The Trillion Dollar AI Reset: Advertising & Gaming is Next w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #170
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What's the world going to look like in 50 years? There's no way. There's just absolutely no way to make that prediction. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, Salim, I really love that shirt and it knows I need a shirt. So it just asks your AI where you got that shirt and then it just delivers to me magically the next day. Advertising will get crushed. You're exactly right. The future belongs to advertising.

Chatting with your trusted agent and your trusted agent making good suggestions for you and then saying, yeah, just go out and buy that or just go out and sign up for that. You'll be able to use AI to not just do legal lawmaking legislation, but actually formulate policy. There's a new innovation coming from AI every single week and you need some kind of a regulatory framework. The only way those laws are going to be written is with AI because nothing can keep up with AI other than AI. Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

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

Well, I want to jump in. This has been, you know, the speed at which we're seeing breakthroughs and activities across the board and all technologies is accelerating and it feels faster. I don't know. Does it feel that way for you? Oh, my God. Does it ever? I was in California at Stanford pretty much all of last week, came back and the amount of change in just one week, you know, the...

New Gemini model came out, their update, the code it can generate is like, you know, noticeably better than it was two weeks ago. I can tell you some stories when we get into it. I want to hear them. How about you, Salim? Salim, you're a probability function. You're like orbiting the planet without a rocket ship. Where'd you come back from?

I just came, I was like a few days in India and then a day and a half in Sao Paulo and I just landed back and I'm trying to figure out where my time zone is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. You truly are orbiting the planet.

And so thanks for joining this conversation. You know, I hate missing a week of this conversation because stuff is moving. The way I frame it is we've hit a singularity in AI development. Like the pace of change is faster than our ability to process it. Yeah, I mean, when we talk about a singularity,

There are multiple singularities on the way to what Ray calls a singularity. So a singularity is like if you can't predict what's going to happen next week, that's a singularity in this area. I want to jump into one of my favorite stories in AI because I've been beating this drum for a while now. And here it is. It's not the Trump drum, but the AI in classroom drum.

So, you know, we heard earlier, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that Beijing has basically made a ruling that all secondary schools, I think primary and secondary schools are going to require AI training throughout China. We've seen that as well as in Estonia.

And I've been like just tweeting this out. Finally, we see an executive order here that is requiring schools to incorporate AI in the classroom. About time. What are your thoughts, gentlemen? Dave?

Peter, you've been saying disruption is coming to education. You've been saying it, like you said, beating the drum for a long time. The schools have underreacted. I think, you know, we're all associated with either MIT or other schools. We don't want to get in the middle of a political battle for sure. But there is a lot of good stuff coming out of the government now in the Doge way.

Wake and in this and then a bunch of other things that are absolutely urgent and necessary but I tell you More of what you've been predicting Peter for a long time The the AI is already far better than any TA in any college class If I think about my grade school and high school teachers with some really good high school teachers But AI is gonna bypass them as a way to learn it probably already has

And then, you know, the professors are next. But, you know, remember when the Internet came along and there was a lot of concern in the schools that if they put all the courseware out there online, is anyone going to keep coming to school? It's all out there and freely available. And people did keep coming either for the social aspects or for the credentials.

But now it's another level with the interactive AI being able to explain things to you better than you can learn them in a lecture. Yeah. And so we'll see. We'll see what that does. I mean, Salim, you and I both have boys the same age in middle school. Is your school teaching them AI? What's the philosophy there?

They're using AI. They're not supposed to use it for writing essays, but they do it anyway. And the good news is at that age, it's pretty easy to spot when a sophisticated AI has written the thing. It's way better than the kids do it. So that for now, it's kind of workable. But I think the key point in referencing what Dave said was it's pretty clear that when you're using an AI to learn, you learn at least something.

twice as fast. The estimates I'm hearing are between 2x and 4x faster. That just is like, you've immediately made the need for school, formal schooling, redundant. And so there's a huge gap now between the regulatory, we want to put kids through school, through grade 12, and what's possible with AI. And that's going to stretch very quickly.

Well, MIT and Northeastern went the complete opposite direction of your kid's school where they said,

Use AI anywhere and everywhere that it helps you. And if that messes up the professor, they got to fix it. They better figure it out in a hurry. And I've got one kid left in high school and he's rip shit mad that their school went the other direction saying, don't use it. We'll catch you if you try, which, you know, it's just crazy. It's incredibly short sighted to take. You know, I can get the idea that middle schoolers shouldn't be using AI to do middle school homework, but it's,

Middle schoolers should be using AI to do extraordinary projects that they could not normally do otherwise. Yeah. There's a second article related to this here, which is over 250 CEOs urge states to make AI and computer science graduation requirements. So,

Here's their stats. Just one computer science class can increase wages by 8% for students. The U.S. is lagging across, again, China, South Korea, and open letter advocates for computer science and AI as core to K through 12. I could not agree more. This genie is out of the bottle and kids are going to hit smack into a brick wall if they're not prepared. Mm-hmm.

The good news is those kids that don't take computer science will be much more ready for all the manufacturing jobs that are coming back. Ouch. Love it. Let's screw those iPhone screws back in. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news.

For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. And that's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you,

And it's available totally for free. Please join me. Subscribe at diamandis.com slash subscribe. That's diamandis.com slash subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. All right. Here's another one. You know, UAE, let's give them credit for so many different ways. They were the first country to have a minister of AI who I've known now for decades.

the better part of 15 years before he became minister. But UAE is the first nation to use AI to write their laws. And here's the stats. Official project will reduce government costs by 50% and speed up lawmaking by 70%. Salim, you're meeting with heads of nations on all of your trips. What are you seeing here?

So they are very far ahead. Most other countries are nowhere near even looking at this. They're still trying to spell AI. This is a huge opportunity. And I think they've actually underestimated it. I think it'll speed up lawmaking by like 5x, forget 70%.

And I think the drop in cost is much bigger than they think because you'll be able to use AI to not just do legal lawmaking legislation, but actually formulate policy. I've said this before that if you want to drop inflation by 1%,

I'm asking a human being to gauge what knobs and levers to pull is a stupid idea. Yeah. Let it to go to an AI and the app can go, well, if you want to do that, looking at all the financial transactions and the access to all that data in real time, let's go, here's what you need to do. And then the human being go, yep, that looks good. Go for it. And so there's all sorts of things that could, that could happen here. Um,

There's a crazy story I have, but we don't need to get into this right now. A few years ago, I was asked to give a talk at the Republican National Leadership Convention on some of this. And the title of my talk was going to be, how would you drop the cost of government 10x within 10 years? Nice. Which you could do.

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

So, as I mentioned, I was in Stanford all last week with Eric Brynjolfsson, our good friend, and also Sandy Pentland, who moved out there recently. And then Mark Orenberg, the chairman of MIT, was also there the whole week. But, you know, Eric, very forward thinking on these topics.

But his point in his lectures on bullet two is that these cost saving areas are the tip of the iceberg. It's a great way to get started. But the real gain here is Greenfield. It's what can you do that's incremental and beyond just reducing the cost of something that already exists. And this area, we desperately need the pace of lawmaking to keep up with the pace of AI innovation.

And so that's, I think, you know, there's a great way to get started and the UAE is very forward thinking on it, but you're going to need this same capability when there's a new innovation coming from AI every single week and you need some kind of a regulatory framework, otherwise it will run wild. The only way those laws are going to be written is with AI because nothing can keep up with AI other than AI. You know, if you're, whatever industry you're in and you're being regulated, like if you're a hairdressing salon or you're a health care,

health care facility, if you do an analysis of all the laws that regulate you, you're going to find conflicting laws on the books. Yep. And I think what would be fascinating is actually running all the laws and say, I'd like you to disentangle these, deconflict these and actually set, you know, find the set of laws which are the minimum laws that

That allow us like the tax code, for example. Oh, my God. Could you imagine running a reinvented tax code? It's like simplify it and and maintain the U.S. revenues from taxes. I mean, sleep off on this. Yeah.

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

That's one way. But then they don't have the people to really enforce anything. So everybody just goes ahead and does what they want. And because they generally follow common sense, it works out. So they're lucky over there. But the step one will be using AI to help navigate this. There's already a company that's helping nuclear projects try and navigate what's the fastest path to getting the regulatory approval and what forms do you have to fill out, et cetera, et cetera. So that's already happening there. Step two will be how would you optimize the regulatory and stop the conflict

and rewrite it. And I think step three would be, is there a way of making this much more elegant and

and cutting through with using first principles, rewrite the legislative foundation of the legislative structure, that's when I think we'll get real benefits. But certainly we'll get huge benefits in the first couple already. And we can do the first one already. And I think we'll see a lot of that going forward. Yeah, amazing. I've never been excited about rewriting laws, but I do think there needs to be some way

Some requirement that every time you put a law on the books, you should take one of the old ones off or at least simplify. All right, let's move on here. This is a big one. This came as a bit of a surprise. OpenAI scraps plans to convert to a for-profit structure. So OpenAI abandons plans to shift after facing opposition from Elon and state authorities.

And they're going to maintain what they call their nonprofit controlled capped profit structure. So what does that mean? There's a nonprofit board that oversees OpenAI. All of the nonprofit board members have no equity incentives, meaning they're there to help maintain OpenAI's mission in the world and not to maximize profits.

The capped structure means that if you put a dollar in, your return on your investment is capped at $100. So I find that fascinating. We reported last time that OpenAI raised capital at a $300 billion valuation. So thoughts on this one? Well, there are a lot of reports that, hey, this is no big deal for SAM. It's going to actually, if anything, reinforce its control.

I didn't kind of read it that way. I was like, no, this is a win for Elon and trying to slow down the rate of investment, you know, and give him a better chance to catch up with, you know, his kind of unconstrained version of this. I also think that...

The number one use case for AI is companionship. The voices and the sympathetic AIs got really good in the last couple of weeks. And I think they'll be out in the world in the next couple of months where you have a very, very intelligent AI model, like a 2 trillion, 5 trillion parameter model married to these super engaging sympathetic voices. And that's going to create all kinds of tough decisions for social media companies on the

Am I just selling as many ad impressions as possible and trying to reel everybody into being on this platform 24 by 7? Or am I actually worried about the psychological effect of that? I think that having a nonprofit board on top of OpenAI, they're obligated to think in terms of the social good version of this, which may not be the biggest revenue driver. Salim, what are your thoughts here?

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

the sort of, uh, uh, emotional engagement of the AI. So open AI is chat GPT. They actually rolled back, uh, that level of emotional engagement. They, they, they were saying that it was just way too complimentary to the user. And, uh, I don't know if the term of sequence is the right term for that, but, uh, they rolled it back to an earlier state. Um,

You don't want your open AI saying, oh, you're so amazing all the time. There's this old definition of diplomacy, which says, you say nice doggy until you can find a rock. So this is the AI is being really nice to us until they figure out what to do with it. Ouch. All right. Not a surprise here. Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of companies' AI code was written by AI and

and predicts that 95% of code will be AI generated by 2030. Dave, you're overseeing how many companies right now inside of the Lync portfolio and the Lync Studios? We're at 24 right now. 24. And so what's it like there? I mean, so take a second and give people a little bit of overview. So Lync Studios is incubating companies mostly out of MIT,

some out of Harvard. Average age of those teams? Well, median age is probably 24, 25-year-olds, and the companies are about one to two years old. And so what's going on in terms of vibe coding for them, in terms of AI-based coding?

Well, they're all AI native. They generate almost all their code with some degree of AI assistance. Blitzy in particular is when I left town last week, they had a two or three million revenue run rate. I came back, they've signed eight million of new deals. And so they're basically signing up customers as quickly as they can meet them. Blitzy, as a reminder, is a company that can write three million lines of code in a single night, uses massive amounts of inference time compute under the covers.

And now the trick is, okay, how do you debug 3 million lines of code that you've written in a single night? But the algorithms are getting so good at writing good code now that that problem is going away in a hurry. But there's no way any company in this building wouldn't be using AI-generated code for almost everything that they do. Also, it makes a lot of sense to write your business plan around areas where it works well.

And then this is coming up with a lot, don't fight any battles, wait a few weeks. And because the things that we'll be able to do in a few weeks will be expanding at this ridiculous rate. So while you were fighting some silly battle, it got ahead of you. And so you just do what comes naturally and easily this week and then wait for the next week's innovations. Dave, I have a question for you. It used to be that if you're starting a company, especially in the AI space,

You need to find a great technical co-founder if you're someone in the business or finance world. How important is that now versus being able to use AI as your technical co-founder? Well, it's in a sense more important than ever, but it's a different skill set. It's very much the visionary that can decide what should we be doing has become incredibly important.

And then the technical co-founder who would just grind out, you know, Steve Wozniak would be the quintessential example. Like Steve Jobs is like, we need to build the Apple II. This is what it needs to be like for the user. That skill set's more important than ever. Hey, Woz, can you get the chip count down? Can you wire this all together? You know, grind it out all night. That skill set becomes much less relevant because, you know, AI will do all the chip routing for you. But that first skill set has really grown in value. And it's very similar. You know, it's a very technical skill.

You got to choose components. You got to decide this will work, this won't work. It's a very technical skill set, but it's more of a visionary skill set. I think there's one other skill set that's coming to the fore here, which is find hidden gems of data sets and figure out how to monetize them.

And I think that's going to become a very big deal over the next few years because we'll have horizontal platforms able to do all sorts of things. The question is, where is the revenue? Where can you mine for little nuggets of revenue and go grab them and leverage AI to do it? I think that's going to add to the business focus and the application focus. So two more things on this topic that I think are really important. First, Mark Zuckerberg last week did a couple interviews saying,

where he made it clear that the backlog of AI research projects is only compute bound, it's not idea bound. So between the researchers and the AI generated ideas, they have a huge backlog of things that will just work.

And there isn't enough compute, even in Microsoft's hundreds of thousands of GPUs, there isn't enough compute to try the ideas. So we've tipped from idea bound to compute bound, and that'll be true forever hereafter. And then on the second bullet, you know, 95% of the code AI generated by 2030. I think that timeline to 2030, he would have said, Satya would have said 2040, 2050, just a few months ago.

And so that, you know, that's consistent with Dennis Hassabis also, you know, he was more conservative about the timeline to AGI and he's pulled in his forecast now too. So what you're seeing is even the conservative, you know, let's be cautious people are really pulling in their date.

And that's telling.

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that AI will be a million fold more capable in the next four years. Let's play a video and then talk about it because, you know, this was the same point that Elon made when he was on stage at the Abundance Summit. Let's hear the numbers that David puts forward.

I would say the rate of progress is exponential right now on at least three key dimensions. So number one is the algorithms themselves. The models are improving at a rate of, I don't know, three to four times a year. Then you've got the chips, depending on how you measure it. Each generation of chips is probably three or four times better than the last on a level. And that would be the third area where you're seeing basically exponential progress. Just look at the number of GPUs that are being deployed in data centers. AI's data centers, Stargate, and within a couple of years, they'll be at

I don't know, 5 million GPUs, 10 million GPUs. The algorithms, the chips, and the data centers are all improving or scaling at a rate of, I don't know, 3 to 4x a year. That's 10x every two years. If you're getting better at 10x every two years, that doesn't mean you'll be at 20x in four years. It means you'll be at 100x. So you multiply those things together, the algorithms, the chips, and then the raw compute that's available. You're talking about a million x increase. So, Salim, how does that feel?

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

of multiple exponentials gives you crazy outcomes. You know, one of the things that we've talked about in the past is skating to where the puck's going to be, right? If I remember meeting the founders of Siri before they were bought by Apple and they were predicting what was going to be possible in like two to four years. And they were building Siri to intercept those capabilities and

Because if you build for what's possible today, then by the time your product gets to market, it's out of date. So Dave, I mean, you're seeing a multitude of, you know, hundreds of startups that are coming across your desk. How do you think about this? Well, first of all, the million X is just raw parameter count in the biggest neural nets. It's really hard to predict the capabilities that are and aren't possible with the million X. And so it's,

Yeah, you're a great, all-time great visionary. Looking five years into the future used to be very possible for you. I don't know. What do you think your view into the future is now? Yeah. I mean, it literally has to be a discontinuous vision. Okay, all...

I have a heart. I remember I was brought on stage at the first world government summit in Dubai. And my request was, what's the world going to look like in 50 years? And I was like, there's no way. There's just absolutely no way to make that prediction. 10 years later.

you know, back then it was 10, 15 years at that most today, I would say, uh, five years is difficult. Three years is possible. Um, and there's so many parameters, including policy, human reaction to this, you know, the capital markets, all of these things are intertwined, uh, what's going on in China and Taiwan. Um,

I think for me, the hard part is when something's a million times, you know, assume it's 100x or 100,000x, right? I mean, you end up with a failure of imagination where you can't conceive of the types of things you might be able to do.

Right? And our immediate thing is to automate what we're doing now, and that's not the right answer. Because you end up with the problem of when they first put TV out, you took radio announcers and put them on TV reading the same scripts. And you're not leveraging the capability in a real way. It takes time to kind of get to grips with the imagination that's possible. So you kind of have to wait until we get there and then go, now what do we do? I know one thing, Peter, when you were out here two weeks ago, I guess, spending time with Alex Wisner-Gross,

There's just a handful of people that you can find that have got their head wrapped around this. If you talk to people at random, 99.9% of them are underreacting. More than that, 99.999% are underreacting. And you find a few people like Alex that are thinking it through. And if you can surround yourself with as many of those as you can find, it really, really helps a lot.

Just to pick on the framework here that David Sachs put together, it's exact same three dimensions that I use to think about scale. I think a million X in four years, four to five years is the right answer. But I also think that the algorithm dimension, nobody really knows. And if anything, it's understated. Yeah.

But we're all surprised in the last few months about inference time, computer test time, chain of thought, reasoning being far more powerful as a scaling factor and trying to build new scaling laws around how do we even think about

inference time because when David talks about the chips getting faster he's thinking about the GPUs you know and just the standard 3 to 4x year over year but the inference time chips are actually improving far far faster it's a much easier problem but that's turning out to be a key factor in the intelligence of the overall system

So I think that the chips will outperform what he just said and the algorithms will way outperform what he just said because of those innovations. When I look at the factors driving this, it is compute, it's total, it's data sets. And we haven't talked about synthetic data hitting this. Algorithms.

money coming in, and then the number of actual human meat bodies getting into the game here is increasing. More and more people are getting into the AI game. Something funny that happened, I was having a conversation, I think it was with ChatGPT, it might have been Gemini 2.5, and I would say, okay, let's look into the future. I was trying to use it as a conversational partner to predict where things are going. And I said, make some predictions. And I said, listen, if we're going to see

A century's worth of progress in the next 10 years, what you just predicted is extraordinarily linear. And he goes, you're right. Let me go a little bit bolder. So you've got to actually push the… So I think this is where the answer will lie. When we see these types of predictions, we'll use an AI to go, you write out that curve and tell me what it's going to look like. Yeah.

Because it'll do probably a better job than us because we're limited in some other ways. We have all our cognitive biases that limit our ability to imagine. Where an AI, in theory, should suffer from much less of that. Yeah, I think that's a really important topic because I think right now AI as a brainstorming partner is hobbled because the models that you love brainstorming with, the 4.0s and the Gemini 2.5s, they have about a 30-second lag. And that kind of takes the buzz out of it.

And then the models that are really fun to interact with, like the Sesame demo and all of that, are super engaging, but they're only like a 7B or 30B kind of caliber model. And so they're not a really good brainstorming partner. All of that will be stitched together within the next three months. So when you have an idea in the morning, Peter, you're going to immediately go to that super engaging 2 trillion to 10 trillion parameter caliber model. And there's no going back from there.

Once you start down that path, you're going to love it. I mean, three months. Did you say three months? Three months, yeah. Well, ChatGPT, sort of the on-the-phone app, does a pretty damn good job. And I have conversations with it. So I do like 20 minutes of red light in the morning. And my conversations during that red light time with my ChatGPT bot are extraordinary. All right, let's go to Eric Schmidt here.

who was giving a presentation and said, AI is underhyped. Please take a listen. - I'm here to tell you that I honestly believe that the AI revolution is underhyped and here's why.

the arrival of this new intelligence will profoundly change our country and the world in ways we cannot fully understand. Many people think that the demand of energy part that our industry takes will go from 3% to 99% of total generation.

One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. Gives you a sense of the scale that we're talking. These things are industrial at a scale I have never seen in my life. So first off, underhyped versus spot on. How do you guys feel about that? And then we should talk about the whole energy of it all. Dave.

One of my most cherished lifetime memories, actually, Peter, is you sitting down with Eric Schmidt. I think it was at A360 just a few years ago. You guys must have riffed for maybe two hours straight just in armchairs side by side. One night, yeah. Oh, my God. Eric is...

Not only is he absolutely brilliant, but he has access to all this information. So, you know, when is he ever going to be wrong? When has he ever been wrong before? Yeah, of course, he's absolutely right. What's amazing to me about what Eric is saying there, he's on some kind of, you know, congressional testimony or whatever. He's always pointing to the energy.

because he knows that's the one thing that will get through everybody's thick head. But there's so many other more important and urgent, like what about the fabs? Like we got to get these fabs up and running on shore like yesterday. That's the more urgent, bigger topic than just the raw energy. But he knows that they won't understand that. So he has to say, hey, we need 29 gigawatts of new power because at least everyone will be able to grok it and it'll make progress.

Yeah. Saleem.

I don't have anything to add to this. I think those are two great insights. I think this will be a really great push for renewables and low-cost energy in all sorts of ways. But at the same time... I think it will force us to expand our energy footprint. I mean, at the same time, you've got the White House basically taking all the constraints off of coal and oil and natural gas and drilling. Because when I look... I mean, I kind of understand why in terms of AI. Because when I look at...

How long it's going to take to get Gen 4 nuclear and fusion online. We're talking decades. It's like Amazon signed a contract with X Energy for a Gen 4, I think it was a Gen 4 plant, it's a fission plant. And I'm like, oh, is it going to be on, you know, in the next two or three years? Like 2040.

Yeah. But I think you have to remember the cost of fossil fuels is way high these days compared to solar, right? So all this extra usage will be coming from renewables in some way. I go back to my example of the guy building a gigawatt wind farm in the...

outskirts of Kazakhstan because the wind howls down a particular valley in a ridiculously consistent basis. And they just plunk an AI data center there. So you can do that kind of leveraging of low cost, far away capability that you'd never get in normal. Or to Iceland, right? You can put the data center anywhere you want. Yeah.

Yeah, I think when I remember talking to Ramez about the energy stuff, he said, we will never go back to oil and gas as fondly as people want because the cost curve is just too high. Can I just drill into that just a little bit? You can drill into the oil and gas, yes. In 2016, it became cheaper to create a solar generation facility than fossil fuels.

And since then, almost all energy generation has been solar. In 2019, a more important inflection point was hit, which is it became cheaper to build and run a solar facility than to just run the oil gas. So the OPEX and CAPEX of solar is now less than the OPEX of fossil fuels.

So we don't need government policy. We don't need any of this stuff. The pure market will now drive it to just going fully down a renewables route. The problem is that the amount that we need is just so huge that we need to get much more quickly to the SMRs and other mechanisms. Yeah, it's also – we need to get rid of the delays due to regulations and permitting.

I mean, this is what's going to slay us. Like, if we can make permitting, like, super, super fast, and this is where AI can support it...

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

You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit live.

online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com. All right, so MasterCard unveils AgentPay, agentic payment technology to power commerce in the age of AI. So it's not just MasterCard, it's going to be all the credit cards. You know, I think

There's a very near future where I speak and stuff shows up on my doorstep. I don't think about it. It just magically happens. In fact, I'll take it a step further. I think AI is going to be listening to my conversations when I say, you know, Salim, I really love that shirt.

And it knows I need a shirt. So it just, you know, asks your AI where you got that shirt. And then it just delivers to me magically the next day. I'm trying to see how you got there from this. Well, I think we crush advertising and I think we crush the ability to select payment methods. I think your AI is just doing all this stuff automatically for you. Yeah. Bill Gross and I were talking earlier today, Parada AI, your good friend, about this exact topic of advertising.

advertising will get crushed. Well, what do you mean exactly there? Because Google has $300 billion of advertising revenue. Are you saying that that's going to get crushed? I mean, but that's exactly, actually Richard Socher, our mutual friend, was saying that in their tests, the revenue per session of an AI dialogue versus a Google search is about one-tenth to one-hundredth

And so where does that put Google if they start, you know, when you do a Google search now, the top thing is the AI answer and then the ads start below that. So that's already got to be cannibalizing the revenue. So it puts Google in a really tough spot trying to

figure out do we cannibalize their own ad revenue? But you're exactly right. The future belongs to chatting with your trusted agent and your trusted agent making good suggestions for you and then saying, yeah, just go out and buy that or just go ahead and sign up for that. Well, we've mentioned this before, but I think the holy grail here is you're

Jarvis equivalent, right? Where your agent will kind of act on your behalf and is bound to you with your preferences, habits, etc. Then you can put a lot of trust in it and just let it go to town and see what happens and have a feedback loop so it just tweaks it. That seems a no-brainer to me. I just spent the most unbelievable amount of time dealing with

flight tickets and logistics and seat changes. I mean, it was just bullshit. Eric, I was on this panel of the future of AI working thing with Eric Brynjolfsson and a few others, and they called it white collar drudgery, right? There's a ton of that that's going on. And I think this is where we'll be able to have huge impact with AI. Yeah, we should keep tracking this thread because trust, you know, when do you trust AI? When do you not trust it? This is just a subset of

But it's a good, it's an important one. Hey, my credit card is a pretty important thing. Do I trust it? Self-driving, obviously, is even more trust. Then you've got life decisions. You know, what do I leave to my kids? Do I buy that house? Do I get a new roof? Like those decisions are also definitely trust decisions. So we should track, you know, a lot changes week to week. We should track what people trust, what people don't trust, because God knows the AI is going to be incredibly convincing.

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

Well, I think here where we've been talking about cryptos, payment mechanisms, right? And you've got this spectrum of stuff that's really hard to mine. And like Bitcoin is not that easy to do payments on. And then you get, or gold, say, if you want to use the old analogy, then you have like

bank vaults and jewelry, that's not that easy to transact. And then you get to bank accounts and then you'd get to credit card. And you have this spectrum of the smaller the transaction, the less security you need and therefore you can make the usability much easier, et cetera. What's happened with crypto is along with things like the lightning network on the Bitcoin protocols, now the payments are really, really easy. And I think we're gonna see crypto type payments scale very, very fast.

especially with the digital, the fiat currencies moving over to the crypto world. We're going to see incredible things happen there. And I think that'll be the biggest trigger for usage of blockchains and so on for handling all of that stuff. There's a startup and I'm on the advisory board of

that is trying to figure this out because one of the biggest problems with trade globally, separate from all the tariff stuff, is that big countries don't like big chunks of foreign reserves leaving their shores.

So they make it really difficult to put capital controls in place and they make it really hard. Yeah. There's this famous story of GE selling 100 million worth of jet engines to China and they took in receipt 150 million worth of frozen chickens as payment. And the 50 million was, I have to deal with all these chickens. Hence the margin. But it turns out that type of transaction is rampant in big companies because China's like, we don't want $100 million leaving our shores.

And so this is going to a combination of crypto plus some of these payment rails is going to change the game with some of these big transactions. And on the smaller side, AI plus some of these will make things really radically much easier. I love it. Digital chickens.

So here's another one. Dave, I think you added this one. NVIDIA acquires Gretel to power next-gen AI. Tell us about this story. Yeah, I think this is important because we talked last time about the CoreWeave IPO, which is holding up just fine. Is that the bellwether to the markets opening? M&A has been very quiet. Now you're starting to see some deal flow, and that all ties back to the IPO markets opening up. The last three years have been the most dead in the history of the country in terms of IPOs. So

So if that comes roaring back, that'll unlock a lot. So this is a good one to track here. But what you're seeing here is NVIDIA recognizing that synthetic data is incredibly strategic. And we talked about Richard Socher's got these 10 areas of AI, some of which run unbounded and others are throttled or hobbled by some constraint. But math is unbounded, coding is unbounded. Why? Because you can generate a near infinite amount of synthetic data

which means the AI can continue to learn and then you can build really easy evals like did the AI do something useful or is it buggy, does it not work? The math is provable, the code is debuggable automatically, and those areas require synthetic data.

But you look across the other areas like biotech and everything else, the synthetic data is the constraint because the AI can run wild to the extent that it can generate synthetic data. So I think NVIDIA being in the middle of the hot seat

realizes, oh my God, what a great opportunity to create some kind of a moat. Let's pick up Gretel and let's build out a synthetic data competency as part of our overall, like while we're top of the world, we need to think about how to defend our position on top of the world. So that's why they picked up Gretel. Nice. Yeah, I think this is a really great strategic thing. You saw Zoom doing the same thing when its market cap went soaring high, they started buying up a whole bunch of stuff.

leveraging the currency while it was high. Yeah, as an investment theme, you know, synthetic data is very different in each domain. Obviously, the full cell simulator synthetic data there in biotech is going to be very different than in math. So it's a great repeatable investment theme if you can find really, really smart teams, because I think NVIDIA could easily acquire 10 more companies doing different types of... Are you investing at

LinkXPV and synthetic data? Yeah, we have DataCibo, which is a co-invest with Mark Orenberg, the chairman at MIT. They do numerical column-wise synthetic data, so things like actuarial or whatever. But again, if you had physical world synthetic data, like simulators for physical objects, driving data, those are all investable data.

We'll do any synthetic data company we can find if it has a great team. Fantastic. All right. Here's one I added. Kleiner Perkin leads $130 million round in Coinbase founders anti-aging startup Ulimit. Let me break this down. So Brian Armstrong and Blake Byers, both are friends. Going to have Brian on this Moonshots podcast sometime next month.

They're both passionate about longevity and what we've seen is a number of billionaires investing in something called epigenetic reprogramming. So what is that? So as I like to remind people, you get 3.2 billion letters from your mom, 3.2 billion letters from your dad. That's your genome, about 22,000 genes.

and you have that same software when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100. And so the question is if you're running the same software, why do you look different? Why don't you have a six-pack at age 100 that you had when you were 18? And it turns out it's not the genes you have, it's your epigenome, epi from the Greek word for above, it's which genes, it's your control system, it's which genes are on and which genes are off.

And as you get older, the genes that should be on get silenced to get turned off, the genes that should be off get turned on. And there's a whole bunch of issues. Folks like George Church, David Sinclair have been pioneering this. And epigenetic reprogramming is can we turn back the clock and set your epigenome to an earlier state? And the data appears to be not only yes, but hell yes.

And it's probably one of the hottest areas of age reversal work and longevity. So I just find it fascinating that Brian is investing here. We've seen Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner invest in Altos Labs. Sam Altman invested in Retro with Joe Betts-Lacroix. Same areas, epigenetically programming.

So, yeah, very exciting. And it should be noted that a lot of this is now made possible because of AI. Oh, how so?

Because the ability to actually process all the data from the experiments and decide what transcription factors to use. You know, we are 40 trillion human cells running about two to five billion chemical reactions per second. And just trying to understand the amount of data is really hard. And so when I visited both Brian and Blake at New Limit, and they're very proud to

the majority of their team are all AI first technologists. You know, they're not lab geeks. Salim, any thoughts here?

I think just, you know, as our AI metals get more sophisticated, the ability to apply them, that number blows. I never stop shaking my head when you say that number of two and a half billion things per chemical processes per second. And that may be like that's across the body, but there's some incredible number just within a cell, isn't it? Per cell. That's per cell, right? That's just unbelievable. Times 40 trillion cells, right?

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

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

All right. Here's one. You know, I have two 13 soon to be 14 year old boys. Salim, you have one and Roblox is part of their, you know, if not daily diet, weekly diet. And I found this amazing. So Roblox averaging up to 43 percent of Netflix users with ninety seven point eight subscribers.

million average daily active users, 7.2 billion hours. It's just exploded onto, you know, we can see this rapid, rapid growth of the gaming world. Dave, did your boys all sort of go deep into the into the gaming world?

Well, it's interesting. I wouldn't say they were big-time gamers, but if you look at the amount of time they spent on interactive media, including Fortnite and some video games, much, much higher than passive media like movies and Star Trek or whatever. So that's just the trend line. But

You add AI on top of video games and it's so incredibly engaging. There's no way people are going to go back and watch passive media again. And I think it's about, I mean, it still really hasn't hit, right? So if you're in Minecraft or in Roblox, the amount of

generated, you know, reality and the amount of AI interaction with you, it's, we're going to see a lot of, a lot of advancement in the gaming world in the next few years. Yeah. You know, the other thing is gaming is dominated by young boys. Yeah. And largely misses the girls for whatever reason, but it definitely misses older people. Yeah.

The new super engaging AI voices actually tend to cover everybody. And so it's going to be a lot broader appeal. So any numbers you see in this world are going to go up tremendously just by covering the rest of humanity. Also, you know, a lot of, you know, Mr. Beast now, I think, is the most recognized person on the planet. Right.

Which is shocking. That might be among stars or some other qualifier there, but it's an incredible stat. But one of the secrets to Mr. Beast's incredible success is internationalization of all content. When you see Mr. Beast in any jurisdiction, any country, any language, his voice...

is that language and his lips move perfectly or well for that language. So you wouldn't even know that it wasn't shot for you in, you know, in the Congo. And so he mastered that using AI and that got him a lot of the, a lot of the footprint. Same thing applies here to internationalizing the language, but also the content and the media, making it a cultural fit for every jurisdiction. What struck me about this was the, almost all of that increment is mobile stuff.

So they're doing it everywhere. That's crazy. Yeah. Amazing. All right. Let's move on here. Let's talk about what's going on in the space world. The first news is that Amazon, this is Jeff Bezos, said,

launches the first launch of Project Cupier, its first batch of internet satellites. So, you know, we've seen head-to-head Elon and Bezos sort of like marching up the curve in space. So Amazon launched 27 satellites of their global internet. This ultimately will be thousands of satellites in orbit. I find it interesting they used an Atlas V. So, of course,

Jeff has something called Blue Origin, which is building rockets. Today it's

suborbital flights, but it did get one of its first new Glenn vehicles to orbit. But I think he's feeling pressure to get Cooper up and running at the same time that Starlink is now probably close to 8,000, 9,000 satellites. So they're buying launches from ULA instead of using his own launch vehicle. It's going to be interesting to have these two, these two companies,

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

It's a good question. You still have time delays, but one of our next articles coming up, which we'll talk about, which is quantum teleportation, would get rid of time delays.

And so if you add quantum teleportation on satellite constellations, yeah, it's instantaneous and global. I mean, it starts to get pretty freaky. You know, we're going to start, you know, we'll have, I think, probably 30, 40,000 comm satellites in orbit, right?

We'll have a constellation around the moon. We'll have a constellation around Mars. All of those will be cross-linked by laser. And so you'll have an interplanetary internet up and operating very shortly. Vint Cerf has been talking about that for a while. In fact, he's designed the communication protocols for that. He has indeed. And it's all playing out. Here's the second space article that SpaceX has asked to increase their rate of starship launches.

So Starship, of course, is the fully reusable version. It will replace Falcon 9, the most successful launch vehicle in all of human history. And Elon has said as soon as Starship is operational, he will shut down the Falcon 9 factory. And we've seen, you know, permission for five launches a year. They're asking for 25 launches per year out of Boca Chica, which is Starbase. And, you know,

He's gotten a lot of criticism for the failures of Starship. It still has not had a fully successful mission. But, oh, my God, what he's been able to pull off is nothing short of extraordinary. And I hate it when he has this amazing launch. The Mechzilla captures the booster, which is like the engineering feat of the decade, if not the century. Century, yeah. And then Starship...

Doesn't make it to a landing and of course the front page articles are SpaceX fails again Yeah

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

They're incrementally trying to make sure that, and I hate to say this, you know, that they're not killing the number of turtles or that the impact of the atomic boom. But once you've done a few, which he has, you know the environmental impact. There should be no, they should have nothing to say about you do 10 more, 20 more, 50 more. They don't want unbridled, unrestricted operations. Yeah.

That's hilarious. I get it. All right. You know the math as well as I do. It's hilarious. You did your 11-year penance there, Peter, on Zero-G. I did my 11-year penance on, you know, it's like the FAA is not happy until you're not happy. I do wonder a lot whenever you see a starship blows up or whatever. A lot of the backlash is actually political. You know, people are pissed off. And, you know, and actually a lot of Elon's support base was, you know, very green energy, Tesla-oriented.

And so now they're all pissed off. But I think he's doing what he thinks is absolutely best for the world, regardless of the cost. I mean, Starship will get us back to the moon. It's the only vehicle to get us there. The NASA government projects, I don't think, will end up getting to the moon. I think they're just too expensive and too risky. Starship will get us to the moon. Starship will set...

orbital fuel depot, Starship will get us to Mars. It's an incredibly well-designed vehicle. And he just needs to continually iterate it. People don't realize that when airplanes begin test flights...

Every test flight is a small iteration and airplanes may have hundreds of test flights in their test flight program before they get certified as safe for use. So we need to expect that Starship will have hundreds of test flights, each one of them getting more data and demonstrating increasing margins and safety until it's like, yep,

This is going to be great to operate, just like autonomous cars. But unfortunately, these incremental test flights are very visible. And when they go wrong, you know, New York Times is here to talk about it. I mean, it's explicit that they run dozens and dozens of experiments per flight because that gives them the maximum rate of learning, right? Yeah.

Yeah, of course. And they're exactly, they're changing the margins on and the material type. They're changing, you know, how they stage. They're changing, you know, their re-entry characteristics. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who,

who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, let's get to this fun article here. I'll read it from the BBC. Quantum teleportation is here.

Quantum teleportation is the instant transfer of quantum information, not matter, between two points. It uses quantum entanglement where two particles stay connected even miles apart. So the first real-world test worked over 30 kilometers of standard fiber optic cable carrying internet traffic. So this is the idea that if, you know, I remember...

Years ago, all of the quant traders moved their fiber optic nodes very close to the financial centers, right? Because, of course, nanoseconds matter to them. So I think they're going to be using quantum teleportation here for instant communication capability. If we end up using it for stock prices, I'll be very disappointed. But your point's right. Yeah.

Look, the amazing thing is that this is happening. I think the reality check is this will take quite a while to commercialize and get reliable and for kind of real-world applications. But the fact that they're able to do is mind-boggling. Yeah, it's fun to think about. Why do we think it'll take a while to commercialize?

to become real at scale other than everything takes a while. I spent some time at the Perimeter Institute at Waterloo where the BlackBerry founders had given a huge chunk of money and they'd broken up quantum kind of research into three chunks. One was the pure computation. The second was communication and the third was networking.

And you have to rebuild the entire stack of how you do it for each of those. So there's a whole bunch of innovation that has to happen and engineering that has to happen for all of those three segments to have reliable communications and teleportations, certainly at scale. So it'll take a while to get there. They've been going at this for

I think like close to 30 years. And they're now getting to this point. So I think it'll be a little while longer, but when it happens, holy moly. Yeah. And the nice thing is it's over standard fiber optics, right? It's not, it's not new equipment. We're not needing to build out a new network.

Here's another fun article in the realm of sort of future forward space. Electron dance breakthrough. Scientists uncover clues to practical superconductors. Researchers discovered superconductivity varies at the atomic scale within individual unit cells of iron-based materials. I won't read the rest, but we've been talking about one of the major benefits that AI will give us

is major breakthroughs in material sciences. And superconductivity would be a huge deal because we can generate, I mean, at the extreme, you can put, you know, solar cells around the planet. And if it's nighttime here in the U.S.,

You could have solar being generated in Europe and having super conductive cable back to the US and you basically get no loss. No transmission, no transmission loss, right? Which is about 30% or something. It depends on the distance, of course. But it's a huge amount. And so this would be very huge.

I remember Shai Mackinac, one of our GSP singularity students in 2010 or 2011 saying he figures we're about a decade away from understanding superconductivity and getting to room temperature superconductivity at the lab level. And so this sounds like we're coming close to that. Well, if it's a decade out, you know, we're going to have Gen 3 fission and fusion going

You know, and those are very small reactors, so they can be sprinkled around. Yeah. So it may not matter. There's a big race between this and distributed energy systems that makes it less relevant. Yeah, that's right. All right, let's talk one of our favorite subjects. At least it's a favorite subject for Salim and I. Actually, Dave, I don't know. Are you like a big...

Bitcoin believer. I know our third fraternity brother is. Well, you know, I was on the board of MicroStrategy back in the day. So I've been a shareholder for many, many years. So I wouldn't say I was ever, you know, a Bitcoin direct, you know, early adopter. But Mike Saylor has dragged me along. Let me ask the question, you know, do you own Bitcoin?

Yeah, MicroStrategy. Yeah. You own MicroStrategy, but not Bitcoin directly? No, not directly. Okay. Mostly because I'd lose the keys and you know. Well, fair enough. I can make some introductions.

So here is Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaking about the U.S. holding Bitcoin. Let's take a listen. But I think it's clear at this point that, you know, Bitcoin is a better form of money than gold. It is provably scarce, just like gold, but it's more portable and divisible. So you can actually use it has higher utility, I would say. And it was the best performing asset of the last 10 years. And so for Bitcoin,

store of value, I think it's going to be important for governments to hold this over time. It might start with being 1% of their reserves, but I think over time it'll

it'll come to be equal to or greater than gold reserves. Okay, great. So, Salim, I want you to weigh in here. I think this is mind-boggling to me. You know, I spoke at... So let me kind of give my reaction in a couple of ways. I spoke at a conference of 100 of the top partners of one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. And when I asked them...

How many of you understand the Byzantine generals problem? One put up their hand, right? And you're like, this thing is going to eat your lunch in terms of trust and reliability, which is essentially what you sell. And you don't understand the core innovation that's taken place in it, which really is unbelievable to me. When MicroStrategy has put Bitcoin on the balance sheet,

Every CFO in the goddamn world should be looking at that and saying, I need to put something in there. It's unbelievably responsible if you're the treasury secretary of some country not to put Bitcoin as a reserve thing. This should be happening in every country in the world.

And one of the things we've noticed before, or I've commented before, it's fascinating seeing the amount of my investment portfolio growing because of Bitcoin, not because I'm getting more Bitcoin, because it's just getting more valuable.

And so this is like irresponsible, financially irresponsible to the extreme level. I'll just give one other piece to this, which is I was talking to a major money management firm in one of the G7 countries. And they're like, yeah, we don't allow our wealth manager, wealth advisors to transact in Bitcoin at all. They're not allowed to advise it to their clients because they deem it too uncertain and too risky.

And you're like, look at the goddamn value over time. I've got a better... They're scared of the legal liability.

If the thing and I'm saying to them, do you realize the liability if you don't recommend it? During the course of our conversation here, Bitcoin is now at ninety six thousand four fifty. It's gone up fifteen hundred bucks during the course of our conversation. Well, let's try and drive it up by talking about it more. I'll give you another case study. I'm the chairman and majority or controlling shareholder of two companies, about a thousand employees.

One of them has about $50 million in cash, just sitting there in cash. The other has $125 million in cash, ever quote, public company. $125 million in cash and making a lot of cash every quarter. I gave both CEOs green light, put any amount of that you want into Bitcoin and borrow it. Do what Mike Saylor did. Neither reacted or acted on it. And I don't want to interfere. Otherwise, I'll be involved.

But it's amazing. Well, I mean, you know. They're both great, great leadership teams. I don't want to get in their way. Yeah, I mean, we did the same thing, Salim, at XPRIZE. We were holding a large amount of capital and it was like. Yes. You know. It was like pulling teeth. Both on my board. I need you to help convince the other old tier, old FOE board members.

uh excuse me if you're listening guys you're brilliant and i love you but can we please put our treasury to bitcoin and an easy thing to do there would be to take a small fraction of it you know and and that's one and just let her do a one cycle around yes small fraction like 80 percent yeah yeah well it makes mike saylor all the more impressive that he uh you know without any role you know now you have a role model but without any role model it's

But this is the part that drives me nuts. Now that we have a role model, right? If you're a CFO of a public company, what the hell are you doing? Yeah. Sorry. It is, you're doing what you've always done because that's the least risky and you can't get blamed for doing that. And the only, so listen, this is the same thing in all technology companies. It is the founder led company.

you know, exponential tech AI first companies that are going to slay everybody else. And so when when Michael Saylor, you know, again, by way of background, Michael was a fraternity brother with Dave Blunden and myself.

at MIT at Theta Delta Chi, our fraternity. And when you're when you're a sailor, you can say we are doing this. And he has a very small board and he basically sat them down, gave them homework and got them to back him.

And he's just been at it. So the first week of May, he actually sells equity and buys another 180 million of Bitcoin. So today, very impressive, MicroStrategy owns basically a half a million Bitcoin.

which is about 2.8% of all the Bitcoin in circulation worth $52.8 billion. Michael owns about

17,000 more Bitcoin than I do. Oh, you're doing well. You know, Mike, not only did he have to do exactly what you said, but he had to go over to Mike Willans of Fidelity, you know, another MIT alum and say, hey, I need to custody this somewhere. Can Fidelity build out an entire business unit to custody Bitcoin? And Mike, you know,

you know, to his credit, Mike Willans built it out at Fidelity. That's a lot of difficult work that's now been done for you. Yes. But, you know, pioneering, it was very hard for a lot of reasons, including that one. You can't just keep the keys in your, you know, your shoebox at the

office headquarters you know you got to have some kind of multi-sig protocols and all sorts of stuff yeah so i just checked you know the market cap of micro strategies that closed today was 105.4 billion while holding 52.8 billion of coins and you know the value it's being given for his mindset and what he does is extraordinary it is

Funny, I was sitting down with my mom who's in her 80s going through her estate and she had this spreadsheet she put together and there's this line item with this huge number in it. I was like, what the hell is that? She said, oh, you know, remember when you worked at MicroStrategy when you were like in your 20s? I was like, yeah. She said, I bought some MicroStrategy back then.

I was like, wait, you're still holding that? And she said, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know how to sell it, so I didn't. Go mom. That is so great. That is fantastic. Well, I think that's our last story for today. But, you know,

It's so much fun. You guys have been as much of a blast as I am. God, I look forward to this all week. It's really a great checkpoint where we can kind of go, okay, what happened? Bring some slides into play and just take a checkpoint. I find that it's a really great cadence thing.

Plus all the viewers. I hear that, by the way, from a few of the folks watching. They're like, it's really great because we can kind of every week or two stop in and see what's going on. We feel like we're caught up. Yeah. I mean, that's the goal here. And so, you know, if you're on YouTube in the comments below, tell us what else you'd like us to cover.

You know, you can happily tell me how much more brilliant Dave is and Salim is than I am. That's fine. But so it's it's fun. So when we say WTF just happened in tech, well, there you get a slice of it. We'll see you guys in a week or two when enough stuff starts mounting, when we say, OK, we got to get the bad back together again. Awesome. All right.

- Selim, where are you? - Great conversation, guys. - Where are you now? Are you back in New York? - I'm back in New York for like three days and then I go to Italy for three days. - What is going on? - It's just a busy time right now. - You're insane. I love you for it. And Dave, you're back in Cambridge at headquarters? - I'm in Cambridge and I'll tell you one thing, Peter. I love every time I talk to Daniela Roos over at CSAIL or Alex Wiesner Gross or Alexander Amini over at Liquid AI,

I can say, hey, we've got this WTF podcast coming up. What's on your mind? And they're like, yes. It's just it's such a good way to keep the dialogue. I love it. So I want you guys like piling in your best stories, those secret stories. You've got you've got Alex Wiesner Gross is a super weapon there. And Salim, you've got an entire EXO community. So bring them in.

And see you guys very soon. Thanks for your time. Always a pleasure. Great conversation, guys. Thanks, Peter. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds.

If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmadness.com slash subscribe. That's dmadness.com slash subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots.

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