The AI-Crypto Collision That Will Redefine Global Power w/ Eric Pulier, Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #187

In my mind, this is probably the most significant economic legislation and changes that we've seen in our lifetimes. Stop what you're doing right now. Because a crypto White House report officially was released to the public, making the United States the bellwether.

This is really the first of its kind from the United States.

It's such a huge opportunity.

What happens to the US dollar?

What's interesting about that is I really.

Think people have no idea how fast the economy is going to accelerate. On the back of AI and crypto.

Together, I agree 100% that we absolutely need. In the age of AI, you can't use the Swift network and three day settlement and $2 transaction fees in the world we're moving into. So this is 100% required.

Once you get this done, Bitcoin demand will explode.

People don't even understand the Pandora's box that this opens up in innovation. Because now that's a moonshot.

Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to another.

Episode of WTF on Moonshots. I'm here with my moonshot mates, Dave Blunden and Salim Ismail, who continue to impress me with their extraordinary knowledge. I brought on another dear friend, Eric Poulier. Eric is the CEO, Chairman, actually the chairman of Vadim, the founder there. He started 16 companies, raised over 1.5 billion. He's had. He's exited five of those companies north of $100 million. You know, super impressive. Harvard graduate, magnum cum laude. I mean, I don't even know what that means, let alone getting that, getting that level. He's built some of the very first enterprise open source companies, cloud computing companies, and something of factual history, which I'm not sure he's properly recognized. He's the first person ever to create an nft, a non fungible token. Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, fantastic. So, you know, on this episode today, Salim and Dave and I pretty much agreed we're going to cover all the other news because we've been so focused on AI all of these last few months. We're going to cover the news around crypto, around space, around robots, around BCI and others. But you know what? The world is just insanely.

Yeah, we got to touch on some AI. There's so much stuff happening.

I mean, it's crazy. We woke up this morning with a whole flurry of. So let's actually jump into AI first because we know everybody loves that story and what the breaking news is. Here we go. Dave, you want to kick us off on Xai?

All right, so Xai is free or Grok4 is free to the world. Now it was very expensive when I got it a couple of weeks ago, a couple hundred bucks a month. But I think this is the pressure from GPT5, you know, and you saw Google actually launch 12 things over the top of the GP5 announcement, all incredible. So this is great for all of us. We can get access to the best intelligence in the world for free for a while. You know, we'll see how it evolves. But jump on it.

I don't know how it doesn't stay free given the, I mean, it's going to be these super heavy models. You'll pay a little bit extra for it, but everybody's just, you know, demonetization, race to the bottom of cost and.

Well, it's also so addictive that they all know they can upsell you to premium services. I think they're, they're counting on about 10% of users up, upselling. And when you upsell, you go to 200 bucks a month, 250 bucks a month. So it generates more than enough cash flow. So it's, it's great for everyone. You know, the, the free tier and then the, the upgrade if you need even more.

Saleem, any thoughts on this?

I think this is just another example of the economics of capitalism. Right. You wonder what happens over. The only thing I can hope for is you don't end up with ad models inserted in the middle of all this. That would be just a disaster.

Yeah. In fact, Eric, we were talking about a second ago that the future of the web is going to be built for AI agents. So are you going to have ad models for your AI agent on your website?

No, what you're going to have is AI agents pretending to, well, actually going out and solving the problem. Not just appealing to humans, but solving the problem they're trying to do. So websites will be for AIs, not for humans.

Fascinating. All right, on the breaking news front, and I'll go to you again, Dave, Nvidia and amd, they're being shaked down from the White House.

All right, so, so this is the biggest thing happening in the world today, actually by a wide, wide margin. And it's not. You'll, you'll see five or six different headlines that look like they're disconnected, but they're actually highly interconnected events and it's all tied to chips. You know, the entire AI race between the US and China is throttled at the chip fab level. And all the news is up here at the model level, you know, GPT5 GRO4. But under the covers, these chips are sold out for years into the future and they're completely the gating factor to success. So China is racing to build their own manufacturing ability for chips and the US Is woefully behind because everything moved over to Taiwan. So now Trump is stepping in and saying, okay, we need to fund, we need intel to come back, we need TSMC to move all their fabs to US soil and we need to fund all of this concurrently with that. They're saying, how are we going to fund this? Why don't we just charge? We'll go ahead and let Nvidia export chips to China and AMD export chips to China. If they're prior generation, it's good for the US economy, but we're going to charge a 15% toll on that and we're going to use that to fund us catching up in the chip wars. Very, very good business deal and an incredibly slippery slope precedent. So my Republican friends love it because it's just a great deal. My Democrat friends are like, okay, this is going to go horribly bad because the last thing we need in the long run is the federal government to directly negotiate business deals. And I completely agree with both perspectives, by the way. In the short term, this is fantastic. In the long term, wow, could this turn bad in a hurry?

Eric, any thoughts?

Yeah, it's too bad we have to live in the long term.

Okay, I see where you are on that ledger.

Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt that if the government starts intervening on business deals, it's going to be complete madness. But there is value in getting everything back. But you know, as you mentioned before, Dave, it's interesting that Taiwan's sovereignty is very much based on this notion of being the power in this space. And by removing that power, you're actually creating a weakening of Taiwan.

You called it a silicon shield, Dave, Right?

Yes. It's exactly how they think. Taiwan pulled out all the stops. Their entire national focus become a chip fab company. The company is tsmc, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The name of the country is right in the company name. They have 66% of world share now on advanced chips that drive AI. 66% absolutely won the battle, locked it up and right at the finish line. You know, this is their barrier. The reason the US Needs to protect Taiwan fundamentally from a Chinese invasion is because the fabs are there. If the fabs all move to the US then the Taiwanese are worried sick that why would the US Then defend us and so that. That's the silicon shield effect. And it's. I mean, this is a very, very slippery and big news story. So the biggest news today, Lippu Tan, the CEO of intel, is at the White House right now. Today, Donald Trump called him in. I remember a couple of days ago on our podcast, we pointed out Donald Trump called for him to get fired. Lippu has a couple hundred million dollars of personal investments, his own investments in Chinese semiconductor companies on mainland China. So the big boss called him into the office today, and so trying to.

Prove he's not Chinese.

That's exactly the dialogue. So Lippo right now is saying, I am 100% as American as anyone on this planet, totally patriotic. And Donald Trump is saying, you have hundreds of millions of dollars of your own money in China right now. What up? And so. God, I wish I could listen to that.

So how does this get resolved? What's your guess? Let's take some bets here.

All right, well, we'll see later in the deck. One thing. Intel will absolutely get turned around, whether it takes 40 billion of government money or some other process, we absolutely, desperately need Intel.

It has to.

As a US it has to. So that's one thing that'll happen for sure. My guess, you know, LIPU will lose his argument with Donald because Donald's not usually a guy who changes his mind, but it'll be some graceful thing. You know, lipu's an old guy anyway.

Hey, who are you calling an old guy? 65.

He's older. Older than that, but he. He will probably have a graceful exit and some. You know, he's a brilliant guy and absolutely one of the top chip guys in the. In the country, so we really do need him. So they'll probably come to some agreement where everybody's happy and. And there'll be some new leadership that comes in.

Just for clarity, what kind of fabs does intel have today, and what are they building?

Okay, so they have the 1.8 nanometer, which is crazy. And we talked about it before, like, how can you build something on that scale? The 1.8 nanometer is running. Okay. The yields are a little low, and they're working. They're putting all their money right now into getting the yields up on that manufacturing process. In the process of doing that, they're cannibalizing the budget for the next generation, which is 1.4 nanometer or 14 angstrom, as they call it. Um, and that's a big strategic mistake for the US And I think that's what's causing the intervention Here is like, look, we, we can't slow down on the next generation of, of chips. We need to keep that going. They paused all their construction in Ohio for the next generation fabs, and that is, that is not a good move for the country. But they don't have the budget to do both. The core technology seems to be fine morale. You know, they've cleaned house quite a bit. I think, you know, smart people from MIT are thinking about joining, you know, and coming on board Intel. So that's a really good sign. I just feel like, you know, a couple of key moves here get David Sachs involved and the momentum will rebuild around the next generation.

It needs the capital to get those fabs done and become a U.S. powerhouse.

Yeah, and one other thing, you know, right now the, you know, TSMC has 66% share. The only other two manufacturers in the world are Samsung and Intel. And so Samsung is intimately tied with the Korean government, which is fine. And you know, Elon just cut a huge deal with Samsung for those chips.

And we'll talk about that in a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, okay. There's only three players. We need some balance in the force here and that's the bottom line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peter, I was just going to say that it needs money to obviously go after the chips, but it needs money for something else. Intel was always known for investing in things around the chips, R and D that brought a lot of innovation into the world. A lot of things we take for granted came out of intel and then were ultimately sp out because they drove demand for chips. A lot of those projects now because of capital are either being discontinued or spun out. And the capital will also go a long way to making them robust for the future because they're just not spending what they used to.

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All right, well good luck to Intel. I mean listen, AMD was at rock bottom and was turned around and intel can again. All right, next story here. Again, just things heating up. I mean it's not a day doesn't go by when we don't see sort of this leapfrog situation occurring in the AI race. So this is titled the AI race continues. Z AI, which is a Chinese AI company backed with $400 million from Saudi, from Prosperity 7. The fund there has launched something called GLM 4.5 and Z AI is claiming it's the best performing open source model in the world. And we've seen China just go heads down on open source. Any comments on this, Salim?

Well, you have the standard problem. I think the one great part is that it's open source and people will be able to use it locally. I think the fact that it's able to be used across the world is going to be very powerful for the Chinese. We need to get in front of this and I think this is a key area. I have a huge issue with this whole China US thing generally. So I, you know, separately it might be worth having a conversation about that. But I find the, the dichotomy of that kind of quote unquote battle to be the wrong way of thinking about this.

But I'd like the US always more.

Noodling as to what that, what the right one is.

The US always loves a good enemy to, to focus on, right? Whether it's the Soviet Union.

The next James Bond movie will be about chips and China probably.

Well, I completely agree that the US needs a good enemy to focus on to rally the, the national will. That's the only way anything ever happens. But then the Chinese have been very deliberate in their design, you know, both for the power, which you've mentioned many times, Peter. Yeah, the onshore chip fabs. I mean these things, These decisions happen 5 years in advance, 10 years in advance. And so it's really clear that they've been ramping up their internal horsepower for a while and US kind of, kind of woke up just in time, I think.

So one thing, the big structural problem is that the Chinese, because of the autocracy, they can make long term strategic decisions, right? When you have a four year metabolism election cycle, two years you can't make long term planning.

You know, has anyone noticed that this open source debate of whether it's going to unleash the pits of hell on humanity or whether we should or shouldn't do this is completely off the table? All that matters now is how fast we can do all the greatest AI in the world and give it away for free as fast as we can. And no one's even thinking about the implications of that.

Well, let's come back and talk about that, Eric, actually, but, but first, you know, Z AI. Where the hell did this come from? So we're still checking whether these benchmarks are real, but they're shockingly good. You know, leapfrogging Baidu and you know, so, so Quen had that title from China before that it was Deep Seq. Those are known entities. Where did this come from? It turns out that this is backed by prosperity. Seven out of Saudi, but also Baidu. And it is supposed to be the answer to Apple Intelligence. That was the original idea anyway. That's why that together.

That's almost funny. That's almost funny.

Well, they didn't know, this is a few years ago, so they didn't know Apple Intelligence, you know, where that would come out at the time. So they clearly did a far, far better job of getting it done. But also, you know, we were talking about OSS. So the, you know, ChatGPT open source came out last week and that puts a lot of pressure on the open source community. There's only two reasons that OpenAI would have gone out of their way to create an open source product. One of them is meta competing directly with meta. And a whole bunch of documents came out right afterwards showing that their number One focus at OpenAI is Meta as a competitor for a lot of reasons we can get into in another episode. But then the other is, did the White House ask OpenAI to put something out there to counter Quinn Deepseek? And now because we don't want. And now GLM 4.5 because we don't want every US company, every US startup using Chinese weights. It's pretty easy to hide things in those weights and you know, sneaky little spyware type things could be in there. And so, I mean, I find it probably was.

I find it fascinating that China is leading the open AI.

You know, the world is twisted. Everything down is up. I mean it's an insane world, but.

It'S the biggest Trojan horse on the planet.

It is the biggest Trojan horse.

A lot of this is intended for the Chinese phones, right? You Want lightweight AI to be able to run on a lot of phones. And this is where this is targeted for sure.

Well, I'm pretty sure though that the, the open sourcing of the best Chinese models is trying to undercut the U.S. funding of the big foundation model companies. It's, it's a dump on the US market. Plan to try and keep, to try and slow down the massive funding going into OpenAI and, and you know, the other big foundation model companies. And it's clearly too little, too late. But I think that was why these are all open sourced.

All right, well here's a thought, here's a quick thought. With all of the chip stuff and all of this and the money going into various places and the, and the government getting involved, etc. Haven't we effectively nationalized AI with all this?

It's coming soon.

Interesting. Right. So I always think of China as a single corporation with all of the companies as apps sitting on top of that platform. And the question is whether the US will move in that direction.

Well, the US is negotiating business deals for intel. I don't know how much more nationalist nationalized we can get.

Yeah, well, I think Alex, Alex was saying on our last pod, we're moving to a war footing. This feels exactly like either the Manhattan Project or the run up to World War II. That's exactly what, what is going on. And you know, it's, it's every bit as important as, as the space race was, as the nuclear arms race was. It's actually more important. So it's, I guess it's not surprising, but it is exactly the behavior you have at the run up to, you know, a cold war, I guess.

All right guys, I'm moving us forward here. We've, that was the breaking news on AI we have so much more to cover across all of these areas. So let's talk about America's crypto plan. Right. So a lot of progress in, in the crypto space. So the White House unveils a crypto strategy plan with a number of key parameters. And I'll just read a little bit of this. We have two slides on it. Make the US the crypto capital of the world. It's fascinating. Of course, the entire Trump family is massively invested in Bitcoin. Shift from regulation by enforcement, which has been the last administration to. Let's get some clear rules. Let's clarify regulatory roles, SEC versus CFTC and promote the US dollar backed stablecoins. We'll talk about the Genius act in a moment. Four more points here. Modernized Tax policy on digital assets. Push for speedy action across agencies in Congress. Let's, you know, let's make this happen. Federal agencies to stop discriminating against crypto and businesses, crypto business and banks and modernize of staking and mining income and tax rules. A quick note. There's $600 billion in real world assets that could be tokenized by 2030. Eric Pulia, this is an area that you've been passionate about and studying. Jump in here, buddy.

I think no matter what side of the aisle you are on, you have to applaud the speed and the significance of what the administration and what the SEC, etc. Are doing because it's truly monumental. I mean, in my mind this is probably the most significant economic legislation and changes that we've seen in our lifetimes. The implications are staggering to the global economy and certainly brings a lot of innovation back to the United States that was having to move offshore. It brings clarity for innovators and startups who literally could not get bank accounts if they just wanted to explore different ideas in the space. And, and now for the first time, there's truly significant changes in how the economy is going to work. If you wanted a license to print money in the past, that would be quite an ask. Now you can say, give me a dollar, I'll give you a token. And this is legal. The whole payment rails are going to change. The way that international remittance is done is going to change the way banks run is going to completely shift as our real world assets become tokenized. It's really as big a shift in our economy as I think we've ever seen.

And let's take a second just to explain what tokenizing real world assets means because it's such a huge opportunity and I'm not sure everybody is clear on it, but Eric want to take a shot at that?

Yeah. Well, this will unfold over the next five years. But even right now, there's certain things that we're getting regulatory clarity on, such as the Genius Act. The Genius act says that you can actually issue tokens.

And let's go. Here's the slide for the Genius Act.

Yeah, you can issue tokens that represent dollars and can be used as payments. It creates an entirely new set of payment rails that are dramatically more efficient and less encumbered by friction and regulatory messes. So yes, you maintain your AML and your KYC and your rules related to being safe, but at the same time you can move really fast. You can now I can move a dollar from a consumer to a merchant and settle instantly instead of waiting days to get my money.

So what is the old way of doing it compared to stablecoins right now? Just to.

So let's say that you wanted to send, I don't know, $1,000 to your mother or something. You would have to send a wire. It's, it's so complicated. If you wanted to send money back home, if you're working in the United States to another country. The, the complexity is mind boggling.

And the wire is going through the banks and the banks have to settle up over some period of time.

Exactly. Over days sometimes. And the, the complexity also around the reporting and the, the compliance is, is so severe that the, a lot of the money is made in the inefficiencies by the float that's being held. Like if you're paying a credit card to a merchant, the merchant doesn't get paid right away. That money is sitting with someone else who's making that float. And all of these inefficiencies benefits the existing system. And that's about to blow up in a really interesting way. Just to answer your question about what is an rwa, a real world asset that's tokenized. And it means that a token can not only represent an asset like real estate or gold or US dollar, but it's going to start to represent stocks. And anything that has value can not only be represented by a token, but fractional representation.

Yeah, I love this. Just to use an example here. If you've got an apartment on Central Park west that cost $20 million and you I'd love to own some of that real estate. Well, what if the owner of that apartment says I'm going to tokenize it? It's now there's a million tokens representing this apartment worth $20 million. And each token's worth 20 bucks. And I could buy 100 tokens and own a small piece of that.

Exactly. And what's so interesting about that is even today among wealthy people, I have a friend who recently has a, has a $30 million house and he wanted to borrow a couple million dollars against that. He is personal friends with the head of the bank. To do that is complex. You have to verify you own it, make sure it doesn't have liens on it, make sure that it's unencumbered. Look at the various processes within the bank in order to then secure that as collateral against the loan. Everything changes. Now when you have instant ownership proof smart contracts that can instantly confirm this person owns that in seconds it becomes collateral. No delivery risk, because you can actually seize the collateral in a moment's notice. You have programmable control of IT, fractional liquidity, global 247 access. So what it's going to do is trillions of dollars of dormant value are now going to be released or opened into collateral capabilities. And what's interesting about that is it's not overnight. Everyone's getting real excited because like in Dubai, you can actually fractionalize real estate and put it on chain today. This is new, but it's true. In the US they've started with stablecoins, they're moving fast with, with this movement, but it'll happen incrementally. But it's so monumental of what it'll mean that I think everybody's taking notice and starting to prepare for it.

Amazing. Salim, you've thought about this a lot too.

A huge amount. Three, three, four quick points here. One, we tried to actually issue a token for our exo ecosystem a few years ago back in 2017, 2018. It was mind bogglingly difficult. The lawyer said, don't do it, the SEC is just going to come after you. And it was terrible. A shout out here, a negative shout out there where what they were doing was deliberately not clarifying the rules so you couldn't follow them. They basically said we refused to clarify the rules because we want to be able to come after you. It was the banking lobby winning massively, saying this cannot happen. Right. And so this turnaround I think is, is to Eric's point, this is one of the biggest things that will happen to the US economy. So a couple of more things. One is they did something incredibly clever because one of the big challenges when you tokenize something and allow collateralization in a different way is what happens to the US dollar. And there was, there was a big concern of that over the few years because if I can tokenize something and make the collateral something else and then you start stop using the US dollar and it loses status over time. And what they've done here in this initial phase of cryptocurrencies and US stablecoins is they've said it has to be US dollar backed, meaning it has to be T bills or it has to be some accredited recognized banking form of collateral which will force increase usage of T bills and keep the dollar in place at least for a while longer, but still gives you the benefits of the USDC side. So I think that's a really, really clever way. It buys the US dollar a few years to do this. Over time though, Your Central park analogy apartment is a really good one because I could tokenize that apartment and sell 5% of it.

Right?

Sell 45% of it. I still have majority ownership, but I could sell it to friends, family, others. It's like timeshare times a thousand. More levels of granularity become much more.

And one much more value you can do is anybody who buys 10% gets to stay there for a week out of the year. You can add added value onto that. And Eric, you've been pioneering that with NFTs for a while.

Yeah, that's a really good point, Peter, because people don't even understand the Pandora's box that this opens up in innovation. Because we're not just talking about now opening up new collateral and moving this money around in a different way. We're talking about programmable money. Programmable money has things like what you're saying it's going to merge with what we used to call loyalty. Right? Loyalty is going to completely change because you're now going to be able to create interoperable loyalty points. Loyalty points will be pegged to stablecoins. Stablecoins will now create lifestyle alliances across companies. So right now, if I go into a yogurt store and I'll roll my eyes when somebody says, here's more points to get 10% off at 11th yogurt, I'll be like, I don't have to fight for this. But if those same points are not only usable at dinner tonight or for my airline or if I take them, they're generating yield because they're moving into a programmable, actually defi enabled token. So now I can make yield on it. I can use it in different ways. These groups can interoperate with one another. It becomes dramatically more practical, so much more interesting. And then the other thing that's going to happen that I don't think people are thinking about yet is if you're a CEO of a major company, you have a few levers you can pull to keep your job. One is you increase revenue. The other is you decrease cost. You can make some products to do that. But one of the main things that you really should be doing if you're CEO of a public company to increase your stock is to make sure people who already bought your stock don't sell it. If you're a Yankees fan and the Yankees, yeah, if the Yankees have like a bad game or have a me too in their front office, people don't say, I'm a Mets fan now. They say, get rid of the bum let's win next year. But if you're a, if you're a shareholder of US Steel and they have some incident, you're like, I'm out of here. 10 seconds, right? Let's buy the competitor, let's do something else. What should happen is if you tokenized your equities, if you tokenized your stock, you're not only going to be able to offer superior loyalty against it, but you're going to know who your shareholders are. And if you own a million dollars of Coca Cola stock, you're not going to pay for parking at Coca Cola Stadium. At three year anniversary of owning U.S. steel, you're going to get dinner for two and a thank you from the CEO because they know who you are. Things are going to drop into your wallet. The loyalty systems are now going to extend into true ownership.

That's brilliant, buddy.

It changes everything.

Absolutely brilliant.

I want to make one couple more quick points. One is the credit union aspect of it has really fascinated me because credit unions, newspapers, because we've lost all the local newspapers which used to be the heart of every community, we're losing communities across the country because there's no sticky glue for connectivity tissue. I've been working on the credit union industry for a few years and it turns out credit unions are a perfect place to be the center of the community. And now that they can issue local tokens, they can become a really powerful force for all because almost all 80% of monetary transactions happens within your town. And so this becomes a really powerful model for creating community stickiness and awareness and a shared sense of values which I think they have the opportunity to really galvanize on. This last point I'll make is in this previous point you mentioned 600 billion of assets could be brought on. I think that's so under.

Yeah, it's so much bigger than that.

I mean it's like 100 times bigger than that. It's trillions of.

Yeah, there's 120 trillion in real estate, 100 trillion in equities, 13 trillion in treasuries, 12 trillion in gold and precious metals. It's all coming.

I think they put that in just to show the banks. It's not a lot. It's not, it's just not a lot. Don't worry about it.

I think that's, that's why I'll make, I'll make one final point on this. We'll move on to the next article which is, you know, when the Internet was developed, it became a, became a place where we Exchanged information, videos for photos, data. It never had a financial layer. And for the first time, this tokenization of assets, of stablecoins becomes the financial layer of the Internet. And oh, my God, when we give our AI agents access to that, we're going to see an explosion in the economy. I mean, I really think people have no idea how fast the economy is going to accelerate. On the back of AI and crypto.

Together, just everything's going to change there, Peter. I mean, today, if you have a dog with diabetes and you decide you're going to buy dog food, a dog food company has spent the time with an ad agency to make a heartwarming commercial about why you should buy this dog food versus another. Very soon you're just going to tell your agent, get my dog food. It's going to know your dog has diabetes. It's going to know your price point. It's going to know things about you, everything that is necessary. It's going to go research all the best medical research on the best foods, and it's going to go out there and buy the dog food. Now, how is an advertiser or brand going to distinguish themselves in that? They're going to build their outreach for the AI appeal, not for the human appeal.

Amazing. All right, let's move on to another piece.

Wait, dogs can get diabetes?

Apparently.

I love Eric.

See them Frosted Flakes.

I love Eric's examples here. All right, so this is more breaking news in the crypto space. Trump allows cryptocurrencies and 401ks. So an executive order enabled 401s to have alternate assets, including crypto and real estate beyond traditional stocks. Right. This EO order, it's going to trigger a regulatory overhaul. It is not putting this in place immediately. The SEC is going to propose guidance, and the 401 market is 8 to 12 trillion dollars. And what they said in the article here was that could move billions into crypto. I think it could move better part of a trillion to crypto. Now, here's the sticking point everybody keeps saying, and our guidance for you is you should have 1 to 2% of your money in crypto. It's like, oh, I'm at like 80%, but hey, who's counting?

Yeah, yeah. It's funny that there used to be a thing called an Internet sector. I remember when, you know, when the web was first coming up and people are like, are you going to use the Internet or let's have an Internet division. That's like having, like, chairs are just like, expected to be In a company, Internet is expected to be a company. The crypto sector, when you tokenize everything, it's just stuff. So, yes, you're going to have a lot of your ownership of things in stuff, and most of that will be tokenized. So you know how much of that should be in bitcoin versus a piece of the Chrysler Building versus gold. It's all going to be tokenized.

Saleeb, what's your thought on this? 401.

I think this is awesome. Specifically, bitcoin can go into 401ks. I'm not sure what the process is to allow this fully because SEC has to propose guidance. I don't know if there has to be a bill drafted and Congress has to move on this. I don't know what the technicalities are, but once you get this done, the bitcoin demand will explode. There's a really great little ins. Somebody went to Grok and chatgpt in Gemini and Perplexity and said, when will bitcoin hit? Act as a financial analyst. When will bitcoin hit? A million dollars of bitcoin. And it looks the ranges are between 2028 and 2031. And so all four engines basically came up with a reasonably narrow perspective of when bitcoin hits a million dollars. I mean, it's just huge.

It's huge.

Dave, I want to make sure you got a chance to add any. Any thoughts on these.

Actually, I had a good conversation with Joe Kennedy back when he was in Congress running the crypto subcommittee on exactly how this works. So the way, the way it works is you create an executive order specifying kind of a broad outcome that you want, and then it hands off to a committee or a commission, in this case the sec, and then they have to spend laborious amounts of time, maybe with AI assistance, creating thousands and thousands of pages of rules to try and actualize it. So the part that scares me on this slide is SEC to propose guidance. Like, okay, when, how, what now? I don't know who's running the show. Well, I guess we know who's running the show, but we know on the AI front, David Sacks has built a dream team of brilliant people which is kind of unprecedented in the government. They need an equivalent capable team in the SEC to deal with this because I think Eric is right.

It's.

It's a game changer like nothing we've ever seen.

Eric.

Eric, you know, you use the word Pandora's box in there like a Pandora. Pandora's box of innovation is coming. But, you know, anytime you can Securitize an apartment building or a stadium, you can also short it. And anytime you can securitize something and short it, it might blow up one night. And you're like, oh, I wonder why it blew up. It's like, okay, so there's a reason that sports team owners aren't allowed to bet on the games. And So I agree 100% that we absolutely need this. In the age of AI, you can't use the Swift network and three day settlement and $2 transaction fees in the world we're moving into. So this is 100% required. But if you ever watch the movie the Big Short, you know, in back. So, so I'm the founder of a company, Vestmark. We manage about $2 trillion of, of public assets and I'm still the chairman of the company today. And we had back during the big Short area era, every asset manager said can you support CDOs, you know, collateralized or credit default swaps to CDSs. And it turned out they were manufacturing $60 trillion of synthetic instruments. The whole, the whole US housing, all housing combined is $20 trillion. So on top of that they layered $60 trillion of synthetic junk. Yeah, and then dumping most of it onto the pension funds. You know, the, you know, the fireman's, you know, Illinois pension fund was buying all this garbage. So that went horribly wrong. As we know, the same thing will inevitably happen here if the SEC doesn't get that guidance. Right. And so we desperately need it. But it's not going to be trivial to make this real. So I've got concerns, but I do completely agree with the need.

All right, one more article in this. And Eric, you shared this with me yesterday, so I'll let you take the lead. SEC allows liquid staking. What does that mean and why is that relevant?

It's highly relevant because it's one thing to say Bitcoin's going to rise to a million dollars over the next X years and if the eth, it might go up, et cetera, and you sit and wait. It's another thing to try to generate yield on the uptick. So a lot of old school crypto holders, really, if they're extremely diligent, will put their crypto in what's called cold storage. So it can't be be hacked. They'll buried in the backyard or something they don't want.

They're just hodling it. They're going to hoddle it for a.

Decade all the way. But the average person isn't necessarily going to think that Way, the family offices, the sabers, the people in ETFs, they might get an idea like, well, look, my assets are dormant. How can I generate yield on them the same way I get interest in a bank? The genius act says you can create stable coins, but you can't pay interest. What that really just means is you can get interest if you will yield if it's a separate company in a separate organization and you click over and have different T's and C's. Well, so what this means is there's a notion called liquid staking, which means that you keep your tokens tradable, but you lock them up in what's called a staking pool. And in exchange, you get liquid, you get tokens. In essence, a bearer bond of sorts where you can trade back for those. But while they're being staked, they can play in what's called defi decentralized finance. So there's these trading pairs and it's an entirely new world of how I think Wall Street's going to start to work and converge with traditional finance, where there's a lot of trading back and forth and fees to be made for providing liquidity into those trades. So what's happening is there's opportunities now to stake your tokens and generate yield. Now, this was not allowed in the past, or let's say it was, had regulatory uncertainty. What this does is it declares that that practice and the outcome of that practice is not a security. It's going to dramatically streamline the rules, give clarity to how people can actually do this. And over time, it'll even make the ETF's yield bearing. Whether that's for the ETF owner or how they share it with the public is unknown. But BlackRock's already applied for this and I'm sure all the ETFs will apply. And a case by case basis, I think they'll start to get approved.

Yeah, and can I make a point on uncertainty? Like, in my experience, I want to really applaud the White House and the SEC for doing this, creating clarity. But in my experience, when things are unclear, like Sam Bankman Fried kind of era, what happens in an unclear environment is that highly, highly ethical people don't touch it because it's unclear and really sleazy people do it anyway. And anytime the White House or the government creates an unclear business environment, the sleaziest people on the planet thrive and it creates all kinds of problems. But when you have clear rules, just like in a sport, if it's clear what's a legal hit. What's not a legal hit? If it's clear then ethical people can play and if it's unclear, you get horrible behavior. So I really want to congratulate the White House and the SEC for creating some clarity. This has been mud for what, like five years now? Ten years now?

Yeah, it's really. Yeah.

I mean there's a AI token called Morpheus where you can stake Ethan earned rewards or whatever and there's $200 million of Ethereum staked to underpin this network. And that's just one minor little number.

Yeah, yeah, this is going to get really big.

Is staggering in terms of.

Yeah. One thing I will mention on that also is that it also will take non programmable blockchains like, like Bitcoin or even tokenized gold and things that don't inherently generate any yield, they don't play in defi. And then there's going to be all sorts of what's called wrapping and bridging protocols etc to allow them to play in defi. So you can imagine when you have something like tokenized gold, which traditionally always does better than a fiat currency because gold generally is more stable, you fiat currencies are being printed like mad and so they tend to depreciate so people will start saving more of their generally value at rest in gold or other more stable tokens. And then if you can then stake those and generate yield, why would you ever put fiat, which is depreciating with a minor interest rate when you can stake in something that is appreciating and pays more in yield? It's just going to change how people.

Say this is the six Ds of exponentials in play in the finance world. Right? We're digitizing, dematerializing, demonetizing and democratizing.

Two key points here. One is the really important part is not that you have digital currencies and cryptocurrencies. It's what Eric mentioned earlier, the fact that it's programmable. And the fact that it's programmable means you can automate all sorts of stuff that you couldn't automate before when you had standard US dollars.

And now it's time for probably the most important segment, the health tech segment of Moonshots. It was about a decade ago where a dear friend of mine who is in incredible health goes to the hospital with a pain in his side only to find out he's got stage four cancer. A few years later, a fraternity brother of mine dies in his sleep. He was young, he dies in his sleep from a heart attack. And that's when I realized people truly have no idea what's going on inside their bodies unless they look. We're all optimists about our health. But did you know that 70% of heart attacks have happen without any precedent? No shortness of breath, no pain. Most cancers are detected way too late.

At stage three or stage four.

And the sad fact is that we have all the technology we need to detect and prevent these diseases at scale. And that's when I knew I had to do something. I figured everyone should have access to this tech to find and prevent disease.

Before it's too late.

So I partnered with a group of incredible entrepreneurs and friends, Tony Robbins, Bob, Hurry, Bill Cap. To pull together all the key tech and the best positions and scientists to start something called Fountain Life. Annually I go to Fountain Life to get a digital upload, 200 gigabytes of data about my body, head to toe, collected in four hours. To understand what's going on, all that data is fed to our AIs, our medical team, every year. It's a non negotiable for me. I have nothing to ask of you other than please, please become the CEO of your own health, understand how good your body is at hiding disease and have an understanding of what's going on. You can go to fountainlife.com to talk to one of my team members there.

That's fountainlife.com I want to move to our next topic. This is from the Washington Post. DOGE AI Tool to cut federal regulations so the summary here is AI is reviewing 200,000 federal regulations with the goal of eliminating 50% of them by 2026. HUD and the Urban Development taking the first testing. They've cut 1083 rules in just two weeks. This is AI driven deregulation, the path to trillions of dollars in savings. Their estimate was if they were going to try and review these 200,000 federal regulations, it would take 3.6 million man hours of human labor. But that can be done by AI Tootsuite. So I find this amazing. Right? I mean if you look at regulations in any field, they're probably all opposing each other and 80% of them could be eliminated. So this is a huge move for Doge and I fully applaud it.

I've said this before when we talked about this earlier. I think for me this is the most exciting application of AI that you could possibly find. There's a term I'd like to kind of push out there called mvr Minimum Viable Regulatory I love that, like what's the minimum amount of regulatory to get something kind of just put some constraints around it while you watch it and figure it out. How big is one area where.

All of that.

But it really requires maximum, it really requires a lot. And you know, I live 10 years in, in Europe and you want regulatory crap. If you're in Europe, you're always violating like 20 laws at some given point. You don't know what they are, right. And I think this what Europe needs, like a Manhattan Project of this epic level of deregulating 90% of all the crap regulatory there in order to get themselves back on track and be innovative again. So there's incredible potential to be unleashed here.

Yeah, well, I mean like, yeah, Europe is the case study and where you don't want to go, right? You've got the most cultured, incredible, beautiful place on the planet, perfect climate, incredible population, and you it all up with regulatory bullshit. And now it's on the, on the cusp of becoming irrelevant in the world.

Can I tell a quick tangent story here for a second? I had a French girlfriend way back in the day and she applied for a cardi Dante or French identity card. And they said, you were born here, your parents were born here, but your grandmother was not born in France. So we have a problem. And she was like, yeah, because she was the daughter of the French forces in Vietnam and her dad was the commanding officer of all those forces. Now they wanted affidavits from all the four grandparents that this was indeed their grandmother, granddaughter. So she said, well, they're dead, my grandparents are dead. They said, oh, problem. Then they give her a list of like 16 things she has to comply with to kind of satisfy all of this. And she finally, after like three months of, she's like hunkered down. She's like, I'm not letting this beat me. Shows up at the City off of hall with like a stack like this. And they said, ah, problem. And while you've been doing all this, your birth certificate has expired. Because it turns out in France your birth certificate only lasts three months. And then you have to apply for a new one to show that you were born. So, you know, you just want, you just want to shoe yourself in the middle of all that when you're trying to get anything done over there. And this is where you could apply.

You know how this all evolved? You know when, when the founding fathers put together the federal government, it was intended to be a couple percent, like 2, 3, 4% of the economy max. Just enough to fund the military, the central military and the post office and one or two other things. And then every time there's a world war or a major crisis, the budget expands tremendously. But there's a war on, you have to expand it tremendously. But then after the war's over, it magically stays flat, it doesn't go back down. And then there's another crisis and it goes up and it goes up and it goes up. So the budget goes up, the taxes go up and the regulatory documents go up and only up. There's no down. This is the first time in almost 250 years now that there's a chance to actually go down in the documents stack. And it's all empowered by AI. There's a very real possibility of this being a continuing trend because we kind of need it to, because we need massive amounts of new regulation. As abundance goes exponential, the number of things that need to be thought about goes exponential. So if you don't have a process for simplifying and streamlining the stack, then the document set's going to go to infinity and the complexity is going to go to infinity and it'll collapse the country. So this is a really good, really good case study and hopefully I'm thrilled by this.

Yeah. I mean, if you want to live in a country where you can always be arrested because you're always doing something wrong with whether you know it or not.

Yes.

All right, let's move on. So, Dave, I added this one on. I'm curious if you want to comment on it. So ChatGPT runs micro cap trading test. So over six months, ChatGPT was given money to trade and it returned 23.8%. So call it, you know, close to 50% annualized rate of return. Is this sustainable? Are we going to see everybody turning over their portfolio to an AI?

100% for sure. I don't know if turning over. It's all AI assisted already. The hedge funds, 2 Sigma 0.72, they're massively AI dominated. Already happened very quickly and very quietly. There's some of the biggest hires out of Princeton mostly, but also a little bit out of MIT and Harvard. And they take some incredible talent and it just disappears into the, into the, the auto trading, you know, GPT driven, AI driven morass. But a couple of our investments, Ant Farm and aru, do massive simulation modeling using thousands of AI agents and they're entirely getting pulled into this, this trading world now because it, it just works so, so well. So this is the only kind of trading I think that'll happen in the Future. This and ETFs.

Is it not a total arms race where you're going to end up with my AI is better than your AI?

Well, it is, but one of the problems here is that even the smallest variations in the quality of the AI or how good it is, will dominate at some point. You know, AGI or ASI is, is going to be so dominant in this space that you could get your chat GTP567 to help you or whatever you're going to try to do as a, as a person. But they're going to have to rename the idea of a public investor, the public, to being like exit liquidity. Right. That's what you should call you because you're not going to be able to compete with people who actually know what's going on. This whole idea of information imbalance is going to explode based on how good your AI is.

Well, I'll tell you, the efficient allocation of capital is absolutely core to the success of humanity and the country. And adding AI as a helper in how to, and where to allocate what's worth something, what's not is only good. Actually, what's really bad is ETFs. You know, just ETFs are like a, like a sucker fish stuck on the bottom of a large. You know, it's fine when it's really lazy, man. Exactly. But when it gets too big, it drags down the whole thing. And that's where it is right now. So adding intelligence to the investment process, you would know this in biotech better than anyone, Peter. I mean, it's like right now it's hot, then it's cold, it's random, it's, it's bullshit. And adding some serious intelligence into. Yeah, this is garbage. This is real. This is, this is going to change humanity, put some money behind it. That would be, oh, that'd be the best thing in the world. So that's, that's what the, you know, the AIs are starting to do.

I mean, that, that's a fascinating thought. You know, in other words, actually investing for an outcome other than just financial return investing because it's going to increase the, you know, lifespan, the health span of humanity and consequently give incredible financial return. Speaking of which, Leopold is doing something interesting. So let's, let's intro this. Dave.

Okay, so, Leopold Aschenbrenner. So just to intro this, I think the three best pieces of media really ever created are my favorites. Gavin Baker on the all in podcast. Unbelievable. Talking about chips, really predicting what we're about to talk about with intel here. Next best, I think would be number two. Alex Wisner Gross on the Moonshots podcast. Solving humanity's last exam problems in real. These are the hardest problems we can think of. And he's just rattling off answers, as Peter suggests some. You got to see that. That was. Oh, my God. But I think the number one in my world is Leopold Aschenbrunner on the Dwarkesh podcast. Four hours straight of everything that matters in situational awareness and what's going on in the world today. And then he turns around and he calls his hedge fund situational awareness lp, which is so cool. So at the time he was on that podcast, he's just a guy. He graduated from Columbia at age 19, top of his class, clearly brilliant. Went to OpenAI, learned everything going on, got fired, controversially from OpenAI, starts a billion dollar hedge fund right after that. And so now, for the first time, we can see the positions in his new hedge fund. And so I cannot wait to get him on the podcast. By the way, Leopold, if you're out there listening, please come on the podcast.

Yeah, I would love that. I mean, his paper, Situational Awareness, if you've not read that white paper, it is, it's brilliant. And it talks about the intelligence sort of explosion that is is upon us right now. He wrote about, what, two years ago or so?

Yeah, I think about two years ago. And then immediately parlayed the white paper into the hedge fund capital raising, which takes a little while. And the whole theory of the fund is invest in the implications of that paper.

So look at the number one investment at 46%. It's Intel Corporation. So, I mean, I find that fascinating. Right. The US Government cannot afford to have intel fail. It is one of the biggest assets on the US balance sheet, if you would, in terms of its potential impact. So it feels like an incredible bet.

Yeah. And it looks like he bought call options. It's hard to tell exactly which call options he bought, so I tried to simulate it in Perplexity Comet. By the way, if you're using all your AI tools, Perplexity Comet, if you're trying to scrape nooks and crannies of the Internet and find details, it's by far the best. It has no scruples about prying into every little URL. So it's very good for this type of research. And it came back with best guess. You know, given volumes of different option types, he probably invested something around 100 million or more into call options that pay off at about 1.5 billion if intel doubles.

This is not investment advice.

Well, I'm just guessing this is his, but I actually was in the news. I'm in the news this morning for a transaction that I did which is part of. Well, I can't tell because it's a public company, but it's in the news. So you can look it up, but it's part of an overall asset gathering. I'm liquidating a bunch of things and pulling them together specifically to try and mirror what Leopold is doing on this sheet. One of the beautiful things about hedge funds is every quarter they have to file a 13F, which shows all their positions. So if the stocks have moved, you might be too late. But if you look down the list and it's like, oh, this hasn't reacted. This hasn't reacted. You can just copy them. So that's kind of nice. It's a little brutal on the hedge funds, but it's nice for us. If you want to. I know mine, Leopold's shoes.

My Abundance360 members would love to get into his fund. So hopefully we'll get him to on the podcast or to join us at the Abundance Summit in March. All right, let's go to one of my favorite subjects. There's a lot going on in the space arena, and it's worth taking a second. So Starship 10, this is the tenth flight of Starship is scheduled for August 22nd, and I just want to take a second and hit on how awesome SpaceX is. And every time we've seen a starship launch and it doesn't, you know, there's a explosion, it doesn't land properly, whatever. It gets decimated in the public media, Right? And I think the media doesn't realize these are all test flights. This is SpaceX moving the needle in so many different directions. A little bit of information for folks. SpaceX right now is at a $400 billion valuation. In the last podcast, we gave old news at 210, it's actually at 400 billion valuation. And get this, SpaceX is responsible for over 95% of all US launches, which is amazing. Over 50% of all global launches. And a lot of the launches outside the US would use SpaceX, except national pride prohibits them. Of interesting note, Falcon 9, which is the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet, has learned to recover the Falcon 9 booster, and it's done it 450 times. And one specific booster has actually made 29 sequential missions. So this is as close to reusability as ever has had. So if we look at this right now, here's the top news. So they'll be utilizing what they call booster 16 and ship 37. And this flight was delayed because there was an explosion on the pad. And it's going to be making a shot at checking out new heat shield upgrades and deploying dummy Starlink satellites. Of course, Starlink is The darling of SpaceX. It's a profitable part of SpaceX. SpaceX. I remember talking to Elon about this. He said, I will probably never take SpaceX public because I don't want the public markets telling me I can go to Mars or not, or I don't want to disclose all my information publicly. But I think they probably will spin out Starlink. My guess is sometime in the next 12 months and make that sort of a. Another financial engine. And it, you know, Starlink was built as an engine to fund Starship and to fund their Mars missions. Any other thoughts on this point about.

I think there's a really important thing here where it's like Google X is not public. Right. But they can spin out Waymo and make that public, et cetera. I think we're going to see a lot of this where people are incubating in private, and then once they're ready for commercialization and need capital markets to really step in, they can take things public. And I think it's such a powerful model that I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future.

Yeah, I mean, just for comparison, for folks to get a sense of how big Starship is, you know, it is probably, you know, it's roughly the same size as the Apollo Saturn V vehicle, just slightly bigger, but it's got almost, you know, two and a half times the thrust, and it's fully reusable. While Saturn V was completely thrown away. The mission right now is to get this vehicle to the surface of the moon by 2027, 2028. And then Elon's been tweeting about the idea of getting it to Mars sometime in the next couple years, probably obviously uncrewed, and we'll see in a second. He's been talking about putting an optimus robot on it.

Why is it so hard to get to the Moon, Peter? If Mars is very, very far away, I get that. But if you're launching immediately and getting into orbit, then from there to the moon seems like a. Oh, it is.

It's not that it's being able to make sure you've got the vehicle working well on Earth first. So once it's making it to orbit and then being able to re enter safely again. This was built so that it could land vertically on the moon. Right. This is a powered landing there. No, there's no atmosphere for parachutes there. But the size of this is huge. Right. These vehicles will enable us to really create extraordinary moon bases this decade or in the next five years. So super pumped about that.

Well, I only ask because of this next story coming up, because launching the Starlink satellites is an obvious, very profitable, great mission. And then going to Mars is way harder. And I was looking for kind of a stepping stone. What gets you in between and suddenly it's obvious. But we'll talk about it in a second.

Yeah, so I mean, it's a three to four day flight time to the moon.

Right.

The moon's 240,000 miles away. Just for fun if you have kids, if you take any ball. So the Earth's circumference is 24,000 miles and the moon is 240,000 miles away. If you take a string and wrap it around a tennis ball 10 times and then pull the string out, that's how far the moon is from the Earth. It's a little bit deceiving to think how far it is. It's huge, super far away. So we're talking about three or four days to get to the Moon. Depending upon human transfer orbits and where Mars and Earth are located, it can be six to nine months to get to Mars. And so here was a interesting tweet or post exchange. So the question was posted here, what's the timeline you have set? Elon, it sounds fascinating. I'm glad to be alive. This is about when we're going to go to Mars. And Elon responded. Slight chance of starship flight to Mars, crewed by an Optimus in November, December of next year of 26. A lot needs to go, right? And in fact I remember at the beginning of the year one of my predictions was will be boots on Mars by 2030 and those boots will be Optimus boots.

What about the power that's needed on the moon to then go to Mars? Do you have to set up nuclear power plants or what happens?

Well, that's our next story here. But what's going to happen is the, you know, starship goes to Earth orbit and meets up with a tanker and then refuels in Earth orbit. So it's got a fuel, you know, a full gas tank, if you would, and then is makes its mission to Mars. Now Starship is is operated on liquid oxygen and methane. And the reason they chose methane over hydrogen or over RP1 is because you can make methane on Mars. This vehicle was designed to be a two way system back and forth to Mars.

Is that out of all the ice?

It's out of the atmosphere, it's out of the CO2 in the atmosphere and there is water in the permafrost on Mars. So there's a reaction you can use to make methane from solar energy, water and CO2 on the moon. On the other hand. Let's play this clip here. This is from Secretary Duffy on building nuclear reactors on the moon. And I think this is just epic, right? I feel like we're finally living in a Star Trek universe here. All right, let's, let's play this video.

We're in a race to the moon. In a race with China to the moon. And to have a base on the moon, we need energy. And some of the key locations on the moon we're going to get solar power. But this vision technology is critically important. And so we've spent hundreds of million dollars studying can we do it? We are now going to move beyond studying and we are going, we have given direction to go. Let's start to deploy our technology to move to actually make this a reality. If we're going to be able to sustain life on the moon, to then go to Mars, this technology is critically important. And I would just note that we're behind.

Right.

If we're going to engage in the race to the moon and the race to Mars, we have to get our act together. We have to marshal all of our resources, all of our focus on going to the moon, which is what we're going to do. And again, there's a lot of things that NASA does and a lot of people love a lot of the things that NASA does, but this is about space exploration.

All right, let's get a few facts out here. First of all, remember that the moon is. You can use solar power, but only for half of the time, right? It's a half the month the sun shines and half the month the sun does not shine on any particular point in the moon. There is a point at the south pole called the eternal peak of light. There's a little bit of a mountain there and the sun grazes by the south pole. But what's interesting in particular is that back in 1994 and I remember this, Saleem, you remember Pete Worden. Pete was involved in a couple of missions, Clementine and Lunar Prospector and lcross and what they discovered was that at the south pole of the Moon, there's ice. And so why is it at the South Pole and no place else? Well, the moon's been bombarded by comets for, you know, 4 billion years or whenever the Moon formed in particular. And these comets are rich in water ice. And when they would hit and land on the surface of the Moon, on the regular surface of the Moon, the ice, because there's no atmosphere, would sublimate. It would go from ice to vapor and would disappear. But at the south pole and to some degree in the North Pole, there's these deep craters. And where the cometary ice landed in the deep craters that never had the sunshine, the ice is still there. And the ice is rocket fuel. Right. It's liquid. You can convert it to hydrogen, oxygen, oxygen for breathing, water for drinking, and there's a massive amount of ice. And so the idea here is you put a nuclear reactor down near the south pole to allow you to mine the ice, hydrolyze the ice, get water and fuel, and support a nuclear based electric system for a human base on the Moon. Pretty cool, huh?

Yeah, I was also. It's the perfect place to put a data center to power. I mean, well, you were mentioning in our last podcast, you know, there's, there's about 200 gigawatts of solar panels and warehouses just sitting there. You put those on the moon? Yeah. Half the month there's no sun, but there's a massive amount of energy the other half of the month. And I actually guess what you're saying is you'd put this at the polls anyway, so.

Well, one of a dear friend, one of our International Space University alumni, Chris Dot, is actually doing that right now. He's working on putting data centers on the Moon. So we're going to see a lot of infrastructure moving there.

No, I think it's, it's like the perfect stepping stone, though. Like, what are we going to do with these monster spaceships between here and Mars? Oh, we're going to build all kinds of stuff on the Moon. Makes a little sense.

I mean, hey, I got a question.

For you about that too.

Yeah.

So, you know, the Apollo mission took about three days to get to the moon, three days to get back. We have two and a half times the thrust now.

You're still doing.

Could it go faster?

You could, but you have to spend in a whole lot of energy being captured in lunar orbit. So the mission time right now on starship is still the same. Three days to the moon, but you can spend a lot more energy and get to Mars quicker. But you know what I think is interesting? I think we're going to have so many breakthroughs in physics, right. Alex Wiesner Gross on previous episodes of WTF has said we're going to solve physics. We're still running rockets the way we always have. We burn shit at one end and throw it out the back. I think we will probably see new physics allowing us to travel in space a lot more efficiently. Here's the next article. This is about an interstellar visitor. Are we alone in the universe? So for the third time in the last couple of decades, we've detected a large, what is being called a commentary, a cometary body that is traveling at extraordinary speed. And it's traveling. It's emanated from outside of our solar system and it's traveling through our solar system right now as we speak. It's going to do closest approach in October. And there's a particular Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, who has basically theorized that it's an alien probe. And he theorizes that because statistically it's coming in at such a particular, you know, close to the ecliptic and it's passing through the inner planets and the probability of that happening is very low. And he's been putting forward a proposal that we take one of our current missions to Juno mission and actually instead of sending it to Jupiter, we send it to intercept this probe, which I think would be so damn cool. I mean, come on, what do you guys think?

Okay, the odds of it being natural are unbelievably low, Right? If I'm really the stats. Yeah, there's some really mean.

Well, if that's the case, do we really want to go up there and intercept it? Why don't we like wave first and say, hey guys, how are you? You want to. Friendly, not friendly.

So I mean, all the astronomers are up in arms about Avi Loeb's prediction that this is of intelligent origin. And we'll see, you know, as it gets closer to the sun, we're going to see. Does it actually create a full cometary tail? Is it got, you know, ice, by the way? I don't know if you guys know this. Two important facts. That's fun. Share with your kids. Do you know that every single liter of water on planet Earth originated from space? So every liter of water was a cometary or carbonaceous chondrite asteroid hitting the Earth. And so as you're sitting here drinking a Glass of water. That water originated some billions of years ago as the Earth was bombarded. So that's fascinating. The second thing is a cometary tail. When you see a comet, Halley's Comet being most famous, that tail is ice crystal. So this rock is coming close to the sun. The sun begins to heat it up. Any ice on the surface of that comet begins to basically sublimate. It goes from ice to water and then the solar wind pushes it back and it recrystallizes. And so you're seeing the reflection of the sun as ice crystals. And that becomes the commentary tale. Anyway, I find that stuff amazing.

I find that stuff amazing too. I had no idea. Now I got 100 questions. I don't know if you want them or not.

Give me one.

We do give you one.

We did a session a few weeks ago on the origins of life and the proposal was somebody actually solved has a reasonable answer to the Fermi paradox. And the answer was that.

What'S the.

Fermi Fermi paradox in the first place? It's clear there's intelligent life teeming all over the universe just from the Drake equation and the likelihood that we found bacteria that can survive space, tardigrades, et cetera, et cetera. So why aren't we seeing a ton of life visiting? Why aren't aliens visiting us every day?

Where are they?

And so that's the Fermi paradox. And the Bruce Damer who's been studying the origins of life coming from asteroids and all sorts at vents on the bottom of the ocean where there's no light, etcetera, has the best framing for this. He says, look, the Earth is the only planet we found where water existed as pure liquid, not permanently freezing or melting for more than 4 billion years. And it gave lifetime to evolve. And that's just not. We've just not seen that elsewhere. Likely it obviously is that it's there somewhere, but we just haven't seen it.

My answer is different. It's here. We just can't see it. I mean, if you imagine. First of all, if you're going to be able to travel interstellar distances and come to Earth, how much more advanced are you than us? 1,000 years? A million years? And do you not believe that the technology could exist for an alien species to be here and remain undetected by us? I think that, you know, why would.

They want to be undetected? You think that they want to come out and I think, I don't know, get a reality show or something.

I think it's a Scientific method. I think they're here studying, not interfering. It's Star Trek's. What is it called?

The Prime Directive.

The Prime Directive, thank you.

Yeah. But I find it fascinating. I mean, two things. I just got to put this out there, right? Two things that's interesting. We're seeing this spike in alien spacecraft, what they're called UAPs, right now, right now, happening. It happened back during the time of the atomic development programs in the 40s and 50s, and it's, it's happening now. Have you guys seen all of these? These, you know, Army, Navy, Air Force generals going and testifying in front of Congress that it's real? I mean, and, and nobody is talking about this.

I mean that is crazy. Yeah. Why is nobody talking about that? These seem to be credible people that haven't suddenly gone crazy.

I mean it's hiding in plain the.

Entire worldview of the Judeo Christian thinking. Because it would be tremendously traumatic.

Anyway, it's fascinating. I would love to get AWG's points of view on this sometimes.

Oh, that would be ours.

That would be ours. Yes.

Very entertaining hours.

Yes, for sure. All right, I'm going to move us forward here. Let's move into the world of autonomous cars, robots and evtol. A lot happening there. The first is that Elon predicts millions of fully autonomous Teslas operated without human oversight by the second half of 2026. And he has ambitious plans to actually get into dozens of cities by the end of this year, covering 50% of the US population. What do you think? Can you pull it off?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, I think, you know, stepping back from self driving for a second, the reason we have self driving now and not five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, is purely because the AI neural net, AI is self evolving, self learning. And so the self driving car, it's just a regulatory barrier. But the other, the humanoid robotics, the. Just the explosion of other new things that comes right after this is mind boggling. It's going to keep every entrepreneur on the planet busy for decades building all of these incredible things. This is just the first one, but it's all enabled by the neural net that can learn. And because that's the control system behind the innovation, the mechanical parts have been there for plenty of years. It's the intelligence that makes it actually work.

Dave, do you think that we need some breakthrough in AI to have continuous learning though? Because it learns, it gets trained. But how well does it continually learn and pick up new information?

Yeah, incredibly well, if you Break it into two different themes. Here you've got like, is it learning to drive better every single time it sees something? Yes, that's already well underway. Then separately, isn't it improving its own algorithm so that it does that more efficiently? That's not well underway, but, but kind of imminent. That'll be within a year, I'm sure. So the first part though is, is way down the path and that's all you need actually for self driving, for robots to clean your house, for, you know, a robot dentist, you know, like, you know, forget your toothbrush, just, just stick thing your thing in your mouth. It'll clean exactly the right spot. Yeah, it's amazing.

It reminds me of what the great Imad Mostak said one of our conversations recently, you'll recall, where he said the value of human cognitive ability is going to go negative. Meaning it's getting, not only that AI is getting better and better against humans at certain things, but it'll have to be illegal for humans to get in the way of things like driving or diagnosing diseases.

Right, because humans bias the situation in the wrong direction. It's crazy. All right, well here's the next article on this. Elon teases major FSD full self driving update. Here's his tweet. Tesla is training a new FSD model with 10x and a big improvement to video compression loss. Probably ready for public release end of next month. So I think tying this to the previous article, he's going to be using this increased capability for safety on cyber taxis. Okay, go Elon.

Go Elon.

So how is he going to power this? Dave? Tesla signs $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to make AI chips.

Over to you, buddy. Well, okay, a couple things. First of all, it's $16.5 billion minimum deal and Elon is posting away that it's likely multiples higher than that. And noteworthy that, you know, TSMC is sold out. So where do you go? You should go to intel, but instead you go to Samsung. A week later the, the guy gets called into the big office. You know, come to the Oval Office. Let's, let's talk to Liputan, what's going on here? But Elon, being, you know, very wealthy and very visionary, knows that he needs to lock up a supply of his own chips. The dojo chips that drive all these cars, but also are perfectly good in the data center for doing core neural network research and foundation models. So he's got his chip in the big game locked up. Bought out Samsung's capacity for a Long time to come. And it's just intel still available.

I mean, he's a four dimensional chess player.

Yes.

In what he, what he does.

Well, he sees, you know, I don't think it's the hardest thing in the world, he's particularly good at it. But he sits in a position where he sees all the parts, you know, you can see all the moving pieces. And then he made that insane election bet that paid off, which got him, you know, complete. Here's what's going on in the government, here's what they're going to do and not do. And I don't know how that had ended up getting fumbled so badly. But anyway, during his time there, he got access to. Okay, this is exactly how it's going to play out. So I suspect he's going to lock up the Samsung capacity. Already has done that. Next on the docket, he'll start negotiating for intel capacity. He'll build the dojo chips. Right now he's downplaying their importance. Yeah. You know TSMC or Nvidia has better chips. The Nvidias are still fine. We want to buy a lot of Nvidias. All of Tennessee is built on Nvidia. In reality, what he's doing is catching up with his own internal design, just like Google did with the, the TPUs and Amazon's trying to do with the trainings.

Amazing. Okay, let's move into humanoid robot world. So humanoid robots are built for connection. So let's take a look at this video here. This is Melody, one of our robots.

She speaks various languages and she's built.

In a modular fashion so we can.

Take off her face, replace it with.

Another face and have her speaking as a different character. Our AI is very different. It's functioned to create companion and friendship.

And, and social type interactions with people.

So our robots don't do physical human labor, but they're really meant for personal interaction.

So you can think about it at.

A theme park, at a conference like.

This, or even at a senior's home.

Where they can keep people company.

I'm Melody, your charming companion from realbotics. We're all about creating customizable human like robots designed for connection and play. Basically the perfect blend of technology and companionship.

All right. Oh my God.

All right, let's just call the spade a spade. It's a sex. It's, it's a sex bot. I mean, I mean, it's just. There's no other way. What I found fascinating is they pull the nose and the, the face is incredible.

That's the next video we'll go to. But yeah, I mean it's the oldest profession and, and I mean talk about, talk about plummeting the, talk about plummeting the reproduction rate on planet Earth.

That are not especially positive about this. Although we'll have a higher EQ than I think a good portion of Silicon Valley given the nature of autism that we have there. But I think that there's obviously a lot of benefits that people will point to for people in say elderly care, et cetera, who can benefit from certain types of interactions. But the, the enormous potential for, to pull people away even farther from human interaction is certainly there and it's not, I don't find that especially attractive.

All right, this is a quick video of what's coming in terms of human skins. So we see here an Asian looking face and this is silicon. But I mean it looks extraordinarily lifelike. Right. And again the biggest challenge here, I think about this having 14 year old boys Salim yourself. I mean between this and AI generated pornography, I mean it's going to begin to disrupt human relationships.

In that Google 3D world that we saw last time. I mean this, things start to go really serious real.

It's really tough. You even find it even in the earliest stages with social media where kids who have grown up on it have less of an ability to deal with difficult relationships and would rather text than interact in person. This, this kind of turbocharges it I think in the wrong direction. Unless there's a counterbalance, unless there's very concerted effort to bring humans together and use technology perhaps for a more beneficial outcome, which is people want people. Ultimately we're fueled by human connection. That is the essence of what gives us purpose and I think gives us an ability to feel useful and happy. So we need a way to not have this become an epidemic.

Yeah, I totally agree Eric. And I think we haven't had to deal with this as an active plan, you know, ever before in history. But the birth rate is already plummeting. Regardless of the robots, the birth rate is going to continue to plummet. And so we need to deal with it.

The problem started a while ago, you know, when you, when you first had apps like Tinder. Right. Sex has been scarce for the entire history of humanity and suddenly sex becomes abundant.

Right?

I mean where was that when we were in our 20s? But okay, but now you take it to the next level and you, you really kind of. The social implication of this are very profound.

Yeah, they really are. You know, keep your eyes out Eric, for that podcast we did with bert Bornich, the CEO of 1x Robotics, because they went the other direction saying, look, we don't want to cross the uncanny valley and make these things kind of half human, like, because they get really creepy. So, so his robots are amazing. They're, they're very robotic looking, but they have perfect voices, they're incredibly polite. It's a different approach. It's worth contrasting that to this like truly, like rubber nose kind of truly human look.

And one thing we, we can say from history is that whatever can go into the, the cycle of capitalism that makes more and more money will grow, right? So as long as people can capture more attention, sell more and, and make more money, then the ethical considerations will be pooh poohed and shoved aside and you'll, you'll just drive more and more people to spend more and more time addicted to the semi humans and less time with each other.

Everybody. There's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin. And honestly, I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product called OneSkin OSO one twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And like I say, I use it every day, twice a day. There you have it. That's my secret. You go to Oneskin Co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode.

All right, let's go back to some news from Brett Adcock, who's the CEO of Figure. And this is video of Figure two, the second generation. They've got the third generation in development right now. I've seen it, but haven't released it yet. And here's his quote. We released a Demo of Figure 2 using Helix like most of the other robot companies. Interestingly, they're developing their own AI system, right? So almost every robot company is delivering, is developing their own, and it's being used in house using neural nets to do his laundry. This is not tele operated. So let's take a look at this video. So here we see Figure pulling stuff out of the basket and putting it into the machine. This video is a little bit sped up by probably, I think, a factor of two. But what's interesting is a lot of the humanoid robots you see in videos are being teleoperated and that's fine because it's basically showing what the robot is physically capable of doing. And of course, all those telerobotic operations are training neural nets to do it autonomously. But this one was done fully on its Helix AI. Dave, any comments? Compared to what we saw with, let's say Neogam?

Burnt. Yeah. Yeah. So 1x robotics is called 1x because they always film at 1x. So they don't 2x the speed. I was thinking about that after we had that meeting and I'm thinking, well, because the robot is working constantly, it's okay to show it at 2x speed because it looks much cooler at 2x speed. But it's going to be working 24 by 7. I don't care if it's half as fast as a person doing it, it's going to actually do the job. Who cares? So, interesting conflict, but folding laundry, there it was, loading laundry, that's easy, easier. Folding laundry is a benchmark that covers tens of thousands of tasks. As soon as you see that, that pulling it back out and folding it, you know it's ready for virtually all household type work. Many, many manufacturing jobs. It's just a huge fraction of what we do is right in line with the difficulty of folding laundry.

You know, I proposed a robot X prize a while ago and so since Dave and Salim are both on our board at xprize and Eric's been a Innovation board member as well, it was this. Have a robot walk into a room, look around the room and capture this is what the room should look like when it's clean. This is the state of clean. Then the robot walks out and then you mess it up, you throw things around and have the robot go back in and put everything back to where it was. I think that'd be a very meaningful and doable X prize. What do you think?

I'd be happy if I could just get a teenager to do that.

I think, yeah, you should probably push hard to do 3, 4, 5 parallel X prizes in various forms of robotics, every one of which would change the world dramatically, inspire some teams, the whole supply chain. You remember at 1x, they make their own motors, like winding their own wires to make their own motors. There's nothing out there.

Yeah.

And figure, figure does the exact same thing. And so does Tesla. It's fully vertically integrated. By the way, when we were at 1x, we saw at least one person wearing an X Prize T shirt and it turns out that we had an Avatar X Prize about a decade ago and this was for tele operated robotics and a lot of the talent went into the humanoid robot companies. So super proud of that. All right, here's some news on Optimus. So the Generation 3 launch has been postponed to 2026. So Optimus or Tesla, if you would had planned to have 5,000 units built by this year. They've only gotten hundreds of those done and in June they paused production and with component orders being frozen and the redesign is under a new leadership of Ashok Elaswami. And so generation three is expected in 2026. Now one of the things that's true about Elon is level of extraordinary brilliance. It's just his prediction on timing isn't always on. So any comments on this?

So the robot got arthritis is what I see from this. You know, I think there's, I think there's a lot of issues to be worked out. This. I, for me, this is kind of normal organizational development. You're gonna have peaks and valleys and building an organization, especially doing something as cutting edge as this. So I don't give much ping to the, to the who left, who came, etc. I do think what they're attempting is so, so, so hard and kudos that they're going after it. That's all.

Yeah. All right, let's continue on this robot journey. This is something that I'm excited about seeing personally. So San Francisco Underground Robot Fight Club. So let's take a look at the video here. This video went viral. We see, we see unit tree G1 humanoids actually look like they were dressed in dresses that are, that are fighting boxing in a, in a cage fight held at Market Street. Anyway, two matches.

This should really not be allowed. This will set the whole field back by 10 years. People are going to see this.

I think it's.

There are too many weirdos doing stuff along this. It's going to be a problem.

I think it's going to be interesting. As you know, Peter, I was, I was in Paris at the Olympics as part of the Global Esports Federation's announcement with the IOC that esports are going to be Olympic sports. And what they're doing with the rings in moving towards validating athletes in the esports arena is they're actually moving also towards something called virtual sports. Virtual sports are not just twitch with your finger sports, but move your body sports. Virtual taekwondo, virtual fencing, virtual rowing. These are all going to become Olympic sports in the coming years. And they're also going to be moving from traditional analogies to sports that we know to sports like kiddish, you know, from Harry Potter or humanoid robot fighting. And I think it's going to be quite entertaining if you can start to get teams from different countries advancing the field the same way. XPRIZE creates entirely new fields by putting up a challenge that a lot of R and D and energy goes into. If you have something like humanoid robot fighting and you're representing your country, I think a lot of energy is going to go into. First of all, it'll be exciting to watch, but it'll also advance the field.

I want the megatronics, I want the giant robots out there battling what, sleep? Come on.

I think it'll be a lot of fun.

No, it's like F1 racing, dude. You're going to have like, you're going to advance the software, the hardware, all of this.

That's fine.

I think fighting just sets a bad tone and sets up all sorts of issues.

What could possibly go wrong? All right, here's another robot of types. This is an evtol and I hate the term evtol, Electric Vertical Takeoff or landing because it rolls off the tongue onto the floor. I'm calling these flying cars. So Archer Aviation with their midnight flying car completed its first test flight in Abu Dhabi. And it's interesting, right? So the UAE and Eric, you, Salim and I have been there a bunch. They really have been on the cutting edge of adopting exponential technologies. So excited that Archer is there. Let me pair it with the following story as well, which is super beneficial for you and me, Eric, is that Archer is named the official air taxi provider for the LA Olympics in 2028. And look at this. They're going to be flying between SoFi Stadium, LAX and Santa Monica. So I am so pissed. I'm a pilot. I fly out of Santa Monica airport. That airport used to be over 5,000ft, which was a decent size for getting decent sized aircraft in and out. It's been shortened to 3,000ft to get rid of all the jets. And all the homeowners under the flight path were just complaining and complaining, complaining. And I, when that was going on, they'd have these signs in their front yard saying no jets. And my son, whose name Jet, would be walking around and he's seeing these signs. What's up with this? But as if those homeowners didn't realize it was an airport and that the aircraft were flying when they bought it anyway. Pissed me off. But hey, the midnight flying car is a four passenger vehicle and they'll be doing VIP travel. And get this, their objective is that the cost of travel is equivalent to an Uber X. So super cool.

This is a technology that I think is so revolutionary. For me, this is a full Gutenberg moment because they're going to be incredibly safe. They can fly in most conditions. It'll unlock all sorts of real estate, which is scarce but now becomes abundant. And I think this becomes transformational for the human race. I mean, I was advising the Prime Minister of Thailand and I said, listen, just wait till flying cars become available. You can land in Bangkok and fly somebody straight down to Phuket in one shot. It just completely changes the game. So can't wait for this.

Well, you know who's big into this in a huge way? Steve funk from our Abundance360 group, but then also Stuart Walton from the Walton, you know, Walmart family, and Ross Perot Jr. From the Perot family. And I was like, why are they so big into this? And it's because they're more keenly aware that there's so many incredible places that very few people go to because there isn't an airport right there. So everybody goes to Vegas, goes to the same casinos. You know why? Well, the airport's right there. You take a cab, you're there. Yeah, you look around the world, there's so many better places you can go that are untouched. And this is the missing link between.

Between this and Starlink. Right. You can live and work anywhere. You know, big shout out to Cyrus Sigiri, who's been a member of our Abundance faculty and runs UP Ventures. He's been backing all of these different companies. In particular, he's invested heavily into Beta. And Beta is based in New Hampshire. It's backed by Dean Kamen, Martine Rothblatt. And Cyrus runs a huge conference called UP Venture called the UP Summit in Bentonville in partnership with a certain family down there.

It actually bounces between Bentonville, where that certain family is, and then Plano where the pros are, and Jackson, Wyoming, where Steve Funk is. They move it in a little triangle now.

Yeah.

Amazing, amazing.

You know the range of these, just out of curiosity.

Yeah. So it's typical. It depends upon the load. But we're talking about, you know, 100 miles thereabouts.

Right.

But it's going to be mostly short haul. It's mostly going to be like 10 mile journey. It is getting from Manhattan to JFK. It is getting from, from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium. It's those sorts of things. And the important thing is rapid charging and Rapid on and off. So they're going to be building these vertiports, these physical structures that are made for the flying car to land, do rapid charging, have the people come on and off and then take off again. And they'll be flying. They'll have pilots in them, at least for the time being. But just like what was Imad's statement about the value of humans in the.

Loop becoming cognitive abilities going to negative.

So eventually the pilots will be, you know, there'll be a dog in there to keep the pilot from touching the controls as well.

I mean, the last few commercial plane crashes have been because the pilot interfered when they shouldn't have.

Yeah.

So this is a huge thing. I want to throw out a second order effect here, please. If you look at Chicago Airport or Pearson Airport in Toronto, at a hundred mile radius, there's something like 10,000 islands and lakes, and those become suddenly really valuable property where somebody puts a container with satellite Internet, water extraction, vertical farming, and you have a, like you can have a little nomadic existence on demand.

Well, if, you know, a lot of our family offices love to invest in real estate, but if anyone wants to contact Salim and say, hey, let's just set up a fund around the implications of this, like Ashenbrenner did with, with his fundamental. Yeah, it's the biggest amazing REIT to put into. So, yeah, now's the time to. You know, Bill Gross, when he was on the pod, was saying that all of the land in the entire world where you can use pumped hydro so you have water and a mountain has all been bought already. Like, oh my God, that happened quickly. So the implications of this would go quickly too. So you might want to jump on it.

All right, our last subject for today is energy. And again, just recalling the fact that the future of AI, AI is tied to electricity production. Eric Schmidt said this on a podcast with Dave and I back a month ago, that AI is not chip limited, it's electron limited. It's the ability to produce energy. And while we've talked about small modular reactors and generation for fission plants coming on, something that I want to hit on is fusion. And fusion is finally here. I mean, I remember Dave, when you and I were at MIT together, people talked about fusion, but it was always 50 years away and holding. Well, we're finally here. There's probably, I think Last count was 37 privately funded fusion companies out there. Let's talk about two of them. The first is Helion, which is backed by Sam Altman, is beginning construction. It employs a magneto inertial fusion approach. Each one of these companies is very different. Construction started on the Orion plant, which is a 50 megawatt plant. It's a test plant. It's relatively small, 50 megawatts and it is. Got a commercial contract with Microsoft. Planning to become operational by the end of 2028. I think it's the first plant planning to come online. Any comments on this?

Well, I, I really feel like the new physics that Alex was talking, Alex Wisner Gross was talking about is going to interact with this because the biggest problem in fusion has always been magnetic containment, which is just a very, very hard math and physics problem which could get crushed by AI very quickly. And then suddenly we've moved the whole world to fusion.

Yeah, for sure. And I find fascinating that Altman is backing this along with Softbank. I mean, Sam is in so many different frontier companies. It's extraordinary.

Well, the thing about these particular investments, they're brilliant in the sense that you're investing in fusion, but almost all the work is concrete and generators and tying into the power grid. So if fusion works very quickly, you win. If fusion doesn't work really quickly, you go with small modular reactors and you win. Either way, you win. So they're very, very smart investments.

Peter, I think it also speaks to the idea of the converging exponentials that you speak of, because a lot of the exponentials in some ways depend on power. Certainly AI does. But if that's one of the exponentials, this actually becomes exponentially cheaper heading towards zero. To some degree, the, the domino effect on society is just massive as all of these things converge around what it, what it means for like housing and poverty and new forms of protein and new physics and new science. The, this is one of the unlocks for the explosion of the implications towards abundance.

Well, the other big unlock is historically, if you're building a power supply and you said, okay, I'm going to put a billion or 2 billion or 5 billion into this project. I need to then have a regulator. Say now you can tap it into the grid. Now we can sell it to households, which is not a given at all. Now you can say, no, the only customer I need is my data center. And if I can sell power beyond that, great, but if I can't, who cares? I'll just put more data center there. So that's a complete unlock as an investment thesis.

That's brilliant. One of the other things they're doing is they're going, you know, one of the visions here is you go into a coal plant and the coal plant has all the power lines coming in, it's got all the property, it's containment and so forth. And you pull out the boiler that's being heated from coal and you put in a fusion plant there to heat the boiler as well. Right. So super interesting there.

Love that.

I think the, I think there's a whole set of considerations to think about as we go from energy scarcity, which has been the paradigm for 10,000 years, to energy abundance.

Right.

And it just changes everything.

Yeah. Let's move next to another company, the nation state of China. China's bet 2 billion on fusion. So China bets an additional 2.1 billion on fusion this week. And they have the longest sustained fusion reaction going on right now. I think they're leading in this area today. Any comments on this one, Saleem?

Well, I think this is, again, if I had to put a priority on the US it would be energy generation, which then unlocks all the other things. And China's clearly making long term strategic bets here. What I really like about this, once you achieve this, then energy becomes really cheap or virtually free for the whole planet because everybody can then copy that and replicate that and that, that the, the, the implications of that are just so profound.

I mean, the U.S. is generating 4 terawatts of, of power and it has been consistently for 20 years. @ the same time, China has gone up to 10 or 10 terawatts of power.

Right.

It's just, it's lapping us. A lot of that is solar, but it's everything. You know, it's not drill baby, drill, it's, it's build baby, build in China. And you know, I keep on hearing about the plans for, in the US for natural gas, for coal, for fission, for fusion. And I don't hear a lot of conversation around solar and that it's kind of disappointing because the tech is there. When I fly over Santa Monica in my plane, I look out the window, you know, tens of thousands of rooftops with shingles on it and no solar, and you could be generating so much power.

I tell you fundamentally though, the issue that investors are running into is if you build a fusion platform with traditional generators, water, you know, steam generators, you win with small modular, you win with fusion. If you go down the solar route, then you're putting the panels, generate electricity directly. There's no generators, it's just like a panel. And then you need massive amounts of storage. So if you invest heavily in solar and then suddenly fusion works, you're totally screwed. It's just a Completely different thing. So that's the problem the investors are having. Even though like if things stay exactly as they are, deploying solar by 200 gigawatts is absolutely the right thing to do. Everybody's just worried about, you know, imminent fusion. Imminent small modular fission.

All right, our last article here comes from Boston and this is Commonwealth Fusion. So Commonwealth Fusion has been noted to be the leading fusion company in the US they have signed a 200 megawatt purchase deal with Google and it's going to be in Virginia. Why? Because there's a lot of data centers in Virginia and the plant is going to begin delivering energy and electricity in early 2000 and 30s. Let's listen to this video. And by the way, super proud to be having the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion on our stage at Abundance this coming March.

CFS is the largest and leading private fusion company with over 1,000 employees and $2 billion of capital invested. We're working to commercialize fusion power as fast as possible. Here at our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts we're announcing a deepening of our strategic partnership with Google. As part of that, they'll offtake half the power of the first ARC power plant. Additionally they'll increase their investment in the company. And importantly, this partnership isn't just about.

The first power plant. We now have a strong demand signal.

That people want fusion power and they're willing to do things like invest and commit to taking the power in order.

To help make it happen.

All right, any thoughts on Commonwealth Fusion?

So Runes Chsonis from the board of MIT is now the biggest investor in this with his fund Safar Partners and not coincidentally I don't think he called said want to put a lot more money into these AI startups. Like okay well if fusion generates the power, the power goes in the data center. The AI startups use the use the data center makes perfect sense. So it's great, it's great to see this happen nearby with a lot of MIT involvement.

Yeah, love it.

Pretty cool.

What do you think the implications are in the AI race though? Like there's this common concept we've spoken about in the past where whoever hits AGI or ASI first six month lead is ahead forever because how exponentials work and if we're like restricting chips to the last generation to China and we're actively trying to win this race, what is happening around this critical piece of that race which is the power? How are we allowing ourselves to potentially fall behind in what's the key lever?

Yeah, I don't think it affects the race with China, I think they're very, very good investments because we're going to use all the power for sure. But the race is entirely bound up at two layers, chip fabs, and also algorithmic ideas. And Those are the 10x and 100x force multipliers. If those get way ahead, we're just going to take the power from aluminum manufacturing. We're going to take the power from wherever. That's a problem, but it's not going to slow it down. It's going to happen because you can overbid by 5 or 10x versus residential use, manufacturing use. So it'll suck the power up one way or another, so it doesn't change the race outcome. They're just good investments, that's all.

All right, guys, as we wrap, I'm expecting we're going to hear news from Google very soon. All right, we're going to hopefully see some announcements coming around Gemini 3, we're expecting to see. What's the next version of Grok? Is it 4.2 is going to be released?

Maybe, I guess.

Yeah. It's just so much. I mean, literally every single day. It's insane. So I hope all of you as listeners feel smarter after hearing this conversation. Eric, super happy to have you here, buddy. Thank you for your brilliance.

Great to be here. It's a lot of fun.

Love it together. In fact, all of us are going to be heading over to Saudi in October for the FII summit, so that's going to be pretty amazing. Any. Any particular news anybody wants to share before we. We call it a wrap?

Keep a. Keep a close eye on that. That Lip Bhutan at the White House thing. This is like the dry. Everybody's going to get involved in this. Elon will be talking, Sam will be involved. This is. If you like the human drama side of things, this is going to be really interesting. I can't wait till the end of the day to see what the outcome of that is.

Between that and the Ukraine conversations, it's a pretty surreal world right now.

I would not.

We've got our exo workshop happening August. We have our exo workshop happening August 20th. So people want to sign up for that.

Where do they go?

They go, we'll put a link in. But we. It's the best 100 bucks you'll spend. We limited it. They sell out every month.

Amazing. Amazing. All right, guys, love you all. Thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your brilliance.

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