 license. A part 135 is. Part 121 is United and JetBlue. It's large airplanes carrying passengers. 135 is smaller aircraft carrying passengers. They have to abide by the Part 135 rules, which means your airplane has to have a seat belt on it and needs to have all of the paperwork on it. And of course, you got these little drones.

Yeah, well, something we were talking about, I don't know, maybe six months ago. I don't know if you acted on it, but island real estate is dirt cheap, either in the middle of a lake or off the coast. And that's because it's hard to get to. But this is going to be the best. Also, we were ahead of the curve talking about the land around nuclear power plants, and lo and behold, it's gone way up in value. But one of the smartest things you could do right now is start a little fund to buy island real estate. In anticipation of the arrival, we have.

A fully developed business plan developed by one of my community members for exactly that. We did a quick study. It turns out if you go just circle Toronto Airport and Chicago airport with a 200 mile radius, there are something like 10,000 islands and lakes. It's a ridiculous number. And you could go around the world where there's decent rule of law and just snap these up. There's no way they're going down in value. And now you get the. And then you drop onto them. Just put a drone landing pad on each one and just wait.

Well, I'm in the office on this, this topic and everybody says, you know what, China can win some races. That's okay. This is one we don't need to win. We can just import these things. But like you said, we need to get the regulatory thing figured out very quickly. Yeah, but as long as we were competitive in the core air race, there's a good one to concede because they're so far ahead of us anyway.

And just I would pay the tariffs from for that.

All right, so here's another race that's going on between the US And China, and it's the humanoid robot race. And of course, this year I had Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure, on stage with me at the Abundance Summit. And their recent release was that the figure 2 robot can now walk like a human. Let's take a look at this, at this video here. So this is figure 1, which is walking like an old crippled man. And here's figure two coming along. So it still looks a little bit awkward to me, doesn't it? I mean, but it's getting. It's getting better. But I'll tell you what's amazing. Kudos to Brett and Figure. They have figure three, that's coming out shortly. They got figure four. They're eight iterating a new robot design like every 12 to 18 months. It's extraordinary. But, you know, I used to be a super fan of, of the Atlas robot back when it was being powered by hydraulics. And now it's gone electric and it's amazing. So let's take a look at the Atlas robot. This video really freaks me out. Check this out. Look at Atlas running like that. Right? And I mean, it's much more human crawling. Well, I mean, very human, like maneuvers. Right. Let's see what it does next.

That's so cool.

Some tumbling. I mean, imagine this in the. In the Olympics. In gymnastics Olympics.

It's a little unfair. Yeah.

You know, it might be fun. These right.

Headstands. Oh, wow.

Okay, now we're doing. Now we're gonna. That's a little bit short now, actually.

I mean, but check it out. Cartwheels. I mean, honestly, it looks like this. Look at the beginning here. Again, it's running. Check this out. This running gate. I mean, amazing, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah.

So you know my beef. Why the hell only two legs? Yeah.

Because it would be a four, then it would be a get a centipede, why not 100?

So much more flexibility.

Yeah.

I think we spent too much time trying to make human.

Saleem.

Yes, I'll back off.

Forget this. This argument you've made in the last three conversations we've had, putting it aside, it. That was, you know, Atlas running was superhuman. Like, you know, imagine that running after you down the street.

Yeah, crazy.

I'll go back to the thing that I'm. That does blow my mind about this is once you teach one of these a skill, all million other humanoid robots have that exact same capability.

Yeah.

And that shareability is something we've not achieved in human beings. And I think this is where humanoid robots have unbelievable applicability.

Well, I also think that the reason we're doing humanoid robots is not because Elon says, well, look, the world is designed for human shapes, blah, blah, blah, Blah. It's not true. What's true is that this inspires a whole generation to work on robotics. And once you have the supply chain of components and also the software, you can make any form factor in no time after that. So why start with a humanoid, not with a spider or something? Well, if you start with something creepy, then you just turned off a whole generation. You start with the video we just looked at. You've inspired a generation. And that's more important at this moment. That's what I think they recognize, Brett.

That's the kind of wisdom that cuts through all of the crap we talk about sometimes. Dave, thank you for that. That's a great comment.

Yeah, it's supposed to throw compliments to me?

All right, here's a couple.

I do appreciate it.

A couple of final stories here. Feeling the future. New wearable tech simulates realistic touch. I want to say new wearable tech stimulates realistic touch. So this is, this is Fruit of the Loom is coming out with this new technology.

Okay, well, that'll sell.

Yeah. So breakthrough in haptic tech stimulates pressure, twisting, stretching under full motion actuators. So, I mean, listen, this is the. We saw this in Ready Player One. This is reality following science fiction. This is the emergence or the. Our diving into the virtual world. Comments.

The porn industry is going to have a field day with this one. Obviously, there's historically always been breakthrough innovators in some of this. I think there's going to be. This is where that whole example of putting away kitchen dishes and then you simulating this becomes really interesting for the avatar use case. If you're, if you can do haptic sensing and the robots on Mars and you're on Earth or you're off, off planet, it becomes some incredible things you could do there. So lots of applications.

Yeah, I don't know about. I mean, I totally agree, conceptually. But then when we did the Avatar X prize, the latency kills you. You know, when you start talking about something on the moon or something on Mars. I mean, Mars, you're talking about minutes.

You know what just happened? Dave, we talked about this at the Abundance Summit. Quantum communications has made instantaneous comms possible. So it's, I mean, that, that blew me away. So all of a sudden, you know, distance doesn't matter. You could have instantaneous communication capability. So who knows?

Yeah, but if that works, I mean, I've read about it and definitely Einstein might, you might agree, might not agree. But, you know, a quantum entanglement is pretty compelling. So it, I guess I Don't know. I'm not, I'm not that deep into physics to know if it's real or not.

But if it is, if we have quantum entanglement, we do much more interesting things than haptic pressure testing. So I think we could do way, we're way past all of that.

Yeah, that's a good point. But, but no, if the, the instantaneous communication from here to Mars and eliminate the 10 minute latency, if that actually works, then we are either immediately going to discover 10,000 other civilizations in the galaxy or we're going to know that they don't exist. And so that's pretty interesting.

Solve the Fermi paradox.

Amazing. You know, on. To wrap up with one bitcoin story, Trump family enters bitcoin mining with new venture American Bitcoin. At the same time as we're recording this, there's been sort of a meltdown of all US stocks and Bitcoin dropped a good 10%. What happened to the idea that bitcoin was an uncorrelated storage of wealth?

Yeah, it's still not uncorrelated.

Yeah, it's still super correlated.

Yeah, well, I mean everything, the etf, everyone moving to indexes, which are stupid and I don't mean that they're literally stupid. They have no thought behind what they buy and sell. Yeah, the ETF position of the world can't go much further without it being like everything will move together because people are pulling money in and pulling money out of ETFs and they're just selling indiscriminately. But you saw halfway through the day, intel is way down and then suddenly somebody realizes, oh wait, Intel's got great news today. It's, it's immune from this and it's like the one thing green on the ticker. So it, you know, it's, it's funny how they created this huge ARB opportunity, you know, in the, in the middle of the day. And of course all the quant funds are making 40% returns like clockwork. How does that work? Well, it's just picking up on that ETF inefficiency. So anyway, that's a bit of an aside, kind of, kind of geeky. I think what's going on here though is data centers are an absolute. Data centers and chip access are an absolutely dominant part of economic success going forward. And what do you know, Bitcoin mining is a great way to make money on idle data center power supplies and idle and like it's hugely correlated with inference, time, compute and training, compute, build Outs. And so, of course, the Trumps are going to be in the middle of those conversations and recognize the opportunity.

Nice. Agreed. All right, Dave, I added this story for you. Core Weave shares rip nearly 42% higher, rising above IPO price. So tell me about Coreweave.

So Core Weave is a heavily levered kind of a bellwether of where AI IPOs are going to go, but it's a tough case because it's got so much debt. And so what's amazing to me is that they wanted to price at 48. They had a little shaky demand, so they came out at 40, which is still great. It traded down, and everyone got scared to death for one day. And then it skyrocketed. And now, even with today's meltdown, it's way up from its IPO price. And that is, to me, very much the Yahoo moment. Remember when the Internet was starting to take off and Yahoo went public and that just blew open the markets, and then they stayed open for a good solid five, six years after that. This, to me, could. We could look back and say, oh, okay, that this was the bellwether that said the markets are back open. You know, there's only been one. Well, it says right there in the bullet, 20. You know, 20, 21 is the last time we had anything like this. That's a long time ago. Yeah. And so I'm hoping. And I really feel like this. This is going to crack open not only the IPO markets, but also the M and A markets for all these. Yeah. For all these AI companies. And that's what we desperately need. You know, the alternative is that we lose the race in AI. But this. This has to happen for the machinery to keep running. So it's great, Saleem. It's really great.

I'm super thrilled to see it also, because the markets need to open up, and I think that was one of the core promises of the Trump administration, is to open up both M and A and the IPO markets. And it's great to see the. The sentiment behind Be quick, because as Dave said, the next few will. Will have as much excitement around them by definition, and it'll be. It'll be kind of amazing. It might crack open the whole paradigm.

Yeah. So, Dave, listen, I loved having you on this episode.

Likewise.

It's like, most fun.

I've been looking forward to it all day.

Yeah, it's great. So, everybody, listen, I know you love Salim more than me. I got it. You know, he's just. He's just better looking, more intelligent. All of that. Let me know.

What, do you got that in the comments or something?

Well, let me know what you thought of having Dave on wtf. You know, I love bringing the most intelligent people I know into this conversation to sort of give an understanding of what's happened in the past week. And just as the speed of this accelerates and it's accelerating rapidly, love having more intelligent people than myself to analyze the news, give opinions, set me straight.

Well, also the insider's view because Dave, you've got so much direct knowledge of all these startups and who's doing what in the space is fantastic.

Well, I don't know if you remember Peter, but all the conversations we've had with Mike Saylor and Sanju Bansal and walking around the streets of Cambridge, this is just like the virtual version of it. It's been the most fun I've had in weeks and just absolutely overjoyed that you have me on.

I look forward to having you back for sure. All right guys, have a get some sleep. Salim, I know you've been like traveling the globe. And Dave, thanks for joining us buddy. See you guys next time. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponential mastery.com you can get on demand access there. Go to Exponential Mastery. If you work as a manufacturing facilities engineer, installing a new piece of equipment.

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