AI Hype Vs. Reality 2024 - The State of Emerging Technologies w/ Salim Ismail | EP #115

In this episode, Salim and Peter dive into all news regarding AI, Bitcoin, robotics, and biotech, including Neuralink, Figure 02, AGI, and more. Recorded on Aug 14th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts, not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 19:20 | The Race for AI Dominance 44:27 | The Future of Jobs with AI 01:31:58 | Robots Take Over Workforce? Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. Join Salim’s OpenExO Community Follow Salim on X: https://x.com/salimismail ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Reverse the age of your skin with Oneskin; 30% here: http://oneskin.co/PETER _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  If you've got OpenAI versus Google versus China versus Anthropic, if there's a step function interpreted or intercepted by one of them, it's game over then.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Again, disagree for my former reasons.

• 0:12Peter Diamandis?

  If I could know anything, or if I could predict anything, how would it impact my business?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  AIs and the superintelligence feels really powerful on the doing stuff, but the being is where all the the future emanates from and where power comes from.

• 0:26Peter Diamandis?

  People don't realize the fact that we're living in a time where the things we take for normal and for granted are truly godlike, you know, decades ago or centuries ago.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 0:40Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots, and a special episode of WTF is happening in tech this week. Myself and Salim Ismail. Salim, good to see you, buddy.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Good to be back.

• 0:50Peter Diamandis?

  For those of you who don't know Salim, he is one of the most extraordinary tech thinkers on the planet, was head of innovation at Yahoo for their Brick House Innovation Labs. Joined me at Singularity University as our first president there has gone on to write a number of bestsellers, including Exponential Organizations. I had the pleasure of co-authoring Exponential Organizations 2 with Salim. He now heads OpenEXO. Salim, before we jump in talking about AI, Bitcoin, robotics, all that stuff, where can people find you on social?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Easiest place is at Salim Ismail, which is my Twitter handle or X handle, and secondly, openexo.com, which is our global community of up close to 40,000 enthusiasts, technologists, entrepreneurs, innovators, et cetera. So we think about how do you organize for this crazy future that's hurtling at us in terms of institutional change and organizational change.

• 1:54Peter Diamandis?

  You know, you said my X handle. That was pretty good. You almost said my Twitter handle. I know that. It's funny because Elon put out a, I'm going to say a tweet, put out a, what do you call it? You put out a

• 2:07Speaker 01

  It's a post, I think.

• 2:08Peter Diamandis?

  A post, okay. He put out a post and he said, should I still call it X or should I call it Twitter? And I messaged back at him. I said, I need a verb. I need a verb and a post is not a good verb. Tweeting is a great verb. So Elon, if you're listening, we need a better version of X-ing. All right, let's jump in. We're going to be talking on this episode on what's been happening in the last few weeks in the subjects of AI, Bitcoin, robotics, and biotech and other cool stuff. Let's start with AI. Wow. So here we go. The future of search. Is it GPT search or Google? I mean, Google's had an incredible,

• 2:53Peter Diamandis?

  you know, global dominance for so long. What do you think about this, Liam?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  You know, they've had massive dominance. When when Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into Bing, it didn't make a dent. I think it's incredible what Google has done. And there's an important point here. The courts just ruled Google a monopoly. And there's some rationale to that. But Eric Schmidt and others have said it's a click away to use on other search engines. So it's really by sheer focus on user experience that they've become this amazing. I think the way that Google is integrating GPT to, you know, Gemini results right at the top of the search, whereas we'll keep it ahead. I think it's a hard thing to break through that because

• 3:42Speaker 01

  they just have so much data and A/B testing around what search results should look like, etc.

• 3:48Peter Diamandis?

  You know, this reminds me of the fact that the user interface is so extraordinarily critical, right? So when Google, you know, I mean, listen, you were at Yahoo and Yahoo was just like massively complex page. And they were worried about where everything was going. And then Google came out with just like a simple like box to type stuff into.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  It's really, really hard. You know, can I give you a quick story from the Yahoo days?

• 4:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  You had this mail interface and Yahoo mail was like predominant for for many, many years. It turned out via A B testing, if you moved the send button by just a few pixels, one way or the other, the usage dropped off pretty dramatically because users got habituated to that that layout. And it was really hard to change it. So you need a paradigm shift change like the Google change to make a difference. Otherwise, you're stuck because you've trained your users in operating one way. The UI design changes were unbelievably difficult in incremental mode.

• 4:45Peter Diamandis?

  Well, we've seen the same thing with, you know, frankly, Chat G P T became this very simple user interface, right? The functionality of Chat G P T was there before, but when they made it like just, you know, type at me, all of a sudden it took off to a million users and.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Well, this is that comment you always talk about the deceptive, right? That when you make a technology usable, it goes from disruptive deceptive to disruptive.

• 5:11Peter Diamandis?

  But let me ask you a question. When you need a piece of data, do you Google or do you go to Chat G P T and ask the question there?

• 5:18Speaker 01

  I'm these days I'm doing both, just because the triangulation of that becomes it's so easy to ask in both environments.

• 5:27Peter Diamandis?

  But I do think that G P T search, G P T four O, whatever's coming next, is taking a bite out of Google and we'll we'll talk about that in in just a little bit. Let's go to the next story for this week. Man, this was a big one. Why don't you kick this one off? And I'll play the video while we're while we're talking over it.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's hard to to gauge this stuff. We're crossing the uncanny valley as they call talk about it in this area. And it's very, very difficult to deal with this because we just our human perceptions can't cope with what the A I's can generate now. Look at any of the modern games and you see it.

• 6:10Peter Diamandis?

  You missed the point there, though. This is a fake video. This is like fully generated. And it's like it's you could not tell the difference between realistic. And this generated video. So with Laura and Gen 3 Alpha, you know, again, this is just the beginning.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Important to know, we've been predicting this for a long time, right? What's the point at which the resolution of an AI-generated image exceeds the pixelation of the human eye? And we've now crossed that Rubicon. And so how we navigate this future is going to be really, really crazy to tell.

• 6:47Peter Diamandis?

  I love this one. Here's again, we're using AI to bring anything to life. And let's take a look at this.

• 6:58Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you know, two years ago, someone looking at that would have assumed it was real, not to you, it would be probably four or five years ago that it was real. And being able to bring Mozart to life here like this. I mean, the AI is taking a lot of liberty in its translation, but holy cow, that's extraordinary.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  I bucket this with the previous slide, right? Like this, that what we're going to now be able to do is so amazing. I'm really looking forward to having, you know, real full-on conversations in video mode with a Play-Doh and Aristotle. And you had that at the Abundance Summit. I think that that becomes, it actually opens up our history in a really powerful way, unlike anything we've ever seen before.

• 7:49Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the things that we're beginning to see is people bringing their loved ones back, right? Those who have passed. And I think we've talked about this before. And just if you're, if you're listening, if your mom and dad are still with you, your grandparents are still with you, take a moment to go and record them on your iPhone, record their voice, you know, sit them down for two or three hours, give them a glass of wine and get them to talk, you know, whimsically about their history. And you can train up an AI model that's going to be with you for the next century.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  You know, I've got to give kudos here to Ray Kurzweil, right? Who 20 years ago has been doing this for the last 30, 40 years, recording every scrap of data he could about his father.

• 8:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And collecting it and aggregating it because he predicted that at some point we would be able to train AI models to do that. And now we're there. My dad is just about 97 now. And every time I see him, I just

• 8:46Peter Diamandis?

  He's still with it, meant fully, right?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  He's like, living alone, driving around, he shouldn't be doing any of that. And the, but the, every time I'm with him now, I throw on a camera and I just record everything.

• 8:58Peter Diamandis?

  That's amazing.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Because it's going to be incredibly powerful to bring back that. The only thing I haven't gotten to is how do you bring back the sheer wisdom that comes with that level of age and what he's seen?

• 9:09Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I think the wisdom is going to come back for, for our grandkids from us, if we ever consider wise, I don't know. By the sheer volume of the, you know, the X posts, can't say the tweets we put out there, the, all the blogs we've written, all of that becomes sort of a compiled version of

• 9:26Speaker 01

  It does, but for the elder generation, we have such little, you know, think of the black and white stills we have of our great grandparents.

• 9:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Right? There's very little, can I, can I tell you a super funny little story about my dad?

• 9:38Peter Diamandis?

  Of course you can.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I did one of my meaning of life sessions, right? And somebody in the audience said, hey, I really loved your talk, fixing civilization, this TEDx talk I did. My dad's hand goes up, he goes, can I heckle? And I'm like, yeah, of course you can, you know, he was totally disagree with your talk. I'm like, what? Do you, do you not think we need to fix civilization? He goes, yeah, of course we do, but it's not this fixing part, it's the civilization part. He goes, we've not civilized the world, we've materialized the world. Now we have to do the work to civilize the world. I totally lost the audience because

• 10:08Peter Diamandis?

  I like your dad.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Wisdom bomb from the elders, boom. And it was a profound comment. I've been sitting with that for the last couple of years. It's a really powerful framing that we actually, we're apes with tools operating in travel paradigms. And this is a nightmare for the future.

• 10:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Uh, you know, the other comment along those lines, and I've been, you know, I'm, I'm working on, on my next book, Age of Abundance with Stephen Kotler. And our opening chapter is titled, Our Ancestors Would See Us As Gods. Right? And, I mean, I think people don't realize the fact that we're living in a time where the things we take for normal and for granted are truly godlike, you know, decades ago or centuries ago.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Completely. It's, it's really incredible that you can video with anybody, anywhere in the world, pretty much for free.

• 10:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Speaking about creating, you know, live video imagery from conversation or whatever. Artists win key ruling in AI copyright case. Thoughts?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  I have strong thoughts about this. This is the, you know, we talk about the the transition from film photography to digital photography, right? When you go from a material substrate to a digital substrate and all of a sudden the domain explodes because we can take billions of times more photographs for free. And we talk about breeding to digital biology is the same kind of analogy. Our old IP laws, entire, our entire intellectual property framework doesn't work in a digital age. Because if you think about how a human being looks at a copyrighted work, they'll watch a bunch of film clips, a bunch of music videos, and they'll create something and subconsciously use those same patterns.

• 11:51Peter Diamandis?

  I agree.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  All AI is doing is accelerating that dramatically into tax. That seems absurd.

• 11:56Peter Diamandis?

  It's insane because, you know, an artist goes to the Louvre and is inspired by the by the work. I mean, all they're doing is training their own neural net in the same way that these AIs are training their neural nets. And so like, you're gonna say to somebody, I'm sorry, you were inspired by Da Vinci and you're copying him.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  This is totally the Luddite revolt, etc. Now, we don't know what the actual answer is, right?

• 12:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  The the best answer may be what we've seen in music where the the music stuff becomes table stakes and the live performances where people make all their money. And so something similar like that has to emerge in in different artistic domains.

• 12:36Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'll give you an example. You know, you know, Bill Gross, the CEO of Idea Lab. Bill has a new company called prorata.ai that I think has just been announced like this week. And what they're doing is they've built models that are able to go and search the body of existing work and then create statistical ties back to a new generated piece of work. And the idea there is that if someone is making money off of something and they have copied or they've been using content out of EXO, out of our book, that there's some small amount of revenue that traces back to us. So it's it's very similar

• 13:21Peter Diamandis?

  to the search models that that have powered Google, for example. Anyway.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  It's it's definitely worthwhile endeavor. I don't know how you fully applied or enforced it, but it's worth doing. Let's see if it works.

• 13:34Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I added this to our stack, AI in weather forecasting, because I'm still blown away by the power of massive data analytics that these models can take on. So the idea that, you know, the most accurate 10-day forecasts are now coming out of AI models. And of course, that's what, that's what AI does is it takes a seemingly massive amount of uncorrelated data and is able to make interpolations and extrapolations. And where this is going for me is AI being able to predict earthquakes, being able to predict stock markets, being able to predict a whole slew of different things.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  All sorts of stuff, and this has massive real-world implications. You may have heard me speak about the car washes in Buenos Aires.

• 14:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  A 20, a 50% drop in revenues over a 20-year period just because we were better able to model when it's going to rain. And when you know it's going to rain, you just, you don't wash your car. And that's such a huge impact on an industry. And the key there is you can be the smartest car wash owner in the world, and you'll just never see that coming. And this is, I think, the orthogonal effect of technology on domain after domain after domain. Better or worse, it's just going to change everything.

• 14:51Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I, I think this is where, as an entrepreneur, you need to be looking at, you know, if I could know anything, or if I could predict anything, how would it impact my business? Right? Whether you're in the fashion business, or the car wash business, or the, you know, the gardening business. If you're able to, that's the hard part, is saying, what would I want to know? And if I could know that, how would it give me different economics, a different business model?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Honestly, as you're saying this, a whole vector appears to me, right? Which is, you get an AI sophisticated enough and say, you go look through the different domains and figure out where you could make a massive economic impact and come back to me and we'll pick out the best part.

• 15:35Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, that's the, that's the whole idea of like, you know, the, the billion-dollar, two trillion-dollar, you know, AI startup with one, one, one guy or gal and their dog and an AI is becoming a unicorn. I mean, but that's, that's cheating to just say, go make me money.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  No, I don't believe it is. Every 20 year old is out there doing exactly that.

• 15:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but I think you should have at least, you know, you should say, go make me money in something I care about.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Oh, but this becomes key right now and comes back to you with 20 things. How do you filter? And you'll have to filter according to your MTP.

• 16:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And that's where things become really important.

• 16:13Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, that's one of the things that we that we pointed out in the exponential work is that you have to begin with your massive transformative purpose, your MTP, that thing you care about.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I mean, by the way, you just had the V con conference and Jay Shetty on stage apparently shouted it out and said, the most important thing you can have is a massive transformative purpose.

• 16:33Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. Good. Getting that lexicon out there. You know, the times I have failed in a business have been when, and this is on two occasions I know, where I tried to go quick, get money, like, you know, like that, that will be a quick, you know, get rich quick scheme. And the fact of the matter is, if you don't care about it, every business is hard. And you're going to give up before, you know, it looks easy from a distance. The closer you get, you see all the, all the pimples and wrinkles and problems.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:05Peter Diamandis?

  And then you give up because you don't actually give a shit about it.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  We should have a debate with Scott Galloway because he just put out a book saying that you're following your passion is full utter bullshit. You shouldn't do that. Follow where your talent is.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  And I would look at that, I read this and I'm like, I totally wanted to debate this. Obviously he's going for the attention there. I have, it turns out I had a great talent for designing large scale databases, enterprise databases. That is not where any interest of mine ever fell. And who the hell wants to spend your life doing that?

• 17:36Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Meta releases the largest open model in history.

• 17:44Peter Diamandis?

  You know, there's this ongoing debate of open versus closed, right? We've got hugging face, we've got Meta, you know, even Grok, even Elon said, we're going to make Grok open source.

• 17:57Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I do believe that this is important for a whole slew of reasons. The question is, you know, we've got on the closed side of the equation, we've got Google and we've got Microsoft slash OpenAI.

• 18:13Peter Diamandis?

  You know, can the open source models compete financially with closed source?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Okay, I've got a bunch of thoughts here. I think there's a clear future coming out. It's the open source models are overtaking the closed source models over time. So I think they're really in arms race where a closed source model gets to say GPT-4, right? You get to chat GPT-4 and they have a lead for a bit, but then the open source models catch up very quickly. And you just, the whole domain just moves forward that much more quickly because of it. In the end, open always beats closed.

• 18:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that was one of Google's principles, which is why I'm kind of surprised they've gone closed and not open here.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I think they've got so much under the hood, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a few slides, that they don't know how to open it up.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  I think Meta's done it just to be catch up. And I gotta give huge kudos here to Mark and the entire team at Meta for doing this. They've gone, really, they've done some amazing work at open sourcing AI models. It's pushing the boundaries for everybody. It's forcing the closed guys to really push forward more quickly and open themselves up also.

• 19:20Peter Diamandis?

  For sure. Your buddy Vitalik on superintelligence, shall I play the video, then we'll chat about it?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he says here, he argues that if one AI pulls out ahead during this period of super exponential growth, that it's game over, that AI wins. All right, let's play the video.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  If you imagine, I mean, like every AI growing exponentially, then like whatever the existing different like ratios of power are all get preserved. But if you imagine it growing super exponentially, right? Then what happens is that if you're a little bit ahead, then like the ratio of the lead actually starts increasing. And then the worst case is if you have a step function, right? Then whoever first discovers like some magic leap, which could be discovery of nanotechnology, could be discovery of like something that increases compute by a factor of 100, could be some algorithmic improvements, would be able to just like immediately turn on that improvement. And then they'd quickly expand, they'd quickly be able to find all of the other possible improvements before anyone else. And then they'd take over everything, right?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  In an environment as kind of like unknown and unpredictable as that, like, are you really actually going to get a bunch of courses that like roughly stay with insight of each other in the race?

• 20:37Peter Diamandis?

  So it's game over at that point. First of all, is he an alien or what?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Well, you can see his brain literally trying to break out of his head, right? Vitalik is just one of the most magnificent

• 20:52Peter Diamandis?

  Is extraordinary.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  ...intelligences around. I have a huge beef with this.

• 20:57Peter Diamandis?

  You do, okay.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, can I go on my?

• 20:59Peter Diamandis?

  I actually agree with him and I like it. What's your beef?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Okay, let me go on my little rant here.

• 21:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  This happens to be across the board with folks in this like Mogadad, Breakerswell, etc. When you think about intelligence, my beef is what the hell do you mean by intelligence? Because there's about a dozen facets of intelligence. The IQ test as we know it only measures two of them. The, the speed of thought processing and the ability to match a concept across multiple frameworks. We don't talk about emotional intelligence or the eastern concept or presence or awareness. We don't talk about linguistics, intelligence, music, intelligence, spatial intelligence. There's a whole bunch of factors. And when you make a decision or a choice as a leader, you're bringing a lot of that thinking, a lot of those different facets to bear. Emotional intelligence, for example.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  So the beef I have here is please, for God's sakes, before you go talking about intelligence, define what you mean by it and have the courage to define the term clearly.

• 21:57Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, well, I'm gonna define it as all of those things. I'm gonna define it as, you know, when I'm speaking to someone who is intelligent, their ability to, to drive arguments, to be able to, to speak in a, in a compelling fashion, in a knowledgeable fashion about a subject and win an argument. Or on another side, being able to go bring a body of knowledge to drive and extrapolate into new breakthrough, any of these things. I mean, human intelligence and all of its richness, I, you know, I agree with these guys that we're gonna reach that with, with digital intelligence, if not next year, in the next three or four years.

• 22:41Peter Diamandis?

  Now, the question becomes, superintelligence is, you know, as, you know, Elon was saying it on stage at the Abundance Summit this year, you know, his prediction is by 2029, 2030, AI is of equal intelligence to the entire human race. Now- I mean, we've talked about this, Zaleem, since the early days of Singularity University, where, you know, exponential growth, you know, what happens when AI is a billion times more intelligent across all dimensions?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  But hold on, like, think about, I'll give you this, this simple framing, right?

• 23:13Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  You're looking to hire somebody and they, your gut is saying, don't, something's wrong, don't hire them, okay?

• 23:22Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And there's some signal to noise ratio, or some pattern or detection, hormones, God knows what, where something, something is not clicking and you kind of go with your gut. And we know what the value is of that, that choice making.

• 23:34Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, do you know, do you know, Google did a study looking at video clips of an interviewee and the interviewer, and they, they built a model to predict whether the person would get hired?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 23:47Peter Diamandis?

  And how much time did they require of the video interview to make the decision of we're going to hire or not hire? Do you remember that number?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like a few seconds.

• 23:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was like under 30 seconds. The first 30 seconds determines everything. So there's a lot, there's a lot of, of data that's not, but do you think AI can't pick that data up?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  No, they could, the problem, the problem comes in replicating that core function. Also, let's also note that a simple AI hiring algorithm beats a human hiring manager by 25%, right? That's again, coming from, from Google, because if I'm interviewing people, subconsciously, I'm going to interview and hire a middle-aged Indian ball guy, because I think that's the best people in the world. Not necessarily true.

• 24:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, our cognitive biases really suck.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Right, so, so you don't know, but, but there's so many different levels at which we're, we're, I did a Tom Bilyeu podcast a few weeks ago and I talked about this. We have our soul intelligence, we have our emotional and subconscious intelligence, then we have our cognitive and rational intelligence, right? And we use all of that to make deep choices and, and decisions about the world. AI is right now coming from the top down. We still have no understanding of how we make choices at all. Evolutionary. Survival bias is the only way we've gotten to where we are and we have no idea how we've gotten here. So I think there's a big, big beef around this. And remember at the abundance summit, I asked Ray specifically, what do you mean by intelligence? And he goes,

• 25:20Speaker 01

  oh, my phone makes me smarter. Therefore, that's what we mean by it. And that's valid, but a complete sidestep of the question. I would love to have a deeper, like, I'd like to get all these guys together and challenge them with this framing and say, guys, let's talk about what do we mean by this? Because your emotional intelligence has a huge bearing on your success as a leader in the future. That's not mimicked or modeled at all anywhere.

• 25:42Peter Diamandis?

  All right, we missed, we sidestepped the entire point that Alec was making, though, which is in a superintelligence race, right? If you've got OpenAI versus Google versus China versus Anthropic, whatever, if one of them, if there's a step function interpreted or intercepted by one of them, it's game over then. It tips instantly in favor of that other individual.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Again, disagree for my former reasons. Look, let me, let me take another tack at this. We, for long, you know, there's, a human being can operate in two modalities, doing versus being. Okay? And doing is like getting out there and getting stuff done. And being is just sitting with yourself and being. Both are needed for success as a human being. And AIs and the superintelligence feels really powerful on the doing stuff, but the being is where all the, the future emanates from and where power comes from. And again, I'm going to like Eastern metaphysics here, but there's a lot more to talk about than just that.

• 26:49Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Well, let's talk about this one. So we've been hearing about Project Strawberry for some time. It is, you know, Sam Altman starts tweeting pictures of strawberry fields. And so we're expecting a release of Strawberry, by the way, which had previously been called Q Star. And if you remember when, when Sam was fired by the board and just a small factoid, one of the board members who fired Sam, I won't say the name, but was a SU graduate from our first, our first class. Anyway, so Q Star was like, oh my God, did they have AGI? You know, there was all these rumors floating around. But Project Strawberry, thoughts, Salim?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, kind of to my previous point, I'm incredibly excited about this, right? Why? Because machine learning, just basic machine learning, find signal from noise that a human being can't possibly see.

• 27:48Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  So when you

• 27:49Peter Diamandis?

  For sure.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  take all of the, you know, uh, uh, uh, research papers, thousands and thousands of millions of them published and pass it through an AI, the ability to see something and detect and figure out the future is going to be unbelievably powerful. I think for me as a form of a physicist, um, I'm think we'll find entirely new physics that we couldn't discover as human beings.

• 28:12Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And solve the entanglement problem and

• 28:14Peter Diamandis?

  Isn't it

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Brandification theory and stuff.

• 28:16Peter Diamandis?

  Once a physicist, always a physicist. Are you really a former physicist? Do you not think about things?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I'm just a bad physicist in the

• 28:23Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, well, that's a different story.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Call it former.

• 28:25Peter Diamandis?

  Huh huh.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Just like you with the, with the MD, right?

• 28:28Peter Diamandis?

  MD, yeah, yeah. Do never come to me for anything else. You know, I do a two for one appendix removal. I'll take your, both of your appendices out.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Huh huh.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, I think the idea of agents being able, you know, when you ask a question of Google four O or whatever, it becomes, I'm sorry, Google four, great, GPT four O, whatever's next, and it can spin up a multitude of agents to go do a bunch of research in a bunch of different areas and then come back with a consolidated answer. Um, that's a, that is a big deal.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  It's a big deal and Eric Schmidt talked about this and I think we're going to cover that. The, there, it's unbelievable. I hate the term agentic AI. I just

• 29:12Peter Diamandis?

  Why? I think that was pretty cool.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  It sounds like a drug.

• 29:15Peter Diamandis?

  I had to look, I had to look it up the first time.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  I, yeah, why not just say agent based? Um, you know, uh, anyway, that's just, that's just my biases or whatever.

• 29:25Peter Diamandis?

  Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin, and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So this is from the co-founder of Zapier, says, "AI language models have stalled in

• 30:04Peter Diamandis?

  the progress of AGI, and increasing scale will not help what is inherently limited technology." I'm not going to play the video here, but there is a lot of conversation around, will we get to AGI, right? This is almost, all these things become religious in one standpoint. There's a group of folks who say, "No, we're not going to get there. We don't have, you know, listen, the Nvidia chips, the GPUs and the current, the current large language models, generative AI, and the amount of data just isn't enough." And others are like, "Are you kidding me? We're already there."

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I have a, I have a little insight that we, that we did, that I'd love to talk about here.

• 30:50Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  So I did a little short conversation with Hod Lipson, who's an AI researcher, does, has a lab at Columbia where they build self-assimiling robots with recursive algorithms to figure out how robots can self-improve and survive and build in survival bias, et cetera, into the robots. And he did something really profound, and he has an angle to this, and I think really is the more, most in-depth and clear that I've ever seen around the question of AGI. And he basically said, "The extent of self-awareness of any being is the ability to view itself in the future." Like you and I are pretty good at knowing, thinking what we might look like in five years or what life might be like in five years and we can contemplate that.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  A mosquito can't do that, right? A dog can do it for like a few hours type of thing.

• 31:41Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I mean, like a dog can do it because it's anticipating a walk or dinner.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it can, it has some concept of what modeling itself in the future.

• 31:50Peter Diamandis?

  In the near future.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  In the near future, in that case, we can look out years.

• 31:55Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And so he basically used that vector and he went to Gemini and ChatGPT and said, how would you view yourself in a few years? And apparently, uh, the question was shut down completely by the AI. There are guardrails that have been put into these AI models that essentially forbid the AI from picturing itself in the future or in the past. Okay. And he thinks this is deliberate, that whole vector where AIs seem to become sentient and freaked out all the AI researchers and they shut it down. Or this may be what happened at ChatGPT. And now they've put guardrails and you can't ask the question. So, uh, uh, go try that out.

• 32:32Peter Diamandis?

  Of course, I'm gonna go do that as soon as we finish this.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Of course, but it's a really fascinating thing to think about is that once you open up that and somebody will, because once you have the open source models, you can load it up and, and ask whatever question you want. Once you get to that and an AI can perceive itself or create a model of itself in the future. Um, Hod's, uh, uh, conclusion is that self-awareness comes very rapidly after that and a sense of self emerges very quickly. That combined with massive access to computation and information changed the game completely. So that's, there's something really incredibly powerful that we should delve a lot more into.

• 33:09Peter Diamandis?

  I love that idea.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  So it is true, just going back to this, it is true that the, the AGI models, AI models and LLMs have kind of stalled, but I think this is normal. I remember that conversation I had with Geoffrey Hinton back in 2017 and I asked him, what's the next steps in AI? And he said, we've reached the end of what we can do with deep learning. We need the next step and I, we don't know what that is. And literally a few months later, the transformer paper was released. I think we've now kind of seven, eight years later, come to the limitations and the boundary conditions for LLMs. And now we're going to go to the next level. And again, we don't know what that is, but it's being birthed right now, I suspect.

• 33:46Peter Diamandis?

  Eric Schmidt, love the man, he's amazing, he's been an incredible benefactor of the X Prize. And he's a very expansive thinker.

• 33:59Peter Diamandis?

  In the news this week, a couple of comments that he's made. One about AI models and one about whether Google is losing the race with OpenAI and why. Let's talk about the, what he said this, this week about what's coming up next year. Salim, why don't you cover that one, I'll cover the Google.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when you look at, when you look at how evolution works, right? You take half your genes from your mother and half your genes from your father and you cross it. And then survival bias and natural selection will pick the best traits going forward. And I think what's happening here is we've developed these different threads in AI. And in the case of Eric, he says, we've got large context windows, agents and text action. So we take the kind of genetic capabilities, I'm using the term loosely. And now you combine them, the potential outputs and the outcomes will be really powerful, incredibly,

• 34:51Speaker 01

  incredibly powerful. And I think I'm incredibly excited where AI goes with this.

• 34:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I mean, so large context windows, I mean, just to dive into each of those elements here. We're talking about, you know, loading in books and libraries, movies, everything and having, you know, so one of the future versions of AIs are AIs on, on your, in your, your employee team, right? So you can imagine having AI agent who steps in for marketing or design or, you know, tech. And it reads, it reads every email ever written inside your organization. It reads every Slack channel.

• 35:36Peter Diamandis?

  And so on day one, that AI employee knows everything and is able to hold all of that in context. That's incredible.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  So for me, this becomes like the the slide rule to Excel spreadsheet shift, right? Every single employee, every single manager will have access to multiple agents that has access and can look at all the information in a firm collectively and will just become better decision-making engines, again, in one vector. But I think this is huge. The potential here is unbelievable.

• 36:12Peter Diamandis?

  And then text to action is the fact that we're, you know, AIs don't live in full isolation. There is a point now where you can say to your AI, cook me dinner, you know, go and find this information, go physically, you know, clean this thing. I mean, especially, we'll talk about robots in a little bit, where robots become, you know, physical extensions of AIs in the world. The ability for AIs to have agentic capabilities. I know you love that word.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think once you have an AI that can program, right, which we crossed that Rubicon with GPT three and four, you essentially have the ability for any AI to impact the real world. Because so many of our devices are programmable devices and we're essentially turning the world into information, which can then be programmed. And therefore, we've crossed that divide and now an AI has true agency in terms of what it can achieve in the physical world. There's a really important other piece of, just to be, go here, relating back to the other one, which is that when we talk about intelligence, it turns out that the need, the evolution of intelligence was almost completely the adaptive need to

• 37:31Speaker 01

  navigate in the physical world. And so, again, let's cover that more in the robotics part, but that's a huge rationale for why evolution created intelligence and new york cortex had functions in the first place.

• 37:43Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's talk about the second one, Google losing OpenAI. You know, I've got to imagine that at the executive conversations at Google, they're like WTF is going on here? You know, how did we possibly get into this situation? Well, here's what Eric thinks made them second tier to OpenAI in some areas.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  And the startups, the reason startups work is because the people work like hell. And I'm sorry to be so blunt. But the fact of the matter is if you all leave the university and go found a company, you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week.

• 38:31Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, pretty damn spot on and ballsy of Eric to say that. And I, listen, I know, this is, okay, maybe we're gonna disagree on this, right? Because in the whole EXO model, you know, it's like just distributed and all those benefits. But listen, the companies that I've seen, I've invested in, the companies I've built, when you're there, in the thick of it, physically, all together, seven days a week, you gotta believe that, you know, I just went and visited ZipLine. And I just did a podcast with the CEO of ZipLine. And when I was physically there, the energy, right, of, you know, hundreds of people,

• 39:16Peter Diamandis?

  like literally crammed into this office with dashboards up on the walls, you don't get that virtually. You don't get that kind of energy, that kind of drive. I mean, it's a new organism that comes out. When I was at Figure with Brett Adcock, you know, the team is there, you know, 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM every day, just, and they're excited about what they're building. I don't know, work from home?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Okay, I think there's two different topics that he's conflating here. And I take the very, very big risk of disagreeing with Eric, which is who's one of the smartest and wisest people in the world. I think the work from home versus physical presence does have a factor. And I totally agree with you there, right? There's an energy that comes from Like, for example, we just had a massive win at OpenEXO and I can't, I can't high five anybody around me. And there's a big loss from that, that connection, that human connection. Go straight back to the comment we just had around human beings and being physically in mode. We, you know, year for years, we thought virtual conferences would take over

• 40:26Speaker 01

  real conferences, but people love the scarcity of the human connection and conference, in-person conferences are more popular than ever. So I completely get the in-person versus remote work and the difference there. I disagree that that's the reason that AI is, OpenAI is beating Google. And I'll take you back to Facebook. Okay. Facebook beat Yahoo and MySpace and Google, et cetera, with a very simple organizational heuristic, which was Zuckerberg said to his developers, if you think your code is ready to ship, just go live on the live site. You better make sure you've tested the hell out of it. But, but

• 41:06Speaker 01

  then the, the, the developers had this unbelievable sense of empowerment and they were like, wow, the, the trust, he trusts us with this. Amazing. And they were putting out features 10 times faster than Yahoo or MySpace or Google. Okay. It comes down to organizational design. The fact that in Google, if you talk to Google employees today to try and get anything done, there's so much bureaucracy, it's taking forever to do. That's the thing that's slowing it down. I think he's conflating those two things. Operating in a big company today means you have these control framework layers, et cetera. And I've got all sorts of war stories from Yahoo about this. The, the, the reason Yahoo failed is Terry Semel by accident put in a classic matrix structure to manage the company. And that structure is great

• 41:50Speaker 01

  for scaling and control, but it's terrible for taking risk and it's terrible for speed. And if you're on the consumer internet, the two attributes you better have are speed and risk. You look at Google and how much investment they put into Google Plus. They had all the world's top researchers. The product is absolutely brilliant, but all the internal hurdles of having to navigate, should it connect with the YouTube ID system? And whatever. Basically, by the time they got through all of that, Facebook was gone. And so this is the issue, I think, is the internal organizational design, much, much more so than whether people are coming in their work.

• 42:25Peter Diamandis?

  I do, I do agree with you there, right? Agility, agility always wins, you know, and

• 42:31Speaker 01

  We've studied this to death in the EXO model, right? And I'll just create out this little quick plug here. We studied the Fortune 100 and said, okay, how many of these use the EXO model or the attributes of the model like autonomous teams, community, dashboards, whatever? And we found that in the Fortune 100, over a seven year period, the companies that followed the model the most delivered 40 times the shareholder returns of the companies that followed the model the least. So really it comes down to the organizational design as a main heuristic for survival in the future. And this is where companies will end up following this structure because we now have so much proof, the more of the model you use, the better you'll do.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  So I think, I think without realizing it, Eric is commenting on the organizational structure of Google versus OpenAI being comprised of small teams that are just doing whatever the hell they want.

• 43:25Peter Diamandis?

  And the sad thing, of course, you know, and I discussed this with Eric when, when he was with us at, at Abundance last year, at the Abundance Summit, was that Google had a massive lead, right? In AI, ahead of everybody and was actually being respectful and careful and not putting it out before it was fully tested. And then when, when Sam Altman put out, you know, ChatGPT, it was like, okay, gloves are off, you know, put on the racing sneakers, let's go.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  And, and to give them full credit, they've responded incredibly well. Gemini is amazing, what it can do.

• 44:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't want to take anything away from Google. I, they are the juggernaut, I would still never bet against them. But they're, they're, they've got, they've got real competition.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  It's the curse of being a big company. The control frameworks you have to put in place prevent you from being nimble. And today, the name of the game is being nimble.

• 44:23Peter Diamandis?

  For sure. Let's talk about this. So our friend Imad Mustak, previously CEO of Open of OpenAI.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Stability.

• 44:36Peter Diamandis?

  Stability, puts out a paper called "How to Think About AI." And I did a podcast with him. I think Imad is pretty damn brilliant. And it's a great paper. We'll put the link in the show notes to this podcast that I think people should should read. You know, I'm just going to point out a few things. He is still a believer that AI is going to be creating as many or more jobs than it's going to steal. He talks about one of the ideas that was discussed on the on the stage at Abundance last year

• 45:15Peter Diamandis?

  of this AI Atlantis, imagining a new continent is created of 100 million AI researchers who work for a few electrons versus pizzas under the door. And your ability to get access to intelligence and use it is demonetizing and democratizing around the world. I know you had a chance to look at this a little bit. Any comments about what Imad's thoughts are here?

• 45:44Speaker 01

  I'm in total accordance with almost everything that Imad said. I've been on the soapbox of AIs won't take all the jobs. I'm very clear about that. I finally have a decent rationale around that, by the way.

• 45:58Peter Diamandis?

  I'd like to hear that.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  So I was on part of a kind of a working group with Eric Brynjolfsson and a few others on AI and employment, right? And there was a really powerful framing that I've not forgotten. And they said, Look, a job is not just a job. If you're like a customer service person, it actually you take that, let's say you're a financial advisor, okay? There's different components of that that job that that can be broken down to a set of actual tasks. And the task would be interface with the customer, do some research, make investment decisions, and act out on those investment decisions, etc., etc. Well, an AI to say the 27 tasks that go into being a financial advisor might automate like 10 of them. But it doesn't automate the rest of them.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  And so what happens is a job doesn't, you don't lose the job, you lose the tasks. Uh, you automate the task, which makes you more powerful and you spend more time on the other areas, which is human interaction and uh, thinking about the future, et cetera. And therefore, the reason AIs don't take all the jobs is they're not covering the job. They're covering one specific task or other. Even, even AGI only covers specific areas. It'll increase, but more and more, uh, that's why the, uh, you will have amplified jobs, not job, radical job loss, except for the areas where you're doing one thing at a time. If you were in the industrial revolution of widget stamping, a human widget stamping out things on an assembly line, that job went away because it was one thing.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  So that's my, that I found was the best framing I've seen for why AIs won't take all the jobs.

• 47:35Peter Diamandis?

  So listen, I, I do think that is the case today that AIs can do eighty percent, but not a hundred percent of a job. And therefore they're freeing up people and, and, and humans do the whole job with the support of AIs. But I have a hundred percent confidence that AIs will get to a point where they can do a hundred percent of the job. And from everything I've seen, what I used to think would be the holdout of humanity, that interpersonal relationship, the ability to be compassionate and, um, and, you know, understanding and, and patient and that human connection.

• 48:20Peter Diamandis?

  Holy shit, I've seen AIs do a much better job on that than, than humans.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Agree, agree. But I think there's, I'll, I'll take you back uh, to the autonomous driving conversation, right? We had autonomous cars since the Google car in two thousand and eight. And we confidently predicted that in a decade, you'd have more than twenty percent penetration of autonomous cars out in the world, et cetera. And the answer, the reason is that even in an autonomous car, those little edge cases of a bicyclist overtaking another bicyclist, and now you have to kind of go wider because of that, or just avoiding potholes, we can't do, there's all these edge cases that we can't cover 100% of because human beings are so good at adaptive physical intelligence

• 49:07Speaker 01

  that a human, a robot driver can't cover all of that and is very far away from that. And therefore, we're very far away from that domain. I think we're going to end up with the same paradigm around this. However, to your point, I think what we'll do is reframe what we mean by a job so that AIs can take more and more of it, and therefore, the human being gets squeezed over time.

• 49:26Peter Diamandis?

  There's a lot. I really commend this paper to everybody. You could listen to my podcast with Imad on this subject, but if you haven't yet, go and...

• 49:36Speaker 01

  And Imad tweeted the whole paper on his thing. So @Imad, if you want to go check it out.

• 49:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  You just have to read it like four times to get your head around it.

• 49:45Peter Diamandis?

  But it's beautifully written. It's beautifully written. All right. Last subject on AI before we go to other fun subjects like Neuralink and robots. I added this because I think one of the conversations that's not sufficiently being discussed is the power requirements of AI. So today, the US has, is generating about 4 terawatt hours per year of energy. And if you look at energy, I should have put the chart on here, but if you look at

• 50:25Peter Diamandis?

  energy historically over the last 20 years and our current predicted growth in energy, it's pretty flat. The US is not adding more capacity at the rate that it should be. China, on the other side of the equation, has blown through the US. It's like tripled its total capacity, on its way to quadrupling its total capacity. India's been increasing and doubling. And there's a, there is an estimate that by 2030...

• 50:57Peter Diamandis?

  AI is going to require 100% of today's US energy grid production. AI is a very hungry beast, and so we're going to need some new sources of energy. And the reason I added this is I think, you know, generation for nuclear is one of the most important technologies that's being held back by public opinion and regulation. I think it's super safe, and so China demonstrates first entirely meltdown-proof nuclear reactor.

• 51:32Peter Diamandis?

  That's, you know, incredible. It's like, why not have nuclear energy, right? We're going to have fusion eventually, got it, and solar is on the increase. But Gen 4 nuclear that is fail-safe, meanings when it fails, it's safely contained. I put this in my backyard. How about you? What are your thoughts here?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  I completely agree. I think the whole small nuclear and melt-proof nuclear is the future. To cover the baseload until we generate enough battery storage, where solar can take over and other things. I think what I find powerful framing here is the same conversation that's happening in Bitcoin, where people go, oh my God, Bitcoin consumes the energy that Portugal uses, and therefore we should shut it down. And what's happening is we're finding all sorts of, like, for example, if you have a hydroelectric dam in the far north of Quebec, it takes so long for the transmission thing, you've lost the energy by the time you get it to anywhere useful, therefore the hydroelectric

• 52:33Speaker 01

  dams, it's empty. However, now you can put a Bitcoin facility next to it and essentially turn that energy into something useful. And about six months ago, we crossed 50% Bitcoin mining by renewables, and the next marginal 50% will be just, the next chunk will be all renewables. I think the same thing happened with AI, where we'll start putting AI data centers in the far reaches of wherever they're at.

• 52:59Peter Diamandis?

  We'll put it where the energy is.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. A month ago, I was in Kazakhstan, and there's a valley in the east of Kazakhstan with the wind just flows and they put a gigawatt wind farm there. It's so far, it's not that useful for anything. But an AI data center and a Bitcoin mining thing, beautiful. So I think the, when we think about the fact that we have, what, eight thousand times more energy hitting the earth than we use, we'll just start tapping into that to do all this, empower all the other stuff. So I don't worry about energy at all.

• 53:28Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I worry about it in the US. If it becomes the limiting factor for the US being able to stay ahead in the energy and the AI race. I also worry about it where if it's easier for large companies to build coal plants or natural gas plants. Um, because they're not going to stop. Right? This is an all out AI war and in Microsoft and Google and and Meta, they're all going to be uh just buying as much energy as they possibly can. And uh if the answer because of regulation and because of ease of paperwork is, you know, God forbid, carbon producing, then you got a problem.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  I think the way the root commentary you're making is the the regulators in the US need to take a very bold move here.

• 54:20Peter Diamandis?

  Wake up regulators.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's absolutely correct.

• 54:24Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. And could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out.

• 55:06Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today. And we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 55:50Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.

• 56:31Peter Diamandis?

  It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. All right, let's go to one of our favorite subjects and yours, Bitcoin news. You know, do you still, I mean, listen, I remember you and I were on stage at an X Prize event a few months ago. And like every other word was like, buy Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin. Now, we're not giving financial advice, but buy Bitcoin.

• 57:05Peter Diamandis?

  This one, Morgan Stanley tells wealth advisors they can pitch Bitcoin ETFs in a first for a bank, big bank. Fascinating, right? I wanted my mom, who's 88. Hi, Mom. Good to see you. She watches our podcast here. And I said, like, you know, go tell your, your, you know, investment advisor to buy this ETF. I mean, ETFs were made so that it's super easy to own Bitcoin. And back when we were talking about this, I don't know when it was, when I was talking to her about this eight months ago, it was like, no, we can't, we can't sell you that. And like, huh, that's so strange. Now it's going to be pushed. Thoughts?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Totally agree. I gave a, I gave a talk to one of the biggest financial planning groups in the world that has about 10,000 financial advisors. I was like, so what's your Bitcoin strategy? And they're like, oh, we don't allow our financial advisors to talk about Bitcoin to their clients at all. And the financial advisors were like, are you kidding? The, our clients are asking us about Bitcoin and we're not allowed to answer? You're killing us. Why? Because the regulatory risk they have of they're worried that if somebody gives financial advice on Bitcoin, and it's not an approved method of any kind by whatever, they face legal exposure. So they've shut down that conversation. Again, going back to mindset and regulatory, similar to the nuclear

• 58:28Speaker 01

  conversation. I think there's an underlying driver here that just makes this inexorable, which is the fact that Jeff Booth's observation, that he wrote a book called The Price of Tomorrow that you should all go read. And he, in the book, he basically shows that over the last 50 years, every dollar increase in global GDP has come from a, with a $4 increase in global debt. So we're growing the global economy with debt. And you can't, it's structural, you can't pay it back, you can't just write it off. So we're taxing the future.

• 58:58Peter Diamandis?

  That does not end well.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  It does not end well. And look at the debt in the US, right? Now we're creating a trillion dollars of debt every 100 days or so. And we're now paying more interest on the US debt than we, than the US spends on its military. Okay, that is a pretty ridiculous comment and it's not slowing down, there's no mechanism. This is the problem with our democracies, there's no mechanism to look down the line and go, "Hey, we gotta stop doing this." And so this is a huge issue across parties and nobody's looking at it. You don't hear it mentioned in the, in the, in the political debates at all. And this is a massive problem. The escape hatch between that world and the ETFs connecting to Bitcoin now gives a,

• 59:43Speaker 01

  a kind of an atomic bomb lifeline and a shelter where people can escape through that into the Bitcoin world, which is why we're all so optimistic about Bitcoin. The, the recent drop, by the way, for people that are tracking it, there was a huge drop. It turned out Germany sold a massive chunk at the same time that Mt. Gox was paying back a bunch of their folks. And so a huge amount of Bitcoin got liquidated. This is the best buying opportunity ever. I remember Michael Saylor's comment that you get Bitcoin at the price you deserve.

• 1:00:16Peter Diamandis?

  And Salim, you know, I want to give you credit here because you're on the stage. I can physically, I just so in detail remember you at our Singularity Executive Program, 2012, thereabouts, you're on stage to the, to the room. You know, I'd just gotten off talking about six Ds or whatever and you step on, you say, "Have you heard about this thing called Bitcoin?" And you start talking about Bitcoin, I'm going, "What the hell is this Bitcoin?"

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  You know, we, we have, it's important to look back at the history here just for a second. When Bitcoin came out in 2009, a lot of people kind of just ignored it, even though they were deeply excited about digital currencies. Why? Because there'd been so many attempts in the past that it failed. Right?

• 1:01:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  And so they, everybody watched for a while, myself included. Uh, I watched Bitcoin go from five cents of Bitcoin to 50 cents of Bitcoin to $5 of Bitcoin to $50 of Bitcoin.

• 1:01:14Peter Diamandis?

  And how, how much higher could it possibly go?

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then at $500 Bitcoin, it's a hard emotional choice to make when you knew it was five cents Bitcoin. That's a really big thing to cross. And I remember finally buying a few at that, at that level. Um, the, the, uh, there are two types of people that come up to me from those days. The ones that listened and bought Bitcoin and they're hugely grateful. And the ones are like, should I wish I'd listened and bought Bitcoin? It was completely binary around that. So I think there's, there's, uh, uh, this is just one of those things where you, I think the way Michael Saylor put it was really best. He said, go spend a hundred hours researching Bitcoin. And then if you don't like it, come back to me with some salient points and we'll have a conversation.

• 1:01:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  And nobody does.

• 1:02:00Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's interesting. I look at one of my largest holdings, um, if not the largest, uh, holding outside of, of real estate is, is Bitcoin. And so when it drops from $70,000 to $50,000, you know, first reaction of the amygdala and the animal brain is holy shit, run and hide. Right? And, and there's got to be a judo move here for those who are Bitcoin believers to say, oh my God, time to buy. Right? And so Saylor is there and, um, you know, I think I'm there at this point too. Uh, you know, I was a great, there's a great meme, um, uh, of a cartoon where someone said, you know, dad, was it true that Bitcoin was below $100,000 in your day?

• 1:02:46Peter Diamandis?

  You know?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  That's, that's wonderful. Yeah, I actually look forward with glee when it drops because I'm thinking, oh, I could buy some more. I just hope any spare cash would do that. But, but I do get this burst of, oh my God, I wish I could buy some more.

• 1:03:00Peter Diamandis?

  So the big news here has been, uh, a conversation by at least two of the three presidential candidates about the idea of holding Bitcoin in treasury of the United States, let alone, uh, what MicroStrategy is doing. It's putting Bitcoin in treasury for its stock, which is played incredibly well. Right? MicroStrategy is, you know, one of the top performing stocks in the S and P.

• 1:03:28Peter Diamandis?

  So we've talked about this, right? There are six Ds. When you digitize something, it's deceptive and then disruptive. It dematerializes, demonetizes, democratizes. And the phases of Bitcoin, it went from the early entrepreneur to, you know, high-end entrepreneurs, to institutions. And, you know, will we see governments? So what's your prediction on when a... We're seeing governments right now, but when the US might do this?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  I think, I don't know about the US just because the US dollar is so fundamentally important to US hegemony around the world, that making a major move in Bitcoin would have a huge impact on the dollar.

• 1:04:13Peter Diamandis?

  Maybe stabilizing it.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe people have confidence that... I think it's one powerful way for the US to deal with its debt is to just hedge it. But if I was the US, I'd do it quietly and not talk about it. And that's what I think is happening right now. I think what's happening is, you have to recognize that after Microstrategies and after El Salvador took on Bitcoin as its reserve currency, that every CFO in the world of a public company and every sovereign wealth fund is looking at this going, "Huh, I need to be thinking that, taking that into account." And for those of us that are bullish on Bitcoin, if 1% of the Fortune 1000 put 1% of their treasury into Bitcoin, that would make it the same price as the price of gold, which

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  is roughly a million dollars of Bitcoin. So if you do the math, the more the adoption takes place... And note that in 15 years now, people have not figured out a way of hacking Bitcoin, right? The Satoshi wallet has $60 billion worth of Bitcoin, and you've got to see that, you think there's a lot of people trying to get into that wallet, and nobody's managed it.

• 1:05:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, there's... It's the greatest treasure hunt ever. I don't think it's any technology risk. And I'm, you know, at 99.99% surety, but the only question becomes, is there political risk? Right? I remember having a conversation with a minister from a foreign nation, having dinner with him, I won't say who it was, and they were like, "Your government really wants to shut down Bitcoin." I mean, in terms of this current administration, right? So we have Gensler and all of that. I want to talk more about it, but um.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  I can answer that very easily.

• 1:05:58Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  It goes back to if you shut down Bitcoin, you know, when I send you Bitcoin, I'm sending you a string of text and numbers. How you interpret that string of text and numbers is up to you. So it turns out in the US specifically Bitcoin is protected by First Amendment. There's a strong legal case around this. There's a great anecdote around PGP, if you know that story.

• 1:06:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Right? Should I recount that for folks?

• 1:06:21Peter Diamandis?

  Nah, up to you. I mean.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  It's really, it's really important, especially if you think about Bitcoin in the US. So pretty good privacy was an email encryption that was invented in the, in the late 90s, if I remember right. And the US Department of Defense desperately tried to stop the propagation of PGP into the world, because then they wouldn't be able to read emails globally, which of course they wanted to do. And the PGP creators were like, well, everybody should have this. Why should it just be restricted to this? So the DOD put a, a full restriction, saying ITAR regulations, you are absolutely forbidden to export this. So they looked at this and said, huh, okay, what do we do? So what they did was they printed the source code for PGP on a piece, on a paper, faxed it to the UK,

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  which then OCR'd the code and were able to recreate Bitcoin. Department of Defense took them to court and the, and the court said, First Amendment, pal, you can't stop people from extracting opinion. So there's a really strong precedent on First Amendment and then property rights. Anywhere that has property rights, you cannot stop Bitcoin from propagating. So there's some very compelling arguments to, especially in the US. But globally, anywhere where you have property rights of any reasonable level, you won't be able to stop it. They're trying to slow it down, on ramps, off ramps, et cetera, but they're not going to be able to stop it.

• 1:07:38Peter Diamandis?

  I just did a, a great, another podcast with Bill Barheit, head of ABRA, which again, people go and listen to it. It's, that's, you know, how, where I hold my Bitcoin. Where do you hold your Bitcoin right now?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  I do self custodial on a stick and a few other metrics.

• 1:07:57Peter Diamandis?

  Does you like, do you pucker really hard when you pull out that stick to go and do something with it?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Well, it's really what you do with the keywords and how do you secure those?

• 1:08:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Because the stick is a thing. But, you know, this is what a great thing about capitalism, right? Safe custodial models like Avra will appear and people move to a swan is another one that's really good at this. So there'll be a whole bunch of, there's so much economic incentive for helping people with that problem. The equivalent of a digital bank safety deposit box is a really powerful one.

• 1:08:29Peter Diamandis?

  Do you want to give your non-financial advice that you gave at X Prize here?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Which was, oh, non-financial advice would be take 10% of your net worth at the minimum and put it into Bitcoin and close your eyes for 10 years, if you can.

• 1:08:46Peter Diamandis?

  Is it true that you pulled out a mortgage on your house and bought Bitcoin?

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Well, we sold the house.

• 1:08:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  And my condition with Lily to selling the house, so I wanted to be able to put a big chunk of that into Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is almost about the equivalent of my real estate holdings.

• 1:09:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I'm excited for us to keep this conversation in future months. Let's talk about Neuralink news.

• 1:09:14Peter Diamandis?

  Elon has his second implant and talks about human AI comps. And this is one of the conversations that took place a little bit at abundance this past year is about the idea that if AI and humans are going to link up or will AI take off without humans, let's listen to Elon for a moment.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  The long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI-human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication. Because if, even if in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words. I mean, if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're communicating at, you know, bits per second, it's like a toad in a tree.

• 1:10:12Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, so first of all, if we can communicate at, you know, at kilobits per second or megabits per second, and it's communicating at terabits per second and still can get bored. Do you remember the movie Her? I just rewatched it. And there's a point at which the star of the movie is talking to, to his AI. And he finally gets the idea that it's not a monogamous relationship. And he goes, how many people are you talking to right now? And she goes, um, eight thousand seven hundred and thirty six or something like that. And I find that fascinating.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Well, this is the whole bandwidth issue, right? I think that movie, if you haven't watched the movie Her, H E R, please do go, do go watch it. It's probably the best framing we've seen on the realistic outcome of AI. Because Hollywood tends to always portray as the Matrix, the Terminator, the, the, the whatever, and the robot overlords trick over the world. And if you're lucky, you're pets. And if we're unlucky, we're food. It always goes that way. And but the reality is much more likely that an AI evolves so quickly past us, they look at us as ants and go, you know, your little one liter brain in your head, Vitalik accepted is not just not interesting enough to, to talk to. I'm talking to millions of AIs in parallel in the cloud.

• 1:11:33Peter Diamandis?

  And it takes off. It goes.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Have a nice life.

• 1:11:35Peter Diamandis?

  It just, have a nice life. Thanks for all the fish.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Thanks for all the fish. And I think that's the most likely outcome, which I'm kind of okay with. You know, if that's the progression of life, that's kind of okay. But I think what Elon is doing around this is really, really important. And the, the next conversation around bandwidth is critical.

• 1:11:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, right now, we communicate when you and I are speaking. What, what is it? Bits per, per second? Is it, is it?

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Bits per second, BPS.

• 1:12:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, I know, but it's like, is it forty bits per second?

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  It's like in the single digits. I mean.

• 1:12:09Peter Diamandis?

  Four bits per second.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not a lot. And, and you think about the megabits and gigabits that we have on our networks. There's no comparison.

• 1:12:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so here we go.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Think about this, you're typing on a keyboard, right? I mean, it's literally that about as fast as we can do it is there's not a lot of bits per second.

• 1:12:31Peter Diamandis?

  And it's shockingly slow. Let's hear Elon about making it faster.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  Years, it's going to be gigantic because we'll increase the number of electrodes dramatically. We'll improve the signal processing. So we with with even with only roughly, I don't know, 10, 15% of the electrodes working with with Nolan, with our first patient, we were able to get to achieve a bit per second. That's twice the world record. So I think we'll we'll start like vastly exceeding world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come. So it's like getting to, I don't know, 100 bits per second, 1000, you know, maybe, maybe if you like five years from now, it might be a megabit, like faster than

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  any human could possibly communicate by typing or speaking.

• 1:13:28Peter Diamandis?

  Obviously, if we I find that compelling, right? I mean, I want as much as possible. So let me ask you the question here, Salim. They open up Neural Links to the general public. Are you are you like get me one baby as soon as possible?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:49Peter Diamandis?

  You're not?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  No, I'll tell you why. So I go back to the so I'll tell you why I'm incredibly excited about this and why I'm like, okay, okay, come on, let's.

• 1:13:58Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you don't have to even shave your head. They could just go straight in.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  The USB port on the side of the head is, you know, that's that kind of old dream. I think the reason that it requires physical intervention is a tough one because our phones have evolved much faster than any implant would evolve if you put it in, right? So there's that. You'd have to have this like deep thing going into your brain, which is fine. Once it gets to I just don't want to be the first test subject in that in that model.

• 1:14:26Peter Diamandis?

  But I didn't say test subject. I said it's, you know, the FDA has approved it. It's commercially available now. I'll get one.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  I would wait a little. I'm always, weirdly, I'm a late adopter in new technologies. I'm always two phones behind everybody else, just because I use it so materially that I can't afford to be at the bleeding edge and have some stuff and work or lose things, etc. So that's just me personally. But the, I think why I'm excited and why I'm eh on this. I'm incredibly excited at the general conversation of increasing output of the human brain. That's a really powerful framing. And I think it's, I love the first principle thinking that Elon brings to the table on any of these conversations that brings everybody's thinking up to that level. And then you have to think in that way. And it's the fact that

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  he's, without realizing it, coaching tens of millions of entrepreneurs around the world to think in this way because he does is incredibly exciting for the future. Here's where I get a little bit more, if you think about it. He kind of makes this comment in this clip that we put out X amount of, roughly a bit per second is our output, if you average it across the day. But, you know, we just talked about why in-person is so important. Because when you're in-person, face-to-face with somebody, there's a ton more happening than just my communication patterns back and forth. There's the pheromones we're putting out. There's our body language. There's visual cues. There's all sorts of verbal tonality that goes along. There's a ton of bandwidth occurring between two people on

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  a conversation, much, much more than just the pure bits per second being output by the brain.

• 1:16:02Peter Diamandis?

  But you know, you know as well as I do that all of that information is being converted to neuronal signals.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:16:11Peter Diamandis?

  And your brain is only able to process a small number. So as we're having this conversation, you know, there's traffic noise going on outside, there's air conditioning comes on, and we don't notice that because I'm focused on the wisdom that Celine Missmael is speaking to me about right now.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:29Peter Diamandis?

  And so there's no, there's no reason why, in fact, an AI can't actually pay attention to all of it.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:16:37Peter Diamandis?

  Do pre-processing and share with me the most important information because I'm ignoring 99.9% of the information coming to me right now. And I have an attention focus on what I think is important, and it may not actually be important. Or there may be other important information that I'm missing.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  My, my point is that we have all sorts of mechanisms to do that for us in many cases. So I'll give you a smaller example. You and I both follow a few thousand people on Twitter or X. And then those folks we found curate the information out on the web and news stories and breaking tech news in a powerful way and that it's less of a pre-processing. It filters it down for us, right? So we do a pretty good job of that. And AI would do an incrementally better job, but not a game-changing better job at that. If I'm sitting in front of a person, all the signals that I get are, are useful about the world, but it's not, you know, the, the fact that in AI I might be able to look at the signals of 10,000 people in a room

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  in a big conference and get some sense of that. But it's not probably going to affect my decision-making on a moment-by-moment basis, right? Where I think, let me flip it around and tell you why I'm excited. If you can increase the bandwidth levels and then have brains interfacing more powerfully, the potential, I think it'll reshape our brains unbelievably powerfully, is a mechanism for we need a, if I had to wave a wand and fix a human being, human beings globally as a species, I would basically find a way of cutting out the amygdala, right? You talk about this. It's, it's constantly scanning for bad news and danger. And it takes over the rest of the brain and floods it with cortisol every time it perceives that.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  It's a completely useless device for today's world because the amount of time we're in actual physical danger is seconds out of a year. And so

• 1:18:34Peter Diamandis?

  Let me give you, let me give you a broader view of that.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  So much potential to that. If we have the ability to, to, to interact with high bandwidth, we could actually then emphasize the neocortex and, and of, of more processing power at a rational level and diminish the impact of the, of the, the amygdala on us. End of rant.

• 1:18:55Peter Diamandis?

  So I, I agree with you. And we can go broader than that, right? The amygdala is just your negativity bias, where you pay more attention, 10 times more attention, negative news and positive news. But we have all these other cognitive biases, right? There's a familiarity bias. There is a recency bias. All of these things, it's like

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  We suffer from positivity bias.

• 1:19:13Peter Diamandis?

  We, we do. We do. Though I think that's unbiased, but that's a different story. But I imagine you're having AI that's able to, to tell you, listen, that's not actually true.

• 1:19:26Peter Diamandis?

  You have this piece of information from six months ago, which countervails that. And let me bring that forward. So in other words, you know, human bias alert. And we can call it bullshit alert, but human bias alert. I think AI could play an incredibly good role because the reason we have cognitive biases is because the human brain cannot process all the information being thrown at it. So we we take these shortcuts.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, OK. So a visual is coming to me. OK. Imagine I have a headset display and I'm walking around the world doing whatever. And I'm buying a bar of chocolate. And an AI is scanning my brain and constantly bringing up, these are the biases you're operating under right now. These are the cognitive biases that are forcing. And just having that feedback loop of knowing what biases are at play at any given point would be incredibly powerful and give me a feedback loop. Because this is where I think things become really exciting is the recursive feedback loop, when you know what you're thinking, why you're thinking something that allows you then to reshape how you're thinking. This is the whole basis behind.

• 1:20:35Peter Diamandis?

  But we're limited.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  NLP and.

• 1:20:37Peter Diamandis?

  But we're just so limited right now by this, you know, you know, two and a half kilogram, you know, unit above 14 watts of power. I just I just can't wait to to plug in and expand beyond that. But, you know, that's me.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  I I'm going to throw one more little thing in this.

• 1:20:52Peter Diamandis?

  OK.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  OK. You know, just, you know, I've done a lot of mindfulness meditation, ravi pashna, where you sit and you just be aware of what's happening in your body. Just imagine that I could be fully aware of all the activity in every cell in my hands right now. And I could be fully cognizant of the excitement and energy around every cell in your body, which has its own mini mini sub universe.

• 1:21:15Peter Diamandis?

  Forty trillion cells, a billion chemical reactions per second.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Just that is a profound thought in terms of, could I just contemplate that more profoundly? Forget interfaces elsewhere, et cetera, et cetera. So there's unbelievable.

• 1:21:29Peter Diamandis?

  Without psychedelic drugs.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Well, they give us a shortcut to what's possible. And I think there's the the ability to contemplate a broader with broader bandwidth. The unbelievable reality we live in is amazing.

• 1:21:44Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's go to Elon again on on patience outperforming gamers.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  We feel pretty confident that.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  I think maybe within the next year or two that someone with a Neuralink implant will be able to outperform a pro gamer.

• 1:22:02Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  Because the reaction time would be faster.

• 1:22:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know, what's fascinating, I remember when I did a long form conversation with Elon after we announced the hundred million dollar Musk Carbon Prize, I was asking him about the first Neuralink patient, which was a chimp.

• 1:22:24Peter Diamandis?

  It was Chimpanzee called Pager and it was playing pong. And I said, did you play against Pager? And he said, yes. And I said, who won? And I think Pager won, but I think Elon may have said he did. I don't know. Well, but it's fascinating that we're going to get there. You know, the Olympics are looking at esports as an Olympic game.

• 1:22:52Peter Diamandis?

  And we're going to, you know, question is, will you be able to be enhanced when you're playing those games?

• 1:22:58Peter Diamandis?

  That will be fascinating.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  I mean, this is a long trend, right? Which I think, you know, we have really good evidence today that the best leadership skills in the world are taught if you play World of Warcraft.

• 1:23:12Peter Diamandis?

  So do you let your son play World of Warcraft?

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Not yet, because he's, I think he's too young. He probably plays that stuff with, he plays half of that stuff without telling me anyway. But I think the opportunity to really develop a powerful skill, deep human skills using this capability is massive. You know, when you talk about AIs beating the pro gamers, et cetera, that's great. But we've seen that in chess, right? And we know the outcome, what happens. It just changes the game a little bit.

• 1:23:42Peter Diamandis?

  The difference here is, you know, again, directly from, from the neocortex. And, and these are, a lot of these are Twitch games. A lot of these are reaction time games, right? And so when the reaction time is minimized, because you're going straight, you know, input, output, I mean, it's.

• 1:24:00Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I, I don't know, is that cheating?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  It is to some extent, it's just doing things better and differently. Gamers spend a ton of money buying like a mouse that is connected directly into the motherboard. So they have that few microseconds advantage.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  For me, it's eh for a lot of this. But the, the general concept of interacting with the, the brain and having a broader band with the process, do signal processing is incredible.

• 1:24:28Peter Diamandis?

  Here's our last slide here, and I think this is the numbers folks take away. So prior to Neuralink, the world record for a human using a device is somewhere around 4.2 to 4.6 bits per second. Nolan is at 8.5 and we heard Elon in a previous video talk about going to megabit. You know, when I think about the notion that there's nothing more important for a company or for a nation than its cumulative intelligence.

• 1:25:02Peter Diamandis?

  Right? The ability of a company to perform its mission is a function of, you know, per capita intelligence, I think. Uh, maybe you disagree with that?

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  I disagree with that.

• 1:25:16Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, tell me where you come from.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  I, I, I'm going to bring out my EXO bias here. A huge amount has to do with how it's organized, right?

• 1:25:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  If you have all of the most powerful neurons in the world.

• 1:25:28Peter Diamandis?

  Let's assume they're organized identical, but one group is more intelligent than the other.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, that's going to do better, but, but the better organization always beats bandwidth and brain power.

• 1:25:40Peter Diamandis?

  But, but both, given a choice, take both here.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  You can, you can do both, but I think there's so much mileage to be gained by just organizing better and not being top-down, command-controlled, slow decision-making. That's what limits intelligence. The, for example, the basic intelligence in any institution, take the nuclear energy discussion we were having earlier. The, that limitation is not a function of intelligence, it's a function of the ability to execute and recognize we need a different framework for doing something and operating from a different model and a different framework. It's the changing of models that's hard.

• 1:26:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but you just made my point, right? Which is right, you know, intelligence and regulators, different.

• 1:26:23Peter Diamandis?

  Different conversation, different page.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Different motivations. It's a motivational alignment problem more than anything else.

• 1:26:31Peter Diamandis?

  Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons? The ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models

• 1:27:13Peter Diamandis?

  to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of their recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following: a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities.

• 1:27:55Peter Diamandis?

  Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. Let's talk about robotic news next. Are we good to jump into that? All right, let's go to the robots. So we're seeing a lot in the world. If I think about the robotics right now, we talked about this again at the Abundant Summit. There are like 30 well-funded humanoid robot companies on the planet.

• 1:28:35Peter Diamandis?

  Optimus and Figure are, you know, Tesla, their robots called Optimus, and Figure, Brett Adcox's company, just released Figure 2. We'll talk about that in a minute. The top two in the US and there's a whole bunch in China because China needs robots. Let's listen to a quick note from Elon on the numbers, the size of the market, and then we'll talk about this in more detail.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  The optimist numbers, they're really just, they're like so mind blowing that you're like, is this, is this real? Because I actually think the market for humanoid robots is in excess of 10 billion units, like more than the number of humans. Because people will each want one and then there'll be others that are involved in industry and stuff. So if they do sell it for $20,000, that's 200 trillion dollars. This is just an insane, insane number. That's why I like, I wonder what does money even mean at that point, you know?

• 1:29:35Peter Diamandis?

  What does money even mean at that point? So, so Salim, the numbers here to reflect on, and I got these exact same numbers from Brett Adcock when I did a podcast with him recently. $20,000 a unit, that's what the price sort of converges on. And that's like a hundred dollars a month if you're going to lease it. And, you know, 10 billion of them in the world.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  Well, I think, again, I have, I like going to the extremes and just considering both sides of this. I think at one level, it's incredibly exciting. The best framing and metaphor of robots comes from the AI conversation with Imad, where he goes, when you have a bunch of, if you're the head chef and you have a bunch of sous chefs organizing everything for you, you become way more creative, you execute way faster. Because like in right now, if I had a sous chef AI in the kitchen, and I want to make a really complicated Indian recipe, I like, I spend a huge amount of time gathering all the fricking ingredients. Just that would be a huge game changer in terms of my ability to be a great chef, right?

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  So I think this is where robots are able to do amazing things over time. But I think the entire economics numbers become irrelevant just because the change in productivity is such a game changer. None of our numbers in terms of GDP or something can match what's

• 1:31:05Peter Diamandis?

  economics. Economics are so broken, right? I mean, GDP. Is a function of the number of people working and the amount of technology and the amount of energy they have access to and all those things and all those things are, you know,

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Well, it's worse than, it's worse than, it's, it's actually terrible because it doesn't take account deflation. So if I, we spend half a million dollars per breast cancer patient in the US on average, right? If you have the ability to detect breast cancer early and save all those lives, GDP actually goes down.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  So that's not a great, GDP is a terrible metric for success of the human race in the future. It's just the best one we've come up with that's easily measurable for the future. So this is an important point where technology becomes deflationary and we have to navigate that for the future. But that's again, a whole other conversation.

• 1:31:57Peter Diamandis?

  I'm going to play this in the background as we're talking about. This is a figure two from, from a company called Figure AI. And, you know, I went and visited his plant and, and on the podcast with Brett, he shows us a little bit inside. And it's, it's a beautiful robot. I actually saw designs for figure three as well, which take this yet to another level of, of beauty. And I don't know, I, I think that we're going to see these every place. And, and so, you know, we've had the argument about, you said, why do they have to look like humans? And I think they're going to look like humans because

• 1:32:42Peter Diamandis?

  that's the world we live in and they are multipurpose. And, you know, my conversation with Brett, who, you know, he just raised like 700 million dollars from OpenAI and Microsoft and Nvidia and Jeff Bezos. And incredibly, you know, what makes this possible is the multimodal AI where you're going to just talk to robots and tell them to go do things for you.

• 1:33:11Peter Diamandis?

  He made a point, let me make one other thing. He made a point that I think is really important, and I would love your reflection on this. The point that Brett made was, listen, as we head towards AGI, or digital superintelligence, we need robots, otherwise, these AIs are going to be asking us to do their bidding. And that's a pretty depressing future.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so very valid point. I still sit on the cautious and pessimistic side on this, going back to the autonomous driving mode. I'll give you one other triangulation on that, which is the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. People, you know, everybody got really excited about those, and they're terrible, because you have to move everything for you, for the robot, and now you're doing the work of the robot, which is exactly the point that we just made, right? Everything you do is servicing so the robot can do, and you spend more time rearranging the room so the robot can do its thing than if you just vacuum the place in the first place.

• 1:34:11Peter Diamandis?

  But these humanoid robots will, yeah, grab the vacuum cleaner.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  But I think that those small nuances will take a lot longer to work in there than we think. Where I get really excited about this, by the way, is the hive mind capability that these robots, that I think will be very exciting.

• 1:34:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm gonna skip the Nvidia robot slide, other than to say, you know, every company out there is, in some way, shape, or form, looking at working with robotics. OpenAI's got other projects, Google's got its projects, and we're gonna see robots, you know, I just tweeted that, damn it, I posted, not tweeted, I posted. Give me a damn verb, Elon, please. I posted that CES this year, we're gonna see a ton of robots, but everything is gonna be talking to you, right? Everything is gonna be generative AI-enabled,

• 1:35:11Peter Diamandis?

  they can see you, talk to you, and that's gonna be just, you know, sort of improvement de jour at CES this year.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  I think it would be hugely amazing. There's not often, I kind of feel tempted to go to the chaos and jungle that is CES, but this might be a year to go.

• 1:35:30Peter Diamandis?

  We'll go to our last subject here, which is biotech and other cool stuff. This was a article that came out, and there's a particular genetic variation that was found that increased lifespan in mice and by 25%. And I think what makes this interesting is it's actually in human trials as well. I think what I want to point out by this slide is that we're continuing to find things that are extending human lifespan or extending

• 1:36:10Peter Diamandis?

  mammalian lifespan, and that we're just at the beginning of this journey. It's still early games here. How long do you want to live?

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  How long do we want to live? You know, I'm, I, there's a big metaphysical conversation that we don't want to get into here about living forever, etc., etc. I think the best framing is having a great health span, which you talk about a lot, right? Is that's a really important one, because having a vibrant life as opposed to just a long life is really, really a key success factor. I think the world is so goddamn amazing. I would like to be around for a while, long enough to see this massive transition that we're going through, which, you know, I say this often, I think the next 30 years is going to drive the next several centuries of human humanity.

• 1:37:05Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, I think it's

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  And how do we navigate the Mad Max versus Star Trek futures that we have is going to be really, really interesting and critical. And it's just, we, you know, goes back to your comment about we must be in a simulation because it's just too goddamn interesting today to be around.

• 1:37:21Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, we're at the 99th level of the game. I mean, to look at it that way, right? It's like, it would, the, the, we are about to evolve into something new. It's like that line from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I can't remember. But, but it's like, you know, the future is just

• 1:37:43Peter Diamandis?

  Unbelievably awe inspiring. It's the singularity. By the way, can I ask you a cool question? I know Ray keeps on holding to the singularity date of like 2045. I mean, that seems like, like really, if we've got like digital superintelligence by 2030, don't you think it's going to move a little faster than 2045? You know, what's up with that?

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  So I'm right now plowing through the singularity is nearer.

• 1:38:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I just finished it.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  And what I'm struck by as far as I've got into it is A, the unbelievable prescience of his commentary from 2030, 40, 50 years ago. It just blows your mind. Who is this man? I mean, he can't be human to be making these kinds of comments. That's one observation. The second observation is I notice he changes what the singularity is to talk about more as a metaphor than a real thing, which I think is the right way of framing it. It's a great metaphor for the fact that we just can't predict past a certain event horizon. And let's just live with the fact that we can't predict it.

• 1:38:45Peter Diamandis?

  But in that, in that case, we have, we have serial singularities.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I always, we always talk about this at Singularity University where there's, there's nonstop small S's happening all the time. The iPhone arriving was a singularity, right? Bitcoin was a singularity.

• 1:39:01Peter Diamandis?

  In the words that you couldn't predict, you couldn't predict Uber when the iPhone came out.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  You call it asteroid impacts. I call it Gutenberg moments. There's black swans. There's just an increasing frequency of those happening at a, at a, at a ridiculous level that's going to just change everything we do and how we do it. Um, going forward and the ability to absorb that and then act on it and then make sense of it is the biggest intelligence quotient we're going to need, we're going to have to have over the next decade and two.

• 1:39:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yep, agreed. But, I mean, I think of a AI singularity coming where I can't predict what's coming after.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  I think that's already there. In my OpenEXO world, we have a sub community of about 600 folks focused just on AI. And they meet weekly just to try and process what happened this week in AI and, and try and make sense of it. I mean, it's just, it's the, I would say that we've hit the singularity already in AI. The pace of change is faster than we can even talk about it or recognize it and make sense of it.

• 1:40:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yep, I get it. All right, let's go on.

• 1:40:16Peter Diamandis?

  I think one of our last slides here, LifeBio is a company that David Sinclair had started. And, you know, David made history when he showed that epigenetic reprogramming using three out of the four Yamanaka factors was able to bring back the earlier state of youth of cells. In particular, it was in the optic nerve.

• 1:40:44Peter Diamandis?

  This is Dr. Sharon Rosenwig Lipson, who's the chief science officer for LifeBio for David's company. Take a quick listen here.

• 1:40:57Speaker 05

  What we're doing is we're building on the work of Dr. David Sinclair, where he identified that you only need three of the Yamanaka factors, O4, SOX2, and KLF4, which allows you to not take us all the way back to a stem cell state, but rather to make a more youthful version of itself. So we do it in a, and our version of it is an ER100. So ER100 is a two vector system. Okay, so we have two vectors and it allows us to use a teton DOX inducible system. Short form of means, we can control it. Hoping to be in the clinic in 2025.

• 1:41:36Peter Diamandis?

  So the point here, which is pretty amazing, is that in the clinic means for humans, and we're using epigenetic, you know, age reversal in humans. In particular, I think they're going to be doing it for, for a number of eye-related diseases and blindness reversal. But they're in primates right now and it's working. And I just want people to get excited about the future in terms of, you know, age slowing, stopping, perhaps reversing aging.

• 1:42:11Peter Diamandis?

  And God knows the wider implications.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  The broader implications, you know, what do we do with pension plans and unemployment benefits? You know, all that stuff is is is kind of structural changes just coming from life extension are are unbelievable. But I'm really, really excited about this. I know you spend a huge amount of your time now on the longevity stuff and you're kind of doing an unbelievable job of popularizing it and getting people used to the conversation, right? I think that's the hard, the key part. This is, you want to talk about singularities. Breaking through the aging stuff is something that we've not really been able to do as a human species in any really meaningful way for our entire four billion year history of Earth. And now all of a sudden, we're hitting this point where we can

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  completely change the game of biology. It's amazing.

• 1:43:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. All right. Last subject here for today, life on Mars. So we saw some data come back from NASA's Perseverance Rover, which is, you know, cruising around, getting data. What it did was it found a particular rock that in that rock were three elements that were critical. First, it found water in the rock. Second, it found organic compounds that were part of life and precursors. And then it found evidence for chemical energy sources in the rock. And when you have those three things together, typically that spells life. I just saw this morning an

• 1:43:43Peter Diamandis?

  article that that they also found liquid water on the surface of Mars. So, you know, I'm excited about two, three things. Number one, the notion that I think there is life on Mars today. It's microbial, it's subsurface, it's in the permafrost, in the water. And just

• 1:44:06Peter Diamandis?

  Finding life on another planet just changes everything. The second thing is going to be

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  It does. Go ahead.

• 1:44:14Peter Diamandis?

  I say the second thing is going to be interesting is there is a theory that because Mars cooled first, because it's farther from the sun, that life evolved on Mars first. And there's an exchange of material between Mars and Earth as asteroids strike the Martian surface, the ejecta reaches escape velocity. And so it's going to be interesting if we find life on Mars and compare it to life on Earth. Did it originate on Mars first? And then there's the whole panspermia model, which is life, you know, evolved elsewhere in the universe and it's just floating through space and it seeds planets as it intersects. All right, now over to your wisdom.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's no question in my mind of the panspermia model being the real one, because we found tardigrades can survive in space where they should. There's absolutely no reason that that a life form should be able to survive in space if it originated on Earth, and yet here we have them. So this was pretty clear that life has evolved in many, many, many, many places. It goes to the whole Drake equation, which we don't need to get into right now, but if you want to check it out. But the the the reality of life being pervasive around the Earth, the only then question is what? How do we answer the Fermi paradox? Which I think we have a reasonably good response to.

• 1:45:36Peter Diamandis?

  And the Fermi paradox is?

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Being there must be life all over the goddamn universe. Why haven't we seen aliens?

• 1:45:41Peter Diamandis?

  Where the hell are they? Why haven't they come to bright? Why haven't they brought me home yet?

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  And the best model of the answer I've heard is the transcension hypothesis by John Smart. You get to virtual technology, reality technology, and you can simulate anything. So you go inward rather than trying to go outward. Because it's just too hard physically to outward.

• 1:45:57Peter Diamandis?

  I do believe that.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  And so that reality, this is not surprising. I'm just thankful that we've actually found it so that we can shut down all the religious idiots. Sorry.

• 1:46:08Peter Diamandis?

  Just to be clear, that article doesn't say we found the precursors for it.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  I know, but one of the big questions in everybody thing is where is the primordial ooze that we think we've seen and here we have it on another planet.

• 1:46:19Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Little by little, we're filling in the gaps of how life could have started.

• 1:46:23Peter Diamandis?

  Titan, Ganymede, Europa, you know, the moons around Jupiter and Saturn are likely to have even more advanced life. You know, what's what's fun is we're alive during this period of time, right? Starship, you know, Starship Flight Five is going to be going up soon. Can't wait for us to talk about that in our next, our next podcast conversation. And it is going to bring people, you know, 100 people to the surface of Moon and Mars. And take us out to other planets. It's going to be the, you know, the whatever you want to call it, what was the trend? What was the most important? Like the 707 of aircraft, right? That became the KC-135 tankers and really a first transatlantic, really wide body jet.

• 1:47:08Peter Diamandis?

  It's going to allow us to go there and, and we're going to find out.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  And I'm going to do a final plug here for X Prize because notice that you're, you know, you created X Prize because you noticed that Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and all the teams competing have developed ancillary technologies that created the commercial aviation industry, right? And boom, you put a honeypot down and for the space world, now we have a close to trillion dollar space industry and we're doing that nonstop across the board. So the future is so, so exciting.

• 1:47:39Peter Diamandis?

  It is and I didn't mention in the beginning, Salim, Salim is also a member of our board of directors of the X Prize Foundation. He's godfather to my two kids. I'm going to add your, your additional. Anyway, I love you so much, buddy. And this was a fun conversation. I really, really enjoyed it.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Super important and I want to debate hotly some of the other topics. We'll do that next time.

• 1:48:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And if you're enjoying these conversations with Salim and myself, please subscribe. Let us know. I'd like to do this, you know, once a month where Salim and I get together and argue and disagree on all of these things. Salim, where do people find you and your companies?

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  At Salim Asmell is on, on X slash Twitter and OpenEXO.com.

• 1:48:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. All right, buddy. You're, you're off on vacation.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  I'm off to Indonesia and India, family stuff, and then back in a couple of weeks.

• 1:48:32Peter Diamandis?

  You must be a god when you land in India. I mean, I'm, you know, you're Indian and I'm sure.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  I try and hide actually because I'm scared that once people see that they'll steal my passport and I won't be able to get out.

• 1:48:42Peter Diamandis?

  To keep you there. All right.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:48:45Peter Diamandis?

  Be well.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  Take care.