The Trillion Dollar AI Reset: Advertising & Gaming is Next w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #170

What's the world going to look like in 50 years? There's no way. There's just absolutely no way to make that prediction. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, salim, I really love that shirt. And it knows I need a shirt. So it just asks your AI where you got that shirt? And then it just delivers to me magically, the next day.

Advertising will get crushed. You're exactly right. The future belongs to chatting with your trusted agent and your trusted agent making good suggestions for you and then saying, yeah, just go out and buy that or just go ahead and sign up for that.

You'll be able to even use AI to not just do legal lawmaking legislation, but actually formulate policy.

There's a new innovation coming from AI every single week, and you need some kind of a regulatory framework. The only way those laws are going to be written is with AI because nothing can keep up with AI other than AI. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody. Welcome to WTF Just happened in Tech this week, a special episode of Moonshots with two extraordinary friends, brilliant thinkers in the field of Exponential tech, and AI. Salim Ismail, the CEO of OpenExo and Dave Blunden, the CEO of Link Exponential Ventures. Both are my partners and both are definitely smarter than I am. So welcome, guys. Good to see you.

Good to be here.

Thank you, Peter.

Yeah. Well, I want to jump in. This has been. The speed at which we're seeing breakthroughs and activities across the board in all technologies is accelerating and it feels faster. I don't know. Does it feel that way for you?

Oh, my God, does it ever? I was in California, at Stanford pretty much all of last week came back and the amount of change in just one week, the new Gemini model came out. Their update, the code it can generate is noticeably better than it was two weeks ago. I can tell you some stories when we get into it.

I want to hear them. How about you, Salim? Salim, you're a probability function. You're like orbiting the planet without a rocket ship. Where'd you come back from?

I just came. I was like a few days in India and then a day and a half in Sao Paulo. And I just landed back and I'm trying to figure out where my time zone is. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.

You truly are orbiting the planet. And so thanks for joining this conversation. I hate missing a week of this conversation because.

Stop. The way I frame it is we've hit a singularity in AI development. Like, the pace of change is faster. Than our ability to process it.

Yeah, I mean, when we talk about a singularity, there are multiple singularities on the way to what Ray calls a singularity. So a singularity is like if you can't predict what's going to happen next week, that's a singularity in this area. I want to jump into one of my favorite stories in AI because I've been beating this drum for a while now, and here it is. It's not the Trump drum, but the AI in classroom drum. We heard earlier, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, that Beijing has basically made a ruling that all secondary schools, I think primary and secondary schools are going to require AI training. Throughout China, we've seen that, as well as in Estonia. And I've been just tweeting this out. Finally, we see an executive order here that is requiring schools to incorporate AI in the classroom. About time. What are your thoughts, gentlemen? Dave?

Peter, you've been saying disruption is coming to education. You've been saying it like you said, beating the drum. For a long time, the schools have underreacted. I think, you know, we're all associated with either MIT or other schools. We don't want to get in the middle of a political battle for sure. But there is a lot of good stuff coming out of the government now in the Doge wake and in this and then a bunch of other things that are absolutely urgent and necessary. But I tell you more of what you've been predicting, Peter, for a long time, the AI is already far better than any TA in any college class. If I think about my grade school and high school teachers, I had some really good high school teachers. But AI is going to bypass them as a way to learn. It probably already has. And then the professors are next. But remember when the Internet came along and there was a lot of concern in the schools that if they put all the courseware out there online, is anyone going to keep coming to school? It's all out there and freely available people did keep coming, either for the social aspects or for the credentials. But now it's another level with the interactive AI being able to explain things to you better than you can learn them in a lecture. We'll see what that does.

Salim, you and I both have boys the same age in middle school. Is your school teaching them AI? What's the philosophy there?

They're using AI. They're not supposed to use it for writing essays, but they do it anyway. And the good news is, at that age, it's pretty easy to spot when a sophisticated AI has written the thing. It's way better than the kids do it. So that for now it's kind of workable. But I think the key point in referencing what Dave said was it's pretty clear that when you're using an AI to learn, you learn at least twice as fast. The estimates I'm hearing are between 2x and 4x faster. That just is like you've immediately made the need for school formal schooling redundant. And so there's a huge gap now between the regulatory we want to put kids through schools through grade 12 and what's possible with AI. And that's going to stretch very quickly.

MIT and Northeastern went the complete opposite direction of your kid's school where they said use AI anywhere and everywhere that it helps you. And if that messes up the professor, they got to fix it. They better figure it out in a hurry. And I've got one kid left in high school and he's rip shit mad that their school went the other direction saying use it. We'll catch you if you try. Which is just crazy. It's incredibly shortsighted to take that position.

I can get the idea that middle schoolers shouldn't be using AI to do middle school homework, but middle schoolers should be using AI to do extraordinary projects that they could not normally do otherwise. There's a second article related to this here, which is. Over 250 CEOs urge states to make AI and computer science graduation requirements graduation requirements. Here's their stats. Just one computer science class can increase wages by 8% for students. The US is lagging across again. China, South Korea and open letter advocates for computer science and AI as core to K through 12. I could not agree more. This genie is out of the bottle and kids are going to hit smack into a brick wall if they're not prepared.

The good news is those kids that don't take computer science will be much more ready for all the manufacturing jobs that are coming back.

Ouch.

Okay, Love it. Let's screw those iPhone screws back in. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. And that's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs. One on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free, please join me, subscribe@diamandis.com subscribe. That's diamandis.com subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. All right, here's another one. You know, uae, let's give them credit for so many different ways. They were the first country to have a minister of AI who I've known now for the better part of 15 years before he became minister. But UAE is the first nation to use AI to write their laws. And here's the stats. Official project will reduce government costs by 50% and speed up lawmaking by 70%. Saleem, you're meeting with heads of nations on all of your trips. What are you seeing here?

So they are very far ahead. Most other countries are nowhere near even looking at this. They're still trying to spell AI. This is a huge opportunity and I think they've actually underestimated it. I think it'll speed up lawmaking by like 5x. Forget 70%. And I think the drop in cost is pretty, is much bigger than they think because you'll be able to use AI to not just do legal lawmaking legislation, but actually formulate policy. Right. I've said this before, that if you want to drop inflation by 1%, asking a human being to gauge what knobs and levers to pull is a stupid idea.

Yeah.

Let it to go to an AI and the AI can go. Well, if you want to do that, looking at all the financial transactions and the access to all that data in real time and go, here's what you need to do. And then human being go, yep, that looks good. Go for it. And so there's all sorts of things that, that could happen here. There's a crazy story I have, but we don't need to get into this right now. A few years ago, I was asked to give a talk at the Republican National Leadership Convention on this, on some of this. And the title of my talk was going to be how do you drop the cost of government 10x within 10 years.

Nice.

Which you could do, but you'd have to embrace technology. And that's where we got a new bit of a mess there. But I think these, these predictions are, are kind of nice, but they're conservative. I think you'll end up doing a lot more. And I think that's incredibly powerful because you could use AI at the policy formulation, legislation writing, and then also on the enforcement side. So this really changes the game on how government operates going forward.

And you could save a lot of money with government employees. Dave, what are you thinking here?

So as I mentioned I was in, in Stanford all last week with Erik Brynjolfsson, our good friend. And also Sandy Pentland, who moved out there recently. And then Mark Gornberg, the chairman of mit, was also there the whole week. But Eric, very forward thinking on these topics. But his point in his lectures on Bullet two is that these cost saving areas are the tip of the iceberg. It's a great way to get started, but the real gain here is greenfield. It's what can you do that's incremental. And beyond just reducing the cost of something that already exists in this area, we desperately need the pace of lawmaking to keep up with the pace of AI innovation. And so that's, I think this is a great way to get started. And the UAE is very forward thinking on it. But you're going to need this same capability when there's a new innovation coming from AI every single week. And you need some kind of a regulatory framework, otherwise it'll run wild. The only way those laws are going to be written is with AI, because nothing can keep up with AI other than AI.

You know, if you're whatever industry you're in and you're being regulated, like if you're a hairdressing salon or you're a health care facility, if you do an analysis of all the laws that regulate you, you're going to find conflicting laws on the books.

Yep.

And I think what would be fascinating is actually running all the laws and say I'd like you to disentangle these, deconflict these, and actually set, you know, find the set of laws which are the minimum laws that allow us, like the tax code, for example. Oh, my God. Could you imagine running a reinvented tax code? It's like simplify it and maintain the US revenues from taxes. I mean, Celine, we've been off on this for a while.

Yeah. I think this is something that we're pretty clear as to what the sequence is. Sequence step one will be use AI to navigate the existing complexity in the tax code or legal structures, etc. You know, in Europe, no matter what you do, you're always violating a few laws. Right. It's just so much.

That's how, that's how they keep you in check.

That's one way. But then they don't have the people to really enforce anything. So everybody just goes ahead and does what they want. And because they generally follow common sense, it works out. So they're lucky over there. But the step one will be using AI to help navigate this. There's Already a company that's helping nuclear projects try and navigate what's the fastest path to getting the regulatory approval and what forms do you have to fill out, etc. Etc. That's already happening there. Step two will be how would you optimize the regulatory and stop the conflicts and rewrite it? And I think step three would be, is there a way of making this much more elegant and cutting through with using first principles, rewrite the legislative foundation of the legislative structure. That that's when I think we'll get real benefits. But certainly we'll get huge benefits in the first couple already. And we can do the first one already. And I think we'll see a lot of that going forward.

Yeah. Amazing. I've never been excited about rewriting laws, but I do think there needs to be some way and some requirement that every time you put a law in the books, you should take one of the old ones off or at least simplify. All right, let's move on here. This is a big one. This came as a bit of a surprise. OpenAI scraps plans to convert to a for profit structure. So OpenAI abandons plans to shift after facing opposition from Elon and state authorities. And they're going to maintain what they call their nonprofit controlled, capped profit structure. So what does that mean? There's a nonprofit board that oversees OpenAI. All of the nonprofit board members have no equity incentives, meaning they're there to help maintain AIs, to maintain OpenAI's mission in the world and not to maximize profits. The capped structure means that if you put a dollar in, your return on your investment is capped at $100. So I find that fascinating. We reported last time that OpenAI raised capital at a $300 billion valuation. So, thoughts on this one?

Well, there are a lot of reports that, hey, this is no big deal for Sam. It's going to actually, if anything, reinforce his control. I didn't kind of read it that way. I was like, no, this is a win for Elon in trying to slow down the rate of investment and give him a better chance to catch up with his kind of unconstrained version of this. I also think that, you know, the number one use case for AI is companionship. The voices and the sympathetic AI's got really good in the last couple weeks. And, you know, I think they'll be out in the world in the next couple months where you have a very, very intelligent AI model, like a 2 trillion, 5 trillion parameter model married to these super engaging, sympathetic voices. And that's going to create all kinds of tough decisions for social media companies on like, am I just selling as many ad impressions as possible and trying to reel everybody into like being on this platform? 24 by or am I actually worried about the psychological effect of that? I think that having a nonprofit board on top of OpenAI, they're obligated to think in terms of being the social good version of this, which may not be the biggest revenue driver.

Salim, what are your thoughts here?

It seems pretty clear that there was going to be huge legal exposure if they pushed through with the full for profit. And so this made it more elegant. He's going to control the nonprofit board. So that kind of minimizes any risk. And then you can always find other ways you do other spin outs, et cetera, et cetera, to harvest some of the upside that may come from this. So I think it's, it'll afford some to change route. I don't think it'll change the game that much, as Dave said.

You know, one of the things Dave, you mentioned in passing was the sort of emotional engagement of the AI. So OpenAI's ChatGPT, they actually rolled back that level of emotional engagement. They were saying that it was just way too complimentary to the user. I don't know if the term obsequious is the right term for that, but they rolled it back to an earlier state. You don't want your OpenAI saying oh, you're so amazing all the time.

There's this old definition of diplomacy which says you say nice doggy until you can find a rock. So this is the AIs being really nice to us until they figure out what to do with it.

Ouch. All right, not a surprise here. Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of companies AI code was written by AI and predicts that 95% of code will be AI generated by 2030. Dave, you're overseeing how many companies right now inside the Link portfolio and The Link Studios?

2024.

Right now 24. And so what's it like there? I mean, so take a second and give people a little bit of overview. So Lynx Studios is incubating companies mostly out of mit, some out of Harvard. Average age of those teams?

Oh well, median age is probably 24, 25 year olds and the companies are about one to two years old.

What's going on in terms of vive coding for them, in terms of AI based coding?

Well, they're all AI native. They generate almost all their code with some degree of AI assistance. Blitzy. In particular, when I left town last week, they had a 2 or 3 million revenue run rate. I came back, they've signed 8 million of new deals. They're basically signing up customers as quickly as they can meet them. Blitzy. As a reminder, as a company can write 3 million lines of code in a single night, uses massive amounts of inference time, compute under the covers, and now the trick is, okay, how do you debug 3 million lines of code that you've written in a single night? But the algorithms are getting so good at writing good code now that that problem is going away in a hurry. But there's no way any company in this building wouldn't be using AI generated code for almost everything that they do. Also, you know, it makes a lot of sense to write your business plan around areas where it works well. And then this is coming up a lot. Don't fight any battles. Wait a few weeks, because the things that we'll be able to do in a few weeks will be expanding at this ridiculous rate. So while you were fighting some silly battle, it got ahead of you. So you just do what comes naturally and easily this week, and then wait for the next week's innovations.

And Dave, I have a question for you. It used to be that if you're starting a company, especially in the AI space, you need to find a great technical co founder. If you're someone in the business or finance world, how important is that now versus being able to use AI as your technical co founder?

Well, it's, in a sense, more important than ever, but it's a different skill set. It's very much the visionary that can decide what should we be doing has become incredibly important. And then the technical co founder who would just grind out, Steve Wozniak would be the quintessential example. Like Steve Jobs is like, we need to build the Apple ii. This is what it needs to be like for the user. That skill set's more important than ever. Hey, Woz, can you get the chip count down? Can you wire this all together? You know, grind it out all night? That skill set becomes much less relevant because, you know, AI will do all the chip routing for you. But that first skill set has really grown in value, and it's very similar. You know, it's a very technical. You got to choose components, you got to decide, this will work, this won't work. It's a very technical skill set, but it's more of a visionary skill set.

I think there's one other skill set that's coming to the fore here, which is find hidden gems of data sets and figure out and monetize them. And I think that's going to become a very big deal over the next few years because we'll have horizontal platforms able to do all sorts of things. The question is, where's the revenue? Where can you mine for little nuggets of revenue and go grab them and leverage AI to do it? I think that's going to add to the, to the business focus and the application focus.

So two more things on this, on this topic that I think are really important. First, Mark Zuckerberg last week did a couple interviews where he made it clear that the backlog of AI research projects is only compute bound. It's not idea bound. So between the researchers and the AI generated ideas, they have a huge backlog of things that will just work. And there isn't enough compute. Even in Microsoft's hundreds of thousands of GPUs, there isn't enough compute to try the ideas. So we've tipped from idea bound to compute bound, and that'll be true forever hereafter. And then on the second bullet, 95% of code AI generated by 2030, I think that timeline to 2030, he would have said, Satya would have said 2040, 2050, just a few months ago. And so that, you know, that's consistent with Denis Hassabas also, you know, he was more conservative about the timeline to AGI and he's pulled in his forecast now, too. So what you're seeing is even the conservative, you know, let's be cautious. People are really pulling in their date. And that, you know, that's, that's telling everybody.

I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. It's the AI Singularity, as Salim and I spoke about earlier. So, speaking of which, our AI czar for the US David Sachs, has come forward with a statement that AI will be a million fold more capable in the next four years. Let's play a video and then talk about it, because this was the same point that Elon made when he was on stage at the Abundance Summit. Let's hear the numbers that David puts forward. I would say the rate of progress is exponential right now on at least three key dimensions. So number one is the algorithms themselves. The models are improving at a rate of, I don't know, three to four times a year. Then you've got the chips. Depending on how you measure it, each generation of chips is probably three or four times better than the last at a level. And that would be the third area where you're seeing basically exponential progress. Just look at the number of GPUs are being deployed in data centers. An AI's data center, Stargate. And within a couple of years they'll be at, I don't know, 5 million GPUs. 10 million GPUs. The algorithms, the chips and the data centers are all improving or scaling at a rate of, I don't know, 3 to 4x a year. That's 10x every two years. If you're getting better at 10x every two years, that doesn't mean you'll be at 20x in four years. It means you'll be at 100x. So you multiply those things together, the algorithms, the chips, and then the raw compute that's available, you're talking about a million x increase. So Salim, how does that feel?

It sounds about right. I mean, look, this is the fastest moving technology we've ever seen and you would expect to see it, I think he framed it very kind of wonderfully clearly in that. But we've seen the same thing where, in say solar energy, where it's not just the efficiency of the solar panel, it's the actuators and this, the system controls, they're all accelerating at their own rate. Not quite at this level of madness, but we've seen this before where the convergence of multiple exponentials gives you crazy outcomes.

You know, one of the things that we've talked about in the past is getting to where the puck's going to be. Right. If I remember meeting the founders of Siri before they were bought by Apple and they were predicting what was going to be possible in like two to four years and they were building Siri to intercept Apple, those capabilities. Because if you build for what's possible today, then by the time your product gets to market, it's out of date. So Dave, I mean you're seeing multitude of hundreds of startups that are coming across your desk. How do you think about this?

Well, first of all, the million x is just raw parameter count in the biggest neural nets. It's really hard to predict the capabilities that are and aren't possible with a million X. And so it's, yeah, you're a great all time great visionary. Looking five years into the future used to be very possible for you. I don't know, what do you think your view into the future is now?

Yeah, I mean it literally has to be a discontinuous vision. Okay. All I have a heart, I remember I was brought on stage at the first world government summit in, in Dubai and my request was what's the world going to look like in 50 years? And I was like, there's no way. There's just absolutely no way. To make that prediction 10 years back then it was 10, 15 years of at most. Today, I would say 5 years is difficult, 3 years is possible. And there's so many parameters, including policy, human reaction to this, you know, the capital markets, all of these things are intertwined, what's going on in China and Taiwan.

So I think for me, for me, the hard part is when something's a million times, you know, assume it's 100x, 100,000x. I mean, you end up with a failure of imagination where you can't conceive of the types of things you might be able to do. Right. And our immediate thing is to automate what we're doing now. And that's not the right answer because you end up with the problem of when they first put TV out, you took radio announcers and put them on tv, reading the same scripts, and you're not leveraging the capability in a real way. It takes time to kind of get to grips with the imagination that's possible. So you kind of have to wait till we get there and then go, now what do we do?

I know one thing, Peter. When you were out here two weeks ago, I guess, spending time with Alex Wisner Gross, there's just a handful of people that you can find that have got their head wrapped around this. If you talk to people at random, 99.9% of them are underreacting. More than that, 99.999% are underreacting. And you find a few people like Alex, that are thinking it through. And if you can surround yourself with as many of those as you can find, it really, really helps a lot just to pick on the framework here that David Sacks put together. It's the exact same three dimensions that I use to think about scale. I think a million X in four years, four to five years is the right answer. But I also think that the algorithm dimension, nobody really knows, and if anything, it's understated. But we are all surprised in the last few months about inference time, compute or test time, chain of thought, reasoning being far more powerful as a scaling factor and trying to build new scaling laws around. How do we even think about inference time? Because when David talks about the chips getting faster, he's thinking about the GPUs and just the standard 3x4x year every year. But the inference time chips are actually improving far, far faster. It's a much easier problem, but that's turning out to be a key factor in the intelligence of the overall system. So I think that the chips will outperform what he just said and the algorithms will way outperform what he just said because of those innovations.

When I, when I look at the factors driving this, it is compute, it's total, it's data sets. And we haven't talked about synthetic data hitting this algorithms, money coming in. And then, you know, the number of actual human meat bodies getting into the game here is increasing. More and more people are getting into the AI game. You know, something funny to happen. I was having a conversation, I think it was with ChatGPT, might have been Gemini 2.5, and I was saying, okay, let's look into the future. I was trying to use it as a conversational partner to predict where things are going. And I said, make some predictions. And I said, listen, if we're going to see a century's worth of progress in the next 10 years, what you just predicted is extraordinarily linear. And he goes, you're right, let me go a little bit bolder. So you've got to actually push the.

So I think this is where the answer will lie. When we see these type of predictions, we'll use an AI to go, you write out that curve and tell me what it's going to look like. Because it'll do probably a better job than us because we're limited in some other ways. We have all our cognitive biases that limit our ability to imagine where an AI in theory should suffer from much less of that.

Yeah, that's a really important topic because I think right now AI is a brainstorming partner in is hobbled because the models that you love brainstorming with, the, you know, the four O's and the Gemini 2.5s, they have about a 30 second lag and that kind of takes the buzz out of it. And then the models that are really fun to interact with, like the Sesame demo and all of that are super engaging, but they're only like a 7B or 30B kind of caliber model. And so they're not a really good brainstorming partner. All of that will be stitched together within the next three months. So when you have an idea in the morning, Peter, you're going to immediately go to that super engaging 2 trillion to 10 trillion parameter caliber model. And there's no going back from there. Once you start down that path, you're going to love it and never go back.

I mean, three months, did you say three months?

Three months, yeah.

Well, ChatGPT sort of the on the phone app does a pretty damn good job. And I have Conversations with it. So I do like 20 minutes of red light in the morning. And my, you know, conversations during that red light time with my ChatGPT bot is. Are extraordinary. All right, let's go to Eric Schmidt here, who was giving a presentation and said AI is underhyped. Take a listen.

I'm here to tell you that I honestly believe that the AI revolution is underhyped. And here's why. The arrival of this new intelligence will profoundly change our country and the world in ways we cannot fully understand.

Many people think that the demand in.

Of energy part that our industry takes will go from 3% to 99% of total generation. One of the estimates that I think.

Is most likely is that data centers.

Will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030.

Gives you a sense of the scale that we're talking.

These things are industrial at a scale.

I have never seen in my life. So first off, under hyped versus spot on. How do you guys feel about that? And then we should talk about the whole energy of it all.

Dave, you know, one of my most cherished lifetime memories, actually, Peter, is you sitting down with Eric Schmidt. I think it was at a 360, you know, just a few years ago. You guys must have riffed for maybe two hours straight, just in armchairs, side by side one night.

Yeah.

Oh, my God. You know, Eric is. Not only is he absolutely brilliant, but he has access to all this information. So, you know, when is he ever going to be wrong? When has he ever been wrong before? Yeah, of course he's absolutely right. What's amazing to me about what Eric is saying there, he's on some kind of congressional testimony or whatever. He's always pointing to the energy because he knows that's the one thing that'll get through everybody's thick head. But there's so many other more important and urgent. Like what about the fabs? You know, like, we got to get these fabs up and running onshore like yesterday. That's the more urgent, bigger topic than just the raw energy. But he knows is that they won't get. They won't understand that. So when he has to say, you know, hey, we need 29 gigawatts of new power because at least it'll. Everyone will be able to grok it and it'll make progress.

Yeah. Salim.

I don't have anything to add to this. I think that's. Those are two great insights. I think this will be a really great push for renewables and low cost energy in all sorts of ways, but at the same time to expand our energy footprint.

I mean, at the same time you've got the White House basically taking all the constraints off of coal and oil and natural gas and drilling. Because when I look, I mean I kind of understand why in terms of AI, because when I look at how long it's going to take to get Gen4 nuclear and fusion online, we're talking decades. It's like Amazon signed a contract with X Energy for a Gen 4, I think it was a Gen 4 plant, it's a fission plant. And I'm like, oh, is it going to be on, you know, in the next two or three years? Like 2040?

Yeah. So, but I think the, the, you have to remember the cost of fossil fuels is way high these days compared to solar.

Right.

Like so all this extra usage will be coming from renewables in some way. I go back to my example of the guy building a gigawatt wind farm in the outskirts of Kazakhstan because the wind howls down a particular valley in a ridiculously consistent basis and they just plunk in AI data center there. So you can do that kind of leveraging of low cost, far away capability that you never get in.

Or to Iceland. Right. You can put the data center anywhere you want.

I think when I remember talking to Ramez about the energy stuff, he said we will never go back to oil and gas as fondly as people want because the cost curve is just too high. Can I just drill into that just a little bit?

You can drill into the oil and gas, yes.

In 2016 it became cheaper to create a fossil solar generation facility than fossil fuels. And since then almost all energy generation has been solar. In 2019, a more important inflection point was hit, which is it became cheaper to build and run a solar facility than to just run.

Yes, the oil.

Gas.

Yeah, right.

So the, so the OPEX and capex of solar is now less than the OPEX of fossil fuels. So we don't need government policy, we don't need any of this stuff. The pure market will now drive it to just going fully down a renewables route. The problem is that the amount that we need is just so huge that we need to get much more quickly to the SMRs and other methods.

We need to get rid of the delays due to regulations and permitting. This is what's going to slay us. If we can make permitting super fast. And this is where AI can support it.

But if I go back to my earlier point, if we put SMR in far off distant remote areas of the US or Alaska or God knows where, you'll end up with a capability to generate energy. Then you can just plug in a data center next to it and you're in great shape. So I think we'll see a ton of that. I don't think the regulatory is that much of a big deal right now. I think it's just the sheer amount that we need that we have to figure out.

Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year I was joined on Stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI humanoid robotics, longevity blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to experiment. Exponential mastery dot com. That's exponential mastery dot com. All right, so MasterCard unveils agent pay agentic payment technology to power commerce in the age of AI. So it's not just MasterCard, it's going to be all the credit cards. You know, I think there's a very near future where I speak and stuff shows up on my doorstep. I don't think about it, it just magically happens. In fact, I'll take it a step further. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, salim, I really love that shirt. And it knows I need a shirt. So it just asks your AI where you got that shirt and then it just delivers to me magically the next day.

I'm trying to see how you got there from this.

Well, I think we crush advertising and I think we, we crush the ability to select payment methods. I think your AI is just doing all this stuff automatically for you.

Yeah. Bill Gross and I were talking earlier today, Paratta AI, your good friend, about this exact topic of advertising will get crushed. What do you mean exactly there? Because Google has $300 billion of advertising revenue. You're saying that that's going to get crushed? But that's exactly. Actually, Richard Socher, our mutual friend, was saying that in their, in their tests, the revenue per session of an AI dialogue versus a Google search is about 1/10th to 100th. And so where does that put Google? If they start when you do a Google search now, the top thing is the AI answer and then the ads start below that. So that's already got to be cannibalizing the revenue. So it puts Google In a really tough spot trying to figure out do we cannibalize our own ad revenue? But you're exactly right. The future belongs to chatting with your trusted agent and your trusted agent making good suggestions for you and then saying, yeah, just go out and buy that or just go ahead and sign up for that.

Well, we've mentioned this before, but I think the holy grail here is your, your Jarvis equivalent, right, where your agent will kind of act on your behalf and is bound to you with your preferences, habits, etc. Then you can put a lot of trust in and just let it go to town and see what happens and have a feedback loop. So it just tweaks it. That seems a no brainer to me. I just spent the most unbelievable amount of time dealing with flight tickets and logistics and seat changes. I mean it was just bullshit. Eric. I was on this panel of the future of AI working thing with Eric Brynjolfsson and a few others and they called it white collar drudgery. There's a ton of that that's going on and I think this is where we'll be able to have huge impact with AI.

Yeah, we should keep tracking this thread because trust, you know, when do you trust AI? When do you not trust it? This is just a subset, but it's a good, it's an important one. Hey, my credit card is a pretty important thing. Do I trust it? Self driving obviously is even more trust. Yeah, then you've got life decisions. You know, what do I leave to my kids? Do I buy that house? Do I get a new roof? Like those decisions are also definitely trust decisions. So we should track, you know, a lot changes week to week. We should track what, what people trust, what people don't trust. Because God knows the AI is going to be incredibly convincing and persuasive.

I think one of the superpowers AI will have is its ability and command over language. Right. So like an amazing politician who's able to take you from wherever you were and sway your point of view. So MasterCard wants to use Agent pay to become my default payment system. Salim, you were talking about Bitcoin in this earlier today. You want to share some thoughts?

Well, I think here where the, you know the, we've been talking about crypto as payment mechanisms, right? And you've got this, you've got this spectrum of stuff that's really hard to mine and like Bitcoin is not that easy to do payments on. And then you get, or gold, say if you want to use the old analogy, then you have like bank vaults and jewelry that's not that easy to transact and then you get to bank accounts and then you get the credit card and you have the spectrum of the smaller the transaction, the less security you need and therefore you can make the usability much easier, etc. What's happened with crypto is along with things like the lightning network on the bitcoin protocols, now the payments are really, really easy. And I think we're going to see crypto type payments scale very, very fast, especially with the digital, the fiat currencies. Moving over to the crypto world, we're going to see incredible things happen there and I think that'll be the biggest trigger for usage of blockchains and so on for handling all of that stuff. There's a startup and I'm on the advisory board of that is trying to figure this out because one of the biggest problems with trade globally, separate from all the tariff stuff, is that big countries don't like big chunks of foreign reserves leaving their shores. So they make it really difficult, put capital controls in place and they make it really hard. Yeah, there's this famous story of GE selling 100 million worth of jet engines to China and they took and receipt 150 million worth of frozen chickens as payment. And the 50 million because now I have to deal with all these chickens, hence the margin of. But it turns out that type of transaction is rampant in big companies because China's like we don't want $100 million leaving our shores. Right. And so this is going to a combination of crypto plus some of these payment rails is going to change the game with some of these big transactions and on the smaller side, AI plus some of these will make things really radically, much easier.

I love it. Digital chickens. So here's another one. Dave, I think you added this one. Nvidia acquires Gretel to power next gen. AI, tell us about this story.

Yeah, I think this is important because we talked last time about the core weave IPO which is holding up just fine. Is that the bellwether to the markets opening? MA has been very quiet. Now you're starting to see some deal flow and that all ties back to the IPO markets opening up. The last three years have been the most dead in the history of the country in terms of IPOs. So. So if that comes roaring back, that'll unlock a lot. So this is a good one to track here. But what you're seeing here is Nvidia recognizing that synthetic data is incredibly strategic and we Talked about. Richard socher's got these 10 areas of AI, some of which run unbounded and others are throttled or hobbled by some constraint. But math is unbounded, coding is unbounded. Why? Because you can generate a near infinite amount of synthetic data, which means the AI can continue to learn and then you can build really easy evals. Like, did the AI do something useful or is it buggy? Does it not work? Is it? And so. So the math is provable, the code is debuggable automatically and that's. Those areas require synthetic data. But you look across the other areas like biotech and everything else, the synthetic data is the constraint, you know, because the AI can run. Run wild to the extent that it can generate synthetic data. So I think Nvidia, being in the middle of the hot seat, realizes, oh my God, what a great opportunity to create some kind of a moat. Let's pick up Gretel and let's build out a synthetic data competency as part of our overall, like, while we're top of the world, we need to think about how to defend our position on top of the world. So that's why they picked up Gretel.

Nice.

Yeah, I think this is a really great strategic thing. You saw Zoom doing the same thing when its market cap went soaring high. They started buying up a whole bunch of stuff.

Stuff.

Leveraging the currency while it was high.

Yeah. As an investment theme, you know, synthetic data is very different in each domain. Obviously the full cell simulator synthetic data there in biotech is going to be very different than in math. So it's a great repeatable investment theme if you can find really, really smart teams. Because I think Nvidia could easily acquire 10 more companies doing different types of.

Are you investing at Link XPV and synthetic data?

Yeah, we have data sibo, which is a co invest with Mark Gorenberg, the chairman at mit. They do column wise, so numerical column wise synthetic data, so things like actuarial or whatever. But again, if you had physical world synthetic data, like simulators for physical objects, driving data, those are all investable. We'll do any synthetic data company we can find if it has a great team.

Fantastic. All right, here's one I added. Kleiner Perkins leads $130 million round in Coinbase Founders anti aging startup Ulimit. Let me break this down. So Brian Armstrong and Blake Byers both are friends. Gonna have Brian on this moonshots podcast sometime next month. And they're both passionate about longevity. And what we've seen is a number of billionaires investing in something called epigenetic reprogramming. What is that? As I like to remind people, you get 3.2 billion letters from your mom, 3.2 billion letters from your dad. That's your genome, about 22,000 genes. And you have that same software when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100. The question is, if you're running the same software, why do you look different? Why don't you have a six pack at age 100 that you had when you were 18? It turns out it's not the genes you have, it's your epigenome. Epi, from the Greek word for above. It's which genes, it's your control system. It's which genes are on and which genes are off. As you get older, the genes that should be on get silenced and get turned off. The genes that should be off get turned on. And there's a whole bunch of issues Folks like George Church, David Sinclair have been pioneering this epigenetic reprogramming is can we turn back the clock and set your epigenome to an earlier state? The data appears to be not only yes, but hell yes. And it's probably one of the hottest areas of, of age reversal work and longevity. So I just find it fascinating that Brian is investing here. We've seen Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner invest in Altos Labs, Sam Altman invested in Retro with Joe Betts, Lacroix, same areas, epigenetic reprogramming. So yeah, very exciting. And it should be noted that a lot of this is now made possible because of AI.

Oh, how so?

Because the ability to actually process all the data from the experiments and decide what transcription factors to use. We are 40 trillion human cells running about 2 to 5 billion chemical reactions per second. And just trying to understand the amount of data is, is really hard. When I visited both Brian and Blake at New Limit and they're very proud. The majority of their team are all AI first technologists, they're not lab geeks. Salim, any thoughts here?

I think just as our AI models get more sophisticated, the ability to apply them, that number blows. I never stop shaking my head when you say that number of two and a half billion things per chemical processes per second. Not maybe like that's across the body, but there's some incredible number just hurting.

A cell, isn't it per cell?

That's per cell, right?

That's just unbelievable in cells, right?

Yeah. It's just mind boggling how the complexity of what goes on in there. So it's going to be amazing to see what's possible going forward.

Well, definitely not my area of expertise, but I remember clearly I took AP bio in high school and then I got to mit, I said, yeah, not doing that anymore because all we're doing is memorizing random Krebs cycles. There's no way this is actually going to work. There must be billions of times more things going on than what we're memorizing here.

So true, so true. All right, here's one. I have two 13, soon to be 14, 14 year old boys. Salim, you have one. And Roblox is part of their, you know, if not daily diet, weekly diet. And I found this amazing. So Roblox averaging up to 43% of Netflix users with 97.8 million average daily active users, 7.2 billion hours. It's just exploded onto, you know, we can see this rapid, rapid growth of the gaming world. Dave, did your boys all sort of go deep into the, into the gaming world?

Well, it's interesting. I wouldn't say they were big time gamers, but if you look at the amount of time they spent on interactive media, including Fortnite and some video games, much, much higher than passive media like movies and Star Trek or whatever. So that's just the trend line. But you add AI on top of video games and it's so incredibly engaging. There's no way people are going to go back and watch passive media again.

And I think it's about, I mean, it still really hasn't hit. Right. So if you're in Minecraft or in Roblox, the amount of AI generated reality and the amount of AI interaction with you, we're going to see a lot of advancement in the gaming world in the next few years.

Yeah, you know, the other thing is gaming is dominated by young boys.

Yeah.

And largely misses the girls for whatever reason, but it definitely misses older people. The new super engaging AI voices actually tend to cover everybody. And so it's going to be a lot broader appeal. So any numbers you see in this world are going to go up tremendously just by covering the rest of humanity. Also, you know, a lot of, you know, Mr. Beast now I think is the most recognized person on the planet, which is, you know, shocking. That might be among stars or some other qualifier there, but it's an incredible stat. But one of the secrets to Mr. Beast's incredible success is internationalization of all content. You know, when, when you see Mr. Beast in any jurisdiction, any country, any language, his voice is that language and his lips move perfectly or well for that language. So you wouldn't even know that it wasn't shot for you in, you know, in the Congo. And so he mastered that using AI and that got him a lot of the, a lot of the footprint. Same thing applies here to internationalizing the language, but also the content and the media, making it a cultural fit for every jurisdiction.

What struck me about this was the almost all of that increment is mobile so stuff. So they're doing it everywhere. That's crazy.

Yeah, amazing. All right, let's move on here. Let's talk about what's going on in the space world. The first news is that Amazon, this is Jeff Bezos launches the first launch of Project Cooper, its first batch of Internet satellites. So you know, we've seen head to head Elon and, and Bezos sort of like marching up the curve in space. So Amazon launched 27 satellites of their global Internet. This ultimately will be thousands of satellites in orbit. I find it interesting they used an Atlas 5. So of course Jeff has something called Blue Origin which is building rockets today. It's launching suborbital flights. But it did get one of its flight first new Glenn vehicles to orbit. But I think he's feeling pressured to get Cooper up and running at the same time. That Starlink is now probably close to 8,000, 9,000 satellites. So they're buying launches from ULA instead of using his own launch vehicle. It's going to be interesting to have these two, these two Internet constellations in orbit, operating.

Here's a question I have. Have you seen Peter, any kind of estimate as to once you got high functioning Internet over space, which we kind of had just about are there now how much will move to that versus terrestrial Internet?

Yeah, it's a good question. You still have time delays. But one of our next articles coming up which we'll talk about which is quite Quantum teleportation would get rid of time delays. And so if you add quantum teleportation on satellite constellations. Yeah, it's instantaneous and global. I mean it starts to get pretty freaky. We're going to start, we'll have I think probably 30, 40,000 comm satellites in orbit. We'll have a constellation around the moon, we'll have a constellation around Mars. All of those will be cross linked by laser. And so you'll have an interplanetary Internet up and operating very shortly.

Vin Cerf has been talking about that for a while. In fact he's designed the communication protocols for that.

He has indeed. And it's all playing out. Here's the second space article that SpaceX has asked to increase their rate of Starship launches. So Starship, of course is the fully reusable version. It will replace Falcon 9, the most successful launch vehicle in all of human history. And Elon has said as soon as Starship is operational, he will shut down the Falcon 9 factory. And we've seen permission for five launches a year. They're asking for 25 launches per year out of Boca Chica, which is Starbase. And he's gotten a lot of criticism for the failures of Starship. It still has not had a fully successful mission. But oh my God, what he's been able to pull off is nothing short of extraordinary. I hate it when he has this amazing launch. The mech zilla captures the booster, which is the engineering feat of the decade, if not the century.

Century.

Yeah, yeah. And then. And starship doesn't make it to a landing. And of course the front page articles are SpaceX fails again. Yeah, crazy.

We focus on bad news. But the one thing bugged me, really bugged me about this particular article, Peter, it was that if the FAA had him allowing five and then now they're allowing 25, why did, why do they care? Why does it do you have to get approval for the number of launches? This makes no sense.

It's environmental impact. They're incrementally trying to make sure that, and I hate to say this, you know, that they're not killing the number of turtles or that the impact of.

Are you kidding?

But once you, but once you've done a few, which he has, you know, the environmental impact, there should be no, they should have nothing to say about you do 10 more, 20 more or 50.

They don't want, want unbridled unrestricted operations.

That's hilarious. All right, all right, you know, you know the math as well as I do. It's hilarious.

Yeah, I mean, you did your 11 year penance there, Peter, on the zero.

G. I did my 11 year penance on, you know, it's like the FAA is not happy until you're not happy.

I do wonder a lot, whenever you see a starship blows up or whatever, that a lot of the backlash is actually political. You know, people are pissed off and you know, and actually a lot of Elon's support base was, you know, very green energy, Tesla oriented. And so now they're all pissed off. But I think, I think he's doing, he's doing what he thinks is Absolutely. Best for the world.

Yeah.

Regardless of the cost.

I mean, I think it's impressive. Starship will get us back to the moon. It's the only vehicle to get us there. The, the NASA government projects, I don't think will will end up getting to the moon. I think they're just too expensive and too risky. Starship will get us to the moon. Starship will set orbital fuel depot. Starship will get us to Mars. It's an incredibly well designed vehicle and he just needs to continually iterate it. People don't realize that when airplanes begin test flights, every test flight is a small iteration. Airplanes may have hundreds of test flights in their test flight program before they get certified as safe for use. We need to expect that Starship will have hundreds of test flights, each one of them getting more data and demonstrating increasing margins and safety until it's like, yep, this is going to be great to operate just like autonomous cars. But unfortunately these incremental test flights are very visible. And when they go wrong, New York Times is here to talk about it.

I mean, it's explicit that they run dozens and dozens of experiments per flight because that gives them the maximum rate of learning, right?

Yeah, of course, exactly. They're changing the margins on and the material type. They're changing how they stage, they're changing their reentry characteristics. Real quick. I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, let's get to this fun article here. I'll read it from the BBC. Quantum teleportation is here. Quantum teleportation is the instant transfer of quantum information, not matter, between two points. It uses quantum entanglement, where two particles stay connected even miles apart. So the first real world test worked over 30 kilometers of standard fiber optic cable carrying Internet traffic. So this is the idea that if, you know, I remember years ago, all of the quant traders moved their fiber optic nodes very close to the financial centers, right? Because of course, mil, you know, nanoseconds matter to them.

Yep, yep.

So I think they're going to be using quantum teleportation here for instant communication capability.

If we end up using it for stock prices, I'll be very disappointed. But you know your points right now.

Look, the, the, the amazing thing is that this is happening. I think the reality check is this will take quite a while to commercialize and, and get reliable and for kind of real world applications. But, but the fact that they're able to do is mind boggling.

Yeah, it's, it's fun to think about.

Well, why, why do we think it'll take a while to become real at scale other than everything takes a while?

I think I spent some time at the Perimeter Institute at Waterloo where the BlackBerry founders have given a huge chunk of money and they broken up quantum kind of research into three chunks. One was the pure computation, the second was communication, and the third was networking. You have to rebuild the entire stack of how you do it. For each of those, there's a whole bunch of innovation that has to happen and engineering that has to happen for all of those three segments to have reliable communications and teleportations, certainly at scale. So it'll take a while to get there. They've been going at this for, I say think like close to 30 years and they're now getting to this point, so I think it'll be a little while longer. But when it happens. Holy moly.

Yeah. The nice thing is it's over standard fiber optics. Right. It's not new equipment. We're not needing to build out a new network. Right. Here's another fun article. In the realm of sort of future forward space electron dance breakthrough. So scientists uncover clues to practical superconductors. Researchers discovered superconductivity varies at the atomic scale within individual unit cells of iron based materials. I won't read the rest, but we've been talking about one of the major benefits that AI will give us is major breakthroughs in material sciences. And super conductivity would be a huge deal because we can generate, I mean, at the extreme you can put solar cells around the planet and if it's nighttime here in the US you could have solar being generated in Europe and having a superconductive cable back to the US and you basically get no loss.

No transmission, no transmission loss. Right. Which is what, 30% or something?

It depends on the distance, of course. Right.

But it's a huge amount. And so this is, this would be very huge. I remember Shy Macna is one of our GSP Singularity students in 2010 or 2011 saying he figures we're about a decade away from understanding superconductivity and getting to room temperature, superconductivity at the lab level. And so this sounds like we're coming close to that.

Well, if it's a decade out, you know, we're going to have Gen3, fission and fusion, you know, and those are very small reactors. So they can be sprinkled around.

Yeah, yeah.

So it may not matter.

There's a big race between this and distributed energy systems. That makes it less relevant.

Yeah, that's right. All right, let's talk. One of our favorite subjects. At least it's a favorite subject for Salim and I. Actually, Dave, I don't know, are you like a big bitcoin believer? I know our third fraternity brother is.

Well, you know, I was on the board of MicroStrategy back in the day. So I've been a shareholder for many, many years. So I, I wouldn't say I was ever, you know, a bitcoin direct, you know, early adopter. But Mike Saylor has dragged me along.

Let me ask the question, you know, do you own Bitcoin?

Yeah. MicroStrategy. Yeah, yeah.

You own MicroStrategy but not Bitcoin. Directly?

No, not directly.

Okay.

Mostly because I'd lose the keys.

Well, fair enough. I can make some introductions. So here is Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaking about the US Holding Bitcoin. Let's take a listen. But I think it's clear at this point that bitcoin is a better form of money than gold. It is provably scarce, just like gold, but it's more portable and divisible, so you can actually use. It has higher utility, I would say. And it was the best performing asset of the last 10 years. And so for store value, I think it's going to be important for governments to hold this over time. It might start with being 1% of their reserves, but I think over time it'll come to be equal to or greater than gold reserves.

Okay, great.

So Celine, why don't you weigh in here?

I think this is mind boggling to me. You know, I spoke at. So let me kind of give my reaction in a couple of ways. I spoke at a conference of 100 of the top partners of one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. And when I asked them how many of you understand the Byzantine generals problem? One put up their hand, right? And you're like, this thing is going to eat your lunch in terms of trust and reliability, which is essentially what you sell. And you don't understand the core innovation that's taken place in it, which really is unbelievable to me. When MicroStrategy has put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, every CFO in the goddamn world should be looking at that and saying, I need to put something in there. It's unbelievably responsible if you're the treasury secretary of some country not to put Bitcoin as a reserve thing. This should be happening in every country in the world. And one of the things we've noticed before, where I've commented before, it's fascinating seeing the amount of my port investment portfolio growing because of bitcoin, not because I'm getting more Bitcoin, because it's just getting more valuable. And so this is like irresponsible, financially responsible to the extreme level. I'll just give one other piece to this, which was I was talking to a major money management firm in one of the G7 countries and they're like, yeah, we don't, we don't allow our wealth manager, wealth advisors to transact in Bitcoin at all. They're not allowed to advise it to their clients because it's. They deem it too uncertain and too risky. And you're like, look at the goddamn value over time.

I've got a better.

They're scared of the legal liability if they end thing in. And I'm saying to them, do you realize the liability if you. We don't recommend.

During the course of our conversation here. Bitcoin is now at 96,450. It's gone up 1500 bucks during the course of our podcast conversation.

Let's try and drive it up by talking about it more. I'll give you another case study. I'm the chairman and majority or controlling shareholder of two companies, about 1,000 employees. One of them has about 50 million in cash just sitting there in cash. The other has 125 million in cash. Everquote Public Company. 125 million in cash and making, you know, a lot of cash every quarter. I gave both CEOs green light. Put any amount of that you want into bitcoin and borrow and do what Mike Saylor did. Neither reacted or acted on it. And I don't want to interfere otherwise I'll be, you know, I'll be involved, but it's interfere. Well, I mean, you know, they're both great, great leadership teams. I don't want to get.

Yeah, I mean, we did the same thing, Salim at xprize. We were holding a large amount of capital and it was like, yes, you.

Know.

Both on my board. I need you to help convince the other old tier, old fogey board members. Excuse me, if you're listening, guys, you're brilliant and I love you, but can we please put our treasury into bitcoin?

An easy thing to do there would be to take a small fraction of it, you know, and. And that's one. And this letter do a one cycle around.

Yeah, small fraction. Like 80%. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it makes Mike Saylor all the more impressive that he, you know, without any role, you know, now you have a role model, but without any role model.

Yeah, but this is the part that drives me nuts. Now that we have a role model. Right. If you're a CFO of a public company, what the hell are you doing?

Yeah, sorry. You're doing what you've always done because that's the least risky and you can't get blamed for doing that. So listen, this is the same thing in all technology companies. It is the founder led Exponential Tech AI first. Companies that are going to slay everybody else. And so when Michael Saylor, you know, again by way of background, Michael was a fraternity brother with Dave Blunden and myself at mit, at Theta Delta Chi fraternity. And when you're, when you're a sailor, you can say, we are doing this. And he has a very small board and he basically sat them down, gave them homework and got them to back him. And he's just been at it. So the first week of May, he actually sells equity and buys another 180 million of Bitcoin. So today, very impressive. Microstrategies owns, you know, basically a half a million bitcoin, which is about 2.8% of all the Bitcoin in circulation, worth $52.8 billion. Michael owns about 17,000 more Bitcoin than I do.

Oh, you're doing will, Mike. Not only did he have to do exactly what you said, but he had to go over to Mike Williams at Fidelity, another MIT alum, and say, hey, I need to custody this somewhere. Can Fidelity build out an entire business unit to custody Bitcoin? And Mike, you know, to his credit, Mike Willins built it out at Fidelity. That's a lot of difficult work that's now been done for you. Yes, but, you know, pioneering it was very hard for a lot of reasons, including that one. You can't just keep the keys in your, you know, your shoebox at the office headquarters. You know, you gotta have some kind.

Of multi sig protocols and all sorts of stuff.

Yeah.

So I just Checked. You know, the market cap of microstrategies that closed today was 105.4 billion while holding 52.8 billion of coins. And the value it's being given for his mindset and what he does is extraordinary.

It is funny. I was sitting down with my mom, who's in her 80s, going through her estate, and she had a spreadsheet she put together, and there's this line item with this huge number in it. I was like, what the hell is that? She said, oh, you know, remember when you worked at MicroStrategy when you were like, in your 20s? I was like, yeah. She said, I bought some MicroStrategy back then. I was like, wait, wow, you're still holding that? And she said, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know how to sell it. So I didn't go, mom, that is so great.

That is fantastic. Well, I think that's our last story for today, but, you know, it's so much fun. Are you guys having as much of a blast as I am?

Oh, God, I look forward to this all week.

It's really a great checkpoint where we can kind of go, okay, what happened? Bring some slides into play and just take a checkpoint. I find it. It's a really great cadence to. Plus all the viewers. I hear that, by the way, from a few of the folks watching. They're like three really great. Because we can kind of every week or two, stop in and see what's going on. We feel like we're caught up.

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's the goal here. And so, you know, in the. If you're on YouTube, in the comments below, tell us what else you'd like us to cover. You know, you can happily tell me how much more brilliant Dave is and Salim is than I am. That's fine. But so it's fun. So when we say, WTF just happened in tech, we. Well, there you get a slice of it. We'll see you guys in a week or two. When enough stuff starts mounting, when we say, okay, we got to get the. The band back together again.

Awesome.

All right, Celine, where are you?

Great conversation, guys.

Where are you now? Are you back in New York?

I'm back in New York for, like, three days, and then I go to Italy for three days.

What is going on?

It's just. It's just. It's just a busy time right now.

You're insane, and I love your.

You for it.

And, Dave, you're back in Cambridge at headquarters.

I'm in Cambridge and I'll tell you one thing, Peter, I love. Every time I talk to Daniela Rus over at CSAIL or Alex Wisner Gross or Alexander Amini over@liquid AI, I can say, hey, we've got this WTF podcast coming up. What's on your mind? And they're like, yes, it's such a good way to keep the dialogue.

I love it. So I want you guys piling in your best stories, those secret stories. You've got Alex Wiesner Gross as a super weapon there and Saleem, you've got an entire exo community. So bring them in and see you guys very soon. Thanks for your time. Always a pleasure.

Great conversation, guys.

Thanks, Peter.

Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here. But these are my personal journals. The things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested again, please join me and subscribe@diamadness.com subscribe. That's diamadness.com subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots. Foreign.

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