I do think that we have achieved AGI. It cannot diffuse. And the reason it cannot diffuse has nothing to do with the technology. It has everything to do with the buildup until you actually build it out so everybody can feel it or a plurality of human beings can feel it. It's just something that exists in a lab.
Welcome to the singularity. Anthropic announced the Anthropic public benefit fund. 5% is somewhere between 75 to 100 billion dollars.
I think that these guys kind of walk the walk and talk the talk. I don't think that there's something nefarious there. I think they genuinely believe.
Next year I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many. There are 72 million Americans under age 18. So that's roughly 10.5 billion in total, $146 per kid.
This is really the better version of the giving pledge.
Teaching this entire generation to own equities is a really good move. I think.
Now the big question. Can Trump accounts contributed from billionaires and frontier labs actually move the needle for the average American? And I think.
Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures.
Welcome to Moonshots, everyone. Your number one podcast in all things AI and exponential, your front row seat to the accelerating singularity. Today I'm here with the original crew, AWG, our in-house ASI. Alex, good to see you. You changed your orchid today.
Nah, it's just a floodfill.
Okay. Dave Blondon, our improario of AI investing and Sel is our warlord against linear thinking. Salem, you're home.
I am actually home. Thank God. Loving every second of it.
And from the All-In podcast, the man his co-hosts call chairman dictator Chamath Palihapitiya. Chamath, a pleasure to have you on our crossover episode.
Thank you. It's great to be included.
Now, at the end of this, I want you to tell me which of the Greek moderators you prefer more, me or Jal. Okay.
J. You.
But for the 1% of people who don't know who you are, let me do a proper introduction. So, Chamath was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Ottawa with very little, working at Burger King to help pay the bills, make ends meet. He became AOL's youngest vice president, then built the growth team that helped Facebook to a billion users. And since founding Social Capital in 2011, he's been on a rocket ship, purchased 10% of the Golden State Warriors, put the first check into Grok, which Nvidia just licensed in a $20 billion deal. Today, he's a CEO of 8090, which raised 135 million this summer to build the world's legacy software with AI. Chamath, a pleasure to have you on the fun side of the podcast universe.
God, I mean, the way you say it, it just looks like it all works.
Hey, what you overlooked there, Chamath is shedding all material possessions. So, the Golden State Warriors, I guess, is going to be off the docket, right?
I mean, parts of my family still own part of it, but I do not.
And everybody, I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and abundance provocator. Our mission is always help you understand what just happened, what it means, keep you optimistic and abundance minded as we go through the singularity. And this is another crazy week. But before we start, I just had the most amazing lunch with William Shatner and his son-in-law Joel. So spent two hours with Captain Kirk, my childhood hero, and he was grilling me about geothermal energy and what the best companies for drilling are.
And I was just so impressed. He's 95 years old and the guy has got just an incredible passion for life. So, and guess what, Seem, he's joining us at Abundant Summit this year.
I am shocked that Spock wasn't your childhood hero.
No, no, it was the guy who got the girls for sure.
And the one who was like just pushing the universe forward.
Well, Chamath, it's incredibly awesome to get you on the pod here. You know, back during COVID, my oldest son, Daniel, came to me and said, 'I just saw the most amazing podcast ever. There are actually four people on the planet who know what they're talking about. You've got to check it out.' So, it was like a lifesaver through that whole window where everyone was trapped at home. So, I've been a huge fan ever since. So, it's great. It's great to meet you.
Thank you for saying that.
Yeah. I think all of us are all podcast fans.
It's the one podcast I never miss. Ever.
Because you see, you miss this one all the time. I missed. Wait a time. How does that work? But I don't miss that one.
Because you're someplace on the planet.
Yeah. No, sure. The two podcasts I listen to is this one when we record and All-In.
We're turning into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with All-In crossover here. I think Where's Iron Man? Where's Doctor Strange?
I see. I see. And then we're going to have an internal war like Avengers against Avengers.
Inevitably.
All right. Let's open with a story that's either the most generous move in corporate history or the cleverest IPO marketing ploy ever. So on Sunday, Anthropic announced the Anthropic public benefit fund. Let me read from their post. Quote, 'Subject to stockholder approval, 5% of Anthropic shares will be committed today with an additional 2% added at the board's discretion for every 50% increase in the company's value above a set baseline.' The post continues, 'It is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives. We are instead directing that equity towards public benefit.' So, what is it worth? Anthropic is heading for a roughly $2 trillion IPO, though 1.5 trillion is being floated and at that range 5% is somewhere between 75 to 100 billion. Now add the founders pledge. When Anthropic started, all seven co-founders pledged to give away 80% of their equity. About half of the employees are also pledging shares with a matching grant. Anthropic says altogether roughly 20% of the company is dedicated to the public good, placing it somewhere between 300 to 400 billion compared to OpenAI Foundation's value of 130 to 365 billion. So, it's a lot of money going towards public benefit. The reactions on X were instant and varied. Elon said, quote, 'I recommend giving the shares directly to the public. This is what I'm going to do.' And more on this in our second story. AI analyst Andrew Curran said, 'It sounds to me like they're planning their own form of self-directed UBI.' Brad Gerstner said, 'It's an extraordinary gift,' but warned about quote 'foundation wealth concentration' and said, 'I hope a meaningful portion of AI wealth is directed as direct dividends.' And then Palmer Luckey came out and said, 'This reeks of USAID 2.0.' So, Chamath, let me go to you first. You're an investor. So, is 5% donation right before an IPO generous or is it a brilliant way to get goodwill?
I mean, I think it's none of those things. I think it's more this is their philosophical bent and you know they're staying true to their word. I mean the idea that when you start a company you would give up 80% of the gains even before you have an idea of what the terminal outcome is is pretty incredible. So I think that these guys kind of walk the walk and talk the talk. I don't think that there's something nefarious there. I think they genuinely believe that what they're doing is the right thing. I think there's a different question which is if you just look at the history of these sorts of philanthropies and philanthropically minded efforts they generally don't turn out that well.
Absent of a feud, and so I think the real question is what is their fail safe to course correct if this mean reverts and becomes what you know everything else in the world has overwhelmingly looked like when philanthropically minded people give large sums of money away in big bursts, which is you know not a lot of quantifiable outcome. I think that's the really big question.
You know one of the critiques I have of the giving pledge is people are pledging half of their Are you a member of the giving pledge by the way?
No, the giving pledge is Okay, great. Thank you. That's You didn't ask me that.
Let me be direct. Right. So, people pledge to give away half their wealth while they're still alive, etc., etc. But the greatest, you know, the greatest ability you have is not just your wealth. It's your connections. It's what you do. I've always said there should be an impact pledge where people, you know, pledge their wealth in a measurable impactful way and you monitor it and people make a difference. They came and pitched me about the giving pledge a decade ago and my take was this thing is a scam and reason is.
It's reputation washing because they had no the only goal was to put my name on a list and to add my number to their number so that they could walk around with a bigger number and I was like this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I'm like what do I get in return for all of this and you know it's like you get to go to a Um, and there's like a weekend where there's like a get together weekend.
And so, look, I think that there's a lot of people that probably thought it was on the margins the right thing to do, but it was pretty pretty obvious to me that it was pretty stupid.
Didn't Warren Buffett bail out of that recently too? He signed up. Well, just recently, but he was right there at the front end kind of like and you know, it's a big deal when you say no to these guys a decade ago because like it looks like you're doing something wrong and they're doing everything right. But it but.
That's a sign of the times actually. There was a lot of social pressure on many many fronts that has since course corrected. But yeah, that was one of the first pure pressure, arm twisted. But if you said no, you get this negative reputation.
I mean, here's what I don't understand. What I don't understand is like if you're capable of making incredible gains in society economically,
what it probably says about you is that you are at a minimum clever. Because you know sometimes you can get lucky but if you're unlucky afterwards you kind of give it all back, you know. So in order to sort of like make and sustain wealth, you have to be relatively clever, well-timed, well-read, well-reasoned. You make all of this progress. What it says about you is actually a fair amount. It says that you know you're quite a successful evolved person. Doesn't mean that there aren't evolved people that don't have money, but it just but what I am saying is that the people you know that typically tend to become hyper successful are functional people. And then the idea that those functional high achieving people would all of a sudden just let some other person that they don't know to be smart or capable all of a sudden put a bunch of money to work. Sounds stupid. It's like you're the smart one. You should put it to work. You know, at a minimum raise your kids because they're likely to be as smart as you. So there's all these ways in which you can probably think about philanthropy or give it away like you know Elon's doing which you'll talk about I'm sure with the Trump accounts. There's so many scaled ways to do it. This was the one that had nothing to do with actually achieving anything and everything to do with just pure pressure and reputation washing.
Yeah, agreed. Your greatest gifts are not your money. It's your intelligence and your relationships and your ability to make difference in the world. Alex, what's your take on these public benefit funds?
Yeah, I think there's an elephant in the room. There are many elephants in many rooms. And this one was what I've called a hyper tithe. This notion that frontier AI labs, which many, not all, think are well positioned to suck up much of the value in the economy, there's an increasing anchored expectation that they will donate some quantum of their equity to the public benefit. Maybe it's 5% hypothetically. 5% is of course also the magic number that in the US nonprofit foundations are required to distribute every year. So I think there was a latent expectation out there that Anthropic probably seeded by OpenAI and others would say take 5-ish% of their equity in connection perhaps with their forthcoming IPO and that they would donate it to a US sovereign wealth fund or the 538 Trump accounts or something some way for the general American public to benefit from all of their newfound liquidity. And the fact as it appears that Anthropic is not doing that, that instead they're creating a private fund and not donating 5% to the general public, I construe as a snub to this particular administration, a snub to the idea of a universal basic equity. Granted, Congress hasn't acted to create a sovereign wealth fund yet, although there was some interest from the executive last year in doing that. Congress hasn't yet acted. I think what the whole world is waiting for would be in my dream scenario an act of Congress. I don't think this could come purely from executive order, an act of Congress that would create a sort of a middle tier of company that's halfway between a nonprofit required to distribute 5% of their assets per year and a general for-profit that distributes none of its assets that somehow gives a certain percentage of its equity to the US, to the public, to the government or to a sovereign wealth fund which also I would argue needs to be created in return for something but Congress hasn't done that. White House I think with the best of motivations tried to put together a sovereign wealth fund last year. Didn't quite happen yet. And I think the question that I have is in a better world where Anthropic could have grown into this. It's not quite a public benefit corporation, but some new class of company that gives up a certain percentage of equity, not cash and not free cash flow and not income to the general public for public benefit. What would they get in return? To Chamath's earlier point of the giving pledge. What would Chamath have wanted from giving pledge in a hypothetical better world in return for?
To be left alone. So, okay. So, maybe.
I would have given him half the money. They just left me alone.
Well, the anthropic version of being left alone maybe lightness of regulation, which starts to smell like a safety cartel or some sort of light touch regulatory treatment, be left alone by the government. Something in return for giving up 5% of their equity and I think that's the part of the equation that's still missing.
Two or three thoughts and you know this whole construct of philanthropy is still a very scarcity era response right a company becomes successful creates wealth decides how to redistribute it. I think as we move to kind of an exponential abundance world you need new models of ownership, participation and direct access to services. I think this is the bigger challenge. The good news is this is actually starting it's the beginning of the discussion of new economic institutions and I think that's the good news around this. Going to force that conversation because you got to distinguish the philanthropy from the structural economic reform that's needed because we're still taxing labor and that's a kind of an archaic structure in a world where AI will take over more and more of that.
Yeah. You know, interesting, Dave, the reality is this philanthropic money, if you want to call it that, is actually controlled by the for-profit company.
Mhm. So, and I've been on many many boards and when you authorize the board to contribute another 2% for each 50% valuation increase, man, did you just make this a stressful board to be on? Like, how are you going to make that decision? Like, you've got the shareholders over here saying, 'No, don't take the dilution.' And then you've got the public over there saying, 'You're authorized to do it. What's the decision, guys?' That's just a.
It kind of punts a really tough choice down the road. I think there's going to be so much demand from the public to own part of these companies. I think this is just the very beginning of the process by which these large hyperscalers start having sort of an expectation that part of their company, part of their equity is going to be distributed. I think this is just the early days.
Yeah. Or for anyone who lost the thread of the drama here, you know, remember Anthropic was born out of disgruntled OpenAI people who didn't trust OpenAI to be safe with ASI or SI now. And so that was their founding and all the MIT people, brilliant, brilliant researchers that I know that went there went there specifically because they trusted Dario to be that voice of sane and safe and rational AI. So that's core. I think much later when he said, 'Hey, I only own 1% of this company. We need to reclassify our shares so that we're the seven of us are super voting control.' That could be spun very negatively. So, I think now and you look at the memes of Dario, you know, he was never me'd in a bad light right up until recently. Now, with the IPO coming, like look all over X. I mean, he's painted in all kinds of different lights.
It's tough. No, I think part of the issue is it really there isn't an established regime, a broadly established regime for the US government to tax equity. It can tax income and it can tax cash flows. There are more exotic ways one could imagine for the government to tax and distribute equity itself. But generally in the US this is an unfamiliar concept. More familiar would be the US government would tax profits for example or capital gains for example and then distribute via whatever means including sty checks cash free cash to the general public but the government being able to tax equity and distribute equity isn't a very familiar muscle movement right now for the US government overall and I suspect if we're going to get to a regime which many would like to of universal basic equity or universal basic dividends. Being able to tax and distribute equity, not just cash, I think would need to become a new muscle movement. And maybe if that existed, perhaps Anthropic would be taking a different position and not just keeping this 5% as a private benefit fund and would instead be more open perhaps to public distribution.
I think that there's a really important concept that was brought up earlier. But I think the question is what is the right level of taxation for labor versus capital?
And there probably is an argument to be made that capital could be taxed much more punitively than labor and that maybe labor should not be taxed at all. And how would you make that argument? You'd probably say that in the wealth inequality distribution, the percentage of wealth that comes from labor versus capital is inversely indexed to the place in that hierarchy in which you're in. So the, you know, first percentile of salaries versus the 99th percentile of salaries. And the 99th percentile of wealth, you know, the 99th percentile of wealth is mostly capital, very little labor, I'm guessing. And the opposite would be true at the first percentile. And so maybe there's something to be said where you just say, you know, as you go up you have to pay much more incrementally for capital.
Which by the way has like an interesting effect which it effectively is your gate on profligate money printing by central banks anyways. So like if they, you know, create fake liquidity and that ends up in your pocket as capital that you could otherwise deploy, you know, charging larger take rates on that is probably not unreasonable. Meanwhile, if you tax labor at nothing, the people whose wealth is 99% labor all of a sudden benefit quite deeply. And there's probably something that's like very simple there that mathematically works and you just have to find the break even point on capital. That may be the simplest and most effective thing that people could do. I think.
I agree with that premise and I think maybe there's a concept that we're circling which is many would regard as unpopular but the idea of taxing capital more effectively. Of course historically the problem with taxing capital is you want to tax the gain not the capital itself. If you tax the capital itself we're talking about wealth taxes in some sense. And part of the problem is wealth taxes at least in many quarters are wildly unpopular. So in if however arguendo if a large chunk of the economies the American economy's wealth were concentrated in just a handful of entities then suddenly not proposing this as a desirable outcome but suddenly the idea of a wealth tax becomes a lot more practical because the US government could by hook or by crook say to say all of the frontier labs I want to tax a few% of your wealth in return for following XYZ positive treatment. I suspect that's where this may go, but I guess we'll find out.
Well, let's move on to this.
Very slippery slope to try to find wealth.
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Let's move on to the second shoe to drop. So Elon just didn't criticize Anthropic. Within hours he answered. So early Monday morning on X, he said, 'Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.' He had 520,000 likes and 27 million views in less than a day. President Trump responded, quote, 'A big thank you to our legendary friend Elon Musk for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX stock to millions of American children through Trump Accounts. This is exactly what was envisioned when we created Trump Accounts, bringing together the great private sector, Elon and so many more to invest in our children, by far our greatest, most important asset, and give every American child a piece of the American dream. Thank you, Elon.' So, let's do the math for a second. There are 72 million Americans under age 18, and SpaceX current stock price about 148 bucks today. So that's roughly 10.5 billion in total, $146 per kid, about 1.1% of Elon's stake being shared. For context, last December, Michael and Susan Dell gave 6.25 billion, about 250 bucks exactly to Trump accounts for 25 million children. Unlike the Dell gift of cash, Elon's transferring equity. And honestly, you know, ownership beats handouts. I think we would all agree with that. And a paycheck gets spent and shares compound. So, we previously talked about SpaceX hitting 10 trillion, hundred trillion dollars and Elon's recent prediction that SpaceX could become quote worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy. The replies on X were classic. The top reply with 30,000 likes was quote, 'I identify as a kid in America.' So now the big question, can Trump accounts contributed from billionaires and frontier labs actually move the needle for the average American? And I think the answer is probably no. So the average US household is pulling in $87,000 a year. And to pay every American just $10,000 a year takes about 2.6 trillion per year. So Anthropic's and Elon's philanthropy is really just, you know, kind of a gesture, not a funding source. Even the biggest fortunes on earth are just one-time paychecks. So Chamath, you know, you've spoken in the past about a birth dividend. I love that idea in which the government invests $2,000 for every newborn in the market locked in until age 65. I'm wondering if Elon's going to put a lock in requirement on his shares as well. I hope he does so it's not just, you know, liquidated and spent right out the bat. So, what do you think of Elon's move here, Chamath?
I think it's great. I think that this is really the better version of the giving pledge. Yeah. And um.
I think that this is the right way for most of us who want to contribute and don't have the infrastructure or the capacity to understand how to discern what is a good nonprofit from a bad nonprofit from a good NGO from a bad NGO. Direct contributions into the accounts of kids who can then be a participant in the experiment that is capitalism and democracy in the United States is a no-brainer. I think it's like unbelievably impressive and unbelievably generous and I think that it has a lot of legs.
Yeah, it's great. My kids every dollar they earn they put half of into stocks they've all put into SpaceX. I wonder where they got influenced by that. And then savings and philanthropy and then their spending budget. Dave, I'm curious. 72 million people now own SpaceX shares at the end of this. Is that a risk if they dump it? You know, what's that going to do to the stock?
No, no, no. It's 1% like you said, it's not going to move the needle if they all dump it. But I think the reason this is brilliant is because we've all discussed on this pod before that the future of value comes through asset ownership and not through employment, not through paychecks because what is AI not going to do two years from today, three years from today? I was over at MIT actually yesterday talking to a bunch of undergraduates and said like your window of opportunity to tap your big MIT brain is about the next two years. But do you really think that AI can outthink you in every conceivable way more than two years from today? Okay. I mean like that is your window of opportunity. You got to move fast. But that doesn't mean wealth goes away. It all moves to asset value. So teaching this entire generation to own equities is a really good move, I think. And yeah, if they dump it, well then their friends will tell them they're idiots for dumping it when SpaceX, you know, Elon, you said a second ago that this doesn't move the needle on the needs of Americans, but Elon believes SpaceX is going to be bigger than the current total global economy.
Yeah. 1 to 10 quadrillion dollars is the estimate. Yeah. So, you know, maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but that'll keep these kids engaged with each other. The ones that dump it will be talking to the ones who didn't. Something good is going to come out of that conversation. I think it's really cool.
Salem, your thoughts, pal.
Chad, very quickly, just to build on what Dave said, I think the fact that you get all of these kids looking at the now you have broad participation in the appreciation of capital, I think is a really good thing. And I think that's the conversation that's going to make the much much bigger difference like a 100x compared to the actual dollar amount because now all these kids are thinking in that modality as they grow up watching this comparing it seeing who sold who didn't sell. It's awesome as a conversation.
I also think this might set a trend. You know what if all other public newly public companies that want to be cool with the next generation just follow the same trend. Then you know you get 50 100 200 copycats then it really does move the needle.
Yeah, it does move the needle and I don't know if you guys have worked in companies that have had ESP plans but employee share purchase plans where you contribute on a quarterly basis and at the end of the quarter they buy you that defined amount of stock at the low point of the quarter. There's all of these mechanisms that induce you to buy the stock of the place that you work to your point. So if all workers and employers embrace this, I think it's a big deal. I also think that this begins the very difficult conversation about moving from defined benefits to defined contributions.
And it shines a light on the fact that these defined benefit retirement programs are insufficient and they're poorly funded. And when you see on the other side, you know, people will say, well, why can't we do more forms of defined contributions? And that'll be the right conversation. And I think you have to have a starting point. So I think that Trump accounts and you know Elon's gift I think starts that conversation.
Which is very important.
Alex, you know Elon said this will be the first of many. I'm curious if this is going to start setting expectations by all the public of Frontier Labs.
Yeah, maybe. I think other than the obvious universal basic equity angle, I think it's also potentially very clever marketing. Imagine an entire generation of Americans who feel economically aligned with the outcome of presumably a merged SpaceX Tesla. Suddenly everyone owns equity not in the general market which arguably would be a slightly better outcome for democracy but everyone owns a share in one company that this is the one company that every American owns a share of and now feels economic alignment with maybe regulatory alignment. Think of all the I was out in California in Santa Monica, Peter, your neck of the woods and walking down Santa Monica place and there was one of these protests, call it protesting Elon right in front of the Tesla dealership there. Imagine an alternative America Republic of Santa Monica for sure.
Yeah. Imagine an alternative America where every person in a generation owns an economic stake in Elon's prolific economic output. Would that be a very different political America? I think it probably would be.
I think it's a brilliant move. You know, I texted with him, God, about four months ago. I was trying to see if he would fund a $10 billion, well, actually, $10 billion X-Prizes, and he goes, 'Interesting, but I'm going to give my shares away.' And so, he's been thinking about this for some time. Alex, you just mentioned, and it's in the news today, that Musk says Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to discuss the merger. So, that game is a foot. Not a surprise.
Isn't that the obvious next move after the Tesla Roadster? We didn't get a chance to talk about it as a full group, but in my mind, the Roadster announcement that the car hops, it doesn't hover. What was the point of that? In my mind, it was 90% just to secure or help to secure a Tesla SpaceX merger.
Yeah, for sure. Well, I love this and kudos to Elon for making this happen. You know, it's one other point. You know, Elon's talked about universal high income. And I think the only way this materializes if everybody gets a piece of the pie and grows with it, right? They couple to the singularity. They don't sort of like go off the offramp here. Anyway, so our next story I want to hit on is a three-part series of clips coming from the Walter Isaacson interview with Elon today published on builders. In our first clip, Isaacson asked Elon, you know, whether we're heading towards a post-cist world. Elon said money is going to stop being relevant at some point in the future.
The future look like that money becomes relevant. I mean there will be still currency but I think currency we mentioned fundamental physics metrics like you know power wattage and time mass and energy mass and power or energy basically. So but conventional currency will not matter in the future. So that's my guess. I think it's pretty obvious. And as soon as you start getting to many orders of magnitude bigger than Earth's economy, satisfying whatever humans can possibly think of for their needs is very easy. You know, if you're several orders magnitude bigger than the Earth's economy, then providing humans whatever good services they can think of that they might want is trivial.
And so what do we do then as humans? What gives us meaning? How do we organize ourselves?
I do struggle with this question. I think people will find ways to be happy in the same way that people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they're not working. But I think the reality is that humans will not there won't be anything that humans can do that the AI and the robots can't do better.
So you know if currency is being measured in watts and tons whoever owns the power plants the mines and the rockets owns the money supply. And today it's a pretty short list. So, Chamath, you've locked up what nearly 6 gigawatts of power. Do you feel like you're holding, you know, humanity's future currency?
Yeah, I'm very aligned with what he's saying. I think the different way of thinking about this, less eloquent, but may make sense, is that at some point you can only debase a fiat currency so much until it becomes fundamentally worthless and you have to shift.
To an alternative way of measuring value. And if you instead move the measurement to what is the implied energy or the implied effort that that currency gives you. I think that's a more symbolic representation of future value. So you know take a cryptocurrency that takes I don't know n number of watts to compute or you know n number of joules or whatever. That's a more valuable thing in the future than pick your fiat currency on which you know it's just completely uncoupled to any form of value. So if this one asset actually has you know some amount of effort that was burned to make it and the other one was just a decision by a bureaucrat I think the latter becomes far less useful. So the question is probably like how do these assets trade in a more fungible way and as a mechanism of exchange and I think typically or I think if I had to guess it would be more like you have things like data centers, things like power plants, things like turbines, things like net gas supplies. So you have effectively like embedded compute, embedded energy and around that you have some sort of like crypto token that represents some unit of that access and that's how you exchange value.
Interesting. You know he's talked about a post-capitalist society for some time you know he's famously said don't save for the future. Do you sort of concur with that?
Well I think what I would say is maybe slightly different is like I think saving in the conventional sense is what we've all been taught to do there hasn't been a bridge that's been created where you can save in an alternative sense.
And these other new forms so a different way where one could save in a new form of value would be where when you have enough local compute you participate in the economy in a way where now you actually do represent value. And that's different in a traditional sense where the work that which we get paid for today effectively goes away because it's done largely via AI and so the compensation for that work then changes materially. But on the other hand, if you have resources that you can put into different pools to accomplish different tasks, that I think will have value. So that is sort of how I think people will make that transition.
You know, Alex, we've been talking on the pod for a while that GDP sucks as a measure. So we're going to get a Kardashev scale as a new measure of wealth for a country.
Maybe the premise of the Kardashev levels though is energy output. And I'm not convinced, I'm not as convinced as perhaps others are that energy wants to be the ultimate unit of currency. I suspect it'll be something more exotic or to Elon's point entirely irrelevant and not even the right question. I have conversations with AIs or SIs all the time about what the future of capitalism looks like, what the future of economics looks like. My working hypothesis is that 30 years from now it will just look unrecognizably different and we'll look back on conversations like well is energy is land is powered land are these the right units of currency we'll look back and we'll laugh at these discussions.
Intermediately they will be intermediate value.
Oh I totally the terminal the terminal who knows I totally agree with you.
By the way the GDP thing I agree with you as well GDP is so so dumb so basic Elon loves his little parable of people passing feces back and forth or whatever and calling that.
You can't just let that hang. You got to tell the actual story.
I sure interview podcast. You can get.
I short-handed Elon politely. But I do think that if I had to guess what does the successor, call it capitalism 2.0, Charlie Straw style to money look like? I suspect I imagine a world imagine a world where 30 years from now the ability to make intelligent resource allocation and other allocation decisions is a lot easier. Right now it's hard to intelligently allocate capital. So it all gets pushed to the edge and we live in an ipencil world where all of the decisions live at the edge. Imagine alternatively without this being misconstrued as some sort of centralized planning or communist utopian vision. Imagine a world where human civilization thanks to super intelligence is just so smart that it's able to model its own needs and doesn't need to push resource allocation decisions to the edge. So the notion of a currency as a way to do distributed resource planning doesn't make any sense and instead intelligent decisions I don't want to say can be centralized because I think that's probably also the wrong metaphor but can be done.
No I don't want to imply centralized planning I want to imply that humanity as a whole becomes so super intelligent that all of civilization is capable of making to the extent anything remains scarce is capable as a whole of making those decisions and As a result, money changing hands between individual actors makes a lot less sense.
Well, well, Kardashev, you know, we're talking 30 years in the future for everything to be in space, but between here and 30 years, it's mostly terrestrial and it's we're not going to get another chance to have a guy who has six gigawatts locked up to pick his brain. I mean, this is such an incredibly brilliant investment. But we know you know from I don't know Chamath if you're invested in Positron or LightQ or we have our company Lightwave there's a lot of efficiency coming to data centers and as the chip costs get undercut by new designs the power costs are still there and so right now when people build these data centers they think oh well it's only 10% power cost the other 90% all goes to Nvidia but that's going to invert and the power costs will still be there so I think between here and 30 years from now, Elon is exactly right. The currency that is most dominant in that next 30-year window is wattage and tonnage. Tonnage to build the data centers, wattage to power them. But I think if you can find a power supply today, it's the investment theme of the decade by far. And Chamath, I'd love to get your thoughts on like you got an early start on this. I don't know if you did it secretly or how it accumulated, but love to get your insights for the audience.
I think the way to think about it is when you look at load growth, just take the United States because I think that's a more tractable example. When you look at the load growth and you look at the sources of load growth, they're relatively
pedestrian. It's more electric cars, more electric fridges, more electric televisions, PCs, laptops, and data centers. But it's just broadly speaking that we are more of an electrified society. So there's just like this, you know, this demand of a need for electrons basically. And then when you look on the supply side, there's huge issues even if you assume that every project that's planned actually gets not only permitted and green lit, but also built on time and on budget. And when you net those two things out, by 2050, we're still 1.4 terawatt hours short, which is effectively six Californias worth of electricity. So there is no world in which we catch up. And then people's reflexive reaction to that is but nuclear. And I'm like, well, I just think like, you know, the problem with SMRs, as an example, is the S in the MR. It's like, you know, what people don't realize is it's the same unit effort to get an SMR approved as an MR approved, or as an R approved, as an LR approved, a large reactor, because you know you're going through state, local ordinances and people and conflicts and push back and all of this stuff that does not change whether the form factor is it goes under your daughter's bed or it sits, you know, over there and it's gigantic.
So we're just massively short and that's where my thesis started, which was just that observation. Then, you know, where I spent a little bit of — well, not a little bit, a lot of my time was what is the most tractable all-of-the-above solution set, because, you know, once you realize that we're so short, you immediately abandon all of the rhetoric around climate change because you're like, just give me anything: oil, gas, coal, wind, solar, nuclear. And if you look at them all on just a total, you know, cost basis, what jumps off the page is solar is slightly a little bit more expensive than wind, but they're the cheapest. But it's just much faster. It's two years. It's do no harm. It's plunk it on the ground and off you go.
So I spent just a bunch of time accumulating solar assets and then that accidentally led me into the data centers because it was like, you know, through Nvidia and Groq, what I realized was, my gosh, the capacity buildout was so upside down because of all these constraints, because the data center is like this incredibly temporal moment where all energy — and energy meaning like people's energy, anger — they all meet right there. And so, you know, you have the permitting issues, you have the pushback issues, you have the political issues, you have pushback against the oligarchy, you have capitalism, you have wealth inequality, all concentrated in that thing. And so, you know, about two years ago, I started to kind of parcel together assets that I thought would be valuable in a world where that looks like it is the scarcest asset.
Not that's how I underw— that's impressive. That pays.
Yeah, yeah. It wasn't cheap. It wasn't cheap. But and by the way, just to be clear, there's huge issues with that. Meaning, even when you have these assets, when you actually try to get them turned on and get them built, my gosh, it's incredibly complicated. The funding cycle is very complicated. The supply chain is very complicated. The labor shortages on critical people because these are licensed, you know, skilled workers. You can't just, you know, grab some bumpkin off the street or go to like, you know, I don't know, Craigslist. Like, I mean, you have to go and find like a licensed master electrician. They're very, very hard to find. They cost a lot of money.
When you start to put all of this stuff together, we are probably going to see a massive, massive, massive compute shortage in the next three or four years. Massive.
So I love the fact that you said that so many — that's — well, so many people come back and say, what are we going to do? What's my purpose? Where's my mission? Everything you just outlined for the next five years.
Yeah, all this. Look, I do think that we have achieved AGI. It cannot diffuse, and the reason it cannot diffuse has nothing to do with the technology. It has everything to do with the buildup, and until you actually build it out so everybody can feel it, or a plurality of human beings can feel it, it's just something that exists in a lab. Now that has value, don't get me wrong, but I would not underestimate the difficulty. And if you look at, for example, the Anthropic S1 that just dropped today, it's shocking to me that the claim that they have to put as a risk factor, which I would never have thought would have happened for a company growing this fast and so powerful with all this money, the hyperscalers will not give them compute.
I've never seen that before.
Yeah, it's wild. No, it's a really good indicator. You know, also Elon was saying there's 15 gigawatts of chips just waiting for liquid-cooled data centers to fall into. That's a massive asset depreciating idly.
It's worse than that. There's that. Then there's also the non-Vera Rubin stack chips, the older generation that are also still sitting. There's a bunch of these guys that have these things sitting in inventory. Those aren't being used. Then even when you try to do liquid cooling, if you saw what happened with NScale and Microsoft, you had two massive leaks of coolant two times in a row where Microsoft finally just triggered the liquidated damages clause and exited the deal.
So everybody thinks this stuff is easy and it turns out, well, again, you know, back to Elon, as he's proven, physics is really hard and building things and mechanically building things is really hard and it's probably particularly hard because we've spent, you know, 20 years teaching the younger generation of kids who should have been learning how to do these trades just to, you know, be on TikTok and social media and video games. And so, you know, the ability to actually build these things is gone.
Yeah. And it's not just trades, too. There's regulatory components. If you're a good negotiator, you can get involved. There's planning. It really involves every human skill. And it just drives me nuts that so many people are saying, 'Well, look, math is cooked. Teaching is soon to be cooked. I guess I'll just sit around and watch, you know, late-night TV and maybe play some video games.' Like, no, no, no. There's a bigger opportunity that just opened up than anything you've ever seen before.
But it's also not that fatalistic. I just think people grossly misunderstand. They're wildly, wildly wrong in the short term. They'll be right in the long term, but they're wildly wrong in the short term because of these constraints. I'll give you another example just to give you an example.
A lot of in America, the decrepit infrastructure we have has forced people to organize into some of these co-ops. What is a power co-op? It's basically a cross multitude of states. And so, you know, this undergirds our growth. And so what happens in a co-op? Well, you think a co-op is great. Everybody just like kumbayas and agrees on stuff. But what really happens is you have, you know, small players and big players in the co-op. And there's an example of one that goes right through the spine of America. And there's an incredible amount of data center capacity that one could build in the northern states of this one path. And it would be great because it would alleviate tremendous constraints that we have in diffusing AI. And so, you know, I went in and, you know, my partner and I, we bought some stuff and it turns out that they're part of a co-op and, you know, when you dig in a few layers, to your point, it's all personal relationships and flows downhill.
And so, you know, the big boys who are actually in the south actually dictate how the co-op works. It's like an organized mafia. And so, you know, when you're up in the northern states, you can't do anything. You can't build. You can't get the right offtake agreements. And you wonder why. And it's because the guys down south are like, you know, Oklahoma Gas and Electric calls the shots.
So when you look at why, you know, Muse won't diffuse, or bot won't diffuse, or Grokbot won't diffuse, that's why.
Fascinating.
Man, all that complexity just smells like opportunity knocking. You know, just to put it in context, too, I think we're looking for about 100 gigawatts total by 2030 to fuel all of AI. Six gigawatts is a big chunk of that 2030 target. So to get that all accumulated in two years is just mind-blowing. But I tell you, like, jump in. You know, anyone who gets involved in this seems to be thriving, and it just is such an amalgamation of different skill sets. It gives you something to really, really get done before Kardashev. Before, you know, Elon is really big on all this moving to space, but even the most wildly aggressive estimates put a couple percent in space within a decade, so you don't have to worry about getting...
The other thing I think you have to think about is I think it makes sense for Google, Microsoft, Meta, SpaceX to essentially deploy 100% of their compute capacity into space. But if you take the Alex Karp AI data sovereignty thing to the limit, let's say you're Humana. I'm just making up a company. You know, Humana doesn't have the capability to deploy a data center into space. And even if they did, they'd be, you know, waiting in line for quite a long time. You know, the prevailing logic was you kind of work in a cloud environment with a bunch of other tenants. The AI data sovereignty question would push Humana to basically say, no, at a minimum we need to be in a VPC. At a maximum we need to be in an air-gapped facility that's our own.
So there is going to be a lot of domestic terrestrial buildout as a result of these strategic decisions. Every single company that isn't one of the big boys will either have to have a multi-year lag and wait for capacity for launch, let alone capacity to deploy, and then capacity to actually have it as a managed service. And so you're going to just build terrestrially while you wait. And if you're going to build terrestrially, you again go back to all these issues. And so it's a huge problem for diffusion. I think that's probably going to dictate the winners and losers more than anything else over the next five years.
For the average user who wants to get in on the energy play and realizes, yes, energy is the innermost loop right now, where would you point them?
Well, I think that there's a bunch of different ways. One is that I think you have to realize that energy generation is — the utility monopoly on generation is breaking. And so you're going to enter an extremely diversified, deregulated, disaggregated generation concept of energy. And so the most obvious way to do that is through residential solar. Then there's going to be CNI solar. And the reason again is just like it's easy to permit, it's super fast, and you're off and generating. And you pair it with a battery...
...and now you're in the currency game. You're effectively your own little money printer. You use what you need, you sell back into the grid. So that's simple way number one is you just adopt solar. Simple way number two is you attach distributed compute and you join these highly fragmented distributed pools, whether it's Venice or, you know, some of these other ones that their names are slipping me. I'm not involved in any of these, but I think they're quite interesting. Then there are companies that, you know, give you the ability to buy these things yourself, like this company called SPAN which just did a deal with Nvidia where it actually gives you like the storage, the battery, the GPU all in like this unit that you can just deploy in your house. There's things like that. That would be the most simple way.
Yeah. And I think probably the most obvious way is just, I guess maybe simply put, people should find the cheapest and most technically simple method that they can manage to get long electrons.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Let me add two things to that, too. You know, a lot of people say, well, look, you know, I'm not involved in the political hierarchy. I don't know Josh Kushner and Jared Kushner, but all of these things are regulated at the local, state, and federal level. So if you're connected at any level, you have an opportunity to get involved in these projects and add value and just kill it. So I think a lot of people underplay their ability to get involved. And also if you're a senior executive of virtually any company, almost all of them got frozen out of compute because it literally got all scooped up by either quant trading firms or by OpenAI or Anthropic. So it is sold out. Now they're getting the big dope slap where, oh my god, we need hundreds of thousands or millions of AI agents to be competitive in insurance and in manufacturing and whatever. Where are we going to get the agents? The computers all sold out. Now you, especially in the insurance industry, you have the opportunity to be the first on your executive staff to go and say, 'We need to unlock a billion dollars to do a prepay on Chamath's next power supply because that's where the compute's going to land.' And if we get ahead of it this time, we won't be frozen out. And so that's another career opportunity where you don't have to know anything about AI. You don't have to know anything about how power supplies work. You just need to know where the capital is and unleash it for the buildout. So there are lots of ways to get involved that involve every skill set.
Yeah, I would maybe also add, so I do buy the premise that at the capability frontier, supplies including energy supplies are a limiting factor. I'm not as confident. I buy the premise at the demand side. Remember OpenAI, we talk about it constantly on this pod, infamously lurched toward and then away from the consumer. OpenAI last year tried to make consumers want to spend money on reasoning tokens and reasoning models, and consumers just didn't want it. They didn't want to pay for it. They didn't have at the time a good use for it. So I do suspect, to Chamath's point about diffusion of capabilities, I also think there's another important part of the equation which is just making these capabilities economically rationally useful to the broader economy. And if they're not useful and if they can't be metabolized by the economy, no matter how much energy is showering down on the frontier labs or anyone else who would host the data centers, it's not going to make a lick of difference if the models ultimately can't generate enough economic value for all of their consumers. That's point one.
Point two, I'll also point out second elephant in this room, which is distillation. The models are getting smaller. The models are getting less energy consumptive over time. So even if we never built a new data center, never built a new power plant, SMR, MR, LR, never built a new watt of capacity, arguendo, this is a thought experiment, wait a few years, and just through the pure power of math and recursive self-improvement, I would expect that we will have models that take a fraction of the current energy footprint and generate many orders of magnitude better capabilities.
Welcome to the singularity.
Yes. Yeah. So you want to close us out?
