Elon Musk on Abundance, AGI, and The Media in 2024 | EP #79 (X Spaces)

In this episode, Peter and Elon hop on X Spaces to discuss Data-driven optimism, solving grand challenges, uplifting humanity, Digital Super Intelligence, Longevity, Education, and Abundance in 2024. 12:42 | The Revolution of Communication Technology 22:12 | Redefining Overpopulation and Healthspan 1:10:05 | The Quest for Safe AI Elon Musk is a businessman, founder, investor, and CEO. He co-founded PayPal, Neuralink, and OpenAI, founded SpaceX, and is the CEO of Tesla and the Chairman of X. Listen to spaces on X: https://x.com/PeterDiamandis/status/1742713338549997884?s=20 Learn about the latest XPRIZE ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots ProLon is the first Nutri-technology company to apply breakthrough science to optimize human longevity and optimize longevity and support a healthy life. Get started today with 15% off here: https://prolonlife.com/MOONSHOT _____________ 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 Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J _____________ 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.

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• 1:00Peter Diamandis?

  Following is in years conversation I had with Elon Musk. Arguably the greatest entrepreneur of our time. Perhaps the greatest entrepreneur ever. During this conversation, which is called the coming age of abundance. We talk about how technologies, including AI and humanoid robotics are creating a world of abundance, uplifting humanity across food, water, energy, healthcare, education. We'll be talking about longevity. We'll be talking about AI. We'll be talking about the decreasing global population. And what are the reasons that you should have for being optimistic about the future? Join me. Happy year, Elon.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  Happy year. 2024.

• 1:39Peter Diamandis?

  I love 2024. Yeah, it feels like the future.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  It is the future.

• 1:45Peter Diamandis?

  It is the future. It's going to be awesome. You know, I'm hoping we get a little bit of conversation on some hope and good news for folks on this on this spaces.

• 1:58Peter Diamandis?

  I think Neil can use it.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  You are the most optimistic person that I know of by far.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  And I guess it is refreshing to hear such optimism.

• 2:13Peter Diamandis?

  I think people need a positive mindset. I think it's self fulfilling prophecy to a large degree. You know, if you're pessimistic, and we can talk about how the news media just decimates our minds constantly.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, the news is so negative. I mean, it makes me sad to read the news, frankly.

• 2:32Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let me ask you a question. I don't watch network news and I don't read any newspapers. They couldn't pay me enough money to do that.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Every time I accidentally read the news and I'll just be sad.

• 2:48Peter Diamandis?

  It's insane.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, as you know, the news, the daily news, really attempts to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on earth today?

• 3:03Peter Diamandis?

  It is. And let me show it to you every five minutes in your living room over and over and over again.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's a big world. There's eight billion people on earth. So, you know, somewhere on earth, something horrible is happening every single day. But there's also great things happening every single day.

• 3:18Peter Diamandis?

  And you know what I call CNN?

• 3:22Peter Diamandis?

  The crisis news network or the constantly negative news network.

• 3:27Peter Diamandis?

  And the problem is...

• 3:28Speaker 04

  They've got to scare you. Otherwise, you know, if they say, hey, it's been a pretty good day overall, you know, violence is an all time low.

• 3:42Peter Diamandis?

  We've got more access to food, energy, water, healthcare, education on the planet than ever before. I mean, people would just start watching horror movies, I think, instead.

• 3:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the challenge is it's our neural nets, the wiring of our brains, you know, evolved in a world of constant danger. And so we're sort of just wired for fear and scarcity constantly.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, well...

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you made this point, maybe others have. But it sort of makes sense as an evolutionary asymmetry that we would respond more to danger than to reward.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  In that, like, the consequences of danger could be fatal. Like, it could be like, well, if you go over there, there's a lion that's gonna eat you, or some neighboring tribe that's gonna kill you, and it's game over.

• 4:37Peter Diamandis?

  Your genes are out of the gene pool.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're out. Whereas, say, like, news that there's a nice bush with berries over there is nice to have. It's optional.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  But it's, in one case, you die, in another case, you're hungry. But death is worse than hunger, so that's why. Basically, anyone who did not respond more to negative news than positive news didn't make it.

• 5:08Peter Diamandis?

  They were selected against, for sure.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, anyone who was complacent about where the lion was, eaten by the lion.

• 5:18Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, the reality is, you know, the news media has one job, to deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And when we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news, that's all we get 24/7. So, I mean, listen, I...

• 5:33Speaker 04

  It's inevitable.

• 5:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it is. I mean, I do get my news invariably, you know, on my feed on X, but I also get all the great things happening in the world, because I can selectively choose to watch that. But when you're watching TV or, you know, in the newspaper, some editor someplace or some producer is deciding what gets fed into your mind. And it can really screw with your mindset.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 6:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so I mean, this this space is called it the coming age of abundance. And, you know, you were really, when my first book came out, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, you were super supportive and I appreciate that. It was 12 years ago and I think the story

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Whoa, 12 years.

• 6:19Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, yeah. And it's gotten so much better. So I It is, in so many ways, not everywhere.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  I mean, I mean, I was to go back a ways. The the I remember when we were at a day of his party in Brazil.

• 6:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  How long ago?

• 6:42Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know. He was it was his 40th or was it his 30th? No.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  No, it was it was his 30th. This was just when SpaceX was

• 6:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was just when I was forming SpaceX. Yeah, it was it was 2003, thereabouts. It was just before the X Prize was won. Right? I was trying to convince you not to build rockets.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  21 years ago, could like, like, you could have a kid that that has to legally drink.

• 7:08Peter Diamandis?

  Or legally have kids, you know.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  So it's 21 years ago.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so and, you know, things things are mostly better.

• 7:22Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I want to give everybody listening a dose of hope and optimism on the abundance side because the world has gotten better in so many ways. All you hear about is the negative constantly. And I think that's going back to our sort of core dystopian mindsets from, you know, evolving 100,000 years ago. But if we just look at some of the, look at some of the areas, right? So like global extreme poverty, right? I mean, what's more, what's what's a more important metric? You know, here are the numbers. 90% of the world was in global extreme poverty in in 1800s. In 1981, it was 42%. Today, it's under 10%. Of the world, right?

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Hunger is actually rare, and it used to be common.

• 8:09Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. And another one is, obviously, one, Harry, that you're leading the charge on is energy. You know, we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights, so we ravaged mountainsides, so we drilled kilometers under the ground. And what's the figure? It's like 8,000 times more energy hits the surface of the sun, the surface of the Earth from the sun than we consume as a species. But what's the rate at which batteries and solar is increasing? It must be massive.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, I mean, it tells that we've made a couple of presentations. One, sort of simplistic, and then one in extreme detail on how to make Earth completely self-sustaining from an energy standpoint. And demonstrating that there is no, that if you break down all of the raw materials for lithium-ion battery and for solar, you can easily make Earth, I mean, there's no shortage of materials, it's easy, it's a lot of work, obviously.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  But there's not like some critical material that we don't have enough of in order to make Earth fully self-sustaining. Even if the only way that you power all of industry on Earth and all power, including heating and transport, electrically, you could do that with solar and lithium-ion batteries and not come anywhere close to depleting the resources of Earth.

• 9:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. My favorite example there was back in the 1800s, the most precious metal on the planet was aluminum. It was more precious than gold and platinum. And even though the Earth's crust is, you know, 8% bauxite, you know, basically aluminum, it was just so energetically difficult. And it wasn't that it was scarce, it just wasn't in usable form yet. And that's what technology does. It takes something which is scarce and not usable and makes it usable, right?

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, aluminum oxide is extremely common. And, um, but, but it is, it is a low energy state. In fact, thermite, thermite, thermite is just iron oxide, rust and, and, and pure aluminum. Um, and the, the energy difference between iron oxide and aluminum oxide is so great that it generates incredible, enough heat to melt through steel. So that's what thermite is. So, uh, yeah, you do need a lot of energy to, um, turn aluminum oxide into aluminum. Um, but, but, but yeah, it, it, in, in World War II, there was a massive scarcity of aluminum for aircraft.

• 10:53Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  And, uh, that just, in fact, in Britain, the, the mosquito, uh, sort of fighter bomber was, uh, made of mostly wood. Um, but it was, it was done with, uh, it, it was basically an early form of, of, of composites, but u- using stiff wood on the, on the outside and, and light wood and like balsa on, on, as a sandwich structure. It's pretty clever. And the, the whole thing was intended to, to, uh, address the shortage of.

• 11:23Peter Diamandis?

  And that, and then, then we get technology, we get better, uh, uh, better mechanisms of extracting aluminum from the, from the aluminum oxide, from the bauxite. And this happens over and over again. In fact, that's just what we do. I mean, I think the number was last year in 2023, or maybe in 22, we had more elect, new electricity production from solar than from any other form. And, and, and you've done an extraordinary job on battery production.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the battery production is growing.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Um, actually almost at, well, at several times the rate of vehicle production. So, um.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  You know, in some cases, almost 10x the rate of vehicle production.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  So, so, yes, there's a massive demand for batteries and, you know, as, as the world uses more electricity, there's actually a lot more capability that the grid has if you can buffer the energy than without it, because the vast majority of electrical grids

• 12:29Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, it's wasted.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  assume no buffering. So they have to size the power plants for, for peak output, peak power output, which is typically a hot summer day.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  And, and then for, at, at night, you can have anywhere from half, optimistically, half power output to sometimes one tenth of the power output.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  So, so, so, basically, the, the grid, almost everywhere, the grid is sized for excess electrical power output. And if you just buffer it with batteries, you can increase the output of the grid by, you know, two or three times.

• 13:12Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, to make, to make the point here on the abundance theme, there is no limitation in energy, right? We are increasing the amount of energy per capita, and there's a direct correlation between the GDP of a nation and its energy production, right? And the direct correlation between health and education and energy. Everything scales as you increase the energy per capita of a nation.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Let's talk about another category, communications, another area that you're revolutionizing. I think the number right now, I just was checking it earlier, it's like 6.9 billion smartphone users in 2023, like 86, 86%. And that's what I got when I, when I Googled it. I don't know what.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  It's 6.9, you don't say.

• 14:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  6,900 million.

• 14:07Peter Diamandis?

  6,900 million, let's go there. That, my, my, my 12-year-olds would say the same.

• 14:16Peter Diamandis?

  It's like eighty-five, eighty-five percent of the planet's got a smartphone. And, uh, and...

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, if you, if you add up the total number of smartphones, uh, may, ever made, it exceeds a...

• 14:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Oh, I think it...

• 14:29Speaker 04

  So...

• 14:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's amazing. So we've gone from like zero telephony to the majority, vast majority of the planet in under a century.

• 14:39Peter Diamandis?

  You know, global internet is well the same thing. And, uh, did I, your, your next iteration of Starlink spacecraft have gone up? Uh, the direct to cellphone?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Okay. Uh, yes, that just went up. Um, so, you know, we, we still have to prove that it works and all, but, um, we, we're confident that e- even if the, if these early satellites don't work, we're confident from, from a physics standpoint that it can work.

• 15:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Um, it's, it is a, a challenge because we have to emulate, uh, a cell, cell tower on the ground in order for the phones to accept the signal. So we have to do double compensation, for example, um, and, and, and do some sort of, because, because you've got the speed of light limitations.

• 15:35Peter Diamandis?

  Pal, if, if it were easy, it would have been done already.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, there's some speed of light limitations. So, you know, this, this, like, light is, is so fast and yet so slow. Um, so, um...

• 15:48Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I, I...

• 15:49Speaker 04

  I think, yeah, a good way to think about light, at least in a space context,

• 15:55Speaker 04

  or for the low orbit context, is, is it travels about three hundred kilometers every millisecond.

• 15:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Um, in, in air or, uh, in... In space and then and then around just over 200 kilometers per millisecond in fiber.

• 16:12Peter Diamandis?

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• 16:54Peter Diamandis?

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• 17:33Peter Diamandis?

  to get your 25% off the first month of Seed's Daily Symbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's go back to the episode. You know, another abundance area is health. I hear some kids in the background there. So interestingly enough, you know, child mortality, I mean, probably, I mean, this is the one that hits me the most in terms of increasing abundance. Child mortality under the age of five was 42% a couple hundred years ago. It was a coin flip of whether your kids survived. And it's decreased now to under 5% and it's gone down by 50% in the last 30 years.

• 18:15Peter Diamandis?

  Um, so just childhood mortality and women dying in childbirth, all of these things, people don't think about when they're listening to all and use on and all the issues. And then life expectancy, my favorite subject, uh, has gone up from, you know, thirty years old to, uh, to seventy-five plus. I still disagree with you on longevity, though.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  That, that we should solve it or not, like, we should, you think we should?

• 18:42Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I, I, listen, I'm not necessarily saying live forever, but I'd like to make it to a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty. Um, uh.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I sort of wonder if we should not solve it too soon.

• 18:55Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Um.

• 18:57Peter Diamandis?

  Your presidential elections?

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Who's gonna get life expectancy first? And, and do you really want them to get that life expectancy first?

• 19:10Peter Diamandis?

  Well.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Uh, you know.

• 19:12Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I, I, I, I think we, uh, I think, uh, being able to have the vitality, the cognition, the physical prowess, uh, you know, that you have when you're in your forties or fifties through the age of a hundred, that's my goal. Um, I mean, you don't wanna, you don't wanna, you know, you wanna make it to at least a hundred, don't you?

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Um, well, I guess it does depend on whether I'm, you know, have dementia. I, I don't think I'd wanna be a burden on society or have dementia and not know what's going on. Um, I'd prefer to be dead.

• 19:50Peter Diamandis?

  Well, yeah, I, I think that's, that's for sure. Uh, but let's assume that you had, you know, all the cognitive power you have today and your physical strength. Is there any reason why you wouldn't wanna, you know, have an extended lifespan or health span?

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  I guess. I think we are end up, there's such a strong forcey function for life extension or health span extension that I think we will see advancements in that area, whether I want them to be there or not.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  And actually, my opinion on the subject is that it's, I think it's actually not that hard to solve.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Because the, if you just consider arguments of symmetry, that's quite helpful, the cells in our body all age, age at bases almost exactly the same speed. Like, I've not seen anyone who has an old left arm and a young right arm.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I've never seen that, not even once.

• 21:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  So how, how are the cells communicating? And how, what is keeping them, what is synchronizing their behavior?

• 21:10Speaker 04

  Something, there's a very clear mechanism for synchronizing aging among the 30 to 40 trillion cells in your body. Like, depending on your body mass, you're typically going to have 30 to 40 trillion.

• 21:21Peter Diamandis?

  That's, that's correct.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  You know, keep, you know, in sync.

• 21:27Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, the other, the other, the other reference proof point is, you know, bowhead whales, one of the largest mammals, can make it to 200 years repeatedly. Greenland sharks can make it to 500 years and have babies at 200 years old. I remember when I was in medical school, hearing that, I said, you know, why can they, why can't we? I said, it's either an engineering problem or software problem. A hardware problem or software problem. And I think, I think this is one of the biggest areas AI is going to give us, is a real understanding. And then to your other point about your left arm and right arm, you know, when you have a baby, a woman's 30, 35, you're 40, 45, your baby starts out at zero.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Um, I, I do find it remarkable that we decompress from a single cell to, um, an adult human. And then, and then we, you know, to procreate, compress back down to a single cell.

• 22:24Peter Diamandis?

  That is fascinating.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  You know, I mean, you look, you sort of look, look at yourself as a sort of, you know, blast assist and say like, I haven't changed a bit.

• 22:37Peter Diamandis?

  Here we go again. Let's recycle. It's like, it's like the big bang. It's like, right, the big crunch. Um, you know, one of the things people argue about on extended health span, uh, and, you know, increasing the population, getting to a hundred, 120, 150. And there's a concept called longevity escape velocity, right? That there's going to be a point at which for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. And that's an interesting, uh, idea to think about. Um, in which case, you know, accidents become really, uh, a thing to be concerned about. Um, they concern about overpopulation and, and you've, you've hit this multiple times, right? The, and I saw you tweeting about it, or sorry, you're, you're X-ing about it today.

• 23:21Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, sorry. Uh, but it's, you know, overpopulation is one of the biggest myths and biggest, uh, false.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Overpopulation is utter BS.

• 23:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Um, you know, and, and, uh, you know, it's, it's such nonsense. Um, uh, the, uh, Earth is underpopulated, not overpopulated with kids.

• 23:46Peter Diamandis?

  Look out the window when you're flying across the country. It's empty.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Exactly. It's, it's like, if you said like, you, if your goal was to like flying from Elliot in New York to drop a bowling ball on a human, you would fail.

• 24:00Peter Diamandis?

  Um, you know, I, I think one of, one of my goal, I think the greatest gift we can give people in this abundance world is increased health span. I mean, when you think about what people want, they want happiness and they want health, right? No one wants to, uh, die in a painful cancer or, or, uh, dementia. Um, so.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:28Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, I, I have extended to you many times, my friend, come down to Fountain Health, let me put you through our, our program. The world needs you around for another 30, 30 years.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Okay, well, what should I do? Let's say...

• 24:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I mean, so there are two...

• 24:45Speaker 04

  What actions can be taken?

• 24:46Peter Diamandis?

  There are two quite...

• 24:47Speaker 04

  This could be helpful for listeners on the discussion.

• 24:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so there are two, there are three things you need to know. Number one, is there anything going on inside your body that you don't know about? So, the body is amazingly good at hiding disease. So, we found in our seemingly healthy adults, 2% have a cancer they don't know about. 2.5% have an aneurysm, 14.4% either have metabolic disease, coronary disease, neurodegenerative disease, and so your body is incredibly good at hiding disease, right? So, you don't actually feel any cancer until stage 3 or stage 4.

• 25:33Peter Diamandis?

  70% of all heart attacks have no precedents. Your body is compensating constantly. And, you know, for most of us, we know more about what's going inside our cars or airplanes than we do our bodies. Yeah, I have a question for you. How many sensors are going up on Starship when you're launching? How many sensors are going onboard that vehicle, rough water magnitude, getting back data?

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Well, I guess there's, when you count everything out, there's several thousand sensors.

• 26:03Peter Diamandis?

  And if I were...

• 26:04Speaker 04

  I mean, they're all 32 engines, so they count from the bulk.

• 26:08Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, but you also have stress sensors and looking what's going on in the structures and the avionics and communications across all the subsystems. And if I asked you how...

• 26:19Speaker 04

  39 engines, including the upper stage. So, there's several thousand sensors. Way more sensors than a body.

• 26:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, if I asked you, how many sensors do you have in your body? And so, we don't look, which is insane, because we do have the technology now to look, to determine, is there anything going on I need to know about? And when's a good time to find out about, like now? Or what's likely to break? What's likely to undergo failure cycles? And then, what's the most extraordinary therapeutics available to extend the human lifespan? So, I mean, for me, that's a big one. Let me ask you another abundance theme, which is education.

• 27:04Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think any of our schools today, middle schools or high schools are preparing any of our kids for the future?

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Um, well, none that I know of. Well, they might, I mean, there might be, probably are a few schools that are doing it, but probably ninety-nine percent of schools are not.

• 27:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  I mean, schools are very slow, slow to change. Um, and, and I, I, I think that they're, they're, I, there is, they just seem to move away from teaching the fundamentals, you know, of writing well and math and history. Um, and I am concerned about the whole woke agenda and ideology permeating through education.

• 27:52Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Um, and, and actually being destructive to education.

• 27:55Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. I mean, uh, you know, how do you think, do you have any thoughts? I mean, so at, at the end of the day, I think our best, our best healthcare and our best teachers are going to be AIs, right? That understand everything and they demonetize and they democratize every aspect. You mean, the AI knows your, your kid's favorite color, sports star, movie star, what they know, the languages they know, what they did today. Um, I mean, it's a way of giving every child on the planet the best education. I mean, you, you funded back years ago, if you remember the Global Learning X Prize that we did.

• 28:35Peter Diamandis?

  We did a, uh, that we, we demoed in Tanzania with AIs on tablets. It was the earliest days of, of AI. Uh, Imad Mustak, who you know, was one of the winners of that competition who went on mount to create stability. Um, I mean, the, the challenge is I don't think the educational systems are going to give up, uh, that control anytime soon.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Sure. Well, if, I mean, if I look at how my kids are educated, they, they seem to be mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit.

• 29:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  Um, and X as well, I suppose. Um, but they're constantly on the internet. Um, that, that seems to be, and I guess a lot, a lot of kids these days, uh, TikTok.

• 29:20Peter Diamandis?

  Unfortunately, yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, so I think the education situation is problematic.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Not sure what to do about it.

• 29:35Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I think, I think ultimately, you know, Khan Academy is one step in the right direction. But I think part of it is getting our educational institutions to first realize they're not preparing kids for the world that's coming. I mean, this hits another point. We are such linear thinkers, right? We're projecting what we have and putting it out four or five years. I don't think people, let me ask you, do you think people are ready for what the world's going to be like in 2030?

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Uh, no. Um, I don't know what the world's going to be like in 2030, so probably I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily 2030. The, the, I, I, we, we definitely live in the most interesting of times. You know, it's like this, allegedly this Chinese saying that may live in interesting times is, is, is a, not a good thing. Um, but, I mean, I, I, I think, firstly, I would like to live in the most interesting of times, and this is the most interesting of times.

• 30:43Peter Diamandis?

  I, I, I also think you said the best time to be alive, ever. Only time more exciting than today is tomorrow. I mean, you know, by what measure? Yeah, we have environmental issues, but I think we have the best chance of solving those environmental issues with the technology we have now versus the technology we had 10 years ago.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I generally think it's, as, as a, as general sort of rule of living, it is, it is better to err on the side of being optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. Um, if you're gonna make, if you're gonna err one side or the other, better, it's just a higher quality of life to err on the side of being optimistic and risk being wrong than, than pessimistic, um, you know, and, and, you know, and, and right. I mean, it's, it's better to be, you'll just have a, just enjoy life more.

• 31:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Optimism is, is, is, is gonna...

• 31:42Peter Diamandis?

  There was a study of fourteen thousand people, uh, it was fourteen thousand women and fifteen hundred guys, um, and it showed that, uh, those with an optimistic mindset lived fourteen to fifteen percent longer than those with a pessimistic mindset. I mean, mindset's a powerful thing, and I think undervalued by almost everybody. One of my, one of my favorite examples of this was, um, do you know what the environmental disaster of the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties was? I'm sure you know.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Um. Uh, uh, the, is this, is this back to Wales?

• 32:18Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, no, no, it's, it's, it's another form of life. It's a, uh, the, the horse manure, uh, disaster.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Oh, you, you, the hor- the horse shit.

• 32:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  What, what is this horse shit?

• 32:29Peter Diamandis?

  (laughing).

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, no, no, you're right. But, I mean, New York, uh, uh, was, was basically a, a horse manure and, and, and urine, uh, and, and carcass.

• 32:43Peter Diamandis?

  It was, it was terrible. People brought their motive power.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  I mean, basically, New York.

• 32:49Peter Diamandis?

  It stank.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Not like shit. If you think, if you think, if you think New York subway's a stinky right now, wait, I mean, try it. (laughing). Where it's just horse shit everywhere.

• 32:59Peter Diamandis?

  Everywhere. Yeah, people.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  Everywhere.

• 33:02Peter Diamandis?

  People moved from, people moved into downtown New York, Detroit, Chicago. They brought their motive power with them. And, and the articles in the eighteen eighties and nineties and into nineteen hundreds, as you, as you read this, the projection was disaster. It was gonna be a disaster, cause hor- horse, horse manure was like, they had like special parking lots for horse shit at the corner of every street.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  (laughing) Well, I, it, it seems like there's also a challenge, because I think, like, if a horse lives, um, you know, for, on the order of fifteen years, um, that means one fifteenth of all horses are kicking the bucket every year.

• 33:41Peter Diamandis?

  (laughing).

• 33:44Speaker 04

  So, you just got, and so, so if you, if you got like, uh, three hundred thousand horses, that means you got twenty thousand horses dropping dead every year. And then you need a horse to move the horse, the dead horse.

• 33:56Peter Diamandis?

  (laughing) Or you just, or you just cover it with horse manure, let it decompose.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be like decomposing horse cockices throughout major cities.

• 34:08Peter Diamandis?

  But then.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  And then, and then like, it's like, well, who's haunted, who's dead horse is this? And people are probably quick to claim a live horse.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  But they're not rushing to claim a dead horse.

• 34:20Peter Diamandis?

  But then, and then innovation came along, and here comes the car, and solves the problem. And I think that's the problem that we keep on forgetting. We, we forget that we are incredibly innovative at solving problems. That's what humans are amazing at.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, true, true.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Actually, on, on, on, on the whale front, I don't know if you know.

• 34:48Peter Diamandis?

  Back to the whales.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  It's a whale of a tale, whale tales.

• 34:53Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  But the, so a lot of people think that the, um, the, the, the low point on whale, uh, population was, was in the eighteen hundreds. Because, you know, whales were being hunted for, for whale oil. Whale oil, yeah. But, but actually, the, the low point, uh, by far, was in fact, um, uh, in the mid, uh, twentieth century. Uh, because, uh, of a bureaucratic error in the Soviet Union.

• 35:26Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. This, this I have to hear.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  They, they kept, so that would always have these five year plans and quotas, uh, for, for how, for whale tonnage. Now, it didn't, they didn't actually have even a, whether the whale tonnage was usable tonnage. Um, in, in any way, they just had a quota for whale tonnage. And what they were doing in the Soviet Union, so just keep increasing the quota of everything, every year, every five years.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  The whale tonnage just got higher and higher and higher. And if you're a captain and you had a high whale tonnage, you'd get a medal and a raise. And if your whale tonnage was low, you'd be sent to the gulag.

• 36:11Peter Diamandis?

  You get what you incentivize, baby.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  Yes, incentives matter. And so it got to, it just got to absurd levels. And you had Soviet whaling ships like going into, you know, US and Australian waters to desperately trying to find whales. And they would catch the whale, weigh the whale, and then dump the cargo.

• 36:35Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  I mean, there's a whole internet rabbit hole that you can go down on this. Which is basically a lesson in the follies of central planning.

• 36:48Peter Diamandis?

  And this is the problem of keeping laws on the books way after they're useful to society.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Well, we do actually have a fundamental issue with the accumulation of laws and regulations because they are immortal. And humans are mortal, as we were just discussing, you know, with life extension. So naturally, every year, you're going to have this accumulation of laws and regulations until eventually, everything is legal.

• 37:20Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, everything is illegal.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Everything is illegal, yes. Nothing is allowed because you're overlapping laws and regulations, and some of which are in fact contradict each other. So whether you go left or right, both left and right are illegal.

• 37:38Peter Diamandis?

  My God.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  You know, SpaceX, I mean, sharing with you know, the DOJ in this respect, in this particular case, where the DOJ, as you may know, is suing SpaceX for hiring only permanent residents and citizens of the US. The reason that we did this was because we were told very clearly that if we did not hire permanent residents of the United States, that that would constitute a violation of international trade, traffic and arms regulations, ITAR, and the entire executive team of SpaceX and the board would go to prison.

• 38:19Peter Diamandis?

  Sounds like a good motivation.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Yes, and so we, we were literally told this by the government in very clear terms. And, and you, I mean, you're well aware of IT.

• 38:28Peter Diamandis?

  I am well aware of this.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a, it's a nightmare. Um, and we would like to hire.

• 38:34Peter Diamandis?

  Which, which, by the way, uh, puts us in a non-competitive world against, uh, uh, other nations.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Yes, it, it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty bad, so, um. But, but then, then, then the DOJ, um, you know, is, is suing, uh, SpaceX, um, for not hiring asylum seekers. Now, an important point here, not asylum, those who have been granted asylum, those who are seeking asylum.

• 39:04Peter Diamandis?

  There's a lot of those, there's a lot of people seeking asylum.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yes, so we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  So, if, if, if we hire someone who's not a permanent resident, we, we're, we're breaking the law. And if we don't hire someone who's, who's not a permanent resident, we're breaking the law. So what's, this is, this is an example of the madness that we're facing.

• 39:28Peter Diamandis?

  Um, buddy, I, I want to compliment you on something which, and I've seen, I've known you for long enough to have seen you gone through this, where you have bet everything over and over again. You've bet, uh, your entire fortune gone into debt to do the things that you believe in. And I, I, I have a question to ask you, which I've been dying to ask, and I'm going to start making this, uh, this known. There are so many billionaires on the planet who have tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars, who are effectively sitting on it and not changing the world. Um, not putting it in, you know, other than for increasing its return, which is not a bad thing.

• 40:12Peter Diamandis?

  I think the more wealth and free energy there is out there to do things, but, um.

• 40:19Peter Diamandis?

  Can you speak to that? I don't know if you're willing to, but there are a few people like Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt and yourself top of the list, who invest on making the world a better place, solving global grand challenges. Thoughts on that?

• 40:42Speaker 04

  Sorry, I just have some kids and stuff.

• 40:43Peter Diamandis?

  No problem.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  Sort of family noises in the background.

• 40:50Speaker 04

  So, let's see.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, I do think that smart people with resources should care about the good of civilization, the future of civilization, even if there is not, even if they're not particularly altruistic, because you can't really, you cannot exist absent civilization. If civilization collapses, it's all over. You know, there's like people who've got like these sort of bunkers in other countries, or Hawaii, or whatever. And I'm like, listen, do you really think that you're gonna make it in an apocalyptic

• 41:45Speaker 04

  situation?

• 41:49Speaker 04

  They'll come and find you in that bunker and they'll pry you out and get your stuff.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  And it's gonna suck anyway. So, really, smart people with resources, any smart person with resources, they just have some long-term perspective.

• 42:05Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, listen, it's you and Jeff Bezos right now who've got the biggest long-term perspective. And I see, you know, I'm just curious about how do you incentivize other people to really help the world accelerate, you know, and make the world a more productive place, right? The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people, the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities.

• 42:41Peter Diamandis?

  Do you believe that?

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Well, I guess maybe we should just talk to people more.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  I guess just talking to them and, you know, I think perhaps just raising conscious awareness, the fact that

• 42:58Speaker 04

  that there is no living without civilization.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  One, one, you, you, like, you, you, one doesn't actually have to make an altruistic argument. You can actually, you know, make a, even if it's a purely self-seeking argument. Say like, but life would be miserable without civilization. And if you want to know what life is like without civilization, just go try living in the forest naked for a day. And you will be naked and afraid and, and quickly realize civilization is awesome.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  You have to eat bugs and get eaten by bugs.

• 43:39Peter Diamandis?

  And, and, and we're so interdependent upon each other to enable the state of technology and capability we have today. You know, I, I'm curious, is there anything that you think that isn't becoming more abundant out there? Or anything that we have an abundance constraint on? You know, I'll just mention, well, answer that first. I don't want to come and talk about the carbon removal X Prize that you funded, one second.

• 44:11Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we're, we're creating abundance of food, energy, water, healthcare, education.

• 44:18Peter Diamandis?

  Are we constrained in any way?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  No, not really, no.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  I mean, no, I, I think, I, I agree with you that the future most likely has abundant. But we, we shouldn't be complacent about the future.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  You know, complacency and entitlement are not a recipe for success. But. Most likely outcome is one of abundance of goods and services.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  That is certainly where we're headed.

• 44:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, when I saw you last.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Mighty likely where we're headed.

• 44:53Peter Diamandis?

  Very likely, yeah. When I saw you last, you said, you know, definitely abundance after AGI. And I saw, you know, when you were talking about Optimus, which is awesome, by the way. Let's just start with that. Congratulations.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Well, thanks. I need to make sure that Optimus doesn't cause, it doesn't add to civilizational risk.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  You know, because you don't want like a billion of these things, all with centralized control.

• 45:26Peter Diamandis?

  Unless.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  What could go wrong? Has anyone made a movie about that?

• 45:33Peter Diamandis?

  Unless they obey you.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Well, I don't think they should obey any one person.

• 45:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Like, I think you have to have local control.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  It has to be decentralized, because any central control is going to be problematic.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  Because you just can't be, like, it could be a rogue AI takes, I mean, let's literally movie. A rogue AI, you know, Terminator, takes over, somehow gains control of

• 46:08Speaker 04

  the mothership of, that controls all the, you know, the Optimus robots or something like that. That is, basically, it needs to be, it needs to be impossible for that to occur.

• 46:23Peter Diamandis?

  Let me ask you, I always love combining your companies, because it's like, you know, it's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. You know, Starlink and Starship together. How about Optimus Neuralink? When can I plug into an Optimus with my Neuralink connection?

• 46:48Speaker 04

  Well, hopefully, the first Neuralink will, the first Neuralink

• 46:54Speaker 04

  in a human will hopefully be soon, within the next, maybe this month or next. Now, this is really just, at first, just trying to give, you know, quadriplegics and tetraplegics

• 47:12Speaker 04

  the ability to control their phone and computer. It's basically like, the first, the first product is telepathy, essentially.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Or telekinesis.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  And then the second product, sort of tentatively called Blind Sight, where we can restore sight even if somebody is, has lost both eyes in their optic nerve.

• 47:39Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. Go straight to the visual vortex, yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Now, these things all already work in monkeys. And I'd just like to reemphasize, no monkey has ever died because of a Neuralink. And we treat our monkeys extremely well.

• 47:58Peter Diamandis?

  Last time, last time I spoke to you about this, you were playing, you were playing Pong against Pajer, I think.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  That's right. Actually, it turns out monkeys love playing video games.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  They're really just like us. I mean, they, they, they love

• 48:15Speaker 04

  eating snacks and playing video games.

• 48:17Peter Diamandis?

  I'll tell my 12-year-old boys about that.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you, you see the video of Pajer playing, you know, Monkey Mind Pong, you know, just telepathic, playing Pong telepathically. He's not restrained in any way. He's just sitting on, on the, the sort of tree branch.

• 48:36Peter Diamandis?

  Drinking smoothies.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  And drinking smoothies, drinking a smoothie and playing Pong. He's not held down, you know? In fact, he gets upset when we take his video game away, just like...

• 48:49Peter Diamandis?

  Just like our kids. That's awesome. And this stuff, I mean, giving sight to the blind. I mean, it's biblical stuff. And this is, again, coming back to the original, you know, kicking off the new year with a positive mindset, with an abundance mindset, with an exponential mindset, with a moonshot mindset, right? Which I think, and I hope you agree, like, I think for entrepreneurs and people listening, like, the single most important thing we have is our mindset, how we see the world. I mean, would you agree with that?

• 49:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you can choose to be. I mean, happiness is, I think, is a decision.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  I mean, largely, I mean, there's obviously people that have chemical invalidness, but for most people, the difference between being happy and unhappy is deciding to be happy.

• 49:45Peter Diamandis?

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• 50:29Peter Diamandis?

  Go to prolonlife.com, P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E.com, backslash moonshot. Get started on your longevity journey with ProLon today. Now, back to the episode. I want to take a second for everybody listening to point something out. You know, Elon, it was 2021, I was texting with you, and I said you should fund another X Prize. You funded an X Prize years ago on teaching kids in the middle of Tanzania, reading, writing, and arithmetic without any adults, no schools around, just on a tablet they were handed, and the software I had to teach them, and it was an amazing success. And then in 21, I asked you if you'd do an X Prize on carbon removal.

• 51:14Peter Diamandis?

  And you said yes almost instantly. And we launched it three months later. It was like the fastest yes to an X Prize launch ever. So, thank you for that. I want to give you a quick update on it if I could.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  You're welcome. Absolutely. Well, I hope the education X Prize and the carbon removal X Prize are resulting in good outcomes.

• 51:36Peter Diamandis?

  They, I'm sure we had 6,000 teams enter the carbon removal prize. We have 1,300 active teams in the competition right now as we down select. About 36%, 460 are focused on carbon air capture. 430 are land-related capture. 240 are ocean-related capture. And the, we've given away 20 million of your money already. 5 million to students and 15 million to the, a million to the top 15 teams. And the finals are coming up in two years in Earth Day of 2025.

• 52:18Peter Diamandis?

  And interestingly enough, you know, the winning team needs to demonstrate a megaton level capture that can scale to gigaton level capture. And so, just the final competition is going to capture four megatons of carbon, which is twice what's being done on an annual basis today. So, good progress so far.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Great. That's, that's good to hear.

• 52:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, as we, as we, as we begin to wrap up, what other thoughts for people on abundance? What other mindset thoughts do you have for folks here?

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Well, I I I do think that the birth rate is too low for humans, as I I'm always going on about that.

• 53:14Peter Diamandis?

  Longevity, baby. I I'm solving it with longevity, gonna keep people alive longer.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Okay, well.

• 53:21Peter Diamandis?

  And robots and AI.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Sure, um, but I I mean, it just, uh, the the current situation is.

• 53:29Peter Diamandis?

  Is is grim, it's grim, yeah, yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, um, I mean, a lot of countries are, um, you know, if we could say, say Korea.

• 53:37Peter Diamandis?

  Italy, yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're they're they're losing roughly half their population per generation.

• 53:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Um, that means three generations, they're one tenth of their current size and and and with the the one tenth that remains being very old.

• 53:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the the numbers for folks, the replacement number is two point one children per family on average. And, um, Europe is at one point five. Um, Asia, uh, dropped from five point seven in nineteen fifties to one point nine today, which is crazy. Uh, North America dropped from about three to one point six, we're below the replacement level of the United States. Um, and it's it is an issue. I mean, we we need smart people on the planet.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, no, if we don't make new humans, we won't have humanity. Um, and and even with longevity, uh, we'll live longer, but we don't live forever. Uh, so I I think we just need, it's it's, you know, I'm concerned that like a lot of people think that the panel of planet is overpopulated and that's one of the things contributing to a low birth rate. Um, in fact, some people I've encountered think they're basically, um, being martyrs for not having kids and that's just, it's just not true. Um, I think we should. Take the position that we actually have a civic responsibility to have kids to at

• 55:10Speaker 04

  least keep the human population constant. Ideally, we should grow it, but we should at least not have population collapse, which is what we currently have.

• 55:21Peter Diamandis?

  I think people fear the future, and I mean, the conversations I've heard is I don't want to bring children into this world, it's too dangerous, AI is going to destroy humanity, the environment, you know, we're destroying the environment and so forth. So I think part of it is getting people to be optimistic about the future versus pessimistic, which is one of, as you said in the beginning of this space, is one of my missions. If people think the world is getting better and they have a hand in making it a better place, you most definitely do.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think people should be optimistic about the future. The Earth can handle far more humans than currently exist, and the danger is not a population explosion, but population collapse. So I would just encourage as many people as possible to have kids, and ideally have a lot of kids because they're going to make up for those who, for whatever reason, don't.

• 56:25Peter Diamandis?

  Buy an extra bottle of wine tonight, folks.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a big deal.

• 56:31Peter Diamandis?

  So. Would you, let's close out on the conversation of AI and AGI, which I know a lot of people are always interested in, and there's a real fear about AI. What would you say to dissuade people? I mean, it's, I've heard you say 80% probability we make it through and we need to protect the downside. Can you speak to that? How can people walk away more optimistic than pessimistic on this front? And how do you, how do you think about, you know, is it containment? Is it shaping how we train our AI systems?

• 57:15Peter Diamandis?

  How do you think we navigate digital superintelligence?

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Well, the rate at which AI is growing is, it really boggles the mind.

• 57:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  So it currently seems as though the amount of compute dedicated to artificial intelligence is increasing by a factor of 10 roughly every six months.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  It's faster than annual, that's for sure. So, I mean, I recently heard today about a gigawatt class AI compute cluster.

• 58:03Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  That's, I think it's being built in Kuwait or something of that effect.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  And it's like 700,000 P100s, which is a couple of generations above, two generations P100, that's currently in production. So this is a staggering amount of compute. And there are many such things, that's just the biggest one I've heard of so far. But there are, there's a 500-megawatt installation happening.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  And there's multiple 100-megawatt installations in the works. It's not even clear to me what you do with that much compute. Because when you actually add up all human data ever created, you really just run out of things to train on quite quickly. Like, you know, if you've got maybe, I don't know, 20,000 or 30,000 H100s, you can train on...

• 59:04Peter Diamandis?

  Synthetic data.

• 59:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically, you have to have synthetic data.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Because, certainly well under 100,000 H100s, you can train on all human data ever created, including video.

• 59:19Peter Diamandis?

  And it's not, and it's not just the compute, which is the major scarce resource, but it's also the number of entrepreneurs focusing in this area, the amount of capital that's going into this area, the amount of data available. I mean, it's all increasing, and it's all feeding on itself. And so it's just, you know, hitting your point about the speed at which it's progressing is, I think the word awesome is, comes to mind.

• 59:47Peter Diamandis?

  Or staggering.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, i- it's it's really staggering and and for sure. Um, so I'm just trying to give a sense of scale. It's I I've never seen anything move this fast. Any of any technology, this is the fastest moving thing. So um, in in terms of aiming for AI safety, my my best guess of my sort of primitive biological neural net is is that we should uh, aim for maximum truth seeking and and curiosity. Um, that that's that's that's my gut feel for this for how to make AI as safe as possible.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  If the the danger with programming morality and explicit i- i- with an explicit morality program is what is sometimes referred to as the Waluigi problem. If you create Luigi, you automatically create Waluigi by inverting Luigi's.

• 1:00:47Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 04

  Um, so um, so I think we have we have to be careful about programming and

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  you know, sort of an arbitrary morality. Um, but but if we focus on maximizing truth with acknowledged error, that's that's probably, I think that's the the way to maximize safety. Um, and and also to have the AI be curious. Um, because I think that, you know, Earth is much more interesting to an advanced AI with humans on it than without humans.

• 1:01:26Peter Diamandis?

  I I I agree with you. Now, a a interesting question of do you think vast intelligence with vast intelligence comes uh, significant empathy and respect for life?

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:01:44Peter Diamandis?

  Because that's the that's the hope at the end of the rainbow here that I don't want to use the word AGI, I'll use a super digital, superintelligence as a as a term with a digital superintelligence that is able to be more benevolent and support us because sometimes I'm not sure us squishy meat sacks can make it through our own our own horseshit problems that we put together. So maybe there is a value there. My, you know, I think on the whole, AI is the single most important technology we ever invented, and it is going to uplift all of humanity.

• 1:02:26Peter Diamandis?

  I think it's what you said, you know, after post AGI comes abundance. I think it's the interim issues in the next one to four years, right? It's it's not artificial intelligence, it's human stupidity.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I mean, one way that AI could go wrong is if the extinctionist philosophy is programmed into the AI, whether implicitly or explicitly. I mean, probably not explicitly, but there's a strong danger of it of an implicit extinctionist philosophy being programmed into AI. You know, and

• 1:03:04Peter Diamandis?

  What would that look like? What would that look like?

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Well, like, there's this guy on the front page of New York Times about a year ago. He's head of the Extinctionist Society, and he was literally quoted as, there are eight billion people on on Earth, it would be better if there were none.

• 1:03:19Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  And, yeah. So, and if you if you take the extreme environmentalist argument, especially like the implicit extreme environmentalist argument, they they there's an implicit conclusion that humans are a plague on the surface of the Earth. So, we I think we have to be quite careful about an implicit, like, if the extinctionist movement was somehow programmed into AI as as the optimization, that would be obviously extremely dangerous.

• 1:03:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, to say the least.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  But, you know, there's, there's, there are people, quite a few people, actually, who, who view humanity as, as a blight on the surface of the earth.

• 1:04:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and we're, we are coming down to, there is the, you know, accelerationist movement, the decelerationist movement, the boomers and the doomers. Um, but I think people forget to realize, or don't realize and forget the fact that, you know, uh, we romanticize the past. And the past life was short, brutish, and you were dead by forty. Um, you know, the life that we enjoy today is a result of the extraordinary technology that we brought to bear.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the, like, you know, Hobbes, life is nasty, brutish, and short.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  I, I actually, I had a little Yorkshire terrier once, um, who was nasty, brutish, and short, and kept, kept biting people, so I called him Hobbs.

• 1:05:04Peter Diamandis?

  Perfect.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  And I, I would tell friends that, that came over, watch out for the dog.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  And they'd look at this miniature Yorkshire terrier and laugh, and then they would tend to bite them on the ankle. And I said, watch out, I said, watch out for the dog.

• 1:05:21Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, you know, that extinctionist meme is the same sort of, you know, you discount it, uh, until it starts, um, uh, being a mind virus, uh, in part, as you've called it, and it starts disrupting us.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  If, if you convince people that, you know, we're running out of resources on earth, that there are too many people in the world, and the only way to survive is to have far fewer people, which a, a lot of people are believed to be the case. And like I said, if that, if that somehow gets programmed into AI... And that AI becomes the most powerful AI, then we're in deep trouble.

• 1:06:10Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, yeah, we need a counterforce to the population bomb. I mean, what an extraordinary disservice to humanity.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, Alex's book was terrible nightmare, maybe the most anti-human book ever.

• 1:06:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. Um, the, but get people hope on the flip side here. Uh, those who are saying, again, going back to, I don't want to bring up my children, because I hear this all the time, and I'm sure you do too, in an age where AI is going to destroy us. So, um, short-term problems, long-term problems, short-term solutions, long-term solutions. You said, make it curious, make it, uh, maximum truth-seeking, a hundred percent.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:55Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I, is it okay to say that we're going to have issues in the short term? And we're going to have to deal with them?

• 1:07:04Peter Diamandis?

  Or do you?

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  There will be, there will be, there will be some issues. Um, I mean, essentially, at this point,

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  no way to stop AI. It, it, it is accelerating whether people like it or not. Um, I mean, that's, that's, uh, that's why, together with a number of really smart people, we created, uh, XAI.

• 1:07:27Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  Um, and, um, you know, hopefully, you know, some really small humans will continue to join XAI and, and build, uh, what is intended to be a maximally truth-seeking and maximally curious, um, AI.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Um,

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  anyway, I think that's, that's really important. Um,

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  so.

• 1:07:55Peter Diamandis?

  Elon, listen, on behalf of, of those of us, and I think everybody here listening, who are pro-humanity and pro-uplifting humanity, um,

• 1:08:07Peter Diamandis?

  And making us a multi-planetary species and living a longer, healthier life. And I, the one place I disagreed with you on, on, on X is on, you know, having people live longer. You don't, people don't need to die for there to be new ideas, you know, that the CEO of Ford and GM didn't have to die for Tesla to come into existence. So, uh, we're, uh, Yeah. Uh, you know, I'm, I wanted to say thank you for all that you're doing and, and setting a model for other, other industrialists and entrepreneurs out there to take on and solve big, huge problems.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  Well, uh, thank you. Um, I would encourage people to be optimistic about the future.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Like, or on the side of optimism, um, you, you will be happier for it. And, and as you pointed out, probably live longer. So, and I'm, I'm not, I'm not totally against life extension. I, I think we did, we,

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  you know, um, we, we want to be, I'm not, I don't think we want to necessarily have people live forever. That's, or live for a very long, like thousands of years that, I think that would potentially lead to ossification of society. It would, it would, it would, I think, lead to ossification of society.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  But, but, I mean, solving dementia and, um, you know, curing cancer, I think are good things, obviously. So, so I'm not sure we're, we're actually that far apart on the life extension thing.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  I, I think we're probably mostly in agreement.

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  I, I, yeah, we just don't want to have like, you know, can you live for, like, do you want Kim Jong-un living for a thousand years?

• 1:09:53Peter Diamandis?

  No, but I, I'd like, I'd like Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis living for a hundred and fifty years. And a few other thousand amazing entrepreneurs out there.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  Sure. Um, so it's, it's, uh, you know, there is, there is a, a challenge that like a lot of people, they really never change their mind, they just die. And this, this is actually, I'm not sure who originally said this, but even in physics,

• 1:10:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  Which, which is extremely rigorous, um, that the, you know, that, that, you know, physics in a lot of cases has advanced one death at a time.

• 1:10:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, my, my friend Brian Keating, who's a, a astrophysicist, reminded me of that. And, and maybe it was true, but in this world of entrepreneurship, I think we do live in a meritocracy to a large degree, and the best ideas can bubble up to the top, um, faster than ever before, especially with, with AI now, where you can build companies, you know, extraordinary companies with a couple of people and a lot of tech. So.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I, I have one last question, and then, uh, uh, it's, I know it's dinner time there. Uh, the future of X, XAI, um, what's your vision there, pal?

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  Well, the other thing, I think the path to AI safety is to build an AI that is maximally truth-seeking with acknowledged error, that's maximally curious. And I think, um, that, I think that, that is most likely to lead to a good outcome for humanity, um, because we are, we are much more interesting than, than, than not humanity. Like, like, I, I obviously, you know, I'm a big fan of Mars, but Mars is much less interesting because there's no human civilization there. Um, and, um, if you take humans, for example, we, we, we could hunt down all of the chimpanzees

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  and kill them, but we don't. And in fact, we make efforts to preserve their habitats.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  We would, so.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  Anyway, I think that that is the path to a great future and a maximally positive AIs to be rigorously truth-seeking, always acknowledging some amount of error and maximally curious. And that's the goal of XAI is, you know, the company motto is, understand the universe.

• 1:12:51Peter Diamandis?

  That's a good mission and one that's gonna take a bit of time. I can't wait till the first AI is able to come up with new theories of physics and new innovations. That's gonna be, I mean, I don't think that's far away and I think that's gonna be one of the most awesome times ever to be alive.

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  True. Like, we definitely live in the most interesting times. And I actually, for a while, I was kind of depressed about AI. But then I kind of got fatalistic about it and said, like, well, even if AI was gonna, you know, end all humanity, would I prefer to be around to see it or not? I guess I would prefer to be around to see it, just out of curiosity. But obviously, hopefully, AI is extremely beneficial to humanity. But the thing that sort of reconciled me to be less anxious about it was to say, well,

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  I guess even if it was apocalyptic, I'd still be curious to see the, it's like, you know, I'd be curious to see it.

• 1:14:04Peter Diamandis?

  I remember I was at your birthday party at one of your homes here in L.A. before you sold them, and Larry Page was there and Sergey was there. And we were having a conversation about living in a simulation. And the notion was, this is, we're in the 99th level of the gameplay and this has got to be a simulation because you couldn't, why would it be alive right now in this single most interesting time? And then the only comment was, don't poke the simulation or.

• 1:14:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  If we are in a simulation.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  The, the, the way to keep the simulation going is to keep being interesting. So, like, humans run lots of computer simulations.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  Because we, we, we don't know what the outcome's gonna be. And we, we're curious to see, we, we'll run lots of simulations, like, like Tesla will run crash simulations and SpaceX will run, you know, rocket flight simulations. And, um. We only stop doing the simulations when the, when the outcome is extremely predictable and boring.

• 1:15:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  And so if, if, if we're in some

• 1:15:21Peter Diamandis?

  Alien computer. That's a great argument, that is perfect. Right, when it's absolutely known. If we're not, if we're not, if we're not entertaining enough to the, uh, the digital gods or the universe gods. They'll end the sim.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. We just need to make sure we have the, to keep the ratings up.

• 1:15:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  But, but this is why, also why I think, like, one of the, um, ways to predict the future i- is that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, as seen by a third party. As seen by, as though we were in an alien soap opera.

• 1:15:58Peter Diamandis?

  I love that.

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, so it's not necessarily good for those in the soap opera, like, you could be watching a World War One movie. And seeing, you know, people get blown up.

• 1:16:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  Um. And, and you're just eating popcorn and drinking a soda. Um. But we're, we're, we're in the movie.

• 1:16:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Well, let's not get, let's not get dystopian here, because I think we can have a, we can have a, we can have a really positive outcome of a lot of other cool stuff. Um. Yeah. Sure.

• 1:16:29Speaker 04

  I think most likely outcome is positive.

• 1:16:33Peter Diamandis?

  And I think if you, you know, and I think that's partly a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don't believe so, if you believe it's going to be a dystopian outcome, then you're going to be back on your heels, protecting yourself, not investing in the future. And it unravels.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Peter Diamandis?

  And, and so, you know, I think the, the message of this entire space is, is this is the most extraordinary time to be alive, most exciting time to be alive, a time where, you know, a lot, a lot of individuals listening on the spaces has more power than kings or queens or heads of nations had just a few decades ago. And it doesn't take a government or a large corporation to solve a problem anymore. You know, an entrepreneur with, you know, some, a few H100s can do a good job.

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think we should err on the side of optimism.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  We should, we should err on the side of optimism and we should have kids.

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  Like, uh, you know, to, to, to err is human.

• 1:17:36Peter Diamandis?

  And to.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  H E I R.

• 1:17:39Peter Diamandis?

  And to reproduce is human.

• 1:17:42Peter Diamandis?

  All right, buddy, listen, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  You're welcome. All right. Thanks, Peter.

• 1:17:49Peter Diamandis?

  Take care, buddy. Bye.