May 2026

Diamandis frames this week as the moment the Vatican recognized AI is already reshaping civilization. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, 'Magnifica Humanitus: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,' a 42,000-word document calling for AI regulation, worker protections, and a ban on autonomous weapons. The Pope coined 'Babel syndrome,' drawing an analogy between the Tower of Babel and today's towers of data and profits. Notably, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI all quietly lobbied the Vatican beforehand, and there is evidence Chris Olah from Anthropic sat with the Pope, potentially ghostwriting sections about AIs being 'grown or cultivated' rather than built. The encyclical also stakes the first major religious position against AI personhood, declaring AIs are not on a comparable moral plane with humans. In industry news, OpenAI posted $5.7 billion in quarterly revenue with ChatGPT reaching 905 million weekly users, while Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4.8. Tech layoffs reached 134,000 workers for the year, though solo founders surged 100% in a single quarter. Nvidia's Jensen Huang criticized the 'lazy narrative' that AI causes job losses. In space, SpaceX launched Starship V3 — the largest rocket ever built — and a crypto billionaire booked the first private Mars flyby. The episode captures the collision of religion, commerce, labor, and space exploration as the singularity accelerates across every dimension of society.

Diamandis draws on an appearance on Ed Mylett's podcast to address the anxiety gripping recent graduates who booed Eric Schmidt and other commencement speakers for mentioning AI. He acknowledges their fear is valid — they spent $200,000 on degrees for a world that may not exist — but argues they are wrong to be passive or to blame AI rather than the institutions that sold them outdated credentials. The essay's core is a distinction between passion and purpose: passion is something you love doing, but purpose is something you love doing that helps other people. That second dimension is transformative because it provides directional motivation that doesn't burn out when things get difficult. Diamandis illustrates with his own origin story — watching Apollo 11 at age nine and dedicating his life to opening the space frontier. The second essential mindset is curiosity, which he describes as the rocket fuel that propels you toward your purpose. In a decade defined by exponential technological change, the ability to constantly ask questions, learn new domains, and remain open to radical shifts is what separates those who thrive from those who stagnate. Together, purpose and curiosity form a framework for taking agency rather than being victimized by change. Diamandis closes by arguing that no institution — not universities, not governments, not corporations — can prepare anyone adequately for the next ten years, so the only viable strategy is to cultivate these internal mindsets and drive your own trajectory.

Diamandis opens with a provocative redefinition of wisdom as probabilistic pattern recognition across a vast number of lived experiences, the kind traditionally associated with grandparents and tribal elders who draw on decades of watching choices and consequences. He then asks what happens when AI can simulate not hundreds or thousands of scenarios but billions, replaying the entire observable history of human decisions to forecast outcomes with quantified confidence. He argues this is wisdom being born. The centerpiece is FutureSim, a new benchmark built by independent researchers that replays the internet day-by-day from January 1, 2026, gives AI agents access to real-time news as it unfolds, and asks them to forecast real-world events 90 days out with no web access beyond the replay window. GPT 5.5 running Codex achieved 25% accuracy, the highest of any frontier model, and beat Polymarket crowd predictions on the Super Bowl. Diamandis emphasizes that 25% is remarkable given the complexity — these are open-ended forecasts of real-world events, not binary coin flips. The essay positions this as a proof point that AI systems are beginning to exhibit the compressed, experience-derived judgment we call wisdom, and that the implications for decision-making across every domain from personal life to geopolitics are profound. Rather than fearing AI as merely faster computation, Diamandis invites readers to see it as an emerging oracle of cumulative human experience.

Diamandis recaps a monumental week on the Moonshots podcast with Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and Salim Ismail. The lead story is SpaceX's filing for the largest IPO in history: a $75 billion raise at a valuation exceeding $1.75 trillion, 2.5x Saudi Aramco's record. The prospectus claims a $28.5 trillion total addressable market spanning Starlink broadband ($870B), Starlink mobile ($740B), digital advertising via X ($600B), AI infrastructure ($2.4T), and the staggering Macrohard partnership with Tesla targeting $22.7T to replicate all digital work with AI. A buried bombshell reveals Anthropic is paying SpaceX $15 billion annually for data center access across Colossus 1 and 2, signaling SpaceX is ceding the foundation model race to focus on infrastructure. The team also notes SpaceX's $60 billion option to acquire Cursor, the AI coding tool. In AI breakthroughs, an OpenAI model disproved a conjecture that stumped mathematicians for 80 years. ChatGPT expanded into financial advisory services. Chinese AI labs surged past American competitors in video generation quality. Colossal Biosciences achieved a biotech milestone by hatching chicks from artificial eggs. On the cultural front, a generation of college graduates loudly booed Eric Schmidt when he mentioned AI at their commencement, reflecting deep anxiety about degrees rendered obsolete. The episode frames all of this as acceleration toward the singularity, with each story representing a different vector of exponential change.

This week's Moonshots episode is anchored by an in-depth analysis of Google I/O 2026, which Diamandis describes as the most ambitious developer conference in the company's history. The headline is counterintuitive: Google announced a 6x increase in capital expenditures — and the stock went up, something unimaginable five years ago. Sundar Pichai opened with staggering scale metrics: quadrillions of operations and hundreds of billions in infrastructure spend supporting products each exceeding a billion users. The Gemini app now claims 900 million monthly users, approaching ChatGPT territory and establishing a genuine three-horse race between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The centerpiece product launch was Gemini Omni, a new family of models that generates video from any combination of text, photos, video, and audio — notably positioning Google DeepMind as the only remaining American frontier lab seriously pursuing multimodality after OpenAI cut Sora and Anthropic focused squarely on cogen. AWG speculates on a deeper strategic bet: Google may be treating biological sequences like DNA and proteins as just another modality, pursuing 'modality scaling' as a differentiated path to superintelligence. Additional segments cover Andrej Karpathy's move to Anthropic, Andrew Feldman's record-breaking Cerebras IPO, and the Build with Gemini XPRIZE. The episode frames this convergence of events as the singularity unfolding in real time.

Peter Diamandis announces what he calls a biological Rubicon: in January 2026, the FDA cleared the world's first human clinical trial of partial epigenetic reprogramming, a therapy designed not to slow aging but to reverse it in living patients. Patient recruitment is already underway. Diamandis quotes Harvard's Dr. David Sinclair, who at the Abundance Summit called this 'another Wright Brothers moment.' The email contextualizes this milestone within a broader acceleration: OpenAI partnered with Retro Biosciences to build an AI model that achieved a greater than 50-fold improvement in the performance of key cellular reprogramming factors, generating modifications so radical that no human researcher would have considered testing them. Sinclair's lab is now using AI to screen billions of molecules. The announcement ties to the updated 2026-2035 Longevity Metatrend Report, which Diamandis promotes as a free resource covering the science and investment landscape. The narrative arc is carefully constructed: the FDA clearance is the headline event, but the deeper story is AI's emergence as a co-scientist capable of generating hypotheses and molecular designs beyond human intuition — collapsing the timeline between scientific possibility and clinical reality. The email also promotes Abundance360 membership and the full longevity report, positioning both as essential resources for understanding the speed of the transformation underway.

Peter Diamandis argues that the fundamental economics of software creation have undergone a phase change. Five years ago, a startup idea required an engineering team, a seed round, and 18 months to validate. Today, a solo founder can build in a weekend what previously demanded a team and a year. The 'builder class' — defined as anyone with literacy, internet access, and a frontier AI model — is expanding from 47 million professional developers toward a projected 1 billion by 2030, a democratization Diamandis compares to the smartphone, the printing press, and the alphabet in historical significance. His emblematic case study: Matthew Gallagher, a 41-year-old self-taught coder in Los Angeles who launched a GLP-1 weight-loss telehealth platform with his brother, $20,000 in capital, and a dozen AI tools wired into an existing supply chain. With no venture funding and no engineering team, first-year revenue exceeded $401 million on 250,000 customers, with a run rate tracking toward $1.8 billion in 2026. Diamandis positions this as evidence that 'high agency' has replaced traditional credentials as the primary determinant of entrepreneurial success. He announces the Build with Gemini XPRIZE, a $2 million global hackathon built on Google's Gemini stack, designed to identify builders who will aim these newly democratized tools at problems that actually matter rather than incremental optimization.

Peter Diamandis delivers a stark analysis of Anthropic's accelerating vertical disruption. In roughly 100 days, Claude has been 'unhobbled' three times — meaning capabilities that always existed inside the general-purpose chatbot have now been productized into explicit vertical tools. In April, Claude Design triggered a 7% single-day drop in Figma's stock. In mid-May, Anthropic released over 20 new MCP connectors linking Claude to law firm software — Box, Everlaw, DocuSign, Microsoft 365 — plus 12 practice-area-specific plugins. The market reaction was immediate: Thomson Reuters shares plunged as much as 18% and RELX dropped 14%. A third wave targeted small business tools including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, and Canva. Diamandis frames this as a systematic dismantling of the $376 billion SaaS economy, one vertical at a time. Anthropic's revenue has simultaneously exploded from $9 billion to $30 billion run rate in roughly four months. The email's core value proposition is its second half: six specific moats that Diamandis argues will determine whether an entrepreneur's company survives or gets dissolved. He positions these not as theoretical frameworks but as urgent strategic imperatives for anyone building in software.

This week's Moonshots roundup is dominated by Anthropic's staggering trajectory. Dario Amodei revealed 80-fold growth in Q1 2026, crushing the planned 10x. Annualized revenue vaulted from $9 billion at end of 2025 to $30 billion by April and past $40 billion by May — a trajectory that took Google roughly a decade to achieve. At a 40x multiple, the current run rate implies a $1.2 trillion valuation, with projections of $100 billion ARR by year-end pushing toward $4 trillion, and a potential $1 trillion ARR in 2027 implying an eye-watering $40 trillion valuation. Diamandis emphasizes that this growth isn't driven by new users but by existing users discovering exponentially more uses for tokens — an analogy to electricity's century-long expansion from replacing oil lamps to powering everything from elevators to refrigerators. The infrastructure math is stark: Anthropic's ~220,000 GPUs serving approximately 1.6 million concurrent threads. The episode also covers Elon Musk's new partnership with Dario Amodei and Claude's continued assault on vertical SaaS categories, which are being systematically unbundled. The broader narrative reinforces Diamandis's singularity thesis: hyper-exponential growth compounding across multiple fronts simultaneously.

Peter Diamandis recaps a standout session from the 2026 Abundance Summit where Idealab founder Bill Gross — who has launched more than 150 companies over 30 years — chose not to deliver a conventional keynote but instead ran an intensive 2.5-hour hands-on workshop. Gross distilled his three decades of entrepreneurial experience into five lessons he wishes someone had told him before starting Idealab: principles covering timing, rapid prototyping, navigating the trough of despair, and other hard-won insights from watching great ideas die and brilliant founders fail. The format was unusually intimate for a summit of this scale — Gross gave every person in the room his personal email address and offered to personally review their one-page Moonshot briefs, working alongside members as they applied each lesson to their own ventures. Diamandis uses this event to promote Abundance360, his year-round membership community for entrepreneurs pursuing moonshots, positioning Gross's workshop as emblematic of the depth and access the community provides beyond typical conference experiences. The email body is structured as a marketing funnel with multiple tracked links driving readers toward the full lesson content and Abundance360 membership.

Peter Diamandis presents a data-driven investment thesis centered on what his Moonshots podcast team calls the 'innermost loop': the four interconnected sectors — semiconductors, data centers, frontier AI labs, and energy infrastructure — that form the engine room of the intelligence revolution. He argues that everything else in the economy is downstream of these four sectors. The centerpiece is a scoreboard of one-year returns from May 2025 to May 2026 that starkly illustrates the divergence: while the S&P 500 delivered roughly 31%, semiconductor stocks posted extraordinary gains — Micron up 770%, Intel up 483%, AMD up 343%, and Taiwan Semiconductor up 133%. Diamandis recounts a March 2026 talk to his Abundance Community where he displayed NVIDIA's $216 billion annual revenue, exceeding the GDP of 160 countries representing over 70% of the world's economies — a slide that silenced a room of 600 sophisticated investors. He frames this not as a transient tech cycle but as the beginning of the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, driven by insatiable demand for compute. The disclaimer is explicit: this is not financial advice but an engineer-entrepreneur's analysis of exponential trends blindsiding entire industries.

Peter Diamandis announces the updated 2026 edition of his Longevity Metatrend Report, a comprehensive document exceeding 200 pages that profiles over 40 companies and research centers shaping the longevity landscape. The update is striking because the field has moved from promise to delivery since the first edition. Key milestones include the world's first partial epigenetic reprogramming therapies entering human clinical trials, AI-engineered proteins achieving greater than 50-fold performance improvements in cellular reprogramming factors, and the first successful transplantation of genetically engineered pig organs into living human patients. Wearable health platforms have crossed $10 billion valuations. Diamandis frames longevity through an investment lens, citing ARK Invest's Big Ideas 2026 report which values quality-adjusted life years at $100,000 each, yielding a $1.2 quadrillion total addressable market — of which the current global biotech industry captures only roughly 0.1%. The report covers leading longevity centers, direct-to-consumer health platforms, epigenetic reprogramming, immune system optimization, and organ regrowth. Diamandis positions healthspan extension as both the greatest gift science can offer humanity and the largest business opportunity of the coming decade, noting that the gap between current market capture and total addressable market represents an unprecedented frontier for entrepreneurs and investors.

This week's Moonshots podcast roundup examines ten developments reshaping the technological landscape. The lead story analyzes Alphabet's extraordinary $109.9 billion quarter — 22% year-over-year growth with $62.6B in profit — and Google Cloud's 63% surge outpacing both AWS and Azure. Diamandis highlights the hidden engine: flat search volume since 2017 converted into accelerating profit through AI-powered ad targeting, with market cap approaching NVIDIA's. A second major thread covers seven frontier AI companies signing Pentagon contracts, triggering protests from 600 Google DeepMind employees and the industry's first unionization effort — which Diamandis frames as a striking collision between 19th-century labor tactics and 21st-century military AI. The OpenAI-Microsoft relationship shows further strain as OpenAI ends Azure exclusivity and diversifies across AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, citing capacity constraints. Additional stories cover ocean-based data centers as a solution to energy and cooling challenges, and Sam Altman quietly winding down his widely publicized universal basic income experiment. The episode reinforces Diamandis's core thesis: AI is becoming a decision layer embedded in every sector simultaneously.

In this second installment of audience Q&A, Peter Diamandis fields forward-looking questions about AI's trajectory and the emerging robotics entertainment landscape. The first question probes whether AI will transcend its current role as a tutor to become a lifelong personal guide — an always-available companion that helps individuals grow across every dimension of life: career, relationships, health, and personal development. Diamandis frames this as a natural progression of AI's increasing contextual awareness and personalization capabilities. The second question examines the market viability of non-combative competitive robot sports leagues in North America, touching on whether audiences will care more about the engineering teams behind the robots than the machines themselves. This dovetails with Diamandis's broader thesis about the coming abundance of autonomous systems and how entertainment formats will adapt when physical constraints are removed. The email serves as a teaser for a longer video or audio format where these questions are addressed in depth, with timestamps provided for navigation.

Peter Diamandis draws a structural analogy between biological and artificial neural networks: both the brain's 86 billion neurons and an AI's trillion-plus parameters learn through prediction, feedback, and reward. The critical difference is that humans can consciously control their own learning rate, and the dial that turns it is curiosity—which triggers the same dopamine reward circuitry used by AI reinforcement learning systems. Diamandis anchors the argument in stark empirical data from developmental psychologist Susan Engel at Williams College, who tracked children's question-asking behavior. At age five, the average child generates 107 questions per hour—relentless, full-throttle data acquisition. By first grade, the entire class combined asks only 2.3 questions per hour. By fifth grade, that collapses to 0.48 questions per hour: less than one question every two hours from a room full of eleven-year-olds. Engel observed a science teacher shutting down genuine experimentation with the words, 'No time for experiments now. We're doing science.' Her brutal conclusion: lose your curiosity by age eleven and you probably never recover it. Diamandis disagrees on recovery—he believes curiosity can be rekindled—and frames the stakes in terms any parent or CEO should find sobering: when the learning rate goes to zero, the neural network stops updating, and in an exponential world, that means obsolescence.