COSM 2025 Archive

Below is an archive of COSM 2025. Stay tuned for COSM 2026 announcements.

2025 Agenda

Wednesday, November 19

10AM		Conference Welcome
		Steve Buri — President, Discovery Institute Cole Smead — CEO and Portfolio Manager, Smead Capital Management

		_{Kickoff Keynote}
10:15		Work Less, Play More
		How The Rise of AI is Transforming Sports and Entertainment
		Ari Emanuel — CEO, TKO Group Holdings, Inc.
		Fireside Chat: Ari Emanuel with George Gilder and Cole Smead

		_{Panel Discussion}
11AM		Educating the Tech Workforce
		Has Arizona Provided a Roadmap?
		Introduction: Sandra Watson — President and CEO, Arizona Commerce Authority Moderator: The Hon. Doug Ducey — Former Arizona Governor Keri Ingraham — Director of American Center for Transforming Education Jenny Clark — School Choice Advocate and Founder of Love Your School

11:45

Break

		_{Keynote Luncheon with thanks to BlackRock}
NOON		The New Paradigm: Life After Chips
		Introduction: Bruce Chapman — Founder and Board Chair, Discovery Insitute George Gilder — Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute
		Fireside Chat: Andrew Mayne with George Gilder

1PM

Break

1:15		The Future of GPU Rendering
		Jules Urbach — CEO, OTOY Inc.

1:45		Innovations in AI Compute
		Have We Solved the Energy Puzzle?
		Jim Tour — Professor of Chemistry and Material Science, Rice University

2:15

Break

2:30		Will Decentralized AI Replace Data Centers?
		Andrew Mayne — Founder, Interdimensional AI

		_{Panel Discussion}
3PM		The Circular Economy
		Will Doc Brown’s Vision End Rare Earth Mining and War?
		Moderator: George Gilder — Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute Jim Tour — Professor of Chemistry and Material Science, Rice University Steve Ragiel — President, Flash Metals USA Travis Langster — Founder and CEO, Tora Consulting

		_{Panel Discussion}
4PM		American Energy Dominance
		Past or Present?
		Moderator: Danny Seiden — President and CEO, Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry Cole Smead — Smead Capital Management Henry Hager — Managing Director, Waterous Energy Fund Doug Terreson — Former Head of Energy Research at Evercore ISI

5PM

Break

6PM

Hosted Reception

		_{Keynote Dinner with thanks to Smead Capital Management}
7PM		Understanding Consciousness
		Are Human Beings Machines?
		Moderator: Jay Richards — Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute and Director, DeVos Center Dr. Michael Egnor – Professor of Neurosurgery, SUNY Stony Brook Michael Shermer – Executive Director, Skeptics Society Robert J. Marks — Director, Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence

9PM

Adjournment

Thursday, November 20

9AM		How 1960s Law Corrodes America’s Can-Do Culture
		Introduction: George Gilder, Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute Philip K. Howard — Chairman of the Board, Common Good

9:30

Break

		_{Panel Discussion}
9:45		Innovations in Health Care
		AI and Other Breakthroughs
		Moderator: Eric Garcia — COO at Oisin Biotechnologies Babak Parviz — CEO and Founder, NewDays.ai Dr. Richard Cartledge — Chief Medical Officer, Syntheon

10:45

Break

11AM		Science, Society, and the Next American Edge
		Lev Gonick — Enterprise Chief Information Officer, Arizona State University

11:30

Networking Break

		_{Keynote Luncheon with thanks to NetChoice}
NOON		Has the Bill Come Due?
		Three Views on the Debt Crisis
		Moderator: Jay Richards — Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute and Director, DeVos Center Steve Forbes — Chairman, Forbes Media Mark Skousen — Doti-Spogli Chair of Enterprise, Chapman University John Tamny — Forbes Editor and Author of The Deficit Delusion

1PM

Break

		_{Fireside Chat with thanks to Microsoft}
1:15		The AI Revolution
		Is it Living Up to the Hype?
		Uli Homann — Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Bob Kelly — Value Accelerator and Advisor

		_{Fireside Chat}
2:00		The Age of Entanglement
		Louisa Gilder — Author, The Age of Entanglement Jay Richards — Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute and Director, DeVos Center

2:30

Networking Break

		_{Panel Discussion}
3PM		The Great Convergence
		Where Public Policy Meets the Future of Technology
		Moderator: Steve DelBianco — President and CEO, NetChoice Mark Baisley — Colorado State Senator Neil Chilson — Head of AI Policy, Abundance Institute

4PM

Break

4:15		Chains of Command
		The PRC’s Blockchain Strategy for Global Power
		Jinyoung Englund — Strategic Advisor and Independent Board Director
		_Reaction
		George Gilder — Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute

4:45		COSM: Past, Present, and Future
		Steve Buri — President, Discovery Institute

Friday, Nov 21

9AM		Tariffs, Technology, and Grand Strategy
		From Hamilton to Trump
		Thomas Lehrman — Managing Partner, Teamworthy Ventures

9:30

Networking Break

		_{Fireside Chat}
10AM		Reflections on *Genesis* and Henry Kissinger (via live interactive video)
		Eric Schmidt, KBE — Chair and CEO of Relativity Space, Former Chairman and CEO of Google George Gilder — Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute Facilitator: Bob Kelly — Value Accelerator and Advisor

11AM		Revolutionary Superconductivity
		Does it Change Everything?
		Jamil Tahir-Kheli — Physicist and Researcher, CalTech

11:30		Reflections
		Carver Mead — Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology, Kyoto Prize Winner (2022) Introduction by George Gilder

11:50		Parting Thoughts
		George Gilder

THE VIBE SHIFT

from George Gilder

Light, electricity, photons and electrons, water, and energy all converge in vibrations, from hertz to exahertz, that tell a story of waves and tides and transformations in reality. We are navigating a parallel shift in technology, as well as in culture.

This COSM is a “Vibe Shift.” We will be telling new stories, as we shift our tributes and testimonies, wavelengths and frequencies, and latitudes and temperatures to the good vibrations at Scottsdale Hilton Resort and Villas in Arizona.

With Arizona making a serious bid to become the global center of the wafer fab industry at the heart of the rise of an AI metaverse, our sensors reverberate relentlessly. They bear phase changes, new optics and oscillations, red and blue Doppler shifts, left and right, across the world technoscape and economy.

By the time we meet, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the lordly TSMC, will have broken earth for its third Arizona wafer fab, joining Intel’s multiple fabs at Ocatello, and more modest fabs of Germany’s Infineon, Holland’s NXP, and Microchip, Inc. of Chandler.

Expressed in the movements of electrons in the gigahertz, and photons in the terahertz, of nations over decades and centuries, of bullets and bombs, drones and missiles on the horizon over the weeks and months, ideas transforming minutes and millennia, vibe shifts change our relation to time.

Gordon Moore’s logarithmic law of advance gives way to Nvidia’s millionfold exponentials and to Cerebras’ launch, way back in 2024, of four trillion integrated transistors on a single wafer.

Vibe Shifts in time shift our notions of money, which measures the value of time and the rise of knowledge.

Converging at lightspeed, this COSM will explore such issues as the move of optical signals onto chips of ever more dimensionality and the eclipse of chips entirely in planar wafer scale platforms running at terahertz velocities.

Our vibe shifts will illuminate two visions converging in semiconductors — the vision of ever larger data centers, and the vision of data centers reduced to a single wafer. The vision of IBM mainframes of yore, singularities on the horizons of mind, seems to clash with the vision of ever-expanding multiplicities of minds, magnifying each individual’s impact on the world. Vibe shifts artificial intelligences toward freedom or control, knowledge or power.

As the vibes shift, we ask, “Are chips ultimately made of exotic materials, on ever more complex and dense shards and towers of multidimensional sand, threaded with rare earths and elixirs, trending toward a miner’s monopoly? Or are they made of ideas, with a bias toward the simple and luminous, that emancipate the universes of mind?”

Are we ourselves ultimately matter or mind? We believe that the vibes are shifting toward mind. And COSM, as always, will assemble some of the world’s leading minds. We welcome you to our fray of frequencies.

8AM		Registration Opens
		Continental Breakfast