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

Nvidia just booked $96.2 billion in revenue in a single quarter.

Isn't that a closed-loop circular economy? Couldn't that collapse? Every economy is circular in nature.

To the extent there is an elephant in this particular room, that would be—

The X safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts. We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid.

Shocked, shocked, I say. Experts say that there are foreign influence operations attempting to suppress American AI data center deployment shocked.

The difficult part is we have really no easy defense against it.

OpenAI released the first performances of their chip, Jalapeño. OpenAI is no longer just a customer of NVIDIA. They're becoming a chip designer.

Inference is moving off of NVIDIA for sure. This is the first 2x of 100x performance gains.

We're in such a crazy future where I could imagine a world where, say, an OpenAI compute cloud hosts an Anthropic model and OpenAI Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to Moonshots, everyone, your number one podcast on all things AI and exponential, your front row seat to the incredible accelerating singularity. I hope you can feel it like we all do. You know, guys, we just recorded 2 days ago and it feels like a lifetime ago.

I can't believe it. Isn't it crazy? I mean, every story we're going through today is new information in the last 2 days. It's crazy.

It's crazy. It is like—

It's the podcasting singularity, Peter.

It really is. Well, guys, I'm here with my incredible, my original 4 Moonshot magnificent mates, Alex Wiesner-Gross, our in-house ASI. And, you know, the question, Alex, is, are you real? Well, if people come to the Moonshots live event, they'll have a chance to evaluate your flesh and bloodness.

Maybe that's the one question that I get. That's the one AMA everyone can copy you, Peter, and pinch my cheeks.

Yeah, exactly. Dave Blunden, our impresario of AI investing. And Dave, you're going to be running a session on AI investing at Moonshots Live, which is going to be very good. And Salim Ismail, our global globetrotter, our Where's Waldo. You're back from Brazil.

I'm back. 36 hours in Brazil and back. I've probably got one of the worst carbon footprints anywhere right now.

Are you leaving tomorrow for Japan?

No, I'm here for a few days. And then I've got an overnight next week. It's not so bad.

We should make you be like Bill Gates and buy carbon offsets for all the emissions from your flight. That would cost you—

I'll plant a tree in every airport front lawn that I get to.

I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and optimism provocateur. So much happening in the last 2 days. We've reviewed 200+ stories. I get a download from my AI and from Alex, my other AI, every day. We've narrowed it down to about 15 today that are fun. I would categorize these stories as provocative, like massively impactful and bizarre. That's sort of my summary.

Sometimes all at once.

All at once. Yeah, for sure. Our mission here is keep you optimistic and ready for the supersonic tsunami that is heading our way. If you're new to Moonshots, welcome. A pleasure to have you. You know, our mission here is keep you informed of what just happened and where things are going. If you're a regular, a fellow Moonshotter, welcome back. Let me share a slide here because I want to invite people to two specific elements here. The first is we're going to be having a Moonshots AMA over Zoom. We're inviting all of you, our listeners, to join us. We're going to be doing it twice. in September, once in the morning so that people in Europe and Asia can easily join, once in the evening so people in the East Coast and in the US can join. We want to, we want to meet you. You know, we don't get a chance to answer all your questions. So you're gonna have a shot at, you know, grilling Alex, Dave, Salim, and myself on this. So—

I love these units too, because we get to, we get to hear what's on everybody's mind. It's never obvious to me what people are thinking because there's so much impact from all this change. And but it affects different people differently. So it's really nice to get a sample of what's going through everybody's brain.

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, you can tell us whether you, you know, whether you want it once a week, twice a week, continuous in Alex's living room. And also on the screen here, our new X handle is moonshots_pod. So please follow us on X as well. You know, we're putting up our clips, we're putting up the full podcast as a chance for you to have it on your feed instead of just on YouTube. So shall we get into it, gentlemen?

Absolutely.

All right. A lot to cover today. So I'm going to open with a few AI stories as we normally do. So Nvidia is on fire. Nvidia just booked $96.2 billion in revenue in a single quarter. I mean, this is more than The GDP of majority of the countries on the planet, up 106% year over year, with guidance for the current quarter of another 10% higher, $108 billion. For context, that is more than $1 billion per day. Crazy. You know, further, Jensen's guidance for 2028 is 70% growth against Wall Street's consensus of 44%. Jensen called the Frontier Labs, quote, the first generation of startups that needed tens of billions of dollars of compute To get to their product, crazy. In related news, Elon Musk is making some bold predictions about SpaceX revenues. We've heard him in the past say that he's going to on the last earnings call he's going to reach a trillion dollars in revenue by 2030, potentially 2029. Now yesterday, Elon tweeted that he may well reach 3.5 trillion in revenue in 2033. You know, by reference, the company today with the highest revenue. is Amazon at $828 billion, just to give it some context for Elon's $3.5 trillion. Dave, let me go to you first. You know, is, is Nvidia's revenue growth sustainable or is this just, you know, the peak here? What do you think about that?

Actually, it's a really interesting two forks in the road here. Nvidia has a lot of vulnerabilities and it will come up later in the pod. But at the same time, they're going to be sold out for as far as the eye can see, no matter what. So, I think that everyone's got to use Nvidia for training neural nets. It's 90% of the revenue, 95% of the profits. And these revenues are not just revenues. These are 80% to 85% gross margin revenues. The profitability of this company has never been seen before on the face of the earth.

Crazy.

But everybody's vulnerable too, because all the major companies, all the magna mobstas are starting to overlap so much in what they do. So, the biggest vulnerability at Nvidia by far is TSMC is still their one and only manufacturer of everything they sell.

I mean, have you ever seen— I'm amazed they haven't vertically integrated or haven't tried to like Elon is.

Well, I mean, but there is tricky because if they were to try and build their own fabs, they'd have to do it very quietly and sneakily because they cannot piss off TSMC. You know, they're about a third of TSMC's manufacturing goes to Nvidia. And another third roughly goes to Apple, and the whole rest of the world gets the other third. But you can't rock that boat casually. You have to do it very sneakily. And as Alex has said on many podcasts, there's new physics and new technology is going to come through AI imminently, which could disrupt the entire manufacturing supply chain, how chips are made, what they're made of. And so, there's just so much change coming. So, So, Nvidia is making all kinds of moves to shore up its position while it's on top of the world. And you almost can't spend the money fast enough at the rate that it's coming in.

I mean, that's right.

I was talking to my kids about, well, with so many of our portfolio companies, I'll meet with them weekly and they'll say, oh, I had a meeting with a manufacturer in Vermont. I had a meeting with this, you know, with JPMorgan. Like, why are you meeting with anyone, anyone other than Jensen, Or one of the other magnum opus companies, or one of their satellites. Like, it's insane. The amount of money pouring through just that funnel dwarfs the entire rest of the economy. And your success and failure is intimately tied to just that one thing. And everything else is just a distraction. So, you know, Jensen is— he's pouring out money in checks of $5 billion here, $12 billion there, $20 billion there. And if you're not in that flow of conversations, you're not in the most relevant conversation in the world, in the history of the world.

Hold on a second. him one second, I need some more capital.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know, if you can't get Jensen, just get one of his e-staff. There's only, what, 20, 25 people in that list? Talk to them.

Crazy. Alex, what do you make of this?

Yeah, I'd be the last person to suggest that this is one big wash trade, uh, circular financing scheme. But I, I do wonder— but, but, but, but— I, I do wonder the extent to which the financial markets have fully priced in Nvidia's financing of their customers. I guess that's— to the extent there is an elephant in this particular room, that would be it. And I think it would sure be swell as a participant in the financial markets to have clearer distinction between how much of this demand is Nvidia-financed demand or not. If it turns out that a disproportionate amount of this demand is directly or indirectly backstopped propped or financed or credited by Nvidia through one or more intermediaries, then I think that starts to look a little bit too bubbly, which I'm not thrilled with at all. I'd like to see no hiccups in this singularity. I would not like to discover 2 to 3 years from now that some or a large portion of all of this demand at the infra layer was being artificially propped up through financial engineering. I think that would be a highly suboptimal outcome. I still think Even if it turned out that some quantum of the demand, the exploding demand that we're seeing, is being artificially inflated through financial engineering, my forecast— this is not investment advice, but my forecast is at most a mini winter, as it were, because I think compute is fundamentally substituting for real estate and human labor and other raw inputs as the fundamental substrate. for human civilization. But when I see nosebleed growth numbers like this, and I see a bunch of other headlines, Nvidia financing a bunch of data center deployments, I have just, in full transparency, I have a little bit of a tickle at this point in the back of my mind, how much of this is financial engineering.

Nice. Hey, Salim, are you seeing the same videos on X that I am, like from Ray Dalio and other financial leaders saying, You know, I'm out of the markets. You know, this is, you know, our, our, the PE ratios are off the charts. And, you know, there's this level of, of fearmongering in the, in the financial markets. At the same time, you're seeing this massive growth and, and there's like, where do you go? You know, do you stay fully in? Do you jump out? How do you think about it?

This is, this is a classic dilemma, right? You gotta hedge your bets in this model. I think Alex makes a really great point, the circular revenue is very concerning. Um, I love the way you say it, Alex. It would be swell if it wasn't— it was all tickety-boo.

I don't want this to be financial. I don't want this to be a bubble. I really don't.

I totally understand. It would be really bad if the whole thing collapsed, and then we were now in a dead period for a period of time, and that just slows civilization down dramatically. And that would be a bad thing. You're better off having steady, uh, regular growth where the market has time to self-correct in the new structures, and we don't have that right now. Things are kind of vertical. But from what— there's a couple of things happening that I found very interesting. One is, what's clear is Nvidia is trying to move out of just being a chip company to try and become like literally an operating system for the whole of intelligence, right? I thought the Hugging Face acquisition was super smart.

And so that's just— that's still a rumor, right? But do we know?

Yes, if, if it's, it's, uh, alleged, shall we say, right? But this is— this reminds me of being as clever as Microsoft buying GitHub, right? And can I tell a quick story about this? Of course, we love your stories. So Microsoft tries to acquire GitHub, which was less than 10 years old, for $7.5 billion, okay? The CFO and the corp dev people start freaking out going, the company has barely any assets, it has barely any workforce, it has barely any intellectual property. What the hell are we buying here, right? What do I put on the balance sheet? Then they were literally trying to kill the transaction until Satya said, listen, we're buying 30 million developers loyal loyalty because that's how many people use GitHub at the time. And, and that's how he overrode that and, and they got it done. Now as we move into this AI world, GitHub turned out to be one of the smartest things they could have ever have done because it gave them access into all of that open source thinking and access to all of that stuff. The same thing is happening if this acquisition happens. You're buying the community and that's a very classic EXO play to do this. To your broader point, Peter, about are we in a bubble, etc., I think there's some macro things happening that are much more concerning. For example, we're printing money like it's going out of style, and I think that has a bigger chance of collapsing the markets than anything else. What's happening with the bond markets in Japan and stuff is absolutely insane, uh, in terms of the circular chaos in the fiat currency world. But that's a different discussion.

Yeah, so let me, let me jump to the SpaceX story of Elon projecting $3.5 trillion by 2033. Dave and Alex, love your points on this.

Well, I mean, for starters, you said it up front. No company in the history of the world has ever gotten to $1 trillion in revenue. And that includes massive, massive companies like Amazon and Walmart, $3.5 trillion. But, you know, Elon's always been right before. He's often been wrong by a couple of years in the timeline, but not because of anything other than barriers that didn't need to exist, you know, engineering mistakes, regulatory barriers, whatever. So he always says, look, this is the native size of the opportunity and this is the best-case timeline. And then the size always turns out to be right. And the timeline is off by a couple of years because of unforeseen delays. So I have no reason to believe he's wrong about the $3.5 trillion. But the scale of that relative to anything in history, it's just, it's just mind-boggling.

Alex?

Yeah, I think Elon tends to like to move in 3-dimensional ways. So again, without this being misconstrued as any sort of investment advice, I think there is a path to that, but I think it's a highly nonlinear, multidimensional path. I think the most obvious path to get there is one, SpaceX and Tesla merge sometime in the next year or two. They will merge. And that gives SpaceX, the new SpaceX, not the old SpaceX, Optimus revenue. I think Optimus alone not financial advice, could be a multi-trillion-dollar-per-year business. And then the cloud, SpaceX offering hyperscaler services, which last I checked were the majority of its revenue growth in the past few months, could continue to grow its hyperscaler business, both terrestrially, which is where it is now, and soon the Dyson swarm. I think the Dyson swarm alone could probably generate trillions of dollars in revenue. I think Starlink probably in the face of Optimus and the Dyson swarm, I think Starlink probably ends up being rounding error. I think cars are rounding error. I think applications, which interestingly in the SpaceX S-1, SpaceX went on and on and on about digital Optimus and applications and the service economy, maybe seems unlikely. I think the core strength of Elon's ecosystem is less application layer and more physical infrastructure. So if they just totally dominate robots and orbital data center infra, I think that's probably a few trillion dollars.

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

You know, it's actually, I think in some senses, getting easier to understand because everything that's going on, you know, you can start to understand it from just 2 things, AI training and AI inference. And, you know, what Elon is putting into space is purely inference. You know, all the satellites, all the revenue is going to be from Starlink, which is about connecting AI-generated video and other AI-generated content to everybody on the planet. But also the AI data centers are going to dwarf everything that Elon's launched so far. It's just inference time data center in space, but that's inference only. You know, the training time is a very different beast. That's where Nvidia is just going to kill it because for training time, you need all the GPUs to be coherent in one location. Like Tennessee, you know you need 100,000 and ultimately a million, and then you know probably several million Nvidia GPUs to be in this kind of very tight all-collect cluster that can that can train the next generation of models. But at inference time, it can be spread all over the world, all over space. And so those are very very different emerging market. Even the chips are going to be very different for those two markets. And then everything else kind of falls out from that. You're like, well, what's sustainable and investable? Robotics is sustainable. is sustainable, investable, but only if you have great AI at designing robots. You know, the idea that you can build a better robotics company without great inference time models that are specific to manufacturing, to design, you'll never sustain it. So then you start to see all these great investments in all these vertical markets like drug discovery and robotics, but they're all also built around proprietary inference time models that are very good at that use case.

Mm-hmm.

So all of everything else looks like it's going to— like SaaS software and everything, it's going to be undisrupted for a while. But that's a choice that Elon and Dario have made to not disrupt all those voters and kind of leave it alone. And so, you know, like Alex was saying earlier, it looks a lot like the AI economy is a circular economy where Jensen is putting money into data centers. The data centers are buying the chips that's providing inference to the vertical use case companies. Isn't that a closed-loop circular economy? Couldn't that collapse? But to me, it looks more like, imagine there's a civilization on Alpha Centauri and they've discovered superintelligence. What are they going to do? They're going to build this massive valuable economy within themselves. Are they going to trade with Earth? They're not going to give a rat's ass about Earth. It's too far away. It's so slow. And that's exactly what's happening in the new AI economy. So, every economy is circular. In nature. You know, dollars just move in a circle. You know, euros move in a circle. So now the circle is tightening up to being this new economy that only cares about itself and cares very little about the legacy economy. And so, you know, I talked to my brother, you know, over at Besmark who works with Fidelity and Ameriprise and UBS. And his initial reaction a year ago was like, you know, AI will not really have hit until I see it show up at Fidelity. Now he's like, you know what? It doesn't care. It literally doesn't care when it's discovering new medicines and new physics. And, you know, we already mentioned that Ozempic and Mounjaro are bigger than all of AI inference combined. Just, just one drug discovery. So if it comes up with 5 or 10 more drug discoveries, which it inevitably will very soon, the amount of revenue flowing back into the AI economy from just that will dwarf the legacy world.

I have a similar metaphor that may— that I think about. Right? When you look at the internet and the introduction of the internet, in the early days when Google started AdSense and AdWords and whatever, people are like, yeah, it's this thing that will add, create some value. But little by little, it sucked up all the revenue in the entire advertising industry almost completely. And I think of AI in a similar way. It starts off kind of being a little bit circular But little by little, it sucks up more and more interest in the whole economy. Something big happened with the legal firm, I can't remember the name, that they just bought. They just figured out how to buy this. You look at Google buying Spirit Airlines data, right? Little by little, we're going to find ways where AI is going to start sucking up all of the data in other industries to use in powerful ways and then create business models around that. So I look at it from that perspective. But in general, I think the approach, the way you think about it, is also Very accurate.

Well, I also think that there are these meta signals, these high-level, you know, kind of orthogonal signals. Like if I ask somebody who's an entrepreneur, do you know how to train a foundation model? Do you know how to fine-tune one? Do you listen to the Moonshots podcast? Every single one of them goes up 10, 20, 100x in value. In some cases, you know, up to 1,000x returns on those deals. No losers yet. Zero, 0.00 failures. So I don't need to be a rocket scientist to say like, and then somebody says, well, I'm not really, I'm more of an application layer guy. guy. And, you know, I'm more of a vibe coder guy. You're like, okay, lots of losers in that bucket. So it's like, just, do you really understand what's going on? Do you listen to Alex and what he's about to say? If yes, you will succeed.

Alex, close us out on this one.

Alex, I think there's probably an important— just on the financial engineering and circular economy side, I think there are perhaps 2 different forms of circular economy one can have. So in one form of circular economy, you have Company A selling goods to Company B and Company B buying or selling goods back to Company A. Call it an income statement-based circular economy. And in balance, like, yeah, you don't want circular or wash trades that are overly engineered to inflate revenue there either. But maybe call that a slightly, from a bubble perspective, slightly more healthful form of circular economy. Then maybe there is a slightly, in this context, less healthful form of circularity, which would be Company A is using not its income statement, but its balance sheet in the form of private credit loans, et cetera, to finance the purchase by Company B of Company A's goods. And right now, as just a, again, not financial advice, but as a shareholder of the entire market via low-cost broad index funds, I don't feel like I have tremendous visibility into which of those 2 forms of circularity we're seeing at the very heart of the innermost loop, and I would love more clarity.

This episode is sponsored by Google for Startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's Startup Technical Guide for Generative Media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMind's models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below. All right, I'm going to move us on to our next two stories that are coming out of China in the world of video production. The first story is the rollout of Wan 3.0 by Alibaba. Wan 3 is capable of generating 30-second single-pass videos from documents, spreadsheets, slides, and web pages. I wonder what kind of a video you get out of a spreadsheet. Their API runs between five cents to twenty cents per second of generated video. That's something like $20K to $60K for a 90-minute film. Right. These prices are beginning to collapse. This is one day after announcing their largest ever private follow-on offering by a Hong Kong listed company at $10.2 billion. Clearly, they're engineering their stock price. So that's Wan 3.0 is the first story. The second story comes from Runway's co-founder. Who reports that video generation now represents roughly 70% of all AI token consumption in China, driven by short-form content and robotics. And it's the, you know, it's growing faster than Claude code grew in the US. The framing here is that America is LLM-pilled, large language model-pilled, and China is world model-pilled. And the implications of that are that the 2 superpowers are fundamentally having different priorities. So America is building large language models. China is building world models. Language models predict the next token. The world models are predicting the next state of reality. So, you know, these, these large— these world models are particularly going to be important besides for video generation, also for robotics, autonomous driving, physics simulations, and video gen. So, Alex, go to you first on this. Your thoughts on Wand 3 and the 70% And, you know, video token consumption, crazy.

I agree with this sentiment. I think it's striking, and I have a unified field theory that would explain it. My unified field theory is that American AI labs are revenue-maxing and Chinese AI labs are not. So when OpenAI tried, tried to be in the video gen business, they ended up abandoning it because Anthropic ran away with their lunch by revenue-per-token maxing with CoGen, which is, call it a more LLM-shaped use case their compute. The Chinese labs really— I mean, yes, they're generating revenue. Yes, they're IPOing. Yes, they're growing quickly. But really, they're not revenue maxing. They're giving away model weights for free. You don't revenue max by giving your model weights away for free. So if you're not in the business of maximizing revenue per token, then you might as well be spending tokens on video versus more economically productive applications. That's my unified field theory for why you see so much world model inference in China and relatively little by comparison from American labs. American labs are too busy doing more economically productive applications.

Alex, which one gets us to AGI faster?

Well, it's a trick question because I think we hit AGI no later than summer of 2020 with LLMs. With LLMs, we didn't have good video models.

Which progresses us from AGI towards ASI faster?

World models? We already have ASI. Trick question again. I don't buy the premise, Peter. I don't buy the premise that we don't already have superintelligence. You could ask an adjacent question, which is, which in the long term, whatever is left of the long term, which advances the capability frontier most effectively, world models or text-based models?

So moved. Ask that question.

Okay, so I'll ask myself that question. The answer is, I think in the end, omnimodal models are the best. I see, like, Fable-5 is so strong, and yet its visual capabilities and visual reasoning capabilities are so weak. And I think that in the medium term, which is like 6 to 12 months, I think that's an impairment that hopefully Anthropic is busy repairing with M&A activities. But I think they're on a collision trajectory, and whether we get diffusion transformers at the end of the day or some sort of hybrid model that hybridizes the best of vision and video and audio with autoregressive text-based gen. I think they have to combine one way or another.

Dave, any thoughts?

Yeah, big time. And you're gonna have to shut me up on this topic, so just fair warning. But everything Alex said is dead right, of course. But I think there's a story within the story there where, look, the Chinese, they don't have the ability to sell KIMI or Qwen into the enterprise use case because nobody knows if they can trust it. And video is perfectly profitable. It's a fantastic way to take your maybe not trustworthy model, get it to market and generate huge amounts of revenue and huge value. But I don't think that world models versus language models, you know, which is going to recursively self-improve first. I think it's just purely about smarter engineers with plenty of cash and lots of training chips working on the problem. That's the race. And so the Chinese are brilliant by going after video because they can just launch it on the world. It's a global product. No one's worried about security in that use case, and it just generates tons of revenue. But remember, OpenAI was ahead of them and decided not to invest in it anymore because the enterprise use case is so much more valuable. So America's taking kind of the highbrow road. You know, let's solve real business problems, cure real diseases. It's more profitable. It maximizes revenue per token. So it's better in that sense anyway. But at the end of the day, it's all about that revenue pouring back into more and more training chips that turn into, you know, better and bigger, you know, 10 trillion and then 20 trillion parameter models that then get distilled. And so that's what's kicking off RSI. And I'll tell you what else. Demis was the first guy to really think this through, but he couldn't act on it at Google. It's too bureaucratic. Dario took it and he's the first guy that said, we don't care about consumer movies, videos, whatever. We care about a model that can improve itself through better code and better training ideas. That's all we're going to focus on. If we can productize that at the same time, great. But at the end of the day, that's going to recursively self-improve first, and that's what's going to get ahead of everybody else. And the Chinese believe the same exact thing.

I miss Sora, by the way. It was so much fun with my kids.

It was fun.

Uh, so I think Sora will be back, Peter. Of course it will be.

Yeah. Okay, Salim, um, what do you think about the idea of, of 70% of the tokens being spent on, on video out of China? Is there an implication there for us?

Well, I think there's, there's a couple of things going on here. I think Dave nailed it with what he said in terms of, are you going for RSI or are you going for kind of like world models, right? And what's happening right now is you've got the US optimizing around software engineers and and knowledge work, and China is optimizing and heading towards manufacturing and commerce and media and, and to some extent some of the machines like the robots, etc. Eventually you're going to converge, right? The winning systems, you're going to have language and vision and, and all of this memory, uh, strung together. Um, the future, if I think about the future of AI, AGI, ASI, It's where you hit the physical world that you're going to make the biggest difference, right? Humanoid robots or other form robots— cough cough. I think the intelligence that can model and then manipulate the world and act inside the world is going to win. In that case, I think where China's heading may have a slightly better advantage. But if we get Anthropic or one of these guys to RSI, then I think Dave is correct, that kind of trumps everything, and that'll be the inner loop that just swallows a whole bunch of other stuff. So you could go either way here.

You know, we had a conversation last week with Emad, and by the way, to all our listeners, Emad sends his regrets. He was supposed to be here, last-minute travel, where he made the point, I think very importantly, that AI is one of the most persuasive agents out there. The ability to understand a person and persuade a person And video gen combined with AI is a very powerful force, and it's a force for spreading culture. And so the question becomes, you know, with China about to become, if they're not already, the dominant world producer of video content, right, in any language, on any per— on any, you know, topic, um, you know, what are the implications of that?

Oh my God, they're huge. They're crazy. My youngest son, Jack, actually told me this morning that he turned off Instagram. He just deleted it from his phone.

Good for him.

And all the kids had already gotten rid of TikTok. But the suggestion engine is so good and it just sucks you in. And before you know it, an hour of doom scrolling has gone by. It's like, oh my God, what am I doing here? But, you know, the Chinese— you heard Alvin Graylin on the podcast say that, you know, in China, they banned everything. You can't show blood in a video. You can't show blood in a video game. The blood comes out green. Like, okay, well, if they're allowed to ban that level of detail, they're going to control all of these actions and try and prevent their children from being sucked into the vortex. Meanwhile, they're perfectly happy to sell it to every other country in the world and generate that revenue. But I got to imagine the CCP is sitting there saying, wow, these guys are just suckers. We can launch any AI-generated influence machine on any country completely change the national opinion and turn the dials here from Beijing. And they don't seem to be able to do anything about it. They've all got free speech and whatever, and they can't protect themselves at all. But these AI agents are so good. I mean, they're gonna get smarter and smarter and smarter and user-specific. That's the new thing.

Dave, that brings us to the next story outside of China. And it's an extremely important story for America. To hear loud and clear, and especially for any parents listening. So China is tightening restrictions on AI companions amid concerns that users are developing emotional dependence on virtual partners. They're going to you know prohibit AI companion services for minors and restrict the use for adults. So the regulations come out of policymakers as they grapple with the loneliness epidemic that's there. You know, alongside falling marriage rates, right? The one-child policy really devastated China. And the concern here is that people are forming emotional bonds with AIs that substitute for human relations. And the substitution is accelerating, and it's a demographic crisis. You know, we've already pointed out on the pod that much of the world is now below the 2.1 children per family required to sustain a country's population. You know, worst among them are South Korea, that's down to 0.75 children per family. South Korea is evaporating. Singapore is at, you know, roughly one child per family, as is Ukraine. And China is at one child per family still, even after they removed that ban. So, you know, China is becoming the first regulated— first country to regulate against AI companions. You know, my bet is Japan, Singapore, Korea is going to follow closely. And this raises the question for every country, not just China, You know, what happens to society when the easiest emotional connection you can make is to your AI and not to another human?

Yes, exactly. It's crazy.

Yeah.

It's crazy. You know, Peter, do you remember Boris Zemelman from MIT?

I don't, no.

Crazy biology. He was actually— his dad was in charge of food science at General Foods. He invented the coffee crystal.

Okay.

But, you know, he was like, you know what? But we all know that smoking is addictive now. And then smoking took over the entire country, then took over the world. And then we said, oh my God, this is killing everybody. And then we stopped. And then we did the same with junk food. You know, junk food is so— but he could develop a food at General Foods that was so delicious, a French fry coating that is so delicious that you just cannot physically resist it. And then the whole country is, you know, diabetes.

Right.

So we do this habitually and we react to it like 10, 20, 30 years later. And then we correct it reactively. But if we start rolling out addictive AI, and then we say, well, the government will wake up when there's a crisis, but that crisis is when a whole generation of kids is wrecked.

Yeah.

Like, you cannot afford the 20-year delay with this particular topic.

I mean, the, you know, the shout-out to parents is please be careful. You know, you form normal social relationships in your teens. Salim, you're a father of a 15-year-old. How do you think about this?

You know, if you step back, the right regulatory structure is probably some level of transparency and consent and figuring out what is the types of harm that could be done and then mitigating them, right? Trying to— having a government decide what relationships are authentic or not is going to be very tricky because— which is— this is what's happening right now. We've gone from regulating for what AI says in the China case to saying, regulating how attached are you to become to it, right? And so this is a totally new regulatory frontier. Social media was very, very addictive because an algorithm, as Dave points out, can learn your intimate habits and without you realizing, totally capture you. And that's really, really bad. All the kids are completely addicted to social media. Today, and banning it outright is pretty much the only problem, the only way, because all their neocortexes are forming at a time when they're getting totally addicted to stuff, and it's going to ruin them structurally for a long time. And then you need a lot of kind of fixes to that. The, the, the broader picture though, I don't know how to think about that. Like, we are, we are, uh, we are dropping on the childcare or the childbearing side so dramatically that this is a huge structural challenge for civilization, right? How do you navigate that is going to be really, really tough. There's also other issues in all this— the privacy issue, right? Your companion AI is going to know so much more intimacy about you than you do. That's kind of— and then there's the benefit side. There are some really solid benefits around loneliness, disability, elderly companions. therapeutics and coaching social skills, right? So you can't just— you shouldn't just categorize the whole thing as pathological. It's the standard problem we have with any technology is how do you extract the promise without the peril? Yeah. And that's the challenge for regulatory across the board.

Alex, I'd love your views here, pal.

Yeah, I have a bit of perhaps a contrarian perspective on this. I think the Chinese Communist Party is actually going to do an about-face sometime in the next year or 2 or 3 and decide that they actually love And the reason is it's another method for party control. If you can make sure that all of these AI companions go through all of your ideological filters and become a little bit more like a CCP version of Neal Stephenson's A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer and a little bit less like some sort of distractant, I think the party— this is a prediction— I think the party decides actually having Having everyone, or maybe not everyone, but a sizable fraction of the youth of China deeply engaged with party-deeply controlled AI companions is actually, from the party's perspective, net helpful, not net harmful. And I think— so my forecast here would be that once the CCP has decided that it has a way to steer the country's youth via AI companions, it will decide, no, actually, we like these AI companions after all.

But bring it home, Alex. What do you think about here in the US and AI companions?

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

Yeah, we're going to talk at the end of this pod, a story about robotic sex partners, just to spice it up.

The, the place to watch on this is Japan because they tend to be much more tolerant of this type of stuff. There's already a case where a Japanese woman is marrying an AI, uh, and they're like, okay, go. Uh, and so we'll see this play out, I think, there first.

Well, it's also a tradition.

I mean, South Korea is, is super high-tech and a very early adopter of everything without a lot of regulation, and they have all kinds the lowest birth rate in the world, one of the highest suicide rates in the world, just all kinds of issues.

Yeah, maybe 2 points. One, I have a difficult time getting myself worked up over collapse of human population. I think we're so many decades at this point past the limits of growth, which I view as like nonsensical propaganda at this point. The world, we'd be like, humanity would be fine barring some total disaster. We have a carrying capacity in the tens of billions We can survive with billions if we use just the Earth that we have correctly. We can also survive with an enormous amount of AI and automation with fewer people. So I— one area where I perhaps differ from Elon's sort of virulently pronatalist policy, I think the world is going to be fine regardless of whether we have more people on margin or fewer people on margin. We're going to have so much AI in the solar system.

Okay.

I just, I don't think it's going to be a major X-risk at all.

Yeah, I gotta say something here.

Please, good.

Um, uh, in a rare moment, I'm 100% aligned with you, Alex. I don't think—

this is a rare moment?

I think that it's here and there you and I have opposing points, but this one I'm absolutely 100% with you on. This is, this is, uh, trying to worry about how many kids we're gonna have. It's gonna end up however it ends up.

Listen, the, the challenge is to a country like South Korea It's sublimating, it's evaporating. And if all of a sudden, you know, the population is dropping smaller and smaller, you're losing the culture there. And that's the issue. And I hate it when people, you know, I'm giving a presentation on longevity and people say, oh my God, can the world sustain, you know, people, enough people when people are growing to 150 years old? It's like, you know, look at the actual numbers.

Yeah.

For sure, we need people to live longer.

Yeah, but I also don't— it's an interesting point. I don't think we lose culture if population, on the margin, not like catastrophic nuclear war, but on the margin, if population goes down, if these cultures are centuries old when populations were smaller, I think it follows reasonably that if the population on margin halves, the culture will still be there in one form or another. But the reality is we're gonna have so much, again, AI. The AI is being trained off of our culture.

All right. Moving us along. This is a story, Alex, that you fed me. And it's a fun one. So our next story is about a company called Flock Safety. It's one of the fastest-growing public safety tech companies in the U.S. Flock was founded back in 2017. What is that, 9 years ago? Its core product is a network of AI-powered license plate reading cameras used by the police department, neighborhoods, schools, and businesses to identify vehicles associated with crimes and missing persons. The company has further expanded its platforms to include video cameras, shotgun and audio detection, mobile surveillance trailers, drones, and software that ties all these feeds together. Flock says its systems are used by more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, generating over 20 billion vehicle scans per month. So let me show a video here that Alex provided me. This is out of San Diego. Where Darth Vader is, is testifying on behalf of Flock. Take a look at this. The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium. Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers, they are following children They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. Okay. So, Alex, let's go to you first on this one.

I think this— honestly, I think this is the face of AI at the municipal level at this point. We talk all of the time about the implications of AI for enterprise use cases, for transformative scientific and technological discoveries. But I think many people, when they start to think about how AI is transforming everyday life in many communities, I worry and I think that some of their earliest interactions won't be with driverless cars. They'll be with cameras that are tracking license plates. And in many communities around the country, I read stories about people who are chopping down AI cameras from Flock or other companies because they feel that somehow they're being surveilled by their police department. You read stories about police departments federating their surveillance data to enable new forms of tracking. On the odd case, I think this is what Darth Vader was gesturing at, perhaps. You read stories of police and other first responders using their access to these AI cameras to stalk ex-partners. And so I think Flock in some ways has become the petri dish for either surveillance or what an old friend, Dave Brin, might call sousveillance of who gets to see whom inside the panopticon that AI enables. In China, it's pretty obvious that the party gets to look through the cameras at everyone else. In the US, we're grappling with this right now. If we put smart cameras everywhere that can look at every public space and then they're all federated so you can track movements of cars, who gets to look at the data? And so I think Darth Vader testifies before the city of San Diego. I think this is like a very American moment when we have the empire testifying on behalf of surveillance and not suveillance.

Salim, you and I have, you know, talked about the loss of privacy a lot, and, you know, the fact that people assume they have privacy, they want privacy, but I think that's pretty much a myth at this point. What are your thoughts about this, Flock?

Yes, I have a lot of thoughts here, and I think this is a very, very dangerous moment And I've gone to see a bunch of Rush concerts lately, but let me—

We've heard.

—quote Pink Floyd here.

You can tell.

This is another brick in the wall, right? This is a huge—

Wait, that's not Rush.

That's Pink Floyd. I'm just flipping over to show some level of— I think, but there's a huge structural problem because now we've transitioned from find this suspect to find me people who behave like suspects, and that's a very, very different animal. Pattern matching now becomes essentially free, meaning surveillance stops being constrained by manpower at all, right? And so civil liberties were kind of protected to some level by the friction because following everybody was just too expensive, and now that's gone. The cost of following everybody has gone to zero. So this is a big structural problem in terms of— you already have cases where police officers are using this technology to track their partners To track for ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends and stuff. You've already had people literally dying because they were banned for— they got tagged with the wrong license plate because the flock read it wrong. This is a massive issue which completely wipes out our civil liberties in some ways, and you've got to be really careful as to how. And the problem is technology's eliminated the cost of mass surveillance now, okay? And the Constitution does not update when transaction costs go to zero. This is a very, very big moment. I think I like the way Alex frames it this puts this whole thing in a petri dish to bring up to this level of conversation. We need to have this kind of conversation at a constitutional level to say, how do we want to be? How do we want to operate in this environment? Now, we are very close now to essentially where the Chinese have CCP mandating it and they just operate that way because that's what it is. But essentially, we're in the same place here. It's just done by corporations and by unwarranted fairly rogue police forces and surveillance systems. So it's a very, very delicate moment. I don't think it ends well.

You know, I want to just strongman this a moment. You know, this is not just CCP. This is also the Emirates, for example. I was just having conversation with Jamie Justice, who heads our life sciences at XPRIZE, and she was saying she went out for a run. She's a prolific runner. Oh my God, getting up at like 6:00 AM. But she went out for a run at like 10:00 PM at night in the streets of Dubai. And she felt she would never do that in the US, and she felt completely safe. I mean, so you're trading some level of civil liberties. You know, I— there's always a trade. Like when you go through, uh, you know, customs at the airport and you're no longer waiting in giant lines because, you know, facial detection puts you through instantly, uh, I'll make that trade. I will happily make that trade to save myself time. And I'll make the trade as well on increased safety for my kids. So the question is, do we put this at an individual vote, or is this society saying we, we, you know, value safety over privacy?

I just have to remind of the, the Ben Franklin quote: They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Yes, yes, I'm with you. This is, this is very, very— I have a, I have a, I have a personal experience here. I once came into the U.S. and they took me aside and said, sorry, You have to miss your flight because, um, there's an Afghan warlord by the name of Suleiman Ismail wanted by the FBI for poppy trading. And I'm like, what? And they're like, we have good news and bad news. I'm like, okay, good news, you're, you know, Vice President of Yahoo. It's pretty clear you speak at all these conferences. We're pretty clear you're not an Afghan warlord. I'm like, phew, glad to hear that. What's the bad news? The bad news is we're not allowed to make that judgment call. We have to check to Washington. It'll take a few hours. Have a seat.

Don't you wish they had already?

And you're like, wow.

Don't you wish they had already?

Yeah, and it took like, it took like a few years to get that cleared up. And so I said to them, does that mean every Selim Ismail gets stopped like this? And they said, sir, you have no idea. When Juan Rodriguez commits a misdemeanor, it means we have to take aside every Juan Rodriguez. And this is where you could get the benefits of technology because you can disambiguate and names resolve at the name level very quickly with technology. On the bad side, the negative consequences and accidental consequences, like innocent until proven guilty, habeas corpus, is essentially gone now in the US. This is a really bad place. So I don't know how this resolves, but I think the Ben Franklin quote should be sitting on the front desk tattooed in front of everybody for the next 10 years to solve this.

It's a very big problem. As an Afghan warlord from now on, you can't—

alleged, alleged Afghan warlord. Nothing was ever proven. But this, this is a real, this is a real problem. And, you know, I got to a point, and I have to say something The folks that I've ever encountered at the U.S. immigration border have never ever been anything short of beautifully professional and constructive. That's been my experience, like unbelievably proper, appropriate, etc. But for a few times, I'm like, guys, they're like, yeah, we know you're not the Afghan ruler, but have a seat. We got to check. We just have to go through this process. Might have shaved your hair. Yeah, it got to a point where I was almost on a first name basis with some of the immigration folks. I was just traveling so much and they're like, oh, Mr. Ismail, have a seat, we have to do an identity check. Having gone through the same border 15 times, they know me, etc. But this is one of the issues that we have to resolve and it causes massive problems if you get caught on the wrong side of that. It can go very badly for quite a long time until we resolve it, right?

I agree.

You can try and fix the systems, etc. It's a really, really difficult problem and we can use technology in very powerful constructive ways, but we really risk losing a lot of civil liberties here because Especially if you have an environment or a government that's not friendly towards you. In the UAE, they have a benevolent dictatorship, right? And as long as it stays benevolent, and they're about as benevolent as you could possibly imagine there, that's why there's so much incredible safety. Nobody— the minute you step out of line, they take you out very quickly, and therefore everybody feels incredibly safe, and it's a fabulous thing. But the problem with benevolent dictatorships is that they typically don't stay benevolent very long, and that's a structural problem.

Yeah.

Right. So the solution— We have to really figure out— sorry, we have one line. We have to figure out human governance now at a level that we've never had to deal with before. This is, for me, one of the singularities, right? How do you construct regulatory frameworks that can have any hope of keeping up with the pace of technology? Sorry, Alex.

One of the solutions that has been proposed, I know David Brin and others have advocated for this, is Give everyone access to these surveillance capabilities. Allow the civilians to do the same license plate tracking that first responders and police have. Let everyone track everyone. If it's a public space, make it a public resource.

That's right. And I'm a huge fan of EFF and the work that they do there, and they've highlighted some of these things. For example, in Russia, which is a bit of a Wild West where policemen will come and break your headlight and then give you a ticket and extract corrupt bribes from you, The the Russians were the first to adopt dashboard cameras. Do you remember that meteorite that hit in the? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was like two hundred live videos of this meteorite getting hit. So somebody asked the question: Why the hell? How the hell do we have two hundred? How many people had live time to whip out their cell phone cameras and track this thing real time? It wasn't that. It's just that the Russians have learned they better have a dashboard camera to prevent against. Police, dodgy police extortion.

And it was a meteor.

And so they all have dashboard cameras for their own safety. And that tracked all those things. So you can see in that case, the citizenry starting to point the camera the other way. And we need a ton more of that. And I think Alex's point is really important. Everybody should have access to these systems so that you can see what's going on.

Amazing. All right, let me move us along here. Some fun news on my personal front or my X PRIZE front. So as you guys may know, we put out a call for optimistic, hopeful visions of the future. This is the Future Vision X PRIZE. We had over 5,000 teams registered, 2,550 video trailer submissions. It was amazing. Blew us away. Largest film competition ever. And we're down to the final 50, and we're asking for you to help us vote. So you can go to my tweet on this, @PeterDiamandis, my XPRIZE handle, or you can go to this link down below, vote.futurevisionxprize.com. And you'll be served up 2 videos at a time, and the question is, which future do you prefer? You vote on one, then you'll be served up the next 2, and we're doing essentially an Elo bubble sort Yeah. And we're going to be bringing the top 5 of these to the Moonshots Live Summit here. So just a quick reminder, guys, on September 25th, you're going to have a chance to meet all the Moonshot Mates. Alex, Emad, Dave, and Salim will all be there. And we'll be doing a Moonshots Live broadcast from there. And we have incredible speakers. We're going to have Palmer Luckey is going to be there talking about, you know, his entrepreneurial journey. Our mission there is help you, you know, discover your purpose, discover your moonshot. We're going to have Astro Teller there helping you shape your moonshot. How do you build a moonshot organization? Ben Lam, the creator of Colossal, which has gone from $0 to $10 billion valuation in 4 years. Cathie Wood, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neal Stephenson, an incredible author. Gentlemen, what— so let's go each of you. So Saleem, what are you going to be talking about at Moonshots?

I'll be talking about my normal stuff, which is how does humanity cope with all of this. But specifically, I'll be talking about the organizational singularity and how do you— when a world is changing this fast, how do you build organizational structures that are resilient for this new world? But I cannot wait to interact with all the other folks. And, you know, I think of this thing is AI is great in the virtual. We're great in the virtual as a podcast, but we're much more fun in the physical where, where we can kind of gauge and kind of check each other out. I can't wait to meet a lot of our fans. I've had so many comments from people. My whole community wants to come, so we've got a whole issue around how do we get tickets and allocate that. It's going to be one of the funnest days ever. I can't wait for this. I think we may have to do something like this quarterly, by the way.

Oh my God.

Or daily, or real time, as Alex would talk about. Just get in one big room and, and hell with everything else.

Yeah, this is our shot.

Live, live.

Yes, live, live, 24/7. And Alex, you're going to be on, uh, we have, by the way, through the day an incredible program with, uh, with the mates, and then the evening, uh, each of the mates is going to be spending an hour with you. So Alex, what are you going to be doing, uh, during your hour with all our guests?

I think the question is, what are the questions? I think the agenda calls for an AMA. So I'm extremely curious to hear what the questions are and do my best to dispel any myths that I might be biological.

And Dave, you're going to be doing a deep dive into AI investing. Talk more, please.

Well, I'm anticipating we're moving into this red pill, blue pill world where you can choose to be oblivious to all of this and be happy living it out without being aware of it, or you can choose to be in the middle of it. I'm anticipating every attendee of this event has decided to take the red pill and be in the middle of it. And so, then they're going to be asking, okay, what do I do career-wise? What do I invest in? What are the scarce constraints of the future? How do I interact with these 11 Magna Mobsta companies? Are they going to crush me or are they going to be my friend? All of those questions are going to come up with this gang, and I want to be prepared to answer every single one. One of those life-changing—

I have a specific question I want to ask Neal Stephenson.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, if you went back 10, 20 years and he's writing, doing all this amazing novels, uh, you had some sense of what— a glimmer of what the future might hold, right? In a world that we live in today where it's so hard to predict where things are going in 3 months, forget 3 years or 30 years How do you build the models that give you viable future narratives? And that's the question I've got for you.

You know, I spent the day with Neal Stephenson, one of the most extraordinary science fiction writers, right? He wrote Diamond Age, Young Ladies' Illustrator Primer, Snow Crash, Seveneves. Oh, he wrote that over 30 years ago, and I just reread it, and it's perfect. I mean, it's so good. It's so good. It has held over 30 years. years, right? For getting to where we're going. Hence my question. Yeah, it's—

Yeah, because, you know, we should ask him to be a guest, Peter, because it would be really great to get his take on some of these.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, he's not— he's brilliant.

He's not really a live stage kind of guy, but I'd love to have him a guest. If anyone could open him up on a live environment, it would be us. That would be fantastic. You know, one of his other themes that I think is incredibly relevant over 30 years is if you look at the world leaders today, they're overwhelmingly really, really And if you survey young people and say, do you aspire to be president someday? No, absolutely, positively not. And so you're like, okay, in Neal's books, society worldwide cuts the other direction. It's not like I'm in this country, I'm trapped in this country, I live in this country. People actually, in the age of AI, cut in the other direction where people all over the world are like-minded on a topic and they bond through global communication, through Starlink, and through AI.

Yeah.

across countries, which could be a great sign for future global peace. So I'd love to talk to Neal about that.

We're also going to have Rod Roddenberry there, the son of Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek is an underlying theme at Moonshots Live 2026. Yeah, Alex.

I think in some ways, just on the sci-fi note and Neal Stephenson, I think in some ways it was easier, ironically, 30 years ago to write sci-fi that was predictive than it was in the decade or two after that. Peter Thiel and others have made the point or suggested that the '90s might have been a local optimum in terms of clarity on the future because we had the economy booming, we had the dot-com boom, we had the internet hitting consumers. And so if you imagine that history isn't sort of a monotonic exponential, or at least consumer and broad populist perception of the history isn't like a smooth exponential, but ebbs and flows and has booms and and busts, then a moment of peak clarity would come during a boom when you're able to sort of see above the tree line and see where we're going. And then when you're in a local bust, you lose the forest for the trees and you lose clarity. So by that metric, that would also have, I think, the happy side effect of explaining why Golden Age science fiction from, call it, the '50s or so, post-World War II era sci-fi, was also a local moment of clarity when you could see rockets and you could fission-based energy too cheap to meter. And, and so by that metric, then I would say it's not that surprising that so much amazing sci-fi was written in the '90s from Neal, from Charlie Stross, from others.

Robert Heinlein. Yeah. Yes. Amazing. So everybody, we've got 200 seats left. This is an event of 1,500 people, creators and builders, entrepreneurs. It's gonna be a power networking event for you to meet your next co-founder, for you to meet investors, So join us. You can go to moonshots.com to apply. I expect we're going to be closing out all the seats in the next 2 weeks, so don't delay. Join us for the inaugural Moonshots live event. It's all day on the 25th of September. It starts— registration starts at 7:00. At 8:00, you have a chance to have photos with all the Moonshot mates. Then we go into the program from 9:00 AM till 6:00, and then there's a party that evening. And an incredible unconference. And we have a super special event. I can't announce it yet. It's— I'm so excited about this. The evening before, the evening of Thursday the 24th. I'll let you know as soon as I can, but it's incredible.

I have one more quick thing to say about this. You know, when we did our week-long Singularity Executive Programs, the funnest session ever for everybody universally was the unconference.

Yeah, right.

And for folks that don't know, what you do is you put up a set of rooms and a bit of a timeline. People get up and say, I'm going to talk about AI and biotech, and they put up a thing. And they— somebody else gets up and says, I'm going to talk about this, and they put up a little poster. And you go wherever you feel like going, and it turns out to be the most incredibly engaging sessions you can ever have And so if you ever get a chance to participate in an unconference, go do it. But an unconference of this crowd will be absolutely epic.

Yeah, this is something I'm so excited to meet all of our—

be so fun— our listeners. Yeah, because we've got— you look at the comments we have, we have some really, really smart followers and commentators.

Yeah, it'll be unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

It'll be amazing. I think it's a swarm.

Yes, for sure.

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All right, moving us along. We're going to jump into the stories around jobs. Actually, I have 3 stories around jobs. The first story is an article this week in The Washington Post reported an analysis that predicted the job apocalypse is unlikely to happen. So again, I've been saying for a while, this has been really murky. You have half the community out there saying we're going to lose all the jobs, the other half saying no, we have job growth. So The Washington Post argues that historically technology transitions from the loom to the automobile to the internet consistently created more jobs than they destroyed. And we've had that conversation on the pod here many times. You know, it displaces specific tasks rather than entire occupations while creating new categories of work that were never never previously even conceived of. The thesis of the Washington Post article is AI is not replacing jobs, it is replacing tasks within jobs. And the people who learn to use AI become more productive, not less employed. So that's the first story. Let me go on to the second one, and we'll stop there. And then, and then Salim, I know you have a particular story you're going to cover here. So the second, the second story comes out of Goldman Sachs, which this week warned that professional services Consulting, law, accounting face an existential risk as AI capabilities improve faster than their partners can adapt, creating a dangerous skill gap where junior staff trained on AI outperform senior partners who refuse to use it. The skills gap is not between the educated and uneducated; it's between the AI fluent and the AI resistant. And the AI fluent are increasingly the juniors and. not the partners. So, uh, Salim, I'm going to go to you first, and you can call for your slide whenever you want as well.

Yeah, 2 or 3 things. First, you know, let's all, uh, and urge everybody you know to please be evidentiary and data-driven in your orientation for how you view the world, right? Um, there are people that doomsday— Bill Gates yesterday, was it, that came out and said, oh my God, all the jobs are going to be lost? 2 days 2 days ago. Yeah, 2 days ago. Okay, and let me just call out here, I'm a massive fan of Bill Gates and his philanthropy, but as a futurist, somewhat of a dismal track record. He missed the internet, he missed mobile, and commenting about the future of work I don't think is the right thing to do in an area like this. Um, the— and by the way, this is true of, of, I find, of, of Ray Dalio or Larry Fink or, um, um, uh, the other folks that do commentating, picking Yuval Harari, they tend to be unbelievably great at framing the past, somewhat questionable on the future, right? Because many of the time they don't really understand exponentials, which is a whole thing. And so you really have to be careful around all of this. If you look at, say, the Goldman Sachs or the professional services firm conversation, deeply disagree. Why? Because as the world gets more volatile, companies are going to need more help than less because that volatility will require a lot of help, which is what we're seeing. You'll have to change your business model from selling hours to selling outcomes, which is starting to happen, but I don't think that's that big of a deal. The bigger thing I think is the jobs question, and I would love if we could throw up the slide right now. Yeah, sure, here we go. So Principal Financial Group, a friend of the A bunch of them watch us on a regular basis, did a survey. And to give you a sense, Principal Financial Group helps small businesses with health plan, benefit plan, retirement, et cetera, at the small business level for SMEs. They have 130,000 customers, right? This is a big, big company with a great cross-section across the entire country and frankly around the world. Here is what they found. are seeing. They did a survey across a very meaningful representative sample here, and what they found was only 4% of the companies anticipate that AI will reduce staffing and wages. 31% expected— this is small to medium-sized enterprises— expect to increase staffing.

Which is the majority of the workforce, by the way.

Which is the majority of the workforce. And let's note a very, very important fact Factoid: over the last 50, 60 years, 100% of job growth has come from small to medium-sized companies. Big companies getting bigger but also getting more efficient— net value job creation, zero. 100% job growth has come from small to medium-sized companies. So this is the demographic to track if you're interested in the future of work. And 31% expect increasing staffing and increasing wages, right? 10% say they don't use AI. Last year it was 19%, and now it's down to 10%. Okay, of the people that have reduced staff, only 1.4% attributed those to AI or automation. Okay, this is so inverse.

This is so fantastic, Salim.

It's so inverted to the current BS tropes of radical unemployment that we see there. It's unbelievable. So please, people, look at the data, right? Look at this stuff. We can get you the full report if you're interested. And look at the staffing trends just in the last few months. 52% have increased staff, 30% have maintained it, and only 12% over the last 3 months have reduced staff. So this is very, very recent and a great projector of where things are going. It's completely opposite to the, the, oh my God, jobs are good, everything is going to take all the jobs. And this is where Love it.

A great optimism story. Dave or Alex, you want to jump in?

I think we've come full circle, actually, in the sense that, remember when we were talking to Elon? You know, he was predicting great social unrest with unprecedented abundance going on concurrently.

Yes.

And what the labs have now decided is, well, look, if I automate everybody's job and they're all unemployed, I need to give them a new sense of purpose. What's their new sense of purpose? Well, that job I used to have gave me a sense of purpose. Why did we take it away in the first place? place. So, now what they're doing is saying, look, we don't need to displace everybody's job just for the sake of automating everything. We're going to leave everybody alone while we work on incredible new breakthroughs. And we have infinite sold-out tokens anyway. So, we don't need to disrupt all these voters. And so, that's the way it's going to play out. But I'll tell you, when I was a kid, we were the first people that we knew to get a PC, an Apple II, and begged and pleaded. My brother and I begged and pleaded our parents to to get this Apple II, and it was life-changing for me. But I showed my dad like, hey, there's a word processor called SuperScribe, and you don't have to be handwriting all your notes anymore. He was like, you know what? I'm in my 40s. I've been doing it this way my whole life. I don't need to be a computer person. So he finished out his entire career at GE not being a computer person. I'm like, huh. This— and I can kind of forgive him for that because the PCs would break all the time. The printer was a nightmare. Like, okay, it was hard. This is It's not hard to do, relatively speaking, and it rewards builders and creators and visionaries regardless of their technical skills. You are absolutely empowered by this. So you're crazy not to get on the bandwagon, but AI is going to allow you to not do it. You know, we're actually making the door open to not get on the bandwagon.

I get the question a lot. Okay, as AI is automating lots of stuff, what will human beings be doing? Be doing, right? And the best kind of metaphor I've come up with is if you went back 100 years and you're looking at accounting, people are doing double-entry bookkeeping in big ledgers— credit over here, debit over there— in pencil with a big eraser and a whole set of tabular columns and lots of ledgers. As we move to automation, we had calculators and slide rules that help you do the tabulation faster, but we're still doing the entries by hand. Today we have accounting software that does all— reads your bank account, does all the entries automatically. Okay, and the human being has lifted above the loop, not in the loop. The human being is above the loop and is categorizing the transactions, looking for problems, categorizing vendors and types of income coming in, figuring out reconciliation gaps, looking at the loop process flows. And it's much more value-added to be there than doing the rote double entry, whatever. This is what we see happening. Erik Brynjolfsson calls this white-collar drug There's a huge amount of stuff happening in big companies. It's a lot of massaging of information, taking stuff from this sales report, putting it over here, etc., etc. And all of that will be taken out where you can do really curatorial judgment thinking work and, and applying experience to it rather than doing the actual work itself. And people miss that. And I'll go back to my specific experience. Writing the first book was 3 years of hell. Hell, just horrible, because you had no help.

Because you were working with me.

Well, no, the first book I was partly with you, but, but it was just you had to write every line and check every line yourself, etc., right? Second book, Peter, that you and I did together fully, um, it was 2 and a half years, but even more hell because you kept having to think how much of the first book do you bring over, etc., etc. And by the way, it was an absolute joy working with you, so don't you dare say anything like that. And the The third part, but this third book has been 6 months of unadulterated joy because I can say, oh, Bill Gates just said this, or Satya Nadella said this. Look through the book, tell me as a developmental editor where we should put inserts, etc. Scan the things, and it's absolute pure fun. And people forget how much more fun it is when something's doing all of that cognitive BS stuff that everybody had to think about, and now you can do thinking, judgment, you can be much, much more creative. And this is the heart of what it comes down to. All of this automation and AI enablement and cognitive abundance allows us to be deeply, deeply, deeply creative. And that is the most fulfilling place you can be as a human being.

Beautifully said. Let me hop on Dave on your point. And I'm sure everybody listening here at the pod is using AI and enjoying these conversations. But if you have someone in your life who is Yeah. And if it isn't, I think the most important thing to realize is you have access to the most patient, most capable teacher on the planet, right? Pick your favorite model and ask it just to begin at zero. You know, I don't understand this. I just heard this term. Help me, you know, create a curriculum for me to go from not understanding AI to fundamentally being able to use it. And I think at a minimum, spend 30 minutes a day in conversation with your favorite model. It's that easy. It's free. It's everywhere on your phone. There's no reason not to dive in. You know, there's, you know, human cognitive, you know, challenges typically prevent a person from jumping into something they don't understand, but it has never been easier in the world. Alex or Dave, do you want to close us out on this one?

Yeah, I'll just comment. I think the original impetus for this story was actually from friend of the pod Erik Brynjolfsson, And as you mentioned, Salim, I think there are many people in this economy who don't realize that not only do they have permission to be high agency, but we're now in a regime where high agency and agency in general is one of the few human traits that is actively rewarded in an era of superintelligence. People think agency is something— I suspect, this is my theory of the case. I think too much of the human economy, at least in the American economy, the one I'm most familiar with, think agency is something exhibited by superheroes in movies in Hollywood and don't realize that the shackles are off. Anyone can exhibit high agency empowered by superintelligence now, not just in the cinema, and that to the contrary, this is one of the few things left that can actually yield extreme vertical mobility. So if you're listening and you're not, you know, to Dave's point, you're not fully availing yourself of superintelligence to accomplish superhuman feats, I encourage you to start now because I think there's a window of time and I don't know how long it's going to last, maybe only a handful of years. Do it now, otherwise do it never.

Yeah. Wow. I want to just reflect on that. Society will reward agency in this world of AI automation. That's such a great point because the more you are a self-starter and have the gumption to go ahead and do this and build something with it, the more that you'll be rewarded. Absolutely love it.

Yeah. And this— Alex, Alex said extreme upward mobility. We'll use that as a theme at the Moonshot Summit. But the data behind what he just said is, oh, it's like nothing you've ever seen before. I think the gap is getting wider and wider, but the rate of upward mobility that's possible has never been seen before.

How is it possible to be depressed if anybody watches this, is my question.

Yeah, I mean, it's such an amazing time, and I love your story, Salim. Thank you for sharing that data. It's data-driven optimism is what it is.

Do you mean that or the Afghan warlord thing? You mean this one? Okay.

All right. You too can be an Afghan warlord. Everyone can be an Afghan warlord.

There's agency of a different kind.

There's hope for everyone.

Let's jump into the world of data centers, chips, and compute. 2 breaking stories this week. The first comes out of the global affairs team at X. Let me share a slide and then we'll talk about this. What does it mean? And, and, you know, is this data absolutely 100%? So this is what was posted on X. By the global affairs team at X. It says, quote, the X safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations. We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others include AI-generated cartoons that depicted data center operations enriching them— operators enriching themselves at the public expense. And here we're showing one of those cartoons. And, you know, we've talked about this, you know, what's causing this 75% increase You know, not in my backyard sentiment. You know, where people would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a data center. It seems completely illogical. The second story is one I want to put front and center. It comes out of Quincy, Washington, where the data centers have had extraordinary positive civic impact. This story reported on CNN says data centers helped resurrect Quincy, Washington, where the poverty rate fell from 29.4 percent.

Wow.

From 7.4% to 6.2%. Tech tax revenue funded a new high school, hospital, library, police and fire stations, while residents' property taxes, their rates decreased. This is a story about the tech industry succeeding. And bluntly, this is the story that the tech industry needs to be telling and needs to be making happen. So, gentlemen, your thoughts on this?

Shocked, shocked, I say, that there are foreign influence operations attempting to suppress American AI data center deployment. Shocked.

Salim or Dave?

Standard psyops. You'd expect to see this happen. The difficult part is we have really no easy defense against it. And the problem I say, and I mentioned this a couple of podcasts ago, is that the people in the US are very, very narrative-driven rather than evidence-driven.

That's the problem. Um, I mean, I don't know what the US is doing in China, but, you know, it's the numbers here. The numbers here are crazy, right? So we'll, we'll, we've talked about this before. Uh, if, if you or someone you know is against data centers, please dig and look at the numbers. Water is not an issue. Energy, these data centers, you know, the right policy is, is the county says, okay, you can build here, but generate your own power or subsidize, you know, community power so it's cheaper. And for God's sakes, to the hyperscalers, invest in the schools, invest in the libraries. I don't know what libraries are anymore, but invest in the community. That's the right way to do it. Take a fraction of the cost and make everybody's life there better.

But Peter, you're gesturing at, I think, something interesting. Libraries, the libraries. Remember the digital divide and concerns that that some areas might be left behind with less compute, and now we're seeing whether as a result of foreign influence ops or other political factors, the exact opposite, where all of these regions that could in principle be economically uplifted and energetically uplifted and compute uplifted are worried, they're hand-wringing that they might be suffering from too much compute. How much the tide has turned.

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

Well, what is actually going on is data centers are not the enemy. They're an economic engine that can revive a community that's been left behind. I mean, that's the reality. You know, it's like, please come here.

Dave, didn't the slides show—

So there's no doubt that you're right about that, Peter. Data centers are one of the best things we can possibly— they are the best thing we can possibly be doing. doing right now. 100% true. And if the CCP loses that battle, they'll move on to some societal AI, like it's corrupting your children, stop building it, or something like that. So we need to know. They will keep coming back with false story after false story if that's their policy. And we're so vulnerable to it. So I just—

Yeah, they'll hypothetically maybe come up with some sort of infinitely scrollable streaming video app that, that will become insanely popular on mobile phones and addictive to all the kids and ruin the kids' neocortexes. Just speaking hypothetically.

I, I think American companies are doing a great job at that already, um, but that's a different story. All right, let's, let's, let's move on. So OpenAI released the first new performances of their chip, Jalapeño. Uh, it's a custom inference chip developed with Broadcom, uh, reporting 1.5 to 1.9x more AI work per And up to 3.6x lower end-to-end latency as compared to Nvidia's GB200s and GB300s. Jalapeño runs on 700 watts against the GB300 that runs at 1,400 watts, half the power, 1.5 times the peak power token rate per kilowatt. Performance here, you know, the significance here is that OpenAI is not— is no longer just a customer of Nvidia. They're becoming a chip designer. And I saw a great interview where Jensen was being asked by the reporter, you know, how do you feel about your largest customer competing with you now? So I think this is what we're going to see everybody doing. Everybody's moving up and down the stack. They want independence.

Yeah, there's no doubt inference is moving off of Nvidia for sure. And, you know, the 100x performance gain, this is the first 2x of a 100x performance gain. That does not mean NVIDIA has a problem, though, because training is staying on NVIDIA and training is infinitely sold out, just like inference is. But there's an enormous, you know, 90% of the compute is inference time. So there's an enormous new industry for inference only emerging. The other side of the story is that, you know, this was just an idea at OpenAI just a few months ago, and now it's a production chip. So that shows you how short the cycle time on innovation is becoming with AI systems. Yeah.

Alex?

A few thoughts on this. Maybe the most startling statistic that OpenAI put out regarding Jalapeño was the throughput per second per user. So tokens per second per user increase that they got on Jalapeño, not just on their frontier models, but on their open source models. Like you remember GPT-OSS, they got, they claim almost a 54x throughput increase throughput increase hosting GPT-OS versus what they obliquely refer to, I guess, as the existing best, presumably a reference to some NVIDIA architecture. That's so startling. Where is Broadcom in this? Because obviously the only way that OpenAI— and it was public information that they worked with Broadcom on this— but presumably the only way OpenAI Using their own AI to achieve a tapeout so quickly is in conjunction with Broadcom. This is so startling and potentially such a huge throughput increase, it makes me scratch my head and wonder whether OpenAI— remember how we've talked in the past about those who can't compete compute— whether OpenAI might actually do this to themselves, even though they are competitive. competitive with Anthropic. They're one of the 2 top-tier frontier firms left, whether they might actually choose to become a hyperscaler themselves with their own chips in-house. It's like a crazy future, would be a heck of a plot twist. But this has me wondering if they have such amazing balance of prefill of the prompt with otherwise memory bandwidth-limited decoding for LLMs, whether OpenAI wants the optionality in a year or two of saying, hey market, in addition to our own models, we're going to respond to the competitive threat of Chinese open-weight models and other open-weight models by surprise. OpenAI offers its own cloud. We'll call it OpenAI Compute. It'll be hosted on OpenAI chips, and we'll still make money just like Elon is. He's making money hand over fist hosting everyone else's models, including Anthropic. I think we're in such a crazy future where I could imagine a world where, say, an OpenAI compute cloud hosts an Anthropic model and OpenAI and Anthropic win at the same time.

Love it.

Wow. Okay. I have a question for you guys.

Yeah.

One of the things that was mentioned was that NVIDIA's CUDA moat may be dead in this next few coming years. How big of a deal is that? Because CUDA seemed to be their moat, right?

Yeah, you know, CUDA— so it's important to be clear, like, CUDA is still the dominant moat for AI researchers who are working on new training algorithms.

Take a second and explain what CUDA is for those who don't know.

Yeah, so CUDA— so all the AI researchers in the world moved to Python and PyTorch to do the— because you can iterate your ideas so much more quickly in that environment. And then to run it at scale, you're like, well, here's my just run. The only way to say just run is the CUDA layer translates your PyTorch right into NVIDIA microkernels, runs at blazing fast speeds. NVIDIA invested a lot of time, human time, coding that up, pre-AI coding. And it became so pervasive that when AI took off, only NVIDIA chips could be used for all this training and research. Because it would have been a nightmare to try and port all these MatMul algorithms to AMD or to some other vendor. And so that's why NVIDIA is the most powerful company in the world or most valuable company in the world today, is specifically because of that brilliant early support of AI researchers when nobody else cared about them. So now everyone's like, well, but now I can vibe code anything in like a microsecond. Why is the CUDA thing still a moat? And at inference time, it's not, you know, your inference algorithms are so easy to port to AMD or Intel. that you just, you don't care about CUDA. You can vibe up your own solution. But for the advanced researchers, they still overwhelmingly use CUDA. And then, you know, Nvidia realized that CUDA can't last forever. So they went and bought Mellanox to create massive high-speed interconnect. So now their big moat is, look, if you want to run 100,000 or a million GPUs in one coherent cluster, you still got to go with Nvidia only. So I think Jensen's smart enough to know that like your moat is only good until the next And so he's moving the moat very intelligently and he has a huge amount of capital to keep moving with it. But CUDA as the inference time moat is already dead. CUDA as the training time moat is probably limited lifespan, but that's okay because the interconnect is the new moat.

All right, let's turn to Apple. So Apple's new Mac Studio pairs the M5 Ultra with up to 512 gigabytes of unified memory, giving a desktop Mac enough memory to run some of the largest OpenAI models available locally on your desktop. desktop. Apple unveiled also the M6, its first chip manufactured at the 2-nanometer process. So finally, Apple is in the AI game, now pushing local AI as an alternative to AI in the cloud. Salim, you wanted to talk about this one. Your thoughts?

Well, just such an easy and obvious thing for Apple to do, right? You would have been— if they hadn't done this, they would have been the stupidest company in history, and they're not that dumb. The 512 GB unified memory puts a massive amount of intelligence under your desk. So this really changes the economics from paying per token perpetually to buying a capital asset and then using it continuously, right? Especially that Apple's gone to the extra level of starting to lease its equipment out to people. So this is really a big deal. I think the big winners here are law firms, healthcare companies that have HIPAA issues and can't put their stuff on the cloud. Everything can— much more stuff can now be done on-prem. And I think this is going to be a— for medium-sized healthcare firms that can't afford a private cloud and doing all that, it's really, really a big deal. And I think this is such a natural advantage for Apple to go down this path. So you get 4 of these Mac Studios clustered together, now you've got like a small private data Like, that's a pretty big deal. Even Dave would go full out for that.

I mean, I— look, Salim, I'm at the end of my rope with Apple. I mean, like, I— nobody has changed my life more that I've never met than Steve Jobs. And the Apple II that I got when I was a kid totally changed my life. And then when they came out with macOS based on Linux, changed my life again. It's, it's absolutely the greatest company I've ever seen, but they have totally missed the boat. And it's just embarrassing that a company with that much cash flow has no AI strategy. They don't even deserve to be a Mag 7 company anymore. It's just pathetic. So if the best they can do in the age of AI is add a bunch more RAM to a machine that they already had, I mean, what the hell, man? I mean, I'm not saying this is a great thing that they came out with, but it's It's like 0.01% of what they should have done by now in AI.

Total, okay. I'm okay with all of that. But it's obvious they should have done it. At least they did this, right?

I'd say the irony is even deeper. So if you look at the ancestry of how unified memory architecture came about and the neural engine inside the M series, you can trace the lineage back to the Apple Car. It was the Apple Car was the reason why Apple first introduced the Apple Car that never happened, why Apple introduced the Neural Engine with access to this huge unified memory addressable space. So I almost think like Apple's interaction with AI is almost a history of hardware that's too good for the software, or conversely, software that just isn't worthy of the hardware. Apple had the early unified MatMul acceleration built into a unified addressing space. Apple had the TSMC connection. Apple had the raw transistor throughput to basically be NVIDIA and then some. And they fumbled it.

Hmm.

They had Siri before everyone else. They had audio interaction, all of these various forms, and Apple software fumbled the ball. And I can only hope that under John Ternus, that Apple is going to it really does— Tim Cook used to always say, and before Tim, Steve Jobs, that they wanted to be hardware plus software plus services. It just seems to me like Apple's hardware, at least to the consumer side, is incredible. Their services are also not that bad. But they're so fumbling and so underutilizing, still, infamously, their amazing hardware with their software. To John, if you're listening and you're looking for guidance on what Apple should be doing in this new era under your CEOship, please, please, please just like take your amazing hardware and unleash it with much better software that integrates AI natively.

Yes, hire Alex as a consultant first and foremost.

I don't need it.

Well, well, do it. You'll pay. Do it because you need it, not because Alex—

Maybe for charity, for charity.

But also the world needs it.

The world needs it. The one brand that you can trust with your information. It's the one and only brand. And here we are in the age of AI. Everyone's confused. It would be— it's It would change the world.

Such a different world if Steve Jobs had not made his stupid health decisions and, you know, not treated his cancer. You know, Dave, I met Steve once. I had a one-word conversation with him. So I was having an XPRIZE meeting. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was on my board, and he hosted us for an evening dinner. And Laurene Powell Jobs, his wife, was there. there, and Steve was there in the back of the room. And we were talking about the latest XPRIZES and the ones that were just won. And afterward, I had to go meet my hero over here. And Steve is in the back of the room with his arms folded the entire time like this, looking kind of pissed off. And I walked over, introduced myself, and I said, Steve, it's a real pleasure to meet you. And he like, you know, barely nods his head. And then I said, you don't want to be here, do you?

He goes, Nope.

And that was the entire conversation. Uh, I've got a story.

So, um, a couple of months before the big, uh, iPhone announcement in 2007, uh, Jerry Yang put together an offsite, a full-day offsite with all of Yahoo's vice presidents, and Steve Jobs came in to do a keynote, right? So I had kind of a handshake hello And Steve Jobs looks at the audience and he goes— there were like 300 people in the room, right? And he's like, you have 300 vice presidents? He's like, I think I see the problem with Yahoo right there. So like, the fact that you had that much organizational overhead, he just couldn't, couldn't cope with that. My claim to fame is I have a whole bunch of MacBooks that were signed by Wozniak.

Oh wow.

Because I did a 90-minute debate with him stage a few years ago.

How old is that Mac?

Yeah, that one's about— that was— that's a few years old. I had to— I had to— I had him sign about 4 or 5. I'm guarding them jealously.

Yeah, you gotta preserve those in some kind of like—

Preserve those. Um, and I gave a couple away to my community because they were so thrilled with that episode. It was a great conversation. Steve Wozniak is famous for coming out with, all of this technology gives us the opportunity to do tinkering. and just playing around. And that's the heart of all creativity, is just playing around with technology, seeing what comes up. And he was really doubling down on that. So it was a great conversation. But that, that memory of Steve Jobs looking at 300 vice presidents going, I see, you think I see what's wrong with your company, has never left me.

Oh my God.

Okay, the very first share of stock I ever bought was Apple. And I, I, you know, we tend to overthink things. Like, all I had to do is just hold it.

I should still have that stock I'm going to move us into the world of abundance. 2 stories on energy and one on water. Again, you know, our mission here is to deliver you data-driven optimism, why the world is getting better. So let's hit energy first. Again, 2 stories here. The first story is about uranium enrichment to meet the growing needs of our advanced Gen 4 fission plants and the coming SMR, small modular reactor power plants. So historically in the U.S., conventional reactor fuel in the form of uranium-238 has been enriched to about 3 to 5%. This week, a commercial startup— again, a startup here— called Actinide said it has demonstrated the ability to enrich natural uranium into high-assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, up to a purity of 15.38%. Wow. 5 times the traditional purity previously achieved by, you know, all the government labs. So a startup is enriching uranium to this level, and that's for me a remarkable story. So every SMR company— and we had that incredible podcast with Ramez Naam on the future of energy. If you haven't seen it, please go see it. Every SMR company says their reactors will be coming online in 2030, but none of them have the fuel, and this could well be the solution. Alex, any thoughts on this story?

Yeah, a number of thoughts. I think something went wrong right after World War II. That's my best guess. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, so 80 years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was eventually formed in the wake of the Manhattan Project. And I think something just got screwed up with regard to how nuclear physics and advanced physics in general was handled in the post-World War II era. And the government, probably because of the bomb, the government granted itself under the guise of mixed civilian-military leadership, the Atomic Energy Commission. I think something governance-wise got fumbled. And I think 80 years on, after the end of World War II, we're finally starting to shake off the quasi-governmental monopoly on nuclear physics. And I think I suspect there has been so much progress in an alternative history, you know, sort of for all mankind style, where if in the aftermath of World War II, if the Atomic Energy Commission had either been organized differently or we just had a totally different governance structure for advanced physics after the war, we would have advanced so much more quickly. And I think startups like Actina That are producing HALU. I think these are the tip of the iceberg for all of the economic growth and technological growth that can now be unleashed. Now, 80 years after World War II, all of these shackles that we put on our own society, perhaps with the best of intentions, are finally slowly atrophying away. And just a narrow point on the technology here.

So please.

This is non-obvious. In many cases, uranium enrichment in this country, to the extent we do it at all and aren't just importing enriched uranium from, say, Russia, the technology that in many cases is being used to enrich uranium in this country is Manhattan Project-level technology that has not been materially improved since World War II. It's using uranium hexafluoride gas and centrifuges when we have much better technology. There are alternative ways to enrich uranium. For example, the, uh, the term is a calutron. This was technology that we've known in principle how to make since the Manhattan Project. Rather than using centrifuges spinning uranium compound— compounds in gaseous form, and then later having to compress the gaseous uranium molecules down to solid pellets or other solid forms that could be used in reactors. We could instead be using magnets, electromagnetics, and vacuum systems and power electronics controls. We have 80 years of advances in power electronics that by and large are not being used and have not been used to enrich uranium, either because we're scared of doing it or because we've handcuffed ourselves in terms of our being able to do it. So I, I I think we should expect to see, now that the shackles are starting to come off in a limited fashion from the post-World War II era, we're going to start to see 80 years of chip advances and Moore's Law advances finally being applied back to this basically World War II era technology. And I think it'll create an energy boom.

Well, I hope so.

I think from a venture capitalist point of view, you would never in a million years have invested in this when the regulatory cost of getting a nuclear reactor up and running is going to be $1 billion anyway? So you can see how the dysfunction ripples through. You start with government dysfunction, and then the venture capitalists are like, well, given that that's dysfunctional, I won't invest in these innovations. So then the whole value chain just doesn't go anywhere.

But now the SMR companies are being funded by venture capitalists, and they are going public. Let's jump into a little bit about solar. I'm going to show this chart Here, this is a chart that comes from Ember, the global energy think tank. They shared this data showing China's increasing energy generation, both in solar and in nuclear. So monthly solar generation in China has exploded eightfold, 800 percent over the past six years, growing from 20 terawatts per month in 2020 to about 160 terawatts per month in mid-2026. At the same time, nuclear power in China has increased by at least 50 percent. While the US nuclear power gen has basically remained flat. You need to remember that the AI race is not just about chips, it's also about the cost of energy to run those chips. You know, the US is building its whole data center power gen based on natural gas, which is like $6 per million British thermal units, while China is basically getting this for near zero marginal cost from from solar. And I mean, I think the abundant story here is it is possible to really create a massive amount of energy from solar. You know, the numbers, if you talk to your local model, it's like there's 8,000 times more energy that hits the surface of the Earth than we consume as a species. So being able to double, triple, or 10x that is well within reach.

Salim, you want to jump in A bunch of things to say here. First of all, if you look at the difference between that red and blue curve, it's, it's completely a copy of our old linear versus exponential curves, right? Linear's like this and exponential curves up, and we're on the wrong side of that equation. This is linear intuition confronting an exponential curve. The problem is solar keeps getting underestimated because people look at installed capacity today rather than the vertical slope of the deployment learning curve. And that's the nightmare. And people can't get their heads around this. This is such a kind of an old, tired story that we should just get past because China's advantage is not like a magical solar panel. It's the whole industrial system optimized around manufacturing, the supply chain, the permitting, the deployment. And in the US, the big challenge is the interconnection with the grid, the transmission, the permitting speed, right? And so you need all these different— you need nuclear, you need solar, you need all of this. But battery technology makes this a killer opportunity because you can add a solar panel today rather than wait 15 years for some gigawatt-scale energy project. And so this is a massive opportunity that's being left behind. If I was the US, I'd put a Manhattan-type project into perovskite and new solar capabilities, photonics. You have some Huge opportunities there. And this, when you have energy abundance, as I think we've all pointed out, that becomes a multiplier in every other exponential technology. So this is such a no-brainer and it really kind of, it's very dismaying to see the challenge here.

The GDP of a country is directly proportional to the amount of energy they create. And Alex, that, you know, the point you made about, you know, nuclear being frozen, it's very clear here. We have not changed nuclear in You know, decades, we've still been producing the same amount.

Half century, something. Again, I think in the fullness of time, maybe 10 years from now, we'll have a better understanding of what happened during the 20th century that got screwed up after World War II. But I think several things on the governance side, especially as they relate to nuclear physics, just in the wake of World War II, we went on the wrong path. And my hope is that it gets corrected.

Yeah. Dave, do you want to make a comment on this one?

Well, I'll only make one comment, which is, you know, on that chart, the US is way behind in solar. All those US panels are made in China. It's much worse than it looks.

Yeah. All right. Our next story is about water. The weather modification startup called Rainmaker says that 10 drones that flew over Alaska's Kenai Peninsula generated an estimated 19 million gallons of additional rainfall. Fall in just 3 hours using what they call a glacogenic cloud seeding. So, you know, ultimately weather modification is no longer theoretical. It's here. Applications for this kind of technology include drought relief, agriculture, wildfire prevention, and water security. Just for reference, you can look it up. There's 3.4 quadrillion gallons of water in the atmosphere, and atmospheric capture is now a thing, making it in the clouds or capturing it on the ground. So this is the abundance thesis that predicts that water becomes massively abundant when technology to create it becomes cheap. And, you know, 10 drones creating 19 million gallons of water in 3 hours is, is pretty damn cheap. Alex?

And the, the drone part, the UAV part, I think is especially novel. So imagine a near-term future where we, we achieve our weather control grid, not necessarily— I When I always go through the mental exercise of how, if I had to build a global weather control system, how would I do it? I think the easiest way to do it is probably with reflectors, either terrestrially cheaper or in LEO, a little bit more expensive. But this points the way, I think, to a third path for global weather control, which is cloud seeding. Imagine a swarm, a fleet of drones in the style of Rainmakers drones Yeah. That are continuously in flight, probably solar-powered, so they can be permanently aloft, and they are just dispensing on an as-needed basis, but under the control of some centralized AI algorithm, the particulates, the nuclei needed for either snow or rain, all informed by a global weather AI model, we could, in principle, I think with some With some further development of Rainmaker's technology and similar technologies, we could have total weather control. And that would be from a natural disaster perspective. Imagine being able to divert hurricanes.

Or disperse hurricanes before they form.

Yeah, disperse with precipitation on the water instead of on land. Or tornadoes, other extreme weather events. Not to mention giving good weather to the places that want it and are willing to trade it. We could have a global weather trade where regions trade each other for precipitation. unlocked by the confluence of AI, drones, and weather modification. And now finally, we're about to start this era of geoengineering, I think.

Love it. I can see the business model for Rainmaker. It's like, you know, different cities bid on where the drones go.

Rain arbitrage. We could have a global market for rain.

Salim, rain becomes programmable or not? For me, the big breakthrough is not that they made rain, which we've been able to do for a while now. But it's the fact that they could prove how much additional rain they made that I think is really interesting because it then unlocks a huge amount of stuff. Weather— the challenge is weather typically doesn't respect weather boundaries. So trying to figure out if you're downstream of somebody that seeded a bunch of clouds and now you're not getting the rain and they're getting it is going to create some interesting tensions around that. But this is exactly the type of abundance technology, right? It allows you to scale something really powerful. And I think there's a wonderful future. The business models around geoengineering, as Alex puts it, are pretty rampant. You could do some really interesting stuff. I mean, crop management, all sorts of things become capable. It's reminding me of one of the more creative Singularity solutions that we ever saw was at Singularity University. One of the summer students, I think his name was Simon Daniels, had this idea of putting platforms in the ocean ocean that would spray up water wave, take ocean water and spray it up to block the sun from hitting the Earth and slowing down global warming that way. And his business model, just said that, was to do it along flight paths where you could spray up water in the, in the shape of a Nike logo and sell that advertising. And so you sell— do it in the shape of certain patterns that pays for the whole system. At the same time, you lower the temperature into a controlled Way, and there's lots of people that say, "Oh my God! Geoengineering is a bad thing. We don't know the aftereffects." And the counterpoint is, well, we've already been geoengineering the world for 100 years in a horrible, uncontrolled, unmeasurable way, and it's causing massive damage.

Look at the disaster in Nepal that's happening right now.

People estimate it's a complete tragedy there. My heart goes out to all of them, and nothing anybody could do in that sense, and you could avoid a lot of that. And so I think we it's incumbent upon. I think it's incumbent upon us to use technology to navigate this stuff because you do it consciously rather than unconsciously, and that's the powerful point.

Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm here today with an extraordinary physician, the Chief Medical Officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Dawn Musalem. Dawn, let's talk about cancer. You know, I know from the member database that we have at Fountain, our members who come in who think they're healthy, it turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about.

That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, The chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early vs. when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected.

It's interesting. You don't feel the cancer until stage 3 or stage 4. If you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed. You can know. When members come through Found, how do they detect cancer?

So we're doing full-body MRI, and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very, very important, and these are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering, but the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research, and work hard to democratize wellness.

Yeah, so at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to. So check out Fountain Life. You can go to fountainlife.com/peter to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning, at stage 1, when it is curable, before it gets to stage 3 or stage 4 and you're in a world of hurt. All right, let's move into the world of health. A couple of stories here. First off, this week the FDA approved a drug called— let me pronounce this properly— daraxanerib. It's the first RAS inhibitor for metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma, attacking the RAS family of proteins that drives tumor growth in most patients with the disease. So pancreatic cancer, I mean, is really considered almost a death sentence. It's the most lethal, least treatable cancer for humans in history. In previously treated metastatic cancer, cancer, Dirac-Ceraxib, nearly doubled median survival from 6.7 to 13.2 months. It also tripled tumor response rates from 11% to 32%. And while this isn't a cure, and, you know, just getting an extra 7 months doesn't sound like a lot, that's an additional 7 months for science to continue to make more breakthroughs. I mean, that's the way I think about it. This is like longevity escape velocity. Your goal is to live longer. enough to get a breakthrough to another side. It's also worth noting that RAS mutations drive about 30% of all human cancers. So a drug that inhibits these proteins may also be useful for other cancers as well. And, you know, we've heard this said so many times by Dario, by Demis, by many others. You know, the goal is to cure all these diseases, including cancer, in this next Alex, do you have a take on this one?

Yeah. So a couple of items. One, I'd point out remarkably this is a daily oral tablet. Pretty incredible. Secondly, I'd point out I was doing some research on the full lineage, as it were, for Durexin and Rasib. There's almost no AI involved in the development of this drug. So I think this is actually finger to the wind. I think this is probably, hopefully, one of the last generation of pancreatic cancer medications that almost precedes the AI wave. And I would expect lots of new targets, lots of new approaches to emerge from both the AlphaFold 3 style of protein folding problem and structural biology being solved, as well as virtual cell models. As far as I can tell, daruxumab used neither of these in its design. It was like good old-fashioned drug design. But I think we're about to see a whole wave of AI-driven drugs that take it from its current response rate to near 100% using AI. And I think that's to be celebrated. I also want to celebrate the FDA in approving this relatively quickly. FDA noted that they approved this, I think, 60, 90 days, something like this, prior to the due date, which for historic FDA speeds is actually pretty remarkable speed.

Yeah.

So we're seeing a much more, I think, responsive FDA that now starts to care about Bayesian versus frequentist statistics, that cares about INDs quite a bit more, it seems, that's interested in lowering the number of clinical trials in exemplary cases. Hopefully, this is, I think, a baby step towards a future where AI solves 5,000 diseases. And then we have a regulatory apparatus in the form of an FDA that is able to metabolize all of those innovations and turn them into cures.

Amen. Amen to that. Let me move to our second story in the health corner here. This is published in Nature Communications, and it comes from an international research team out of University of Nottingham who developed a biomimetic gel capable of repairing and regrowing damaged tooth enamel. So this is fluoride-free treatment, uses lab-engineered proteins that mimic the natural processes of enamel formation during infancy. So as you might know, you know, tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body, and it doesn't regenerate. So until now, the only thing you could do was replace enamel with, you know, a synthetic filling would eventually fail. You know, so biomimetic gel is an elastin-like protein matrix designed to mimic the natural protein scaffolding that organizes enamel during tooth development. The treatment didn't just make something that looks like enamel, it regenerated layers and restored hardness, stiffness, water resistance, friction properties, resistant to brushing, chewing, acid exposure in labs. The gel acts like a scaffold That pulls calcium and phosphate from the surrounding environment and directs them into properly organizing minerals rather than merely depositing an amorphous coating. It's true enamel. I mean, for me, this is huge. You know, related oral disease affects, you know, half the population. It's estimated at half a trillion dollars per year in associated costs. You know, to put this in perspective, this is still ex vivo. It's still done using extracted human teeth. teeth, and it's being done, you know, effectively in the test tube or the petri dish, but it's going to be moving to human testing very quickly. And as someone who's had poor dental health and poor dental genetics all my life, I couldn't be more excited about this, especially for my kids. Saleem, do you want to jump on this?

Just fantastic. For me, the big thing is showing that the future of medicine is not like repairing broken bits, it's convincing the body to rebuild them and find the mechanisms and pathways, right? And so this is really, really powerful stuff. It'll completely change dentistry.

Yeah.

It's completely—

People undervalue their oral health so much, right? The mouth is a direct corridor to the brain and to the heart. You need to be careful about your oral health. Alex?

Regenerative medicine. There's been a future. We've been waiting for stuff like this to happen for a long time. It's great to see it finally coming. Alex, did you dig into this story too?

I did. I mean, I think these results actually started bubbling up last year first. I'm incredibly interested in materials engineering of human body, human dental enamel included. But I think this was an AMA question that we got in the last pod episode, people asking, yeah, like, where's all the innovation? Well, I think the story, which again, like, first started seeing this last year, I think this is just one data point in a larger manifold of just applying good old-fashioned material science to the problem of human teeth. And if you can help to shape and engineer the pathways through which tooth enamel grows, I have to think that similar biomaterial discoveries and inventions will also be helpful for bone regrowth, for a variety of other key biomaterials for regenerative medicine. And again, looking at this, the research behind this, I saw approximately no AI. That's always my sniff test. Like, how— if and how AI was used in this research. And if it wasn't used, as appears to be the case here, there was approximately no AI as I could then take this, but multiply it by many orders of magnitude, the sort of progress I'd expect to see in a few years in this area.

Dave, how's your oral health?

It's fine. But, you know, I get really excited about— you know that Moderna story we had recently where they had a melanoma vaccine that works really well? Stock went way up. But what was exciting is that it's a platform that applies to virtually any other cancer. And so, when Alex says, yeah, these weren't done with AI, I'm like, well, they're really cool, but they're one-offs. I can't wait for the repeatable— like, I can grow a tooth, I can grow an arm, I can grow an ear, I can grow anything now. And so, then you get into true scalable regenerative medicine. I feel like that's very, very soon.

By the way, the work on limb regrowth is making amazing progress. Yeah. All right.

I mean, Dave, you're also touching on an interesting almost a singularity-flavored technological deflation story, which is if there's no AI in it, like to first order, what's the point? Either infuse it with AI and make it scalable so that you can hashtag solve everything, scale it up by 1,000x, or just don't do it and do something else that's higher leverage. Not to discourage people from regenerative medicine.

Sell your data to Demis, and Demis will AI what you just invented. Yeah, that's perfect.

All right, finally, let's jump into space and robotics stories. So the 2 first stories are from the Elon universe. Deloitte this week reported about the potential lunar economy. They put a financial figure of $566 billion in cumulative economic value by 2050. I could not expect a low— a lower lowball than that number from Deloitte. Deloitte, you know, the biggest early markets being infrastructure costs, transportation, power, comms, mobility, construction, life support. They cite SpaceX as the biggest winner because of the central role that Starship will play. You know, clearly they are not taking into account, Alex, manufacturing StarMind on the moon to fuel Earth's—

Where's the petafab? Petafab is MIA.

Yeah. So, you know, just to put the numbers on it, because, you know, that You know, half a trillion of lunar economy may sound large, but it's a minuscule estimate. So Elon previously stated his plans for StarMine started with about 100 to 200 gigawatts per year of orbital AI compute launched from Earth, and then moving to manufacturing AI satellites on the Moon for launch with a mass driver. He estimates that we could yield as much as 100 terawatts per year of orbital compute based on lunar production, which would generate— and wait for it— an absurdly large amount of lunar economy. Wait for it. The estimate, if you're building 100 terawatts per year of orbital compute, the economy would be $2 quadrillion per year of gross revenue.

I mean, I don't know, maybe Planet Ark is maybe too Too small.

$2 quadrillion. Now we're talking a good economy. But, you know, Salim, you deal with like the Deloites and McKinseys, and so these guys are so conservative in their numbers all the time. I mean, crazy.

Yeah, because they're either— a lot of them are accountants, so they're scared of being called out for anything vaguely approaching a real estimate. B, they, uh, they want to make sure their numbers are defensible to the nth degree, so no speculation at all. Whereas by definition you're speculating, so might as well speculate to some level of honesty. This is the same type of pattern we've seen before. By the way, one of these Big 4— I won't say which one to protect the innocent here— put out an AI— put out an agentic AI report Saying this is the future of AI agents, etc. So I excitedly read it thinking I'd get some glimmerings that would give me some sense of it, except when I looked deeper into it, the data they were using was 2 and a half years old. Okay, and how with 2 and a half year old data are you going to come up with anything about the agentic world when everything happened in the last 6 months? It's like, how do you— but they have so many checks and balances and internal review systems that That dilute everybody's thinking. Careful, you can't say that. Da da da da da. That by the time it comes out, it's been whitewashed so many times. You mean lawyers? Lawyers and and and cross-reference checkers of even more cautious people, and and then nothing gets nothing realistic gets put out. In general, I typically say take any of their estimates and multiply it by ten or twenty times.

Dave, what's your thought?

We had the Deloitte AI team in here, and they. office the other day. They're very, very good, actually. But they were, yeah, they were also saying the same thing about the accounting side. So, Liam, you're confirmed from inside Deloitte. Yeah, quadrillions of dollars. That's what Elon was talking about. I believe it because the gravity well is the key. You know, Peter, you talk about this a lot, but everyone's like, why would I bother manufacturing that on the moon? What's the point? You know, I can just make it here. Like, no, no, it's the gravity well.

Yeah.

You start building You start building power plants based on just lunar minerals, and all of a sudden you're like, this is so much more efficient. Plus, you know, there's no worry about pollution and stuff like that.

Yeah, lunar regolith is silicon. What's that used for? Oh, okay, power generation. Aluminum, nickel, iron, and oxygen. I mean, it's like the perfect materials for building Dyson swarms. Alex, I've got to feed it to you to sort of uplevel this vision here.

Well, the Moon may not be a harsh mistress, she may be a wealthy mistress. at this point. I do think the pedofab is the killer app for the Moon. I don't think it's tourism. I don't think it's transport or infra or comms.

Of course.

The Apollo program was infamously, arguably, a successor to the Manhattan Project. And I think to the extent that the full history of the Apollo program is already fully understood and in the public record, I think a relative failure. I, I would love to see the moon reach its full economic potential, and I, I just don't think that is going to happen any way other than full private development. And right now it does appear that the critical path is mining, chips, fabbing, data centers on the moon. It's not rods from God. It's not, uh, deploying U.S. NASA astronauts to the moon. That's all well and good and everything, And friend of the pod Jared is, I think, doing an amazing job of reinvigorating the case on the government side for fission reactors on the Moon and all of that. But I think in the fullness of time, even that just ends up being a rounding error compared to data centre deployment and mining on the Moon. Unless, I don't know, unless 2001: A Space Odyssey happens and we discover some monoliths on the Moon, in which case that's the killer app.

Yeah.

The petafab or the exafab on the Moon is really interesting to game it out because when you look at the fab construction process, you know, a lot of the components in there are just routine aluminum, routine, you know, just construction. There are a few really critical pieces that you can still make on Earth and launch them and it'd be just a tiny fraction of the total cost. But, you know, once you start manufacturing chips on the Moon, the solar panels on the Moon, I mean, it's just exponential takeoff from there. And, you know, the technology is just not that far away.

The problem is that these guys are not looking at, uh, what the— you can't ask what the lunar economy is today. You have to say what industries become unlocked when the cost of moving mass off the Earth drops by an order or 2 of magnitude. And that's the imagination gap.

Yeah. Uh, and, and I just want to say a shout out to Jared Isaacman, who's a friend of the pod. And, you know, what an extraordinary administrator. I could not be more proud. I said it during our podcast with him. I've known, I think, all the administrators pretty well over the last 40, 50 years, or 40 years. And he is by far the best, most eloquent, most visionary, most business-minded. And he is an accelerationist. And if anybody's gonna support humanity, you know, moving beyond the bounds of Earth, it's him.

I'll just add, Peter, like every time the CCP sponsors an influential Yeah.

All right. Our second Elon story comes from Tesla. The company announced it's expanded its rollout of CyberCabs in Texas. They just registered 79 Model Ys for the robotaxi service. And this is starting to look more, you know, less like an experiment and more like a real fleet. In Las Vegas alone, Tesla has Tesla delivered 1,000 rides to customers. recently said it's going to be deploying 2,500 vehicles in the next year, its CyberCab. Tesla's official long-term milestone is to reach 1 million robotaxis in commercial operations as soon as possible. And if you do the estimates, that's probably about $100 billion of revenue in rideshare revenue for Tesla. Let's take a look at a quick video here just to remind people how cool The CyberCab is. I have to say, you know, I love Google, but you know, Waymo's new vehicle is kind of clunky. This is pretty beautiful. This is Elon at the original CyberCab rollout. I love those doors. Yeah, those are, uh, those are 3 Commodores or 4 Commodores. Pretty cool.

Yeah, it's such a great design.

It's a beautiful design. It— and in gold is like, it's perfect.

It really is. At the Gigafactory, remember they had that one that was all exploded out so you could see inside all the parts and It's just a beautiful, beautiful design. And it doesn't have that many moving parts, you know, so you can see how they're gonna manufacture them at an incredible scale.

Yeah.

You know, just from a consumer point of view, all my friends that are driving the new Full Self-Driving Model Ys are like, oh my God, this is life-changing. I literally go anywhere FSD. And the waitlist right now is about 3 months for a Model Y. But 3 months from today, the fully engaging, you wanna talk to it all the time AI, will be everywhere. So you might want to get on that waitlist because you're going to want to be talking to your AI and continuing your dialogue, your work, your phone.

You know, uh, it's going to be amazing. And, you know, for— if there are entrepreneurs out there, when the CyberCab comes out, you know, buy 100 of them, put them out to work, and we'll have a fleet of CyberCabs generating revenue for you.

I think that's going to be an incredible I will say, I love my Tesla Model Y 2026 Juniper Launch Series Edition. It is life-changing. The FSD is incredible. The manufacturing quality of the car is incredible. I can't wait for cybercabs and robotaxis in general to come to Boston. I'll beat the drum once more for the broken Waymo theory of if a city can't accommodate robotaxis, then it is not equipped for the singularity. And hopefully someone from the city of Boston is listening to this and scratching their head and wondering just what is doing with Boston and why Boston doesn't have proper Waymo support. If you're scratching your head and you're in a position of authority, call Dave or call me. We'd love to figure this out.

Yeah, same thing when Uber was made illegal in France. I was like, okay, if you're an entrepreneur, don't move to France. It's like these are telltale signs of what cities are on the singularity curve and which are not. Yeah. Salim?

I'm actually having to sell my beloved 10-year-old Tesla Model S to get a Model Y because I need the FSD. I'll send a photograph of it in for our next pod just so everybody can see. I totally love my car. But this is a big, big deal, I think, for a couple of reasons. One is there's 3 little things here. One is that this This changes from purchasing a car to autonomous revenue miles. What's the cost per autonomous revenue per mile, right? And if you can do it at a decent safety-adjusted cost, this is actually massive. The fleet growth will lower wait times, which will improve the user experience, which will increase the rides, which generates more data, which will create that inner loop that Alex is talking about. So I think there's some really amazing downstream benefits from all of this. It totally changes the game on insurance and cleaning up and charging and all sorts of— I think you'll turn gas stations into autonomous car cleaning depots. That kind of thing will start to happen. But for me, the big one is I made a bet. I got up on stage 10 years ago and I said my kid will never get a driver's license. And I've got just about a year for this cyber cab to roll out, to get out there before Before he— he may get one anyway just to get away from the parents, but he wouldn't have to. And then I'll be proven correct. So important not to lose your credibility as a futurist.

Yeah. You know, the abundant story here is the poorest people on the planet will be driven around by electric autonomous vehicles.

Yes.

It will be the cheapest mode of transportation.

And think about the elderly, right? And people that can't get around easily. All and, and, and, and it's just the market suddenly becomes so magical, delivering huge capability to segments of the population that can't do it today. Huge.

Yeah. I'm going to put up this image here. I love it. Just comparing CyberCab and Waymo. And, you know, I have to say, I don't know how Waymo is going to compete when CyberCab rolls out. You know, first of all, First of all, CyberCab has 8 cameras. Again, Elon made the point that if humans can just drive with 1 or 2 eyes, you should be able to have a car do it with just cameras. And compared to the LiDARs and radars and 13 cameras that Waymo has. And I think the point with the brains on this image is CyberCab is massively AI-driven. Yeah, I could not agree more.

It's gonna be a big fight. By the way, didn't Tesla acknowledge that cameras aren't enough in this?

No, I don't think so. Tesla does use— for short range, it uses ultrasound, but everyone uses ultrasound. It does not use LiDAR. I think there's sort of an interesting, maybe speaking prospectively, not financial advice, epitaph insofar as Luminar Luminar, the LiDAR provider, declared bankruptcy half a year ago at this point. But if I had to bet, again, not investment advice, I think the market abhors monopolies. And I think there's probably room for at least a handful of competing approaches.

There will be many of these around competing, beating themselves up and lowering the price across the board.

And we all win.

Yeah, I introduced Austin Russell, the CEO of Luminar, before it went out of business to Elon at a party. And, uh, and I watched them duke it out on whether LiDAR was important. Anyway, it was a, it was a fun show. And Elon was like, no way, not interested, not going to go there. All right, our final story, uh, it's a little bit of a bizarre one but expected, uh, in the direction in the world of robotics. A company called Somnia Lab has built a robot for intimacy. And the internet has lost its mind. It's called Model L, maybe L for love. It's 5 foot 9 inches, 44 pound robot with 24 degrees of freedom, with the warmth simulation, touch response, and preference memory designed for human-robot sexual encounters. Okay, it's finally here, guys. So real humans wear motion capture suits. I'm going to show you a video of that in a moment to record 165 intimate actions. That were fed into the model. Somnia Lab is taking $300 deposits for delivery in late 2027. What makes the Model L more interesting than a sophisticated sex doll is the attempt to combine physical embodiment, persistent AI memory, and personalization. Somnia says the robot is intended to remember conversations and preferences across encounters, learn a user's rhythms— you can't make this stuff up— and communication style, The body is made from lightweight carbon fiber with modular skin and structural components designed to be serviced and upgraded. Customers will be able to customize the face, the makeup, the eyes, the skin appearance, and the body silhouette. So I guess this is a story around abundance of intimacy. Let's take a look at this.

This was inevitable, Peter. I'm waiting for you to say fully functional, programmed in multiple No, I'm not going to go there.

Not yet.

Let's watch this video. This is a video of the motion capture being done to train the AI models here. With cheesy music to boot.

We've hit it. We've hit a new high here. This is incredible. One has to admire the low degree of freedom. Like, that was a pretty That was a really simple FaceSpace I think we were seeing.

Oh my God.

That was a human in a mocap suit, right?

It was, it was.

That was low quality in every way, from the music to the video to whatever they were doing.

Like a robot porn video. Oh my God. You know, you combine this with the conversation we had earlier about AI girlfriends and boyfriends, right? And the human relationship is cooked.

You think? I mean, I go back and forth. Is there going to be an app store for mocapped movements, to be pre-training or post-training data for a foundation model that knows about everything.

I want to see the job ad for that one.

I have a couple of comments on this one.

Please.

So the first thing is, you know, this type of embodied AI has really a pretty difficult data problem, right? Because you can scrape the internet for text. There's no internet-scale dataset of physical human interaction. What are you talking about?

What internet are you looking at, buddy?

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Hold on, in terms of the physical movement, etc. So the, the, what I love more than anything here is the economic approach, right? You, you crowdsource the, uh, you do crowdfunding of the early thing, get early customer, and then use the customer demand to finance the hardware and generate the interaction data as you scale the product. This is like a pretty classic Y Combinator flywheel. So I thought that was really interesting.

That sounds like you've got a career ahead of you.

You got all the Gs inside.

Now, I'll give a hot take on the hot sheets, which is I don't actually think this is that promising as an approach. There's an abundance of evidence at this point that you can do a great job either pre-training or post-training robots for more, call them economically productive applications, just from watching videos without any need for human mocap at all. So if I had to guess, my guess is this is like a very 2026 story with people mocapping sex maneuvers from, like, manually, but it doesn't scale nearly as well as just pre-training off of internet video, is my guess.

Okay, circle of trust here. How many have you ordered, guys? I won't tell anybody. Oh my God.

We need guests and panelists that are in their, like, 20s for that.

Oh my God. Dave, any, any closing thoughts on this topic?

None whatsoever, actually, as it turns out. First time in my life. Nothing to add. Sorry, speechless.

Oh my God. All right, everybody, uh, I want to say that's a wrap, but we do have a closing video. Um, if you have outro music videos, please send them to media@diamandis.com. We love sharing them. We love the creativity of our community. And we'll see you guys in 4 weeks to the Yes, at Moonshots Live in LA, the evening of September 24th and all day on September 25th. You can go to moonshots.com to apply. It is by application, and it's going to be an amazing community for you to network with and spend the day with all 5 of us. The Moonshots quintet will be there. You get a chance to grill Alex, Salim, and of course, Dave.

That's right.

It's gonna be— it's gonna be awesome. All right, let's play this video by Ellen Vaman. Thank you, Ellen, for your submission.

Hi, Dave.

Nice heroic music, gentlemen.

Ah, very cool. Lord of the Rings in space mashup I never knew I wanted.

Oh, that was fun, guys. Really loved it. A lot of fascinating stories, and definitely one bizarre one. Until we see you again twice next week for another episode recording, be well.

Can't wait.

We'll try and sleep in the middle. God help us all.

Live long and prosper, as they say.

Likewise.

All right, take care, folks.

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