AI This Week: NVIDIA’s Record Revenue, Elon’s Data Centers in Space & Gemini 3’s Insane Performance w/ Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #210

Just when you thought Nvidia couldn't do it again and again, we're now at $57 billion, 62% year-on-year growth. We're in the beginning of a very long-term build-out.

of the fundamental infrastructure of humanity, which is computing. NVIDIA has just become the central bank for AI and they're minting their own currency which is compute and everybody's got to buy their currency there's got to be somebody who's going to challenge nvidia the non-incumbents are obvious saudi arabia is positioning itself as a global AI superpower. That to me looks like we're seeing the re-architecting from the ground up.

of an entirely new sovereign stack. Since I was a teenager I've been trying to visualize how the Singularity happens and what does it look like in the last few years before the Singularity and now we're right in the middle of it and it's just I'm giddy with excitement. First of all, guys, what are you doing tonight? Anybody know what they're doing tonight? I know what I'm doing tonight. What are you doing tonight? I'm watching on Prime Video the age of disclosure.

Alex, you? I'm already well into it. Okay, that's right. It went live at midnight last night. Do you guys know what this is? No. So, Salim, it... is a tell-all documentary about the fact that we've been covering up alien visitations, spaceships for the last 80 years. So I can't wait to see it. I'm going to drag my kids along with... with me to watch this thing i mean it should be epic dave uh now that you say it i will i didn't have plans otherwise all right well i mean listen the the fact that

At the same time that AGI and ASI is coming online, there is all of these, you know, increasing evidence of, I don't know, I just think, is it causation or causality or just, you know. Correlation. Correlation is what I meant. Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, it's definitely tied to human events that trigger. I mean, every sci-fi movie knows this. When you hit a milestone, it triggers something and then the aliens reveal. Okay.

I'll just comment also. I mentioned in the last episode, given enough superintelligence, any and all hidden agents become shallow. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Alex, I'm not big on the aliens, but I am very big on intelligences everywhere. I really love your theory on that. But after we discover the nature of intelligence, we're going to find that you can compute. with virtually anything and it's happening all over the place.

uh i just can't wait for that breakthrough which is connected it's not quite i think you know i think it'd be interesting once in a while to have a couple of dedicated episodes to very specific topics like one is what's intelligence Another one could be abundance and what the hell is it and how do you measure it? And really go deep on that topic for a whole episode. Interesting.

You know what I was thinking after the last episode too is Peter the future is faster than you think is Incredibly timely And, you know, reprinting that or rewriting it with, you know, there's so much that's changed. It's just been a few years. But that book, it's the one on my backdrop, you know, in the podcast studio in the office. And I just moved it to the front and center now because I really want everybody to flip through it again.

But it's really, really prescient. Thanks, buddy. The next book that Stephen Kotler and I have written comes out April 14th. It's called We Are As Gods. Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. So it's a follow-on to the original book, Abundance. Anyway, it's probably the best work we've done, but I agree the future is faster than you think. I'm not sure what the new title would be. Well, it's faster than you think. Oh, no. I'm not going to pull a Kurzweil on this.

Hey, that outro today is unbelievable. It was nuts. Creativity is crazy. We'll show it. We'll show it at the end of this episode. Ask the audience during the episode to rebrand your books with video. Yeah. Sure. Or just all of your content. If you want to flatter Peter, take any of his books, his TV shows, from For All Mankind.

Take any of that and redo it through Sora, and we'll post it. All right, guys. Let's jump in. Our Moonshots episode today here with DB2, AWG, Mr. EXO. Last episode, we had so much content. We really went deep on hyperscalers, and it was a great, great pod. Today, we're going to continue on the conversation. There's a lot.

that we didn't get a chance to cover and so we're covering it today and i'm excited for it let's let's begin we're going to start this episode today with chips and data centers all right

Here we go. Nvidia beats earnings and has record revenues. So, you know, just when you thought Nvidia couldn't do it again and again. We're now at $57 billion, 62% year-on-year growth driven by AI compute demand. NVIDIA has announced 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure deals. And Jensen is expecting a $65 billion in revenue next quarter. So quarterly earnings are increasing at an extraordinary rate. Let's dive into this. Dave, do you want to kick it off?

Well, yeah, just to set context for where we are, you know, NVIDIA was a graphics card company doing polygons for video games. The AI community discovered it's a very good fit for neural networks. And then NVIDIA... just caught the wave and took off but they're only about halfway down the journey of redesigning the chips to be perfect for ai and so they can price up

the chips tremendously and there's another you know 2 to 10x performance gain in just the architecture and design that's still in their future but every time they roll out an improvement like that is a chance for them to you know increase the prices by

50 60 70 percent and the community will buy them no matter what so that's what you're experiencing right now with nvidia you could argue whether that's sustainable or not but clearly there's more you know headroom in in this uh ridiculously high margins that nvidia has

Can I give you what I think the real story is? NVIDIA has just become the central bank for AI, right? And they're minting their own currency, which is compute. And everybody's got to buy their currency. I think it's extraordinary. AWG, what are you thinking? Yeah, I think that party can continue as long as revenue generation continues. And I think...

two things need to happen for revenue generation to continue to justify the trillions of dollars of AI compute capex. And those are automation of the existing service economy. And two, creating transformative new markets through the discovery of transformative math, science, engineering, medicine advancements. I think we do those two things. The revenue generation continues and the AI compute.

nvidia capex party can continue indefinitely part of the question is you know people have thought is this a bubble i mean nvidia is just driving incredible revenues now for me Alex, my question is, there's got to be somebody who's going to challenge Nvidia. There's got to be somebody who's going to start developing systems that are competitive. Any thoughts on that?

I think the non-incumbents are obvious. There are TPUs from Google, Powering, Gemini, and if you believe the reports, eventually lots of other first-class frontier labs as well. You have AMD. You have a whole bunch of ASICs that are specialized on inference time transformer compute. So I think we are moving towards a heterogeneous ecosystem of lots of different architectures, not just CUDA.

Yeah, I am not buying Nvidia stock and I am invested in a company, Standard Kernel, which is building AI that redesigns kernels. and soon chips to fit specific AI algorithms. And that's where the Google TPUs, you know, Google has this vertically integrated, we innovate at the algorithm level, we roll out Gemini 3 two days ago, we immediately start designing the next generation TPU.

to fit the algorithm change. That's something that Jensen doesn't have quite yet and unless he invests very, very quickly up the stack, it's a big weakness in the competitive positioning. Because you know right now it's it's very hard to redesign a chip but with AI doing the redesign that cycle time is gonna come way way way down And it's not a manufacturing problem. You know, you just have to crank out the mask. It's more of a debugging and simulation problem, which can be solved with AI.

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why it matters and how you can benefit from it to subscribe for free go to dmagnus.com slash metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else all right now back to this episode we've got a couple more stories on video kicking us off here this morning uh let's dive into that

So we've got NVIDIA announces strategic partnership with Anthropic and Microsoft. So Anthropic just agreed to spend $30 billion on Microsoft Azure Cloud, all powered by NVIDIA's latest chips. In return, Microsoft and NVIDIA are putting up to $15 billion into Anthropic. This isn't a product launch. It's the formation of an AI power block. These alignments we're seeing week on week, right? The deck keeps getting reshuffled. Anthropic has been...

I guess, under-resourced with compute. And so this is a power move by them. Dave, you want to weigh in or Alex? Well, so I remember very clearly when Microsoft had a $300 billion valuation, became the most valuable company in the world. And we were like, wow. That's huge. So now Anthropics were 300 billion and a big company is now three or five trillion. And that was not that long ago.

And you'll see that now Anthropic with, you know, they have this 15 billion plus another 30 billion. That's a lot of. Capability, you know, and you'll see them start to do things. You're like, how are they getting that done? How are they getting that done? But but you really have to back up and look at the magnitude of these dollars. It's incredibly empowering this amount of money. And so.

you know since i was a teenager i've been trying to visualize how the singularity happens and what does it look like in the last few years before the singularity and now we're right in the middle of it and it's it's just

giddy with excitement but this is one of the ways it plays out if you if you have true agi to work with you can do anything you can win a nobel prize in chemistry like denis you can you can change you have unbelievable capability and if you have the capital to invest in the teams it's wide wide open I'm predicting a merger between Anthropic and Microsoft here. This is clearly them.

kind of diversifying their bets from just open AI. And enterprise is where Microsoft wants to make sure they're really strong. And Anthropic is there. So I predict a merger at some point. interesting you know i i thought you know there are a lot of rumors out there one of the rumors i heard was the potential of google acquiring anthropic um but uh you're right i this relationship sort of quelch that you know there's a there's a close relationship between demis uh and and dario dario

Yeah, sure. I mean, because they're the they're the, you know, of the leaders in the field, they're the ones that actually go home at night and play with the algorithms. They write the code themselves and they're on a different level. So if you look at Jensen and Sam and Elon.

They're very much business dealmakers and they're engineers at heart, too, but they're they're they're dealmakers at heart. They're not going home and tweaking parameter files. But these two guys are, you know, which two guys.

Oh, yeah. Dennis and Dario. Yeah, sure. So I think I'd be surprised if Dennis is willing. I'm sorry, if Dario is willing to let Anthropic get acquired by Microsoft, unless Google just says, you know, we're not interested at all. But I really doubt that. I think Dario and Dennis really want to. stay as close friends and work together on this. They're also the two leaders in ethics. Both guys at the core of their absolute bottom of their heart are concerned about ethics.

And, you know, the other guys might be too, but they're really entrepreneurs. That is so... Dave, that is such an important point, right? I mean, I've heard Demis and Dario talk about... This is the right thing to do independent of maximizing profit, right? This is what we have to do for humanity. And those conversations, it makes you feel so much...

safer in the world when you hear that coming from leaders like that. Totally right. If you don't believe it, read Machines of Loving Grace that Dario took the time to write. It's epic. And then listen to Demis Hassabis' Nobel Prize acceptance speech. And also the coming wave. This is incredibly awe-inspiring. Peter, you identified this in abundance, right? The tech philanthropists. This is the...

If you went back 100 years, the richest folks in the world had incredibly extractionary business models. And what's incredible here, starting from Google and so on, these guys all have a deep ethics sense and they all want to give back. And I think that's so inspiring.

That feedback loop starts to get really incredible. Yeah. I'll just say one thing, and then I want to turn to you, Alex, here for your masterful analysis, as always. One of the things I still feel... despite some criticism that, you know, Google is actually always taking the long view, right? They're always taking the how do we help humanity, you know, their original motto, don't be evil.

I remember those early days at Google with Larry and Sergey. And of course, it then became a real business, a massive business. But I still think that underlying... current of what can we do to make the world a better place uh drives a lot of their decisions especially especially for demis uh alex this alignment this power block between nvidia and Microsoft and Anthropoc. What are your thoughts?

There are multiple power blocks here. If you look at the larger picture, Anthropic is the last of the four or five frontier labs that doesn't have its own data center and chip architecture play. There are other stories just in the past few days that Anthropic is... finally moving into data center space, finally moving into

chip architecture design space. So I think going back to the earlier discussion, I think we do move to a heterogeneous future where there are these vertically integrated players like Detroit had the big N. largest car companies. I think we're going to have the big N frontier AI companies that are vertically integrated with their own data center design, their own GPU or equivalent chip compute.

architecture, their own models, their own applications. It seems like we're moving to this vertically integrated future. And I think this announcement is more a reflection of Anthropic becoming one of those vertically integrated players. Two, the big tech companies are now in a position where they could literally take over any industry anytime they want.

And the only barrier to them just completely absorbing the entire world at this point is antitrust law. And so they like these partnerships without acquiring each other because it achieves their goal without. triggering antitrust action. And if you look at all of them, including Google right now and Microsoft a few years ago, they were stopped dead in their tracks by antitrust.

legislation and it's torture when they're where they're subpoenaing investigating you know they they give you the the they send you a notice that requires you to start saving every document and email Just that alone is just torture. Really important point, Dave. Salim, you were going to say?

Yeah, I mean, look, the whole model here now becomes, I mean, I want to go back to the bubble conversation because I think we're pretty clear here that we're not in a bubble, right? Can we say that categorically? Yeah, I think it'll be a correction of some type because how much capital is being thrown without regard. But I don't think we're in a bubble where aligned revenues and values are going up in parallel.

I think it's a function of revenue generation. If revenue generation continues to scale really quickly, it's not a bubble. If revenue generation fails to scale, it looks bubbly. So I'll make a prediction. I think there'll be a slight correction as these guys do what Dave is talking about and start going after other industries, which will take a little bit of time to figure out and penetrate. And then it just goes vertical again. It's like a Gartner hype cycle.

And I think this is also a hedge for Microsoft against a full dependence on open AI, right? This relationship they're getting with... Anthropic. All right, let's go on to our next article here. Again, an NVIDIA article. NVIDIA may shift from GPUs to full AI servers. Let's go to you, Alex.

What's the story here? I think the bigger story is for the first, call it 60 or 70 years of electronic computers, the form factor of computers got smaller and smaller. We went from mainframes. to mini computers, if you remember those, to microcomputers, to PCs. then to smartphones and maybe wearables. That's a pretty monotonic trend towards the form factor of standard computers getting smaller and smaller, probably peaked sometime around.

call it the 2000s or 2010s, but now I think we're actually seeing that cosmic calendar of compute form factors reverse itself, that the key... form factor of the most important computers is arguably now starting to look like these AI data centers, these coherent super clusters, and they're getting larger and larger again. And I attribute that to Moore's law ending as sad as that is in the beginning of

horizontal exponentiation. So I think seeing Nvidia generalize and vertically integrate from just offering the chips to full ai servers is actually a reflection that the form factor for computing is now no longer getting smaller it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger until is there a name is there a name alex for what's

the next version of Moore's law? Is it the AI scaling laws? Well, if you ask Ray, he'll talk about the law of accelerating returns and he'll point to a much broader trend that generalizes beyond electronic computers or CMOS. But is there an equivalent for our GPU world that we're living in? Are we going to create a Wang's Law?

or Jensen's law of some type. There are dozens of experience curves. I mean, if you want to name one after yourself preemptively, you probably can. Their naming rights are still open. But there are so many experience curves now, including the one that we were chatting about for the past couple of episodes about hyper deflation by 40x year over year of cost of intelligence. There are so many new experience curves coming out of AI.

I'll make one up on the spot, though. This is the law of abundance, right? Technology takes something that's scarce and makes it abundant. Yeah, but it has to be quantitative, Salim, to get the naming rights. Fair enough. i mean and i think the short answer to peter's question is no and it's wide open if somebody out there listening wants to it has to be simple and quantitative like alex said and people have to it has to be accurate you know it has to last a while that's a good challenge

All right. By the way, for me, this was like an iPhone thing where the iPhone succeeded by owning the whole stack from design to experience to hardware all the way down. get the whole ecosystem. And this is NVIDIA trying to grab the whole ecosystem and create more value and aggregate more value in one spot. Agreed. All right. The next article here is a fun one.

XAI will be the first customer for an NVIDIA-backed data center in Saudi Arabia. A lot going on here. And I think basically... Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as a global AI superpower. All right. This is part of their Vision 2030 play, their commitment to $100 billion. They're trying to diversify behind oil. You know, I've been going to Saudi at least once a year, sometimes twice a year in my board role at FII. And the conversation's very clear. MBS, who runs the...

The nation, you know, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he has wanted this. He wants to be, you know, their goal is number two behind the U.S. in AI. Obviously, you know, U.S., China, maybe it's number three position, but. This has been at the top of the conversation across the leadership of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia now for years. And this is a massive commitment. And this also brings...

Musk what he needs most, which is massive GPU capability. We'll talk about that. Alex, let's go to you first. Yeah, I think the story behind the story is, as I've said before. inference time compute and these this data center ai data center capex this is just the opening act for an entire stack that's about to pop out, including AI powered humanoid generalist robots. So when I see stories about countries positioning themselves for sovereign inference time.

AI inference compute, that to me looks like we're seeing the re-architecting from the ground up of an entirely new sovereign stack.

It'll start with the data center inference compute. It'll run through humanoid robots. And you'll see, I think, Saudi Arabia and other countries probably beyond just... demanding sovereign inference compute and starting to demand sovereign compute for humanoid robots as humanoid robots start to be more broadly deployed all of societal automation to the extent we have sovereign countries in in the present paradigm this entire stack wants to be sovereign at least a difference time dave

Well, there's a long, long history of the U.S. needing international partners in biotech. We can't just try everything here. The FDA is way too slow. So you roll out in Panama, you roll out in Caribbean nations. manufacturing you know india just took off long before the the us because regulatory barriers make things so slow here so in sovereign ai uh saudi is going to move much much faster

I think actually Bermuda also are going to move much faster. They'll learn. And everyone's like, well, who cares about sovereign AI? Well, at the rate of technical change, we need a much faster process of creating laws and rules. And so I think, you know, Saudi will be a great test bed because they're so nimble. You know, they can make a decision and act on it instantly. And you see this with things like simple things like health data.

Miles ahead in health data. Trying to do anything under HIPAA in the U.S. takes just way too long. Can I just tell you what I think one of the underlying stories is here? that i want to just hit on and then salim i want to hear from you on this it's that uh xai needs compute xai needs mass amount of compute for elon's vision to happen and they've got colossus one They're about to get online classes, too. But if you look at sort of the players out there, you know.

Google by far is the number one owner of compute on the planet with their TPUs and GPUs. OpenAI is next. XAI is coming in third. So this relationship has got to be... critical for Elon as he's standing up in Memphis and Mississippi, you know, classes one and two. Any thoughts on that, gentlemen?

Well, one takeaway from our trip to Saudi two weeks ago is I had gone in thinking that it's just going to be a massive amount of compute all over the desert, huge data centers. It's actually much more of an investment vehicle. I think they're building big data centers to learn. And their goal is to invest a trillion dollars as intelligently as possible. But I think you'll see later in this pod that the data centers are more likely to go to Texas and then space.

And Saudi will be along the way, you know, but it's not going to be like Saudi is the compute capital of the world. It's just it's more of a learning experience, a test bed and a sovereign, you know, a controlled subset of compute. Salim, thought, please. I got nothing.

You know, this is like, there's a sequence of these stories that just run from one to the other, each one order of magnitude more crazy. And my brain is just blurred and fogged up with all of this. I mean, they're all amazing and significant.

But the broader implications is something that I'm more interested in. But for the specifics of this, let's move on. You guys have covered it way more. Yeah, I just, you know, one of my questions is XAI. I mean, they're all compute starved, right? So XAI in particular needs NVIDIA chips, and he is getting them left, right, and center. I think one of the things we're seeing is Elon's getting access to NVIDIA chips.

very early as he's been building the Colossus clusters. I'm just wondering, and there was a rumor I saw out there about Elon potentially buying Intel, right? I mean, that would be a fascinating move by him. Yeah, that's one that actually, you know, well, anyone buying Intel would be a genius. But.

He might actually get that through the regulators because he's not, you know, Google could never get away with it. And certainly NVIDIA could never get away with it. But could you imagine the world if Elon was running Intel just to accelerate it? I mean, to just literally... move it warp speed forward, that would be amazing.

That would be incredible. And keep in mind also that Elon's getting tons of Jensen's chips, but he also signed up for $16 to $45 billion of Samsung manufacturing to make his own chips. So that's not exactly, you know, hey, they're going down a couple different paths, some of which are competitive.

If you pull back one second, the multipolarity of this, I think, is the most exciting thing for me, where they've got major different parties doing amazing things. And that means the whole rising tide lifts everybody. I think that's really great. Yeah. Alex, do you want a final comment before we move on?

were you good i'll just i'll just say that there is a race to super intelligence and we're going to get abundance from super intelligence and each one of these stories is just as salim says as a facet of this common theme nice

All right. This is one of my favorite stories of this week. So I want to dive into this. I care about this deeply. I know, Alex, you do as well. All right. This is Elon talking about 100 gigawatts per year. uh data center installation in orbit uh let's listen to the video and we'll go from there like like we see a path to to putting 100 gigawatts per year of solar-powered AI satellite into orbit. And having this be actually the lowest cost way to power and operate.

AI at a very large scale. For reference, the United States consumes roughly 460 gigawatts on average per year. Because the average power load in the U.S. is 160. The whole country. The whole country. All electricity of all sources in the U.S., yes. And you're talking about 100 being added. Well, roughly a quarter of the U.S. electricity output. We have a plan mapped out to do that. It gets crazy. It does get crazy. That's 100 gigawatts per year. Not in total. Do we have a timeline for that?

You know, well, listen, Starship has got to become up and operational on a regular basis, which, you know, is something I think we'll see in the next 12 to 18 months. And you're then basically taking compute off planet on Starship. But what I find even crazier, and Alex, we can talk about this, is Elon's plan to mine the moon for silicon, right? So...

We're going to mine it for compute and solar power. And I think his estimate of what he could do if he was launching using O'Neill-like mass drivers off the surface of the moon... is to go from 100 gigawatts per year to 100 terawatts of energy per year, which is five times the total energy output of the Earth.

As I've said, the moon's had it coming for a long time. Time to make use of that. Time to pay up. I mean, just to take a step up, it's remarkable how quickly we moved from the Dyson swarm is science fiction. to, okay, we've deployed an H100 to orbit. Now we're deploying multiple hundred gigawatt data centers in a swarm in LEO, GEO, and probably soon solar orbits.

The Overton window just zoomed by on the Dyson swarm. And I think now we're moving to a regime where we have to potentially worry about interoperability between multiple competing Dyson swarms. maybe even thinking about an internet. We've talked for decades about an interplanetary internet. Now, while there were limited efforts in that direction, now I think we're about to hit a regime where we really do need to... Yeah, the interplanetary internet. Yes, for sure.

Wait, can we go back to the timeline? What do we think is the realistic timeline? Exactly. Let's come back to the timeline because I don't think it's as long. We talk a lot about robotics refactoring construction all over the world, but that's a pretty long 15-year timeline. I think this is actually sooner.

than people might think i'm a huge believer i've been studying it since you know i didn't believe a year ago it was like why why on earth would you want to reboot a server in space but now if you think about the cost of compute coming down a thousand or ten thousand x is there any barrier to that and the answer is no there's no barrier whatsoever other than power and power is free and abundant in space and then the only barrier after that is radiant cooling but they they've

they've you know we have our first 100 in space there's work to be done on cooling the systems and just for a reference point if you take into account day night cycles and the you know the solar flux in orbit

In other factors, it's about potentially a six-fold increase in energy density in orbit versus on the ground. So that's what you're doing, plus the fact that you have... the ability to distribute compute and bring it down bring down the answer to the speed of light uh can we just slow this down for our our listeners a second in the first phase of this we're talking about using starship uh to launch

this next generation of Starlink. So Elon's already built the largest satellite manufacturing capability on the planet, right? Starlink, they're like 10,000 Starlink satellites. They're going to version three coming up very shortly. They'll get launched on Starship. And so the next iteration of that is going to be putting whatever the top chips are in orbit, powering them from solar. And then the biggest challenge, Dave, you nailed it, is how do you cool them?

Now you can do radiative cooling, but there's no material, there's no atmosphere, there's no liquid water to carry the energy away. The heat, right? Heat is one of the biggest issues you've got. But space is absolute zero. I mean, it's got to be easy to... to create that mechanism right now just let me ask one more question and then we could guys pay so basically you get a satellite up there it unfolds a solar panel

That collects the energy you do the compute on there and then beam the information down. Essentially, that's what we're talking about? Yes. Yeah, exactly. and beaming the data back and forth is easy easy easy a lot of people think well how are you going to get the data up and down that lasers and it's trivially easy that's not a problem at all

Let's go to our resident super genius here. Alex, talk to us about radiative cooling. Yeah, there is this misconception that you can't operate a thermally intensive data center without conduction based cooling. It's completely not true.

The solution here is the cosmic microwave background is about three Kelvin. The universe on average is pretty cool. The trick is you want to make sure you're radiating in the right direction. You don't want to try to radiate heat, for example, in the direction of the sun. That won't help you.

from a thermodynamics perspective. But as long as you can make sure that you have radiative cooling in the direction of the cosmic microwave background, which is most of the sky, you make sure that you aim your radiative cooling in the cooler directions, you're fine. And you can use radiation rather than conduction to radiatively cool. So there's a bit of...

navigational issue with making sure that you're pointing in the right direction, that you're oriented correctly. But this is completely doable. And to the timeline question, I would be mildly, if not significantly, shocked if 10 years from now. conservatively we don't see low hundreds if not many hundreds of gigawatts of ai compute not on the earth's surface yeah i think starship is the means right what i mean

Just to be clear, which is amazing, this is an attempt to move the bottleneck of AI from Earth's power grid to SpaceX's launch grid. So in other words, all of a sudden, it's not power on the ground. It's how many launches to orbit we can get. And alignment, what Elon has built in his ecosystem of XAI and Tesla and SpaceX. is extraordinary. I mean, is it luck or is it genius? And an extreme, maybe both.

in some quantity. But in extremists, this involves taking apart the solar system, which is, I think, perhaps the most tantalizing. You are dying to nail the solar system, Alex. You're just like, that is waiting to be taken. He's going to Accelerando. Right. But disassembling the moon is just a milestone. If Jupiter isn't decompiled, then there's something wrong. Okay, to our listeners, if you love looking up at the sky and seeing the moon, don't worry about that. Enjoy it while it lasts. Okay.

But let's actually talk about that part. So Gerard K. O'Neill, professor of physics at Princeton University, who I consider a mentor for me, who passed way too early, he... wrote a number of books, a number of papers about how do you mine the moon. And one of the things that's true about the moon is there is no atmosphere and there's a lot of solar flux. So he came up with the idea of creating these mass drivers, basically these electric...

electromagnetic guns that you could put something in one end, it's accelerated to lunar escape velocity, and you shoot it towards the Earth. And so what Elon's been talking about here is basically the idea of you set up satellite... you know, data center manufacturing on the moon, and you launch those using rail guns into Earth orbit. And his objective, 100 terawatts of capacity per year.

Yeah, I think one thing that was a big shift in the last couple of weeks, you know, the first H100 went into space two weeks ago. It's operating, it's cooling using aluminum only.

as the radiator and you know prior to this everyone was thinking you need obscure metals and and whatever but apparently it's working and it's aluminum only and if you read peter's you know books the first chapter of abundance the great best story ever please read it seven percent of the earth's crust is aluminum we don't have aluminum oxides

aluminum oxide so it's a great story anyway cliny the elder and that's just such a good story thank you for thank you for listening to that well that's a big breakthrough so now if you want to make money today on space-based compute in the future We have to get the weight down. You get the mass down. That first H100 is 50 kilos. That's way, way, way too much. Most of that's sensors and stuff. It'll be very easy to get it way down. But invest in whatever it's going to take.

to get the mass down so that we can launch these more cheaply. And, you know, eventually we'll make them on the moon, but that's way out there. You know, right now. You know, a data point that I talk about a lot is when we were launching space shuttles, it was, what, $600 million per space shuttle launch? Yeah, about a billion dollars per launch, yes. SpaceX dropped it to like...

50 to 100 million and then relativity space where eric schmidt is now the ceo etc plans to do it for about five to seven million dollars a launch and i find that interesting because that's like a hundred x drop in a domain this is not a silicon valley

social media gaming play. This is real physics trying to get out of the gravity well of Earth. And even there, we've seen 100x drop. And what can you do with 100x more capacity? And it'll go another order of magnitude by the next time I... I was in a conversation with...

Elon a couple of days ago when he was briefing some XAI investors and not disclosing anything confidential but one of the things he said is in the future if you could set up a Starship launch facility on earth next to a natural gas production capacity, right? Because that's what it's basically burning, methane. And you could then use solar to pull oxygen out of the atmosphere.

so that the fuel basically is effectively free, his estimate of the cost of transport would be cheaper to go to orbit as an individual seat ticket than it would to be... to fly transatlantic as an individual. I mean, this is an incredible vision he's been building. And I want to put one more figure for our listeners. We talked about 100 gigawatts.

per year of capacity being launched in the next decade or so, that's the equivalent of 100 nuclear power plants, right? These are typically one gigawatt capacity. I mean, that's awesome. All right. Well, I'll tell you what else is awesome is that the people who are making these choices are math, physics, computer science.

geniuses and if you look back in the history of business you know it's jack welch he's great but john chambers you know these are the people running you know the the billion hundred billion dollar kind of budgets but they didn't have that background and so now

You know, when Elon talks about these things, he's almost always right. In fact, so far, he's pretty much always right because he looks at first principles and he actually does the math and he says, look, that'll never work, but this actually will. It sounds crazy.

But it actually will work. There's no fundamental barrier. So it's just a different community making these choices than ever before in history. And you're seeing the things that are possible actually starting to happen. Alex, I want to give you the final word here on this one, please. You know what? Saturn has its fate marked as well. Oh, no. Stop taking apart our solar system. Solar system is a dead mass right now. Oh, my God. Computronium.

We're turning it all to computronium. You can't actually disassemble the moon. It controls not only the tides, but also the molten core of the Earth, the magnetosphere, requires the moon. We can't disassemble the moon. You can do Saturn.

No problem. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for defending our sisterly body here. All right, let's jump into the topic of energy. We talk about compute as energy and energy as compute. I put this chart here for you, Saleem, principally. So here we're seeing China is driving global electricity generation. On one side of this chart, if you're listening, not watching, is the change in electricity generation over the last 12 months, September 24 through...

September 2025. And what we see here is China basically 4X-ing the U.S. in terms of total energy production. We're seeing China leading the world in solar and in wind and in nuclear and in gas. And then... Another chart next to it is a change in electricity generation. And just by itself, so we see, again, this is China basically putting out around 325... terawatts versus the US putting out about 80 terawatts. Salim, over to you.

There was one little piece of this that I found very exciting, which was that big red drop in coal. We've been predicting this for a while where the cost of solar is now so cheap. You know, I mentioned before that the capex and opex of solar is now cheaper than just the opex of fossil fuels. And what we're now seeing is that just the economics of it mean we'll start to dismantle all of our fossil fuel facilities unless we need...

incredibly dense energy generation. But for most normal use, we'll be doing that and then moving fully to solar. And I thought that'll be hugely powerful and important for climate change and all the carbon extraction stuff that we need to do.

I just think this is a shocking difference in energy capacity production between the U.S. and China. Kudos to China for having really gone all out. kind of shocked at this point that we haven't seen president trump stand up and say we need project warp speed for energy we're seeing it in different places we're seeing regulations change uh and uh and well just yesterday they said

We're going to make all this drilling in open water available. And there's a big paradigm shift that's missing on the power of solar energy and other... Well, solar and fusion and Gen 4 nuclear, all of these things, I mean, we've... got to be, if the US wants to be competitive in the long run, I mean, unless we skip this entire decade and go straight to orbit, right? That's the alternate. Alex, what are your thoughts here?

yeah i i think we have seen an operation warp speed for at least certain energy categories including nuclear and maybe certain fossil fuels so i i think i i think that the increase toward, call it, Kardashev Type II civilization level energy production. I think this is going to happen with time, barring some ontologically shocking discovery about the nature of our universe. It seems like we're on trend.

whether one nation is temporarily in the lead or another is temporarily in the lead. I think the long term trend line is visions happening. Fusion is going to happen. Maybe there will be even more efficient ways to recover energy, as I like to point out, if we had... microscopic black holes we could just drop objects into them and recover their rest mass that in principle would be far more efficient than fusion power fusion it's like four percent efficient

Vision is less than 1% efficient. We could recover nearly 100% of the energy associated with rest masses if we could just drop objects into black holes. So the known physics of our universe allows enormous amounts of energy production. I think whether one country is ahead of another in the short term, these are just non-secular. But Alex, we are electricity limited in the U.S. on our we're not chip limited. We're not real estate limited. We're electricity limited.

For the moment. For the moment. I mean, this is a blip. Again, Fission is in the process of coming online. Fusion's in the process of coming online for the moment. Okay. I'm just calling it like I see it. which is when I see the timelines for Fusion, for real production of Fusion, the earliest, I mean...

It's going to happen, yes, but we're talking 2030 to 2035 for the first plants and then mass production really till 2040. That's 15 years out. That's insane. And then the timelines for even bringing existing... uh fission plants back online are like five years um so i think exactly right peter like the the the gap like we're flying through 2030. because we're looking for 100 gigawatts and we can't make the chips any faster anyway so between here and 2030 we're fine just taking

old manufacturing power and redirecting it just like Elon did in Tennessee, you know, redirect it toward data centers. But then from 2030 to 2035, we have a massive gap. Because the chip fabs have accelerated like crazy. Fusion kind of works, but it's not online yet. And then there's this big gap from 2030 to 2035. And keep in mind, as Alex is always pointing out, we're going to discover brand new physics and math between now and then.

so anything could happen yeah i just think i think solar is the easiest to scale other than oil and coal I'm predicting we'll see a massive breakthrough in photonics or some of those domains over the next couple of years. But we're in for a five to seven year difficult period. And I think the only option is to steal all the energy from residential. Don't go there. Don't go there. It's the only option.

There are lots of options. And I would say also don't underestimate the power of the market. If the party continues, the CapEx party continues and revenue generation from killer new AI apps continues, we have the ability to reprogram the existing electronics. electricity production of our civilization to extraordinary degrees if the market absolutely demands. And I think we'll know the answer to that in the next few years.

You know, we should have Saul Griffith on. He probably has the most macro view of all this stuff. Saul is great, as is Ramez in this area here. All right. I'm just saying we need to scale up solar in the U.S. Perovskite is coming, super excited about perovskite as a technology for higher energy, you know.

conversion rates and lower costs. All right, let's move on to this next article here. Fascinating. Google's investments run deep in the heart of Texas is the concept here. So Google announces a $40 billion investment in Texas. through 2027 to build new cloud and AI infrastructure. The project is adding 6.2 gigawatts of new energy generation and a $30 million energy impact fund. You know, when I see 6.2 gigawatts...

of energy, and I remember 100 gigawatts per year in orbit. These things sort of just, you know. They warp my mind. Space is beckoning and calling. But here's what the real story for me is. Google isn't just going to Texas for sunshine because part of this investment includes renewables. They're going because AI... is about to become the biggest consumer electricity in the US. It's going to be bigger than steel, bigger than crypto, bigger than every industry combined.

I think Texas is the only state that can build fast enough in the energy world. Well, and they have space. And they have, yes, they have open area. And a friendly regulatory environment. Texas is doing a great job of welcoming energy data centers, AI leadership. I would love to see other states launch vehicles.

Yeah, launch vehicles. We'd love to see other states provide as welcoming an environment for acceleration like Texas is doing. They'll have to. Just the competitive nature of this will open this up. I don't know. I wish that were true. But if you look at what's actually going on in California and elsewhere, it's like, come on, guys. I mean, I don't know. The government's so messed up.

No, but this provides an actual competitive opportunity for many, many states that have a difficult time competing with, say, California and New York. It's one of the best parts of the U.S. having different state legislatures. The United States of Texas is definitely pulling in some great opportunities here. There's one problem with the U.S. right now.

You have to drop the word united off everything. Because it's not really the United States. But, you know, that's been true since the 1700s. And, you know, as long as people don't get violent, the variety is actually very healthy.

And, you know, the internal competition is very healthy as long as it doesn't tip over to dysfunction, which it does every now and then. I agree. But, you know, having we're founded on freedom and we're founded on variety and a weak central government and strong local governments, you know, and. Trends go in the other direction all the time. But but I think, you know, Texas running away should put competitive pressure on other governors and the governors in Ohio and Wyoming have reacted already.

So it does work. You know, it's just the pace. It's just frustrating. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context.

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The title is X Energy Begins Construction of the First Category 2 Nuclear Fuel Facility. Kudos to Cam Gaffarian. Cam is a friend. He's on my board at XPRIZE. He's the chairman, co-founder of... of X energy. And this isn't about creating a new facility, a plant, for producing energy at a nuclear plant. It's about creating the nuclear fuel, something called...

TRISO, T-R-I-S-O, Tri-Structural Isotropic Fuel. It's an advanced nuclear fuel, one of the safest, most robust ever created to power the next generation of SMRs. Alex, let's go to you on this. Yeah. So the headline is pebble bed nuclear is finally happening after decades of people hand wringing. When are we going to get pebble bed reactors? We're getting pebble bed reactors. So what is a pebble bed reactor, Alex?

What is a pebble bed reactor? So think of a pebble bed reactor a little bit like a gumball machine where you have sort of billiard ball sized spheres. that are have uranium cores or have lots of particles in them with uranium cores surrounded by a carbon ceramic composite and the basic idea of pebble bed reactor is you have all these billiard balls they're being heated by radiation from the uranium cores. You pass helium gas through the gumball machine as it were, the helium gas.

is heated by the radioactive decay and that powers steam turbine and that generates electricity but critically this is much safer than than many other forms of nuclear reactor because The individual uranium cores are nicely encased, and they, over time, you could imagine sort of this gumball machine where these spheres, these billiard balls, fall over time. They decay.

about three years of of of lowering these spheres in one gumball machine they're offloaded into another and then recycled a few times but it's these pebbles these these gumballs if you will because of the way they're packaged up and this is what our country's first Cat 2 nuclear fuel facility in the story. That's the announcement here. We're finally manufacturing these pebbles domestically. This is in principle far safer than a fuel rod based.

earlier generations of nuclear reactor yeah i think one of the key points to make is these don't melt down melt down they literally cannot melt down as a nuclear reactor which gave us fukushima and three mile island and all of those failed earlier versions. So again, kudos to Cam Gaffarian. And this is, you know, this is first principle.

uh capabilities driving us towards a new generation of of nuclear it's unfortunate it's taken us this long my father worked on pebble bed nuclear really yeah he was working on that in the 80s and he was going crazy going why the hell aren't we using this for everything this has been decades this has literally been decades coming we spoke in a previous pod episode about thorium reactors which go back to the manhattan project there are so many concepts

for nuclear energy and energy in general that have been sitting on the shelf in some metaphorical sense for decades, if not almost a century, that are finally only now being put out into production. It's not often I can see a term for some of these obscure...

scientific stuff that I recognize, but this one I saw. Wow. You know, this is, I mean, there's a really important point here. AI is the string pulling everything forward, right? So AI is driving. All of the technology we've been thinking about forever, it's driving us into orbit. You know, it's driving us to go back to the moon. It's driving us to build global energy infrastructure.

I prefer the analogy of a gravity well, but I'll go with string. My modal, I mean, just maybe riffing on that point, Peter, my modal scenario for the next 10 to 20 years is... like most science fiction concepts, all happen at once. We're going to live in a future where it's not just like a Star Trek future, not just like an Accelerando future, not just Heinlein or Asimov. They're all going to happen more or less at once in the same universe. universe over the next 10 to 20 years.

What you said, Alex, still rings in my mind. We're going to speed run the Star Trek universe in the next decade. And the Asimov universe and Heinlein and Charlie Strauss. All of these are going to happen. Maybe we need to rename the pot to be everything, everywhere, all at once. Yes. Oh my God. I think that one's taken. But what an exciting time to be alive. I just, again, you know, this vision of people complaining, I get it. Yes, there are problems on the planet.

But also, what an extraordinary time to be alive. I mean, when during Earth's history would you ever prefer to be living other than now, other than perhaps tomorrow? Dave, you want to close us out on this one?

I'm just going to repeat Alex's, the innermost loop of humanity is what's driving this. This is... it's ai at the core it's the innermost loop and everything around it is accelerating because of because of that innermost loop so it's it's yeah it's just so so exciting to watch all right let's jump into drones and robots

A lot going on in this universe here. I pulled this particular story out because I love this company. This is a company called Zipline. that's about to begin producing their drones, their delivery drones at 20,000 per year. This is Keller Clifton, the CEO of Zipline, an amazing entrepreneur who built this company against all the odds. Let's listen to Keller and then we'll talk about it. Everyone, it has been an insane two months, but I thought it'd be cool to give a two-minute update.

and standing in our expansion space for the manufacturing facility as we speak. We're getting ready to build 20,000 autonomous aircraft a year, all here in South San Francisco in the United States. Right now we're growing the number of deliveries we do per day at around 15% week over week. We've been growing that fast for about 30 weeks straight. A lot of our customers out there are placing orders three to four times per week. In fact, some customers are ordering three times a day.

people actually just fundamentally change their ordering behavior. So some people are grocery shopping once every one to two weeks and ordering from zip line three to four times a week just to do fill-ins. We've also been able to launch a new Walmart Supercenter every week across Dallas over the last couple months. In the US right now, the client is doing an autonomous delivery about every 30 seconds. We have one very big announcement that we're expecting to come out in about 10 days.

Thanks for believing in us. Stay tuned. All right. Incredible story behind Zipline. They were founded in 2014. They're headquartered in South San Francisco. This was a vision that Keller put forward. And, you know, I did a moonshot recording with Keller. You can go back in our library and find that podcast. And I remember him saying when he started the company.

He told his employees there was like a less than 10% chance of success. And they started in Rwanda and Ghana. And it was a sort of regulatory arbitrage, you know. Flying drones to deliver things to the United States without having support of the FAA and DOT wasn't going to happen. But in Rwanda and Ghana, there was a real problem. And they focused on that problem, which was delivering blood and critical medical supplies to different parts of the country from a central repository.

They screwed up in the beginning. It was difficult, but they got it better and better and better. And finally, they were operating at such a high success level that they were able to bring those operations. And by the way, they operated in Rwanda and Ghana from their headquarters in South San Francisco. An extraordinary story. And today they're doing about a million commercial deliveries per year. They've flown 70 to 100 million autonomous miles. They're doing this for a whole...

bevy of companies. Walmart, Chipotle, and others, sort of a 30-minute retail-to-delivery capability. Alex, excited about this one?

Drone delivery is happening. It's happening here in the United States. It's happening in China. And I think it's an interesting thought experiment to ask what happens when this is fully realized. This is a fully mature technology. I think it leads to a... Ultimately, I think a relocalization of the supply chain we've we've talked earlier in this episode about.

sovereign stacks. I think ultimately, if you extrapolate the ability to do drone delivery of supplies and supply chains, I think ultimately, we're going to find ourselves in a regime with hyperlocal manufacturing. And I think it's very exciting. We asked for flying cars. I think that this is in microcosm, the first version of flying cars where in the near term future, optimistically, we find that our skies are filled with delivery drones. Yeah.

I have a couple of points here. One is this is such a big thing. This is one of the Gutenberg moments that changes everything, right? AI changes everything, but drones really do change everything. We're seeing the last number I saw, we're saving about a thousand people a year using drones because we can use thermal imaging to find people in earthquakes and so on.

We're dropping in life-saving stuff to them. And it's going to grow exponentially as we propagate the drones. So this is going to be very, very big over time. But it's already had a big, big impact. I remember in 2000. 2010, one of the singularity teams kind of launched this idea of drones by delivery. And then Amazon, a few months later, copied that and announced they were going to do delivery by drone. And that has inspired a whole vector of all of this. So really, really exciting to see.

And of course, Google Wing, which is part of the Alphabet. I had the CEO of Wing on my stage at the Abundance Summit last year, I think it was. Again, zipline. Just a beautiful design. If you go back to the pod that I did with Keller, I don't know about...

18 months ago so you can see how they operate they can set up in your store an automated look automatic location where the drone comes back picks up the next order and delivers it a lot of drones flying in the air and these drones of course have cameras and sensors these drones are going to be helping to create this uh imaging of the surface of the earth at millimeter resolution when there are millions of drones flying in the air dave and for many years

Two more quick points. For many years, they were doubling. Every nine months, the price performance was doubling. So that's a hell of a curve to be riding on. And let's also acknowledge China is already doing...

delivery of coffee by drones and all sorts of stuff. They're living in this universe already. Yeah. Yeah. Big time. Big time. It's that last point that Peter made that I really...

was hoping Peter would do a relaunch of The Future is Faster Than You Think, one of his bestselling books. But it talks about this topic a lot, and it's all about converging technologies. But that was before... the neural net based vision and feedback control systems were perfected, which is really just the last year or two.

And that's a total game changer in that whole thesis. But I had dinner with Rodney Brooks. And do you remember Helen Grainer from MIT? Sure. She and Rodney co-founded iRobot. Yeah, I talk about her in my next book. Yeah, yeah. For sure. Oh, do you? OK, well, she's doing the turtle now, which is a basically a gardening and farming robot. And I'm sure she'll expand it out from there. But, you know, I had dinner with Rodney Brooks and he was really down.

on the supply chain for robotics and he was like you know what happens is we invented it's great and then the chinese come and clone it and then they undercut your pricing and they slide you're like well okay that's what happened to irobot i get it but that was before the vision and feedback control systems. And also we have a much more protectionist economy now, which is another story.

Your ability to launch a robot that does something very specific is a completely different world today than it was two years ago in terms of its dexterity, its vision. And it's not just vision, it's any kind of sensor. can now be you can train a neural net very very quickly and once you have the data you know this came up with with xai or sorry with um uh 1x when we're talking to burnt bornik uh the

the data that comes back from this deployed set of robots gives you a huge flywheel effect and a competitive advantage. So if you get your robot to market at any given use case, just like Zipline is doing, then you can use that to retrain the neural net every single night.

And it just gets better and better and better. So I think people are underappreciating the degree of dexterity, the degree of capability that's in this new generation of robots. And it should just absolutely take off. You know, one of the things that is also underappreciated...

As we're moving forward with millions of autonomous cars that are imaging everything on the street, where we have millions of drones flying over your head that are imaging everything at millimeter resolution, where people are walking around with their AR glasses. is looking around when we have thousands of satellites in orbit imaging at sub-meter resolution. We're entering a point where everything knowable on the planet is being imaged and recorded.

constantly, which leads to a point at which you can ask any question and get an answer, right? This is a very different universe where you can know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. I remember the stat that each Waymo car is recording a gigabyte of information per second per car. Yeah, it's crazy. Alex, can you give us some wisdom on that idea?

Yeah, I think this is the planet waking up. I speak about decomposing the solar system to build a Dyson swarm. I think a baby step in that direction is deploying. small masses in Earth's atmosphere. to transport other masses around. And I would expect if we are on this trajectory, and I think the jury is still out as to whether we are, but if we're on the trajectory toward a Dyson swarm, it's very natural that in the intermediate term, we'll see.

drone delivery and all of these masses start to move around in Earth's atmosphere. Can I make a couple of quick points?

sure there's the negative side of it where people go oh my god loss of privacy etc etc right but there's also the unbelievable positive side where there's an unbelievable amount of illegal fishing going on for example we're just literally scraping the life out of the oceans

we can track that and police it a lot better because we just know and that i think there's so many positive use cases it outweighs the negative by a long margin this is a point i've made people put you know people act differently when they know they're being watched now this is you know brings an entire conversation on police states and China and so forth. But he supported the Lindbergh Foundation. This is Charles Lindbergh now, Eric Lindbergh, his grandson. And they were...

They were funding drones that would fly over herds of elephants and rhinoceroses to keep the poachers away because if the poacher knew they were being imaged, they stayed away from illegal activities.

Anyway, a few more robot stories I think I would love us to... to chat about that topic just for the poaching topic yeah there was an idea a few years ago which i think now started to be implemented where if you use synthetic biology to create rhino powder horn you flood the market with super cheap rhino powder horn rhino horn powder and then you take away the economic incentive for poaching yep

Awesome stuff. Okay, so this is Unitrees G1. Learn to do human-like chores. And I'm showing this video just because I want people to start to imagine what it's going to be like to have these robots living in your home with you. And again this is a $16,000 robot. Maybe this is a little more advanced version. uh so vacuuming in the bed uh no i think it's it's ironing ironing the bed yes ironing the sheets okay that's a service i don't really need

Don't knock until you've tried it. Well, that's a good point, actually. All kinds of things I don't feel like I need are going to be so cheap. I just don't want to be in the bed when the robot tries to iron it. Oh, my God. So just Unitree is about to go public. You know, it is the probably the leading manufacturer of robots on the planet in terms of volume. Again, I would never bet against Elon and he's.

he's convinced that what he's building with Optimus 3 will be the single most useful machine on the planet. And by the way, guys, I was texting with... brett adcock last night the ceo of figure cool and uh brett's agreed to come back on the pod so we'll get an update on figure three so excited about that we have to decide whether we go to his facility or do it uh digitally here

All right. I just stuck this in because one of the things, I put out a humanoid robot report every year. It's going to be coming out in a couple of weeks. But... The number of humanoid robot companies is exploding. I've never seen this. I mean, it's just crazy. This is hardware. This is real hardware being manufactured. This is a company called Sunday Robotics.

And what I found fascinating, and you'll see this in the video, is they've created an army of 500 what they call memory developers. So in this photo, you see a human wearing these gloves. And these gloves are basically the hand manipulators of Sunday robotics. And the human goes about their normal daily chores with these gloves.

And it records every action, every motion. So they've claimed at Sunday Robotics, they've created the single largest robotic data set for dexterity. Let's take a look at this video and then we'll chat about it. and So he's opening a dishwasher and he's putting these wine glasses in the dishwasher with very high precision Folding socks.

Nice. Neo Gamma, would you please bring me a cappuccino? I'd appreciate it. I think by next year, hopefully that will happen and actually the cappuccino will materialize magically via robot. Dave, what are you thinking here? Well, a couple things. The programming by actual action, you know, you just do it.

know either vision or you just move uh and that programs the robot that's a huge unlock versus sitting down and writing the python code or the it couldn't even be python because it's too slow so you have to write assembly or c code that takes forever that's completely gone now you just train it and that's a huge huge unlock um and also we tend to visualize the humanoids working in the home because that's what everybody loves

But these things work in nuclear reactors where no human can go. They work inside pipelines. There's just huge amounts of use cases for this in areas where there's no other option. You know, build a data center in space. Well, it's not going to be people with spacesuits. That's going to be. be robots in space. 100%. So lots of unlocks here. You almost can't go wrong.

right now um i will be curious when we're talking to brett about whether he's using nvidia chips because you said elon almost never loses but elon's making his own dojo chips for these robots and you know brett I don't know what Brett is using. I know that One X was using two NVIDIAs per head of each robot. So that's a big constraint. And so we'll see what Brett's plans are. Yeah, Alex.

We know algorithmically how to solve robotics. It's vision, language, action models, foundation models that are generalizations of LLMs like ChatGPT. The hard part is the training data. And there are so many different approaches emerging for training data for these VLA models. I think to Sunday's credit, what they're doing is, as as alluded in the video. They're using special gloves that human operators wear that are exactly matched to the size and form factor of the hands of the robots.

This is one approach. I think it's a very promising approach to their credit. It requires, as they say, zero tele-operated data for training purposes. But there are lots of other approaches. We've seen figure announce cameras on palms of hands.

We see a lot of so-called sim to real approaches that generate lots of synthetic data and attempt to translate those over to reality. I'm optimistic that one or more of all of these approaches that are being tried for data set generation and data set curation.

will solve robotics eminently i'd like to somebody somebody needs to figure out how to program the swarm too because you when you walk around the research labs a huge fraction of people are working on grippers and like okay i picked this up i'm squeezing from both sides but you know you can do that with a gripper but you can also do it with two independent um you know drones pushing against each other and you can't program it that you can't program a swarm of 50 drones

by showing it what to do with your hands. So someone has to crack the code on how you use that same exact approach for the swarm. Someone's going to have to start strapping wearable cameras to swarms of birds or something like that to gather the good training data. There's a startup there for someone in the audience.

So I've got a positive and negative perspective. Positive is a few years ago when Baxter first showed up. Yes. You could actually train it. Instead of saying lift object, turn 90 degrees, move over here, turn back, put it down, and explicitly program.

code, you could move Baxter's arms and adaptively show what to do, and it would learn that. And I think we're seeing the fruition of that vector, which I think is very, very powerful. On the negative side, I think we're a long ways away of picking up salad plates. I think Dave's... point of of delderity dangerous the ddd thing is is where we'll go for a long way before we start doing this as general purpose stuff at home but still my viewpoint let's see what happens i may be wrong

All right. I'm going to move us along here. This is a company called Clone Robotics. They're going to be one of the robot companies at the Abundance Summit this year. We have four robot companies on stage with their robots. Let's take a look at Clone here. So what you're seeing basically is a human-like setup with... Though it's different here is instead of electromagnetic motors, these are hydraulic systems moving the tendons and the muscles to get...

dexterity. It's sort of Westworld robotics. And I just show this to show the variety of different approaches that are going on today. In very brief, we're seeing... The $100,000 robot from Boston Dynamics in particular, this is their robot dog entering into police work and safety work. Do you want to add a point here, Alex? Yeah, I'll point out it's really interesting. The ratio between humans and dogs on Earth is nine to one.

The ratio between humans and domesticated four-legged mammals on Earth is approximately three to two. I think the elephant, no pun intended, in the room is, will we see robot dogs and robot... quadrupeds scale in proportion to humanoid robots? Yes or no? I don't know.

the answer to this either, but one can imagine there are lots of scenarios where you don't want humanoid robots, where you want something maybe difficult terrain or other more difficult circumstances. You want lots of other animal, non-human animal. form factors. Maybe you want snakes. Maybe you want insect type form factors. I can imagine micro drones, flies. I think we're going to see all of these. And this is one data point.

Yeah. You're dead right. You're feeding Salim, which is sad, but... More nightmares for you, Salim? No, no, no. I'm actually, again, for policing and dangerous work, absolutely right. But if you want a dog, give me a male dog and a female dog. I'll get you a dog. I mean. Oh, my God. Salim, I put this chart in here for you. We're going to wrap very shortly, but EVs to soar as gas car efficiency stalls. Do you want to speak to this slide?

Oh, my God. I mean, give us a rant, buddy. No, I'm going to keep it short. This is the International Energy Agency again, kind of doing their predictions. I'll go back in history and say back in 20... they put out a prediction that the number of electric cars, it would take till 2040 before he had a million electric cars out there. And by the time they'd kind of finished their report, Elon had a million Teslas out in the world already.

this case there's one data point here that is complete complete which is the number of electric cars in india as you see they're predicting that it'll be near zero till 2035 that is Complete horseshit. It's going to be vertical like all the others. So what the hell are they doing? U.S. I can just about understand, but that's even going to go away just because of the sure economy of it. Well, the autonomous electric cars, the cybercabs are going to be.

displacing gasoline cars yeah yeah so i mean what are they talking about here i think i'm what are they missing how do they miss this uh year after year after year the the the number of moving parts in a combustion engine car is 2 000 moving parts in the drivetrain and a tesla is 17. you can't compete with that in terms of design reliability maintenance etc etc yeah i

rant is over okay all right i want to close us out today with the notion of science and technology is creating an increasing world of abundance The first story here is epigenetic reprogramming trials are close. So we've got an image here of David Sinclair. David is the founder of Life Biosciences. Life is a company we just had at...

the Abundance Longevity Summit, which I do every fall. And a number of my Abundance community members are investors in Life Biosciences. What is it? Life Biosciences is commercializing. The work that David has done with partial epigenetic reprogramming, he's using... basically a modified adeno-associated virus to put the OSK genes into cells. What does this all mean? It means that he's demonstrated age reversal in mice.

and in monkeys. And for the first time, this age reversal technology is entering human trials in the first quarter of 2026. And it is a big deal. and has the potential to really transform. You know, he's going into the eye to deal with nion, which is strokes in the eye, and glycoma. But if it's a true age reversal technology, it's going to affect the entire body. So it'll go from the eye first, it'll then go to liver and other organs.

And you have to understand, when you were young, you didn't have a specific disease. As you got older and your epigenome shifted, this disease materialized. So if you can reverse your epigenome to an earlier state... The disease should go away and a lot of work here. So super excited about that. Let me link it with this story here with Anthropic is hiring life science researchers. Again, we've heard Dario talk about.

Could we double the human lifespan on the back of progress with AI? So super excited. Anthropic's been going very hard and heavy here. Alex, what are your thoughts, please?

Yeah, Dario has stated publicly that he expects disease to be, or let's say disease, biology, and medicine to be solved by the end of the decade in the next five years. And I think Anthropik's doing an amazing job of pushing forward AI for science in general. But I think this is what solving biology looks like. It looks like starting to apply dedicated efforts. hiring biologists and building out facilities to solve biology by the end of the decade. And I think they will succeed. Amazing.

part of what we're talking about solving as soon as possible is the cost of sick care. Again, reminding everybody, we do not have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. The system takes care of you after you're sick. A healthcare system would keep you healthy, right? So... AI is going to be the biggest impactor here. We saw a study out of Stanford and Harvard Medical School that definitively shows that...

An AI diagnostician looking at your data will diagnose you far better than any human or even a human with AI because humans introduce bias into the results. This is the progression of AI as a radiologist. And so in this chart, we're seeing basically how Gemini 3 is doing performing versus radiologists. So Gemini 3 has outperformed radiological trainees and it's on its way to, you know, taking over the role from board certified radiologists. Not there yet.

But I think in a year, we'll be there. Alex, your thoughts? First of all, I love benchmarks. I've made no secret that I love benchmarks. The benchmark in this case is named radiology's last exam. It's composed of, I think... 50 radiological images spanning multiple modalities, multiple body systems. And the basic task is handing an image or imagery to an AI of various sorts and asking it to specify a final diagnosis.

And as you say, Gemini 3 Pro, which just launched, beats radiological residents. And on its present trajectory, if you just plot a straight line through progress from GPT-5 thinking to Gemini 3 Pro, I think we're going to see radiology get solved in the next year. And my brother-in-law, Tim, is a radiologist, and surprisingly, he cannot wait.

for ai to outperform him which he says is basically today but he got into the business to save lives not to have a job and he is just super excited about it saving lives also the number of other types of sensors that are coming online in medicine is on an exponential curve and so you need ai to read all those scans too there's no shortage of jobs for radiologists if you just stay on top of the wave because there's

always more training data needed, always more types of sensors. And the other thing is the amount of data that comes out of a scan today is way more than any radiologist could ever read. Just huge, huge amounts of very high resolution. So he's just wicked excited. I hope all doctors are super excited because, you know, at the end of the day, it's about saving lives, not about protecting. Yeah, I think you're going to find people who are going to.

actually say, no, no, no, we can't let AI do this yet. They're not good enough. And you're right.

There's not enough radiologists. I know we hire radiologists at Fountain. I hope we're going to transition to our AI radiologist soon enough. Talking about... Creating abundance in the world. This was a fascinating article. I think you found it, Alex, so thank you for that. Rainmaker's bold plan to refill the Great Salt Lake. Alex, you want to hit this one?

Yeah, there's a scene in the Johnny Depp movie Transcendence where nanobots are released throughout the biosphere remediating it. I do think we're going to find ourselves in a world soon where some... facsimile of that scenario is the case. So in this case, this is drones that for weather modification that are being used ultimately to refill.

the great salt lake and i think this is an early preview of that scenario where many of the the most in principle labor intensive capital intensive energy intensive environmental issues that we face in the case of The Great Salt Lake, it's losing water that's resulting in arsenic that was already in the salt bed being aerosolized and people are breathing it. It's not a great situation.

All of these environmental scenarios can ultimately, I think, be remediated at scale with enough automation and AI. And I think this is just a sliver, just a preview of what we're going to see biosphere-wide. Yeah, you know, we talk about water scarcity in a world, right? Water is one of the most important things, clean drinking water. If you've got that, you can eliminate half of the disease burden on this planet. And we have to realize that...

We have an incredible supply of water on this planet. The problem is 97.5% of salt, 2% is in the ice caps, and we fight over a half a percent of the fresh water in the lakes and rivers. But it turns out there is another source of water. It's quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. And so if you can access that, we've had a couple X prizes on that topic.

you can move the water to where you want it and need it. So this is about creating water abundance on the planet, which I think is so cool. I have two points to make. One is this is climate engineering at like full operational scale, which is amazing.

The downside that people say is, oh, my God, we shouldn't be geoengineering the world. And the counterpoint to that is we have been geoengineering the world. We've been throwing up a ton of carbon into the atmosphere for decades now. We have to use technology. You know, I've been watching the outcomes of the COP.

you know, a farce going on in every year we get all the folks together we are not going to find a political solution to climate change nation states cannot solve climate change you need a technological approach i think this is the start of a whole array of those yeah uh

In terms of reengineering and gaining access to resources, one of the biggest conversations is rare earth metals are rare. And how do we get access to them? for our electronic supply chain. This is a company called Vulcan.

The title here is ReElement, and U.S. government launched $1.4 billion to build domestic rare earth supply chain. So critical for so much of what we're building here. And, of course, for... the last couple of decades this has been a supply chain controlled in china alex do you want to give us some 101 on this or dave

Either of you, please. Maybe just I'd like to comment in again in extremis. Where do I think all of this ends up? I think it's it's relatively easy to imagine a future where so-called reindustrialization. reaches an end state where local supply chains become hyper-local, where for rare earths, for other key elements, other key feedstocks for the supply chain of the innermost loop, if you will, are farmed.

completely locally. And I think ultimately that takes us to nanotech. It takes us to Drexlerian nanosystems. It takes us to robots that are able to scavenge. raw resources from the immediate environment and immediately you get an immediate supply chain that's packaged up in some sort of self-contained way to produce finished projects. And I think this, again, this is just the start of of maybe a 10 to 15 year journey towards those types of nanosystems. Dave?

We have two investments in companies now that use AI vision systems and sensor data to scour through recycling and trash, looking for rare earth and looking for things that are extremely valuable. And that's a I mean, everybody loves that because the. the the supply chain people love it and the recycling and get the garbage out of the streets people love it it's just a pure good enabled by ai and robotics and it's a really really good theme

And very, very profitable business, too. There's also a book called The End of the World is Just the Beginning that Thomas Pederfee gave to me. I love that title. It's an incredible, packed with data and statistics, a really good read.

But amazingly, the U.S. is one of two countries in the world that has everything. Literally everything is here. So our rare earths come from China, but that's only because we didn't bother to mine them out of the earth here. We have them. We just didn't put together our own mining operations. We had rare earth metal operations. The problem is China would undercut the marketplace.

and put our companies out of business. But that's a different... Yeah, the whole push now is like, hey, make sure that everything is able to be done here, doesn't get undercut, and re-industrialize America. and you know france is the other one that has pretty much everything surprisingly if they can just access it including great it's a great book yeah all right before we go to our outro music which is epic again this week uh i

Put this in here, Dave, because, you know, Link Exponential Ventures is a Boston-based company. So here it is, the data. Massachusetts leads in VC-backed IPO success. So Massachusetts leads with 4.1% probability of going public. Within 10 years, California companies are at 2.3% and New York companies are at 1%. Any comments, Dave? Yeah. So no mystery here. You know, Massachusetts is also the the healthiest state in the country and also best place to raise a family in the country. And it.

It's not magic. It just tracks university density. So if you do the exact same chart on university density, you come up with the same curve. So as a fraction, if you walk out on the streets of Boston and you touch a random person, 25% chance they're a student. And some other chance they're a professor or working in a startup. It's just an incredible high density of very, very smart, upwardly mobile people. Not a lot of homeless problem. It's just all of that.

really feeds this machine. But people come to Boston to study and to learn and to build and then, you know, a big fraction of them stay. Another big fraction goes to California. So this is tracking where they started. A lot of things actually start in Boston. Many of them do migrate to California, which is why people perceive that as being the epicenter. But it actually, if you want to be there the day that they're founded or if you want to recruit.

The talent, you know, there's 20 times more engineers in Boston than there are in Silicon Valley. 20. Because of MIT, Harvard, BC, BU, Northeastern, Tufts, it's all within walking distance. It's just a really unique place on Earth. You couple that with the stat that you showed me that the unicorn venture-backed companies... The highest rate of giving birth to a venture-backed unicorn company comes out of MIT, is number one. It turns out USC is number two.

And then Stanford is number three, which sort of shocks all my Stanford friends when I show them that figure. But it's why Link XPV is based out of MIT. All right. I've got to say one thing about that. Yeah, please. It's a wonderful statistic, but California has 10 times more IPOs.

than Massachusetts and only six times more of the population. So I think that speaks to Dave's comment about people moving over there. So you've got to take that a little bit. And the weather is cold, but I think when I remember building a company... It's frigid.

The best engineers and systems engineers we could ever find were in the Boston area. The game plan that has worked for so many of my friends is you start in Boston, you hire your first 10, 15, 20 people in Boston, you get revenue, you get traction. And then a West Coast VC offers you a $100 billion valuation. So you move your headquarters out to Silicon Valley. You grow, grow, grow. And then you have your first kid.

And then you move right back to Boston because the school systems are the best in the world. And also it's very community oriented. You know, there's a little town center with a white steeple church and the police and the firemen and everybody all interact with everyone. It's very, very social. You rake leaves. you shovel snow, you grow up strong, and then a cycle starts all over again. So just one thought on a possible life plan. It certainly worked for a lot of my friends.

Fascinating. All right. We're about to go to our outro music, which is literally called The Epic Fantasy Edition by Jono. John Ovotny, 5074. Thank you. We've been getting some incredible entries into our outro music, so thank you for all the creatives out there for your support. Didn't John create another one of ours?

That's right. This is John's second contribution. Before we go to the outro music, just any closing thoughts here. Let's go around the horn. Salim, how did you enjoy this episode today? Any other closing thoughts? Any other rumors you're hearing? Any other fun things?

Just an epic steamroll towards the era of abundance. I mean, we have collapsing costs. We have access into multiple industries. We've got new industries forming the seams of everything. Very quickly, you're going to have a personal AI that's adopted. a lawyer, a tutor, a mentor, a coach, and that's all going to be free.

So when people talk about abundance, we're kind of getting there so fast. I think all these stories that we're talking about show us how quickly we're going to get there. It's incredibly, just unbelievably exciting. Amazing. Dave. your thoughts please well two things i saw in the comments one was uh dave can you stop wearing checkered shirts every single time so i heard you

I'll try and develop a look. I don't have a look, but I'll try. The other one is really cool. It's like I like to listen to it at 1.5x speed, but then when Alex speaks, I need to go to 1x and listen to it twice. Yeah, you want to slow it down by two, two times. So we could try to automate that. That's a very easy AI problem. We'll create a little overlay that can automate the process for you. Yeah, I do want to encourage our subscribers. We're at $399.

1000 subscribers about to hit 400,000. Thank you for that support, everybody. If you haven't subscribed, please do. But please put your questions in. In the comments, we do read them. And I'd like to be doing more AMAs on this. So we're going to be looking for great questions and then bringing it to the Moonshot Mates for conversation. Alex, please, your closing thoughts here.

Two comments. One, we didn't get a chance to talk about the new Nano Banana Pro model, which is just incredible. Encourage everyone to play with it. It has transformative new multimodal capabilities. I was very impressed. Kudos to the team. And second, I spend all of my time thinking about

solving the hardest problems on earth with AI. So I've mentioned in past folks, if you have really hard problems that you're working on solving, I would love to connect with you. I think we're entering the age where the hardest problems on earth are solvable with AI. And Alex will be at NeurIPS. Don't forget. I will be at NeurIPS next week. So yeah, if you're at NeurIPS, the AI conference, definitely reach out to me. Would love to connect in person.

And plug from my side, December 17th, Meaning of Life session online. Amazing. We had put out a call to see if you guys wanted to get together with a moonshot mate, sort of at a moonshot gathering in the fall of next year, fall of 2026, probably in L.A. We've had about 700.

of the thousand right back saying that they're interested in joining us. So if you're interested in a moonshot gathering, send an email to moonshots at diamantis.com so we can hear your vote. Our goal is to get to a thousand people. We'll say they're interested. And if we get enough interest, we'll pull this together in the fall. So moonshots at diamantis.com. If we disassemble the moon per Alex's prediction, we're going to have to rename this podcast.

No, that's why it's called Moonshots. We're all about shooting the moon, disassembling it, and building the Computronium cloud, obviously. Groan, groan, groan, groan. All right. Our outro music here, Epic Fantasy Edition. All right, let's enjoy. So good. check it out please watch this oh the lord of the rings theme awesome Oh, my God. This is the best. Have you seen this before? Wow, Dave, you look good. Yeah, that's much better. This is cool, though.

That's the way I visualize Alex. Your kids look like that, Peter. There we go Oh, that was so good. All right. If you were listening and not watching, it's worth going to YouTube to watch this. Thank you, John. That may have been my favorite one of all of them. You got some real talent there, John. I love AWG as an elf and Dave as some version of Robin Hood. And Salim, share that to your wife. You're the sexiest man on the planet in that one. I look like a troll. That's great.

As always, gentlemen, love you greatly. Thank you for your wisdom and your passion and your commitment here. Everybody, that's a wrap on Moonshot. See you guys again next week. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff.

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