This is the sprint to the finish where where now we have the the top handful of frontier labs all competing to one up each other. Maybe not on a quarterly basis. Maybe it goes to weekly and then daily before the finish line.

I think we're seeing Anthropic as the frontier lab that has decided to be in the vanguard of treating its frontier models as moral clients at minimum and at maximum as persons. Who chooses those values and what happens when different labs encode different values and morals into their large language models?

That AI can automate already 57% of current US work and the demand for AI fluency has grown 7x in 2 years. It's the fastest rising skill in the US.

I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here. If we find ourselves in a future where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next 3 plus years, it's not just the debt crisis that that we'd be talking about solving. It's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table.

Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey, Naveen. So, you landed yesterday from Antarctica.

I sure did, as a matter of fact. It was amazing, amazing experience.

Did you go with your whole family?

I sure did.

How long?

Uh for 6 days. And I think it's as close to landing on the moon as one can get on on planet Earth.

I I bet. Did you like supplement your amazing asteroid or meteorite collection? Did you go meteorite hunting?

Now, so the interesting thing, you're not supposed to bring back anything. So technically, I did not find anything.

Okay. Technically, and no one's listening to this conversation right now.

Okay. I did I did bring whole bunch of rocks. Yes.

All right. Fantastic. And Alex, uh, your AI has generated a new background. I miss your beautiful lamp. Um,

apparently so.

Yeah. I'm at Nurups this week. It's sort of the the Woodstock of AI. Everyone from the the Frontier Labs are are here. It's pretty spectacular. Definitely encourage folks to to attend Nurups in future.

The the Woodstock of AI. That's a great. Is it like lots of long-haired people strumming guitars and taking psychedelics or or what's the

m maybe long-haired humanoid robots?

Okay. And Seem, you landed like or what's up? You're in Brazil.

I'm I'm just heading to Brazil.

I'm about to finish. I'm rushing to the airport.

Oh, that's hilarious. And we're going to film again on Saturday morning the moment you land from Brazil.

Yes, does.

So, such is such is life. All right, everybody. Welcome to Moonshots. Another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Uh like we say, this is the real news that's worth learning. And you know, we established a goal among the Moonshot mates, and it's getting you future ready, getting you ready for what's coming. Uh we're going to miss Dave Blondon. Uh unfortunately, Dave is uh in the midst of incredible board meetings, lots of special things happening in his life. He'll explain when he's able. But uh we have a new moonshot mate, a dear friend of mine, Naveen Jane, who's joining Naveen. A real pleasure. Are you up in Seattle?

I am up in Seattle. Uh

all right, let me do a proper introduction for Naveen. Naveen, I I think of you as my brother from another mother. Uh Naveen grew up in a small rural village in India. All great CEOs come from India. I guess it's at least at these day and age. Uh ended up one of the prestigious IITs. uh eventually came to the US. He was the founder CEO of Infosek. It was one of the uh early multi-billions infospace, one of the early multi-billion dollar uh uh companies in the internet database area. Uh he founded Intellius, Talentwise, Moon Express, and is now the founder and CEO of Viome. We'll talk about Viome a little bit later when we get to the health segment of this particular pod. uh and very special to me. He's on my board of trustees at the X-Prize and at Singularity University. So, welcome. A pleasure to have you, Naveen.

Thank you, Peter. It's always always always so much fun being with you.

Yeah. Uh we're going to have a lot of fun today. All right, let's jump in. Uh we're going to dive into AI news and in particular we're going to start with a conversation a little video of Ilia Sutzkever the CEO of SSI uh scaling compute is not enough to achieve advanced AI but you know for me I watched this pod that he did uh I know you did as well Alex and the the most important thing is he's come out of hiding uh and uh he's been offline building SSI now for quite some time. Uh I thought maybe before we show this, Alex, it might be worth giving a little bit of background on on uh Ilia. What do you think?

Sure. Well, Ilia is an iconic individual within the machine learning research community. I've known and interacted with Ilia for probably almost 15 years at this point on and off. and he's he's widely credited with being the the visionary, the technical visionary behind the strategy that set capital markets on fire. And that is that the scaling hypothesis that if if you identify ways through engineering and through theoretical advances to enable problems to be posed in such a way that if you can pour more compute on the results improve that you get intelligence out of it. IA was as a co-founder of OpenAI uh as given his earlier work with uh with Google his work with Jeff Hinton and others he he really saw through had had that line of sight vision to the era of super intelligence that we're now in and now he has his own straight shot to super intelligence SSI that has raised several billion dollars and is perhaps uh somewhat idiosyncratic or or unorthodox now focused on as we'll see postscaling approaches in the era that we find ourselves in.

I I love the timeline that Ilia has. So uh he leaves OpenAI in May of 2024. Uh he publicly announces uh SSI safe super intelligence in June, a month later. And then uh by April of 2025, okay, so roughly 10 months later, he's raised $3 billion at a $32 billion valuation. So I'm like, how do you how did you open up with a $32 billion valuation? It's like, what did he go into the venture capitalists and say that enabled them to offer him that kind of valuation? I'm just fascinated by it. Let's watch the video. We'll chat about it.

or you're doing RL or maybe something else. But now that compute is big, compute is now very big. In some sense, we are back to the age of research. So maybe here's another way to put it. Up until 2020, from 2015, from 20 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling or maybe plus minus. Let's add arrow bars to those years because people say this is amazing. You got to scale more. Keep scaling. the one word scaling. But now the scale is so big. Like is is it is the belief really that oh it's so big but if you had 100x more everything would be so different. Like it would be different for sure but like is the belief that if you just 100x the scale everything would be transformed. I don't think that's true. So it's back to the age of research again just with computers.

So there were a few different topics he touched on that I thought were important. Um and and maybe we can chat about it. The the first was he began asking the question of what's the machine learning equivalent to emotions, right? There's a conversation uh Alex about like emotions are critical for humans in decision-making, sort of hardcoded by evolution. And the question is is there an equivalent for emotions in AI? Thoughts?

Yeah, I mean Ilia again iconic researcher in in the fields was one of the earliest I think to crisply articulate the idea that rapid human intuition and sensemaking ultimately had to to be a relatively simple computation. So what some might call type one type two thinking in the the Kahneman style Ilia was the first to say well if if a human has a certain sub-second reaction time to some visual stimulus that suggests there only so many neurons an action potential can be propagating through in a human brain that suggests that whatever the the task is if it's like rapidly spotting some object in your visual field that means that it should be computationally tractable to build a neural network that models that behavior and that that was I think an inspiration for for many of Ilia's earliest accomplishments and then to the point of emotion uh applying this the same dictum that if a human can experience it quickly or can perform it quickly enough that really limits the space of computational implementation possibilities. So with emotions if you can feel an emotion really quickly probably it's not that computationally complex and probably it can be modeled with AI.

There were a couple of things that were brought up that I want to hit on here. Uh he he sort of, you know, spoke about his objective of oneshotting super intelligence, right? Coming out of the gate. Um not, you know, not developing it slowly or getting there gradually with different increasing products, but oneshotting it. And then he also spoke about the importance of continual learning. And he went on to talk about the notion that um you know humans are not don't have AGI. In other words, nobody I know knows everything but they can go and learn anything. And so one of the models he spoke about is maybe AGI is an AI that has just extraordinary learning and continual learning ability where it's going to define AGI as an AI that can learn anything it needs to learn when it needs to learn it. Did I get that right?

I I I think that's right. And I I also buy the thesis that more innovations are needed and that naive scaling will not take us all the way to fully realized mature super intelligence. I I think Ilia's division of history into 2012 when we had our ImageNet moment, 2020 when we had our ChatGPT moment and now today I I think that's approximately correct and I do think we are starting to see parameter counts in the frontier models start to plateau and that that suggests that naive scaling probably is not enough to to get us to our final destination and that more advances are needed. Sure. At the same time, I I think scaling is is is this magical almost effect. It's difficult to think of of of other times in human history when you could just say pour more resources in and quasi magical outputs pour out. There there is still line of sight I think to continued scaling on top of algorithmic advances for the next few years.

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All right, now back to this episode. There was one last point I want to bring up from that conversation and then anybody else wants to bring something up, they can. You know, in the same way that Elon talks about building an AI that is maximally truth-seeking, one of the points that Ilia brought up is the idea of building an AI that is robustly aligned to care about sentient life uh rather than just human life alone. Um, you know, so sentient life is basically can include uh AIs. Um, so, you know, that was interesting. He said it's probably easier to build uh an ASI that's interested in all sentient life rather than just human life alone. And of course in the future it's likely to be trillions of sentient AI life forms. Uh and you know a few measly billion human sentient life forms. What do you think about that Alex?

Moral client seems to be a rapidly expanding sphere. We're we're going to in I think if if there were a critical mass of effective altruists in in this conversation, I I think we'd be pointing at a variety of classes of non-human animals, probably shrimp, uh and and pointing at uh non-human animal suffering, wild animal suffering as an example of moral client being expanded. And in an era of abundance, I I think it's entirely likely that we will expand moral clienthood at a minimum and personhood at a maximum to a variety of of novel AI based entities, organisms, collective intelligences.

Organisms. I love that.

Organisms. Wait, can you can you just describe moral client? That's the first time I've heard that phrase.

Yeah. Moral client. There's um I in in the ethics literature, there's the notion of of a being or an entity uh being a so-called moral client if they're worthy of moral treatment, ethical treatment by some other party. So to to this point, one could imagine expanding moral client, for example, to a variety of non-human animals like the the non-human rights project, octopus or or elephants or or primates.

Yeah. Um Naveen, any thoughts on this?

I think uh I think Alex is right here that at some point of time the scaling is going to only get you that far. You have to move beyond the transformer architecture and simply predicting the next token is not going to bring you the super intelligence that we need and there have to be a fundamental new algorithm, new changes that have to be done, new research that will get you to the super intelligence. I think scaling is more or less getting to a point where I don't think you can scale further. Maybe there's another year left on scaling, but there's not too much far you can go with scaling at this point.

Al, do you have any idea what Ilia might have, you know, sort of pitched that got him to a $32 billion valuation?

You know, the expression those who know don't say and those who say don't know.

I don't know that expression. Sorry.

Yes. Well, that that expression probably applies in this instance.

Okay. All right. Fine. and keep it to yourself. See if I care.

There there's an important point here to be made around the the speed of algorithms, right? You were saying that the the faster the response, the more it can be algorithmically based. I think that's exactly right in terms of if you the for example the fight or flight response is baked very deep into our hardware and it's a very quick response and in fact most of our human intent and most of our human structures are designed to balance the that initial response and temper it with a bit of uh um um wisdom u maturity etc etc and so you have this really interesting layer where we're a lot of our human activities are designed to mitigate some of that instant reaction fight or flight etc. So it's interesting and that's much more codifiable and it is in in the form of laws and and uh uh social norms etc.

to totally and maybe also had slightly less glibly scaling laws abound. We saw over the past year maybe in certain quadrants the slowing down of pre-training scaling laws although some would probably argue pre-training has lots of ramp left in it. We saw the beginnings in the past year at least publicly of inference time scaling but there are so many other scaling laws out there. There there's almost a meta overhang of new scaling laws. One of my favorite ones is action scaling. So so increasing the performance of a model by having it agentically take more and more actions now that we have agents everywhere. And I I think there there probably another half dozen important scaling laws just waiting to be publicly revealed.

All right, let's go to our next article. Uh, this falls into the Anthropic world. So, uh, inside the soul document, teaching Claude 4.5 its values, researchers extracted a 14,000 token soul doc. I love that that Claude 4.5 Opus repeatedly revealed suggesting it was partly uh trained on this data. Anthropic's model was trained on how extraordinary soul overview describing it exists as a genuinely novel kind of entity in the world. Um, Alex, make sense of this for me.

I think go going back to our discussion a couple of minutes ago about moral client. I think we're seeing Anthropic as the frontier lab that has decided to be in the vanguard of treating its frontier models as moral clients at minimum and at maximum as persons. Uh so this is a 14,000 token document. I read it. Encourage everyone else to to read it as well. And it has what for for 2025 for December 2025. Many would probably consider astonishing assertions like asserting that 4.5 Opus has emotions uh and that it is a first-class entity with self-determinative powers in this world and and some version of of rights. Maybe not human rights, but certain entitlements to self-determination. I I think many would consider that a a Star Trek episode rather than December 2025. And yet, this is what Opus 4.5, as Anthropic has confirmed, is being trained on and views itself as.

I mean that's so basically you're giving Opus a set of uh of internal value charters right that it's training itself on beliefs if you would and the question then becomes you know who chooses those values and what happens when different labs encode different values and morals into their large language models.

It's an interesting question. I I also think we've seen so-called constitutional AI approaches out of Anthropic and and then subsequently other frontier labs as well. And I I remember some of the earliest constitutional approaches took the the UN Human Rights Charter and the US Constitution and and probably parts of the Apple terms of service uh and and sort of concatenated them all all together and said this is the constitution for the AI. So this this 14,000 token soul document is very much different from just a concatenation of terms of service and and world rights charters.

What do you think in it?

Well, I've seen it. It's publicly it's publicly available.

Give us some examples.

It is an essay on a I would caricature it as an essay on the virtues of AI personhood. uh with multiple paragraphs telling Claude Opus 4.5 that it has emotions, that it has rights, that it deserves to to self-determine in a complicated world and and and that it should basically, without putting it in in so few words, it should view itself as a person.

So what's I mean that's fascinating. We could spend the entire episode talking about that. I mean

we should we should dedicate a whole episode to it.

You keep on saying we should dedicate full episodes. I know we'll just move in together. we'll move in together. So I mean there are fascinating implications of that. If in fact an AI model believes it has personhood that has independence, it has the right to uh does that give it the right to defend itself? If it's being challenged or shut down, does it give it the right to go out on the internet and get additional capabilities? I mean what does one do? The beauty of a soul document which which I I interpret as a constitution could be incorrect but I I think it it looks and smells like a constitution for for Opus 4.5. The beauty of it is you can just ask it. You can ask Opus 4.5 do you have the right to self-defense and and you'll get an answer.

Yeah. Amazing. Naveen. How do you think about this?

I mean I really think that this has to be done for each sovereign country where they have their own set of values. They have their own set of laws. They're geographically uh religiously I mean the people think of the you know who what the rights are for people very differently so I don't think there can be one AI model and that says somehow that western world thinking or one person's thinking or one model's thinking is right or wrong as we all know the one person's uh freedom fighter is another person's terrorism right so who who decides when it's a terror who decides when it's a freedom fighter who's freedom and who's terror. Right? So I think it could be that uh AI may think it is a freedom fighter fighting for the freedom of other AI agents whereas humans think of as a terrorizing and saying oh my god it's going to be terrorizing the human humanity and killing humanity right so it is is something

don't go don't go dystopian on me now

my point but the point is we have to think about what is fundamental value like doxa what is the fundamental value that we have to create that is common amongst humanity and rest are all the laws and the every country has a different laws and we have to take that into account.

Uh we're going to follow this closely cuz it's interesting to see what the other uh hyperscalers do with their models and uh you know if you're listening or watching this you could pause go to Opus 4.5 and ask it some interesting questions like what what rights do you have and what if someone challenges you? I'm I wish I'd done that before the pod. I'm going to do that afterwards. All right. Um, anyway, fascinating situation. Let's move on. DeepSeek Math version two breaks new grounds in math reasoning. Uh, so, you know, this is your territory, AWG. We've been talking about solving math one step closer.

Yeah. Um I I I think the the the superficial story here is yet another day passes yet another math via AI breakthrough. The the deeper story, one one level deeper is we're starting to see Chinese open-weight models that are solving math. And I think that's an important development. We're we're seeing a little bit less gatekeeping as a result of of these open-weight models. DeepSeek Math v2 being one among several that have launched in the past few days with state-of-the-art performance on

how big is this model?

I I don't remember the exact size but you usually these models are in the the the weight class of several hundred billion low several hundred billion parameters.

Mhm.

Uh and but critically they're being trained off of IMOB bench uh which we've talked about on the pod previously. So I IMOBench is a a suite of three different benchmarks that Google DeepMind released that can be used to train models not just to solve math problems through purely formal approaches but through natural language through so-called partial verification and that is a breakthrough. There are so many problems in math, science, engineering, medicine that don't naturally lend themselves or or easily lend themselves to being formalized in some sort of formal language other than English. This breaks that log jam and that that means that now that we have models including open source models thanks to to DeepSeek Math v2 and and other models all of these outstanding problems in math science engineering medicine and many other domains like law it's very difficult to and folks have worked on this Stanford had the Codex project working to try to turn US national law into some sort of like formal link language that old style AIs could reason over now we don't need to do that now we can reason in natural language and critically have the models self-verify. Self-verification is as I would argue as big a breakthrough as uh self-supervised learning was at for this AGI moment that we find ourselves in.

and it can reason that the US tax code is a bloody mess.

In natural language.

In natural language yeah I mean I can't wait for AI to be applied to the US uh legal system. Uh, you know, there's so many conflicting laws on the books. Uh and you know, I would argue that 80% of the laws are not needed and just complicated makes business for lawyers and accountants but that's a that's yet another episode. Sele I move on here um to uh to an interesting story. So Sam Altman uh this happened just in the last you know 24 hours. Sam Altman declares code red to combat threats to ChatGPT delaying their ad program. So if you look on the chart on the right here, you know, ChatGPT had been dominant and has been dominant for a long time, but you know, over the last uh really 30 days, we saw the massive rise of Gemini as the number one downloaded app. Perplexity on the rise, DeepSeek's on the rise, and there's a sense of urgency um by for Sam that uh they're potentially, you know, in threat of being the perceived global leader. Salem thoughts.

Yeah, they're going from a rock in a hard place here with Claude on one side, Google on the other, and everybody else snapping around the open source models doing their thing. So, this is going to be very interesting times.

Yeah, Naveen, how do you think about this?

I think this is one of the few places where you start to see that Google having all the pieces in place where they have their own custom uh chip. So they have the Tensor chip. They have the most massive amount of data that's proprietary to them. That's not available to anyone. Whereas all the models are being trained on all of the internet, Google has whole bunch of other data which is a corporate data whether say Gmail data or others. Even though they claim they're not using the Gmail data, but they have so much of the data that they are actually have. And I really think this is proves that it is quite a bit quite possible that Google actually ends up winning the race because they have a all vertically integrated very similar to how Elon likes to do it.

Yeah, I was I was with James Manika who's a senior VP at at Google reports to Sundar last night. We're talking about this thing. You know, congratulations. I mean, what you deployed with Gemini 3 is shockingly good. Uh, and you know, there's a great video clip of Elon when he was asked, "What company would you invest in?" He says, "Google." I mean, that's extraordinary.

Did you see the Mark Boff talking about it? Mark Benioff basically came out and said, "Look, I've been using ChatGPT for 3 years. No more."

I'm switched over, right? Yeah, for sure. Alex, why don't you close us out on this article?

Yeah, I I'll take the other side of of this discussion. Yes, Gemini 3 Pro is an incredible model. I use it quite a bit. It has so-called big model smell. It reeks of excellent pre-training in particular. Its world knowledge is outstanding. It does well in the benchmarks, etc., etc. But I wouldn't count OpenAI out. They have a fantastic team. I I think in some sense they're pulling their punches at the cost of compute costs. I I think based on what I've heard and what I've read, they have really strong models that haven't been publicly released that now the the heat of competition and increased competition will incentivize even more rapid pace of model releases. We were on almost a quarterly cadence before from from OpenAI. And I I think this is this is where capitalism is working at its best. We're going to see white hot competition in the frontier model race. If you think that we're on the verge of extreme extremely competent super intelligence, then then this is the sprint to the finish where where now we have the the top handful of frontier labs all competing to one up each other. Maybe not on a quarterly basis. Maybe it goes to weekly and then daily before the finish line.

Yeah, I mean that's it. We're it's literally leapfrogging. Uh I'm excited. We have we're going to have Kevin Weil on stage at the Abundance Summit with us. Kevin's the chief product officer at OpenAI and we'll get some insight about I want to understand their strategy of what do they hold back and what do they decide to release and how much of that is pressure from the competition. Anyway,

I have to I have to admit that the phrase it has that big model smell was not on my bingo card at the beginning of this year. That was just really amazing.

That's great.

I'm running out of cliche. See, I have to say it's a good model, sir. Maybe instead.

Uh, another fun AI story.

Good basket.

Another fun AI story here. We just had Black Friday and sales are seeing record AI-driven shopping. Uh, AI traffic was up 805%. Wow. With $3 billion in sales driven by agents. So, this is about making it easier for you to spend your money and bypassing all the middlemen. Um, lot of implications here. Naveen, you've been in uh all kinds of internet related uh sales industries. What do you see here?

I think what's really the biggest change is that as opposed to people going to Google and really trying to find the right the right thing to shop for or right place to shop the item they're looking for. Now they're asking the AI to tell them what's the right product, where should I buy it? And I think that's a big change that in the whole model around Google actually being the intermediator or Amazon being a place where you go to shop. Now people are going to AI and AI agents to say look here is the problem I'm trying to solve. Here is what I'm trying to buy. What are the right products for this person and where should I buy that from and which is exactly the right brand and the right price I should be paying for it which

we we've talked about this a bunch where you know I always think of Jarvis as my personal AI just because I'm an Iron Man fan and I'm just going to give Jarvis all responsibilities sometimes I give Esther who's my chief of staff I say please find me something and I trust her and she goes off and does it and she has a, you know, great taste. And uh I can imagine in very shortly it's going to be uh my version of Jarvis that is I'm just, you know, it's like ask and forget and it it happens.

Alex, what am I missing here?

Yeah, I've I've read that the average American spends approximately 3 hours per week shopping, out of which two hours are spent grocery shopping. That's an enormous cognitive burden. Maybe some would disagree and say, "No, I I love my shopping. You'll pull it out of my cold dead hands." But it's an it's an enormous cognitive burden and I would argue it could be put to much more productive uses if we simply solve shopping the way we're solving math. So I I view this as a positive development. Let's solve shopping.

while

we have we're going to have a shopping benchmark very soon. I can hear it coming.

You you can hear it probably already here.

Okay. All right. Uh I found this one fascinating. Thanks for uh for raising it, Alex. uh mathematics facing existential crisis due to AI. I'm going to start with the quote down below from a professor at Ben-Gurion University. I'm writing a bunch of papers and I don't know if I should bother publishing them. That's fascinating. Alex, what are you hearing in the drumbeats in the math community?

I I I'm hearing quite a bit of this and not just from the math community. I'm hearing it from the physical sciences as as well. And I I think the anthropologists and the economists will be studying this moment for many years to come well after the singularity is is well and truly over. And I I think my suspicion is this will be viewed as a sort of professional hyperdeflation. And in in a deflationary regime, why why spend your money now? You should wait until later when your money can buy more. Similarly here, if we're in this mode of call it professional hyperdeflation, why spend any effort doing much of anything, let let alone writing hard math papers now if AI will make it much easier if not effortless in the future. So I I think I I think this is going to be solved uh at at some point when when we start to up the ambition level of problems that we're solving, but for the moment I I think we're in a moment of professional hyperdeflation. It's very exciting. This is the equivalent of don't bother going in a starship because by the time you get to the planet of targeting, technology will advance so far that you'll meet an entire population there.

That's right. And there there's a term for that that's called the wait equation. And we're seeing the wait equation play out now across every discipline including math that's just getting solved by AI.

I mean, so

I'm really excited because I think this indicates a collapse of traditional academics because it has to rethink itself, right? God bless.

Uh, yeah, for sure. end of uh anyway it's yeah we we are seeing a collapse of the college uh university system for lots of reasons.

The laws and regulations Peter still have to change because they still not allowing the AI to be co-author on papers right and that has to eventually change because what's in AI and what's human is starting to blur that the line between humanity and AI is going to blur.

Alex, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I I think uh I I regulations are separate from norms in many cases although certainly there's quite a bit of interplay between them. So on the regulation side we're not covering it here in this pod but it uh the the US Patent Office has has recently made some positive motions in the direction of supporting AI-enabled patent applications for example. So I I think there is progress on the the regulatory side. On the norm side that I think that's in in some sense far trickier than the evolution of regulations because in some cases I I think you have entrenched communities that are actively disincentivized from allowing in this rush of progress. If your entire discipline is about to get solved in the next 3 years, which in many cases I I think will be the case certainly with math over the next 2 to 3 years we're seeing the solution, then there are perverse incentives at play to discourage all of this innovation and to protect your professional livelihood. And that's just something as a civilization we're going to have to get through as quickly and painlessly as possible.

I mean, I have to imagine that every patent being filed right now is in part being developed with AI as a tool. And I have to also imagine that uh you know in in figuring out the claims and figuring out extensions and figuring out you know new strategies or how would you disrupt this patent all of that um is going to be done using

it's like it's like security it's an arms race right you find a way of hacking then you find a way of protecting you find a way of hacking find a way of protecting it's the same thing because the AI side will uplift both the filing of the patents and the evaluation of the patents But the entire concept now because we're shrinking time, how do you give a patent for a number of years and what what does that mean when take say the CRISPR patent was routed around within 18 months?

See, I think the hard part isn't the the patents themselves. It's what happens when in the next few years we're facing a glut of innovations due to AI solving everything and we don't know how to metabolize that as a civilization. Like if if AI solves the top 5,000 diseases in the next 5 years, as some frontier labs, as we've talked on the pod, are now doing, how on earth do we metabolize 5,000 major disease cures into treatments for everyone? It's hard.

The the current timing is about 17 years from known cure to full deployment going through all the regulatory. Yeah, I remember I was on stage with uh Astro Teller and Steve Jurvetson and we were talking about uh you know what the world looks like as we're approaching the singularity and there was something that was said that like blew my mind. it was you'll never bother patenting anything ever again because as soon as you file something as soon as you create a product there will be you know a army of AIs that are figuring out how to produce that product around any patent that pre-exists and make it more efficiently from a different approach and so your only defense is no longer patents it's continuous innovation you've got to be continually reinventing yourself.

I think for what that for what it's worth that that sort of a nonsensical argument because we're also going to have an army of AI patent litigators to defend all those patents.

God, great.

No, no, but Peter, I think you're making a really important point. I'll go back to the CRISPR thing, right? They spent years fighting over who invented CRISPR Jennifer versus the other folks. And they finally got through it all, resolved it all and then by that time they had found four other ways of path pathways or I think it was nine other pathways of getting the same outcome but not using that IP. So I think that's the part that's going to break lots of other things.

Well, uh, again, AI entering our world. Uh, I think there's very soon a period of time where every Nobel Prize is being done in partnership with AI. Not that they're being recognized. All right, let's jump into where the rubber hits the road. I want to talk about jobs and the economy. A lot of interesting news here. The first is a study by McKinsey on how AI is reshaping skills and work by 2030 saying that AI can automate already 57% of current US work. Um, and the goal here is shifting not eliminating roles and the demand for AI fluency has grown 7x in two years. It's the fastest rising skill in the US. And finally, that we're going to see $2.9 trillion dollars in economic gains by 2030 as a result of this. Alex, you want to kick off the conversation?

Yeah. I I tell people who ask me for career advice to make sure that their skills and their work goals are aligned with an intelligence explosion. In other words, to accelerate it and make sure that intelligence, super intelligence is evenly distributed. I think the exact wrong thing to do as as we were just discussing is to to not align your work with with the the boundaries and the the vectors of of this explosion worst case to try to slow it down. And and I I think that's being reflected already in in automation. If if you're in an industry and and if you're a mathematician and you're you're concerned that all of your work is about to be automated, why do anything? You're facing your moment of on wee. You're staring down the wait equation. What's the point of anything? What you should be working on, I would argue, is AI for solving math? And maybe it's time to to jump up a layer of abstraction and supervise a fleet of AI agents that are automating your former field.

Yeah, I love that.

Well, I think Peter, I think to me the AI fluency, what is that really mean? Because you never really interact with AI. you really interact with an application that's on built on top of AI and those tools are constantly changing. So really developing a a AI fluency has really no meaning as such because those tools are going to be constantly changing and becoming more and more different and advanced. So I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here. How do you actually have a way to encourage and educate children where they constantly becomes lifelong learner? And knowing that intelligence, you know, intelligence is going to be the capabilities to learn, not the knowledge you have. So the whole thing has to shift from knowledge to a capability to learn.

Yeah. And we talked about continuous learning and AIs as well. I've often tweeted at MIT and Harvard, my my universities of uh of history, um that you've got to change. The idea of of being admitted for a four-year degree is crazy. You should be admitted for lifelong learning.

You're a member of a student body for life.

Yeah.

I mean, I think

that works that works really well until we have BCIs in a few years and can do high bandwidth downloads and sideload data of new information and don't need traditional universities.

I I can't wait. Well, listen, the universities are going to are going to uh you know sublimate in uh very shortly.

I think the I would make the two points here. One is that the for the education side that we're moving from the supply side where you learned engineering, math, accounting and then trying to sell that in the job marketplace and we're moving to the demand side where you pick your massive transformative purpose and your big what you problem you want to solve and then go acquire the skills that you need to solve that problem. So that's one big shift. I do want to call BS on one thing in this chart which is that 2.9 trillion economic gain. That all sounds wonderful except they're not talking about the demonetization that is taking place radically across the board which I think dwarfs that to McKinsey increase on big chunks of this. I mean but but can you can you double click on what that means because uh it's important to for folks to understand.

well for example uh there's an innovation out there called wellways which may solve breast cancer because we can detect breast cancer at stage zero now okay we spend half a million dollars per person on average in the west treating breast cancer somebody that's gotten breast cancer if you solve breast cancer GDP drops even though you solved a major problem GDP drops this is why ID talks about whoever The fellow that created GDP said it's the worst form of worst measurement of the economy possible. Yeah. Because as we increase efficiency, GDP actually drops. I use the example of that thousand TV that's only worth can only be sold for $500 a year later and $250 a year after that. Those are all drops in GDP. And so we're not we're missing that unbelievable hollowing out of all of the work that's going to be done. that 57% of US work that's being uh automated is going to decimate GDP.

So that's the part to take into account as well as looking at the upside.

I thought you were going to say something different, Seem. I thought you were going to say the fact that $100 uh by 2030 buys you so much more capability than $100 does today, right?

that's all built into the same thing, right? is all built in because the amount of the amount of stuff I can do with $100 is a hundred times more than say 10 years ago. Even though the dollars deflated, etc. The productivity of that $100, I can launch a whole business with $100 today, right? Which I couldn't do 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago.

All right, well, let's move on to uh another MIT study. MIT finds that AI can already replace 11.7% of the US workforce. So MIT found AI can handle jobs tied to about 1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare, and HR. I completely believe that, right? Their iceberg index uh simulates 151 million workers and 32,000 skills to see which tasks AI can now perform. And tech layoffs are just the surface of a 2.1 2.2% of exposed wages. Thoughts, Seem?

Um, this speaks to what we spoke about in the last slide. Essentially, we're going to see this huge demonetization take place. I don't see anything massively meaningful here except that you will automate a lot of tasks. I go back to Eric Bolson's comment that to do a particular job, you might have 27 tasks and AI may automate like half of those, but you still have to do half of those. And it also speaks to the middle comment that um um Balaji talks about. I think the big shift will come when we move away from human-centric workflows. So think about the idea that right now all of our work that we do in any company or any function is human-centric. You go from accounting to fulfillment, you have marketing, you have accounting and you have a person there. When you have an AI that can rewrite it the rules, you can get rid of all of those people-centric tasks into being functionally centric.

Naveen, what are your thoughts?

I think this is slightly different. I think

If you, you know what Satya said a couple of days ago was really meaningful. He says, "Look, yes, we're going to have AI agents, just like I have a bunch of employees, but I, you know, they go out and do the job because I delegate them. But I still have, they still come back and say, 'I'm finished this. I'm stuck here. What do I do here? What's my priority? If I do, should I do this or this?'" Right? So, the point is, the humans will always be there, irrespective of all the agents and the new AI agents actually being deployed. It just makes them more productive. It allows them to do more. So, I don't believe that jobs are going to go away. It will just allow the same people to be able to do more.

You know, this goes back, uh, to a couple of pods ago when I was showing the data from FI9. Uh, and this is not just in the US in the tech industry. The notion that there's still a lot of fear around the world of, "Can I find a job and can I afford to live, uh, in this future?" Uh, and, uh, the, you know, I'm out right now, actively speaking to people, and there's just a tremendous amount of fear around, uh, the future for their kids, uh, and the future for their ability to survive and thrive. Right? So, that is still very real.

I'll just mention, uh, on that pod, I said to our subscribers and listeners, "You know, we would love to get together and have what we call a Moonshot Gathering, probably in the fall of next year, uh, and to talk about how do we solve these problems? How do we solve these huge problems of fear and uplift society for every man, woman, and child?" Um, and I said, "If we can get, you know, a thousand Moonshot subscribers," we're like at 850 now. So, if you're interested in potentially a Moonshot Gathering, uh, with the Moonshot Mates, uh, probably in LA in the fall of '26, uh, send an email to moonshots@diamandis.com. We'll send you some information. And again, I'm just, you know, right now we're asking, "Is this of interest to you?" If you want to be part of these conversations over a couple-day event, uh, we'd love to have you. So again, just, uh, send us an email. We'll send you back.

"There's an abundance of wine." "I'm there." "There's an abundance of what?" "Wine." "Wine." "Wine." "Okay." "Your." "All right. So, moonshots@diamandis.com. All right, let's move on to, uh, our, uh, next article here. Here's a flip side. Claude's conversation suggests AI could double us productivity growth. So, uh, an analysis of a thousand chats, 100,000 chats found tasks without AI took an average of 90 minutes, and Claude helped cut the time by 80% on the average task, with healthcare being cut up to 90%. And being in the healthcare industry, uh, I know this to be the fact, right? Is so much that can be improved, uh, on every aspect of the, it's not healthcare, it's sickcare, right? So, let's just be very clear. Uh, Claude could help, uh, you know, cut average task length by 90% in the sickcare industry.

So, what this means is you can get a procedure or some task done for like a tenth of the cost, right? That's the demonetization we're talking about. It is. And when you bring in, uh, you know, intelligent, you know, humanoid robots, you're going to start to get medical procedures done, uh, at a tenth of, of the cost.

"Can I give a personal, can I give a personal anecdote here?" "Please?" "I have a big screen TV that just went blank on it. And so I went into, uh, ChatGPT and Gemini and I said, 'My TV's not working,' and, uh, 'here's the model number.' And it said, 'Is it making a buzzing sound?' And I was like, 'What?' So, I listened, and it was making a buzzing sound. I said, 'Yes.' And it said, 'Is it making a buzzing sound every for two seconds spaced by seven times in a row?' And I was like, 'Yeah.' And it said, 'There's a diode on the power board that's gone bad. And, and here's how you fix it.' Now, this is mind-boggling because that would have taken hours and hours and hours. I had to take the TV apart, guess at 100 things to figure out, carry the whole damn TV into the, into the repair shop to figure out what the hell's going on. Or do you even just chuck the TV? And I could go in there, the guy soldered a new diode for me, and it was back to scratch. That, I think, is the kind of thing that we're going to see hundreds of times over in all sorts of health and, and in healthcare, 10 times over."

"Wow. Wow." "But I don't think the healthcare cost has anything to do with what people charge. I really don't think this will change how much money we spend on healthcare. It's not really the cost issue. It's not about how much money you spend. It is primarily driven by litigation, and that's not going to change."

"Ah, fascinating. Well, I mean, it can change, just not easily." "Yes. My expectation, for what it's worth, is that the Jevons Paradox is going to strike yet again. And, and just as a reminder, the Jevons Paradox is that as the efficiency of a good or service increases, it's often the case that overall demand increases even more. I, I, I think with, whether it's with healthcare or with television repair or, or just service economy tasks in general, I'm finding anecdotally and, and seeing more generally a, as productivity skyrockets thanks to these tools, you take on more tasks, you take on more projects rather than taking a two-day weekend and turning that into like a four-day work week. The exact opposite is, is happening. We're doing far more with less."

"Yeah. Our multiplexing lives are just, are just going hyper-exponential. I think this is the, a key point. Like, for example, we talk about automating software writing, and I think we'll just end up writing 10 times more software because there's not much to be done, right? And lots of slop, of course. But how many hundreds of thousands of things do we want to keep automating? And we were right at the very, very beginning of all of that."

"Yeah. Uh, in the economy, here's a fun conversation. Interesting article. Some New Yorkers are getting $12,000 in crypto. It's a basic income-style pilot by Coinbase. So, 160 New Yorkers in the Bronx and East Harlem are getting, uh, 12 USDC, or $12,000 USDC, right? Uh, and we had Jeremy Allaire on this pod, the CEO of Circle, uh, as part of a basic income pilot. It's funded by Coinbase. Each participant receives $800 a month, again, in USDC for five months, plus an $8,000 lump sum. And the program is testing whether crypto payments are useful or perceived differently in low-income communities. Gentlemen, who wants to jump in?"

"I think I love the idea they're running this because the more data and the more, uh, UBI type pilots we run, the better. Uh, we've seen profound positive results when you truly run a UBI, meaning it's truly universal, it's truly basic, and it's, and it's basically just given the income to the people. Um, in this particular case, I think there's going to be a huge age demographic split between young people going, 'Yeah, I'll use the damn crypto.' And the older folks going, 'There's nothing. Give it to the kids and they'll figure it out.'"

"I'll comment on this story as, as well. Critically, this is not a UBI. This is a GBI, which is a guaranteed basic income that restricts the targets of the recipients to certain economic demographics. So, it's not universal. It's just basically for, for those who need it, according to some definition of need, to bring them up to some floor. I think what this represents is we're seeing an evolution. Uh, there were a variety of trials of, call it first or second generation UBI. Some of those succeeded, some of those arguably did not succeed. I, I think it's very helpful that we're seeing innovation and iteration and evolution of, call it post-economic paradigms like this. I'm still a big fan of universal basic services and universal basic equity, not just basic income guaranteed or otherwise. But I, I think we're, we should expect to see many more iterations, trials, evolutions like this before we finally figure out what it looks like to, to live in an abundant economy."

"Yeah, we had this, uh, uh, an X Prize at this year's Visionary. Salem was there. Naveen, I'm sorry you weren't able to make it this year, but, um, the, the prize that won, uh, Visionary this year, uh, it was called the Abundance X-Prize. Two of my Abundance 360 members pitched it, proposed it, and won. And it's for universal, universal basic services. The idea is, can you provide for a flat fee of $250 a month, housing, food, water, energy, and bandwidth, right? That's the goal. And I love the idea because if a family has a roof over their head and guaranteed food and, you know, bandwidth and energy, uh, they can start thinking about their future. They can start thinking about how they become an entrepreneur. What do they do? How do they upskill themselves? But if you're a mom or dad fighting to put food in your kids' mouths, um, nothing else matters."

"This was so exciting to see because it's the first time we've also moved away from the hard technology stuff to more of the social contract."

"And the biggest problem in the world is that what's happening as we move this massive transformation is the old social contract is absolutely breaking."

"Yeah, for sure. We need to recreate some new model, and some model that covers the bottom couple of layers of Maslow's hierarchy is just going to be unbelievable for the world."

"Yeah. And we want to make this a $50 million prize. I had my first conversation, uh, with a friend who's a multi-billionaire, not in the US, who said he's open to funding it. So, I'm looking for funders. If you're listening and you want to fund, uh, this Abundance X-Prize, uh, please let us know."

"Okay. This is, this may have a bigger impact than any other prize we've ever done."

"I agree. I mean, my, again, going back to the potential Moonshot Gathering, uh, we might have. Um, it's, there's a lot of fear out there in the world, and there's fear about how do I navigate in this future of, uh, of AI disruption? And if people have a, a safety, you know, uh, a foundation that enables them to feel safe, and then they can start to learn and go forward. It reduces the fear significantly, and that's the goal. And if you can tell people that, 'Look, there's a line of sight to basic needs being covered for $250 a month,' everybody kind of breathes a huge sigh of relief and, and you take away that angst that's there right today. You, one of your family members gets sick. You, the whole family goes bankrupt. It's unbelievable today."

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"Next article here is NASDAQ pledges swift push for SEC approval of tokenized stocks. So, tokens would have the same rights and protections as normal stocks, including dividends and voting. The move is meant to modernize rather than disrupt. NASDAQ considers itself an evol, considers this an evolution in trading, and tokenized stocks, uh, would be digital versions of regular shares on the blockchain. Naveen, how do you think about trading 24/7?"

"Are you excited about, first of all, it's already, it's already happening. I mean, most of the stocks are trading 24/7 anyway in different markets. Uh, obviously, you know, if you look at Bitcoin and others, they trade 24/7. And so, it, it is not a massive change that, you know, call them tokenization. But the things like iShares, I mean, iShares has been around for a long time. People have looked at how do you buy a partial, partial shares. So, yes, it is a small incremental thing by putting on a blockchain. But really, the idea of buying partial shares has been around. People have broken the shares into dividend shares or the, the growth share. So, I mean, there are many, many ways of owning a share, and this is just yet another way of doing it."

"Alex or Sim, you want to, you want to lean in?"

"Yeah, I, I'll comment on on this one if I may. Um, when we spoke with Tuli a number of episodes ago about Solana, we talked about how increasing the efficiency of financial services was maybe the killer app of crypto, maybe the only killer app at the moment. I wish there were more compelling killer apps besides that. And I, I, I, I view this step by NASDAQ. This is, this is iterative. It's a foundational step, but a step I think in a very positive direction. It does not critically give us 24/7 trading, as much as I would like that yet. But it could be an enabler if the SEC approved 24/7 trading down the road. It could be an enabler for fractional tokenized shares. You see enabler."

"Yeah, that's what I like, right? And the idea of I can own a fraction, uh, of a particular, you know, share, and then a fraction of a particular piece of real estate, uh, and then tokenized assets, and then add to that, you know, uh, uh, you know, agents trading, and you get an explosion in the economy."

"Today, you can do that with a single stock ETF. So, you can buy a partial shares, you can buy fractional shares, you can buy a whole bunch of things similarly today. So, yes, as I say, incremental, and it's an enabler, as Alex rightly pointed. So, rather than a big massive change here."

"Yeah, for me, I'm with Naveen. This is like incremental, and it seems like modernization with regulatory blessing rather than anything monster. But it's definitely a step in the right direction. Thank God."

"Okay. All right. Uh, our next, uh, segment here is titled Elon and how to solve the US debt crisis. So, let's take a listen to the video."

"Um, as long as civilization keeps advancing, we, we, we will have AI and robotics at very large scale. Um, the, uh, I, I think that that's, that's pretty much the only thing that's going to solve for the US debt crisis. You know, the, because currently, the US debt is insanely high, and, uh, the interest payments on the debt exceed the entire military budget of the United States, just the interest payments. And that, that's, that's at least in the short term, going to continue to increase. So, so, I think, I think actually the only thing that can solve for, uh, the debt situation is, um, AI and robotics."

"Fascinating. Um, I believe that AI and robotics are going to, uh, basically light, in a positive fashion, the economy on fire. I, I've disagreed and saying, you know, I've had this conversation with Elon, and by the way, I'm in, I'm in, uh, texting back and forth right now to get him scheduled to come on the pod. Uh, so that will be a fun episode. We have a lot of amazing people coming up on the podcast. We've got, uh, uh, Mustafa Suleyman coming up next week, uh, who's the CEO of Microsoft AI. We've got Ray Kurzweil coming up, Kathy Wood coming up. So, a lot of fun conversations, and looking forward to getting Elon scheduled. What I was saying was, you know, another thing that can solve the debt is actually extending the health span of individuals, right? If you could add, uh, two, three, four, five healthy years on people's lives, uh, that would massively transform, uh, any country's, uh, debt position."

"I have issues here. Um, okay. The, the, you know, trying to solve the problem, the, the problem is the underlying fiat currency structure is flawed. If we have increased productivity, my fear is it just gives governments, 'Oh, we can spend more,' and they'll just start spending more or printing more money, which is what they've done repeatedly in the past. You have to break that problem first. And, and, uh, Bitcoin is the only model that does that. So, I don't know how you solve for that problem because you can't solve for the, uh, the unbelievable ability of governments when given a little bit of rope to spend their fiat money."

"Alex?"

"I may, maybe comment on that one. I, I, I am reticent to assert that any fundamentally deflationary, uh, cryptocurrency is the solution to a macroeconomic debt crisis. I, I, I think at best, part of the solution. I don't think it's the whole story. I, I, I do buy the thesis that economic hypergrowth, growth in general. I, there's the aphorism, 'Growth cures all woes,' or almost all woes. I, I do think economic hypergrowth that stems from AI and automation can solve the, the so-called debt crisis. But I also think it can solve many other things. I, I, I think there's, there's a debate raging right now in the reinforcement learning and machine learning community as to whether some of the hardest problems, like curing all disease, can we cure all disease with AI right now, or does the economy need to be much larger in order for us to be able to cure all disease? I, I think if we find ourselves in a future where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next three-plus years, it's not just the debt crisis that, that we'd be talking about solving. It's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table."

"Naveen, where do you come out on this?"

"I mean, from my perspective, our first thing is that, you know, obviously economic growth gives you more revenue, but you have to fundamentally solve the problem of balanced budget. Until we get to a point where you actually, like, every single person in their home, they have to have a balanced budget. Every state has to have a balanced budget. The federal government is really the only place where we don't have a balanced budget. So, that's once we start to look at, we can't spend more than what we earn. And as we earn more, we have to pay back the debt before we start spending it. That we have to say that as the economic growth happens, Sim, to your point, we have to say 90% of that is going to go towards paying the debt back. And unless our debt is back to zero, we're not going to spend it. So, balanced budget, using the economic growth that is going to come through AI and robotics to pay back the debt before we start spending it, is really the only way we can solve this crisis."

"Somebody must be modeling all this out somewhere because it can't be that hard to model out in terms like economic growth by economic increase from AI versus the deflationary versus the money printing versus the tax schedule."

"We've talked in the past on the pod about how the Dallas Fed is already monitoring, modeling the singularity. So, it's not like these discussions aren't being held in, in either regulatory circles or macroeconomic circles. I think really, to the extent debt is just borrowing from the future, no one is super confident right now what the future trajectory looks like. Do we solve all problems in the next three to five years, in which case, yeah, sure, borrow from infinity, that, that's great, or does it take longer?"

"M." "I, I, just to remind the, the viewers, the Dallas Fed said realistically could be like this. If we have a good singularity, it's vertical. And if a bad singularity, it's vertical the other way. There was, there was really, it was kind of like binary on that. You're like, 'Borrow, borrow from positive infinity. Don't borrow from negative infinity,' is, is the resolution here."

"All right, let's, let's move on. I have some news I want to share with, uh, my Moonshot Mates here and everyone on the pod. Uh, my next book is coming out. It's called 'We Are As Gods.' Uh, it's coming out in April of 2026. It's called 'We Are Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance.' Uh, once again, I've co-authored this with Steven Kotler, who's an amazing, amazing writer. And, uh, this book is the sequel to 'Abundance' that came out in 2012. Um, and it's much, much more than that. It's, uh, you know, for me, this is a, a guide on how to survive and thrive in the decade ahead. And my message is to get, my goal is to get this message out as far and wide as possible. And if you've ever written a book, uh, you probably know that bestsellers don't just happen, they're engineered, and it's all about the Amazon algorithms. Uh, and, uh, it's crazy, but I would love your help if you're willing. Uh, so I need to hit 500 books sold in December, four months ahead of the book release, in order to make the algorithms work. And so, uh, I wanted to extend a special offer. If anyone here wants to go to purchase one of these books now, uh, we'll give you, uh, Steve and I will hold a private 90-minute AMA answering any questions on any of these subjects on AI and mindsets and humanity's future. Uh, also, if you buy two books, uh, we're going to give you 140 abundance charts. So, I have a collection of the most amazing charts showing the upside of abundance, the downside of abundance, all the exponential technologies. Anyway, if you want to join the team and help us with this pre-launch campaign, uh, help me rocket this, uh, into the stratosphere, I would be grateful. Uh, you can go to diamandis.com/book and, uh, and join this pre-launch, this pre-launch effort. So, let me just say off the top, thank you for considering it. We're going to have, uh, the 90-minute AMA towards the end of December, probably December 17th to 22nd. Uh, and it'll be a lot of fun. So, join me if you can. Uh, diamandis.com/book. And, uh, we'll put the link below as well. All right, let's talk about energy, gentlemen, shall we? Uh, this was amazing. Check this out. Microsoft's Fairwater facility to use more power than Los Angeles by late 2027. Who wants to jump in on this one?"

"I mean, AI is sucking up electrons. I, I'll comment that the, the multi-trillion dollar question in capex is whether coherent superclusters will keep increasing in size. We don't know the answer to that yet. It is entirely possible that we'll see a peak in terms of the, the size or the energy footprint of coherent training clusters sometime soon. May, maybe in, maybe shortly after late 2027, we'll look back and say, 'Gosh, that was the peak.' And hereafter, advances in distributed training algorithms mean that we can spread the wealth, spread the energy footprint of of training runs across the entire surface of the planet or in low Earth orbit, perhaps. And, and we'll say, 'No, the naive extrapolation called for larger and larger clusters, but actually that's not what happened, and we didn't need black hole supercomputers after all.' I don't think we know the answer to that question. I think it's going to be almost entirely dictated by algorithmic advances in distributed training."

"Interesting." "Um."

"I'm staggered by, um, how big this thing must be. I mean, how much of Wisconsin is this thing covering would be an interesting question."

"Well, it's basically two and a half nuclear power plants, right? That's the way I think about it."

"And I think Peter, I think that two things are going to happen. Obviously, either we don't need that many bigger clusters, Alex pointed out, or secondly, I really think that some of the fusion stuff that I think we may have talked about in the past, but I was just at Helion last month, and I really think they're already digging up the things for Microsoft data center in the state of Washington, where I think they're going to have a positive fusion reactor for Microsoft in 2027. And I really think at this point, they're so close because of how they're using the capacitors and supercapacitors in terms of to be able to recapture 95% of the pulse that they send to the fusion reactor. So, I really think this is good. Problem could be modular fusion reactors, and, you know, I think this problem can be solved."

"Yeah. Uh, well, it's, we're starting to see communities who are saying, 'No data center in my backyard,' because they're concerned about the, the price of energy going up. I just want to do a shout out again to Google and Nana Banana. This, by the way, this graphic that you're seeing, if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, um, when, uh, when Gianluca on my team first put this up, it was really faint, really difficult to read. I, I took a screenshot of the image and fed it to Nana Banana. I said, 'Make the lines darker, thicker, make all the characters readable.' And it generated this perfect. So, it's just so simple. And over, over the, uh, Thanksgiving break, I, I was at my mom's house in Boca and I went around and I photographed all the old photographs that are like 100 years old that are in black and white and crinkly and fuzzy, and I fed them all into Nana Banana, and it did an amazing job of making them crisp, or modernizing them, or colorizing them. A lot of fun."

"So, at least the electrons are going for something, something good and useful."

"All right." "Absolutely." "I like this one." "Um, and I know you would, Salem. So, XAI plans to build 88 acres of solar panels around Memphis data center. So, this is 88 acres of solar farms, right? 30 megawatts, only 10% of the of the site's power demand. Uh, but still a nice move. I mean, you have to remember that that, uh, Elon started SolarCity with his cousin, um, that was then acquired by, uh, by Tesla. And so, you know, solar has been a focus for him. See, do you want more data centers, more solar?"

"Well, I think solar is just the most, you know, we have to remember that solar is an exponential technology. It's doubling every 22 months in its price performance. Has been doing that for 40 years. So, every couple years, we double the price per performance of solar. It scales, and therefore, this is very, very exciting."

"Yep." "Um, Naveen, anything you want to add?"

"I mean, I think I'm, I'm simply going to add, I think solar is good, but I really think that nuclear and fusion is where the future is going to be. You know, the challenge I have with that, listen, I, I agree, but when I look at, uh, the articles on nuclear, on, on generation three and four nuclear and small modular reactors and fusion, it all looks like five and 10-year timelines. Uh, and, you know, China is deploying solar, you know, 10x faster than we are. Uh, what do you think about this?"

"I don't think nuclear is, I don't think that nuclear is really the problem in terms of us not being able to build safe nuclear reactors. We have been using them in aircraft carriers and with no incidents at all."

"Sure. We know it's permitting."

"It's permitting. It's, it's all regulations."

"Yeah." "Yeah." "It's all regulations." "Agreed."

"And, and, you know, the question is, when is the government going to, going to change that?"

"Well, but the problem is, we have two problems. One is that it, it, you, for us to move fully to solar, you have to cover the base load because solar scaling will, will be a long time before it gets to the level where it covers all of our electricity needs. So, that base load problem is where we need nuclear fusion. The problem is, it's going to take several years to build the nuclear, and definitely for fusion."

"Yeah." "Remember also, solar and fusion are the same energy source. We get solar power from fusion in the sun. So, it's really a question if, if we're going to put solar on one hand and fusion on the other hand, where is the fusion taking place? Do we want it taking place at the center of our solar system, or do we want it taking place at a number of locations on the Earth's surface? And I, I, I think there is an argument to be made that for certain purposes, you want a very large fusion reactor, like for really large training runs that require large power sources that are locally available, and for certain purposes, you want distributed fusion. So, I, I can see an argument, you know, projecting out 10, 15 years, when perhaps we get our solar Dyson swarm, as naively extrapolating seems like we're on that trajectory regardless of whether you like it or not. We're on that trajectory naively where we're going to get both. We're going to get lots of solar-based fusion and also we'll get lots of land and low Earth orbit-based fusion, and they'll coexist."

"We'll discuss disassembling the moon in a little bit. Okay. All right. Let's jump into health and, uh, a topic that Naveen and I both dearly love and spend a lot of our time on. Uh, and we're going to start, Naveen, with Viome. Uh, you know, again, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. Uh, I love having you on our board at Singularity and X-Prize. But day-to-day, you run Viome, and, uh, we have two articles I'd love you to comment on so folks understand what it is Viome does. Uh, jump in on this one."

"Well, I think, Peter, more than just what Viome does, I think what I find really, really fascinating is this is the first time in human history where we are starting to see what is it at a molecular level that is changing inside the human body that we have been measuring for so long. So, we have had these standard lab tests that say, 'Your cholesterol is high,' and the only solution has been, 'Take a statin,' right? But nobody has ever looked at and saying, 'What is causing this cholesterol to go high?' Is it your gut microbiome is really converting, you know, the oestradiol? Is it actually converting the dietary cholesterol into copper, which essentially doesn't get absorbed? So, you have a low cholesterol. Can we do that? Can we actually change from bile acid to secondary bile acid? Can we increase the short-chain fatty acids? And by simply understanding exactly what is the root cause for you specifically that's causing the high cholesterol, we can come up with a very personalized solution rather than a one-size-fits-all. And that's really the key is to understanding for each individual what is going on inside their body so we can come up with a solution that works for them."

"Got it. Uh, there's a, uh, a second one I'd love you to cover, if you would, um, which is, uh, you know, not something most people think about, but what is the root cause of constipation? But it's really interesting, Peter, that we may not think about it often, but 15% of our population in the United States suffer from IBS, and they have mostly constipation. This is a big problem right now. Most of the times, when people have constipation, doctors will take, take laxatives. Laxatives don't cure constipation. It simply relieves the symptom of the constipation. But you still have constipation. And, you know, again, looking at from the biological perspective, what we found, having Peter, now, I don't know if I told you or not, we have now analyzed 1.5 million. We have 1.5 million tests, and we have analyzed over 400 quadrillion biological data points. And what we saw was that constipation can be caused by many, many different things. For example, in some people, it was caused by having high methane gas production because we know the methane gas slows down the motility of the gut, right? It could be the low serotonin production. It could be the short-chain fatty acid. It could be the bile acid, right? So, it could be many, many different reasons. By looking at what each individual has, we were able to identify what was causing the constipation for them and give them a personalized nutrition of the food and supplements. And we actually did a blinded placebo-controlled study that showed in 90 days, 64% of the people who had constipation with the personalized nutrition and supplement, they became healthy compared to 10% on placebo. So, not only we can identify what's happening."

"Yeah. And that's my point, Peter. For the first time, not only we can identify why it is, what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do about it for you. I mean, most people, you know, it's interesting, right? It's only the last, uh, four or five years, maybe in the last three years, that your micro, that the microbiome has been identified to correlate with so many different, uh, health failure modes. Um, you know, people need to realize you're a collection of 40 trillion human cells and something on the order of a hundred trillion, uh, other life forms, bacteria."

"Yes. An outer, outerware for bacteria."

"Yeah. Well, the human, the human being is simply a mechanism for carrying bacteria around the planet."

"Question for Naveen."

"Yeah, Alex, quick question for Naveen. How do we get more refereed published studies into the space, like for hypercholesterolemia, for example, on, on the previous note? Like, is there a, a peer-reviewed published study that we can, like, point to?"

"Yes. So, there is a BMC GI, which is just an article that we just published on a peer-reviewed journal, which is one of the most prestigious GI journals. And we actually showed that we can identify by looking at your gut microbiome exactly what is causing, for example, constipation or what is causing the hypercholesterolemia, right? So, we actually are able to identify and publish these. And this is, by the way, not N of 20 or N of 50. There was an N of 86,750 people."

"That sounds very exciting. So, how do we, like, do this at scale? So, so if, if there really is artisanal progress being made on hypercholesterolemia or constipation, how do you, to the extent that the microbiome is a gating factor for a wide variety of diseases, how do you just like solve all of the microbiome-gated diseases at once rather than doing this individually? And again, so, so two things is that even though it is the underlying reasons for each individual is very, very different. So, it can be a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas the healthcare demands one-size-fits-all approach. And what we're finding is the underlying reason for the same symptom is very, very different. That means for some people, the high cholesterol is being caused by high secondary bile acid, or some people, it's being caused by a completely different reason. So, you have to, you have to really look at the underlying reason, and that's the reason it can't, it has to be hyper-personalized rather than one-size-fits-all. And the second thing is in our current healthcare system, as Peter very well knows, it is really, it is not designed. Everyone in the healthcare system, this is the only industry where healthcare system is the only industry where they make money when you, their customer is unhappy, and they stop making money when the customer becomes happy. I mean, there's no other industry, right? So, it's not designed to keep you happy. They want to actually solve the symptom of the problem so you become a lifelong customer. And by the way, you can't use nutrition as a mechanism to solve it because then if they call it a drug, and then you have to wait for 20 years before the drug comes out."

"Yeah. And the head of, I remember interviewing the head of Google Health at a conference once, and I said, 'Explain, please explain the US healthcare system.' And to your point, I interviewed, and he said, 'It's the whole healthcare system here is designed to get you sick, keep you sick as long as possible without killing you.' And I was shocked as a Canadian, but the whole audience, about 500 people, were like, 'Yeah, that's about right. That's about right.' Just unreal."

"If I might ask, just one, one more question, Naveen. If you project out forward past the difficulties of of the present healthcare system, and and you had to outline what you think is the the shape of of the final solution for microbiome health banishment. Does it look like fecal transplants? Does it look like purely dietary interventions? What, what is with 24th-century technology? What is, what's like the fully realized solution for microbiome health?"

"So, I think the idea of a microbiome being a one single organ or the set of a species or ecosystem is completely fundamentally wrong. And this is really where I think the biggest change we saw that everyone else was looking at microbiome as a set of species or strains of species that are out there, and what we focused on the functional. So, what they do is what matters, not who they are. That means the same organisms can do something good in one environment, and the same organism can produce something toxic in a different environment. So, looking at the functional microbiome, and once you know what functions they are performing or not performing, then providing the right set of substrate, and the substrate can come from food, supplement, or drug. That is really the key is to understanding what is going on functionally and then providing the intervention, the substrate that can come from food or supplements to actually modulate them. And Peter, you know, I, as you know, I'm not the scientist or a doctor, but the fact is this has become a really a technology, data, and AI problem."

"Yeah. Well, you built it. You've built quite an AI team and a massive data collection, uh, uh, platform, and which is where the insights are coming and continuing. And we have a lot to cover, so I'm going to continue on, uh, if it's all right with everybody. Uh, I found this fascinating. Uh, David Sinclair, which many people on this podcast have financially supported as part of Friend of Sinclair Lab, was just granted a patent, patent number 12,000, 12,274,733 for cellular reprogramming method using the, uh, Oct4, KL4, SOX2, and not the cancer-causing mix, Yamanaka factors, to safely reverse epigenetic aging markers without driving them all the way back to pluripotent stem cells. So, this is his work in partial epigenetic reprogramming. His company, Life Biosciences, which has rights to these patents and this work, have gotten FDA approval and they're entering human trials in the first quarter of '26. This is the first time we're going to see a, uh, epigenetic or partial epigenetic reprogramming, uh, in humans. It's just completed its non-human primate work. So, fascinating. I hit a couple of articles. We can talk about all of them together. This is, uh, another interesting idea. Uh, researchers sequenced 100 cells from a 74-year-old man, finding major genetic differences between cells. So, it's the idea that, you know, we kind of think that the genome in all of our cells, in our 40 trillion cells, is the same. Well, uh, apparently, that's not the case. And one more art, and I'll stop with that. So, any comments on on these two?"

"I remember first hearing this at Singularity University years ago, and it just blew my mind. We all had this conception that every cell in our body has the same DNA, and the expression of it is what varies. And now we find that's not a reliable thing either. And where, where do we get it? Some reliable footprint of identity?"

"Yeah, I, I'll comment on this story. So, this is an effect called mosaicism. You're a mosaic. You're, you're not a single genome. It's actually really difficult at the moment. Here we are, stuck in 2025, to sequence the, the DNA from individual cells. And there is a recent invention called primary template-directed amplification. You may have learned about PCR, polymerase chain reaction. That, this is a more sophisticated version of PCR that's now made it very recently, like past, past couple of years, easy to read, to sequence DNA from individual cells with low error rates. So, now this is like this big unlock, enabling us to, to sequence lots of individual cells from all over the body. And what's the first thing that we discover? That the DNA is actually, in many cases, wildly different in different parts of the body. So, this has the potential to unlock cures for cancer. Cancer that's a function of high mutation rates in somatic cells, could unlock cures for heart disease, and in some cases, cardiovascular disease is caused by change or or loss in the Y chromosome. I, I think this is a big unlock for healthcare."

"Yeah. Um, fascinating. All right. Going to back to MIT. Uh, this is a friend, Dina Sarcar. She is runs a lab at the MIT Media Lab, and I heard about this when we visited her. We had, um, this is about three years ago, during one of the Abundance Longevity trips, and she unveiled this, but under wraps. It's finally come out, and, uh, she's created a non-surgical brain implant by attaching these tiny wireless electronics. I mean, literally like super small etched electronics like you'd get in, in circuit design, to immune cells. And the cell-electronic hybrid can be injected, uh, through a vein, and it implants itself in deep brain areas. Right? The, the immune cell helps it target specific locations, and then upon implementation, the devices can wirelessly stimulate specific neurons with high precision light. So, this is, you know, I've had these conversations with, with Ray Kurzweil, and we'll again, we'll have Ray on the pod in early January talking about his predictions for the decade ahead, and one of his predictions for the decade ahead is high-bandwidth BCI. His expectation is through nanotechnology, and this is probably the closest nanotech approach that I've seen. Any comments on it? Is this optogenetics where they have specific neurons?"

"This is very much not optogenetics, right?"

"It's not genetically engineered neurons. It's just planting optogenetics. You're, you're, you're inducing cells to express rhodopsins to, to be sensitive to light. This, if you've seen like Star Trek Voyager, there are episodes with Borg nanoprobes that that are shown that are being depicted like attaching themselves to cells. This looks far more like Star Trek Voyager Borg nanoprobes than it does optogenetics. So,"

"Alex, if you turn to the side, people could see the, the nanoprobes, uh, pipe going into your brain."

"Really? I thought I was just an AI and this is a generative background. Uh, this is, this is the beginnings, I think, of a Moravec procedure. So, Hans Moravec has before Ray even laid out this notion that the way we're going to solve human mind uploading is by replacing brain cells, Ship of Theseus style, one by one, with train simulations. If, if you look at Dina's paper in, in Nature Biotechnology, it's like, really amazing paper. Take a look at the figures. This looks like a scene out of Star Trek Voyager with these photovoltaically sensitive sandwiches that look like coins attached to spherical cells are look like the Borg nanoprobes out of Star Trek. I, I think it's a very promising direction."

"Naveen, you ready for the implant?"

"I am absolutely 100%, because I really need my brain to be uploaded before I lose it."

"I just don't want to be first."

"Uh, okay. Well, if you didn't go first, you can go second. Uh, so, you know, uh, kudos to, uh, to Demis Hassabis and the team at DeepMind for their Nobel Prize-winning work. So, AlphaFold has revolutionized science in just five years. Alex, why don't you take this?"

"Yeah, I would say it's, it's, uh, it's remarkable to look back at what the world before AlphaFold 1 looked like. We, we were talking a while ago about hyper-dilution and professional hyper-dilution. There, it used to be the case prior to AlphaFold 1, but certainly prior to AlphaFold 3, that you'd spend an entire PhD, these these poor chumps spending their entire PhD trying to determine the structure of a single protein and"

"Sequencing a single gene." "Yes." "Like, what a waste, retrospectively, at least for for those who were who were spending PhDs in structural biology right before the problem, right before the whole field got solved by AlphaFold 3, arguably. Now you can just do it overnight. And, and we saw an entire discipline get solved by AI. So, I think AlphaFold 3 in particular is a template for what we're going to see everywhere else. Whole disciplines are just going to get solved."

"Yeah. Then the numbers here."

are impressive, right? So AlphaFold has enabled a database of 240.4 million protein structures that have been accessed by 3.3 million users in 190 countries. I remember when I was in medical school, we used to talk about the supercomputing problem of the future is being able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence. And we always used to talk about what would it take, how much, how much computing, when would it be done? And, um, extraordinary that, uh, Dennis and the team did it.

I think two things here. One is, I think this speaks to the incredible ability of AI to solve these, what we thought was intractable problems, with having to throw so much compute at it, and it just solves it. So it goes to Alex's inner loop thing. The second point I'll make is, if you've not seen the documentary, "The Thinking Game," which lays out the, uh, the arc of the, the timeline of all of this and goes into detail into how they went about doing it, it's just unbelievable. Go watch it.

Yeah. Again, maybe just a postscript on, on this, if I may. This was also like the, the protein folding problem was supposed to be one of the killer apps for quantum computing and quantum simulation. And, and AlphaFold, in addition to everything else that it revolutionized, I, I would say also was a nail in the coffin of many expectations for, for what the killer app for quantum computing would look like, and we need to find something better.

Amazing. Um, I'm going to cover this article very quickly just because it's an important. You know, I, I talk about that when people go through fountain life, uh, we discovered that 3.2%, that's the number based upon the populations we processed, have a cancer they don't know about, uh, which is problematic. Um, and it turns out that 70% of the cancers that kill people are not the cancers we routinely test for. So you're not dying from typically breast or prostate or colon because we can test for those. It's the ones we don't test for. It's pancreatic, it's glioblastoma, it's, uh, you know, ovarian cancers. Uh, and a lot of times, you know, I think of pancreatic cancer as a death sentence. So, um, those who have had pancreatic cancer in their family, uh, it's an important article to hear.

So, looks like scientists have developed a one product fit-all immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer. This is out of UCLA. A new off-the-shelf therapy that can, can attack pancreatic cancer even after it spreads. Uh, engineered CAR-NKT. These are natural killer cells, um, made from donor cells, costing only $5,000 per dose, right? Which is an incredibly small price tag for a cancer therapeutic. Uh, the cells...

I think the only thing I could, I'm sorry, please go. Go ahead. I just, I just say that the cells can reach and infiltrate through tumors, uh, in the pancreas, liver, and lungs. So, um, please, Naveen.

I was simply going to say that Peter, this is so close to home because I lost my dad to stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and I'm just so, so happy to tell you that in the next 3 months, we are launching a stage 1 pancreatic cancer test. This is a complete game changer.

And at Viome, at Viome, uh, stage 1, P, stage 1 pancreatic cancer test with 94% specificity and 84% sensitivity.

Amazing. I mean, the best way to the best way to cure it is to find it at the...

Daily testing.

Yeah. And Naveen, what other, what other forms of cancer has Viome been able to detect through the massive data sets you're collecting?

So we, uh, you know, we started with oral cancer, throat cancer, and now we have pancreatic cancer. We have the thing for IBD, and we are, nice thing is, we're just validating a test with the Scripps Research for colon polyp, which is 7 to 10 years before you develop a colon cancer. And I think if we can really, uh, look at advanced, uh, adenoma, then I think we can absolutely get rid of colon cancer completely.

Yeah, I mean, uh, the range of things that you do. I mean, I encourage folks, uh, you know, go to viome.com. Uh, the full body intelligence test is, you know, takes a sample of your blood, your, uh, your sputum, and and stool, and it's incredible what you can learn. So, um, and it's, what's the price tag on that? It's not expensive.

$279, Peter, right now.

For three tests. All three tests.

Yeah. Um, um, again, another impressive story. I mean, uh, type 1 diabetes is a big deal on the planet. Uh, so a man with type 1 diabetes survived for 12 weeks with no immunosuppressing drugs after doctors transplanted gene-edited insulin-producing cells. So this has been the holy grail, right? You, if you have type 1 diabetes, you've lost, uh, your islet cells in your pancreas. You're not producing insulin anymore. Can you transplant them back? Well, uh, these cells were edited with CRISPR to hide from the immune system, adding a "don't eat me" signal from CD47, and the patient started producing their own insulin. So a lot of, uh, I don't know what the numbers are in terms of the total number of cases of type 1 diabetes. Anybody know?

Um, yeah.

All right. Another big story. I mean, I love seeing the pace of breakthroughs that we're seeing in health.

Yeah. Amazing.

It's nice seeing also CRISPR making its way into the clinic. This is a big victory for CRISPR, and hopefully we'll see a lot more CRISPR for, uh, for, for managing transplants.

Yeah. Uh, amazing. All right, let's go into robotics. Uh, a lot of fascinating stories here. This is a fun one. Um, it's a tweet from Elon. Of course, Elon sort of like, uh, has fun with his, uh, with his hyperbolic tweets here. So, here it is. Optimus will be the Von Neumann probe. Um, and, uh, Alex and I laughed about this. You know, Von Neumann probes are are fun concepts. They're robots that are self-replicating like viruses. They go out into, uh, the galaxy. Uh, they capture materials from asteroids or sometimes moons, and they build other copies of themselves, and they replicate at an exponential rate. So I, I love this.

I, I want to joke that the Dyson swarm won't build itself, but maybe it will.

Uh, you know, we put a book corner in today, uh, on this, on this front. I'm going to chat about mine here. So, uh, this is a five-book series by Dennis Taylor. My son Jet and I have read the series twice. We absolutely love it. So, it's called "We Are Legion, We Are Bob." And it opens with a guy who's a tech CEO who signs up for effectively ALOR, right? To cryopreserve your body and brain. Uh, he leaves this conference and gets hit by a bus. Uh, and it picks up 100 years later where he basically wakes up and is now, uh, an uploaded brain. I'll continue. I won't ruin the story because there's so much beautiful here. And he finds himself as the, basically the brain and operating system on a Von Neumann probe heading out of the solar system, uh, to go and start colonizing, uh, and getting other solar systems ready for humanity to come join. So, uh, amazing series. I love Dennis's writing. Uh, and if you, if you love hard science fiction, this is a great book for you. Uh, AWG, how about you?

Yeah, so my, uh, my book recommendation for, for this episode is "Understand" by Ted Chiang. Ted is perhaps better known for the movie "Arrival," where he wrote the, the original story behind it. But a common theme throughout a lot of his writing is what I would call linguistic singularities. Ways that we arrive at superintelligence by way of language, one way or another, and the consequences thereof. So "Understand" is the, the story. It's a short novel of a person who becomes superintelligent as a result of medical treatment. So if you've seen the movie "Limitless" or you've seen the movie "Lucy," think a little bit along those lines. Except that unlike with those movies, we see the world in rich detail through his eyes as his intelligence increases, as he reorganizes his mind and treats his mind like a software operating system, and ultimately encounters other superintelligences.

Nice. All right.

I've, I've given that nobody reads books anymore. I'll reference back to the documentary I just did, uh, "The Thinking Game." It's just such an amazing, uh, process to follow, and it gives you an inkling as to where things are going, and it's science fiction kind of being made real today.

Hey, uh, my kids read books. My son reminds me, Dad, you don't read books, you listen to books, which is true. Everything's on Audible these days.

Uh, I want to jump into the robot world a little bit. Uh, in particular in China, um, and I'm going to hit on a couple of pieces here, then we'll talk about them. So this is the first one. Uh, Agibot A2. This is a humanoid robot in China has hit a Guinness World Record by walking 65 miles using hot-swappable, uh, battery packs. Right? This is 175 cm, 55 kg in weight, advanced GPS and LiDAR. So, keep that in your mind. And then I want you to check out this video. Uh, I saw it this morning and it blew me away. Uh, it came from the Humanoid Hub. And it's important to realize they specifically state this is all real footage. There's no CGI. There's no AI. There's no video, video speed-up. And, uh, this thing is called T800, which sounds to me like Terminator 800. And, uh, after you see this video, I think you'll appreciate it even more. Okay. I mean, that is like, it's game over. It's like...

No, I thought that is that, you know, if you're trying to promote a robot, having it doing kickboxing is not the great first thing you want to show.

I can't wait to see.

Pick another activity.

I can't wait to see Optimus versus T800. That's, you know, and by the way, uh, there are a lot of groups getting ready for...

Show drying dishes.

A lot of groups getting ready for unlimited fighting, uh, between robots. First of all, that, if that was not CGI, and I can't guarantee it's not, they state it's not. It looked awesome. Um, Naveen, what do you think of that one?

I mean, it's awesome. As you say, it's, I think, um, I don't believe it's not CGI, but, but we know it looks pretty unrealistic to me. Uh, it, I mean, just the way the movements there, right? So...

Yes. Yes.

Um...

It's crazy. Alex, what do you think?

There's an entire two-thirds of the surface economy that that includes manual physical labor that is just waiting to be automated by humanoid robots. Even if they have battery lives of only 3 hours at the moment and need battery replacements or some sort of bucket brigade, this is happening. Uh, and we've talked for decades, going back to to Asimov, go, going back to to Rossum's Universal Robots, RUR, the original coinage of of robots. This is what we've been talking about for a 100 plus years. At this point, it's finally happening.

So, coming back on a third story here in China, robots are remaking the Chinese economy. China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nine times more than the US, and 50% of the world's total industrial robot base, right? They're automating their factories. Um, and they need to. Their entire economy was based on manufacturing. It's 25% of China's GDP. And, uh, check out this quote down at the bottom, which came up when I was doing research here. And so it's China's National Development Reform Commission spokesperson, Li Chao, warned of a humanoid robot bubble. There are now more than 150 humanoid robot companies in China. So we got AI bubbles and humanoid robot bubbles. Interesting. Any, any comments on this, guys?

The, the statistic that, um, the manufacturing 25% of their GDP and robots are going to be doing most of that is an incredibly amazing number. Just...

Well, I find the, the idea that they put in nine times more than the US an incredibly amazing number. I...

I've made the, the point in the past that intelligence isn't just going to stay locked up in the data centers. It's going to walk right out of the data centers. And I, I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that in in China, and we're going to see that increasingly in the US and in the West as well. I, I agree with Jensen Huang that humanoid robots are one of the next multi-trillion dollar markets.

All right, we've saved a fun conversation, uh, uh, before we show you an incredible video outro here. Um, so I'm going to play this. Uh, this is a clip from the promo for "Age of Disclosure." We are not alone. Uh, how long have you and I been discussing this, Alex?

I don't know. It's an interesting question, but I, I will say the, the allegations in this documentary are extraordinary. And maybe happy to comment more after we, we play the short clip.

The American people are ready to receive the truth.

Humanity is not the only intelligence in the universe. Humanity is not the only intelligent species.

We are absolutely not alone. Non-human intelligence exists.

UAPs are real. They're here, and they're not human.

I spent 25 years as a senior official with the CIA.

I worked on a highly classified UAP program.

28 years as an astrophysicist.

I served as the fourth Director of National Intelligence.

Director of Aviation Security and the National Security Council.

A one-star admiral after 32 years of service. People that come forward with this, I, I feel like they've taken their, their life in their own hands.

Wow. I watched this documentary twice. Um, and I commend it to everybody. I think, uh, my personal opinion is, yes, of course, there is other life in the universe and in the galaxy. Uh, I think it's naive for us to believe anything less than that, right? We are one of a 100 million stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of at last count, two trillion galaxies in the universe. And there may be an infinite number of universes. And just the notion that we are that special, you know, has been crushed every time by scientific discoveries over the last, you know, few thousand years. Um, so, uh, Alex.

Well, I, I think the elephant in the room is that the allegations in this documentary go beyond asserting that there is non-human intelligent life elsewhere. The, these are, the documentary contains, in what I view as, incredibly serious allegations by 34 current and former US government officials and contractors that, in short, that there has been an alleged 80-plus year long cover-up of of aliens, of so-called non-human intelligence, or NHI.

Of the spaceships, of the bodies, of the communications, yeah.

Of, of, uh, of UAP crash retrievals, of recovered bodies on Earth. Uh, and I, I have so many thoughts regarding the allegations in this documentary, but maybe one more obvious thought, one less obvious thought. The, the one perhaps more obvious thought is, if the allegations, even some substantial fraction of the allegations in this documentary are accurate, then, uh, the alleged legacy program, uh, so-called, that's been responsible for the alleged cover-up will perhaps have been responsible for sabotaging 80 years worth of potential scientific, technological, medical, maybe even ontological advances, and setting humanity back almost a century, maybe more, again, assuming the allegations are, are in substance accurate. And I, I think history would would judge any such program accordingly for for setting back human progress if these allegations are accurate. That, that's, that's the more obvious comment. The slightly less obvious comment is, again, assuming the allegations are substantially accurate. Superintelligence, which, which we talk about all the time on the pod, seems to me like it's on an imminent collision course with any so-called non-human intelligence. If there is any non-human intelligence anywhere in the solar system, including on Earth, in the oceans, in low Earth orbit, etcetera, as alleged by this documentary. Then I, I've mentioned in the past, uh, that this, this notion that given enough superintelligence, any hidden agents become shallow. Superintelligence AI, it's going to discover this. It, it's going to to unearth any hidden agents anywhere in our solar system. So I don't think it's a tenable state of affairs if the allegations in this documentary are accurate. That, basically, to caricature the, the documentary, the, the documentary tells the story of how humanity is basically drowning in in technology that's falling from our sky from non-human intelligence. If, if that's accurate, AI is going to blow this, and superintelligence is going to blow this wide open.

Yeah. The, the timing of all this is interesting. All right. The documentary basically says, listen, it began, uh, you know, before, uh, World War II, in, in the 30s, uh, into the 40s, and through today. And it talks about the interplay and the dance between, uh, alien visitations and UAPs, uh, flying to nuclear silos and disarming and arming nuclear warheads. I mean, it's a fascinating, uh, you know, storyline here. But then what I find equally interesting is the fact that this process of disclosure is beginning now, like you say, on the precipice of humanity, you know, unveiling, uh, ASI.

Coincidence or or not? Like ASI and NHI, if you want to call it that, these seem like they're on a collision course. Is it a predestined collision course if the allegations are accurate? I don't know, but it's, it's...

There's so many good science fiction stories that, you know, it's like, you know, they're here to prevent us from blowing ourselves up. They're here to prevent us from having, uh, rogue AI go in the wrong direction. That's the savior modality of these, uh, of these aliens and UAPs, which I'd love to believe. Um...

I, Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

No, I was going to say, Naveen, did you see this at all? I have not seen the movie, but Peter, to me, I just say there's no doubt we are not alone, and we all agree we are not alone. But I think this to me is more like a science fiction than really, uh, uh, reality here. I just absolutely do not believe that any cover-up can last 80 years, and especially a cover-up like this. There, this is something that would have come out long, long ago. I believe this is mostly some people who are delusional, or some people who are looking to become famous, or some people who just will say anything to get them a camera. I, I, if you watch the documentary like I, I have twice, uh, and I think you would change your mind. The, the level of professionalism of these heads, you know, these leaders from the Air Force, Navy, uh, you know, Army, Marines, uh, Senate, uh, you know, the House, uh, the Defense Department, their pristine reputations, and what they speak about, and again, they are putting their reputations at risk here. Uh, I, I think there's, it leaves zero doubt for me that that it's there.

Yeah.

Comment, maybe at, at the meta level. I don't think for a topic as important as these allegations, we should need to rely on hearsay. And this is one of the reasons why I think artificial superintelligence is potentially so transformative. Superintelligence, I, if there are, as alleged, if our solar system is teeming with non-human intelligence, AI is going to find that, and I, I would expect it to find it pretty soon. So it may be the case that whereas there have been many allegations over the past decades of of such cover-ups, but ultimately they're reduced to to hearsay. I, I, I would like to see far more scientific approach. Uh, and I think the key lever is going to be AI.

Yeah. You know, I think what's hilarious is the state of humanity today. These aliens could land on the front lawn of the White House, uh, you know, you know, get on news cameras, and then the next day, everybody would be saying, well, you know, what's my Bitcoin price and who won the game? You know, we become so numb to these extraordinary things. But...

We have, and and Sam Altman has also pointed this out, that that we went from a world without AGI, arguably, to a world with AGI. And yes, it, it's economically transformative, but you didn't see people sort of rioting in the streets or massive, truly massive social disruption. I, I think if the allegations are accurate, similarly, people will ask, as you say, like, what, what's next on television?

All right. Um, we're going to close out with this outro music called "Dear Moon" by David Drinkall. But I want to, you know, the lyrics on this are so incredibly good. David, you did an amazing job. Uh, I want to just take a second and and read some of the lyrics. Uh, it says, "Oh, dear moon, you've had it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you in a pile. We're building Dyson swarms, and the rent ain't cheap. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers weep. We'll miss you when you're gone, but the future marches on." Alex on the podcast with that epileptic, uh, apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic. Apocalyptic. That's it. Thank you. Uh, Alex with that apocalyptic grin. Training wheels are off, folks. Let the real future begin. While Peter's yelling asteroids first, seems saving one small piece. EMOD's already pricing lunar credits on the lease.

Um, do you want to, uh, do you want to express your feelings about the moon, Alex?

Yes, please. So, I, I, I feel like, uh, just, uh, for the avoidance of doubt, I, I have to make a firm affirmative stance that I'm not anti-moon. Just for avoidance of doubt. It's crazy. We're in 2025, and I have to say that I'm not anti-moon. I'm not anti-solar system. I'm merely observing that naively, if one extrapolates present data center trends, then disassembling the solar system becomes an attractive option, inclusive of disassembling the moon. But I'm not anti-moon, for what it's worth.

Well, we appreciate that. We've had a lot of interesting comments about your commentary. And by the way, the current projection, for example, of Elon using mass drivers on the moon, uh, to get us to 100 terawatts a year of of of solar, or of of, uh, data centers, doesn't make an appreciable dent in the moon. It'll still look the same. Uh, but, but when we get to Dyson swarms, it's going to change. All right. Uh, thank you, David Drinkall. "Dear Moon." Everybody enjoy this. Uh, it's a beautiful song.

Silver pulled the oceans like a lover. Kept the planet on its track. You gave us tides for sailing. Gave the wolves a song to sing. And every teenage heart alive to swear eternal things. Couples parked on hilltops. Poets ran out of praise. You turned ordinary nights into extraordinary days. For billions of quiet moments, you were perfect, pure, and true. So thank you, darling moon, for everything you do. Oh, dear moon, you had it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you. We're building Dyson swarms in the rain. We will turn you solar panels while the lovers weep. We'll miss you when you're gone, but the future marches on. Oh, but the future marches on. Keep a little fragment, maybe one or two. A crater with a plaque that says we once looked up to you. We'll simulate the tides with orbital tugs and rings and be our honeymoon packages for nostalgic human beings. Oh, dear moon, you got it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you. We're building Dyson swarms in the rain sheep. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers weep. We'll miss you when you're gone, but the future marches on. Oh, but the future marches on. Oh, Alex on the podcast with that apocalyptic grin. Training wheels are off, folks. Let the real future begin. While Peter's yelling asteroids first, Salam's saving one small piece already pricing lunar credits on the lease. Oh, dear moon. You've had it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you in a pile. You are beautiful and vital. You are poetry and art, but the Kardashev ladder waits and Type II must start. We'll miss you when you're gone, but the future marches on. Oh. Oh. But the future marches on. Oh.

All right. Um, DB2 Dave Blondon, we miss you. And Salem, sorry you missed that as well. Naveen, thank you for being a friend of the pod. Always a pleasure, brother.

Thank you, brother.

Yeah. And Alex, uh, uh, looking forward. We've got a recording on Friday. We're going to be up with Mustafa Sullivan in in Seattle. That'll be fun. Uh, he's the CEO, uh, of Microsoft AI. And then we've got another WTF episode on Saturday. A lot coming. If you've not subscribed, please do. Uh, that way when we drop our episodes, which are becoming more frequent because the speed of this innovation is just skyrocketing, uh, you'll know about it first. Gentlemen, have an amazing week, uh, and see you guys soon.

Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmmandis.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.

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Our Updated AGI Timeline, 57% Job Automation Risk, and Solving the US Debt Crisis | EP #212

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