Salim Ismail, founder of OpenEXO, reveals how AI-driven exponential organizations—like BrightLearn’s 30,000+ free books and BrightVideos’ fictional avatars—slash costs to near-zero, democratizing knowledge. Meanwhile, China’s rare earth export restrictions (e.g., gallium for F-35s) expose U.S. military dependence, rendering threats against Iran unsustainable due to depleted stockpiles and adversaries’ domestic production. Radical abundance via vertical farming, AI drones, and deflationary tech could outpace scarcity, but fiat systems risk collapse as debt outstrips GDP growth. Ismail’s vision—constitutional AI governance and grassroots innovation—challenges legacy power structures, urging listeners to embrace decentralized tools like Claude code or vibecode to build prosperity over conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, welcome to Bright Island Broadcast News for Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.
Yeah, thank you for joining me.
I've got something really cool to show you, a couple of things and a couple of, well, at least one report, maybe more.
And then I've got a really great interview for you today with Salim Ismail, who is an Indian, originally from India, but then lived in Canada, now lives in New York, I believe, has lived in the U.S. for many, many years.
He's a tech innovator, very sharp guy.
And we had just a great interview talking about technology and how quickly the future is going to change here.
Yeah, things are happening very rapidly.
So you're going to want to stay tuned.
That's a special episode of Decentralized TV without my co-host Todd Pittner because he was stuck on an island, not Epstein Island, just to be clear.
It was an island.
It was like a vacation thing with his wife.
And then the airline canceled all flights for two days to leave the island.
So he was marooned on an island stuck in like vacation hell.
Have you ever had vacation go on too long where it's like, oh my God, I wish this would just end?
Yeah, for me, that happens in about 12 hours.
It's like, I just want to get back to the projects.
Anyway, he ended up having to spend like five days or no, seven days or something.
So he missed decentralized TV.
He missed one of the best interviews that we've ever done.
But I'll play it for you today.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
I've also got some really interesting and fun videos for you here today.
I mean, we're going to cover news.
We're going to get serious here in a second.
But I want to play for you.
My dog, Rody, has set a new record of the maximum number of toys that he can carry all at once.
And he did this on his own.
I wasn't training him or teaching him or encouraging him.
He just showed up.
I was feeding my animals in the barn.
You're going to see the barn floor.
It's got some like little hay scraps and some goat poop on it right now because the goats have been hanging out there since it's so cold.
So I was just getting ready to feed the animals and he shows up with all these toys.
Crazy.
I don't even know how he can see anything when he's walking around.
I missed one of the green rings at the very bottom that's being held horizontally.
I missed that.
So he's actually, he's carrying 13 rings.
13.
That's a record.
I've never seen him do that.
I've seen him do nine before.
This is a whole new record.
So, you know, for my dog, this is like his version of solving the Rubik's Cube.
You know, he's like, how can I put, how can I put 12 toys around my neck?
And he, I've seen, I've watched him stacking them.
And then he'll, so he can dive his snout through the middle of them and pick up the ones on the bottom so that the ones on top go up around his neck.
And then he'll walk around and bump into things.
Seriously.
And what's really funny is that these toys, they panic my donkeys.
Because donkeys, they've seen coyotes before, you know.
They've seen dogs.
They've never seen like this mad hatter striped toy Belgian Malinois thing.
So one day my dog discovered that the donkeys were just terrified by this.
And ever since, oh, he can't get enough of freaking out the donkeys, man.
He loves it.
He runs up on them and shakes and the donkeys just freak out and flee.
Oh, man, he has a great time.
Well.
Needless to say, we don't have problems with donkeys coming into the main yard area anymore where they used to try to creep in and steal the goat food.
So now we have Roadie the Donkey Terrorizer.
All right, so anyway, that's one kind of interesting thing.
I've got something else to play for you here.
30,000 Books Milestone00:03:00
We've hit a milestone on BrightLearn.ai.
Yeah, the site has now published over 30,000 books.
30,000 books.
And, you know, hundreds more each day.
Typically, I guess about 500 or around that number each day.
And so this is a big deal.
So I actually did a special report on that.
I'll play it later.
But then I took the transcript of that special report and I handed it over to my AI engine, which is, you know, brightanswers.ai.
And I said, hey, generate a shorter summary script that explains what we've done with BrightLearn.ai and why this is such a big deal for lowering the cost of knowledge down to zero, you know?
And that's something that I'm talking about today with my guest, Salim, by the way.
So you'll want to stay tuned for that.
It's really interesting.
So anyway, then I took that script and I fed it into an AI avatar engine and I built up an avatar that is a tech guy avatar.
And I created about a two-minute video for the tech guy to explain BrightLearn.ai.
So I'm going to play that right now and then we'll come back on the other side with some interesting behind-the-scenes comments.
But check this out.
The cost of knowledge has just hit zero.
In a development that's reshaping the entire information landscape, BrightLearn.ai has become the fastest growing book publisher in America, surpassing traditional giants.
Tech innovator Mike Adams declared this milestone means they have reduced the cost of knowledge to zero.
This is not just another publishing story.
This is a direct challenge to centuries of censored information.
The platform is an AI-driven engine that creates fully researched, citation-packed books from simple user prompts in minutes.
It's powered by a massive two-year, multi-million dollar project, a curated knowledge base of nearly 100,000 books, 240,000 science papers, and millions of articles from independent sources.
This allows for deep research on any topic, automatically sourcing evidence often suppressed by mainstream narratives.
But the revolution doesn't stop at text.
Brightlearn.ai has achieved a breakthrough in audiobooks.
Using local workstations to bypass expensive corporate cloud services, they're scaling up to generate thousands of free, full-length audiobooks.
These are plain MP3 files, meaning once you download them, they're yours permanently, making them uncensorable and accessible even offline.
The impact is global empowerment.
It provides a lifeline to impoverished communities, offering university-level learning on everything from natural medicine to survival skills, all without the debt of traditional education.
The vision includes rapid translation into Spanish, French, and Chinese to dismantle language barriers completely.
In an era of digital censorship, this represents a pivotal shift, harnessing AI not for control, but for liberation.
It's a tool allowing individuals to reclaim sovereignty over their health and minds, breaking free from cycles of forced ignorance.
The age of expensive knowledge is over.
Visit BrightLearn.ai to see why users are flocking to the site.
Derek Navarro Reports00:14:10
This is Derek Navarro reporting for BrightVideos.com.
So there you go, huh?
Kind of interesting.
That's a two-minute video, and it's one of many videos that you can now check out at our new video site.
I mentioned it yesterday, and it's called brightvideos.com.
I'm making sure everything's loading on there.
So, if you go to brightvideos.com, you'll see some of our different avatars that I've put together.
And I've built these different avatars.
I've created them.
They're fictional characters.
They are AI avatars.
One guy is like a retired military veteran.
And another guy is a professional newscaster.
We call him Mr. Handsome.
And then we've got Mr. Huang, who is the economic guy.
He's kind of like Asian guy, but older.
He's had more business experience, obviously.
And then we have a gal that I call Jessica.
She's the gym fitness woman with a really big smile.
We kind of accidentally overdid the smile.
And she returns to this smile after everything she says.
She'll say a sentence and then it's a smile.
And it's like, oh my God, do you ever not smile?
Anyway, we're going to fix Jessica so that she's a little less on like smile cocaine all the time.
She needs to chill just a little bit.
I understand that working out in the gym can give you all kinds of happy vibes and everything, but she's really overdoing it.
So anyway, this guy that just did the tech segment, so I wanted to create him as having an ethnic background of being Middle Eastern, but he grew up in America.
That's why he speaks perfect English.
And he's a very high IQ, intelligent tech guy.
So he's going to be the guy that talks about robotics and drones and things like that.
And I think I named him Derek, right?
Is that what it was?
Derek Navarro or something like that?
I don't even remember all their names yet.
But the funny thing about creating Derek was in the voice creation.
Now, the voice that he's got right now is really good compared to where it started.
It turns out that when you try to create voices, and these voices are 11 labs voices, by the way.
So when you try to create voices at 11 labs and you give it kind of a prompt, like I want a voice of a kind of a youngish male, highly intelligent tech expert.
And when you use that prompt, every voice that it renders back to you sounds totally gay.
They sound so gay.
And I don't know why.
Is it like every person in the tech industry is gay sounding?
Because I don't think that's true.
There's a pro-gay bias at 11 labs in the voices.
Like, just because you say they're into technology doesn't mean they're gay, but they all sound gay.
And then I found out that it's actually true that there's a specific kind of pronunciation that's in the San Francisco Bay Area, which, not surprisingly, is totally gay.
And it has sort of bled into the AI industry.
Now, San Francisco is a hub for breakthrough AI technology, it turns out.
It's a lot going on in San Francisco.
There's a lot going on in Cambridge and, you know, Austin and so on.
Those are kind of the tech cities of America.
So in the San Francisco Bay Area, almost all the tech people talk totally gay, even when they're not.
That's the weird thing.
And there's a certain, there's an intonation style of their voice, and there's a way they pronounce the S's.
And I can't even really do it.
I mean, I'm not even going to try.
But they do end their sentences with a all the time.
So there's a upward pitch at the end of it.
Even when they're making a statement, like, Did you see the AI context window has been expanded to 512k tokens?
I mean, I'm exaggerating.
They don't sound that crazy, but they do sound totally gay, even when they're not.
And that's really bizarre.
And to me, a lot of the default voices from 11 labs sound something like this.
Okay, today we're going to talk about robotics and drones and high technology.
And I'm like, whoa, is that like a Ben Shapiro on crack or what?
What is that exactly?
Turns out that's just sort of gay tech America right out of San Francisco.
Seriously.
So I want you to know that I'm not making this up.
So I'm going to actually play for you now the first version of this video with the voice that was rendered that sounds totally gay.
It's the same guy.
It's the same guy.
It's just a different voice.
Okay.
So check this out.
Oh my God.
The cost of knowledge has just hit zero.
In a development that's reshaping the entire information landscape, Brightlearn.ai has become the fastest growing book publisher in America, surpassing traditional giants.
Tech innovator Mike Adams declared this milestone means they have reduced the cost of knowledge to zero.
What is that?
That's so gay.
That's so, it's the same guy on the screen, but suddenly, like the size of his arms and legs just shrank.
Suddenly, he looks like a total wimp because of the voice.
Just because of the voice.
And also, where'd they make up this crazy picture of me?
That I don't, I don't look like that.
That guy looks like they dragged him out of a gutter somewhere.
Looks like he's got an alcohol habit, you know, and bad skin on top of that.
Anyway, I just had to show you that because it's the same video.
It's just a different voice.
And again, just let me show you now the first 15 seconds of the same guy with the new voice that I chose.
So let's play that.
The cost of knowledge has just hit zero.
In a development that's reshaping the entire information landscape, Brightlearn.ai has become the fastest growing book publisher in America, surpassing traditional giants.
Tech innovator Mike Adams declared this milestone means they have reduced the cost of knowledge to zero.
Now you see the difference?
You see, I mean, it changes your perception of what they even look like.
You know, now this is a guy, this new voice guy, this is a guy you want to hang out with.
This is a guy some of you ladies might want to go out with.
You know, this guy is way more handsome just because of the voice.
Think about that.
Oh my goodness.
I mean, he actually looks more handsome because of the voice.
I mean, I don't know.
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong?
I'm a guy judging another guy by his voice, but you tell me.
Did you have the same reaction that I had?
And by the way, I also found out it's not difficult to clone the voice of Ben Shapiro on 11 labs.
All you have to do is just put in like a gay tech nerd description and it'll just pop out Ben Shapiro.
Anyway, now that we have this guy's voice correctly installed in his voice box, we can do all kinds of interesting stuff.
That avatar is going to cover technology, like I said.
And we've got another avatar that you haven't seen yet.
Her name is, what is it?
Like Linda Lynn or something?
She's an Asian academic scientist researcher woman.
She's on the older side and she's really smart.
And she sounds smart and she looks smart and she dresses smart and she's going to be bringing you information about big pharma and the dangers of pharmaceuticals and the promise of nutrition and herbal medicine.
Yeah.
So we can watch for that.
And we're going to have a lot more avatars coming in, by the way, making appearances and doing fun stuff.
And you might wonder, well, why are we doing this?
What's the point?
Well, it's very simple.
See, you know, I'm publishing a lot more articles right now with the help of AI research agents and writing agents even.
So all my new articles are going on naturalnews.com.
And you've seen probably there's a lot now.
I used to do one a day and then I took a couple years off to do all the AI stuff.
Now I'm publishing multiple articles per day.
Well, each of my articles will have an AI avatar explaining the article in two minutes.
The thing is, it'll be delayed a little bit.
It takes a little while for the video and everything to be created and rendered and then encoded and uploaded and inserted and re-rendered into the article, etc.
It takes some time, but that's what's coming.
So when you want to read my articles, you know, you'll just go to naturalnews.com.
At some point, coming up, that site is going to be switched over to a whole new template, a whole new format.
And when you see my articles, you'll be able to either, number one, read the article text if you want the full experience.
Number two, play the article audio if you want the article read to you by a professional digital voice actor.
Or three, watch the avatar explain it to you.
And the avatar depends on what the topic is.
If I'm writing about business, that's going to be Mr. Huang.
If I'm writing about working out in the gym, that's going to be Jessica.
Or if I'm writing about technology, that's going to be Derek there with the enhanced macho voice.
Just depends on the topic.
And we've got a guy that's a military expert too.
You saw him.
Maybe you've seen him.
And we've got some other people.
So that's the whole point is I want to be able to bring you information in whatever format suits you the best.
Sometimes you're in a hurry.
You just want the short version.
Other times you want to sit and read the whole thing.
And that's great.
So next here, I'm going to play the special report for you about Bright Learn AI.
And then what's coming after that is sort of the feature today, which is a deep analysis of China's export restrictions on strategic metals and rare earth elements.
I did a deep dive into this and I'm going to bring you that report.
So, and that's me performing it.
Oh, by the way, did you know that you can also take a picture of yourself and you can record your own voice and you can have an AI avatar animate your face and your voice.
And some people do that and then they upload those to YouTube.
I've seen those.
Like there's a tech gal there called, I think, Julie McCoy.
And she dresses up like Dr. McCoy from Star Trek, you know, like uber geeky, which is, you know, pretty funny, I guess, but fun also.
Anyway, Julie McCoy, if I'm getting her name right, she apparently just has avatars do all her videos.
And she says, hi, I'm the avatar of Julie McCoy.
While Julie is off creating business ideas, I'm covering the news for you.
And so let's just jump right into it.
And then she goes in and explains the news.
I'm not convinced that's actually an AI avatar.
I think that it might be Julie McCoy herself pretending to be AI.
No, seriously.
So we live in a society today where you have AI pretending to be human, but then you also have, I think, humans pretending to be AI for some reason.
I don't know if that, because see, her video looks so real.
So, I mean, I can't tell that it's AI at all.
If it is AI, it's the best AI avatar I've ever seen.
Maybe that's what she's trying to do is trying to impress everybody.
by saying, look, my AI is so good, you can't tell the difference.
But maybe it's just her on camera pretending to be AI.
You see what I mean?
So we are in a different world now where you don't know what is real and what's not real.
But I'll tell you my take on it.
Number one, I don't want any AI avatar using my face and my voice.
For me, I always want you to know that if you hear my voice and you see my face on a video, it's legit.
It's me.
And if there's any AI version, that's somebody pirating my likeness, okay?
Which they're doing that to David Morgan.
They're doing that to a bunch of people now.
There's a lot of voice piracy taking place right now.
And also, I don't want AI to perform my stuff because, you know, I'm very spontaneous and I'm very uncensored.
And some of it is sort of stream of consciousness presentations, which is fully human.
Okay.
And I want to be fully human.
I don't want you to ever listen to me and say, is that really Mike or is that Mike's avatar?
If you have to ask that question, then I've become too boring or something.
Got to keep it spicy.
I got to do stuff that AI would never do.
And I think I've set a good standard of doing things that AI would never do.
And I'm going to continue that way as best I can.
Anyway, I'm never going to put out an AI avatar of myself.
I will put out fictional AI avatars like I just showed you.
The tech guy, the military guy, the whatever guy, the gal, Jessica in the gym.
These are all fictional characters.
Looking Asian Avatars00:03:24
And if they resemble anybody you know, that's pure coincidence.
Trust me.
I rendered these from nothing but prompting.
Some people might say, well, that looks like me.
Well, maybe you don't look that distinctive.
Maybe you just look the same as a bunch of AI avatars because there's not really that many different kind of faces on this planet.
I mean, 8 billion people, there's going to be some people that look the same.
Okay?
There's only so many combinations of proportions of eyeballs and noses and nostrils and things.
Eventually, you know, somebody's going to look like you, especially if you're Chinese.
There's a lot of Chinese that have the same genetic code, or, you know, virtually the same.
You know, 99.9% identical genetics.
And because there's such a homogenous genetic code, well, I guess I should differentiate that it is different in the North versus South, etc.
But for like really native mainland China Chinese, you know, there's only so many combinations of different shapes and sizes of Chinese faces.
See, Americans have a lot more diversity in the look because, of course, we're the melting pot, etc.
So you could have sort of like Latino American, you know, or like Middle Eastern American, Asian American, Japanese American, Korean American, Italian American, etc.
In China, they're all Chinese Chinese.
And that's not, I'm not judging.
That's not an insult.
I'm just pointing out the obvious fact.
So, you know, out of the 1.4 billion Chinese, I bet you there's some that look the same.
In fact, and I apologize, this is a tangent, but when I used to live in Taiwan, and if you've, okay, this is funny, but so if you're listening, if you have a spouse who is Asian and you're not Asian and you're looking for your Asian spouse, especially like if you're a man listening to this and you have an Asian wife, in America, it's easy.
You're looking for your wife like at a grocery store or a shopping mall or something.
You're just looking for the Asian hair.
You know, who's got the long black hair?
And that's probably your wife, you know.
But in Taiwan or China, if you lose your Asian wife in a mall, good luck.
You're never going to find her.
Because everywhere you look, they're all Asian.
Oh my God, I'm never going to find my wife.
She's going to have to find me because I'm the white boy that's taller than everybody and standing out like a giant American sore thumb here.
She's going to have to find me.
There's no way I'm finding her.
That's just a fact of reality.
Just sharing that with you.
Anyway, it is bizarre.
When I lived in Asia and so many of the men would look at my height and everything, they would say, oh, I wish I were tall like you.
And I would say, I wish I could fit into an airplane seat like you.
Tall isn't always awesome when you're flying internationally or trying to fit into a space capsule or an airplane flight deck or whatever.
Audiobook Indexing00:14:48
Anyway, okay, moving on.
All right.
Let's play the special report here about Brightlearn.ai, and then we'll continue on the other side with the special report on Chinese rare earths.
All right, enjoy.
I want to share my vision with you of what's coming up this year, what we are releasing from our company, all free AI tools, content tools, educational tools, just an extraordinary collection.
Let me give you a couple of updates.
So first of all, on BrightLearn.ai, we now have reached 100,000 books in our index.
That's our research index.
We've reached 30,000 books published by the thousands of authors that are using BrightLearn.ai.
And remember, this is a book creation platform that takes your prompt and then it does tremendous amount of research and builds your book for you with the cover art and the chapters with the citations and references and everything.
The only thing it lacks right now is it doesn't do illustrations and diagrams.
But it's an incredible tool that almost 8,000 authors have used so far.
So we have 100,000 books in the research index and that is going to continue to climb.
I mean, substantially.
And then we have almost a quarter of a million science papers that are indexed in the system right now.
So if you create a book prompt about anything related to chemistry, biology, botany, atmospheric science, physics, astronomy, you name it, almost every area of science, well, I would say, yeah, almost every area is represented.
And then in addition, the recent DOJ file drop of all those files that the DOJ put out there, since they're public, we are indexing those and we're going to be including those in the research documents as well.
But it turns out it takes a long time to index those documents because, well, all of the redactions make OCR very difficult.
And a lot of it was just released as JPEGs or PDFs.
And it all has to be run through an OCR engine.
And then you have to do OCR cleanup and then document normalization.
Fortunately, I already built an infrastructure to do all that.
I built it over the last two years.
I've been using it for other documents.
And so I just basically took those DOJ documents and shoved them into the funnel that we already have running.
And eventually those will be processed and those will be added to the index.
And you know, it's funny.
I didn't go out looking for all those documents, but I figure if the DOJ releases them publicly from the DOJ government website, then, you know, hey, it's a matter of public record and probably they should be included.
So that's why they're being included.
We're about to launch some new content websites.
In fact, a lot of them.
These new content websites, I'm not going to give you any names yet, but they're going to be amazing.
Top domain names, kick-ass sites.
Those sites will feature books from Brightlearn.ai as related reading.
So if we have an article on one of these sites that's about, let's say, I don't know, vibe coding or robotics, let's say.
And then at the end of a robot article, it's going to recommend the most closely related books from Bright Learn that are about robots.
Those could be your books.
That algorithm is, it doesn't give any preference to, you know, me or anybody.
It's completely driven by keyword matching or concept matching.
So if you have a book that you would like to get read or you have a book concept and you want it to get a lot of visibility, that's one way to do it.
You create the book on brightlearn.ai and then our content system will begin promoting that book.
And you'll get a lot more reads of the book and more downloads of the book.
And why does that matter?
Well, because we're about to unleash full-length audio book generation for the top books, that is the most read books.
So, you know, we can't do audio books for all 30,000 yet because the amount of compute and just the electricity costs is prohibitive to do all that.
However, we can do audiobooks at a pace of, I don't know, 10 a week or something like that.
We'll have to figure out what's reasonable, maybe a lot more than that.
I'm trying to scale it up here.
I mean, we're in the testing phase.
We've got it all nailed down of how to do it.
We just have to scale it.
And I'm waiting on some graphics cards to show up.
I have to upgrade some workstations, etc.
But at some point, we'll be doing, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred audio books a month.
And they'll all be free to download.
But we have to choose the books that are the most popular.
And that means that if you have a book published at brightlearn.ai and you want that book to have a free full-length audiobook version created, then you would want more people to visit your book page and read your book, and we're going to help you do that, you know, through our articles and other content on these other content sites.
It will help promote your books and then, when those books reach a certain threshold of how many people have read them, then they're going to get put into the queue for full-length audiobook generation and then the audiobook will be available for download.
We're also going to offer a mechanism where you can accelerate the audiobook generation for specific books if you want, and the way to do that is you're going to end up using our tokens.
We're calling them bright tokens.
It's not crypto, but it's just, these are just credits, like, I don't know, vouchers.
Whereas right now, you can use a Bright token to create a longer-length book.
You'll be able to redeem some tokens to force the generation of a full-length audio book.
Now, it will take more than one token, but there will be a mechanism for doing that.
So, if you happen to want an accelerated audio book, you'll be able to do that.
And of course, once the audio book is created, you'll be able to download the MP3 files completely free, completely unrestricted.
And everybody else will be able to download them also.
So, this is how we're going to build the world's largest audio book library, first in English, and then in other languages.
And by the end of the year, we're going to have thousands of audio books.
And no doubt in more than just English.
You know, we'll be doing Spanish as a second language.
And I think French is the third language.
And then after that, I think we're going for Chinese.
That's the current trajectory.
You know, Spanish, French, and then Chinese.
And then after that, I'm not sure, but we'll figure it out.
And the books will also be translated into those languages more and more.
Now, I recently interviewed a tech innovator, or we call him Mr. What is it?
EXO?
His name is Salim Ismail.
He's an expert in helping organizations achieve exponential growth.
He's really bright.
I had a great interview with him.
And he's, of course, right on the cutting edge of using AI technology.
He's part of the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis.
So anyway, Saleem, we were having a conversation, and Salim said, essentially, whoa, I was telling him about this project.
I showed it to him.
And he said, whoa, you've reduced the cost of knowledge to zero.
And I said, yeah, that's exactly what we've done.
We have reduced the cost of knowledge to zero.
And we've done it on purpose.
We're about to reduce the cost of audio books to zero.
So there are many, many people all over the world who can't afford to pay, what is it, you know, $10 for an audio book or $7, or I guess depends on the service.
And for these people who may be very bright and very inspired and very passionate about a number of subjects, and they may be all over the world.
They may live in very impoverished conditions in places like India or other nations, anywhere, Southeast Asia, you name it.
They may still be very bright.
And if they only had access to knowledge, they could teach themselves.
They could get essentially a university degree at zero cost.
Well, we're going to be providing the audio books and the PDF books for people to do that all over the world.
You'll be able to achieve a university education at zero cost.
In fact, you can do a lot of that right now at books.brightlearn.ai.
And of course, we are just getting started.
So some of the things that we're about to roll out are our new content sites.
We'll have articles and each article will have an audio player to play the article, you know, to play a person reading the article or speaking the article.
In addition, there will be a short video segment for many of the articles that will be between two and three minutes that covers the basics of the article with a video avatar.
And you can see our early work on that right now at brightvideos.com.
Now, brightvideos.com, it's public.
It's not officially launched yet.
It's a little bit sort of basic.
We're still building it up.
But right now, it's a pilot project, kind of a proof of concept.
But you can see there that we have a lot of videos using our new avatars.
And we'll be producing many of these videos each day.
And we'll have lots of different ways for you to acquire this knowledge or information.
in whatever format suits you the best, whether it's short format, long format, video or audio, text, PDF, and then coming up, mini documentaries.
So that's next on my list is a lot of mini documentaries that explain critical concepts, especially about nutrition and health and, you know, natural medicine, things like that.
All of that is coming.
Now, what I want to do for you right here is I want to play some of these videos that you're going to see on the on BrightVideos.com.
Well, I'll tell you what, I'll play one of them for you, which is our AI avatar named Jason Huang, who talks about silver and controlled demolition.
This is kind of our own Asian guy, you could say.
But our Asian guy is older and wiser than the other Asian guy.
That's just a joke.
The other Asian guy is also pretty smart.
But I want to give you a demonstration of the kind of video content that you're going to be seeing from us on a regular basis.
So check out this video.
And oh, finally, by the way, we can't do any of this without your help and your support.
So thank you for your support.
You can shop with us at healthrangerstore.com.
And remember that when you shop at HealthRanger Store, you get loyalty points, and you can swap those loyalty points for the bright tokens that you can use.
You can redeem those tokens at brightlearn.ai to generate longer length books.
And you'll also be able to use those tokens in lots of other ways that I'll announce pretty soon coming up.
So check it all out and enjoy this video, which is our AI avatar, Mr. Huang, the expert on economics and finance.
Check this out.
What appeared to be a simple market crash in silver last Friday was, according to financial analysts, something far more deliberate.
A controlled demolition.
Headlines blared about the plunge, but insiders are calling it a psychological terror campaign.
A coordinated effort to panic holders of paper-silver derivatives into selling at catastrophic losses.
The goal?
To allow certain entities to cover massive short positions at a profit and acquire physical metal at an artificial discount.
While the paper market on exchanges like the COMEX was in chaos, the price has already recovered to a robust $79.39 an ounce.
The real story lies in the critical distinction this event exposed.
The crash vaporized digital entries, ETFs, and futures contracts.
But it could not touch a single ounce of physical silver in a vault or a safe.
This was a brutal lesson in counterparty risk.
The fundamental case for the metal remains stronger than ever, driven by relentless industrial demand from solar panels to electronics, far outpacing mine supply.
Meanwhile, media narratives blaming the plunge on Fed policy are being dismissed as a convenient cover story.
A misdirection to obscure what analysts describe as financial warfare.
The ultimate takeaway for investors is stark.
Refuse to play in the paper casino.
Own the physical asset.
Every engineered panic, they argue, is not a reason to flee, but a strategic signal to acquire tangible wealth outside the digital control grid.
This is Jason Huang reporting for BrightVideos.com.
All right, so hope you enjoyed that report.
I want to remind you that our Valentine's Day sale is on now at healthrangerstore.com/slash Valentine's with an S on it.
That's plural.
Now, why do we have a Valentine's Day sale so early?
Because we want to help you get the gifts that are perfect for your Valentine.
And that's what this is about.
We've got gifts for him and gifts for her and gifts of nutrition.
We've got some special sales and discounts.
So check it all out at healthrangerstore.com slash Valentine's and take advantage of this.
It's three days only.
It's just three days.
And I think it ends at 11 a.m. three days from now.
That's central time.
But it's on right now, so check it out.
Take advantage of it.
And then remember to stay tuned for the special interview today with Salim Ismail.
And you're going to love that interview.
Banned Minerals Export Restrictions00:15:30
It's all about technology and building a better civilization, building a future together, and harnessing technology for humanity and even decentralizing away from the broken, corrupt government and the broken, corrupt monetary system, and so much more.
So you're going to love that interview.
But before we go to that, we've got the special report coming up here right now.
So enjoy the report and then enjoy the interview.
And I'll be back with you tomorrow.
All right.
Welcome to the special deep research report on China's export restrictions of strategic metals and rare earth elements.
And this includes an analysis of U.S. military applications of these rare earths and why we are in deep, deep trouble.
I'm Mike Adams.
I'm the creator of numerous AI platforms, as you know.
And one of the interesting things that I did is I wrote an article based on my research.
That article has been published at naturalnews.com, if you want to see it.
Anyway, I took the article and then using our AI engine, I created a newscast script for our AI avatar, who is our sort of our retired military expert, AI avatar guy.
And he wants to tell you something.
He wants to tell you the summary of this report.
So I'm going to play this, I don't know, two-minute video roughly of our military guy to give you the overview of this report, and then I will continue with the details.
So check this out.
Imagine a world where America's most advanced fighter jets and missile defense systems could be switched off by a foreign power with the stroke of a pen.
That's the stark reality we face tonight, as China's near-total monopoly over strategic metals threatens to cripple U.S. military readiness and technological sovereignty.
This is not merely an economic dispute.
It's a silent siege on the foundations of American power.
China controls staggering percentages of the global supply, over 80% of rare earths and up to 98% of gallium, a metal critical to next-generation radar systems.
Their dominance wasn't accidental.
It was achieved through decades of state-directed industrial policy, while environmental regulations and cost pressures force the closure of major U.S. mines.
The result?
Our most advanced weapons, like the F-35's radar and systems designed to track hypersonic threats, are held hostage to China's export licensing whims.
The vulnerability is profound.
A Pentagon report warned that just a six-month disruption in gallium supplies would halt production of 60% of planned radar units.
And it's not just gallium.
Graphite, essential for both stealth technology and batteries, is 93% controlled by China.
Tungsten and antimony, crucial for armor-piercing rounds and semiconductors, are also under Beijing's command.
This centralized dependency is a fundamental security failure.
However, there is a path forward.
The current administration has initiated aggressive countermeasures, including an executive order to fast-track domestic mining and Project Vault, a plan to build a $12 billion strategic mineral stockpile.
Discoveries of rare earths in U.S. coal ash and new mines signal that domestic resources exist.
The temporary suspension of some Chinese export bans offers no cause for complacency.
It's a tactical pause, not a strategic reversal.
Breaking this resource stranglehold requires treating these minerals not as commodities, but as strategic assets vital for national survival.
The battle for control over the elemental building blocks of the 21st century has begun.
America must win it to secure its future.
This is Daniel J. Harris reporting for BrightVideos.com.
So there you go.
That was Daniel J. Harris.
At least that's our fictional AI avatar.
I created a backstory for him.
He's a military professional who blew out his voice screaming at the other soldiers because they were idiots.
That's why he talks that way.
He's got a little bit of a southern accent because he's probably from Texas or Tennessee or someplace like that.
You know, he's a honorable guy, honest, you know, hard-hitting, uncensored, just gives it to you straight.
But he did blow out his voice a little bit in the military.
You're going to hear more from him in upcoming videos.
And again, he is one of the many AI avatars that I have created in order to, well, to present information to you in various compelling formats.
So you'll hear more from him.
Let's move on to the special report here.
So here's what I did.
You know, I've talked about rare earths.
I've talked about the strategic importance of all of these key elements for quite some time.
I've done quite a lot of research myself.
And you know that Trump has declared silver to be a critical resource.
And I think copper is on the list.
And then China also late last year, actually going back for many years, they have declared many elements to be critical minerals.
And then late last year in 2025, they slapped all these export restrictions on these minerals, especially rare earths like dysprosium or what, terbium, neodymium, using magnets and so on.
These elements that are used in military applications can no longer be acquired from China.
So the U.S. military is in a very difficult situation where the military can't manufacture much right now.
And that's why Trump is appropriately panicked to build up a domestic supply of rare earths.
But that's going to take more than a decade, easily.
In the meantime, better not get into any wars because whatever missiles we fire off, you know, we can't replace them.
I mean, not easily.
And this might be one of the reasons why Trump seemingly backed off of attacking Iran recently, because it turns out that if you attack Iran with your ships in the area, and I'm not a naval expert, but I guess there's, you know, frigates and destroyers or whatever they are, and they've got missiles, and they only carry a couple hundred missiles on each ship, is my understanding.
Once they fire all those missiles, you know, to intercept incoming drones and things, then they're done.
They got to sail back to port to reload somewhere.
And that, you know, that can take weeks.
So, and that's assuming you've got the missiles to reload with, you know?
So I don't think that the U.S. military wants to tangle with Iran right now.
And that's one of the reasons why there has not been a big attack, at least not yet.
And even if there is, it'll probably be very calculated and narrow is my guess.
Okay.
So that all traces back to the shortage of rare earth minerals in terms of the western supply chains.
So let me read you the executive summary.
Oh, let me back up and tell you.
I did spawn a bunch of research agents to scour the web and look for all kinds of information and documents about the history of rare earths and what they're used in, etc.
And then I also used my own book engine at brightlearn.ai to create a book on this topic.
And it conducted additional research spanning 100,000 books and almost a quarter of a million science papers and millions of pages of articles, etc.
So there's a lot of research behind what I'm about to bring you.
But here's the executive summary.
So it says that over the past six years, China has implemented an increasingly comprehensive export control regime targeting strategic metals and rare earth elements that are essential to the United States defense industrial base and advanced technology sectors.
So in July of 2023, they began with gallium and germanium restrictions, and then they've expanded their controls now to include graphite, which is really key, antimony, tungsten, and other rare earth elements and critical minerals.
These restrictions, according to my report, have significant implications for U.S. national security, as these materials are essential components in radar technology, guidance systems, military electronics, and other advanced weapon systems.
The key finding, if you want to wrap this whole thing up, the key finding here is that China controls 48% to 99% of global production of restricted minerals.
You know, it depends on the mineral.
The U.S. is 100% import dependent for several critical minerals.
100% import dependent.
The U.S. does not produce some of these domestically at all.
And as a result, if we get into an extended war with China or with anybody, the U.S. will be out of ammunition and out of minerals and rare earths very, very quickly.
So all of this really begins in 2020 when China enacted this comprehensive law called the Export Control Law.
And this provided this legal framework for China to start restricting exports of strategic assets.
Once that law was established, then year after year, they started putting out more restrictions.
So in July of 2023, they restricted gallium and germanium.
And now you have to have an export license for that.
And that license is not given to any company that sells weapons or materials to the U.S. military, by the way.
In October of 2023, graphite was added.
And in December of 2023, they restricted exports of rare earth processing technology because other countries were trying to tap into Chinese expertise because China is ahead of the whole world on how do you extract rare earth elements from ore, mining ore.
It turns out that's a very tricky thing to accomplish.
China is leading the world.
Everybody else in the world wants to know how to do it.
But China's now banned the export of that technology.
Then in August of 2024, they expanded export controls to hit antimony, which is, and other certain metals like, let's see, super hard materials, they call them, antimony.
That's a funny mineral to me.
I think it's hilarious.
I call the dollar currency anti-money.
Why?
Because if you say, show me the moni, and then I show you dollars, that's anti-moni.
Get it?
Okay, sorry, bad joke.
Anti-moni.
Antimony is used in alloys for weapons because it has very high density.
Not perhaps as much as tungsten, but it has very high density.
And then in December of 2024, they also expanded, well, they had a total export ban to the U.S. of gallium, germanium, antimony, and other super hard materials.
And then in December of 2024, also, they expanded the restrictions to dual-use items.
They prohibited exports of dual-use items to the USA.
In 2025, then this really accelerated.
In January of 2025, they expanded their export prohibitions to specific companies, including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, etc.
And then in February, they expanded export controls over tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum, indium.
Yeah, some interesting stuff there.
And then in April, they added seven more elements to the restrictions.
That includes gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium plus samarium.
I know, we almost never talk about these metals.
They also banned all kinds of permanent magnet materials and various alloys and oxides, compounds, and mixtures.
So pretty much, you know, if you want dysprosium, you're screwed.
Because, you know, your dysprosium has become unobtainium.
And now the U.S. military is running on hopium, which doesn't exist.
In July, then they banned exports of lithium technologies, which of course is used in battery technology.
They banned all kinds of positive electrode material preparation technologies.
By the way, don't forget, during all of this, the U.S., of course, is banning all kinds of technology from China, such as UV lithography chip making equipment or certain microchips themselves.
So this goes both ways.
This isn't just China saying, no soup for you.
October 2025, they added restrictions to holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, which should just be called hopium, and ytterbium, ytterbium.
It starts with a Y. Why would anyone spell an element starting with the letter Y?
I don't know.
Then in October, let's see, more processing equipment is banned.
Rare earth technologies banned.
Design drawings, simulation data.
Then they banned lithium battery components later on.
And then, yeah, that's kind of where we are.
Now, let's talk about the elements and what they go into.
But, you know, before we do that, we have to play the elements song by Tom Lehrer.
here we go.
Here's a song I always get requests for but I can't understand for the life of me why.
It's simply the names of the chemical elements set to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune.
I think the only reason I do it is to see if I still can.
That's right.
There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen, and rhenium, and nickel, eodymium, neptunium, germanium, and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutecium, vanadium, and lanthanum, and alzium, and acetine, and radium, and gold, pteractinium, and indium, and gallium, and iodium, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium.
Acetrium, terbium, actinium, rubidium, and born and gadolinium, niobium, urinium, astronium, and silicon, and silver, and samarium, and bilos, brominalithium, beryllium, and barium.
Rare Earths in Defense00:16:08
I left out one actually.
A new one was discovered since the song was written.
It's called Laurentium.
So, those of you who are taking notes can write it down in your programs.
There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium, and phosphorus, and francium, fluorine, and terbium, manganese, and reconnecting, lymph, and nitesium, dyscosium, and scandium, and cidium, and cesium, and lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium, palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, tattoo, and magnesium, titanium, tellurium, and cadmium, and calcium, and chromium, and curium.
There's gold and californium, and fermium, berkelium, and also metal, emium, ethanium, nobelium, and argumentium, nickel, rhodium, and chlorine, carbocobal copper, tungsten, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard.
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.
All right, you got that?
Tom Lehrer, probably his most famous song.
So now we begin with gallium.
U.S. military applications for gallium include electronically scanned array radar systems.
Let's see, the F-35 Lightning II radar systems use gallium arsenide technology.
The Navy uses it in missile defense radar systems.
The Army uses it in ground-based radar for detecting, you know, incoming everything.
Missile defense sensor systems for Patriot missile systems, electronic warfare and jamming systems, military communications, etc.
So there are 11,000 U.S. military components that depend on gallium.
85% of those components use Chinese suppliers of gallium.
And that's cut off.
Oops.
Okay.
Germanium.
You can tell this is going to be a long report, so I will try to move swiftly.
Germanium, China controls 60% of the global refined germanium production.
We use it in our military in night vision goggles, thermal imaging cameras and FLIR systems, missile guidance, early warning systems, fiber optic communication systems, tank sights, aircraft surveillance systems, and UAV sensors and semiconductor components.
That doesn't sound important at all.
Okay, antimony, which has the element symbol of SB, by the way, in case you're wondering.
SB.
Let's see.
Chinese shipments to the U.S. have dropped 97% since September of 2024.
China controls 48% of the global antimony production, and the U.S. has no domestic production.
No mo antimony for the U.S. There we go.
Now it's used in things like ammunition, in primer compounds, armor-piercing ammunition, flame retardants, night vision goggles, nuclear weapons, submarines and warships, laser sighting systems, and military vehicle batteries.
Yeah, apparently there are lead antimony alloys, which sounds incredibly toxic.
Okay, graphite.
This is important.
Graphite.
You know, it's a special substance.
Itself is not on the table of elements, but it's made from, you know, special carbon obviously, but graphite?
China controls 77 of the world's graphite production, uh 95 of the synthetic graphite and 100 of graphite refining.
That seems like a big deal.
The U.s imports 100 of its graphite.
And what is graphite used in?
Oh, I don't know.
Just a few things like F-22 and F-35 airplanes that use graphite composites, lithium-ion batteries for drones, missile guidance systems, thermal management, tank and infantry vehicle components, combat ID equipment, inertial navigation systems,
nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers, gun barrels and artillery because of the temperature resistance, submarine holes, and high-power laser weapons for thermal management, among other things.
So graphite seems important.
Tungsten.
Tungsten, the symbol for tungsten is W, by the way.
China controls 80% of the global tungsten supply.
The U.S. stopped mining tungsten in 2015.
No more tungsten for you.
Armor-piercing ammunition is made out of tungsten.
Kinetic energy penetrators for tank ammunition.
Missile components, fragmentation components.
Jet aircraft engines use it.
Armor plating uses tungsten alloys for the tanks like the M1 Abrams.
Semiconductor manufacturing and radiation shielding for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which are powered by onboard nuclear power plants, obviously.
Multiple plants in the case of aircraft carriers, right?
Okay, so now that alone, what I just covered, that's bad.
Like the U.S. doesn't make any graphite, and it has almost no supply chain for tungsten or antimony or germanium or gallium.
Where are you going to get that stuff?
You know, Trump had better keep us out of war because the U.S. could only last a couple of weeks and then it's out of ammo and can't really make anymore unless China agrees to sell us more stuff.
So let's talk about the rare earth elements here.
Samarium and gadolinium and terbium and dysprosium and so on.
And it's almost getting to the song at this point.
So all those export controls are still in effect from China.
They will not export those to the United States.
For phase two, they kicked in, they started restricting the holmium and erbium and others.
China controls 60% of mining and 91% of global processing.
Now for dysprosium and terbium, China controls 99%.
99% of dysprosium and terbium.
That's a big deal.
So why is this a big deal?
Well, there's something called neodymium iron boron magnets that contain dysprosium and terbium.
Did you know that?
Yeah, it's neodymium iron boron.
It's NDFEB, right?
Those are the chemical or the elemental symbols together.
Those are special magnets.
In every F-35, there's 920 pounds of rare earths per aircraft.
920 pounds.
That is a boatload of rare earths.
You have to mine thousands of tons of ore to get that much of various rare earths.
Every Virginia-class submarine uses 9,200 pounds of rare earths.
And you know this is according to online research.
The let's see the our Arleigh Burke Ddg 51 destroyer uses 5 200 pounds of rare earths per ship.
It's also used in fin actuators for precision guided missiles and disk drive motors in aircraft and tanks.
So kind of important and we don't have any more coming.
We're, we're done.
Samarium cobalt magnets sm co.
There's 50 pounds of samarium cobalt magnets in every F-35 engine.
Did you know that?
Every engine, by the way?
Also, if an F-35 ever gets shot down, it's like a gold mine of debris.
Seriously, it's an actual gold mine, but I mean it's a rare earth mine.
Whoever finds the F-35 can probably sell off the rare earths for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars or more way more probably.
Think about that.
It's like you're flying around with a giant vault of gold in the sky that everybody's trying to shoot down.
Let's see, uh, Lockheed Martin is the largest consumer of samarium cobalt.
It's also used in stealth helicopter rotor systems.
Uh, the use of dysprosium and terbium back to those two is that it enables magnets to maintain strength at high temperatures in jet engines uh-huh.
And it's used for vibration dampening in tanks and vehicles.
Uh, yttrium is a thermal barrier coating, or it's used in that for jet engine turbine blades.
It's used in laser systems and optical optical applications.
Overall, 78 of us weapons or weapon programs use rare earth magnet components 78 and the dod consumes 3 000 to 4 000 tons of rare earth magnets annually.
And those are all cut off.
Now you see why Trump is going after.
You know, Venezuela or Greenland got to open up some new mining operations.
Tellurium te let's see, this was uh restricted under China's announcement number 10, sure how?
Uh infrared detectors, cadmium telluride and mercury cadmium telluride for military sensors.
I thought that's the name of a town in Colorado, isn't it?
Is that a ski town?
Telluride, isn't, isn't that where they?
They uh traffic cocaine and everything uh.
Anyway, cadmium telluride is not for snorting, it's for military sensors.
It turns out thermoelectric devices, bismuth telluride for cooling, electronics and solar cells for space and military applications.
Then there's bismuth.
That was restricted since february 4th of 2025 and that's important because it bismuth germinate Germanate is for radiation detection in nuclear applications.
And then molybdenum, or MOLI, as some of you may know, if you work in industry, you live on a ranch, you know that the best grease for your equipment contains moly.
That's molybdenum.
It helps protect parts that wear, right?
So molybdenum is used here.
The powder is used for high-temperature missile parts.
and high-temperature alloys for jet engines and rocket nozzles, armor plating, and military vehicle components.
I've got grease that's like 3% molybdenum.
Probably I'm not going to be able to get any more of that.
I'm just guessing.
Indium in 2025, this was restricted.
Now indium phosphide is used in semiconductors for military electronics.
Indium tin oxide is used in touchscreens for military displays and cockpit systems.
And let's see, LCD displays in military equipment.
So if you go on down the list, I mean, there's more, you know, lasers and magnets and displays, electronics, radiation detection, and everything you can imagine.
The key findings here are that China controls 48 to 99% of global production for virtually all of these restricted materials.
Now, in November 2025, there was a suspension of that because of Trump and China agreeing to this in order to drop tariffs.
But that window only operates, and that only affects some of these, and it only operates through later this year.
And the most strict conditions can be reimposed at any time, such as if Trump bombs Iran.
If Trump bombs Iran, China's just going to say, no soup for you.
Let's see.
And there are complete bans, regardless of that agreement, on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum, indium, and seven other rare earth elements.
All right.
So remember that each F-35 requires over 900 pounds of rare earth materials.
This means that if the U.S. starts to lose aircraft, or stealth bombers or F-35s or ships, it can't replace them.
It cannot replace them.
And even though the Department of Defense and Trump, they are working right now to try to develop domestic supply chains, that's going to take at least a decade to have any meaningful impact whatsoever.
And probably longer than a decade.
I'm guessing more like 20 years because U.S. companies don't even know how to do this.
China has been the pioneer in this space.
They've figured this stuff out, just like they're going to lead the world in AI technology.
They're already leading the world in robotics and drones and automation of factories and vehicles.
You know, China makes the highest quality vehicles in the world now, by far.
You haven't seen them because they're not allowed to be sold in the U.S.
But around the rest of the world, people are buying Chinese-made EVs that are extremely high quality at a fraction of the price of U.S. vehicles.
Did you know that?
You're just not allowed to buy them.
But China is leading in almost every area of technology other than, let's say, heavy lift, you know, rocket technology or things like that.
China leads in almost everything, including in rare earth extraction.
And that's a big deal for all the reasons that are now obvious.
So here's the situation.
Trump is, you know, he's like a bull in a China shop, right?
He's running around the world as a bully with a baseball bat, like cracking everybody's dishes, you know, like, we're going to come after you, we're going to bomb you.
He's threatening Iran, you know, he's threatening Yemen and bombing Yemen, etc.
And then shipping all these weapons to Israel, you know, anti-air systems that like a quarter of all those got used up last summer when Iran fired a bunch of missiles in the 12-day war.
Well, I think Israel fired first and then they exchanged missiles.
And then, you know, Ukraine has been begging for all these weapons for all these years.
And the Biden administration basically emptied the U.S. military storehouses of excess weaponry and shipped it off to Ukraine, where it mostly got blown up by Russia.
So the truth is, this is my understanding, but I don't have any special inside information.
This is just my best guess based on public information.
The U.S. weapons stockpiles are near zero.
There's almost nothing left in the system, nowhere.
So even though Trump is running around the world threatening everybody, if he actually starts a war that lasts longer than a day, you know, like some kind of staged kidnapping of the president of another country, if it lasts more than a day, the U.S. is toast.
The U.S. can't replenish its weapons.
And it can't rebuild the fighter jets.
It just doesn't have the supply that it used to have from China.
And it's 10 to 20 years out before it can have a domestic supply.
U.S. As A One-Punch Fighter00:06:32
So this, the reality of this situation is incompatible with Trump's posture, where Trump loves to say, oh, we have the biggest, baddest, most kick-ass military in the world.
We've got the most capable ships, this and that.
Yeah, okay, yeah, you can sail around with your, you know, your nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
But when you start launching missiles, you flame out within a matter of days or maybe a couple of weeks.
And then you're just a giant floating, you know, high school of 5,000 sailors that mostly just came out of high school, and some significant portion of whom cannot swim for some odd reason.
So that's not a sustainable war-footing situation.
Trump likes to project this idea that, oh, we can fight these wars.
We could beat Russia.
We could beat China.
We could beat Iran.
We could beat them all at once.
Not even close.
We couldn't beat even one of them if we focused everything.
We just don't have the depth of the weapons.
It's all gone.
It's all gone.
So what's really floating out there right now, the U.S. Navy, it is a, I mean, I don't want to call it a paper tiger.
That's not the right term.
It's formidable, but only for a brief window of time.
It's formidable for a few days.
And then it's done.
It's out of weapons.
And the entire stockpile of the U.S. military doesn't really contain much in terms of actual weapons, you know, missiles, etc.
And half the stuff we have doesn't even work anyway, like Israel found out the hard way last summer, you know, when the Patriot missiles didn't really shoot down much that was coming in from Iran.
So-called Iron Dome turned out to be what was it called?
The nylon dome, because it didn't work.
Everything got through it.
And even though Trump loved to make new enemies around the world, even Trump can make enemies out of allies.
He can piss off India or Japan or Taiwan or South Korea for that matter.
He loves to run around making enemies.
I mean, he's making enemies out of freaking Canada.
Canada is kind of hard to piss off because they're friendly people.
I mean, well, the people in charge are tyrants, but I mean, the everyday people of Canada are friendly.
But Trump loves to make enemies all over the world.
The problem is he can't make good on these threats because if there's any war that begins and the U.S. actually has to fight a war, even for a couple of weeks, it's going to become apparent to the rest of the world that the U.S. is really kind of a shadow military.
It doesn't have any depth to it.
It can't fight for any extended period of time.
Just doesn't have the weapons.
Who's got the weapons?
Well, China, Russia, and Iran.
Well, and Turkey, a NATO member, Turkey makes lots of weapons.
China is the world's industrial base now.
China is making weapons at a scale that you can't even imagine.
Iran is also manufacturing weapons like crazy, plus a lot of drones, but also missiles.
And Russia has reinvigorated its entire domestic supply chain ever since 2022.
And Russia's got its own steel industry, its own weapons industry.
Russia has, you know, innovated in ways that are just shocking the whole world with its Oreshnik missile systems and its Kinzal hypersonic missiles and many other systems.
So the U.S. is still cruising around with mostly ships that were built decades ago and threatening the world with ICBMs that were also designed decades ago.
The U.S. can't even field a hypersonic cruise missile that works and the U.S. can't replace anything if it actually gets into a fight.
So it's kind of like the U.S. is kind of like a one-punch fighter.
If the U.S. doesn't get you with the knockout blow in round one, then the U.S. can't win.
It's just going to go for the knockout blow, like with Venezuela, and hope that everybody buckles.
But in an actual knockdown, drag out fight, the U.S. loses.
And that might be why the military commanders told Trump, you better not attack Iran because we can't sustain a fight with Iran.
Can't do it.
Now, we'll see.
Maybe Trump is, I don't know, arrogant enough to think that this is still the 1980s and we can beat everybody in the world with our advanced military technology.
Well, if he launches a war and then he finds out he's wrong, then the dollar collapses because the dollar, the strength of the dollar is based on the idea that the U.S. can project military power and that the U.S. can credibly threaten other nations around the world, you know, bombing them or destroying their ships, just like the U.S. is seizing ships coming out of Venezuela, you know, piracy on the high seas and all that.
If it turns out that the U.S. can't project its power and the U.S. is shown to be a shadow military with no depth, that changes the dynamic all over the world.
And when that changes, more countries will pull out of the dollar.
They'll stop using it.
China will sell off treasuries.
Japan is probably going to be forced to sell off U.S. treasuries no matter what, pretty soon.
And we're going to end up in a situation where not only does the U.S. military collapse, but the U.S. dollar collapses.
And then the question is, does the U.S. Empire collapse at that point?
Maybe it does.
So let's hope Trump understands everything I just presented to you in this report, but I doubt it.
I doubt it.
I'm not even sure that he's ever seen the table of elements.
But who knows?
I mean, a staffer one time showed him the word antimony, and Trump thought it said alimony.
But, you know, that's that's just the White House.
Active Skill Upgrading00:14:47
So stay informed, folks, and you can find my article on this topic at naturalnews.com.
And you can also find video summaries of these topics at brightvideos.com.
And thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams.
And you can also use all my AI tools for free at brightlearn.ai or brightanswers.ai or brightnews.ai.
So check them all out and you know, pray, pray for sanity, pray for peace.
Because if we go to war, the U.S. might very well lose.
So thank you for listening.
Take care.
If you went back to 200 years ago, the 1820s, 97% of the global population lived in extreme poverty.
That's true.
Today it's less than 9%.
You don't see that in the news because it's good news.
We have a J-curve coming where we go from extreme poverty at one end to extreme prosperity on the other end, which is why you see us get bubbly excited about technology, abundance, etc.
That future is coming.
How we bridge to that future and how fast can we get there is really the only question right now.
Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV.
I'm Mike Adams, and I think you'll really enjoy our special guest today.
And this is a first-time guest, and I'm really honored to have him on the show.
I've been following his work and his interviews, and he is the founder of what's called OpenEXO.
The website is just like it sounds, open exo.com.
His name is Salim Ismail, and he is, well, he's lived in the United States.
He's also Canadian, and he's a tech expert, but an expert in showing companies how to achieve exponential growth, which is critical in today's economy as things are moving so quickly.
Now, he's an advocate of AI technology, but he goes way beyond just AI.
This isn't just a tech show.
It's about how to innovate in your business and do more with less to hopefully stay ahead of the competition and innovate more aggressively in this competitive environment.
So he's been called Mr. EXO by his guests.
He's also a frequent guest on the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis.
That's also a very popular podcast.
But welcome to the show today, Mr. EXO.
Can I call you that for calling me that?
Great to be here.
I'm a big fan of the overall concept.
I love the name of your show.
So thrilled to be here.
Well, thank you so much.
I'm a big fan of your show and your work.
And here's what's really interesting about today: your world is more of a sort of mainstream corporate world.
You've helped mega multi-billion dollar companies radically expand their revenues with your methods and techniques.
And then my world is more of sort of the maverick, independent entrepreneurs and innovators.
And yet, where our worlds meet is here with technology and innovation.
So we get to bring together two worlds today.
That's very much so.
And, you know, given the state of my boldness, you know, which one is more stressful, right?
I'd way rather be over on your side.
Yeah, I'm shocked how much you travel, how many speeches you give.
How do you even keep up?
Well, you know, this all started, I was building what's called Singularity University.
So I was the founding CEO there, built it out for about seven years, and then I wrote the book Exponential Organizations, and the book took off and I had to kind of go AWOL a bit from SU dealing with this.
And it's been quite a tear for about the last decade.
Just before the pandemic, I was in four cities a week.
And it was really intense.
Luckily, that hamster wheel is broken a bit, and I'm choosing more carefully where I speak.
But it's clear the world, the pace of change is accelerating, and it's actually moving much faster than we thought it would.
And that's really quite something.
Yeah, actually, I wanted to bring up your book here, the newer one, Exponential Organizations 2.0, the new playbook for 10x growth and impact, also with your co-host, Peter Diamandis.
And I got to say, you know, you and Peter and the other guests on the Moonshots podcast, sometimes you're characterized as extreme optimists.
But I say, what's wrong with optimism?
You know, I mean, I'd like to think we are more realist.
And there's an important distinction here, right?
Which is that the general tone that you hear in the public, certainly what you see in Hollywood, is almost always very, very dystopian, right?
If you watch any sci-fi Hollywood movie, you end up with Terminator, Skynet, The Matrix, the robot overlords come and take over the world.
If we're lucky, we're pets.
If we're unlucky, we're food.
Kind of always goes down that path.
And then you've got the lone hero trying to save humanity in the middle of all that.
The actual reality of what we are actually seeing is we're integrating technology and amplifying the human experience rather than degrading it, right?
Yes.
I would argue that with my smartphone, I'm more human than I was before because I can project empathy around the world.
I can video with my son for free anywhere in the world.
I can see what's going on in the world.
My eyes and ears are pushed out to a very broad extent.
And so I would argue I'm more human with that rather than less human with that.
I absolutely agree with that argument.
And, you know, I've been accused of being a doomer and sometimes I'll go down the doom rabbit holes as well.
But it's really important to consider both sides.
Yes.
But then have the freedom of thought to be data-driven about what's actually happening.
Yes.
And our premise philosophically, and mine personally, is very, very simple, which is that technology has always been a major driver of progress in the world.
It might be the only major driver of progress in the world, right?
And now we have, and the thesis at Singularity University was that, okay, we've seen Moore's Law for 60 years, double every 18 months, but now we have a dozen technologies operating on that doubling pattern.
And this is something completely unique in human experience.
And the human benefit that will come from all of these technologies accelerating rapidly is unbelievable.
We just don't see it as well because we're not good at seeing great things.
We're really good at seeing bad things.
Yeah, really good point.
But you said something key there, which is that technology can help us be more human.
And I completely agree with that.
And I think, I mean, we can start with some really basic examples, such as Suno, the AI music engine.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to write a song about this or that, but I couldn't hire a band and do everything, record all the keyboards.
Suno, all I have to do is describe my idea, and then I've got it.
It's incredible what's possible today.
And this is a perfect example, right?
At the ultimate end, human beings operate in pure creativity and self-expression and humor, in expressing our personalities, in expressing our deepest selves and bringing out to the surface.
And technology is aiding that aspect of it so radically.
We can have longer health spans than we did.
People forget that up to like the 1900s, average lifespan was like 42.
So, you know, most of us listening to this last one, we'd be dead by now, right?
And so technology has given us a radical doubling of life extension over the last 150 years or so.
It looks like it's about to double it again in the next 10 years.
And so that's just a magical, amazing thing.
And not so much lifespan, but health span, where you're like, you know, in a cognitive, fantastic mode for much, much longer.
That's just a beautiful thing.
Well, 100%.
And let me ask you to address this related question that I get from people all the time.
I talk about what AI can do.
I talk about content generation and AI cognition and augmented human cognition with the help of AI.
And then the argument that comes to me is, well, they're going to replace all the humans in the corporations.
And I'm like, wait a second.
I think people are going to upgrade to more important roles and it's going to end the drudgery of humans doing silly, repetitive things.
That's my take on it.
What do you say?
I'm a thousand times with you.
And by the way, let's just be data-driven about this.
We've seen this repeatedly throughout history.
My favorite example is if you go back to the 1970s, we created ATMs for the first time and we could essentially automate banking.
And there was all sorts of hand-wringing.
Oh my God, what will we do with bank tellers roaming the streets aimlessly?
How will society absorb this?
We'll have chaos reigning, et cetera, et cetera.
All this hand-wringing happened.
What actually happened in reality was that the cost of running a bank branch dropped out by about 10 times.
The banks created 10 times or more branches.
And the number of bank tellers has not changed at all.
And this is what we see repeatedly, repeatedly repeated.
I'll give you one more data point, which is the three countries with the highest penetration of robotics in the world are Sweden, South Korea, and Germany.
And the countries with the lowest unemployment in the world are Sweden, South Korea, and Germany.
And it turns out that when we automate, it's exactly what you said.
We shift people up the Maso's hierarchy.
They become much more effective at doing design thinking, problem solving, increased efficiency.
We don't see radical job loss.
If you like, another example I would give is what's projected to happen in the driving industry.
People are saying, oh, my God, 3 million truck drivers and related jobs will be wiped out because we'll automate truck driving pretty quickly.
If you talk to any trucking company today, they'll tell you they would hire a thousand truckers today if they could.
The demand is so high, they just can't find them because nobody wants to do that work.
Right.
And where we'll have AI and robots doing are what we call DDD roles, which are dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs.
Okay.
Almost all white-collar work is dull, right?
And most manual work is dangerous or dirty.
And so you want to have a robot going into noxious fumes in the mines, which doesn't care about oxygen consumption and mining for you and bringing the stuff out.
And you focus on other things.
So this is what we see repeatedly in instantiated as the data is rolling out.
We don't see a radical change in that.
And I love what you just said, by the way.
And it's actually a real joy to get to hear you speak for more than little snippets because on the other podcast, they don't let you go the full sentences.
We talk over each other a little bit too much.
No, but you have so many great, you know, amazing co-hosts that every one of them is a genius.
So it's a I would listen to all of them.
I should just shut up and just listen half the time, which is also part of it.
No, I'm just saying it's a pleasure to get to get to hear the depth of your thoughts on this topic.
But what you just mentioned and what I've been saying, and we agree on this point, but it still requires the humans involved in this process to actively upgrade their skills rather rapidly because of the pace at which technology is penetrating the corporate world.
Going forward into the future, whether you're an individual or a company or a small company or a big company, you have only two paths, right?
You're either the disruptor or you're disrupted, right?
There's no middle ground.
You kind of have to pick and not choosing means you're disrupted.
So right now you have to pick up these tools that are available and create your own agency for what's coming in the world because the reality is nobody has any idea what's coming.
And so you better be able to forge your own path.
Yeah, well said.
In fact, let me ask you to just plug your company here and describe to our audience what you do, how you help entrepreneurs and business innovators become way more effective at what they do.
So when I wrote the book, it first came out in 2014.
What we did was we looked at 150 of the fastest growing unicorns and said, how are they doing it?
How are they scaling as fast as technology can scale?
Because for the first time ever, we saw organizations that were scaling in an unbelievable pace.
So Uber scales by not hiring its own staff.
Airbnb scales by not owning its own bedrooms, right?
We saw a whole bunch.
We kind of modeled all of these and teased out a model over like a two, three year research period and documented that in the book.
We then started getting calls from people saying, hey, can you help us implement that?
Procter ⁇ Gamble called up and said, book has required reading across senior management.
And the first thing we did was I wanted to solve what I came across.
So before Singularity, I was the head of innovation at Yahoo running their incubator.
And I came across a problem which is very pervasive culturally, which is you try anything disruptive in a legacy environment, the immune system attacks you.
Yes, yes.
And so big companies struggle with disruptive innovation because all their corporate architecture is designed to reduce risk and withstand risk and reduce uncertainty.
All big companies anywhere and all government agencies are architected for two things, predictability and efficiency.
Efficiency and predictability.
Those are the two things.
But in a volatile world, you need to be architected for agility, flexibility, adaptability, and speed.
And what we did was when the book came out, we scored the Fortune 100 and tracked them for seven years.
And we found that the companies that follow these characteristics the most, the top 10 compared to the Fortune 100, bottom 10 that follow this model the least, delivered 40 times more shareholder returns.
Wow.
Why?
Because as the external world becomes more volatile, your ability to adapt is going to drive market value.
It's very, very simple.
And right now, the Silicon Valley companies are doing the best in the world, not because they're that much smarter.
It's just they are more agile at their core architecture in the core organizational architecture.
They pivot much better than anybody else.
So we advise companies and coach companies.
So we solved that first problem.
We carried out a 10-week engagement that we piloted with Procter ⁇ Gamble.
We've now done it 100 times with big companies around the world.
And we found a way of hacking culture at scale and increasing the metabolism of large organizations.
We've done it also with public sector.
Well, I love that term, increasing the metabolism of large organizations.
Increasing Metabolism of Large Organizations00:06:41
That's a great question.
Let me give you a crazy quote.
Jack Welch in his annual report for GE, he was the CEO there in the year 2000, said, if the metabolism of your company gets slower than the outside world, you're dead.
The only question is when, right?
You could argue today that the metabolism of almost every big company in the world is slower than the outside world.
Right.
So how do you increase that metabolism?
And so you have to create structures and cultural changes to allow that to happen.
And so that's what we do with big companies and now more and more with governments.
So as we started doing that and it started to work, we started to create a group of consultants.
And I was like, well, I don't want to have to eat our own dog food.
Why would we hire consultants to go do this?
So we started forming a community and that community grew and grew and grew.
And now we're up to 42,000 people in 150 countries.
So we're like a peace core for transformation.
When somebody says, hey, we want to help transform this division of Siemens Energy or Black ⁇ Decker or HP or Visa, we pull a team together from the community, which allows us to keep our costs low and be maximum agile. And then we send them in. They do the transformation work, et cetera. So we're essentially this kind of peace core for the transformation the world is going through today. We're in 150 countries speaking, I think, 48 languages or something. That's extraordinary. So someone listening to this,
if they want to engage with your group, OpenEXO, they contact you. They describe their problem or challenge. We need help with X. And we go, right, for that, you want to talk to those three guys over there who've got experience in it, plus experience with our ecosystem and community. Go do that. Wow. Wow. That's that's okay. And again, how many countries did you say? We're in 150 countries. So this is this is everywhere,
almost everywhere on the planet in almost every major language. Yeah. And I get, you know, strange calls. I got a call from the Vatican saying, hey, the Pope is trying to change the church. His immune system is 2,000 years old. So I went and did a workshop with the senior leaders at the Vatican. Are you kidding me? No,
it was super fun. Because I said in the book, we have AI coming along and AI may achieve consciousness. How are we going to deal with the morals and ethics of that? Right. Or I can edit my own genome using CRISPR. How do you think about that? Because according to the Bible,
only God can change human beings. So what do we do with that? Or we have life extension coming. And I said to them, your business model is about selling heaven, right? How are you going to sell heaven if people aren't dying? That had some rich Italians for it. I love your uncensored approach on that. He's just like, just lay it out there. It's rare you get to speak truth to power. So I was like, let's just go for it. Yeah. So it was a really fascinating cover. And, you know, to their credit,
they actually were listening very carefully. And Pope Francis was one of the most profound transformation leaders in the world. He had this amazing ability for generating and spreading tenderness around the world, which is such a huge, badly needed thing in the world. Yeah,
we could use a lot more tenderness right now in the world. And I'm okay. So let me just give out your website again. Openexo.com is where people can learn about. And we do networking events. We have membership levels. We have a weekly session with our Pearl members where I will go spend a week,
spend an hour and a half with them every week where we'll go through what are you building and how can we specifically help you. And then we, as people need more help or need more capacity, we point them to folks in our community to get involved. We have all sorts of tools and training that people can take. Wow. Okay. That's amazing. All right. Well,
okay, Salim, you've inspired me. Let me share this with you because, you know, I'm an AI developer and a disruptor. I have people calling me asking me for things all the time. Like, how do I do this? So I built an engine and launched it a couple of months ago. It's an open source nonprofit book creation engine called brightlearn.ai. And so far,
we've had 7,500 authors publish 28,000 books. Wow. And they're all free. They're all free to download. And I'm just, this is from today, Awakening Wisdom for Life. What is this? The old Antarctic Explorer's Oracle with an alien on the cover. That's interesting. Off-grid survival,
the soul journey, whatever. I mean, people do. And this is all based, of course, on AI. I put together a data set over two years, you know, a curated data set about a lot of world knowledge. And then my nonprofit put this out for free. And then it just took off. And now we're about to roll out audiobooks free because of the Quinn3 TTS engine that is so amazing. So now I'm like,
let's just throw audiobooks out there in multiple languages. Well, the reason I bring this up is to get your, you know, your analysis of the fact that every industry, I mean, think about book publishing or the audio book industry. If they don't move very quickly into embracing these kinds of things,
then disruptors like me and you are going to come along and offer an alternative like this for free sometimes. Absolutely. And A, I love the tool. I want to talk further with you about that because all of our community members have book ideas inside their heads and how can they express them. So let's chat about that. Oh,
yeah, me too. But let me give you the core underpinning economic thesis, A, of what's happening today, and B, what we found with the book. Okay. When you're building a business, you worry about managing your cost of demand and your cost of supply, right? Hopefully you're on the right side of that equation. When the internet came along, something interesting happened. It allowed us to drop the cost of demand generation exponentially, right? Online marketing, referral marketing. Every Silicon Valley company is trying for a viral loop,
which brought their customer acquisition costs to zero. And for the first time in business history, you could acquire customers at very low cost. And you saw this explosion of the first wave of internet businesses, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, et cetera, building on the fact that you had very low customer acquisition costs. What EXOs have figured out is how do you drop exponentially the cost of supply? So if you think about Airbnb, the marginal cost of adding a room to their inventory is almost zero. Wow. If you're tight,
you have to build a hotel. Same with Waze, same with Uber. So what EXOs do is go into legacy industries and radically drop the cost of supply, which if you're an incumbent is an existential threat. What you just showed me is radically dropping to cost to near zero or at zero publishing a book. We've partnered with a large homeschooling organization,
Decentralizing Value Creation00:08:26
by the way. And now their teachers are using it to generate textbooks for free. Now, if you're Pearson publishing and you're selling textbooks for $100 each, how are you going to compete? And there's something huge happening,
which is so important for the decentralization of the world. It's really decentralizing value creation and dropping centralized system costs to near zero, right? Crypto is doing that to the banking world with DeFi. And so this is creating a radical change in the world and really a bifurcation of before and after scarcity to abundance. How will we manage that? The only way we're going to manage that is in a decentralized world. 100%. I'm sure you've covered this,
but are your readers and viewers familiar with what's called the Byzantine generals problem? No, I don't think so. I don't think we've covered that. Can I just touch on that for a second? Okay. So the core innovation in blockchains is the solving of this very old computer science problem. It's actually the story of Constantinople in the 1500s,
this Middle Ages city. And there was eight generals circling the city trying to coordinate an attack. And they were sending messages around that little network saying, who's going to go first? How we're going to get in, what time are we going to go, et cetera. The problem they had, which is why it's called the Byzantine generals problem, is that one out of those eight generals was a traitor and could send the wrong information, blow the element of surprise, lose the whole operation. And so in computer science terms,
that became known. The problem became how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network when you don't trust the network? Really hard problem. 40 years of computer science PhDs have been trying to solve that problem unsuccessfully until the blockchain. And on a blockchain,
Because of this distributed ledger capability, when I send you a message, you have 100% guaranteed that it came from me, couldn't be double entered, couldn't be revoked, et cetera, which is a magical thing in a digital world.
And that's that's achieved by decentralized consensus.
Decentralized consensus mechanisms, where we have to update all the ledgers using a cryptographic mechanism at the same time, allows us now to completely guarantee this centralized, authenticated message, and it solves the Byzantine Generals problem.
What it means is you can decentralize authentication.
Okay.
And that's a very powerful concept.
And so let's look at government for a second.
Government has two aspects to it.
About 20% of government is policy formulation.
About 80% of government is policy enforcement.
So you go to a DMV and they're like, are you 18? Do you have a driver's license? Do you have insurance? Do you have the title for the car? All of these questions. Then they authenticate all of those things. And then they go, yep, you can transfer ownership of that car. If you can put a bunch of that capability and authenticating on a blockchain,
80% of government functionality gets automated. Yeah. It can focus on just the actual policy formulation because authentication can be outsourced and so on. I'll give you one more example just to triangulate this, which is retail banking. We understand retail banking very well. We put in $1,000, it lends it out over there. And we trust our life savings to this centralized authentication,
authenticated ledger. And we pay the banks a truckload of money to manage that centralized ledger. Along comes DeFi or decentralized finance, and I can do exactly that same transaction,
save or borrow against my assets in that model. I don't need the retail bank. So I give retail banking about four or five years before it gets completely disrupted, which is kind of a big deal in the finance world. Yeah. So this is happening now to more and more sectors as we decentralize not just the value creation,
but the authentication of things. We're seeing open source models, DeepSeek and others allow you to generate what you just did with Brightlearn in an amazing way. Anywhere in the world, anybody can do it. And there's two things about technology today that I think are very, very unique that I talk about a lot. One is that we have a dozen technologies all accelerating: AI, computation, blockchains, autonomous cars,
drones are doubling every nine months in their price performance. Okay. So we've never seen this many technologies all accelerate all at the same time. So that's part one. Part two, though, is even more interesting, which is the cost. So it turns out that throughout humanity and throughout our history, it's always been true that advanced technologies cost a lot. And only a government or a big corporate lab could do RD launch new products and services. Today, for the first time in the history of humanity,
advanced technologies are cheap. Solar energy is cheap. Sensors are cheap. Blockchains are open source and free. We'll look at what you can do with open source AI models that are free to download and use. So the cost of disruptive innovation has just gone to zero. Well, and absolutely. And I would say the cost of cognition is approaching zero. It is absolutely approaching zero. For example, two years ago when I was first building AI models, I had a team of programmers and they were great,
nothing wrong with them. But six months ago, I just started using cloud code and I found out that instead of me describing the project to this team, I could describe it to Claude. And then Claude would just write the code. And more importantly,
you'll love this, Salim. Then I could work on evenings, weekends, and holidays when nobody else was working so I could get things done and not get distracted by the rest of my company. All my best friends that are software guys are like 18 hours a day buried in cloud. They love it because they can go from pure expression of an idea to running code with total automation on that path,
which is kind of an amazing thing because you actually now are scaling humanity. Yes. And I can't stress this enough that people worry about the automation, but you're actually bringing true expression to each human being and allow them to express themselves and automate anything they want and create anything,
build anything, compose anything in a radically compressed way with hyper-efficiency. Extraordinary. And you're 100% correct. Let me just mention your website again for those who are really resonating with your message and want to learn more from you and your community. The website is called openexo.com. And you're just getting a taste here,
folks, a taste of what's possible with whatever you're trying to do. In fact, Salim, I want to ask you, even large nonprofit organizations can also benefit from the philosophies that you espouse, correct? Yeah, we advise tons of organizations like Save the Children, which is delivering food into Ukrainian kids and war refugees, et cetera, and Gaza and other places to big companies, to governments, et cetera. Because we have a phrase that my head of community, Kevin Allen, created. He said,
this is the decade of the EX. So pretty sure that by the end of this decade, every nonprofit, for-profit, big company impact project will be structured this way because we have the evidence that it's just better. These characteristics we're finding to be more and more accurate as time goes by. It's led to some side effects,
which is when I first wrote the book, I asked other business authors, hey, how old does this go? I've never written a book before. They're like, oh, business book, you'll have a shelf life of about 12 to 18 months. So milk it while it's hot, because then something else is going to come along and you'll be, you know, yesterday's news. So I'm like, great. So I tell my wife, okay, I may be really busy for like 18 months. And then that turned into two years, turned into four years. Six years later, she's like, hello, when are you getting home? And I'm like, damn, I've created a monster here. And we've now, I think,
just crossed a million sales of books around the world. Wow. Congratulations. So publisher is very happy. Wife, you know, less happy. But now I can stay home and do a lot more podcasts and other things like this. It's a little easier. So it's good. Okay. That's that's fantastic. And again,
I want to encourage people to check out your books. They're on Amazon and other booksellers. Now, let me ask you about radical abundance and decentralization and then deflation of food pricing. Wow. Okay. So let me just do one more thing. Sure. Yeah. It's true to our form. We actually self-published this second edition. It's free to read on our website. Oh. Okay. And there's an AI where we put all of the corpus of the book and all the interviews and case studies. So you can say,
Supply Side Surprises00:15:52
hey, I've got a Brazilian shipping company. How do I turn it into an EXO? And it literally for free tell you, here's what you need to do. Wow. And is that the engine that's right? I see it on your homepage. Is that the engine? Just go to openexo.com slash chat. Oh, slash chat. Okay. Great. And it's right there on our homepage. You can just click on it. So you're asking about food and what happens with that. Yeah. Let me give you a lead in on that because you may not know this about me,
but I'm a food scientist. I've run a food science mass spec laboratory for many years. I do crazy things like drinking food smoothies and nutrition and things like that. And I have mentioned to people, you know, food prices have been rising and rising. And I've said to people, the number one robot that I want is a weed pulling robot. Because if I have a weed pulling robot, then I can scale local food production because pulling weeds is the worst part of growing food, right? Right. So tell me,
you know, we talk about abundance and, you know, people are experiencing food prices rising. They also want local food, which tends to be more nutritious and they don't have to use all the same pesticides or whatever. So they can make it more holistic or organic. But when robots can move dirt with a shovel,
when they can harvest tomatoes, how is this going to change agriculture? Wow. Okay. Let me talk about agriculture for a second and then lift up to a couple of other things around the same thing. But let's deal with agriculture, right? It's like the second oldest industry ever. We've been doing horizontal farming forever. What's about to hit us, and it already has in subtle ways, is A, the automation at a radical level of horizontal farming,
meaning we have drones that scan farms to see using infrared to see where there are hotspots that diseases are breaking out and cut off and surround that plant and protect others from the spread, et cetera. That's happening already. But the biggest thing that's happening that people aren't really watching that carefully is vertical farming. Okay. So if you stack lettuce in a vertical farmed shelf,
you can drip feed water to them. We have sensors that know exactly what nutrients the plants need so you can give them exactly that amount of nutrient. We know what wavelengths the plants are optimized for so we can give them exactly those wavelengths. You can operate it 24-7. When you have a good successful vertical farm,
you generate about seven to eight times the yield of horizontal farming. Okay. With no pesticides, no weed pulling, any of that stuff. That is just crossing over into economic viability. Most of the arugular lettuce you eat today is already vertically farmed. I'll give you the calculation that we've seen that blows my mind on a non-stop basis. So the best calculation I've seen is if you took 35 skyscrapers in Manhattan and turned those into vertical farms,
that would feed the entire city sustainably. And that's the thing is that food can be produced locally in the cities. Locally, like on your building wall. So we already have restaurants. I've seen one in Brazil where the four walls of the restaurant,
outside and inside, are just covered with vegetables and plants. And that feeds the whole restaurant. This is like nuts. So think of all the food logistics. The average meal travels 2,500 miles to reach the U.S. table. Wow. That's a crazy number. In terms of food security,
food supply, pesticides, threat of illness, pandemics coming from all that. It's just a huge thing that we'll be able to change radically, decentralizing food supply in a magical way. And that is now about to go crazy. So that's farming,
okay, and agriculture and food supply. But if I lift up a level, I'm on the board of the XPRIZE Foundation, right? We give large public prizes wherever we see market failures. We just gave out a $100 million prize for carbon extraction at scale out of the atmosphere. The prize that we've got in the books right now that we're kind of designing and waiting to get funding is an abundance prize. And the prize will be: can you drop the cost of housing,
food, education, healthcare to $250 per person per month in the U.S.? Okay. Now, what about energy? Energy is built into that. Oh, I see. Housing, healthcare, education, whatever. Because if you can do energy, housing, energy is built into that. Okay. All right. Got it. So the prize is going to be one when somebody can demonstrate $250 a month per person. Now,
what happens is when you have AI-based systems and radical new systems like a modular building where robots can build the houses, robots can grow the plants on the walls, et cetera. We have AI doctors already in healthcare that can diagnose people much better than a human being can. You should be able to get to that level. Imagine what's possible. This is why Elon on our podcast a couple of weeks ago said in about four or five years,
you won't need to save for retirement anymore because the cost is going to drop so low that anybody can afford it. And the government will essentially cover that because $250 a month per person is not a difficult thing for the economy to generate. So this is a very powerful, massive concept. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. The only question is when. This is not an if. What we found is once we compose an XPRIZE and get to the price parameters,
it typically gets won within seven or eight years. Interesting. Let's say it takes longer and it takes 10 years. That assumes that by 2035, 2036, the cost of living for the U.S. will drop to near a very, very manageable number below the cost of poverty today for anybody in the world. That's an amazing thing to be able to say. That's the future that's coming that most people don't realize. However, this has a huge issue for the economy because it means radical deflation,
right? And it means a massive change in regulatory and how we operate, how we governance completely changes, all sorts of things have to change. But that's the end point that's possible that we're very excited about. But it does mean a whole hearted change to the economy because our fiat currency systems can't navigate a technology deflationary world. That's a really important point. Is that prize,
is it defined in today's dollars or the dollars at the year? The dollars at the time? No, today's dollars. Today's dollars. Okay. Right. I'll give you a hard data point from the past. Okay. If you went back to 200 years ago, the 1820s, 97% of the global population lived in extreme poverty. That's true. Okay. And that's about, that's $2 equivalent in 2011 dollars, going back to whenever. So maybe it was like 10 cents 200 years ago,
But the equivalent of $2 a day in 2011 dollars.
Sorry, it was 94%.
That number.
Today it's less than 9%.
So we've actually dropped extreme poverty globally from 94% to 89% in the last 200 years.
You don't see that in the news because it's good news.
And so that will drop to.
Bill Gates thinks we'll eradicate extreme poverty by the end of this decade.
So we have a J curve coming, where we go from extreme poverty at one end to extreme prosperity on the other end, which is why you see us get bubbly excited about technology, abundance, et cetera.
That future is coming.
How we bridge to that future and how fast can we get there is really the only question right now.
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of disruption between now and then, but I tell you what, I'm doing my part. I'm focused on free knowledge for humanity to share knowledge in every language, in any format, any medium. But let me let me I agree with your vision of radical abundance, but let me push back for a moment with some things that people have said to me. And we want to talk about the actual physical hard limits of what's behind all of this. For example,
I mentioned power earlier. The power grid in the United States is not nearly as strong and resilient as, let's say, China's power grid. And, you know, the Eastern power grid where you are also, what's it called? JPM, I think, is particularly strained because of data centers coming online. In addition, robot manufacturing at scale requires a tremendous amount of raw materials. Yes. And those raw materials have to be typically mined. And we're all familiar with the rare earths,
the neodymium, the dysprosium, the terbium, whatever. Plus, silver is skyrocketing right now. Silver is used and it's becoming more physically scarce. So how do you view the issue of what you and I both agree is a radical abundance in things that can be created with AI or things that can be automated? But there's also hard physical limits in the world of how quickly we can scale to that. What do you say to that? Very accurate if you operate on current paradigms. But the hard,
maybe the hardest part that I find in politicians and in thinkers is to project out not just the demand side, but the supply side. Let me explain what I mean by that. So people always, always, always underestimate how radically the cost of things is falling. So for example, when Elon, let me give you a few data points. When Elon creates the Tesla 2011, 2012, when it first comes out, all the car companies go,
that's bullshit. The cost of lithium-ion, look at it. Look at the cost of lithium-ion batteries. That's like 70% of the car. You can't build a car economically. That's bullshit. What Elon does, by the way, he does this for all his companies. He looks at a technology, whether it's lithium-ion costs or solar energy increases or mural interface speed, and he looks at 10 years. Where will that technology be on a 10-year exponential pattern? So if drones are doubling every nine months in their price performance, well,
where will that be in 10 years? That's like 11 doublings. That's a pretty amazing. That's a million-fold increase in capability. So he looks at 10 years and then he builds a company to intercept that curve. Sure enough, The cost of lithium-ion batteries today is about 94% down.
That's right.
First created Tesla.
That's right.
It's dirt cheap now.
Dirt cheap.
Nobody sees that part of it.
I'll give you a more tangible example.
The jet fuel needed to cross the Atlantic in the 1970s compared to today.
We use about two-thirds less jet fuel today than we did 50 years ago because people didn't understand what altitudes were most efficient, what routes to fly, where would the wind be the worst? Because then planes started telling other planes, hey, the wind is really bad here, go down a few thousand feet, whatever. And now we're like two-thirds more efficient at crossing the Atlantic than we were 50 years ago,
right? People forget that the deflationary aspect of the supply side. And this is what's the killing to fiat currencies, okay? Because fiat currencies rely on an inflation-based thing, which should cost more over time. Here's the macro example I use for fiat currencies. Let's say I borrow $10 million to build a TV factory, and according to my business model,
I'm going to sell those factories for $1,000 each. Great? All great. Okay. Except, and that worked, say, until about the mid-70s, and then technology prices started dropping. If I build a TV factory today, in a year, I can sell those TVs for $1,000.
They're only worth $500.
A year later, they're only worth $250.
I can never pay back the $10 million.
And that's how we're building the global economy.
We're building it on a money-printing system based on the increase in prices.
But the reality is prices are dropping.
So we're having to print even more money and issue more debt.
That's why the debt is so high.
And that system is going to structurally fail.
That's why Bitcoin got created.
People saw that this system doesn't work.
Let's create an alternative to it. And that's the alternative hedge. Jeff Booth, who wrote The Price of Tomorrow, would be a worthwhile guest for your program. He made a really startling observation in his book. It's called The Price of Tomorrow. And the observation was that over the last, Say, 50 years, every dollar increase in GDP globally has come with a $4 increase in global debt.
Right.
So try going to a bank and saying, I want to borrow a million bucks and I'm going to return you $250K.
And see how quickly you get walked out the door.
We're literally printing money to borrow from the future at a 4X rate to sustain economic growth today.
Yeah.
And you're right.
Deflation terrifies the central banks.
Deflation terrifies the central banks.
They can't navigate it.
So they just end up.
The only two left is to print more money.
The US dollar is deflating at about 14% a year.
So any investments you have have to do minimum 14% to keep purchasing parity, right?
Well, and let me add one more aspect to this that actually I think further underscores what you're saying here. This falls in the radical abundance physical category, which is new battery chemistry innovations that we're now seeing. So not only, you know, you talked about lithium,
but sodium ion is now being rolled out by Katil out of China. And then I saw out of a lab out of China, I saw sodium sulfur battery chemistry that achieves 10x energy density of kilowatt hours per kilogram. So let's look at this just for a second,
right? If you went back 20 years and you had lithium-ion batteries and you were like, okay, what could I do to improve the efficiency of batteries? You might have a research that thought, oh, maybe sulfur ion is better,
maybe lithium air is better. And they would test that compound and then they would test the next compound and they'd test the next compound. Okay. There's a database that got created over the last 10 years called the Materials Project. What they've done is taken five half a million compounds and cataloged in great detail the electrical,
physical, chemical properties of these. Really? Really? If you want a compound that has holds its voltage like this and has this type of thermal retention, da-da-da-da-da, instead of testing compound, you can just go to this database and go, I want something that'll fit these parameters. It'll spit out the five you need that meet your criteria, and you're already 95% of the way there. Okay. That's before we add AI to the mix. Now, with AI added to the mix, you could say to an AI,
go engineer a compound that has these characteristics whose materials engineering is about to radically change. And you engineer around all of the rare earth things. So you can basically say, take dysperbulium, whatever version that you need for whatever, and say, give me something that has those characteristics and engineer me a molecule that costs one tenth as much. And people forget that we are able to do that today,
and we'll be getting 10x better at that every quarter now going forward. And as we do that, you start to see where the path comes to radical abundance in all of these areas. Already in solar energy, we've seen this transition where silicon panels are very inefficient, use a lot of rare earths. So you have the current administration going, well, we need to drill more oil because clearly we can't do that. Well, already there's a new material called perovskite. I'm familiar with it, which is way cheaper than lithium silicon,
right? It's got a higher efficiency even and it's abundance. It's like a salt. So you spray the sun and you're done. They just need to figure out how to get the maintenance right, but that's an engineering problem, not an invention problem. As we scale perovskite systems, we solve completely the solar energy problem. And go back to Elon's comment. If you took 100 by 100 miles square in Idaho, that would power the entire U.S. electricity needs. Yeah, yeah,
Trust In Open Source AI00:12:22
he's right about that. And I think Elon is correct about saying the only energy source we need in the solar system is the sun. Obviously, it's not. Well, and let's note for anybody that's not clear that fossil fuels are just an old battery that the sun powered years ago. Good point. What's been missing? Oh,
I'm sorry. But what's been missing and now with the breakthroughs in battery technology, why this matters is because we haven't had efficient storage that could cycle the number of times that we need to cycle to have daily grid shifting off of solar. Now that's coming into existence. So with these sodium ion batteries, you can do 10, 20,000 cycles. So if I lift up to the societal level and we look at your decentralization theme,
right? Then imagine the following. If you're a town or a community or a city and you have vertical farming, solar energy, satellite internet, why do you need a city? Why do you need a country? And all the constraints that come with that. So we're going to decentralize society now in a very aggressive way,
in a magical way, in a very abundant way. And this is the massive opportunity that exists for humanity. And Salim, you said it so perfectly right there. And I just want to share this vision with you too. I think as battery technology goes 10x and 100x and 1000x in terms of energy storage density,
I think that one day local currency could simply be gigawatt hours in your pocket. 100%. That's what Bitcoin is essentially energy, right? Stored energy. That's right. So it's all through energy. Proof of work. It's right there. So we'll be doing that on a, it's the cleanest, what we call the inner loop, right? So we talk a lot about this on the podcast where you'll have robots putting down solar panels, collecting the electricity off the solar panel,
creating intelligence from that solar panel. Then robots build the robots that create more solar energy to do that. You create a loop. Once we get that inner loop, you're done. You basically just have a positive flywheel effect. And all of a sudden, you have radical abundance across the entire world very, very quickly. And again, you're nailing it. But I want you to comment on the idea that I think also wealth, we have to redefine wealth because wealth, I believe,
is going to be access to cognition, access to compute. It's completely going to be that. And this causes enormous stress and challenges because, you know, take any business for the last 10,000 years. It was really about selling scarcity. Right. If you didn't have scarcity, you didn't have a business. You got a legal, you had an asset or a workforce or a great chef or a design team or a hotel on a beach in a beautiful cove,
and you put a legal boundary around that and you sold access to scarcity. And that's been the basis of almost all business. But what we're seeing is now the shift to abundance-based business models. Okay. Let me give an example. If you went back 10 years ago, you had seven or eight music studios selling cassettes, CDs, DVDs, selling the physical scarcity to distribute music. Then we digitize music. Now we have two platforms, iTunes and Spotify, selling you an abundance of music on a subscription model,
essentially the exponential organization version of the product. That transition from product single sale to abundance subscription model is what we expect to see in energy, healthcare, education, literature, you name it, right? The freemium models, all of this type of thing. That's the model that's transitioning, happening now across industries. Soon, once we have autonomous cars, you'll pay a subscription model per car, like 10 cents per mile driven,
and you just pay that model at variable cost, and you're done. So right now, it's about $3 a mile for an Uber. It looks like a Tesla robot taxi will be able to do it for about 30 cents a mile. Wow. Yeah, that's coming. 10x drop. What happens when you can drive your kids around for 10x less, right? Yeah. Now we sell, by the way, you own a car. It's the second most expensive purchase you have. It depreciates while you own it,
and it sits empty 94% of the time. True. Well, and that can be running AI inference while it's charging in your garage, right? There's so many things that all of this capability will allow us to automate. All these pockets of latent abundance will start being tapped,
right? The Tesla store, the battery storage and all the Teslas collectively is adding up to very interesting marginal grid protection, right? And so there's all these things we'll be able to tap and AI will help automate all of that. So this is why we get so bubbly excited. We can see the beginnings of this. The jigsaw puzzle pieces are now kind of starting to form. And we're like,
holy crap, the future is just so goddamn amazing, right? How the hell can you be pessimistic in today's world? Well, but let me ask you about the, there are sectors that you mentioned that will have strong resistance. I think Elon even ran into this when he was doing the Doge activities in government. In particular,
healthcare doesn't want to change in the way that you and I might want it to change and government. So I got a lot of pushback one day when I said, hey, I don't want a human senator, especially not the ones we have in Texas. What I want is I want an open source AI model as a senator that we vote on the prompt. 100%. Oh, yeah,
vote on the prompt. Love it. Vote on the prompt. Yeah. So do you know Albania has already implemented an AI minister? I saw that. Right. So to fight corruption. All the other human ministers are like, oh, shit. So this AI is going to be really clever at watching at everything they do. This is such a no-brainer. Let me give you my favorite example of this is I'm a central bank and I want to drop inflation by 1%,
right? Okay. I've got a certain set of tools to my available to me, interest rates, libo rates, whatever, whatever. And I've got old data that's about two quarters old and data, so it's frail. And my mind can only grasp a certain piece of that data. So I'm basically guessing. I'm completely guessing what it's going to take to drop inflation. Now, if you had an AI that was tracking all financial transactions in the country in real time,
It's going to figure out and say, here are the 10 ways in which you could drop inflation by 1%.
If you do five of these, or this batch or this group, you'll do it by 2%.
And then a human being just has to ratify which ones are acceptable and go click and we're done.
Right.
So this is the Mo Godat path of let's use AI and move to AI management of the world as fast as we can.
It'll just be so much more effective than human beings are.
And we skip past all this BS and get straight to radical abundance very, very quickly.
Governance should not be done by human beings, in the same way that driving should not be done by human beings.
We are very poor systems control systems for two-ton cars going at high speed.
I tend to agree with the premise.
However, my audience and I, we will share some concerns. We want privacy, right? We still want to have privacy to the extent we can. Now, I know that Diamandis would say there's no such thing as privacy, right? Yeah. But look,
who do you want privacy from? That's the big question. Okay. In Europe, they want privacy from corporations. And in the U.S., they want privacy from government. The big difference between the U.S. and Europe is in the U.S., they will trust corporations and not the government. And in Europe,
they trust government, but not the corporations. Interesting. I'm Canadian. I kind of sit in the middle. By the way. Well, I don't trust the corporations or the government. No, neither. Exactly. You have to be self-sovereign going forward. And so now you have to push government to getting you there. The problem that I see in the U.S. is not government. Because let's note that the U.S.,
in theory, you're for the people, by the people, of the people. So what are you complaining about? It's government is you. As opposed to other countries where I've lived in eight countries for more than a year each. So I've got lots of experience with different systems, France, for example, et cetera. So I can comment on this to a higher degree than many people. The U.S. has had what's called regulatory capture, and it's actually government is run by the corporations. 100%. Healthcare policy, food policy, industrial beef,
industrial cheese. Absolutely. USTA. You have to break that. Now, to break that, you have to have the citizens demanding that money is not in politics because the big companies have the money to fund politics. And this is where Citizens United was a massive disaster for the country. I think the Constitution,
I'm 100% clear that the Constitution is the most beautiful document ever created. But let's also note a Constitution is like software. It has to be updated. This is my beef with the originalists, right? They're like, let's go back to what the framers thought. No, the framers knew that the world would change and they built structures. And so you adapt the Constitution as time goes by. There are so many amendments that need to be updated in the U.S. Constitution, but we don't have the mechanism to update those. If you don't update software,
what happens? You get bugs, you get patches, you get security breaches. And we're seeing that today. And we're not updating the Constitution. Now, how are you going to update the Constitution? Guess what? AI is going to be really good at helping us update the Constitution. How we get it implemented is a whole other problem. Well,
that's the thing. The framers could never have anticipated AI cognition that we have today. And that's why, see, when I was smart enough to go, we'll put in the structures to adapt to the conditions that are there at the time that people want to change. But to put an end cap on this,
I'll say that I actually trust open source AI with chain of thought reasoning where I can monitor the output. I trust that system more than I trust a human senator. 100%. 100%, right? Because then you don't know that senator is doing deals in the background. The only thing you know about a human senator is they've been bought. Exactly. You don't know by who. So let me give you, let me give you a quick example. I had a friend, and I'll ask him if it's okay that we reveal his name,
but he went through 10 years of getting legislation passed for a very worthy cause. Nobody would argue with the cause that this was. And it took him 10 years. Wow. And I said to him, You know, how was the experience? And he goes, I have the most bitter taste in my mouth after going through this experience because we talked to every senator and every congressman and their staff. It took us like 10 years. We finally got it done. I'm like, well, what's so bitter? You got it done. He's like, no, the problem is that, okay, you see a senator,
you see a congressman. You know that they were trying to fundraise and you know that they're power hungry and you know that but you think that doing the right thing would be somewhere on their list. Maybe it's not number one, maybe it's three, maybe it's number four, maybe it's number five, but you think is on the list. And I'm like, yeah, he goes, not on the list. Wow. Not on the list for any of them. Wow. Any of them. Right. And you're like, really? It's that bad? And he's like, it's that bad. And he was like, I've never seen, he's a dear,
dear friend. He's one of my mentors. And he was so disgusted by this experience, right? We need to get past all of that and just move completely past it. And AI, this much more objective, that's open source. And you look up with a set of values like the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights and say, go implement policies like this that give us the outcomes of this constitutional framing. And let's let it go and watch how much better the world gets. I just want to say,
AI actually knows the Constitution better than most members of the House from the state of Texas. And that's not an exaggeration. That's absolutely true. Yeah. I was on Tom Bill Hugh's impact theory. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I was complaining about the Second Amendment. And he's like,
yeah, like that doesn't say that. Bring it up. And he looks at it. He goes, oh, I'd never read it before. It's really just one line. I was like, how can you not have read the Second Amendment? He's like, man, I'm going to get flamed by my people. It's a brilliant document,
Extracting Radical Abundance00:06:36
misinterpreted and ignored. And now we're shredding it as we unfortunately it is being shredded right now. That's true. So, okay. We're almost out of time. I want to be respectful to your time. I just want to say, number one, I so much enjoy talking with you. You're brilliant and you have really thought in depth about these issues. And very few people I encounter have even really thought about where this is all going. You have. So congratulations. You know,
I love what you're bringing up. My MTP or my massive purpose, which is one of the key attributes of exponential organizations, is what is your massive transformative purpose. My MTP is to transform civilization. So it's a niche project. And why? Because I'm kind of find myself at the cutting edge of technology and at the cutting edge of organizational design,
right? And so I'm able to comment on: okay, listen, here's the technologies coming. Here's how we need to organize for it. And if you can do that, we actually radically get the radical abundance in a very painless, seamless way. We don't have to fight it out. And you know, what's interesting, too, I mean, you're in New York. I'm in Texas. We probably have totally different, you know, friends of political circles or corporate circles or whatever. But yet,
this important common ground about radical abundance and why we need to embrace this, this is what's becoming apparent in this conversation. People like you and I need to help lead our, you know, the people that we influence. We need to lead them into this brighter future. We don't have to starve and suffer and end up in a war or whatever. We can all be better off. We have kind of two futures,
right? We've got either a Star Trek future or a Mad Max future. Right. And it's pretty clear that both are happening. I thought we'd end up with one or the other. I was wrong. We're ending up with both at the same time. True Queen or Gaza, which is straight down Mad Max or Minneapolis,
right? And we've got Star Trek. If you go to China, you get a drone delivering you coffee and it's amazing. And so how can we get to that model as quickly as possible? I think what the objective is great. Again, love your show. Totally love it. Well, thank you so much, Salim. I'm really honored that you took the time to join me today. And let me give out your website again one more time. It's openexo.com. If you have any kind of nonprofit organization, commercial or otherwise,
and you need help to exponentiate your growth, then this is the organization that can help you. So go there, sign up. It's free to join and become part of the community. But of course, if they need expertise, That's going to cost something, But that's the next step.
If they want to do that.
Because we're decentralized, it's actually very inexpensive.
A really good point.
So any last thoughts you want to say before we wrap this up?
I think it's really critical that people follow what's happening with technology and put on the optimism hat.
It's so easy to put on the doomer hat right now.
There's so many chaotic things happening.
Can I mention one of them for a couple of minutes?
Of course.
This is totally uncensored.
You can do whatever you want here. So, you know, we've got this crazy conversation happening around AGI, right? Yeah. Which nobody knows what it is. And we're freaking out about it because we think AI is going to come along and become the robot overlord and it's going to wipe out humanity accidentally or intentionally or whatever. And you have to kind of figure and watch like,
please don't watch too many Hollywood movies around this before you start thinking that's the future, because you actually see people like yourself enabling, empowering themselves with AI in a really radical way. My wife has just started doing workshops for teenagers on saying, hey, how do you use AI as a superpower to go from future shock to future shape? Right. And so they're seeing how do you have radical agency going forward? And that's what we're going to be ending up with with AI,
with technology. We'll have radical self-dependency and radical agency going forward. And that's really an amazing thing where you can choose your path into the future and choose where do you want to express yourself and technology will get us there. And if all goes well, We'll be able to cut through all of this bureaucratic BS that's going on and get to that future in a pretty interesting way.
So I'm very, very excited about the future.
It's going to be kind of an ugly path to it, but it's pretty clear that the outcome on the other side is going to be amazing.
Well, I've been guilty of some doom on this before, but today my answer.
It's not unrealistic, by the way.
It's not unrealistic.
Yeah.
I don't, we shouldn't kind of, it's not fair to, you know, you have to also be realistic and go, wow, look at all of this, right?
Look at the damage that this could do.
Throughout history, we've had this where people have the struggle of how do you extract promise of technology without the peril?
Yes.
If you want back 3,000 years, I can use fire, new invention.
great. I can use it to heat my home. I can use it to burn down yours. How do we pick? Right. And we've done a pretty damn good job over those millennia of extracting that promise without the peril. And now we have like pretty amazing lives, extreme poverty down to like less than 10%, etc. The challenge now is as the technology amplifies, the ability for one person to do a lot of damage is going up exponentially. How do we capture that and restrict the damage that people can do? 100%. 100%. Big thing. The whole agency of AI,
I think, is overblown. I think one day I should debate Roman on this one because he's the biggest doomer that I know. I've had him on the show, yes. Yeah, so he's one of our singularity alumni. And important points to take into account,
let's watch for these things. Let's set up scenario planning and say, okay, as we start tilting into the bad scenario, what are the protective mechanisms we can implement to guide us away from that? And let's note that we've done this very well over the centuries. We just have to keep going and be much more vigilant about it. And my default answer now to people who say,
well, the robots might kill us, I say, have you seen what humans are doing right now? I know. I know. It's like, come on. Who needs Skynet? You know, when we have all these other forms of violence that are being inflicted upon innocent people all over the world, right? Quick,
quick message for all the people building humanoid robots. Maybe kickboxing is not the first skill you want to have. Right? Have you got to play? Weed pulling robots. Weed pulling robots. There you go. That's what I want. Let's go back to that. Awesome. Okay, Salim, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. And thank you for all that you do. And hope to talk to you again soon. Great conversation. All right. Take care now. All right. There you go, everybody. Wow. What an extraordinary person and just a real visionary. And so check out his website,
Weed Pulling Robots00:02:54
openexo.com. And I love having these conversations with highly intelligent, well-informed people who also have a passion for helping humanity, which we share, you know. And all of you watching, you know, look,
whether or not you agree or disagree with every single thing that I said or he said, it doesn't matter. You understand? We are good faith people working to help humanity do well, to have abundance and to have compassion, to have health and to have joy in your lives. That's really what this show is ultimately about. So thank you for watching. I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Decentralized TV. Until next time, take care. Join the official discussion channel for this show on Telegram at t.me/slash decentralized TV,
where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next. Also, be sure to subscribe to the email newsletter on decentralized.tv, where you'll be alerted about one day in advance of each new upcoming episode before it gets published. On decentralized.tv,
you'll also find links to our video channels and social media channels across all platforms, including Brighteon, Rumble, BitChute, Twitter, Truth Social, and more. Check it all out at decentralize.tv. All right, welcome back. This is the after party, except we don't have Todd Pittner with us today because he got stuck in traveling. Well, you know, he took his wife on a 25-year anniversary or something like that. He took her to this beautiful island,
and he was sending me all these videos, you know, making me jealous. Here I am freezing my balls off in Texas, you know, jogging and doing kettlebells outside in 20-degree weather. And he's texting me like, you know, the beautiful sunset on the beach. So he made me plenty jealous with that. And then the flight, his flight got messed up. So he didn't make it for today's show. So we don't have the normal Todd Pitner after party,
but he'll be back with us next time. So what I thought I would do here, just briefly, this won't be maybe as much fun because having Todd here is always a blast. But I would like to just offer a little monologue here. And this is not scripted, but just in thinking about the conversation that I just had with Saleem. And one of the most important parts of this entire thing, of this interview today, and one of the reasons I loved it so much,
is because you notice that, you know, Saleem comes from a different world than I do. Saleem, you know, he's able to meet with people like Elon Musk and the Pope and, you know, the corporate world and the proctor and gambles of the world. And, you know, that's not the world that I operate in. My world is more, you know, sort of mavericks and maybe renegades or whistleblowers or people, you know, really, really intelligent pioneers and innovators,
We Deserve Better00:11:46
but not mainstream people. But guess what? What you just watched here today is a demonstration of why both of these worlds have recognized the same core lesson. That core lesson is that decentralization of power,
of knowledge, of money, of compute is the answer for humanity to make humanity better in terms of our knowledge, in terms of our freedom, in terms of our health, our abundance, our joy, just quality of life, and achieving the things that we're here to achieve. And I want to say about all of this,
our world is not about political parties. It's not about left versus right. And, you know, if you haven't yet realized that it's all the same uniparty, you know, you're already late to the game because it's all the same party. And that party is obsolete, whatever you want to call it, whatever labels you want to use, that's obsolete. Because the decentralization of technology and compute,
as Salim mentioned throughout the show today with numerous examples, is making all those old systems utterly obsolete very rapidly. And that's a positive thing. You know, the future should not look like the past. If it does, we've failed. The future can be much better than the past. And of course, as I mentioned during the show, I want to protect privacy from government and corporations. I want to be able to live in a self-reliant manner. I want to grow my own food,
right? I want to be able to determine what I'm allowed to read or to be able to express myself in congruence with the First Amendment. And, you know, unlike Saleem in New York, I'm in Texas. And yeah, I have a lot of guns because I use them on my ranch. I take care of chickens and donkeys and goats. And, you know, I've got predators out there that are always trying to eat the animals, you know? So it's different cultures. But what we have in common,
again, is that the future can be made much, much better. And we don't have to stay stuck in the past. I'm still going to live in Texas. I'm still going to live off-grid as much as possible. But these technologies will allow people like me and you listening to do that more effectively. We talked about advanced battery technology. That will allow us to live off-grid,
where we can just erect some solar panels and we can store the solar energy at night and we don't even have to be connected to the power grid. Talk about decentralization. And then when we have robotics locally, I've talked about this. If you want to get out of the city and live in rural America like I do, it's going to take a lot of work. You have to physically do a lot of things. I've learned a lot of crazy things like how to build goat-proof fences and how to maintain a John Deere tractor,
change the starter on a skid steer, dirt mover, you know, lots of things like that. Not everybody's down for that. Not everybody wants to shovel dirt around and plant rows of tomatoes and do the irrigation that's necessary to grow crops. Well,
automation is going to help you do that. Automation is going to make it easier to live in a more decentralized manner. And if you prefer to live in the city, that's fine. That's your choice too. You'll have more access to local food with vertical farming in the cities. And in fact,
you'll have robotic assistants that can help you do things like, hey, go out and buy some fresh mangoes for me at the local market. Go, robot, go get that done. And it'll go do that for you and bring it back so that you don't have to spend time being a shopper. You can spend time being a creator. You can stay at home and create things. You can create ideas. You can write books. You can write music. You can build businesses. You can launch new amazing projects with the help of cognition. And it doesn't matter where you live in the city or the country,
you can be more decentralized and you can have a better life because of the technology that Salim and I are talking about. And again, this is actually the common unifier that can bring together so many people in our fractured society where we have so much on the left and the right. And sometimes it gets racial. Sometimes it's black versus white or sometimes it's LGBT versus Christians or whatever. Those are all fake separation strategies,
really, by the powers that be that want to keep us warring with each other while they maintain control of an obsolete system that suppresses us and keeps us down. The best way for us to become better people and to have a better quality of life is to embrace universal uplifting of all people. And that's why I routinely argue for the principles of free speech,
for example. I believe free speech applies to every person. Every person on the left or the right, every person who, even if they have a different lifestyle than me, they look different. They have a different skin color. They speak a different language. They talk with a different accent. It doesn't matter. Everybody has the same First Amendment right. It's not even,
I mean, it's beyond a right. It's also an obligation. You should express yourself. And so these principles, as we were talking about, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, these principles, they do need to be now augmented with this technology because nothing augments the First Amendment better than AI expression, text generation, book generation, music generation, video generation,
being able to express yourself. AI research agents being able to conduct the research and build the books that you want to write. I hear from people every day, they love the book engine that I built at brightlearn.ai because they say, you know, for years I've had these 10 book projects that I've wanted to get done and I've never had the time to do them because every book would take months. Now every book takes minutes. They just take all their notes and they feed it into the prompt. You know,
Corey Engelat did this. He took all his notes, he took a bunch of transcripts and interviews that he did with a bunch of people, fed it in and boom, creates an amazing book. And then he's selling that book on Amazon. And he's actually earning money off a book, which is totally allowed because we offer it under a Creative Commons attribution license. You can use the books commercially. So you see what I'm saying? So now you can use this AI technology. You can revolutionize your income streams. You can revolutionize your creativity,
your passion, your activism, whatever that may be. What do you care about? Do you love to rescue animals? Wildlife rescue. If that's your thing, do it. Do you love to feed starving people? Do it. There are plenty of people starving in the world right now, believe it or not, which is insane because we know how to grow food. But it's politics that stands in the way. So if that's your passion, use technology to help you achieve that. If your passion is building amazing, you know,
new living structures for people that are affordable, you know, affordable housing for Americans instead of all these giant mansions that, frankly, have too much square footage to try to maintain anyway. You can make that your passion and you can use AI technology to help you achieve that to help others. See,
we've got to get past this whole era of fighting one side versus the other, one party versus the other. And you realize, you know, both parties just want to keep you down, really, ultimately. We've got to get past that and realize that we have to help each other organically. This is a grassroots, decentralized, technological, civilizational revolution. We have to help each other. We have to reach out to each other and offer to each other,
which is like what I do with all our free AI tools. That's why I keep them free because I want you to use them. I want you to copy the books. I want you to spread them around. I'm put them on the torrent websites, you know, spread knowledge. That's how we make it out of this current era. Understand, this might be controversial, but so what? We are not living in the world that we deserve. We deserve to be living in a world much better than the one that we are experiencing right now. In other words,
to say it two different ways. Why? Because we've been held back. We've been held down. And lots of things have been denied to humanity. A lot of technologies, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of freedoms of access to knowledge. AI is changing all of that. And the whatever you want to call them, the controllers or whatever, they no longer can maintain suppression and control of knowledge. Because even with my own book engine,
we've dropped the price of knowledge to zero, to zero. That's never happened before. We've made it so that, you know, an impoverished person in India, as long as they have access to the internet, which 85% of households do, even in India, if they have access to the internet, they can create a book on any topic completely free and they can learn anything and they can achieve a university-level education in mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry, economics,
you name it, just using our engine. And we're just one of many players out there who are disruptors, granted. And I understand, you know, I piss off people sometimes because I am a disruptor. That's my mentality. But I'm a good faith disruptor. I'm here to disrupt the world in favor of humanity. And that's why we've built these engines in this new era is revolutionizing everything. So I just say,
look, join me in this. I mean, it doesn't have to be anything official, but share this video. You know, tell people about the show, Decentralized TV. And stop being okay with a shitty world. Does that make sense? Stop putting up with the status quo. Change it. Change it. We are the revolutionaries. And I'm talking about in a non-violent way,
I just mean philosophically, technologically, we are the revolutionaries. We are the people we've been waiting for to change the world and make it better and finally deliver the world that we all deserve. We deserve better than what we've been living in. All of us deserve better, whether you're Canadian or American or Palestinian or Israeli for that matter. We all deserve better than where we are right now. And it's not going to come, you know, abundance isn't going to come from killing each other, bombing each other,
suppressing each other. Abundance is only going to come from empowering each other. That's what I believe. And I believe Salim believes that as well. It's very clear. That's why I'm just honored to have him on. And This kind of conversation is what we need to see a lot more of as we move forward and help create a better world together. So,
look, let go of any cognitive anchors to the past. The world that we need to create is not the one that we've been in. And it's time to get busy. Let's roll up our sleeves. Let's get to work, download Claude code,
you know, start jamming away. Start building the new world that you want to live in and share it with others. I do that every day. I vibecode every single day. And because that's my passion is to do what I just said. We're going to help make the world a better place together. So, thank you for watching today. And that's what this show is all about. Decentralize.tv. Be sure to check out all the other episodes at the website decentralize.tv. And yeah,
Giving the Gift of Great Nutrition00:04:03
We have a lot more amazing episodes coming up this year with amazing guests.
I mean, really, I can't wait to share it with you.
Thanks for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams of decentralized.tv and Brighteon.com.
care.
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