After Interviewing AI Founders, Here's What You Really Need to Know | EP #175

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://bit.ly/METATRENDS This talk was recorded at MIT in collaboration with Dave Blundin’s Link XPV Fund. – Offers for my audience: Get the first lesson of my executive course for free at https://bit.ly/diamandisfutureproof Test what’s going on inside your body at https://bit.ly/FountainLife Reverse the age of my skin using the same cream at https://bit.ly/OneSkinPeter –- Learn more about XPV: https://www.linkventures.com/xpv-fund Connect with Peter: X Youtube Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on April 24th, 2025 *Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 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?

  Doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don't love it, you will give up before you succeed. If mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? If you don't believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there's no way that you can sell it at the level that's required. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller, to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and they're believing you.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Thank you all for coming tonight. This is, I get to do a lot of really fun things in my role here, but this takes the cake, doesn't get any better than this. So where you are right now, you're in Link Ventures office space. We're about a billion dollar venture fund. We invest almost entirely in MIT and Harvard teams. Everything is AI now. It's been at least 90% AI for the last couple of years. Most of the teams are upstairs above us. They're all sprinkled around. It's like a high-energy factory up there. And then downstairs here, we have events like this. I really appreciate you coming to hear us tonight. So I'm Dave London. Peter and I founded the venture fund together. You see it there, Link XPV.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So we have a rare opportunity to hear from one of the true luminary visionaries in all things technical. When I was at MIT many, many years ago, I was undergrad, getting a computer science degree. Peter had already gotten his bio degree from MIT. They went off to Harvard, got an HST degree, so MD PhD.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Then came back to MIT to take an AeroAstro, to get an AeroAstro degree. And so he was taking Unified Engineering, which was the hardest class that MIT has, having already gotten multiple degrees, so true glutton for punishment, while I was getting a computer science degree. So we lived together on campus and I've been inspired by a few people in my life, but at that age, Peter was by far the most inspiring person that I had met. And so it's been like a lifelong dream having Peter as a best friend all these years.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  So Peter, you know, he's in town every now and then. Today happens to be one of those days. While he was on campus as an undergrad, he started Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS, which is still, I think, the biggest club at MIT. Pretty sure it is. And his good friend Jeff Bezos heard about it at Princeton and copied it and created SEDS Princeton. Then he graduated. He started the International Space University, which is thriving today.

• 2:51Peter Diamandis?

  This is gonna be a long introduction.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  It is, because you've done so much. I'll only add one more thing then. So then after that, he was the founder of XPRIZE. XPRIZE is, I'm on the board of XPRIZE. I get a firsthand view into what he's created there, but it's changing the world in Actually, I'll just use that as a way to hand off the mic to Peter to tell us about why you're in town this week in the first place.

• 3:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Usually I'm the one doing the interviewing on my podcast, so it's nice to get someone else to do the work now. I was in town yesterday at the 1000 awards. We were announcing our largest cash prize ever. We gave away $100 million of Elon's money yesterday.

• 3:36Peter Diamandis?

  It was the carbon removal XPRIZE. So we challenged back in 2001. We had had, so the XPRIZE Foundation's been around for 30 years. I started it in 1994. After reading, before many of you were born, after reading a book called The Spirit of St. Louis. And I found out that Lindbergh in 1927, coming up on the 100th anniversary of that shortly, flew from New York to Paris, not on a whim, but to actually win a $25,000 prize. And I'm reading this biography of Charles Lindbergh, and I'm like, counting the amount of money spent to win this $25,000 prize.

• 4:21Peter Diamandis?

  And it's, it's crazy. It's $400,000 is spent by all the teams cumulatively to try and win this guy's $25,000 prize. And the most likely aviators to cross the Atlantic, New York to Paris, don't pull it off. In fact, Admiral Byrd, who was one of the great aviators at the time, first person to go to the North Pole, crashes on takeoff out of Roosevelt Field on the way to Le Bourget because he had overweighted his airplane with champagne in China so he could celebrate when he lands in, as if France would not have champagne in China.

• 5:00Peter Diamandis?

  But Lindbergh, and no one would sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so worried that he would not succeed. And they'd give their airplane or engine manufacturer a bad rep. So he goes to Ryan Aircraft in San Diego, which was building only, only building airmail aircraft. And he bought one of those to convert it. So that was the origin of the X Prize. I read this book and said, okay, I want to go to space. You know, I was born in the 60s. It was the Apollo program and that scientific documentary called Star Trek that was, inspired me.

• 5:41Peter Diamandis?

  And I wanted to go, spent a decade here at MIT, and then realized I didn't want to go as a government astronaut. I said, you know, my dream of spaceflight is not, I get to go once during my career after five years of praying. I want to go every weekend. And so the only way to do that is commercial. And when I read Lindbergh's book, I said, I'm going to create a prize for private spaceflight. And so, long story short, organized and launched a $10 million prize for the first person who could build a spaceship carrying three adults up 100 kilometers, come back with the same ship, do it again within two weeks. And that launched the commercial spaceflight industry.

• 6:25Peter Diamandis?

  Before that, the capital, the regulatory industry, none of that was there. Elon, Jeff Bezos were there early on, supporting X Prize. And we've launched 30 prizes since then, about $500 million of incentive purses that have driven about $10 billion in R and D. And yesterday, so every year, we go through this process of designing prizes, voting up prizes, and many years ago, we said, we need a carbon prize to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean at scale. And year on year on year, it was it was designed, but wasn't getting funded.

• 7:09Peter Diamandis?

  And I remember on January 7th, 2021, putting aside all the political bullshit going on, Elon became the wealthiest human on the planet, and was getting a lot of flak for not being philanthropic. So I texted him and said, hey, how about doing another X Prize? He had funded an X Prize for teaching kids in Tanzania, reading, writing, and arithmetic at scale. Long story, successful one. And he he said, well, do you have mine? I said, how about a carbon removal prize? He goes, how much? I said, $100 million. He goes, sure. That was it. We want, we got the contract, you know, 30 days later. And so, four years later, we had 1,300 teams enter that competition, approaching every

• 7:54Peter Diamandis?

  Darwinian evolution in in carbon removal. And we awarded six finalists and a grand prize winner, who I gave a check for $50 million yesterday, which was amazing.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  You left out really.

• 8:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Peter.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  He left out a really interesting nugget in that story, which is Elon is the first prize funder who said, "Here, I'll just give you the money up front."

• 8:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he gave us not only just $100 million, but the operating budget, about 30 million, and gave us the capital, which is sitting in a bank account until yesterday, accruing interest.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And funny, at the next X Prize board meeting, Peter said, "I want to put all that into Bitcoin."

• 8:34Peter Diamandis?

  I did, and I wish I had.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the board said, "No, no, I don't think we're allowed to do that." And yeah, if they'd said yes...

• 8:42Peter Diamandis?

  It would be a different story. We'd be funding a lot more, bigger prizes.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:49Peter Diamandis?

  But we do have, we do have $300 million level prizes. So originally, the first prize was 10 million, and people laughed at that amount of money, "You'll never raise it." An amazing woman, Anusha Ansari, who is now the CEO of the X Prize, very quickly, she's worth speaking about for a second. I came up with the idea of the X Prize in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, I took a risk, as entrepreneurs do, and I announced the $10 million prize without having $10 million. I had two of my board members resign on the spot. We announced it under the arch in St. Louis, and we had TV cameras. It was an incredible event.

• 9:34Peter Diamandis?

  I had raised $500,000, 25K at a time. And we decided to spend the entire half a million on this massive PR launch event to announce this to the world. And it was incredible. We had, I had, here's another idea I want to share as entrepreneurs here, that how you announce an idea to the world really matters. You see, in our minds, each and every one of us have a line of credibility. If you hear an idea below the line of credibility, you dismiss it out of hand. Like, your neighbor's kid wants to go to Mars tomorrow, "No, not going to happen." Great.

• 10:12Peter Diamandis?

  If you announce it above the line of credibility, and this person has a possibility of pulling something off, you're gonna follow and see what happens. But then there's this line of super credibility. If you can announce something above the line of super credibility, people go, "Oh, my God, what's it gonna happen? How do I get involved?" So I wanted to do that. And what I did was we stationed under the arch in St. Louis. I didn't have one astronaut on stage. I had 20 astronauts. I had Buzz Aldrin, a bunch of Apollo astronauts and Shuttle astronauts. It was amazing. I had the head of NASA, the head of the FAA,

• 10:51Peter Diamandis?

  the Lindbergh family. And when we announced this prize, it was like, "Oh, my God." No one asked, "Do you have the money?" I did not. "Do we need teams?" No. But we announced it. And then reality started hitting. As I went out to try and raise the $10 million, because my pitch was, "Listen, you don't pay the $10 million until after someone has won it." You get to naming, get all the publicity. You only pay on success. How great would that be? And it was like, "No, no, no. Why isn't NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off?" And the clincher was, "Isn't someone gonna die trying?"

• 11:32Speaker 01

  That's what I would've said.

• 11:33Peter Diamandis?

  I... No, you wouldn't. You would've said you would fund the whole thing, the Blundin X Prize. It would've been great.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I didn't have the money.

• 11:41Peter Diamandis?

  Not that then.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Didn't have to take the question.

• 11:43Peter Diamandis?

  So I, five years in, and I literally was getting calls from the teams saying, "Do you have the money? We're building our ships. Do you have the money? We're building our ships." And I was like, "Okay, trust me." There's an incredible book called "How to Make a Spaceship", which is my biography and the story of the X Prize and the X Prize-winning teams. Julian Guthrie, who is incredible, she wrote...

• 12:12Peter Diamandis?

  Larry Ellison's biography as well. Anyway, long story short,

• 12:19Peter Diamandis?

  I am, one day, reading Fortune magazine. It was the issue of the wealthiest 40 women under 40. I wasn't married at the time. It was another financing strategy.

• 12:33Peter Diamandis?

  And I read about Anusha Ansari, who had just sold her company called Telecom Technologies to Sonus Networks for 1.3 billion dollars. In her biography, it says she wants to fly in a suborbital flight into space. And I was like, oh, my God, after 150 no's, this is the person. And it had been an asset sale of her company, so I'm trying to track her down. Where is, there's no one left. I finally find somebody and find her old assistant. And they're vacationing, the whole family's vacationing in Hawaii for three months. And I got her assistant to promise me if I sent her a package that she would FedEx it to Anusha in Hawaii. Long story, I was, Anusha's first meeting when she got back to Plano, Texas.

• 13:19Peter Diamandis?

  And they said yes. After 150 no's, it became the Ansari X Prize. Two years after, the X Prize got won in 2004. I had, I had, I had James T. Kirk there at the launches, which was fun to have my childhood hero there. But Anusha flew to the space station privately. One of my company's, Space Adventures, was brokering flights on the Soyuz, the Russians. And now she's come back as the CEO of the X Prize. She's an amazing woman. And we've launched, we have 300 million dollar prizes going on. One we wore yesterday, one in longevity, they had 20 health years on your life. And one on large-scale desalination at scale.

• 14:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yep, yep. Every week, I study the 10 major tech meta-trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robots, AGI, quantum computing, transport, energy, longevity, and more. No fluff, only the important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives and our careers. If you want me to share these with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short, two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta-trends 10 years before anyone else, these reports are for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive companies.

• 14:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's not for you if you don't want to be informed of what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmanus.com/metatrains.

• 14:57Peter Diamandis?

  That's dmandis.com/metatrends to gain access to trends 10-plus years before anyone else.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  All right, so our first line of questions here is actually mindsets. I'm really gonna enjoy this one with you. Before we get into it, how many people have read Peter's books? He's a four-time bestseller. My favorite is actually "The Future is Faster Than You Think," because it's all about the convergence. You know, through most of technical history, there's one thing going on. Now, because of exponential curves, there are so many things going on concurrently, and they all interact. And "The Future is Faster Than You Think" is all about the interactions and predicting the interactions.

• 15:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, convergence.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  But before I get into mindsets, being a futurist, and one of the reasons you've been so inspiring to me over the years is because you're willing to actually try to predict the future. And you and Ray Kurzweil started Singularity University together, and Ray Kurzweil is famous for predicting many things, including AGI in 2029. And he predicted that in 1999. And he's gonna be right within a year, as it turns out. But for most of his life, people have been telling him how stupid he is for being miles off. And now, as he gets close to the finish line, it turns out he goes right in the end. But one of the problems that futurists have, and a lot of reasons people don't put themselves out there, is because, in Ray's case, if you predict 250 things, and 240 of them become exactly right,

• 16:19Speaker 01

  they just seem obvious to everyone in hindsight. But they weren't. And the 10 that are wrong seem really silly. And so, it's a very fragile thing to actually be a futurist, and therefore, very few people actually put themselves out there and make predictions. And Peter is one of the handful of people I've ever met in my life that actually repeatedly and habitually do predict the future, and almost always right. It's incredibly valuable to me, because so few other people are willing to do it. So, the topic is mindsets, and what it takes to have the mindset of an entrepreneur.

• 16:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So here's a question for you guys. If I were to ask you to think about the most successful leader or entrepreneur in the world, from your consideration, whoever it might be, you know, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Elon, Steve Jobs, I don't care who you think, if you think about that person...

• 17:18Peter Diamandis?

  And then I ask you, what made them a successful leader? Was it the money they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had? Or was it the mindset that they had? Right? I, I hope you would agree, it's their mindset. If you took away everything from them, but they retained their mindset, that they would likely regain the success that they've had. If that's true, if mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is, what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead?

• 18:03Peter Diamandis?

  You see, we tend to sort of adapt a mindset, absorb a mindset, given a mindset, right? Our brains are neural nets. Right? Work that you did earlier on, and neural nets, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And our, our neural nets are shaped by what we listen to, who we speak to, what we read. It's constantly shaping. And so I tend to be as careful about what I let into my mind as what I let into my body. And, and

• 18:44Peter Diamandis?

  the question is for you to actively shape your mindset. And so, uh, one of my next books is called Mindset Mastery. I've been working on this forever. It's a, it's a personal passion project. But I think about the important mindsets, and they have different names. But the first one for me is having a purpose-driven mindset. It was a great quote from Mark Twain who said, "There are two important days in your life, the day that you were born and the day that you found out why." It's a beautiful idea. Alright, so I won't ask, I'll ask the question but not force anybody to answer. Do you know your purpose in life?

• 19:28Peter Diamandis?

  Do you know why you're here? You know, when I started Singularity University back in 2009 with Ray Kurzweil, I had the first class, and these were incredible students from around the world, the very best at the best institutions, who had gone through this huge, you know, series of gauntlets to end up at our founding class. And I asked them, "How many of you know your purpose in life here?" And a third of them raised their hands. I was like, I was aghast. I was like, "Oh my God, the rest of you? I don't care why you came here, you have one mission this summer. It's to find out why you're here. What's your purpose?

• 20:09Peter Diamandis?

  What is that thing that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night, drives you? What's what I call, taking the step further, what's your massive transformative purpose? Right? What's the thing that really? So, we are emotional beings. We as humans are emotional beings. We don't do things just for cognitive purposes, we do things for emotional purposes. There is something that inspires you massively, like Star Trek or Apollo did for me, or something that just pisses you off so damn much that you refuse to let that continue and you're focused on solving that. Right?

• 20:47Peter Diamandis?

  And either one of those, awe or pain, can be the energy of your massive transformative purpose. But you deserve to find that. If you're, I created a, a platform and on a large language model.

• 21:07Peter Diamandis?

  Setup that I did called, it's called mypurposefinder.ai and it will walk you through a series of questions if you're interested and it will help you actually shape and verbalize your massive transformative purpose. So mypurposefinder.ai if you want to play with that.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it works really well. We do it at XPRIZE Offsites, actually. It works really, really well. And, you know, actually, I want to ask you about this too because for those of you that are AI startup CEOs which are founding teams, the process of being a successful entrepreneur has changed tremendously with social media. And, you know, when I was doing it at a very young age, you were pretty much invisible and you could stay invisible. Now you're out there no matter what. It's important for capital raising. It's important for recruiting. And I think Elon Musk has kind of reinvented the degree to which you can take this. But if you don't have a massive transformative purpose that's right on the tip of your tongue, then you can't articulate it when the moment arises and you're on camera or whatever. And then you don't get the talent

• 22:10Speaker 01

  and then you don't get the capital. And so, you know, Peter's been saying this for many, many years, but it's more true today than it ever was before. So I think it's, you know, go ahead, Dan. Try the online exercise, ask the LLM. How many of you right now could say, yeah, I can articulate my fundamental purpose? That's pretty good. Yeah. So Founder Dynamics.

• 22:34Peter Diamandis?

  I'm just going to say, I dive into that. There's an exponential mindset, right? That I think you need to really contemplate. Are you able? Our brains are very linear thinkers. We're designed in a linear fashion. Can the lion get to me before I get to the tree? Right? So understanding an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, one in which you're going 10 times bigger versus 10%. Most of the world is happy with 10%. 10% more revenue, 10% more clients, 10% less cost. That's success for most people. Ten times is a thousand percent, right?

• 23:13Peter Diamandis?

  And so can you create a moonshot mindset where you are able to conceive of something that's a thousand percent bigger, which typically means you're not starting where you are, you're starting with a clean sheet of paper, right? So Astro Teller at Google X, now X, says if you are running a car company, I'm gonna go old school here, that's getting 50 miles per gallon, and you want to get 10% more, you can get there, you can work hard, you can, you know, better aerodynamics, better tires, better fuel, you can get 10%. But if I say, "No, no, no, I want your car to go from 50 miles per gallon to 500 miles per gallon," you ain't getting there incrementally, right?

• 23:56Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, clean sheet of paper, start again. The other mindsets for me are an abundance mindset, not weaponized, an abundance mindset in which you realize there is just more opportunity next year. If you missed an opportunity, it's fine, there's gonna be more next year, and that there is nothing truly scarce. Whatever you conceive of is scarce, I don't care what it is, there is a mechanism driven by technologies to create a level of abundance. And the final mindset I speak about, write about, and I spend a lot of my time right now, is a longevity mindset.

• 24:38Peter Diamandis?

  It's a belief that we're gonna significantly extend the human lifespan from AI principally very shortly, I'm talking, you know, next five, 10-year timeframe, and your job is not to die from something stupid before these breakthroughs occur.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you don't read all of Peter's books, definitely the first chapter of abundance is about the story of aluminum.

• 25:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And it's just absolutely brilliant story, but it goes from being the rarest thing, more valuable than gold, to being 7% of the Earth's crust.

• 25:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, all bauxite. Yeah, do you know the tip of the Washington Monument is aluminum? Because it was the most valuable metal at the time until we learned how to smelt it properly.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great story. So, let's see, I don't know if you want to riff on this or not, but we met with the MIT administration this morning. And clearly, Peter thinks in exponentials. Very few people can visualize exponentials. Education is in the crosshairs now. My kids would much rather talk to an LLM and learn from it than go to class. But they learn what they need to know. Curriculum isn't even coming close to keeping up with the rate of change of technology. It's not even trying. I throw it out there as a topic. I don't know if you want to talk about it on camera or not.

• 26:03Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'll talk, sure. I'm not shy about any of my opinions. So Ray Kurzweil, we mentioned earlier, brilliant individual. I had him on stage at, I run a large community called the Abundance 360 Community. And I run a summit every year called Abundance Summit. And he was on stage with me and Jeffrey Hinton at my event 18 months ago. And he, basically, we're talking about sort of the speed of ramping things up. And he said, listen, we're going to see as much change in the next 10 years, 2025 to 2035, as we saw between 1925 and 2025, right?

• 26:48Peter Diamandis?

  The next 10 years, we see a century worth of progress. And by reference, just to remind you, because it's a distant memory of what life was like in 1925, penetration of electricity and telephones in the US was only 30%. 30% of homes had TV and a party line, I mean, not TV, electricity and a party line. And the most advanced tech back then was the Ford Model T. So imagine how far we've come since then to today? And what is life going to look like in 10 years if that level of progress occurs? I mean, it's truly unfathomable.

• 27:27Peter Diamandis?

  And so my biggest concern is that no educational institution is preparing any of us for that speed of change, not close, definitely not our middle schools and high schools. And I would have hoped an institution like MIT would be doing that. But maybe not.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, a quick survey, especially for the young entrepreneurs in the crowd. All right, so Thiel Fellowship, Z fellows, Y Combinator acceptance, MIT degree, Harvard degree, which would be more important to you to get? So think about it for a second and I'll run down the list. And so you get one vote. So Z fellows? Any takers? Y Combinator acceptance? Oh, I guess some Y Combinators. Thiel Fellowship? There you go. So one of the investments we made, Merckor, they were freshmen or sophomores, I think, at Georgetown and Harvard. They got the email saying, oh, give you $100,000.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Thiel Fellowship, you win. Give you $100,000 right now, but you have to drop out and start a company. Two years later, the company's worth $2 billion. They have $100 million of revenue, doing $20 million on the bottom line. So the Thiel Fellowship, I don't know exactly how you get it, but it arrives in your inbox and you get $100 grand with it. Okay, so I got some Thils in there. Harvard degree? Nobody. MIT degree? All right, a little biased here. Yeah, so I mean, if I'd asked that question three years ago, it would have been like, of course, the degree. Now you can see the trend line, you know, drifting in that direction. There are other credentials that are starting to matter to people even more than that degree.

• 29:10Peter Diamandis?

  The problem is that the time between matriculation and graduation is infinite in terms of progress.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:18Peter Diamandis?

  And so ultimately, your MIT degree is learning how to learn and how to socialize and making contacts. It's not what you actually learned.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So 27 time founder and co-founder. So 27 samples, that's a lot of samples. One of the things I was telling the teams earlier today is if you think about Ford Motor Company, when Ford started, they made cars. What does Ford do today? They made cars. Okay, look at the magnificent seven tech companies. Every one of them does something today that's very different from when they started. So look at Apple. What did Apple make originally? Actually, the Apple I was a box of chips you assemble together. The Apple II, which I had as a kid, is it's a desktop PC. Then the laptops came along. Then now today, 90% of the revenue comes from the iPhone. Wasn't even a concept when Apple started.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And so tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves now. And what matters over the long run in a tech company is not what your business plan is today, but the founder dynamics, the team dynamics, the culture that continually innovates. But now, you know, when I talk about Apple, I'm looking really in the rearview mirror. Look at the future and the rate of change. So love to get your ideas.

• 30:40Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I think the most interesting companies are the founder-led AI or tech-first companies that and it's it's so hard for an existing company to retrofit itself. It's nearly impossible, right? But what you do get is a founder-led tech company where the founder says, no, stop doing that. We're now only doing this, right? So you get that with Zuckerberg, you get that with Musk, you get that with a few other companies.

• 31:12Peter Diamandis?

  But that level of like, you know, full-body right turns are what is required. Otherwise, I mean, I was amazed when Bezos said at a shareholder meeting, in 30 years, we'll be gone.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, the Tesla reinvention as a robotics company, and you know Elon very well, that to me is right at the point where any, actually I met with a woman yesterday who's from Bridgewater, who talked about enshitification. She said at Bridgewater, we talk about public companies, the founders take it, they get it to a certain level, and then the enshitification sets in.

• 31:48Peter Diamandis?

  Enshitification.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  All that means is that the professional bureaucrats start coming in, the founders gradually leave, nobody really notices, but then the company is enshitified. And so here you've got Tesla, right at the point where you knew the stock had peaked and it's going to come down, because it's a car company. No, we're not, we're a robotics company. And that to me is the definition of, the founder is still there.

• 32:13Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's even more extreme in SpaceX, where when Falcon 1 flew, the first few times it flew, it failed. And Elon and the team borrowed enough money to make a fourth flight, and Falcon 1 succeeded on the fourth flight. And he flew it a number of other times, they got a contract for Falcon 9, and then he shut down the Falcon 1 line, right, burned those ships. And what he went on to say, as soon as we get Starship flying, we will shut

• 32:55Peter Diamandis?

  down the Falcon 9 line, the most successful launch vehicle ever in human history, right? And it takes that level of leadership to be able to make these right-hand turns, and say, we're going to put, we're putting everything into that, right? And the same thing with Starlink.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Well, I'm always telling people in class on Thursday mornings that they're spending way too much time on their plan, and way too little time on their networking and team building, because you're in this incredibly talent-dense environment here.

• 33:27Peter Diamandis?

  And it's rare, if you take advantage of it while you've got it, you'll make lifelong friendships, lifelong connections, and be able to build many things together. If you let it fritter away while you grind away on your business plan, you won't get that opportunity again later. And a single individual can make all the difference in the world and your company. A single individual, I'll give you an example. So George Church at Harvard Med School, one of the genetic professors, brilliant area in synthetic biology. He had been focused on bringing back the woolly mammoth for many years. Talking about it, talking about it, there was a nonprofit and so forth. He meets a guy named Ben Lam, who has no background in biology.

• 34:11Peter Diamandis?

  He's a software engineer. He becomes enamored with George. He becomes enamored with George's mission of de-extinction. Starts colossal four years ago. And today, it's a $10 billion company. That's brought back the dire wolf. It's bringing back next to the dodo and Tasmanian devil. And, you know, and of course, the woolly mammoth. But, and has spun out three other companies. It's the difference a single entrepreneur, CEO can make. So your job is always to find the smartest people on the planet to partner with you. I will happily hire anybody smarter than me.

• 34:56Peter Diamandis?

  There's a coming wave of technological convergence as AI, robots, and other exponential tech transform every company and industry. And in its wake, no job or career will be left untouched. The people who are going to win in the coming era won't be the strongest. It won't even be the smartest. It'll be the people who are fastest to spot trends and to adapt. A few weeks ago, I took everything I teach to executive teams about navigating disruption, spotting exponential trends a decade out, and put them into a course designed for one purpose, to future-proof your life, your career, and your company against this coming surge of AI, humanoids, and exponential tech. I'm giving the first lesson out for free.

• 35:37Peter Diamandis?

  You can access this first lesson and more at diamandus.com/futureproof. That's diamandus.com/futureproof. The link is below.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Speaking of smartest people on the planet, I'm gonna do this speed style first, and then we'll come back.

• 35:53Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  So in your travels through life, you've met pretty much all of the big shots in entrepreneurship, and I've got their names listed out here. So I'll give you a name, you give me one sentence, and then we'll go back to the top.

• 36:05Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Ready?

• 36:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I'll go in reverse order here. Richard Branson.

• 36:10Peter Diamandis?

  Frustrating.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Frustrating, alright.

• 36:13Peter Diamandis?

  So when I was trying to pitch, when I was trying to raise $10 million for my spaceflight X Prize in the beginning, of course, Richard Branson's the first person I go to. And I fly out there and pitch him for Virgin Galactic, no, Virgin Atlantic to become the, Virgin Atlantic's spaceflight prize. He says, "No." Two years later, I go back and pitch him for Virgin Mobile. "No." The day that the X Prize got won, October 4th of 2004, after I had spent six years pitching him, he's at the airport, at Mojave Airport, where the winning flight takes place,

• 36:56Peter Diamandis?

  signing a contract to buy the rights for the winning technology, after turning me down twice for funding the $10 million. Years later, he goes, "Oh my God, I should have funded the $10 million. I spent $500 million trying to build Virgin Galactic instead. It would have been much cheaper to do it."

• 37:11Speaker 01

  God, I had no idea. This is the first time I've heard that story.

• 37:14Peter Diamandis?

  He's brilliant and charming, and he just frustrated me.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Alright, we're gonna give up on the speed style then. I'll just go. Alright, this one drives me crazy, actually. How many people know Tony Robbins? Okay, good. Very glad to see that. In class every semester, it's like three people. And what drives me nuts is that the younger, you know, a lot of the teams now are like high school, freshmen, and college. They're really young. And they think the body language you want as an entrepreneur is cool. Like, too cool for school. Which is a good way to survive high school and a terrible way to start a company. The body language you want is exactly Tony Robbins. Relentless enthusiasm, never-ending...

• 37:53Peter Diamandis?

  Extraordinary confidence.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Your capital raising story for X Prize is a good example. You have to over, you have to give the same pitch 150 times enthusiastically.

• 38:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  So Tony is the master of that. So Tony's your co-founder.

• 38:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I've had the pleasure of knowing Tony. We were on the same stage, got, I don't know, 15 years and became best friends. We've started a couple of companies together. And he is one of the most beautiful human beings that I know. He gives of himself 24/7, over and over, in the most relentless schedule on the planet. And he, people don't realize the level of philanthropy that he puts forward in terms of feeding people, growing trees, energy systems. I mean, I'm just blown away by his level of brilliance and authenticity. What you see is what you get. And he's just extraordinary.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Drew Houston gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2017, I think it was. You know, everyone knows Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox? Yeah, that's also one that's kind of dropping off the curve for some reason. But he gave the best commencement address, I think, ever. But he said, "You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with." And that's true whether you want it to be true or not. So choose those five people really, really wisely. And if you think about, well, what attitude would I want those five people to have? Relentless enthusiasm.

• 39:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Relentless, yeah. It really is. Think about this. Do you want to spend time with someone who is kind of depressive and low energy, or someone who's just like, you know, just vibrant and you love spending time and they're excited about life and they're, I mean, it is contagious. And so make yourself that person that people want to spend time with.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  All right. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they're one person in this chart.

• 39:47Peter Diamandis?

  So I, the pleasure, so years ago, when the X Prize got won on October 4th, 2004, you guys remember the Google Doodle? So Google Doodle was changed on that day with Spaceship One flying over the Google logo and this alien spaceship up there looking at us. I loved it. And I got invited to go up to Googleplex to go give a presentation. And I did to the entire, it was like 2,000 Googlers back then. And afterwards, I'm standing in line, answering questions, answering questions, answering questions. And this kid in a black t-shirt and a backpack comes up and goes, "Hey, I'm Larry Page. Let's have lunch."

• 40:32Peter Diamandis?

  So I befriended him. We flew a number of zero G flights together. I pitched him and he joined my X Prize board and became a benefactor. He brought in Sergey and Eric Schmidt as well. And just very brilliant. You know, he's unfortunately gone MIA to a large degree. Sergey or Larry? Larry mostly. Sergey has been a little bit, but he's back now with Gemini's training. But what I get frustrated about, and I'm public about this, is individuals like Larry and Sergey who've got $140 billion to their name.

• 41:17Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, excuse my French, why the fuck aren't you solving the world's problems with that money? It really pisses me off when you have such levels of retained capital and the money is not being put to work. I mean, okay, fine, set aside a billion dollars for your kids, ruin their lives, and then, you know, I don't know, launch a $100 billion X Prizes, you know, invest in people changing the world. I mean, it's... Money is a form of energy that should be put to active use to make the world a better place. And I just, I don't, you know, there's so many billionaires out there.

• 42:01Peter Diamandis?

  I had this conversation with Marc Benioff, who is one of the billionaires who does incredible good and invests in, mostly in environment and in biology. He backed Dr. Yamanaka, who did the Yamanaka Factors, and he's backed a number of Nobel laureates. Again, Marc and Lynn are amazing. And this conversation with him and Tony, and I said, you know, you've got the giving pledge, which I don't get the giving pledge. Giving pledge says, "I'm gonna give half of my money to a nonprofit before I die." Okay, that doesn't mean it's gonna do anything with the money.

• 42:40Peter Diamandis?

  What I really want is people to participate in an impact pledge. Like, I pledge to solve, you know, eliminate hunger in Tanzania, whatever you want. And giving money is the easy part. It's using your intelligence that made the money to go and solve the problem, which is really the highest value. So if we had, you know, I don't know how big the Forbes list is right now, you know, a thousand plus multi-billionaires, I mean, incredible opportunity for the world to be uplifted.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  This next one's really important to me. So Jeff Bezos, and he's been an important connection point for the two of us, because when I was at MIT, I was the only person on campus doing neural networks. It was kind of not cool around MIT, so, but I got support. MIT is infinitely flexible and friendly, and I got support to use the biggest computer in the world to build the first commercial neural networks. So launched the company, was selling, ended up with Walmart as a customer, and then I got a call from Rick Dalzell, who ran data warehousing at Walmart. He called me one day, he said, "Hey, I just joined a little startup on the West Coast. You may not have heard of it, it's called Amazon." I said, "Oh yeah, I've heard of it, it's small, you know, it's about to go public." He said, "I want you to fly out here and meet our founder, Jeff Bezos.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  I think you guys are gonna love each other." So Amazon became our biggest customer, but the very first time I met Jeff Bezos, we were walking around their headquarters, and he said, "Do you know Peter Diamandis?" And I said, "Yeah, we were roommates at MIT." He goes, "Oh wow," because I started SEDS at Princeton. So that little bonding moment helped a lot in making them our customer, then they grew like crazy, so we grew like crazy, and it all worked out really, really well. But I think Jeff is the greatest organizational genius of all time. I've spent personally about $200,000, $300,000 now interviewing former Amazon executives, trying to reassemble everything he did along the way into our training program here. But you've known him for, well, since teenage days, I guess?

• 44:51Peter Diamandis?

  Well, yeah, since college.

• 44:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I had started SEDS here at the Student Center. I was very, very frustrated that NASA was mortgaging my future and was moving glacially. And so I ended up creating, I was at Thetel Takai at TDC here. And when I got to campus, I found out there was no student space organization at MIT. I said, "That's ridiculous." And I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna start one." And I realized I needed to get five signatures to start a club on campus.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Didn't know that.

• 45:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and so I went to five of our fraternity brothers. And so it was like, "Okay, I'm gonna call it Student Space Society," or "Space Cadets at MIT," SCAMET was one of the names I came up with. And then SEDS stuck, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. And this is, I wrote a letter to Omni Magazine, which no longer exists, Analog Magazine, and Astronomy, saying, you know, "We students need to band together to guarantee our future in space because I don't trust NASA to do that for us." And at our house, I had no idea the articles got published.

• 46:08Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, the mailbox, my mailbox was stuffed with letters one morning. And it was letters from students around the world saying, "I wanna start a chapter, I wanna start a chapter." And so we had like 104 chapters coming out of those. And one was from Princeton. And Scott Scharfman and Jeff Bezos had gotten the chapter going there. Years later, when Amazon started, I went and had a coffee with Jeff in Seattle. And I was like, "Jeff, what's this Amazon thing? I thought you wanted to do space." And he goes, "Yeah, I'm gonna do Amazon first, make some money, and then spend it in space." An easy one-two plan. And it worked.

• 46:51Peter Diamandis?

  And he's like, just like, he's executing on that perfectly. Yeah, and incredibly brilliant entrepreneur, incredibly focused entrepreneur.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And last on my list, we've already talked on that a little bit, but Elon Musk has kind of redefined what it means to be an entrepreneur and how much you can do concurrently in life.

• 47:12Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And set a new pattern.

• 47:14Peter Diamandis?

  So he's on my board at XPRIZE for four years. And from 2004, so how I got him on the board. So I'd known Elon for some time. I had pitched him originally on funding the X Prize instead of the Nushansari. I was gonna say Musk Prize. And I actually tried to talk him out of starting SpaceX. I said, "Look at all these rockets blowing up. Just fund my $10 million prize instead. Guaranteed to pay the winner." He still tries me for having tried to convince him to not start SpaceX. And so finally, where was I going with this story? So.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Welcome back, Dave. Something about Elon.

• 48:02Peter Diamandis?

  No, so.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Something we, now we're gonna be curious for the rest of our lives about some Elon nugget.

• 48:10Peter Diamandis?

  Anyway, so he starts SpaceX. He continues, "Oh, yeah. I am going to meet with Larry Page for the second time. And I'm like gonna ask Larry to join my board at X Prize." I was like, "How can I get Larry to join my board at X Prize?" And so one of the things I realized about boards, if any of you are on the boards, is I'm on boards because I enjoy spending time with the people there. Right? It's a chance to meet with them on a quarterly basis. I got a chance to meet with Dave. And so I'm in the parking lot at Google, about to go and meet with Larry. And I call Elon and say, "Hey Elon, I'm about to meet with Larry Page. Invite him on the board. Would you get on the board of X Prize?

• 48:54Peter Diamandis?

  Because if you're on the board, I think it'll increase the probability that he'll heal on the board." And he said, "Sure." So that's how I got Elon on my board. No shit. And then four years later, he calls me and he says, "I have to drop off the board." This is 2008. He says, "I have got to focus on SpaceX and Tesla. I can't do, I'm dropping off of all boards." And of course, that lasted for like a microsecond.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:20Peter Diamandis?

  And then 10 other companies started.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Any other takeaways on like how he's redefined what it means to be a CEO? Just in terms of, you know, doing Saturday Night Live or, you know, being in social media constantly?

• 49:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think one important element there is...

• 49:36Peter Diamandis?

  Some of the most successful CEOs take on a brand of their own. They become the mechanism by which they can promote their company from an orthogonal point of view. At the end of the day, your company is searching for attention in this attention deficit economy. And so you can either get it by having an amazing product, having an amazing brand, having great stunts. But one of the other elements is can you have a CEO who is super highly visible and is able to penetrate the noise that's out there. So Elon's very much done that. You know, I've worked on this through my, you know,

• 50:20Peter Diamandis?

  Moonshots podcast, my Metatrends blogs, my books, my other things. Because if I do that, I can support, you know, Link, X Menial Ventures, I can support the X Prize, I can support my company's Fountain Life and such.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  You know, I'm going to add one to the list. It's not on the list here, but I think it's directly relevant to what you just said, Sam Altman. So, you know, in the history of tech, it's more, I'm going to raise some money, I'm going to build something, I'm going to prove that it works, I'm going to start selling it, then I'm going to raise more money to expand and grow. But now in tech, you have these areas where something clearly will work. And, you know, LLM AI being a great example, or nuclear power to fund a data center that will have a gigawatt or two gigawatts of power. But you can't build it, or demo it, or start selling it. You need to sell the vision way ahead of the construction. And Sam has reinvented the level you can take that to. Yeah, storytelling.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  I think that's going to be a far more important part of entrepreneurship in the future, just because the nature of innovation lends itself much more toward that design than toward, you know, the design of building Ford Motor Company from scratch.

• 51:29Peter Diamandis?

  We are still human beings and we convey information through story. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller, to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and they're believing you.

• 51:47Peter Diamandis?

  And in order to get there, you have to believe in yourself at that level. If you don't believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there's no way that you can sell it at the level that's required. Right? And so I would on at my abundance summit this past year, Rana was there, Dave was there, I had Palmer Lucky, which was a fun conversation. I'm gonna do a podcast with him next week again. And I Travis Kalanick. And we're talking about when do you give up on your startup? I don't know about you, but of my 27 companies startups, there's a number of them that I read, I rode that horse into exhaustion.

• 52:30Peter Diamandis?

  It died with me on the saddle and I should have given up. And the question is, when do you give up on on something that you're passionate about? One of the, one of the times you give up is if you don't believe in yourself anymore, or you don't believe, you cannot fake that. You have to believe it. You have to believe in yourself, believe what you're doing. A quick aside, you've probably heard me speaking about Fountain Life before. And you're probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about Fountain Life? And the answer is no, I won't. Because genuinely, we're living through a healthcare crisis. You may not know this, but 70% of heart attacks have no precedent, no pain, no shortness of breath. And half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage three or stage four, until it's too late.

• 53:13Peter Diamandis?

  But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap, and Bob Hurrey, founded Fountain Life, a one-stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late, and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span. Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/peter and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  So I have a whole bunch more questions here, but I actually want to make sure that we get any burning questions from the crowd. We happen to have Alex Wozniak Gross with us tonight. He's the only guy who can say he got, he got three degrees from MIT in four years, math, physics, and computer science. And then MIT said, no, never again, we're banning this.

• 54:01Peter Diamandis?

  And he's incredibly brilliant and sweet man.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And always has a good question on top of his mind. I'm sure tonight's no exception. Yeah, kick us up.

• 54:12Peter Diamandis?

  Hi Alex, good to see you Bill.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Peter, good to see you too. I'll give you two questions if I may.

• 54:18Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, of course.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  So, one topic heavy on my mind today that you alluded to already, abundance and the weaponization thereof.

• 54:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Do you think that we are finding ourselves in a world where as the singularity or whatever approximation you may or may not believe in approaches, where it becomes possible for the great powers of the world to selectively weaponize abundance for hegemony? And if not, why not? And if so, which form of abundance do you think will be weaponized first?

• 54:54Peter Diamandis?

  Oh my god. So, I have zero doubt that we're heading towards this world... So back in 2012, I wrote a book with Stephen Coller called Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. We just sold and just finished writing the follow-on, which we're calling The Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. Because one of the things is, we have created an abundance of everything, both good and bad. So, I do believe we're heading towards a world in which you can have anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want.

• 55:37Peter Diamandis?

  One of my greatest concerns is the dissolution of purpose. So, if you can have anything you want, any time you want, can we still retain the idea of a deep emotional purpose for our lives? There's an incredible experiment done in the 1960s... Did we talk about the Universe 25 experiments? Do you know what the Universe 25 experiments are?

• 56:11Peter Diamandis?

  This was done in one of the large medical centers in New York in the 1960s. An experimenter had done sequentially over the years, this was the 25th time he did this experiment, where he took a population of rats and he created utopia for the rats. This was, he put in a number of breeding pairs and the universe that they were in had all of the food, all the water, all the nesting, everything they needed, and he saw normal exponential growth. But before they saturated the population, what occurred was this very rapid die-off,

• 56:55Peter Diamandis?

  and the entire population died every time, because there was no challenges for them. And so, it's like the idea of the unchallenged life is not worth living. It's anybody of you who play video games, or have kids who play video games, right? That video game is so finely tuned to not be too easy where you give up, or not be so hard that you can't win, it's just right. So, on the thesis that we're living in a computer model, which of course we are, it's just beautifully finely tuned. But what happens if everything becomes available all the time, and we have true maximal abundance of anything you want, because nanotechnology and AI and robotics and 3D printing and all

• 57:40Peter Diamandis?

  the accoutrement of exponentials makes it possible for us? How do we up-level our challenges? Not quite the weaponization of abundance that you were speaking of, but this is on my mind. You have a second question?

• 57:58Speaker 03

  I defer.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  I had a wonderful conversation.

• 58:04Peter Diamandis?

  Hi there.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  Nina Hyder.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  All of a sudden, related, as a geneticist, evolution is very slow for our species. And so if we think about, and I typically, technology advances at exponential pace, where we haven't quite reached our capacity, nor near perhaps. However, there will be a point perhaps where we do reach that. And if you can comment further on abundance and not just weaponizing, because you know, in your rat example you gave, how they die off, there's good and bad, right? Our emotional IQ, our different, um, product of DNA and environment, and our different

• 58:50Speaker 04

  experiences which we conceive in today's world, of both the most decrepit human behavior, as well as the most amazing human behavior. How do you see the future evolving in this world so that we can reach even closer to a utopia rather than, and do we need to go through this complete mass loss in order to happen?

• 59:15Peter Diamandis?

  So, there is a wide variety of future scenarios that humanity is going to have before it. One of them that I find fascinating, that I wrote about in my last book, is a world in which we are all connecting ourselves to the cloud. Where our neocortex is connected to the cloud, and I am, if you would, you know, through some version of BCI, and I've seen some incredible recent versions of high bandwidth BCI. We talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions earlier. One of the predictions he made, which was like, Ray, you've got to be wrong on this

• 1:00:00Peter Diamandis?

  one, no way it's going to happen, was was high, high-speed BCI by the early 2030s, but I've seen it. I've seen it, it's coming. But now imagine I connect myself to the cloud, and you connect yourself to the cloud, and you all connect yourself to the cloud, and now we are connected to each other. So you are a collection of 40 human trillion cells, and each of those cells is an individual life form. And you operate as a single consciousness of you or me. Imagine that we have eight billion people now connected through this mechanism, becoming

• 1:00:43Peter Diamandis?

  conscious on what I call a meta-intelligence. I find that as a fascinating potential future scenario. I'll leave it at that for the moment.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  All right, we're going to do a John Werner style here in a second to collect as many questions as possible. Before we do that, we've got a really cool couple of MIT agentic AI startup guys here. Do you guys want to ask a question?

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Here.

• 1:01:12Peter Diamandis?

  Catch.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  I think I'm curious about, you keep bringing up this idea that we might be going too far in technology in some ways.

• 1:01:24Peter Diamandis?

  I don't think I said that.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  Not too far, but in the sense that if we solve all the problems, humans have no challenges to face.

• 1:01:34Peter Diamandis?

  Ah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  Things like this.

• 1:01:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  And I guess I wonder at what point do you develop technology? And the point you brought up about uploading your brain to the cloud.

• 1:01:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  Is there a point that's too far? Is there some metric we can use to figure out if we've gone too far in some direction and it's potentially dangerous?

• 1:01:56Peter Diamandis?

  So I don't think there is any on-off switch, and I don't think there's any velocity knob. I think we are accelerating at a pace which is unconstrained. We're spending a billion dollars a day, or is it a billion dollars a day being invested in AI today? And it's driving, you know, super exponential breakthroughs. And digital superintelligence, if it isn't right on the edge, is here very soon thereafter, which will just accelerate everything even further. So there is nothing that's going to slow this down, I hope. Because the things that can slow this down are not things I want to live through.

• 1:02:43Peter Diamandis?

  But I do, I do think it's on us, on our our responsibility to look at how we up-level the challenges we take on. So I, I close my next book on abundance with a look at how do we, how do we go a thousand X bigger in our dreams?

• 1:03:07Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Alex, you and I talked about the human race coupling with AI, that there is a moment in time here as AI is taking off, you know, think of the movie Her, and we humans are sublinear at best. You know, do we couple and accelerate with AI? We're giving birth, AI is a new life form, it is a new species. Will we hybridize with them? I mean, these are the conversations, I think, that are very real. I don't think anybody on the planet today in, truly understands how fast things are gonna get in the next four years, and the implications thereof.

• 1:03:49Peter Diamandis?

  Clearly not in 99.999%. And so there's gonna be some, you know, disruptions as a result of that.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  So we have, we have time for maybe two more questions, but I want to do this again John Werner style. We'll pick three, just yell them out. Peter, answer any subset you want of the three, and then we'll do another batch of three, and then we'll have to wrap it up. So, fire away. Just yell it out.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:04:21Peter Diamandis?

  Good, good, good, microphone so we can record it properly.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I flew this morning to see you.

• 1:04:28Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  And because you changed my life, and I read the Future is Faster Than You Think, that, that's why, you know, wanted to come to MIT, and became MIT fellow.

• 1:04:37Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Appreciate that.

• 1:04:38Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Then, I'm passionate about the solving climate change, but the industry, you know, then I was focusing on green hydrogen, but industry is struggling right now.

• 1:04:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  So what do you think of the future of, you know, climate change?

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  All right, so you've got I love you and green energy. Hold on, hold on.

• 1:05:00Speaker 06

  What are you most excited about, longevity?

• 1:05:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Oh, that'll be well, okay. Longevity, and?

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  So you said that we're gonna see a century worth of change in ten years, but there's a grounding of like the physics of human change. I'd like to get a better sense for the mediums in which that change is gonna happen through. Is it like just through, you know, mobile phones again, where like Instagram to call, because it could be, you know, the brain, you know.

• 1:05:27Peter Diamandis?

  So, in reverse order.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:31Peter Diamandis?

  I was having this conversation with Alex earlier, and I agree with him. I think we're gonna see AI make the most profound discoveries in fundamental math and physics ever. That will unlock a, you know, a century worth of progress in some small number of years. You know, we just saw the Nobel Prize given to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold. I think that's the beginning of a long line of AI-driven Nobel Prizes. And the ability for AI to hypothesize questions and then run the experiments and solve them

• 1:06:13Peter Diamandis?

  and come up with, you know, sequential and adjacent breakthroughs is gonna be staggering. It's literally like a civilized alien civilization landed on Earth and just disclosed all of its discoveries to us. Because it is exactly that. So that's gonna be fascinating. Longevity, I spend half my time in longevity, and I think that it is, we're in the midst of a health span revolution. We just saw Dario, the founder of Anthropic, on stage at Davos, saying he expects that we will be able to double the human lifespan in the next five to ten years.

• 1:06:59Peter Diamandis?

  Crazy. I was just with David Sinclair this morning at Harvard Med School, looking at the research they have on epigenetic reprogramming, and I can't disclose it, but it's shocking. We just saw Sir Demis Hassabis talk about being able to cure all disease within a decade. So there's something definitively happening here.

• 1:07:26Peter Diamandis?

  The human being never evolved to live past age thirty. For, you know, as long as Homo sapiens have been around, two, three hundred thousand years, that was our average lifespan. And then we hit a number of benefits from, you know, pasteurization, better sanitation, and antibiotics, and move the needle. Now we're moving the needle as a result of AI. Another point we made, right? We're going to begin to model the human cell. And I will know, this is my cell, this is my tissue, this is my organ system, this is me. And based on my genetics, this is my model. And I'm going to make these tweaks.

• 1:08:11Peter Diamandis?

  Right? The reason that Falcon Nine flew the Dragon capsule to the space station perfectly the first time wasn't dumb luck. It wasn't just intelligence. It was, they modeled the shit out of it. And then you exactly how it was going to work. And they ran it in silico, you know, ten thousand times. And so we're going to begin to run your biology in silico. Crazy, no one thought possible, just around the corner. Thank you for your kind words.

• 1:08:49Peter Diamandis?

  I think, I think the climate crisis and all of that is going to fall as a gift out of digital superintelligence. Like it or not, want it or not, it will be just like, literally, you know, longevity falls out, climate crisis, you know, we're going to see new, new materials that are being, are being enabled.

• 1:09:21Peter Diamandis?

  We just awarded, you know, obviously, this $100 million on six different approaches for carbon sequestration at gigatonne scale. That was the important part. But, energy? Yeah, we're gonna drive energy because we need it, need it, need it, need it. But then that energy is gonna drive the, you know... We are living in a universe of an infinite amount of energy. There's lots of energy out there, right? It's just not in a usable form yet. And we're gonna, you know, whether it's just solar, or fusion, or zero-point energy, or whatever it is, it's coming.

• 1:10:03Peter Diamandis?

  It's there, and the breakthroughs in physics are gonna open all of these doors. And it'll be... I think it'll be shocking. It's like we wake up, "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit." It will be one of those. Every day, I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, "Peter, you have such nice skin." Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called OneSkin OS1 twice a day, every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it, and again, I use this twice a day, every day.

• 1:10:44Peter Diamandis?

  You can go to oneskin.co and write "Peter" at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's oneskin.co and use the code "PETER" at checkout. All right, back to the episode.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  All right, well, we'll be exactly 12 hours since we got together at MIT this morning, so I promise I'll let you off the hook after just... We'll do one more batch of three.

• 1:11:04Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, that's great.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  And then, are you okay?

• 1:11:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm totally good.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  All right, and then Alex, get the door.

• 1:11:09Peter Diamandis?

  It's 5:30 on the west coast.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  All right, I promise to you.

• 1:11:17Speaker 06

  I like this optimism and abundance. And right now, if you look at the human race, we have abundance of food. But here, there's inequality between where there's too much food and where there's starvation.

• 1:11:35Peter Diamandis?

  We have more people dying from obesity than starvation. It's crazy.

• 1:11:42Speaker 06

  So the question is, in this next generation of abundance, will the humans all come, our own human limitations to share?

• 1:11:52Peter Diamandis?

  That's a great question.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Right behind you.

• 1:11:58Speaker 06

  Hasn't come up yet, quantum computing, the positives and negatives that are possible around the corner?

• 1:12:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Very nice. Do you want to do another batch of three after this?

• 1:12:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  All right, now, one more.

• 1:12:10Speaker 07

  All right. Allison and you, the next one to take it. If you had small people...

• 1:12:18Peter Diamandis?

  I have two 13-year-olds.

• 1:12:20Speaker 07

  Okay. So how, what do you do every day to instill in them that deep purpose? And what stories? You say we need other storytellers, and we risk losing that deep sense of purpose. So what stories are you telling the youngest people to help them cultivate this new kind of purpose that you open to?

• 1:12:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's a great, great question.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Kids, quantum...

• 1:12:46Peter Diamandis?

  And abundance, more in abundance. So, on the kids' front. First of all, I think the single most important thing I want for my kids isn't for them to learn how to program, isn't for them to become space cadets. It's for them to find their purpose in life. Right? So it's like, when I was growing up, my parents desperately wanted me to become a physician, which I did. I went to medical school around the corner here to make them happy. And my fourth year of medical school, I was running two companies. I got a copy of my diploma. I shipped it to my dad and said, "Okay, obligation complete."

• 1:13:31Peter Diamandis?

  I don't want my kids doing anything for me. And I tell them all the time, your job is to find what you love, what it's passionate, what you're passionate about. The second thing I want for them is to learn how to ask great questions, to be questioning everything. And so when they go to school every day, when I drop them off, whatever, I say, listen, ask great questions today. We joke about that. It's become... So I do try and incentivize them to be, you know, to question both authority, but question what they hear. You know, you can call it prompt engineering if you want, but we're heading into a world

• 1:14:12Peter Diamandis?

  where you're going to be able to know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. I mean, just think about that. I can know the average color of a woman's blouse on Madison Avenue today because the cameras are there, the AI can analyze it, I can know that. So if you can know anything from a business perspective, or from a purpose-driven perspective, it's how do you use that information? What's the question you want to ask? Right? Someplace, there is a billion-dollar question, that if you could answer that question, it's worth a billion dollars to you, or it will solve one of the world's biggest problems. So it's getting into that mindset, right? I think is...

• 1:14:55Peter Diamandis?

  So mindsets are what I try and focus my kids on, not anything else. Because the tech is always changing. The final thing is become an expert in the problem, not the solution. The problem unfortunately remains sort of there, and we try different solutions, different solutions, the solutions constantly are changing, but if you understand the problem, then you can apply the new solutions as they come on. So those are my thoughts.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  And Quantum, I really want to hear your answer on this.

• 1:15:30Peter Diamandis?

  So I'm actually doing a salon this Saturday night back in LA with the head of Google Quantum, and the head of the Brain, Allen Brain Institute, and then one of the top physicians in the psychedelic space.

• 1:15:52Peter Diamandis?

  And we're talking about Hartmut Nevin runs Google Quantum. We're talking about consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, which I find absolutely fascinating. So we are quantum beings. You know, I'm tracking what's going on at Google, at Microsoft, and other locations in this space.

• 1:16:34Peter Diamandis?

  I think, you know, the area that is most... So the question is, when is it going to become applicable? When are we going to get, basically, you know, a sufficient number of logical qubits that it's useful? What's interesting is the work that Sandbox AQ is doing right now, right? So Sandbox has taken the quantum equations, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and so forth, and they're using AI to solve those equations. And we're getting the first glimpses there. Alex, do you have an opinion further?

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Very strong ones.

• 1:17:12Peter Diamandis?

  I want to hear them. I do, too.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  So this is all off the record, right?

• 1:17:17Peter Diamandis?

  No, it's been... Sorry.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  So the conventional wisdom in certain communities, I'll project it onto everyone else rather than taking credit for this opinion, is quantum computing has been a major disappointment thus far. That some would say that the best application that we can hope for right now from quantum computing side is to generate huge amounts of synthetic training data that we can then feed to very much classical machine learning algorithms to do things like drug discovery. We'll do efficient synthetic generation of quantum chemistry calculations, build up a huge synthetic... Data set feed back to classical ML. I think that's, that right now, if nothing else changes in the quantum space,

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  that's the trajectory that we're on where it's basically wildly under-delivered on the promise at the

• 1:18:12Peter Diamandis?

  There was a lot of hype in the early days, yes.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  The quantum computing lunch got eaten by classical AI ML and otherwise useless. If I had to make the steel man case for how quantum compounds expectations and ends up being wildly more useful than right now it appears to be, I'm with you on your earlier gesture at something to do with quantum biology if it turns out that biology is a lot more quantum than, than most biologists think it is right now, if it turns out there's some essential bit of quantum mechanics in biology, I think that's likeliest to be the saving grace of quantum computing, or quantum sensing, I think is incredibly promising.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  It's well established that we can get major quantum advantages for gravitational sensing especially.

• 1:19:01Peter Diamandis?

  And this is where Sandbox AQ has developed products right now, right? So Sandbox is using quantum sensing to be able to navigate without GPS by using slight variations in the magnetic field of the Earth due to ferro deposits in the crust.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  There are just enormous potential discoveries right under our noses, it's not likely appreciated. Even gravity hasn't been, Newtonian gravity hasn't been established to length scales as short as a micron, no one knows. Quantum sensors could mean the difference between discovering new physics at mesoscopic length scales and knowing physics. So I'm personally, I'm very bullish that quantum sensing could unlock enormous revolutions.

• 1:19:48Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. And then abundance.

• 1:19:51Speaker 08

  You were saying it's better than EKG tools?

• 1:19:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so they do for EKG, yes, exactly, yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  No worries about encryption for interview.

• 1:19:59Peter Diamandis?

  What's that?

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  I'll just listen to you now.

• 1:20:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, what's your, what's your, go ahead, give me a microphone. Anytime I get to hear from Alex Weiser-Gross, I want to hear as much as I can.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  The question was, no worries about encryption. No, I mean, the companies and agencies have already moved to post-quantum. So it's, yeah, the world has moved on.

• 1:20:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's your old hard drive that's ruined. Yes. Okay. So phrase the question on abundance for me once again. Human nature?

• 1:20:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the question is, as we enter this new age of abundance, and as we have seen in the past experiences, that we have this abundance of food, but where there is still this inequality of food and food distribution, this new age of abundance, again, I'm going to have the same thing play over, where some people have everything that they want anytime in their fingertips, and the vast majority are still left because humans don't intuitively want to share, other than with their tribe, because it's a problem of equal tribal people.

• 1:21:07Peter Diamandis?

  Great. Okay. Thank you for the question. First of all, if you look at the data, and in the back of my new, my next book, whatever we call it, Age of Abundance, or Survival Guide for Abundance, we've got 80 charts. And you look over the last, we look at 200-year life, 200-year spans, 100-year spans, 50-year spans, and 30-year spans, and the access to food globally has massively increased. Malnutrition has fallen by 300%.

• 1:21:45Peter Diamandis?

  So while there is still this, this lack of equitable distribution, it has consistently gotten better, consistently, over this time. So the analogy I use is, you know, if you think about this device, right?

• 1:22:09Peter Diamandis?

  Any kid with a smartphone, and the number of smartphones, call it seven billion or thereabouts, any kid with a smartphone has access to Google at the same level that Larry and Sergey's kids have access to Google. It's not a little bit better, a little bit worse, it is fully democratized and fully demonetized. And where we're heading next is that this device will be your diagnostician. And anyone with a smartphone will have, not a decent diagnostician, the very best. You can't, a billionaire can't afford a better diagnostician than the kid with a smartphone.

• 1:22:55Peter Diamandis?

  And the very best educator will be there. So, we are bypassing human nature. We're bypassing tribalism in that regard. I find that very refreshing in that in that fashion. And we're coming up with new business models for the things that are still physical and not digital. Those those models, if you would, for vertical farming or stem cell grown meats, where we're able to, you know, move the production of food to where the, where the humans are and need them.

• 1:23:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're, we're, we're dealing with a very, you know, a Paleolithic mindset, unfortunately. And if you can bypass that mindset by making things, again, this isn't the abundance mindset, that things are just so available and so cheap that anyone can have it.

• 1:23:58Peter Diamandis?

  That's part of the solution.

• 1:24:01Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Elon talks about, you know, So here's some numbers, right? Tesla, Bot, Optimus, Figure, AI. There's, I'm tracking about 100 decently funded, 50 well-funded humanoid robot companies. The prediction on the price point of these robot companies is $20,000 in production, right? The number, the estimate now is by 2040, there will be 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet, more than there are humans. I'll ask you a question about that in a minute. So, the price point has been said 20,000 to 30,000. And in that, in volume production, things get down to a price per kilogram.

• 1:24:45Peter Diamandis?

  And so that's where it will end up, at 20,000 to 30,000. And if I've got a humanoid robot that's operating on GPT-5, it's just operating on the latest models, and it costs $30,000 to buy, and it costs me $300 a month to lease, which is $10 a day, which is 40 cents an hour. And I have a digital superintelligence robot at my beck and call for 40 cents an hour. I don't know, that creates a lot of abundance for a lot of people out there. So the question is, if it costs you 300 bucks a month, 10 bucks a day, how many will you own? Right?

• 1:25:27Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know, probably a couple at least, maybe more. Maybe one will massage my left foot, one will massage my right foot. So, I think the bottom line ultimately is we're moving to a post-capitalist society. I mean, just to jump ahead to the punchline, money will mean very little at the end. It will mean very little, right? If you can have, if you have nanotechnology on top of AI and robotics...

• 1:26:02Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know. Alex, you agree?

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  I've had long conversations with AI about AI-driven post-capitalism.

• 1:26:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And it agrees, eh?

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it has very strong opinions about what post-capitalism looks like.

• 1:26:14Peter Diamandis?

  I should, I should talk to mine about that. Will existing systems allow that? What's that? Will existing systems allow that? No, they will fight like hell. And, and they will become irrelevant. Just like libraries. I'll tell a librarian about that.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  Still want to take three more?

• 1:26:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  All right, we'll take three more and then Alex is gonna ask something totally out of control, brilliant. Rana.

• 1:26:39Speaker 07

  Do humans have a vote?

• 1:26:41Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, that's a great question. I love that. Saf, you write that down for me. It's a great blog.

• 1:26:49Speaker 09

  Liberal arts and religion. What is the appropriate amount? Should we be worried that no one answered that Harvard was the right choice? Not a single vote.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  Is anyone here from Harvard that didn't want to? And you guys didn't vote for yourself? That's interesting. All right, last one.

• 1:27:06Speaker 10

  Hi, thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:27:08Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 1:27:08Speaker 10

  You're really inspiring.

• 1:27:09Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 1:27:10Speaker 10

  A question. Apart from that particular startup that you, you know, was on for like a long time, didn't give up. What is something else that you feel like after doing 27 different, or 27 different startups, that you could have done differently in hindsight?

• 1:27:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, what did you, what did you fuck up?

• 1:27:30Peter Diamandis?

  What would you say then?

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  So, all right, last one is what did you fuck up?

• 1:27:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, got it.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Right, Rana, what was yours?

• 1:27:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I got, I got hers. Vote for humans. So, so, listen, there's no question that in hindsight, you can do everything better. I'll tell you some of the very big lessons learned. Whenever I did something for money and not for purpose or passion, I failed miserably. Because doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don't love it, you will give up before you succeed. I learned that lesson, it's like, no way. It's like, you know, get rich quick schemes, nah-uh. So...

• 1:28:13Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I think the other thing is who you start your companies with is one of the most fundamental things, right? You're going to spend more time with your co-founders and your founding team than your husband, your wife, your kids, your best friends. So you gotta make sure that you love these people, you respect these people, and that you want to do something awesome with these people. Right? That's one of the fundamental learnings that Dave, when he's looking at teams to invest in for LinkX Mental Ventures is like, you know, were they best friends in high school or through college or grad school and such? Those are much more likely to succeed.

• 1:28:57Peter Diamandis?

  And I think the final thing, and it's related to the first one, is, you know, being driven by a massive transformative purpose, being driven by something bigger than yourself. Because when you've got that in your heart and you're communicating what you want to do, people see that, they feel it, they hear it. It attracts the best people to you, and people want to be with you, and people want to support you along the way. I mean, so a purpose-driven effort versus something that you're doing for somebody else, or you kind of want to do, no, no. Find that.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  So the question was, what did you mess up? I know you never messed up the transformative purpose part of that, but it sounded like the co-founder's side of it.

• 1:29:46Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, I went after companies because I thought it was a quick way to make money.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Oh, did you?

• 1:29:51Peter Diamandis?

  I did, I did. I did a couple of those, and I say, I'll never do those again.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:29:54Peter Diamandis?

  And, yeah, there were a couple of times where I started a company with somebody who I didn't fully have that level of bond with, and it just, it broke.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, we call that the Fred Wilson rule, because we borrowed it from another MIT alum, Fred Wilson. The founder of Union Square Ventures would only invest in teams of three or more people, best friends, they all write the code themselves, meaning they're all technical, and you trust them. If they passed those filters, you'd always invest, no matter what the plan was.

• 1:30:25Peter Diamandis?

  So...

• 1:30:28Peter Diamandis?

  Say again.

• 1:30:29Speaker 09

  Liberal arts and religion, what is the appropriate amount?

• 1:30:32Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:33Speaker 09

  You touch on a lot of those topics and sort of around them, but don't directly touch on a lot of them.

• 1:30:37Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, it depend, I mean, I, honestly,

• 1:30:42Peter Diamandis?

  for me, it's low. But that's not my, who I am.

• 1:30:53Peter Diamandis?

  But there are some of the most extraordinary leaders on the planet who, that's, that is their, that is their heart's place. I think it, it, there isn't.

• 1:31:10Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, one of the biggest questions is, what will happen to religion in the next decade?

• 1:31:21Peter Diamandis?

  We're, we're giving birth to advanced digital superintelligence. We're giving birth to new species, we're uncovering what we thought were long-lived secrets. We're doubling the human lifespan, we're, humanity is transitioning so rapidly.

• 1:31:42Peter Diamandis?

  I think, you know, the question is, will religion play a stabilizing role or break? Will history play a guiding role for us?

• 1:31:57Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know, you have an opinion about that?

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I'm not, I'm not taking that one. It's too complicated. But, Rana, you have the.

• 1:32:06Peter Diamandis?

  Is there a mode for humans? We're gonna find out.

• 1:32:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so, I mean, that's a fascinating question. Are we simply a transient life form?

• 1:32:20Peter Diamandis?

  That we are giving birth to our, our, you know,

• 1:32:29Peter Diamandis?

  our children that will conquer the universe?

• 1:32:34Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the questions I asked a couple of years ago at the Abundance Summit is, would you want to live on this planet with digital superintelligence or without it?

• 1:32:50Peter Diamandis?

  My conclusion is I don't trust this planet with the powers we're developing without digital superintelligence.

• 1:33:00Peter Diamandis?

  I don't think human nature is able to deal with the level of power without having a stabilizing force.

• 1:33:11Peter Diamandis?

  Alex, I want to hear your thoughts on these last two questions and your final question.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I have a favor to ask on the final question. It'll be something mind blowing because it's Alex. And then we're going to capture whatever the answer is on film and then whatever it is, that'll be the end of the night, so applaud wildly so we capture that on the video for KJ over there. Okay? All right, your thoughts on the last two?

• 1:33:34Peter Diamandis?

  Doctor, doctor, doctor.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the last two were humanities. Maybe just a comment, I think we're already seeing the emergence of AI-driven cults. It's like pretty obvious trends there, a number of crypto, AI cults emerging in social media. So it seems like we're already witnessing an explosion of new religions inspired by AI. Seems reasonable by the law of straight lines to assume that we'll see many more. And to the second question of...

• 1:34:07Peter Diamandis?

  Is there a mode?

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Is there a mode? I don't think the question makes sense. I think that the premise humanity needs a competitive differentiation, presumably against superintelligence or whatever barbarians lie outside the mode. I don't think it's even wrong. I think the premise is flawed. I think we merge with the superintelligence and the question that's interesting for me is what happens after that. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what is the post-singularity look like, given that at least from my foxhole, the singularity, or I just use that term as a placeholder because I don't actually think we're going to hit a sort of an IJ Goodstike-type vertical wall

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  where there's instantaneous progress. Technologies that we call in singularity, prosaically. That's a foregone conclusion at this point. We're well past the heterozygote.

• 1:35:04Speaker 11

  I agree with the merging, but I wonder if there are human qualities like curiosity or agency or love or something. That was more.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  No, those are all, I would argue, those are all instrumentally convergent requirements. So AI has those as well.

• 1:35:18Peter Diamandis?

  Your question, Doctor.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait, before your final question, because at the end of this, we're going to erupt in applause and that'll be the end of the night. So I want to, first of all, thank everybody for coming tonight. I hope it was worth the price of the ticket. And really, you know, Peter is just such an incredible joy and so motivating for everyone when you come to town.

• 1:35:39Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  The more we can get you here, the better. So, and the applause at the end. But not it. David, could we have our... So I have no idea what Alex is going to ask. It's always ingenious. And whatever we end on, let's make sure we end it on the final sentence being something upbeat and inspiring, which is very.

• 1:36:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, a positive note, of course.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  All right, there we go. Ready? Here we go.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  You're the founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. You're the champion in chief for abundance. I want to put you on the spot and ask you to project forward, say, 100 or 200 years and ask the question, what does humanity, from the reference, from the perspective of SEDs or abundance, look like? And I'll offer you a few options, you know, door A, B, C, D, and other as well. Does humanity look something like the wheel cylinders, where we're just projecting atoms outward into stellar space? Does humanity look like transcension hypothesis, where we break out of SED singularity, SED

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  simulation, or other dimensions, you know, fill in the blank? Does it look like humanity turning purely inward?

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  Building vast computers and living in inner life, does it look like something else entirely? What is, if not the terminal state? If you think that we're on an exponential, presumably, although I heard a point on exponential looks like the knee of the curve. If we're on a hyper exponential, then presumably we hit the vertical sometime before a hundred years from now. What does the state of humans in space look like?

• 1:37:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's a fantastic question, Alex. Expect nothing less from you. So, first of all, the realization I had combining space and abundance is that the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. Right? And that this is a very magical moment in time over the next decade or two, where we are moving humanity off the planet irreversibly. The best analogy I have is the lungfish moving out of the oceans onto land. And so there will be some elements of humanity that are moving out into space. The tools that we'll have with robotics

• 1:38:13Peter Diamandis?

  and nanotechnology that's able to reshape material resources into anything and everything we need. But I think the overwhelming vision of the future is us uploading into some version of a pre-computonium out there and living our lives. I have searched this in my mind a thousand times, and I do believe without any question we're living in an nth-generation simulation. And we'll create N plus one.

• 1:38:55Peter Diamandis?

  And it's a mechanism by which we can tune the dial on the degree of difficulty on purpose.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  So the high note is recursion.

• 1:39:09Peter Diamandis?

  Recursion and repeat. And infinite possibilities. I do believe we can create a world of extraordinary abundance. The work I do across everything with X Prize and Singularity and my venture funds with Dave and all is how do we uplift humanity? We have the ability over this next, not 50 years, 20 years, this next decade, to uplift every man, woman, and child. Right? I define a billionaire as someone who helps a billion people. Right? And it's an incredible, incredible time. We're about to give every human on the planet access to the most powerful resource, intelligence.

• 1:39:53Peter Diamandis?

  And what they do with that, what we do with that, I think is what we need to keep our eyes focused on. But 200 years from now? I mean, first of all, I'd like to start a city on the moon. That's one of my goals. And I'd like to fulfill Didi Harman.

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's 10 years from now. I'm asking hundreds of years.

• 1:40:14Peter Diamandis?

  I think that we're living in a virtualized universe. How about you?

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  You want that? I already turned it off.

• 1:40:28Peter Diamandis?

  I want to hear Alex's idea.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:40:31Peter Diamandis?

  You can cut in the door.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  All right, ask me the question.

• 1:40:33Peter Diamandis?

  So 200 years from now, in a world of infinite abundance and spacefaring humanity, what does it look like?

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  All right, so I have a really scary answer. I've had a conversation, extended conversation with a few frontier AIs about this. The answer is sort of terrifying from an exponential growth perspective. So Carl Sagan's cosmic calendar, right, suggests the universe, when it began, time scales were very short, slowed down, U-shaped, and then as we came up to the present, things seemed to be accelerating again back up on an exponential. The scary answer, one of the frontier models in an extended conversation gave me, is that we're going to hit a plateau. And even though it looks like we're on an exponential or a hyper exponential development

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  right now, and we're going to hit a number of major universal milestones, we're going to find that the next runs of the development ladder take exponentially more time than the speed up that we've experienced to the point where AI thinks the next few runs of the developmental ladder, not quite Kardashev levels, but it's its own somewhat similar version of that, are going to take progressively hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of millions of years. So to the answer, my answer to your question.

• 1:42:02Peter Diamandis?

  So we're in our solar system?

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  If we can survive technologies that enable us to destroy ourselves, then we leave our solar system. And if we can survive after that, we colonize the galaxy, meet all of the other intelligences that are cohabiting.

• 1:42:23Peter Diamandis?

  And this, of course, presumes that they don't come to meet us before then?

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  It does not presume that we haven't already made contact with them.

• 1:42:34Peter Diamandis?

  Which will be the subject of our next evening conversation.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you, David.

• 1:42:38Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, everybody.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:42:48Peter Diamandis?

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