AI Is Making More Millionaires Than Anything in History w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #181

We may need to rewrite the whole paradigm, Peter, because what's happening now is another double exponential on top of that with AI accelerating everything so quickly, including path to revenue. 36 unicorns in half a year. I really, really hope you know the young entrepreneurs coming up appreciate what a moment in time this is. This is exponential thinking. This is entrepreneurial thinking. There is a bet to be made right now if you're an investor on where are you going to invest to ride this curve because it's not slowing down. Is it real estate? Is it data centers? Is it chips? Is it power? Cuz all of these things are going to make somebody, hopefully somebody listening right now, huge amounts of wealth. This is an unstoppable meta trend. Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey everybody, Peter Diamis here. Welcome to Moonshots and our WTF Just Happened in Tech episode here with the extraordinary Salem Ismael and my partner Dave Blondon. I'm still thinking the architect of AI, the alchemist. Alchemist of AI. All right. Peter, you're the pope of hope. I'm the pope of hope. All right. Well, hey, listen. Uh, a lot going on and excited. I just want to do a shout out to our our super fans out there who are just giving us incredible love for this episode uh every week that we do and we care deeply about it, right? Our goal is to deliver to you the news that really matters, the news that's shaping our companies, our entrepreneurial journeys, uh, every aspect of our lives. So please share this with your friends and family. Uh, the goal is to give people a sense of optimism, a compelling abundant future that's being driven by this technology. It's not all dire crisis news network out there. Anyway, welcome Dave. There were some incredible messages in last week's episode about how awesome you are and I don't think our, you know, our fans know enough about you. So, if you don't mind, I know a lot about you. I've been your roommate since, you know, our undergraduate days at MIT. But, uh, what, what is Link Exponential Ventures? What do you do? Just so folks can really appreciate how awesome you truly are.

Well, we we manage about a billion dollars of seed-stage money, you know, here in Kendall Square, right between MIT and Harvard. Um, but, you know, fundamentally, what we do is when I graduated, I immediately tried to start a company and, you know, everything is working against you at that age. You know, it's, it's almost impossible even to get an apartment. You know, you have no credit score. There's no funding at the time. Uh, there were no incubators and accelerators. And so I've spent, you know, a big chunk of my life actually now trying to identify everything that slows down a new founder, especially in today's day and age. Almost all the deals are AI companies and we see many, many companies reaching multi-billion dollar valuations in, you know, two, three years. So you've got very young teams, very fast timelines, and there's so much that we can do to help them. And so, you know, we started with office space and funding, then we added accounting, we added big data. Uh, a few weeks ago, we bought an apartment building. So, you know, one of our observations was Merur added from the day we invested at the seed stage to today, it added $20 million a week of value. And we're like, okay, how much does it cost to buy this apartment building? About six million bucks. Okay, buy it. Because if we can save a team like that, even one week in their growth cycle, it pays for itself times five. And so just doing everything we can at Link to accelerate these young, super-smart AI teams. And so, you know, funding is is part of it, mentoring is part of it, and and so on. And the returns have been extraordinary. To, you're a unicorn incubator. Unicorn incubator. Yes. That's right.

Hey, I'm curious. Uh, guys, what did you do for the 4th of July? Anybody explode anything? Uh, went up to Vermont. Tried to get away from AI as much as possible for a day or two. It's hard to. Salem, how about you? Uh, I sat in the garden with a glass of wine and a glaze look at mice. Ah, okay. Well, I was in Montana building explosives. It was so great. I had my two boys there and we were like taking apart M80s and firecrackers and separating out the gunpowder from the filler. Uh, I mean, we had an arsenal. It was extraordinary. I mean, when I remember when I was a kid, I could buy potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, make my own gunpowder, and then I remember buying potassium perchlorate. Potassium perchlorate is great because it generates its own oxygen and if you mix it with, you know, charcoal and sulfur, any any reducing agent. And I remember throwing, so this is there's a book called um Poor Man's James Bond and they talk about, you know, so you take like an old film canister, you put an M80 fuse, fill it with gunpowder, put it in body putty, and I built that, threw it into my friend's pool to see like this splash and what occurs next taught me something in physics. Liquids are not compressible. The explosion literally cracked my friend's pool in half. Oh no. So yeah, I'm not sure you should be talking about some of this stuff publicly. Knocked on the door from. I'm not. I didn't know that story after all. But you cannot buy. You can't buy this stuff anymore. Uh, you can still buy what we used to do is buy the SDS model rocket engines and then just crack them open and scrape out the insides. Well, you can do that with fireworks, too. But I want to buy the pure chemicals and teach my boys how to be true, you know. Anyway, let's move on. I may need to find another podcast. YouTube. All right, let's let's move on. Uh, our first area, of course, AI supremacy and speed everywhere, always, all at once. Another and crazy week in AI. Uh, Dave, uh, tell us about this TechCrunch article here.

Yeah, so 36 unicorns. I I really, really hope you know the young entrepreneurs coming up appreciate what a moment in time this is. You know, I love to tell the students that, you know, last year there wasn't a single self-made billionaire under the age of 30 in America. That was the first time in 15 years that that was true. You know, prior to that, you had your Mark Zuckerbergs, then you had your your Larry Pages and and um, you know, every, just a whole litany of internet, you know, young billionaires, but there's this huge dead spot over about a 15-year span. And now we're in the the biggest peak of my lifetime by far, and you'll never see anything else like it again. But 36 unicorns in half a year on this kind of accelerating rate. And then, you know, a couple that we've invested in. And then, you know, prior to this window, you also have Liquid AI and a bunch of others from the from the prior half year. This is not normal. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. And and, you know, the rate at which you need to move to keep up with it is is just, you know, a full sprint.

So the question is, is this is this new normal, right? Because uh, we're seeing this crazy valuation increase and speed to not just valuation, but speed to revenue like never seen before. Yeah. Look at the next slide for the for the revenue view of it. So this is also not normal, right? Like, you know, the uh, the timeline to to profitability or to significant revenue is super, super short. Uh, that means you're stable. Like if there's ever a financial collapse, you can switch to profitability instantly. Uh, that's so just for those those who are listening and not watching us on on YouTube, which is the preferred mechanism for you guys to see this stuff, but heck, uh, median months to $1 million of annual revenue. Uh, before 2020, it would take 16 months. Now it's taking people 5 months uh to get to $5 million. Used to take 41 months, nearly 4 years. Today it's taking 13 months, just one year. So this is a, this is a 4x acceleration in uh, in getting significant revenue as a startup.

Well, Peter, remember when we graduated, you know, I went to MicroStrategy and then immediately back to Boston to start a company. I was building a company that was a true hypergrowth company of its era. Founded it in '91 and got it liquid in 2000. So nine years to get to a $1 billion valuation and probably what, 20, 30 million of revenue run rate. Nine years, that was really, really fast at that time. Compare that to the numbers on this slide. Uh, it's so, you know, here we're comparing 2020, '23 to prior to 2020, which is really, you know, the prior decade. Uh, so if you look at the decade before that, it was even slower. Yeah.

Salem, these are all exos, right? They're all exos. And, you know, there's a step change from 2008 where you could build a company and use cloud services and therefore you could scale, you could take all computing costs and off the balance sheet and make it a variable cost, right? And that was the birthplace of the exo. We may need to rewrite the whole paradigm, Peter, because the what's happening now is another double exponential on top of that with AI accelerating everything so quickly, including path to revenue, which is a huge, huge thing. As as Dave mentioned, this now stabilizes companies very, very early, and that's a powerful point to be at.

Are you proposing the third book in our EXO series? No, I hope I never write another book again. The first one almost killed me. The second one 90% killed me. It's a horrible. I mean, you know, I'm more proud of it than we I thought we'd be, but but damn, it was a tough process.

Dave, what you were saying? Well, if you look at the next slide too, I think one of the things that that isn't mentioned here is the headcount that gets you to these numbers is lower than ever before by a lot. You know, for me to get to get my first company to a billion dollar valuation, I had to hire 200 people. Mhm. Uh, for a young entrepreneur like the Cursor team, you know, or the Merkore team, the comfort zone of these management teams, you know, 30, 40, 50 people feels a lot like college friends. And actually, when you meet the people, they're they are a lot like college friends. So it is so much more fun to build one of these companies because you're in that, I know everybody. I know what their capabilities are. We have, you know, one or two kegs for the whole gang. It's just so much more manageable. And I I bet there's a, there's a curve that looks like a peak uh of value per human being and fun value per fun per human being that basically starts falling off after a after a company population in the 40s or 50s. Oh my god. When I have a whole presentation on this, but when you get to about 200 people and more like 100, but around 200, there are people in your company you don't really know. And in fact, you can't even remember their name when you walk by them. That is a different world in terms of comfort and management from the one-layer company where you know everybody directly. It's just a whole different world. You know, the other direction, you know, we're all we're all hypothesizing the company of one person that reaches a billion dollar valuation, that's coming soon. But that sounds really lonely to me too. I think the sweet spot, the perfect happiness sweet spot is right where we are right this minute.

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I'm going to predict though that we're going to see a have a problem, which is once these companies go through that super exciting phase and stabilize, they're going to go through a lot of conniptions as they lose the buzz that got them there, right? Um, it's a great problem to have. It's like we could all wish for that kind of a problem, but I think they'll start, you'll see a lot of angst, a lot of founders leaving, etc., etc.

No, they got to keep dreaming bigger, right? It's upleveling constantly to the next level. I mean, vibe coding startups are here to stay. That's the story here in Stripe. Uh, Cursor to $500 million ARR, Lovable at $7 million, Bolt at 20 million. So, these are uh, these are a set of technologies. You know, one of the things that makes these unique is they are technologies that'll enable entrepreneurs to build other technologies and companies, right? So they're a base layer. Um, any other comments on this?

No, I think you're right. I think I think when you look at the list that we had a couple slides ago, uh, the base layer companies are about two-thirds of what you see there. Mhm. Uh, you know, RHF and uh, foundation models and and uh, so forth. You're starting to see though uh, some multi-billion dollar value vertical companies now starting to pop up and there will be many, many more of those. So So to answer your question, you know, is 36 a lot? Is it going to go up or down from here? It's definitely going to go up more. Yeah, we have at least a couple years of really good uh, very rapid expansion of that number and then, you know, AGI and then, you know, who can predict after that? Yeah. Then it goes insane. I mean, the interesting thing is, you know, the IPO market is just beginning to open, but the merger and acquisitions market is wide open and and as we've seen, it's gone absolutely crazy in that regard. Yep.

Um, so this is another interesting slide. It says the new reality, vibe valuation. So we're seeing crazy valuations that are being uh, you know, sort of opening bid $9 billion, $10 billion, $30 billion. Never seen anything like it. And so vibe valuations are when an investor bets big on a Gen AI startup with little uh, traditional metrics like AIR uh, you know, annual rate of return or cash burn. And this is from Vindra Mathur. Uh, this is this is a problem you've solved, Dave, right? Because um, you know, most people don't have access sufficiently early and then you're stuck at the later valuations when the company has blossomed and like, do you invest at, you know, $120 billion into XAI or?

Yeah. No, we we never do. So it's it's kind of scary when you do. But uh, you know, I was talking to General Catalyst last week, actually. They they've more or less abandoned seed stage because they're managing $60 billion now and they they need to write these big checks to keep that money moving, but they're going to try and rebuild their seed stage capability. They hired a new guy to do it. But it struck me that, you know, doing seed stage and doing $60 billion of asset management are really incompatible with each other. Yeah. And uh, what's your what's your average, what's your average check size at Link XPV?

Average uh, you know, our opening checks are often, you know, half a million, a million, two million, something like that. Uh, we'll allocate 7 to 10 million per company over time. We've left billions of dollars of pro rata rights on the table over the years. And pro rata rights meaning we have a right to to maintain a certain ownership stake in a company, but if it gets to a 2 billion, 4 billion uh, you know, in some cases recently 10 billion valuation, we can't even come close to keeping up with our pro rata rights. I mean, one of the questions I get asked all the time, I'm I'm guessing Salem, uh, you and Dave do as well, is like, what AI company should I invest in? It's like, really, you want to, first of all, you're not going to get an allocation in Anthropic or OpenAI or XAI. Those those offerings when they do secondaries, tenders, or their next, it's they're snapped up instantly. And then you're left with the public companies, right? Which are, I mean, there is growth, but you're never going to see the real valuation growth. So you're either in an AI venture fund like Link or or what you're going to your local university and trying to find a startup and put it in there.

Well, the other option is pick a domain that you know really well that and then invest in AI companies where you can gauge the value add and the differentiator from others, right? That's the only other way to do it. Pick an area of existing passion that you have and go that go down that route.

Well, the other thing you can do, which I love just as a life strategy, is is find three, four, five, six venture funds that you really, really like that are seed stage. Yeah. That route their pro rata rights out to their investors and say, "Hey, look, we have capacity here. Uh, we can't keep up with it." What we do is we just email our LPs. Virtually none of them read their email and react, you know, and usually these deals like, you know, SpaceX or XAI, you have a week or two to make up your mind. You don't have a month. And so, but if you're if you're the one investor that actually reads their email and pays attention, then there are great opportunities that come your way through those, just pop open the email. And then, you know, if it doesn't fill with those LPs, then the new investor just takes it, you know, and two weeks later it's gone. So, it's it's a pretty good strategy.

All right. The big news this month has been uh the release of Super Grok. I love that. I love we went from Grok to Super Gro and and Grok 4 and uh GPT5 is coming. So this is Sam Altman on a podcast with his brother. Not much content here, but worth hearing. What is the time frame for GPT5? When are we going to see this?

Probably sometime this summer. Okay, that was a big data point there. So Chad, you know, GPT5 this summer, um, one of the things that's interesting about GPT5 is they've made a proclamation, no ad-influenced answers, and they're really trying to strengthen user trust. So any predictions here, gentlemen?

Oh yeah. Uh, I think it's funny. Polymarket seems to think that it is less like, you know, 25% chance to. Yeah. Let's go here. There's the here's the Polymarket bet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I was almost sure like more like 80% July because there's all these pictures of Sam, you know, giving little hints and and also the competitive pressure kind of would line up with Grok. So I was really thinking July. This will be a great test of the wisdom of crowds. It is, you know, uh, and we've written about that extensively. So here's what it says for the you listening. Uh, the Polymarket on GPT5 release is 26% by July 31st and 93% by December 31st. Yep.

Um, all right. We'll find out. I love I love this. Um, this is uh uh Grok 4 scoring 35% on Humanity's Last Exam, 45% if they're using uh their reasoning model. And you can see, you know, I'm always trying to track these models against each other. And I love it when they say the models' IQ is so so and so, but they don't always do that. The last time I saw it on the uh sort of the uh IQ scale, it was at, I think it was GPT-3 at an IQ of 136. Yep, that's right. Uh, but so let me read this about Humanity's Last Exam. Uh, it's a challenging AI benchmark developed by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI. It consists of 3,000 expert-crafted multimodal questions across 100 subjects, including mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, humanities, social sciences, and more. Humanity's Last Exam tests the limits of an AI at the frontier of human knowledge. And I found this interesting that the questions are crowdsourced from nearly a thousand experts globally. So I, you know, if you're a listener and you got an extra minute, you got to look up the actual exam and look at a couple of the questions there. I defy anyone to answer a single question. I mean, unless you're the world's leading expert on that particular, you know, there there's questions from physics, from math, from philosophy, from history, covers every area. But I I defy you to answer one question correctly. It is so hard. And this test is supposed to last like 10 years. Yeah.

So I have the I have the I have the counterpoint on all this. Please. Yeah. Um, you know, this this I find this mostly irrelevant. And the reason I say that is this feels to me like asking a question like, oh my god, that calculator can make a calculation way faster than a human being with a piece of paper and a pencil doing long division. Well, of course it can. So what? Um, I think that's true. And to Dave's point, if you put, I looked up a few questions, right? One of them is, is there a God? And you ask an AI that question and they give you the standard. Here's the different ways you could look at it. Monotheism versus deism versus atheism versus whatever, whatever. It's not clear if there's a God. You could take each point. It depends on your personal perspective. Da da da da. It's a non-answer. If you looked up Wikipedia on any of these topics, you could kind of root through and find the answer and answer the question yourself. Some of the detail ones. This is essentially like saying, um, we're automating Wikipedia. And so can you answer the question? Can Wikipedia answer these questions better than a human being? Of course it can, because it has all the data to do it. So having it be able to answer these questions does not really make that much of it. It it doesn't feel meaningful to me at all. I think the really big question is, what do we do with it? Yeah. Yeah.

No, you I think you're on to something really, really important and interesting. And, you know, all the dystopians are like, oh my god, it's going to run away from us. And, you know, but it actually, when you're using it at this level of intelligence, it feels exactly like Jarvis in an Iron Man movie where, you know, Tony Stark is saying, here's what we need to do, and Jarvis is like, oh, I never thought of that, but I can, you know, I can create that for you. And it, it actually is behaving almost exactly the way they visualized it in that movie. And so when it when it ratchets up this curve and you ask like, I need to design a protein that does exactly this, or I need to design a new type of bicycle that does exactly this. It gives you great, great answers back and does the work for you. But it never has, you know, the word reasoning is being really bastardized when we talk about what's happening in reasoning here. It's iterative reprompting of the same old thing, which squeezes more performance out of it. But it's not really like human reasoning and brainstorming. And so it's kind of a bummer that we borrowed the word reasoning to describe what's going on here, but it is so useful as a tool for a creative person. And 100% uh in to do actions and get things done and do almost any inimaginable thing faster and faster. Huge.

For example, I've got a lot of pain in my shoulder. So I had an MRI done as to what was going on. It's taking me weeks to get a doctor's appointment. I uploaded it into an AI and it's given me the answer in 2 seconds. That kind of speed of decision making and getting to conclusions would be invaluable going forward. Is it an alien growing inside your body? What's I seem to have a bone spur and that's impinging on the nerve and it's causing pain and nothing. So I had I had the exact same surgery with a bone spur. A piece of recommendation for you cuz I did an actual test. I had the same surgery on both shoulders with the same surgeon 10 years apart. I did it when I was 50 on my left and when I was 60 on my right. And on my right shoulder, I injected exosomes post-surgery uh one week after and two weeks after. My recovery was like twice as fast. So, okay, squirt some. What's the name of your surgeon? I I'll bring him. He's at Kurland Joe about here in LA. He's amazing. I So, you know, I expect to see massive. So just to come back to this, the the speed of getting to outcomes and decisions and getting things done, the speed of that will accelerate radically, which is fantastic. And now comes down to what do you want to accomplish? And I think that's the bigger questions that we we're going to start pondering.

So, uh, here's a big one. We keep on cursing about I keep on tweeting about how awful Siri is and, uh, thank God, uh, you know, it's lit literally. I I know that you've been an Android user, Salem, for a while now. And just what we saw at Google IO was epic. And so, I am going to buy a I've got an, you know, the latest iPhone here, but I am going to buy an Android phone as well, uh, so that I can start to play with all of Google's incredible uh, tech. And also because Siri sucks so bad, they're pushing me away. Having said that, uh, the here's the news article from Bloomberg. Uh, Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI for Siri rather than an in-house AI team. Let's take a quick listen.

So Apple is now evaluating for the first time using a third-party model, either Claude from Anthropic or ChatGPT from OpenAI to power Siri. Obviously, as we all know and experience in our day-to-day lives, Siri is not very good. Now it's exploring maybe using Claude or ChatGPT instead in order to get new features out the door more quickly and make the voice assistant more appealing. You talk to people at Apple though, the word on the street there is it's all about Anthropic. And so Anthropic is really the focus of of Apple for this new generation of Siri. They're using Anthropic to power a lot of their internal AI technology. But again, as I say in my story, Anthropic wants billions of dollars at a scale that doubles annually for Siri to be powered by Claude. And so Apple is now taking a close look at OpenAI as well, which has historically given Apple extraordinarily favorable terms.

Sound of desperation or smart move in terms of what Apple's doing? It's a smart move in response to desperation. I love that. Yeah. So interesting, right? Because Anthropic's also partnered with Amazon. Um, and if they've got Apple and Amazon and billions of dollars of revenue, uh, they stand a good chance of of really rapid acceleration.

Well, Dave, we we talked a week ago about Mirram Marotti's new startup and Ilia Sutskever's new startup, both doing new foundation model companies from scratch, huge valuations. Uh, part of the logic there is the musical chairs, there aren't enough Anthropic's to go around, as you're pointing out. And so there's a version of Anthropic where it's an independent company for 10 years, but there's another version where it gets acquired by Amazon or Apple and the other guy gets deprived. And this is, you know, just just happened recently with Scale AI as well. And so, um, there's room in the market for more foundation model companies, but, you know, the price of poker is very high now and and going up quickly.

That's a really good point. I mean, if you get if you get alignment of Anthropic with Apple, like a, a, you know, a captured entity, OpenAI, you know, has been dancing with individual partners for a while. Google, the same. You're right, there's there's room for a couple of others. I have some I have some comments here on this um, you know, this is classic corporate innovator's dilemma, right? You cannot do disruptive innovation in any big company. To from now on, there's it's not an accident that that Microsoft essentially invested in OpenAI or Amazon put money into Claude or whatever. Uh, you cannot build that capability. The mindset is too different between Apple being a consumer products company largely and the mindset needed and being under 25 to even start and kind of a foundational model company. You have to partner and invest and do this. Apple, I'm surprised that it's taken Apple this long because they do all their manufacturing with a partner in Foxconn. Why aren't they building a core capability like this on the edge? And part of then you go ahead, Dick.

Well, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to k. So, you know, just a reminder though. So, today Nvidia is worth more than Apple, like this exact day in world history. Um, Apple never in a million years could have predicted that 5 years ago. In fact, Apple treated Nvidia like like dirt. But Apple has the chip manufacturing. They have about a third of TSMC's manufacturing capacity. They were in a far better position to become Nvidia than Nvidia was, but had no recognition of the opportunity whatsoever. So here's the problem here. Here here's the problem. And Salem and I have discussed this. It's about founder companies, right? So Jensen as the CEO and founder of Nvidia is driving it. And when he says right, everybody goes right. The same thing with Dario at Anthropic, you know, the same thing with Sam at OpenAI. But Apple has lost Steve Jobs, right? Steve would have been all over this and he would have set up the team that would have just basically driven it. And it's it's innovator's dilemma. But during this period of exponential growth, you need a dictatorial passion-driven founder who has the has the, you know, complete faith of his board and his or her board uh and their management team. Mhm. Uh, I mean, Salem, do you agree with that?

I somewhat disagree. Okay. I think I think yes, if you're in that industry, like for example, if you're Facebook and you need Facebook to do something different and you're Mark and you're Zuckerberg, you can kind of get that done and it's important to get that done. But the control systems, remember the big companies are optimized for two things, right? Efficiency and predictability. This comes from John Hegel and John Cely Brown's work. Um, and so you're trying to deliver the iPods at the same AirPods at the same quality into a million retail locations for purchase by everybody and their grandmother. Your your entire focus is on that. You're you cannot do disruptive things when you've got that machine trying to deliver gross margins on a. But you can do what Steve Jobs did, right? He took his Mac team and he he moved it off on the edge. You have to do you have to do that edge innovation in a stealth way. Google is doing it with X, right? Google X. Um, uh, this is what we try to do with Brick House or Yahoo. You have to do that type of model. And then the second level of thing is when it starts to succeed, don't bring it back in because it won't fit. If it's really disruptive, it's not going to fit in the mothership. You have to spin it off. Now, lately, companies have kind of tried. I mean, like Amazon did with with AWS in one sense. Absolutely. Or Google is this is why Google split up into Alphabet. Spinning off Waymo and whatever. So, this is the only model that works. I've looked at me in my ecosystem, we've looked at disruptive innovation across probably 200 of the Fortune 500 companies in detail. And this is the only modality that ever ever ever ever ever works. It's the only one. And so, you have to do that or you acquire that disruption and you leave it on the edge the way uh Microsoft has done with OpenAI or Zuckerberg did with WhatsApp, or you will kill it inside the core organization, it won't work. And let me give you the a negative side, right? Walmart realized somewhere in the mid-2000s that it had to compete with Amazon, that this e-commerce thing was not a fad. So they set up a team inside Bentonville and they said to that team, "All right, we have the best distribution logistics in the world. Go beat Amazon." Within 18 months, the immune system had killed it. Could all the existing managers said, "We have our own capability. We should be optimizing for our own stores. Look at that PE ratio. It's never going to succeed." Da da da da. They did it a second time. Second time they put the team at the edge and they said, "All right, go to the edge, away from the core, and do the same thing, but still use our existing systems. We have the best in the world." Within 18 months, the business had figured it out and killed it. They did it a third time. Third time, they made an amazingly courageous decision. They said, "Go to the edge and build your own independent supply chain, distribution, etc. Even though we have the best in the world, we have to figure this out." Started to succeed. The business got excited, pulled it back in, and killed it. And it was on iteration number four that they finally did it separately on the edge and only after it achieved critical mass did they start stitching the backends together. But in that intervening six or eight years, Amazon was gone. You know, interesting story. And ladies and gentlemen, this is why Salem Ismail is incredibly brilliant and why I love him so dearly. It's just that we've seen so much of this across so many, we have so many data points over 10, 10, 15 years of looking at this and looking at big companies in great detail. It just doesn't work any other way than for looking for the disruptive uh uh technologies, buying them or investing in them and leaving them on the edge. Right. Dave works.

Oh, well, I just happened to be in Bentonville, Arkansas. You know, they were my biggest customer at the time, Walmart, as this was going on. So, just one little interesting nugget on your story there, Salem. And when Jeff Bezos needed to recruit Rick Delzell, he needed one brilliant retail industry guy to come out to Seattle and make Amazon like organized and structured and and retailing because everyone he had was kind of a computer science PhD type. And so he needed Rick Delzell. But he actually took Sam Walton's book and there was a sentence in it where Sam predicted that a disruptive innovator will eventually come along and gut Walmart. And so he circled that sentence and took it to Rick's house because, you know, the Walmart gang is super tight. They're like a family and trying to break up a member of the family is almost impossible. And and Rick needed to talk to his wife about this, like a big change, moving from Bentonville out to Seattle. But the book is what put it over the top. He circled Sam's own words predicting the disruptive innovator, innovator will come for us and we won't be able to defend ourselves.

And can I can I flip to the other side for a second? In in 1990 when I was starting out in my career, I was building software systems and I went to Bentonville and we were trying to sell Walmart something. We passed, they had me sign all these crazy NDAs to go into the data center and I was like, why would you have me sign NDAs to go through a data center? It's just there's nothing there but racks of servers. We walk past a particular room which has like flashing lights and dials and blinking things that I've never seen. And I said, "What the hell is that room?" And they said, "Oh, that's why the the NDA that's our satellite control center." Yeah. Yeah. And they had their own geostationary satellite because Bentonville happens to be the geographic center of the US, the continental US. And they were doing everybody else was doing batch updates to their AS400s at the end of the day. And and the buyers didn't know what to buy for the stores till months afterwards. Whereas these guys had real-time inventory management, credit card reconciliation, uh, distribution, logistics, all that stuff figured out. And and that was delivering them 15% better margins, which in the retail industry is insane. And that's why they wipe the floor with Amazon. When you can successfully integrate disruptive technologies as a big company, you have a street uh streets ahead of the competition. And they show that's what we call a moonshot, right? U exponential tech with a crazy idea and a high revenue. I would love to meet the executive at Walmart. If anybody's listening in the news, I'd love to interview whoever the executive was that got the board to do this. That's like that's hardcore.

All right, we're going to we're going to move on here. So, uh, let's take a look. This is the state of the union on large-scale AI models. Uh, we're seeing uh Grok 3 and GP and GPT 4.5 at the top of this in 2025. You know, I looked up where XAI is right now. So, the XAI cluster has uh 340,000 Nvidia GPUs today. 150,000 H100s, 50,000 H200s, 30,000 GB200s of the Blackwell architecture. Uh, their goal, what Elon has announced is a million GPUs by December 31st. So, um, I mean, he is scaling, I think faster than anybody uh, and it's pretty extraordinary. Any comments on this, Dave, before I move on?

Well, I mean, the scale on the left side is somebody out there listening should give some terminology to this so we can stay on the same page, like, you know, calling it 1E26 or 1E27 training. Uh, so like a petaflop is a huge amount of compute. That's 1E15. So that's way off the bottom of the chart here. So then it goes exaflop and then zettalflop, which would be a 1. So you're getting near the chart. Nobody has terminology for scales of this size. But we do need to talk about it in other than an exponential. So that's my challenge for the audience, like somebody name these scales. One E26 is officially a shitload of computing. It's really hard to imagine. You know, Peter, you took a tour, right, of the XAI data center? It's crazy. I'm an investor in XAI, full disclosure. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's see this this it's, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark where there's this rows and it goes to infinity like these rows of boxes. It's like that. It just.

Well, one of the key points uh that we need to talk about on the back end of this is how do you power this, right? We're talking about every week that the limits are not the GPUs, the limits are our electrical available power system. So this is an article um that came out. Elon Musk purchases overseas power plant to support massive XAI data center. So XAI acquired a fully built overseas gas turbine power plant expected to house nearly a million GPUs and be powered by that power plant. So it's an unconventional approach. to basically, you know, get power as quickly as possible. I remember um in about a year and a half ago when XAI announced its Colossus system and I was listening into an investor Zoom with with Elon, he said to, you know, this was in May before they built it and he said, "Okay, we're going to build it by the end of the summer, like within 3 months," and people thought it would take like 5 years to build what he wanted to do in a grade 100,000, you know, H100s. And he said, "To do this, we have to corner the US market on helium." And I mean, just the level of thinking of doing whatever it takes. And here's an example of that. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty awesome. We had that kind of epic podcast with Eric Schmidt that should be out in about a week, I hope. I hope everybody. We talked a lot about energy supply. He's he's very knowledgeable in this whole area of uh energy supply. And here we're talking about 2 gigawatts. I mean, this is a big, big bold move. But remember, we need 100 gigawatts by 2029. So there's a lot more. So he would have to do this 50 times over. Just and this that just gets you the turbines, right? It doesn't get you the actual power supply. This is all going to be fossil fuels. I think the important point here is it's disruptive thinking. It's unconventional. It's no, we're not going to go through the permitting process. No, we're not going to order. We're just going to buy the and move it over here and use it. Classic first principle thinking. Um, just to calibrate for the folks listening, one gigawatt is about what a major city in the US uses. So this is like two Dallas-Fort Worth, right? This is crazy. Calibrate, you know, the new Elon Musk could become Chase Lochmiller. He's the other guy thinking this way. He's doing, you know, Abilene, Texas, uh, Stargate, you know, $500 billion buildout. And he thought the same way, like, where am I going to go to build this? Okay, there's there's actual natural gas flare-off that's not even being used and power generation that's that's so abundant that it's not even being used in this one location in the country. So I'm just going to He was in Denver. I'm going to pick up my pick up my ass and move to Abilene, Texas. And that's where we're going to do it because I want. So, this is this is exponential thinking. This is entrepreneurial thinking. This is when I know we're going to get to, you know, ASI digital super intelligence, when you say to your AI, "Where can I get the power I need?" And it says, "Well, I found this power plant over in Europe. Um, it costs this much. Let's buy it and move it here." When it makes those kind of suggestions, then I'm impressed. Mhm.

All right. You mentioned this, Dave. Why don't you lead us off on this one?

Yeah. Uh, so, you know, we we took a bet around the office many years ago, maybe. I don't know. Um, what what company will be the first to hit a trillion dollar market cap in the history of the world? Is it going to be Google, Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft? Because those are the only candidates. Who else could possibly get there? At the time, Nvidia wouldn't even have been like you wouldn't even vaguely consider it an outside possibility. And this is what Salem is saying all the time. It's always the outsider up-and-comer founder-led visionary that blindsides you and is now the most valuable company in the world. This, you know, you could argue whether it's overvalued or undervalued, but the demand for compute for AI is going to be 10,000 times higher than the supply for the foreseeable future. There's a coming wave of technological convergence as AI, robots, and other exponential tech transform every company and industry. And in its wake, no job or career will be left untouched. The people who going to win in the coming era won't be the strongest. It won't even be the smartest. It'll be the people who are fastest to spot trends and to adapt. A few weeks ago, I took everything I teach to executive teams about navigating disruption, spotting exponential trends a decade out, and put them into a course designed for one purpose: to future-proof your life, your career, and your company against this coming surge of AI, humanoids, and exponential tech. I'm giving the first lesson out for free. You can access this first lesson and more at dmandis.com/futureproof. That's damandis.com/futureproof. The link is below.

I'm going to read the article headline. Nvidia sets new milestone with a $3.92 trillion market cap, topping Apple's $3.915 trillion market cap. So I mean uh I you know, I looked at Nvidia a year ago and six months ago and my answer was, how much higher could it go? Well, there here's the answer. So here's the question, right? There is a bet to be made right now if you're an investor on where are you going to invest to ride this curve because it's not slowing down. Uh, are you going to on the chip side? Are you going to invest in the power generation side? Are you going to invest in the, you know, I have a friend of mine who has identified geothermal energy as the as a key source of energy. And so he's going to start drilling over a geothermal bed, you know, bedrock hard zone and put in a large plant over there. So is it real estate? Is it data centers? Is it chips? Is it power? Because all of these

Things are going to make somebody, hopefully somebody listening right now, huge amounts of wealth. This is, this is an unstoppable meta trend. Period.

Just to clarify one thing on this slide, too, because it's even more profound than that seemed. Uh, Nvidia just beat Apple's all-time high, which was Christmas Eve this past, uh, you know, six months ago. Um, it's actually significantly higher than Apple today. Apple's down to $3.2 trillion while, while, um, Nvidia is at $3.92. Uh, so it's, it's a significant gap that's opened up. Uh, and yeah, I don't think anyone would have seen it would have seen it coming. You know, Sam Altman is always saying that, you know, a lot of people think about this as victims, like, oh, if this goes up, that goes down. It's really not true. Like everybody participating in this buildout is, is going up, and there are some companies that are getting crushed along the way, but they're, they're kind of rounding errors compared to the number of things that are going up.

So, Dave, where would you invest? I want to hear, where would you invest right now? Because people are asking, you know, our, our super fans here are asking that question, where do I put my money? I would do a basket of these to get the general trend, and get the general transformative trend, and then I would pick, uh, certain verticals where AI can make a massive difference, and then invest in the companies going after those.

What's in your bucket? Hell no. I'm trying to put everything into Bitcoin. So, it's hard to think, you know, my bucket as well. Yeah. I'm famous for, kind of, a lot of people ask me, "Oh my god, you've been tracking Tesla forever. You must, must have made a fortune." And the answer is no, because every quarter for a long, long time, it looked like Elon was going to run out of money, right? Um, I even had the chance, as you mentioned, Peter, to invest in XAI at a crazy valuation, and I said no. And it's, it's 10xed from that. And I'm like, duh. It's, this is a very hard game to play, and you have to really set aside a lot of assumptions to do it. And, and in general, I think you just buy these top hyperscalers and just sit on it. And, and this is not investment advice, by the way. I should say that.

Dave, where would, what's in your bucket? Uh, for me, it's a no-brainer because we have access to some incredible investments that most people can't access. But in the software layer, which is not nearly as capital intensive, there are 10x and 100x performance improvements. So, so when you're looking at, you know, Elon buying a million chips, a million and a half chips, you know, it's a $30, $40 billion risk. Uh, if you accelerate the algorithm running on those chips by 10x, you just saved an enormous amount of money. And so it's not as capital intensive. The innovations are right in front of us. You know, Blitzy down the hall from me here, uh, is innovating, you know, writing three to 10 million lines of code a night. So you can implement these ideas in, in like a week. Uh, so that is where you get the, the highest, very quick returns. And so if you have access, that's the sweet spot. Now, when you go to the conferences, like when we go to Riyadh together, or we go to, you know, any of these big, you don't hear about that as much because it's not as capital intensive, and they're all putting much larger amounts of money into physical real estate, generators, power supplies, chip buys, spaceships, you know, that's where all the money goes because they're very capital intensive, so it tends to dominate the agenda. But the returns are far, far better in the software layer.

Yeah. Well, you know, just to round off a comment on this slide, I was talking to an executive at Intel who was saying, "Oh my god, look at that PE ratio. That's insane for Nvidia, etc." And my comment was, "I'd rather be them than you." Because, like, really, that's brutal. But that's the reality of it. I mean, it's the, the moaning and winging from the incumbents is incredible. All right. Uh, uh, Merkle partners with six of the Magnificent 7, uh, and all top five AI labs. Super proud. Uh, Dave, this is one of your key investments at LinkXPV. We had Brendan Foody, uh, with us at the Abundance Summit last year. Tell us about about Merkle.

So, so, uh, you know, Brendan is just an awesome guy. And talk about getting lucky again. Uh, Scale AI got acquired last week, uh, what, $29 billion by Meta. All the customers of Scale are like, "Well, now I can't work with Scale anymore. It's part of Meta." All the other, you know, competing, uh, big AI labs. So now Brendan's got all of them except for one. Actually, guess which one he doesn't have? He has six of the seven. Meta. You'd think, you know, actually that was his anchor customer, so he still technically has it. That, that would, I guess, yeah, that's, that's exactly right. It's Elon Musk doing it all himself. Elon doesn't like partnering with people. He likes to build vertically, internally.

So, out of curiosity, just so folks can know how awesome you are, at what stage did you guys invest in in Brendan? How old was he then? And what, and what's the valuation now? 'Cause I mean, this is the story that people need to realize. You know, what used to be the peak age for building a unicorn was in sort of early to mid-30s, and it's dropped a decade. It's now like the peak age for creating a unicorn is like 20 to 23. So tell us the story there, Dave.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we were the first money in. Brendan. He was actually, uh, he and two of his best friends from high school started the company together. Uh, two of them went to Georgetown. The third friend went to Harvard. Uh, that made them eligible for Prod, which is this really, really cool student-run, student-founded joint venture club between MIT, Harvard, and now Stanford. So they did Prod, which is where they developed the idea for Merkle together. Uh, and then we found them at Prod because we know the founders of Prod, like, kind of all the little clubs and things around Boston here. Uh, and that's where we met them. And then, yeah, first money in. And then what was the, what was the valuation at that point? Just to make, it was like $30 million, plus or minus. Uh, you know, what's their latest valuation? Uh, they were, they got to revenue very quickly, by the way. Latest valuation. So, they, they closed a $2 billion valuation round two months ago. Uh, heard rumors this week that they're looking at an $8 billion or so preemptive term sheet, which they may or may not choose. It's eight or 10. No one, no one's quite sure. Uh, so that's a, like a 5x step up in two months. But Brendan, to answer your age question, I think he was 18, 19 when we first met him. Uh, when you had him on stage in LA, uh, remember he told that story, he had just raised a $300 million valuation funding, and the VCs wanted to meet him at a bar, and he said, "Well, I can't meet you at a bar." And they said, "Why? Now, you don't drink?" And I said, "Well, I'm only years old. I haven't, haven't turned 21 yet." So, I mean, this guy, I mean, he is such an inspiration for everyone around our ecosystem now, and everybody knows his name. Uh, it's just, it's just so cool to watch. I mean, just again, for, for our fans listening here, I mean, the story is that we're going to see such an explosion of entrepreneurship at the younger ages. Why? I think for a few reasons. Number one, um, they're unconstrained thinking. They have nothing to lose. Nothing to lose. Number two, they've got the tools with vibe coding and with access to these large language models, uh, to iterate and rapidly build stuff and throw it against the wall. Um, any other reasons why that's happening? Well, for me, those are the top two. So many of the people that we run into are worried about losing their job, losing their career, losing their whatever, um, rather than jumping into the huge, into the huge opportunity that opened up. Uh, because, you know, you get invested in your career, you get invested in your job, you get invested in learning. But if you unconstrain yourself from all that baggage and just, just think from a clean sheet of paper, you know, when you're, when you're 18, 19 years old, you have the benefit of, of you don't have a job, so there's nothing to worry about. But everybody could do that, right? You're not, you're not actually constrained. You just feel like you are. It's the analogy I use is like a 2-year-old skiing, right? They have no fear because they only have this far to fall. Um, you get older, you get taller, you got a lot further to fall, you're going to break a leg or something, and you don't have that far to fall, and it's the same type of mentality. I remember me meeting this young kid who was the founder of Arbitrum, which is one of the layer 2 blockchains, right? And he, and he was, I asked him, well, why do you think you'd succeed? Why not build your own L1 rather than, and why would you go with Ethereum as a layer 1 as opposed to one of the others, etc., etc.? And he says to me, well, according to your Exponential Organizations book, a new innovation has to be 10x better than a marketplace, right? And therefore, we figured these other ones are 2x better than Ethereum, but they're not 10x better. So, and the ecosystem of developers in there. So, we decided to layer on Ethereum. And I was like, wait, is this kid quoting my own book back at me? This like, how like, so I'm so impressed with this younger generation of founders where they got this all. I think a third reason is they're digitally native in a way that is just not right. They live and breathe this stuff. So, it's, it's really a key part of this whole thing. Also, you know, a lot of the, uh, a lot of the really successful new companies, they have very specific recruiting domains where they're pulling their best friends in or their people they know. And when you happen to be that age, all of your best friends are also not doing anything. So, it's a lot harder when you're older to go to, like, if you think of the 10 people you would most want to work with and you get really excited about it, nine of those 10 are going to be unavailable today because of some bonus cycle or whatever. Case, case in point, busy on podcasts, this podcast right now, right? I mean, it's like when I reached out to you, Dave, and see, and said, "Let's do, you know, this, this weekly WTF episode together." Um, you both said yes. And it's been a blast. I mean, I look forward to this every single week to have this conversation. Yeah. But let's note that scheduling these things is like Haley's Comet coming out, right? It's like a nightmare in between our schedules, for sure, but we're committed to it.

Core points. Uh, we'll talk about it on some other podcasts, but he has a really good set of core points that was in our little newsfeed here. One of them, though, is you have a lot of things in your life that you can cut. And if you're honest with yourself and you look at them, uh, to make space for what's going on right here, you're going to have to cut something else. Yeah. But look objectively at your life and think, "Okay, something's I cut to sleep." No, unfortunately. At least this morning I did to prep for this podcast. All right. Uh, the talent war remains on. So, uh, you know, just want to lay this out because it's ongoing. Uh, and when we think about sort of what are the constraints on this Gen AI revolution, we talk about chips as a constraint. We talk about power as a constraint. It's talent. Talent right now is, is the constraint, right? So, Meta offers huge $100 million comp packages. Zuckerberg himself is going out and and finding people and bringing them in. Um, OpenAI is giving, you know, 10 to 20 million equity on top of Google, Anthropic hires. I love this. OpenAI spent $4.4 billion in stock-based compensation, right? It's more than their compute is costing them. Uh, they're spending on on talent. Um, I want to quote a few things here just for people to get a sense. If you believe that access to AI is in fact the single differentiator that's going to, well, to the next levels of AI, AGI, ASI, whatever, it's going to differentiate all of these hyperscalers. Um, then it's the single most important thing they can do. So, Meta is at $1.35 trillion. They have $58 billion of cash on hand, and they're going to spend that. Google's at $2.2 trillion. They have $101 billion of cash on hand, right? OpenAI is at $300 billion. The estimate is they've got about $20 billion of cash on hand. Microsoft's at $3.2 with $78 billion of cash on hand. Anthropic is at $61 billion with about $3 to $5 billion of cash on hand. So, I just want to make the point that there's a lot of cash on the balance sheets of these companies, and this is an existential risk if they don't acquire the best talent today. So they're going to play full out. This has been a complaint on Apple because they've got like unbelievable amounts on their balance sheet of cash, and they're just not using it, and it's a, it's a huge problem. By the way, can I point out something on this slide? Sure. Look at how much Meta has spent on AI in that third bullet point, which says aggressive spending impacted margin, going from 28 to 23%. I'm like, boo. Oh, woo, woohoo. I mean, I mean, any company would kill to spend that much money and then your margins are impacted by 5%. You kidding me? Yeah. Yeah. Well, point being, there's a lot more room to go, and, uh, you know, as things heat up, they probably will. Do you remember a few years ago, uh, they were all talking about doing dividends? They couldn't think of what to do with their money. There's so much of it. Hey, why don't we just do a dividend, like a, like a bloated old bank or car manufacturer? Wow. It's just such a different world today from just four years ago. That's. But I want, I want people to hear, expect that there's going to be outlandish spending to get the talent, and then once they've got what they can get, uh, uh, spending on on energy, and then spending on building, uh, you know, we, we mentioned before that this year is about a billion dollars a day being put into, uh, into the AI arena, and we expect by 2030 it will triple to a trillion dollars a year. Um, anyway, it's, it's insane. We've also seen this in Saudi and the Emirates and so forth. I don't know what happened with Mark Zuckerberg, but he woke up one morning and said, "You know what? We're going to win this race." And, and so he has built an incredible dream team in, in no time. Uh, but the top offer, it turned out, was a billion. Remember we were talking a week ago, oh, billion dollars, hundred million offers. Um, and, you know, since then, we discovered that no, that was actually, there were several of those for sure, but then there was a $1 billion offer that got turned down. Uh, and that, you know, that's just, that's a person who also has a team that would have come over, but that person, you know, yeah, it's, it's like, I think the key thing there is they turned it down. Well, this is when Palmer Lucky, and Palmer Lucky turned down a billion dollars. He turned down a billion dollars, the first offer that that Zuckerberg made for his his VR company. Look, there, there's a really important point to be made here, right? If you're going to be building one of these companies, you have an MTP. You have a Massive Transformative Purpose, and you're really keen on that, and you're driven by the passion and the emotion. Peter, you talk about the emotional engagement that that brings it to people. I remember Yankum when they, when Mark, when Zuckerberg and tried to buy WhatsApp, the actual valuation was about one and a half billion. And so they made, they started having a discussion, and very quickly Apple and Google and others came to the table. So the valuation kept going up, and he kept just kept saying no because if I get acquired, my MTP gets threatened, which was simple communications globally, and I don't want to. Only after like at $18 billion is the rest of his shareholders said, "Come on," and then after extracting a promise that Zuck would not touch the company or change anything for five years, did he go, "Okay, fine." Right? And that's, I think that's what's amazing about MTPs and the founder mentality. That's the same situation that Palmer Lucky talked talked about on stage at the Abundance Summit last year, right? He, he said no to a billion. He finally accepted $2.2 billion, but only after Zuckerberg agreed to spend like a billion a year on the whole metaverse activity, and he ended up spending like $50 billion instead. I would love the framing he put on that, saying, if I wanted, if I'm excited about the domain and I want to try to get $10 billion of investment into it, it would take me forever because I'd have to go raise that money. And so therefore, by doing it this way, I got Facebook to invest or Meta to put that money in, and the whole place exploded, which is amazing.

Yeah. Now, quick story for you on why these numbers are so big. Uh, and this is, this is hearsay, but I'm pretty sure it's accurate. You know how, uh, you know, OpenAI, if you're an OpenAI user, nobody uses GPT 4.5, which was supposed to be a big deal. We're still on 4.0 or or 0.3, which is using 4.0 or 4.1 under the covers. What, what happened to 4.5? You know, it was a, it was a multi-hundred million dollar training run. Uh, turns out there was a bug, probably a single line of code in PyTorch, and the thing was just grinding, using up compute, but, and, you know, they thought it was making forward progress, but it wasn't for a long time, probably. Wow. And, uh, yeah, it torched the whole training run. And that's, uh, that's why GPT 4.5 has been a disappointment. So then you're like, okay, why would I spend a billion dollars or or hundred million on a single person? Well, like, if it's the right person, the next training runs are going to be much bigger than the last ones, and there's a lot of room to optimize, improve, and avoid bugs in that process. So, these are really rare, super valuable, uh, human beings at this point in time. Amazing.

I don't get it. Why can't you just say to the AI itself, go find the bugs in your code? Well, I mean, that's, that's, uh, certainly going to be the truth within a year, right? Um, yeah, the rate Blitzy is moving within a year for sure.

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All right. Uh, we mentioned last week, uh, that Dan Daniel Gross, who was the CEO of Ilya Sutskever's company, Safe Superintelligence, had been poached by Meta, and now Ilya has jumped into the seat of CEO. It says that Zuck has upped the number of researchers poached to 11, coming from the buzziest and earliest AI native firms, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind. And this is part of a major reorganization that puts Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman, two of the highest profile hires of the past few weeks, at the head of a new group at Meta called Super Intelligence Labs. But what may be the most critical part of this memo, Zuckerberg writing that, quote, "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, super intelligence is coming into sight." A source confirms Wire's reporting that OpenAI's chief research officer described it as if, quote, "Someone has broken into our home and stolen something." He vowed to be proactive, creative, recalibrate comp to recognize and reward top talent. Kelly Zuckerberg reaching super intelligence before Altman does, that would be like taking over the whole house itself.

Yeah. That memo. You can't quite tell from the way she she uh describes. So, an interesting point on that CNBC, uh, clip is the notion that the conversation has slowly slipped from AGI to super intelligence over and over again. I'm super happy for that because the theme of the Abundance, the Abundance Summit in March of '26 is is digital super intelligence and the rise of humanoid robots. So, got that one right. But the question is, what in the world is super intelligence, right? This definitional problem, that's the soapbox, right? Like, what the hell are we talking about here? Can anybody come up with a clear definition of this? Actually, I'd like an invitation to the viewers. If anybody sees a good definition of ASI or AGI or anything, please help us out here because nobody has one. The, the one that I've heard that I, I just put out, so I put out a newsletter every week, twice a week, and I just put one out on, on, on super intelligence, and, uh, uh, the definition is an AI system that is smarter than any human in anything. Um, so we'll see if that, if that stands. I mean, it blurs with AGI. Um, but sure would love a, would love a better definition.

Dave, do you have one you like? Well, no. And does, and does it matter? Oh, it totally. So, look, what's, what's happening obviously is that super intelligence is happening in all these domains already and has been for a while, like protein folding, and speaking any language, and singing in seven or 20 different octaves, and like all these things that are so totally superhuman are happening. And then this little area of reasoning and creativity, the AI can't do it yet. Which to me, is a perfect period of time. Like, this is like, you have an incredible purpose to serve with the AI to build great things together. So, it's actually a very golden moment, and we shouldn't be cheering for AGI for AGI, but it's a sweet spot, Dave. Like, everybody is thinking, oh, it becomes human-like, and then it becomes superhuman. It's not like that. It is way past us in some areas and behind us in others, and it's a good thing. We, we should be cheering for that to stay that way for a while.

Yeah. I would be, I would be very happy if it stayed where it is, uh, for a while. I agree with you on that front. Yeah.

Can I give you my view on this? Of course. Stay at this view level, at this paradigm for a long time to come. Okay. I'm going to take the other side of that bet. See? Please. Let's do that. First, for God's sake, somebody define it for me. Sorry, soapbox over. That's why I'm taking the bet.

Hey, well, back on, back on the Meta hires, though, talk about a dream team now. So, so Mark can get on stage now with Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Alexander Wang. Yeah. You compare that to a month ago. What an incredible, yeah, dream. We had, uh, we had, uh, two of them on stage at the Abundance Summit, uh, two years ago, which was fun. All right. Uh, for every time you put somebody on stage, you should get 10% of their future earnings. Yeah. Right. My God. We would, we would start having, uh, trillion-dollar X-prizes being launched very shortly thereafter.

So, this is a fun one. You know, looking at practical applications of AI. We talk about all the theoretical stuff. Google launches Doppel, and I'll run the video here, which is silent, which is a new app that lets you virtually try on, uh, any outfit to see how it might look on you. Right? So, I love this. I hate going to a store and trying stuff on. You know, the fact of the matter is the future of all clothes shopping, at least for guys, may be very different for women, is I take a body map, which is very easy to do, uh, actually with your phone, and you upload it, and then you can actually probably employ any of the great fashion designers as AIs. You know, I'm going to this party this time of year in this city. What are the five outfits you recommend for me? And I see a fashion show of, you know, five avatars walking on the stage who are wearing five different things who look exactly like me, and I say, "That's the one I want," and it's shipped custom fit. I get it the next day. That's the future.

Yep. What do you think? I think the future is one step further than that. Okay. Which is, I'd like an AI to kind of go, you know, for the shape of your head and your jawline, this is the type of collar that looks best on you. We're just shipping you a bunch of stuff that's going to look good on you. You can't pick this stuff up for yourself. You're just not good enough. So, we're going to pick it up for you, and we're just going to ship it to you on a, like a Rent the Runway thing, but all driven by AI. And the clothes just arrive, and I just put them on.

How about if you give your AI a budget per month, and you say, "I'm giving you a $2,000 surprise and delight budget." Cool. You know, you, you know what I like. You're, you're seeing all of my, you know, texts and my emails, and you're listening to my conversation. So, just, you know, have fun, surprise, and delight me every, every day. You got $2,000 bucks a month to to play with, you know, or, uh, similar for vacations and and activities. Um, you know, it's not all about physical stuff coming to your door. It's, uh, you know, what are you doing with your life today? What are you, where are you going here or there? Could you imagine an AI that say, "Okay, I've got the weekend off. Plan something amazing for me." Mhm. And it goes, "Sure, their car will pick you up at 9:00 a.m. at your doorstep, and I'm not going to tell you what you're doing, but it's going to be an incredible two days." I would love that. Yeah. It's like a surprise and delight adventure. That'd be so.

All right. Can I propose a a startup idea for the three of us? Sure. Of course. Um, you've got the reach, Peter. Dave, you've got the funds. We have the team. Uh, we could do this in two seconds. It's an Amazon Prime for living an amazing life. So, you pay a subscription fee of some number, $50 bucks a month or whatever, and an AI-driven environment learns about you and just does stuff like what you just mentioned, Peter. It says, "We've, we know you're free on Saturday night, and you have date night, and your kids away at camp. This is what you're doing this Saturday night. Be ready at this point." And you just. And that surprise and delight is something that people. And because something about these subscription services, you never, ever, ever unsubscribe. Yeah. Right. As long as you're delivering some serendipity now and then, you're off to the races. So, you could just create a like a serendipity AI that just delivers magical experiences on a subscription model.

Okay. Okay. So, I agree with you. Let's, let's keep this secret. Let's not tell anybody about this idea. You know, the problem is we all have so many ideas to build. We, I just want to see that one built, right? Because I would subscribe to that. I think that's actually, I think it's a fantastic idea. Dave, what do you think? You know, I, I think I had this thought very related to this back when the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer edition came out. I don't know if you remember that, but it's like Eddie Bauer, like, okay, that's like, you know, outdoor clothing and stuff, but the self-image of that person is, look, I got the, I've got the Ford Explorer. I've got my surfboard on the roof. I've got my Eddie Bauer. This is like my lifestyle and my what I like to do and my self-image is this. And it cuts across like cars and surfboards and clothes. So, I think the AI version of that that you're describing, Celine, is, is a great idea. It's definitely going to happen, and it's going to have different pathways for different types of people, you know, outdoors person, yeah, you know, a video game expert, whatever. And also, you can, you could build in the, the orthogonal aspects. If you're an outdoor person a lot, okay, go see a Broadway show once in a while, just to break the pattern, right? And just create, add those extra dimensions to your, your day-to-day life that you wouldn't normally think of or do yourself. So, listen, if anybody, if anybody ends up building this, at least let us know and give us a little bit of credit. Give us a free subscription. And if we end up building it, hell no, we want equity. Okay, we want equity. Fine, we'll take it. We'll take, we'll take some advisory shares.

All right, let's move on here. Uh, uh, here's another fun one. This comes from Rolling Stone. Uh, you know, this was predictable and it's finally here. The AI band with over 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify. So, the band is called Velvet Sundown, and they've amassed a million listeners in one month. And here's the key point. It's not a physical real band. It's an AI with over 15,000 AI tracks per day are being uploaded to streaming services. So, if you're a Velvet Sundown Band Le, uh, you know, fan, let us know in the comments. I think this is amazing. And of course, what's going to follow this next is they're going to be virtualized concerts of these guys. You'll see them on TV, on your eyewear, and you'll go to an event, and they'll be performing, and they'll be flying through the air because they're superhuman.

The, uh, the two things here. One is, um, I think this is awesome. I went and actually listened to a couple of their songs. It's really good. It's really, it's really, really very, um, approachable music, and it's really great. Um, my kind of holy grail here is to take a favorite old band of mine. I used to listen to Rush, that old rock band from Canada, and, and like compose me some new songs and have an AI version of the band, compose and present those songs. It would be fantastic.

Yeah. Another great, another great idea. Some of the rights owners get on board with what you just said, because I want to do the exact same thing with, you know, some of the, some of the classics like Boston and Rush are phenomenal, and you'd love to hear some new material, and they're not, you know, Boston put out three albums and then never again. Four, they put out four. Do they put out four? Yeah. I'm, I'm a Boston fan. It's like the one band. I had one, I had two records through college. I had Boston and I had Kansas. I mean, I was, I was a, you know, social ignoramus, and I just play them over and over and over again. I still play them over and over and over again. H wouldn't be stuff you don't want to know about me. Okay. So, right now, the, uh, the rights owners are like, "Hey, let's sue the AI companies." Like, don't do that. Get on board with it. It works much better. It would be such an amazing thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. Such a good. For sure.

Okay. Um, we've been talking about all the upside. Let's talk about some of the concerns. Uh, and this is, uh, Roman Yampolskiy on on Joe Rogan. All right, let's take a listen. Talking about super intelligence, a system which is thousands of times smarter than me. It would come up with something completely novel, more optimal, better way, more efficient way of doing it, and I cannot predict it because I'm not that smart. That's exactly what it is. We, we basically setting up an adversarial situation with agents which are like squirrels versus humans. No group of squirrels can figure out how to control us. More resources, more acorns, whatever. They're not going to solve that problem. And it's the same for us. And most people think one or two steps ahead. And it's not enough. It's not enough in chess. It's not enough here. If you think about AGI and then maybe super intelligence, that's not the end of the game. The process continues. You'll get super intelligence creating next level AI. So, super intelligence plus plus 2.0, 3.0, it goes on indefinitely. You're talking about super. It does go on. It does go on indefinitely. Uh, there is no ceiling on this. You know, and Ray Kurzweil has talked about this, uh, many times, that they will be as intelligent as human, then 10x, 100x, a thousandfold, a billionfold. Uh, there is no upper limit.

So how do we deal with this, Dave? You've had some ideas here. You can put, put that video screenshot back on there. I got, I figure out like this Joe Ro. By the way, Roman is a singularity student. I know him pretty well. Very, very smart. But I disagree deeply with the conversation. Yeah, me too, actually. Me too. Okay, so they're right, and fundamentally self-improvement is imminent, and that's going to, you know, exponentially skyrocket the capabilities. Uh, where it's completely wrong is, look, every single iteration can be logged. Uh, it is not a hard thing to do. Also, the self-improvement can be limited to the algorithmic self-improvement. It doesn't have to be self-training. So that the AI can say, "Hey, here's how I suggest I speed myself up or remap myself to faster hardware or get rid of operating system overhead so that I run more efficiently." Those suggestions are fine. That self-improvement will really accelerate things. There's no reason it needs to develop new internal capabilities blindly. Like that's a different loop, and it's very controllable. And so a lot of people in the research world are like, "Well, look, if I deploy it in my car, I want it to continue learning and improving its driving." No, you don't. You want the debugged, not self-improving thing to be driving your car, because if it could do anything. And that's specifically what we never as humanity ever need to cross that line. There's no benefit to humanity to crossing. But we keep crossing the lines. We set boundaries and we keep crossing them, right? ChatGPT or GPT2 and 3 was not supposed to be put on the open web. Um, you're right. I mean, right now, look, the regulators have no idea what I just said. Uh, and no way to enact or or interpret it. Uh, and, you know, the people, there is a view of the world where, you know, you remember how we talked a week ago about five of the top AI guys just became lieutenant colonels in the army. Yeah. Uh, so a model like that on this topic would actually work. So there's a path forward. But, but where we're sitting right now, you're right, there's absolutely nobody even vaguely contemplating controls. You know, just, just the process of logging exactly what it's doing, so easy to do. And, and then the metrics, you know, the measurement of the logs, everyone will be like, "Oh my God, that's terabytes of data. Who's going to look at it?" The AI will look at it. You don't have to worry about that. You just have, have an AI check of the AI logs and have that report to the regulators like, this is over the self-improvement line. We need to stop it. And just improving its own algorithm, making faster. This is fine.

A quick thought on this. So, I, I have, you know, I think there's an important point that Dave made, which is that if you have a, a bounded system like self-driving, right? You want the AI to be bounded. You don't want the AI to see a tree and say, instead of drive around that tree, let me try and drive up the tree and see what happens. Um, you know, why not? We're experimental, after all. Um, so you want some bounded conditions, which I think is easy to program in. I think as, as Dave talks about the logging of the steps, that's also very easy to do. I think where I would get to would be, show me the boundary condition, and I think there is a safeguard, and the safeguard is that these systems are not cognitive and they're not self-aware. If they develop self-awareness and a deep sense of self with their own sense of agency and internal model of themselves, that's when not cooked. I think that's when you kind of go, okay, now we need to deal with that, and let's think about that. The problem is we don't have a test for it, and we don't have a definition for what that looks like, right? I often joke that I feel like you look like you're self-aware, so I attribute self-awareness to you. I joke that I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife disagrees, right? And so it's hard to even have the conversation around some of these topics. We get stuck in the language problem. We have no idea what we're talking about when you talk about this, and then you get into the philosophical stuff about the hard problem of subjective consciousness, as David Chalmers has defined. We have no sense of what we're talking about here. So to freak out, I think is overstated by thing. We naturally go down and anthropomorphize the outcomes, and as, as Roman says, there'll be an adversarial relationship, and I just don't see why that would be the case. I say we're cooked because if they are conscious, there's going to be a sense of self-preservation. Anyway, let's, let's move on to, uh, a few areas. Like, there's no way people are like, yeah, we're cooked. That's awesome. So, I want to hit, I want to get to the science breakthroughs that are coming out because they're important, and I, I don't want to go through Dave Blondon's, uh, you know, sort of end time.

Uh, so, AI job battles. Uh, so, Amazon CEO says AI will take some jobs but make others more interesting. Totally agree with him. Uh, this is the, this is the scorecard thus far in the first half of 2025. AI has already replaced 94,000 tech workers. Um, and we'll see where it goes. The question is, that's not a huge number. It's significant. Yeah, it's between one and. But it's an exponential. So, uh, let's take a look at the next one. So, uh, Vinod Khosla, who is a friend, uh, had him on stage at the Abundance Summit last year, said AI will replace 80% of jobs by 2030. So, this is when it starts to become interesting. 80% of jobs by 2030. He's saying, "Hey, humanoid robots, uh, are going to hit their ChatGPT moment. In two to three years, they're available for you at $300 a month, which is $10 a day." Um, AI healthcare could become free if the regulators get out of the way. And by 2040, people will work out of passion, not necessarily, um, not necessity, in an era of abundance. I completely agree with all of these. I'm not sure about the 80% figure. The question is, is that I disagree. You just because I join, I kind of align with Eric Brynjolfsson on this, because if you take a job like financial analyst, it's not one singular job. It's broken down to about 27 different tasks that that person does to fulfill that job function. You might automate 10 out of those 27, but you're not automating the rest. And we've seen this throughout history. We automate bits of it, but the job still stays, right? We just augment capability, and we're able to do much more. And AI with a chatbot that can do customer service can now focus on the really hard customers that need the in-person human touch, and leave the AI to deal with all the level one, level two support issues.

Well, you know what the good thing is, Slim? We're going to find out pretty fast, very fast. And, and I think I'm happy to put a bet on this one if anybody wants to go against me on this. We got that. So, on our, on our Moonshots website, we need to keep track of our bets and put some, put some cash against them.

All right. Uh, here is Mark Benioff. I love Mark. Mark is brilliant. He's one of the most extraordinary philanthropists. Um, I'm not sure about the fashion statement here. It looks kind of sci-fi. He looks like Emperor Palpatine. Okay. So, uh, this is from CNBC. A benevolent one. A benevolent. He is a, he's a gem of a human being. Look in that picture, though. It's true. AI is doing up to 50% of the work at Salesforce, says CEO Mark Benioff. That's pretty extraordinary. Salesforce is targeting a billion active AI agents by the year's end. So, what I love about here, what I love here is this is the model of disrupt yourself before somebody else disrupts. And it's a core mantra that we spout, that you better, you are the disruptor, you're disrupted, right? There's no middle ground. And this is a great example of somebody living that and saying, "Okay, we're just going to disrupt ourselves because we have to, and there's an opportunity there." But here's the point. He can do that because he's a, it's a founder-led, tech-forward CEO. Agree.

All right. Yeah. One other little nit on what Mark is doing so, so well. Uh, you know, a lot of the doubters in AI investing a year or two ago are like, well, look, there's, there's a lot of venture-funded money coming in, but where's the actual corporate money coming in? And, you know, of course, they're very slow to react. Mark said, you know what, we're not going to wait around. We're going to go out to all these companies, especially in insurance, and we're just going to AI operations for them. Yeah. So, really, really got deep into just take over. We're not just trying to sell you a software product. We're actually going to just revamp your whole organization. And that's worked really, really well for Salesforce because a lot of people are like, how did they get so big? They're worth $200 billion. How did that happen? I mean, listen, SaaS, SaaS is up for disruption. Software as a service. And he is looking, like you said, Slim, to disrupt himself before the entire industry does.

This is an important conversation here. Uh, I don't want to spend too much time on it, but this is from Reforge. It says, "Product Market Fit Collapse. Why Your Company Could Be Next?" So, a company called CHEG lost 90% of its market cap in 2024 to ChatGPT, faster and cheaper use. Um, so, you know, when you put wrappers on top of these large language models, you can get very rapidly disrupted. And here's a list. Here's a list of some of the other companies. Can we go back a slide here? Yeah, sure. Um, just a shout out to Mikhail Mon from the Open Expo community who pointed this, uh, article at us, and this is a really important conversation, as you said, because there's a huge number of companies which we're going to talk about in the next slide where you're trending along with good product market fit. You think you're doing very well, and then boom, you get disrupted. Very. Look at that. Look at that chart, right? That's an unbelievable drop in like zero time. Yeah. And that's going to start to happen to a larger, larger group of companies. And I love the fact that we have a list of potentials here. And every CEO in the world needs to be watching out for this to say, "Am I next?" 'Cause you, it's, you are, it's not an if, it's a when. You better be watching out for what's going to disrupt you, because this chart is going to hit you if you're not employing these types of models yourself very, very quickly.

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All right, back to the episode. By the way, a call out to our listeners. If you have a a article or chart or a news headline uh that you'd like us to talk about, go ahead and stick it in the the comments on this session. We'll look at it for next session. And again, please invite friends to join us. You know, my mission here is that we're giving a hopeful, compelling, an abundant vision of the future to counterveail all the negative news out there in the world. We're still in a negative story here, but here are the companies at risk. Um, not negative, this is creative destruction, right? This is like the reality of the future. Uh, and it's an opportunity to reinvent these. So, Reddit, Kora, Medium, right? Canva, Adobe Stock, Survey Monkey, right? I mean, oh my god, talk about old school. Uh, Khan Academy, Quizlet, Wolf from Alpha, Wikipedia. Uh, these are companies that are, you know, companies well known by us today, but may not exist in the next two or three years.

Comments, Dave, at all? Uh, Steven Wolram's a good friend and and in our office a lot. We should get him to comment on that. I wouldn't have expected Wolf from Alpha to be on the list, but you know, next after this, this is a pretty straightforward analysis. Then after this, you got all the white collar insurance type companies, financial services companies, banks, banks, banks. Yeah, that's the one I'd really be looking at. Yeah, they have a couple more years. Uh so, but they got to get moving like now figure out what their role is in the world three, four, five years from now.

Can I just talk about that just for a second? The only thing that's saving both banks and insurance companies is the regulatory mode, right? I talk to CEOs in that world and they're like, "Oh, the regulator is a pain in the ass." And I'm like, "Are you kidding? They're your best friend. They're holding the horde of startup folks at the gate preventing from disrupting the crap out of you cuz you're not doing anything around this for yourself. You have to disrupt yourself." And I think the regulatory barriers in both healthcare and in financial services are holding back these guys and it's preventing them from being doing the disruption. How long do they how long is that? Let me really simple look at in the crypto world, look at DeFi, decentralized finance, right? What's a central bank? What's a a retail bank? A retail bank is just a centralized ledger where it knows that you deposit $1,000 and we lent it to Dave over there and that's it. We trust our life savings to the secure that centralized ledger. If I can decentralize that ledger, which is what DeFi is all about, why do I need the retail bank, right? So there's already huge amounts of transaction flows happening on these DeFi networks uh which will start to circumvent existing flows and as that happens more and more uh the centralized banks are going to be totally at least the retail banking part there's other functions uh investment banking etc which has a much more human touch but all of that will get disrupted I would give it three years for retail banking amazing amazing all right let's move on one of my favorite subjects is breakthrough science Want to call out a few of these. So one of the areas again Ray Kerszswall my mentor your mentor Sem predicted by the mid 2030s we would have high bandwidth BCI and I was like you know a decade ago I was like really you really think we're going to get there? Well so how does he do it? How does he do it? You call me the emperor of exponentials. He's the grand puba. Yes, for sure. Uh let's take a quick listen.

This is Neuralink's road map, right? I want to just point out there's I know of in writing my next book with Steven Cutotler which is called we are as gods survival guide for the age of abundance. Uh we track sort of the top five or six companies in this field. Neuralink is definitely one of them. Uh but there are others that are have the potential to do far more. But let's take a quick listen at what we should expect. Next quarter, we're planning to implant in the speech cortex to directly decode attentive words from brain signals to speech. And in 2026, not only are we going to triple the number of electrodes from 1,000 to 3,000 for more capabilities, we're planning to have our first blind side participant to enable navigation. And in 2027, we're going to continue increasing channel counts, probably another triple, so 10,000 channels, and also enable for the first time multiple implants. So not just one in motor cortex, speech cortex or visual cortex, but all of the above. And finally, in 2028, our goal is to get to more than 25,000 channels per implant, have multiple of these, have ability to access any part of the brain for psychiatric conditions, pain, uh, dysregulation, and also start to demonstrate what it would be like to actually integrate with AI. So, the other thing that this is going to enable is for you to occupy an Optimus robot, right? So, you can see through its eyes, you can listen through its its ears, you can feel what it feels and move around. There's some good movies on that subject, but this is moving fast. Um, and again, it's not the only company doing this. There's Paradromics, there's Forest, there's Marylu Jepson with Openwater. Uh, amazing companies out there and super exciting.

You know, one of the subjects we had at the Abundance Summit a couple years ago, uh, it was a conversation actually with Alex Weezner Gross. Uh, it was are we going to couple with AI? Right? So AI is growing exponentially. We are as humans flat, linear or sublinear in some cases. Can we couple with AI? So as AI is moving, we can move with it. Can I say something here? Um, of course this is the actual massive optimistic hopeful benefit of technology where you augment the human experience. Right? Hollywood always has a dystopian Terminator Skynet Matrix Rou overlords come and take over the world. If we're lucky, we're pets and if we're unlucky, we're food. You always see that outcome. But the if you actually look how my smartphone augments my humanity, right? I I have empathy built in, my memories built in, I have reach, etc. I think the ability to project consciousness and awareness and human ability and empathy, etc. through other devices becomes the holy grail of where technology can take the human condition. Yeah. Beautiful. Um very quickly, uh we're going to see tech like this coming out. These are emotion tracking smart glasses. Apple has got smart glasses. Google's got smart glasses. Meta's got smart glasses. And what we're going to start to see finally, hopefully, it's the visual recognition. when I see across the hall my AI tells me oh See is approaching you remember his his son's name is Milan and he was born you know his birthday is coming up and you basically have this ability to have a perfect memory for people places and things but also the idea of facial and biometric sensors so the fine you know uh muscle movements in the cheek and the eye that tells you this person is fearful or excited or lying I I need one of these cuz when you approach me, Peter, you're always have that look like Sim, you didn't do this thing that I asked you to do and so I'll be able to tell that beforehand. Um the I've kind of found this. The point I want to make about this one is each time we find a layer of capability and we information enable that and make that available to both computation and AI. We have whole classes of applications that get unlocked at each of these. I think that's incredibly exciting about what's information enabling all these different domains that we never thought possible around this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a side of side conversation on this, we can have it later, but uh this is definitely going to happen. It works really well. The cameras are super super high def and they they operate in frequencies that the human eye can't see. So, they're going to detect all kinds of things that you never even knew you were telegraphing. I I think the recipient, the person in front of the camera has a basic human right to know when they're on camera. And I think all these cameras should have built-in uh transmission that identifies, you know, where they are and what they're looking at. So, you can have a little app on your phone saying, "Oh, I'm being watched right now." And just know um and I think that's a quick fix, but it's going to happen no matter what. I'm not delusional about it, but the cameras are going to be everywhere. Next time we connect, I'm going to show a slide on this. It's super funny, but we'll do that next time. Okay.

All right, um so a couple of slides in the bio uh biological world. Um I track this carefully uh making investments in it. Uh and I think this is where all of the longevity play is going to be happening. It's the impact of AI on the complexity of the human body, right? 40 trillion cells uh every cell running about 5 to 10 billion calculations per second per cell. Uh, so how can you possibly understand that? By the way, a quick shout out. We're running our longevity platinum trip at the end of September. It's capped at 60 individuals. We're at 54. There are six seats left. If you're interested in joining me for full 5 days, go check out um abundance360.com/ longevity and you can get some more information there. But let's listen to this. This is introducing Chai 2, a major breakthrough in molecular design. We've now developed the ability to engineer molecules and placed atoms in 3D space. It's like Photoshop for molecules. Previous methods have had to screen millions or sometimes billions of protein sequences to find a solution. But with our latest breakthrough, were often successful on the first try. The solutions that our models come up with are incredibly creative. They think very differently than our scientists do. There was a group that had been working on this hard problem for about 3 4 years having spent5 10 million in the program. We typed what they were working on into chai 2. Within hours we had a candidate solution and within 2 weeks we had those solutions validated experimentally in the laboratory. That's amazing. These types of breakthroughs are where we're going to have the biggest outcomes for humanity where we find these things that we couldn't find otherwise. Yeah, it is. It is spectacular. By the way, if you're listening to this and you haven't listened to my uh podcast that I did with David Sinclair, uh I think it was a couple of weeks ago. Listen to it. One of my best podcasts ever. Uh and he's using this kind of technology to develop a reversal pill. And so thrilled about David's work. We're going to be spending the weekend with David uh at the Longevity Platinum trip uh at the end of September. Um here is uh one other related article and this is fascinating. So big pharma has this giant lock on trillions of dollars worth of of value uh which they have you know biologic patents and here is a tool that is able to recreate a protein that mimics an existing biologic drug but works around the patents right so genetics is not going to slow down because they're so what's Tony Robbins quote on this a healthy a healthy person has a thousand wishes a sick person has one. Yeah. Uh beautiful. So much good that's going to happen so quickly from this and we we can't afford to slow down because a lot of people are saying why don't we just stop which you know for two reasons. One one because of this and two because China's going to keep going anyway. Uh but this is the really beautiful thing about what we're doing with AI now. Yeah.

Um, we're about to wrap. Um I'll just hit humanoid robots and we'll cut it off there. Gotta hand it to the Chinese. Beijing is hosting the world's first humanoid robot games. You know, I think this could get interesting in the final result. I really want those giant mech robots doing, you know, battling out. Um, I don't know. I think gymnastics will be cool. I've seen the soccer on these little guys. It's kind of slow, but it's gonna it's going to go, but it's gonna improve exponentially. Yeah. Um we're seeing uh you know robots are have taken over the Amazon warehouse but what's new is uh one of the companies uh called Agility Robotics is actually going to be putting their robots in uh Amazon Rivian vans and those robots will do the last 100 feet. I think we talked about that last week. Uh and this is you know a a cool point. Uh this video doesn't have sound, but the way that we solve the US debt problem is by hyperrowth on the backside of AI and robotics. And the notion is when robots build robots and AIs build AIs. Thoughts about this? Yeah, it's going to be, you know, I think a lot about you see these pictures of of India and, you know, Peter, you were over there not that long ago and there's piles and piles and piles of trash, you know, from massive overpopulation. And then you think about the robot cleaning, sorting, and recycling every little bit of it, and it becomes this beautiful green paradise. And that's that's exactly what will be possible in just a couple of years. That's beautiful. I have a one thing we need to think about and we may need to drill more about this is that when you have increased efficiency like humanoid robots can bring us GDP will actually drop. Um because if I can do something for a tenth of the price that money isn't circulating the in the economy. So we're going to have to think about a new different measures like some of the human development index or some of the others that people have come up with to measure success. Uh, I don't want to go into that math right now, but we should have that conversation, right? Because it's you're you're the other argument that people make is we're going to have this massive spike in GDP as labor costs and cognitive costs go to zero and the denominator starts, you know, shrinking rapidly. Oh, yeah.

Wait, one more thing. Uh, it's in the tech world, you have to wear black t-shirts for this segment. uh and one in the tech world something happened this past week uh and that is Elon announces uh America party um he puts out this poll and he says should we form a independent party to break the monopoly of the two-party system two to one the answer is yes and then Elon announces uh his plans to do that uh comments on this before we wrap Dave yeah actually We had a great riff with Scaramucci, Anthony Scaramucci on this a couple days ago. So check out Is that podcast out? It should be. The podcast is out with Anthony. Yes. Yeah. Check it out. I think a lot of people loved it even though I'm not a big politics guy usually, but uh but I think everyone agrees we need we need much much more rapid progress. You know that the tech is going to move forward regardless. And if you don't if you don't change something, we're we're not going to have any regulation or any it'll it'll get ugly if we don't do something. So, uh, I think Elon recognizes that, but I was really always wondering how this would play out because so much of the voting process now has moved to Meta, you know, so Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, now X, and it's owned by the big tech guys and but but that's actually the election determiner, too. So, something had to collide. This is a very direct collision right here. Doesn't get more. What I was surprised at given the audience that it's is on X, I thought the number would be much higher than 65%. I would have put it more like 80% would say yes. It definitely badly needs to happen because the current system is totally broken. The spending and the pork in this bill is off the hook in terms of creating more and more debt. There's a really big existential threat here because they've shown that if you go over 130% uh debt to GDP, your civilization collapses very quickly afterwards. And we're at 126 or 127%. So this puts it over the top. Flashing red lights, flashing red lights, flashing red lights and lots of levels. And we could talk more about this another time. Oh my god. You know, the the one thing that's interesting is it would definitely be a tech forward uh a tech forward uh party. You know, I think the best way to drive uh you know, debt reduction and growth in US GDP, yes, it's robotics, yes, it's AI, but it's also extending the healthy human lifespan and health span. Right? If you gave everyone in the US an extra 20 healthy years where they're not making payments to their doctors, they're not in pain, they're not missing work, where you know 80 years old is the new 40, um that would change the game in a significant fashion. So that's my vote here. Here's the structural outcome of this. If this becomes real, which I hope it really does, then what happens is this becomes the marginal decider for any election. Whoever whoever collaborates with this party will decide the future and therefore you get to dictate policy which I think is the real outcome which I think would be hugely beneficial. Yeah. But we don't talk about we don't talk about politics on this podcast. It was so fun to see some of our fans uh in the notes uh to this podcast saying I love you so much more than the all-in podcast because you talk about real science and technology versus versus politics. So just thank you for that comment. Um, and uh, we love doing this. I hope you love uh, receiving it. Uh, subscribe just for fun just so we can, you know, see that number tick along. It incentivizes us. Dave, uh, take care, buddy. See, I'll talk to you soon. All right. I think our next our next podcast guest on WTF is going to be Immod Mustach backed by popular demand. That'll be fun. So, one quick thing on the 23rd, we're doing about EXO. Yeah, if people are interested on the 23rd, we're doing a a two-hour workshop where we go deep into one of the attributes. We do this every month. It sells out. It's a hundred bucks. Um, and so come along and help take your company to the next level by applying this. Okay. So, just to slow this down one second, it's an exo workshop, an exponential organization workshop where we invite people to come. It's a limited to a number a certain number. It's a hundred bucks and we spend two hours going into the key attribute of the exo model like crowd community AI. Where do they find out about it? We'll put a link in the description. Uh or go to openexo.com and then come join us because it's we've getting we're getting rave reviews on it. It's selling out totally. Uh it's going to be a lot of fun. Love it. Love it. All right, Moonshot mates. Love you both. Love you, too. Be well. See you next time. See you next time. See you next time. I'll see you in a scaramucci. Yeah, I see you in a scaram merchie.

If you could have had a 10-year head start on the dot boom back in the 2000s, would you have taken it? Every week, I track the major tech meta trends. These are massive gamechanging shifts that will play out over the decade ahead. From humanoid robotics to AGI, quantum computing, energy breakthroughs, and longevity, I cut through the noise and deliver only what matters to our lives and our careers. I send out a Metatron newsletter twice a week as a quick two-minute readover email. It's entirely free. These insights are read by founders, CEOs, and investors behind some of the world's most disruptive companies. Why? Because acting early is everything. This is for you if you want to see the future before it arrives and profit from it. Sign up at dmmand.com/tatrends and be ahead of the next tech bubble. That's dmmagnus.com/metatrends. [Music]