Ask the Mates anything | MOONSHOTS AMA #289
Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Alexander Wissner-Gross answer questions from founders and professionals on using AI, building hardware startups, and preparing for rapid institutional change.
The gist
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Mid-career professionals should build AI-powered side projects at night and brainstorm ideas with LLMs by describing their specific skills and constraints.
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Hardware founders should build a syndicate of co-founders, VCs, and industry partners before prototyping, and think of themselves as an intelligence company whose products have atoms.
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Schedule deliberate slack of 10 to 20 percent unscheduled time each week for learning new tools and experimenting, or you risk falling behind.
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Education should shift from memorizing content to helping kids find problems they care about, then teaching the skills needed to solve them.
What they recommend · 1 pick
Diamond Age
Books
"It's called The Young Primer. Read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. If you have not read Diamond Age yet, I highly recommend it. It's a vision of what's to come."
Peter, Salim, Dave and Joe agree on 13 things
See what they all use, in their own words. Paid ads are left out.
See what they all swear by Or pick your own peopleAlso mentioned
17:00
Mercury
· "If you go to mercur.com and you say, 'I have domain knowledge — how is this of value?' and you just throw..."
37:25
Moonshots Live
· "If you're able to make it to Moonshots Live in LA on September 25th, please do. It's going to be a massive..."
46:57
TKS
· "Go check out something called TKS.world. It's a group that I'm involved with. It's an overlay over mostly..."
47:03
Alpha School
· "Alpha School has gotten a huge amount of good credit and name brand out there and McKenzie Price is a..."
1:19:55
Substack
· "I wrote on Substack about this — most all revolutions in the world happen from young testosterone-laden men..."
1:21:51
The Last Invention
· "So in the book, The Last Invention, if it's the same book I remember, I think I was interviewed for a chunk..."
Ads in this episode
Abundance Summit, Link Ventures, Blitzy, Google for Startups, Fountain Life, Google DeepMind. They're paid, so we keep them out of the picks above.
See what Peter recommends without being paid →
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