First Neuralink Implanted & Where Other Tech Giants Are Headed w/ Salim Ismail | EP #85

In this episode, Peter and Salim dive into the craziest news in robotics, generative AI robots, Neuralink, and the Uncanny Valley of robots. 11:59 | $500 Million for Humanoid Robotics 29:07 | Robotic Surgeons of the Future 47:21 | The Future of Brain Interfaces Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. Join Salim’s OpenExO Community ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:09Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  We're literally within a site of that type of abundance where every single person on the planet can be fed and clothed and have energy. Five years, 10 years, or 20 years? I think we're within five years.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Now things get really interesting because you've got a distributed intelligence that can be applied, learn once, and apply a million times. Every percent increase, I can increase my brain processing power. That's just a game changer. The ability to think things into existence is going to be powerful. People forget that scaling things is an engineering problem, not an invention problem. Once you figure out the invention of it, then the scaling is actually not that difficult.

• 1:42Peter Diamandis?

  We tend to make linear our future extrapolations, even though we're faced with this amazing exponential growth.

• 1:53Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome back to Moon Shots. Peter Diamand is here and this is my favorite segment of the month. It's WTF Just Happened in Technology with my dear brother Salim Ismail. We're going to be looking at what just happened in the news and what's hot and what we think of it. So, let's jump in. Salim, welcome pal.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Good to be here. Good to be back.

• 2:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's blinding speed and I don't know, I'm, I'm having a blast.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's just so interesting. Every day you have no idea what's going to show up. Your mind is blown every month or two with something that happens. So you almost want to do this more often than monthly just because there's so much going on.

• 2:35Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, so I'll call you every morning. Lily will be really upset at me, but you know, it really is. I mean, I literally wake up, the first thing I do is I, I look at my, my Google News, I look at my, my, I gotta say Twitter stream, you know, I just, I would, I did a, I did a podcast with Elon and I'm like, you know, it's like, do I call it, what do I call it? I Xed? I'm looking at my X stream, I guess. It's like, it will eventually flip our neuron, right? We will eventually let go of Twitter and, but he needs to give us something to hold on to.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  That's right. I think it'll happen when he's doing payment processing. For me, the thing that's going to be a game changer is when he allows, turns every crypto user and gives every X user or Twitter user a crypto wallet.

• 3:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure. And that's going to be an inflection point.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  He'll be instantly the biggest bank in the world.

• 3:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, it, it will give you a, X will give you a sovereign identity and a wallet and an interface to all crypto and NFTs and everything you own and it will be the everything. It'll make Amazon look like really small potatoes. Yeah, so I would never, you know, people say, you know, would you bet on Elon and stuff? I would never bet against him.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Well, this is the key point, right? People complain about it and I have my, I have my big beefs about Twitter and, and what's going on there. Um, but when he looks, when you talk to him about that and you hear him speak about that and he says, I'm, we're swinging for the fences and we may throw out a bunch of features that don't work, but one out of five could be a homerun and then off you go. Yeah. And that's just awesome.

• 4:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So I, I teed up a few fun news items that really like, like snap my gaze. Uh, here's the first one I, I found amazing. Uh, this year, Google was spending more on compute than people. So Google invests thirty billion on data center expenditures and Microsoft fifty billion. Um, insane, right? So it's, another tipping point is the amount of chip compute over brain compute on the planet. And I think we've passed that or about to pass that. The amount of processing power resident in eight billion brains, which is a hundred billions, a hundred billion neurons per brain, a hundred trillion synaptic connections per brain. I mean,

• 4:56Speaker 03

  It's just a lot of zeros, but you're saying the chip compute exceeds the brain compute globally.

• 5:00Peter Diamandis?

  I think it's either we passed that or it's very close. And, and people, um, so this is fascinating, right? So where do you, if you're a tech company, where do you spend your next hundred thousand or your next hundred million? Do you, do you hire smarter people or do you spend it on, on tech?

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Well, I think you spend it on tech and it goes to that comment we had the other week where we said, you can now build a billion dollar company with three people.

• 5:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Right? Uh, Sam Altman just said one person with a billion dollar company, by the way.

• 5:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's just shrinking to, to absurd levels. Uh, and the value creation, I think, delivered by technology.

• 5:39Peter Diamandis?

  So for our, for our moonshot listeners, your goal, take a moonshot, is it's a billion dollar company with one person or a hundred billion person with, uh, company with three people. I mean, It's the other flip side of it is are we about to demonetize the the economy? Where money has that much less meaning.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  I think I think this speaks to your abundance concept, right? Like, once you have abundance, then money does kind of does matter.

• 6:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  And everybody has a lot of whatever they can tip. I think I don't know why we can't flip as quickly as possible into like a Burning Man type economy. Which is a gifting economy, and if you need stuff.

• 6:14Peter Diamandis?

  Wear your scantily clothed.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  At least the weather, if the weather provides it.

• 6:20Peter Diamandis?

  This year, it was the mud mud economy. It was like the economy at Burning Man this year during the during the rains was plastic bags to wrap around your sneakers.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:31Peter Diamandis?

  So that you could actually make it through the mud.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, and those are, you know, very high class problems. But I think as we deliver more and more, you know, imagine a little community in the Western Sahara, right? You have water extraction out of the atmosphere. You have satellite internet via Starlink. You have uh um energy production by solar, you have local battery.

• 6:56Peter Diamandis?

  Protein production via.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Vertical farming and microgreens, which are richer. Like, you kind of don't need much else. And I think we're we're literally within a site of that type of abundance. Where every single person on the planet can be fed and clothed.

• 7:13Peter Diamandis?

  Five years, ten years, or twenty years?

• 7:15Speaker 03

  I think we're within five years.

• 7:18Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting. You know, of course, the endpoint, when I was in at MIT as a as a undergrad and grad student, there was a guy named Eric Drexler there.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Sure, of course.

• 7:27Peter Diamandis?

  So Eric wrote an amazing book. Um, I'm so proud. I was credited and the opening notes of that book that I reviewed his draft. It's called The Engines of Creation.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:38Peter Diamandis?

  And he talks about the future of nanotech.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:41Peter Diamandis?

  Right, where uh where we have assemblers and an assembler, for those who don't know, because you haven't, you know, haven't read Engines of Creation, or you don't know, you're not a geek.

• 7:52Peter Diamandis?

  Or enough of a geek, but most people listening this are. An assembler is a little micro, a molecular machine that can pull a carbon atom from here, you know, nitrogen from here, silicon from here, and, and build things on an atomic level. And so if I have an assembler in my hand and I command it to, you know, generate, uh, you know, copy itself and I give you one.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:15Peter Diamandis?

  Now you've got an assembler, I have an assembler. Now I take my assembler and I throw it in the, in the ground. And I say, build me an electric Ferrari.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:23Peter Diamandis?

  And it says, okay, I'm gonna get the, the design, the data is open source, it's free.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:30Peter Diamandis?

  Right? The energy to build it is from solar or fusion, it's effectively free. And then it's really the material cost.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:38Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and you may need to throw out a chunk of titanium or lithium or something, but all of a sudden, stuff becomes really cheap.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Well, I remember Ralph Merkle talking about this.

• 8:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  And he said, you should be able to build anything for about a dollar a pound.

• 8:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Ralph was one of our faculty members in the nanotech field.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:58Peter Diamandis?

  At Singularity University in the early days, brilliant guy.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Brilliant, more famous, because I remember, you know, there's been one of the lectures. Somebody said, are you Ralph Merkle from Merkle hash trees? And Merkle hash trees are the basis of Bitcoin.

• 9:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  It's the one-way encryption. And he goes, yeah, that was me, but that was like, you know, decades ago. So in the nineteen eighties, he conceived of Merkle hash trees, which then thirty years later. So I actually did a session with him about, about two years ago.

• 9:25Peter Diamandis?

  Uh huh.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  An interview.

• 9:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  I said, where are we going with computation?

• 9:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  And he goes, oh, I'm working on a paper that for thermodynamically reversible computation. Which means you take the heat out of the computation. I said, how do you get there? He goes, well, if you do a computation using molecular bonds to form the ones or zeros. You essentially can read or write and then you don't generate any heat.

• 9:48Peter Diamandis?

  Huh.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  I'm like, okay, and what will that give us? He goes, oh, ten orders of magnitude on top of this. The transistors per per square millimeter at least.

• 9:57Peter Diamandis?

  Ten extra zeros.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Moore's law is another ten orders of magnitude on just from that, right? And you're like, okay. In terms of a bridge to quantum or whatever, like this is so, this is, you know, people could worried that we're running out of um, uh, computational capability and you talk to Ralph and it just goes so far past what you're thinking. And and this is the, this is where people kind of really lose their way. They get so stuck on, oh, silicon chips can only deliver so much, right? And then you have to go to them and go, listen, we have Profska coming, which takes a widely abundant, it's like a salt. And and they're just working on how to scaling it. And people forget that scaling things is an engineering problem, not an invention problem.

• 10:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Right? And once you figure out the invention of it, then the scaling is actually not that difficult.

• 10:45Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, you know, it's like, you know, nothing can go past the steam engine. Nothing can travel faster than a horse or or train.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:51Peter Diamandis?

  It's over and over again. I mean, uh, haven't, when do we actually figure that out and stop saying never? It's insane.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Well, Ray figured it out a while ago.

• 10:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  And then Ray Kurzweil, and the rest of us are kind of catching up to it now.

• 11:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Right?

• 11:04Peter Diamandis?

  Um, so here's another story from the news uh, this week. Um, and this is a company in Silicon Valley uh, called Figure. Uh, full disclosure, my venture fund is an investor in Figure. And uh, there's a whole breed of humanoid robots coming out. I want to talk about three of them.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 11:23Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and uh, at uh, the gentleman who is the CEO of Figure um, has built a number of moonshot companies uh, uh, previous to this. But here's a quick video clip of Figure making a cup of coffee. Let's check it out.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Can you make me a cup of coffee?

• 12:13Peter Diamandis?

  That might not look as impressive as it is. I was talking to Brett Adcock, who's the CEO, he's the moonshot entrepreneur in here, and he was talking to me about a day where they went from programming this to like how to move the joints and so forth, to the day they had generative AI watch a human do that thing over and over and over again. And the generative AI model is what the software that drives that thing.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:45Peter Diamandis?

  So what we're seeing is basically a neural net inside this robot, watching and learning by repetition, which is the way kids learn.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  So I have an issue.

• 12:58Peter Diamandis?

  All right, but before you be, let me show you one other news. So this came out today. And this is Microsoft and OpenAI are in talks to inject $500 million into humanoid robotics, in particular with Figure AI. So I don't know what your issue is, but Microsoft and OpenAI think it's worth a half a billion dollars of injected capital. So tell me your issue now. This is my defense mechanism.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  That's fair enough. You know, when you talk about, there may be lots of classes of applications where robots, humanoid robots are really valuable. Mining applications where it's really dangerous or toxic environment, for example.

• 13:35Peter Diamandis?

  Bring me my dinner.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Well, no, I think that's where it falls down. So let me give you the example.

• 13:40Peter Diamandis?

  The robot or the case study?

• 13:41Speaker 03

  The anecdote here. So take a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot, okay?

• 13:47Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Once you use a Roomba for a while, you stop using it. Why? Because you you still have to go and prep the room for the robot. You have to pick up all the laundry off the things and da da da da da and it gets stuck on slanted things. There's like a hundred little things that can't do.

• 14:01Peter Diamandis?

  You must have an old Roomba.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  And by the time you finish kind of configuring the room, you might as well just vacuum the room yourself, right? This is the same difficulty with uh self-driving cars. Where and and I and God knows I'm one of the people that die, I'm dying for the self-driving car.

• 14:17Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, so listen, you got a Tesla.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  By the way, I've got a Tesla that I've driven four times from Miami to Toronto or New York and back. So I've crossed the country. I may be the one of the longest distance-driving Tesla drivers, owners anywhere in the world. Okay, I've done ten thousand miles back and forth. Okay, now it's incredibly valuable getting on the highway, hitting the button for autonomous mode. And then eating a shawarma.

• 14:40Peter Diamandis?

  But you don't have the self-driving driving beta right now, right? Which which I do.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  No, this is just the straight autopilot.

• 14:46Peter Diamandis?

  I know, and and so the the self-driving mode, right, will take me from door to door without me touching it. A few moments of, you know, being a little bit nervous, but it works amazing.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. And and Phoenix now has self-driving taxis, Waymo, etc. And it's coming. But look how long it's taken. We kind of, we first posited that in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, that within five, six years, you'd have a large percentage, a meaningful percentage.

• 15:13Peter Diamandis?

  We were off by that.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  And here's why, okay?

• 15:16Peter Diamandis?

  Elon was slow.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  No, no, it's it's the fact that that driving, which is moving around in a physical environment, is just inherently very hard.

• 15:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  You drive, you you weave a little bit to avoid a po- I live in New Jersey. Okay, there's pothole center.

• 15:31Peter Diamandis?

  My apologies.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Okay, um and and you weave around a pothole. A self-driving car doesn't see any of that stuff. Okay, and so there's lots of little things. It'll get there eventually. But it's like the rumor, it's just gonna take a long time before it gets to the point where it can handle.

• 15:46Peter Diamandis?

  There was, there was a change this year, pal. There was a fundamental change this year, so.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  I still, so I call it the, that's my version of the uncanny valley.

• 15:55Peter Diamandis?

  For robotics.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  It's like dealing with these stupid niggly.

• 15:57Peter Diamandis?

  So what's the uncanny valley?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  The uncanny valley is um adapt, a physical adapt, adaptation to local physical phenomena. Is just a really difficult task. Can I go back and tell a story about Dan Berry here?

• 16:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  So Dan Berry was a astronaut faculty member.

• 16:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he's flown five times.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he was building. And he was building robots, uh he was trying to build intelligent robots. And is, and he was like talking about intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. And his wife, who's a neuroscientist, says, you're an idiot. Come outside and let me show you something. So they go outside and she's like, show me everything with a brain and everything that doesn't have a brain. Out in the, out in the garden, in the woods. And he's like, well, I don't know, like this squirrel has a brain, da da da da. And she, it's really simple. Anything that moves around in the world has a brain. Anything that doesn't move around in the world, like a tree, doesn't really, it may have a nervous system, except but doesn't have a brain in the classical sense. It seems we've evolved brains purely to adapt to moving around in physical space, okay?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  There's an amazing animal called a sea squirt, which in its larval stage moves around the ground and filter and and moves around catching things, et cetera, and has a brain. Then it, when it graduates to being an adult, it plants itself on a rock and it filter feeds from that on.

• 17:12Peter Diamandis?

  Like a lawyer.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Like, and and the first thing it does when it plants itself, it eats its own brain.

• 17:18Peter Diamandis?

  Like a lawyer.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  It eats its own brain and now it never needs a brain anymore. So it turns out to to have a brain, you, the reason you we have brains is to move around in the physical.

• 17:28Peter Diamandis?

  I, I think that, and in fact.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a great distinction.

• 17:31Peter Diamandis?

  There's a lot of individuals who feel like we don't have full on AI until we embody. AIs into physical robots.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, now, there's lots of ways of doing it. Like, if I had a a and a robot that I was kind of transporting into or bridging into, right? And I could move with my horns, like the Avatar X Prize thing that you had. Uh, and there's there's models like that. There's other models where um the now I did get very excited when we were talking. When we first saw the Baxter robot, okay?

• 18:03Peter Diamandis?

  I remember Baxter.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Right now, I got super excited for a specific thing because I have a computer science software development background. If you used to program an industrial robot to say, pick up a widget, turn ninety degrees, move over here, turn back, put it down type of thing. You had to program every step in the path and it took a long time. Hundreds of instructions just to do this little thing, okay? And with Baxter, you could move its arms and show what to do, stock picking, whatever. And it would then go, oh, I get it. And it would just do its own thing. And I thought that was a massive step change, which is roughly what you're referencing.

• 18:33Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's it's actually a step further here. So, for example, Tesla, this earlier in twenty three. Announced that they had replaced three hundred thousand lines of computer code in C plus plus.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:46Peter Diamandis?

  With three thousand lines of a large language model.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:50Peter Diamandis?

  And so basically, they used all of the self driving uh data. To train a model to look for the potholes, look for this, look for that and and do it. And it's doing amazingly well. And I, you know, full credit, yes, Elon was six years off from what he promised. But it's getting there.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  It's happening. So I I'm I'm excited. I I I would like to see the you for me, it feels like. The use cases are not clear for.

• 19:20Peter Diamandis?

  Oh dude, I totally disagree.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Hold on, let me give you one last anecdote. So I remember um Boston Dynamics had this robot horse, right?

• 19:29Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that was called Big Dog.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and it was amazing watching this thing and.

• 19:35Peter Diamandis?

  It was a pack animal.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  And uh and it cost like three, four hundred thousand dollars for this thing, okay? And somebody asked Brad Templeton, what do you think of that? And he was like, great, but if I wanted a horse, I'd get a male horse and a female horse, so I'd breed a I'd breed a horse at almost zero cost. Right? Give it a bit of hay and you've got a horse. Why do you need to build a robot horse, right? So I I think we we in this is like it's for me, this feels like when we move from radio to TV. The first thing that people did was read radio scripts on television. Right? Because they didn't have the imagination to have TV series and sitcoms and drama series and do acting. So for me, hold on. So for me, it feels like we've moved into, okay, we have humanoid robots. Let's do what human beings are doing.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  I think we could use humanoid robots to do stuff that we aren't able to do or don't wanna do.

• 20:26Peter Diamandis?

  Dan Barry used to say, do things that are dull, dangerous or dirty. With robots. I got it. And I think we're gonna see a new generation of robots and like figures amazing optimists. Especially Gen two, I think is is extraordinary. Let me just show you this video of Gen two. This came out in December of twenty three. Um, let's roll the video.

• 20:51Peter Diamandis?

  So not bad humanoid robots. It can be your workout coach here.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  If it can do my workout for me, that's when I'm happy.

• 20:59Peter Diamandis?

  Well, listen, I wanted to just cook me my omelet every morning here. I mean, I the precision here is is pretty extraordinary.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, by the way, that I just want just on the other side of the argument. That little thing of picking up an egg and knowing how much pressure to put on the egg to. It's a huge, huge break right? The other one that I've remember, I think, uh, hearing about the big challenge is proper reception. Right? Like if you close your eyes, it's very easy to go touch your nose. You you instinctively, your brain knows where you are in three dimensional space and you can do it blindfolded. A robot has a very difficult time with that. However, generative AI built into the robots and leveraging it, I think is a game changer. I still don't understand.

• 21:43Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, let me let me share. Let me tell you. So so first of all, uh, you know what? Again, Elon's numbers, Elon's timeline, which is, you know.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Ignore the timeline.

• 21:53Peter Diamandis?

  He calls me the most optimistic person in the world. I would say he's the most optimistic on timelines and and costs, but uh, we're, you know, his number here is twenty thousand dollars per optimist robot, right? Let's call it fifty thousand dollars. So what does it cost you to lease a fifty thousand dollar car?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, very little, few hundred, a couple hundred a month.

• 22:15Peter Diamandis?

  Call it five hundred a month, right? So imagine you've got this in your closet for five hundred bucks a month, right? Uh, what is that, Doug? There are twenty bucks a day to clean up the house while you're gone, mow the lawn, you know, uh, prepare lunch and dinner for you. It is, I mean, I don't want to go to to the notion of free labor, but it's effectively free labor. So anything, and why humanoid robots? Why not a, you know, first of all, anything that becomes really good, like something, a robot that cleans dishes, we call a dishwasher.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 22:50Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So we, or a dryer or a washing machine. But the humanoid robot, we live in a human world. That doorknob over there, the accelerator in your car, or the, you know, the steps we go through, the size of the doors. And so being able to navigate our physical world by humanoid robot. So I want one, maybe two.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:15Peter Diamandis?

  You know, clean up after me, cook my meals, do the stuff I want. Um, I don't know. I think, I think there are a million uses.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  When you, so I'll tell you what my um, inflection point threshold is for me.

• 23:30Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  When you have a robot that you can say, oh, go tidy up the kitchen.

• 23:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And it can go and put the kitchen, the dishes, rinse them off, put them in the dishwasher, put the salt and pepper away, uh, put away the, the various appliances you've taken out, et cetera. Uh, and do that reasonably completely because that's a repetitive task. Once you learn a bit how to do it, it's not that hard. That I think is a game changer.

• 23:53Peter Diamandis?

  I think.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  I'll give you another application.

• 23:54Peter Diamandis?

  But I think we're gonna be there because you can have that robot walk into the kitchen and say, this is a state of clean. Look around. Memorize where every single thing goes.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:06Peter Diamandis?

  Right. Open every drawer, look in it. I mean, photographic memory.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:09Peter Diamandis?

  It's there, right? And then, and then return this kitchen to a state of clean.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So let me flip around to your side of the argument for a second. So I'll give you a couple of areas where I think it'll be monstrously useful in a house. Okay? Where did I put that damn little pair of pliers?

• 24:26Peter Diamandis?

  I don't think a robot for that.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  And the robot will, will know that.

• 24:29Peter Diamandis?

  No, but that's, that's a cat, it's an AI, that's, that's Jarvis and cameras. That, that happened to notice where your things are.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Get it for me. That's, that's.

• 24:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, go get it for me. Sure.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  I'll give you another one. Go walk the dogs. I think that'll be awesome. A dog walking robot is going to be coming very quickly. And I think that can be done very soon.

• 24:46Peter Diamandis?

  I pay my dog walker much more than twenty bucks an hour.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  There you go. So I think there's some areas, but I still think there's, we're looking at, uh, there's some cost effective areas. I think the vast majority of really powerful applications will be construction. Right. We're, go build a house and a swarm of these robots. By the way, I disagree with the fact that it should be humanoid. There's all sorts of inefficiencies with being humanoid. And so why are we building that into the dang robot?

• 25:15Peter Diamandis?

  A multitude of, it's gonna be Star Wars.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:18Peter Diamandis?

  And.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Like I'd rather see an octopus spider-y thing because then it can navigate lots of environments.

• 25:23Peter Diamandis?

  And some will fly.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  It'll have eight arms. It can do lots of things. It can do it super fast.

• 25:27Peter Diamandis?

  But.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  I'd prefer it not to be humanoid.

• 25:29Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'm sorry. We're gonna have humanoid robots and I want data. Okay, so let's talk about humanoid robots. One second. We've got, uh, we've got Terminator. Don't want those.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:38Peter Diamandis?

  Um, Data, C three PO.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:42Peter Diamandis?

  What's your favorite robot?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Probably Data.

• 25:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Positronic brain.

• 25:48Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. Sure.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Um.

• 25:51Peter Diamandis?

  If I only had a brain.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  C three P, C three P O for me is too, uh, fanciful or too.

• 25:57Peter Diamandis?

  Cartoonish.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Too much partic, too much personality.

• 26:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  In it. Um, do you have one?

• 26:03Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I mean, Data, Data for sure, but growing up, it was, you remember Lost in Space?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So Robot, that was his name. Very imaginative Robot, you know? Uh, I loved Robot.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:17Peter Diamandis?

  From Lost in Space. Actually, I remember just build those with like.

• 26:22Peter Diamandis?

  Core, you know, things from the dryers and boxes and so forth. It was fun. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some

• 27:04Peter Diamandis?

  time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find

• 27:46Peter Diamandis?

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

• 28:29Peter Diamandis?

  family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. I think there's something magical about a humanoid robot. And, you know, I want to show you another humanoid robot here. Actually, here's Tesla again, doing something useful.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:56Peter Diamandis?

  Like, you know, folding my-

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Folding your shirt.

• 28:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:00Peter Diamandis?

  Now, this is pretty amazing, the ability to actually understand where the edges are. I remember Scott Hassan, who had Willa Garage.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:11Peter Diamandis?

  And he built a robot-

• 29:14Speaker 03

  To fold laundry.

• 29:15Peter Diamandis?

  To fold laundry.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:17Peter Diamandis?

  And it was just extraordinarily difficult. It did it.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was really slow.

• 29:24Peter Diamandis?

  It was really slow and really painful and detecting the edges and where to pick it up and a whole model of how a cloth folds. I mean, it's crazy.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  So I'll flip to where I think this robot is really powerful. They now have a stitching robot.

• 29:40Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Okay. We have a trillion dollars of the global economy of people sewing t-shirts together and clothes together and jeans together, etc. And it's really horrible work. And it's low-paid. It's very difficult. Child labor in a lot of cases in dodgy countries.

• 29:59Peter Diamandis?

  I agree.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  And you have this sewing robot that just does it all. And I think things like that are where the game-

• 30:04Peter Diamandis?

  Well-

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Agricultural application.

• 30:06Peter Diamandis?

  How about surgery?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Surgery, huge.

• 30:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so I've said this before, and I say this to all my friends who are in medical school or physicians, it's like this, the best diagnosticians will be AIs.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:19Peter Diamandis?

  And the best surgeons will be AIs.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:21Peter Diamandis?

  So let me ask you this. Do you know the question, if you're, if you need to get a surgeon for any procedure?

• 30:27Peter Diamandis?

  And hopefully you don't, but if you do someday, there is one question you ask when interviewing a surgeon. Do you know what it is?

• 30:33Speaker 03

  How many of these have you done in the past?

• 30:35Peter Diamandis?

  How many of them did you do this morning?

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:38Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So in other words, the surgeon who has the most experience with a particular procedure.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:43Peter Diamandis?

  Is the most, you know, is trained his or her neural net to see every arterial venous malformation, every situation, is prepared for everything.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:53Peter Diamandis?

  And it's really, it's, he wants someone who's done eighty of them a week.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:57Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I want you to imagine a future in which these robots are our future surgeons. And every time a robot does one, it's uploading its experience to the cloud.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:11Peter Diamandis?

  And every surgeon, every surgical robot has had every experience, seen millions of them.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So now this is where, this is where things get interesting for me, right? Uh, this is the same thing with the Tesla car. Once it knows to navigate a pothole and tells every other Tesla car to do that. Now things get really interesting because you get a distributed intelligence that can be applied. Uh, learn once and apply a million times.

• 31:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  And I think if you, if you have the, somebody who's done a, a, a hundred, um, heart replacements a month, a surgeon. And you have a robot, a camera just watching over that with the generative AI built in. The robot will be able to do the same thing very quickly. And that's super exciting.

• 31:51Peter Diamandis?

  So you mentioned the uncanny valley before.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:54Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, which is a term that's typically applied to how human-like we make a robot's face look.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what that means is when you see an animation of a human face.

• 32:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Right? Because we're so attuned to human faces, our brains.

• 32:09Peter Diamandis?

  A whole bunch of neurons.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  We have a million brain to detect, detect, et cetera. It turns out like seeing a cartoon face is easy, but making it visibly, visibly real to the point where you think it's real is near impossible. So the uncanny valley is a robot that we think is human. And that I think is like a Turing test for, uh, visual robotics. Um, and can you detect that or not?

• 32:31Peter Diamandis?

  So this is a robot, um, Amica, uh, who's been on my stage at the Abundance Summit. Amica is coming back this year in twenty twenty four. Uh, Engineered Arts out of, out of London, uh, manufactures. I keep on wanting to say her.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's a she in a sense.

• 32:53Peter Diamandis?

  Is it? I mean, uh, why? It's gray, has no hair. I mean, anyway, um, I, you know, I'm gonna say her.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  We can, we can barely classify humans right now. Like, like, like, like, it's probably safer to go.

• 33:08Peter Diamandis?

  My, my, my pronouns are it.

• 33:11Peter Diamandis?

  Alright, so, check, check out, check this out. So this is a video of Amika seeing herself in the mirror for the first time.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Has she been told that that's her in the mirror?

• 33:30Peter Diamandis?

  I have no idea what the setup is.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:37Peter Diamandis?

  But

• 33:40Peter Diamandis?

  it's amazing. I think, I think she has like twenty-three servo motors in her face alone.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:47Peter Diamandis?

  I want her to wink at the end there.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  That's freaky.

• 33:49Peter Diamandis?

  It is freaky. And so, you know, here we have an a humanoid robot that for me would be meeting me at uh, the entryway someplace, would be my guest service manager, would work the front desk at a hotel.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:05Peter Diamandis?

  Um, you know, I think that's pretty extraordinary. And by the way, when you uh, when you see Amika uh, at, at the abundance summit this year, um, at A three sixty, it is, uh, she's powered by G P T four.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:23Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So when you have a conversation with her, you're having a conversation with, uh, with, with a, with a large language model.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:31Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I don't know, I want, I want some, I'm looking forward to, uh, uh, having some humanoid robots in my life.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Again, one of those fun to play with, uh, but I think there will be enormous power in. Various activities that can get done. For example, if you had a robot like this as a a reception check-in, hotel check-in, right? They will process white-collar drudgery. Like, okay, I want a king's room. I registered for a book for this, but do you have one of these free? And I arrived early and do you have a room available? Et cetera. They'll be able to handle that stuff very fast. Whereas today is like super slow.

• 35:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  And takes a long time and they'll be able to do a lot more effective. Uh, they'll process many more guests at a time per hour type of thing. I think that's where things will become really interesting around this, but I still don't see the need for it to be humanoid.

• 35:20Peter Diamandis?

  Well, sex bots. I mean, you can, you can imagine there's gonna be a market for that.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:27Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And in that case, you.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  I mean, there already is. The, the one that blows my mind is this phenomenon in Japan where men walk around with blow-up sex, not blow, blow-up women figurine dolls, just for companionship.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  And.

• 35:42Peter Diamandis?

  No wonder, no wonder their reproductive rates.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  It's very surreal, but it's just a thing over there.

• 35:48Peter Diamandis?

  Just a thing.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:50Peter Diamandis?

  Um, so this blew me away. This was an article that came out on the prediction of how many bipedal humanoid robots will have. And so I, I, the prediction I heard from, uh, from the team at Figure is single-digit millions by 2030.

• 36:12Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and, uh, billions in the 2040s, Elon came out with his prediction of a billion by 2040.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 36:20Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and, uh, I, you know, potentially 10 billion by the end of, of the 2040s. So imagine a world with more humanoid robots than humans.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  This is like the equivalent of, we have more chip. Uh neural power, the human neural.

• 36:36Peter Diamandis?

  And we have more cell phones than we have humans on the planet right now.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Right. Um. So I I think I go back to the use cases, right? I think the number is not that relevant, but I think the use cases is fascinating. So if you can have a rice picking robot that goes and tends the rice fields, or in this case picks things or picks lettuce or strawberry or whatever, and takes away that drudgery from human beings. I think that is a game changer in some profound ways. But I think we're kind of almost all the way there that we have many, many areas where uh uh apple picking is now done largely by robots, et cetera, et cetera.

• 37:15Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  And I think that we're, and it doesn't have to be humanoid robot.

• 37:18Peter Diamandis?

  No, and we have in in in Amazon uh uh service stations and so I mean.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  I I think the the the automation of labor is, I think the one thing that we found most surprising is when we were looking at automation and robotics and AI, we thought blue manual labor would be automated first, white collar labor automated later.

• 37:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  And this is another one of those areas was really, really hard to be a futurist because ChatGPT comes out, all of a sudden white collar thinking is totally automated.

• 37:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  And it's way harder to do the manual labor because of the physical dexterity stuff. So I'm excited by the robot revolution. I think it's farther away than most people think. Certainly farther away than you want.

• 38:01Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, uh, these robots will be in production in twenty twenty five, and they'll be sold, and they will be put into limited use cases.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:13Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and I I think we're gonna start to see them uh as they learn. And the thing I remember, and this is where, you know, I have having a conversation with Ray the other day, Ray Kurzweil, and and we both hit on the same thing that we tend to make linear our future extrapolations, even though we're faced with this amazing exponential growth.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:39Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So, listen, if we've got. What I'll again term AGI, artificial general intelligence by twenty twenty nine. Driving these robots, these robots are doing anything and everything.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 38:51Peter Diamandis?

  In which case, if they can do anything and everything, even if they're a hundred thousand dollars a robot or quarter million dollars a robot. We're gonna have a lot of them.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:00Peter Diamandis?

  They're not limited by physical manifestation, they're they're limited by the intelligence to have them do things that are useful.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, true, I think you will have a corresponding concern around regulatory and safety, right?

• 39:15Peter Diamandis?

  What could possibly go wrong?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Well, if I can tell my human or robot, go steal the something from that house.

• 39:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Uh, and figure out a way of getting into the house and go get stuff from the house. How do you navigate that, those?

• 39:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're we're back to the general concerns of of AI, right? This it comes back to ethics and morals and.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, dystopian uses. But, um, you know, it's so interesting, you know, we're here in Santa Monica recording this. And, uh, did you see the cocoa robots on the streets here at all?

• 39:46Speaker 03

  The delivery robots?

• 39:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah, so it's it's fascinating, right? So these little six wheeled robots, uh, with a little antenna and little headlights and they, you know. I think they're manually driven. Or or they're manually assisted, they're like some AI plus somebody in somewhere in the world. Deciding whether to cross the street or not. But the first time you see them, I was like, wow, that's amazing.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:11Peter Diamandis?

  Look at that delivery robot, you take photos up and so forth, and then like a week later, it's like boring.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's this is the back of that conversation, how quickly we normalize.

• 40:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  These things, right? And I think, once you, once you get, I think the way to do this is to pick some. Uh, value added use case that people allows people to get used to them and then it'll spread, then they'll take over and you be used for lots of other things.

• 40:34Peter Diamandis?

  All right, well, I think. I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna surprise you with this prediction that we're gonna have a billion robots and you should listen to this, you know. I didn't listen to you in 2011. When you were like Bitcoin Peter Bitcoin 2011, like you should have forced me dude.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Dude, I didn't buy it either.

• 40:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Until like, so I watched Bitcoin go from five cents to 50 cents to five dollars to 50 dollars. Finally at 500 dollars about a bunch.

• 41:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Okay, and like that was hard when you first saw it at five cents. To go, I'm spending 500 dollars on this thing that costs five cents like I'm like it's that emotional resistance is a very difficult thing to overcome. And then you kind of have to just go, if I was coming in a blank, what would I do? Da da da da.

• 41:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, if we've got billions of these robots walking around, we're gonna need battery power. So two articles come out um that were amazing. Uh, you know, there's been a whole debate and discussion about do we have enough lithium?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:37Peter Diamandis?

  To power, you know, the cars and will we have enough for for robots? So this was interesting. So this is the first mass produced EV with sodium ion batteries.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 41:48Peter Diamandis?

  Right, gets 250 kilometers. So new battery chemistries. One of the things people forget is that scarcity drives innovation and reinvention.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is a really, this is, you know, I remember this conversation for me. The penny dropped when we first came across CRISPR. Which is a biotech capability of of programming your genome.

• 42:11Peter Diamandis?

  Editing your genome.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  And people tried to patent it.

• 42:14Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  And and then people thought, oh, my God, if it's patented, there'll be da da da da. And very quickly, researchers found like five other mechanisms to achieve the same thing.

• 42:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Right? And and when I first heard and I've watched the people complaining about lithium ion forever and complaining about China hoarding all the rare earths, etc. I've never been worried about it.

• 42:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  I feel I've always figured either engineer around.

• 42:36Peter Diamandis?

  We don't have enough.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll engineer around that.

• 42:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Or we'll find other compounds to do the same thing. Or we'll we'll kind of create different models for how to do this and something will happen. And this is for me, the validation of that type of thing where we are going to completely blow the lid off energy storage in the next decade. And I think that for me is an absolute game changer.

• 43:00Peter Diamandis?

  Well, here's a amazing story.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:03Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, this is a tweet from Beth Jaisos. Uh, Beth goes, his real name is Gil Verden. And he'll be on stage. He runs Effective Accelerationism. Um, and he's just a brilliant. He used to be, uh, working with Sergey Brin at Google in quantum. And he is, you know, in the boomer to doomer scale. He's like, you know, the extreme on boomers. Like, we have to go as fast as possible.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:31Peter Diamandis?

  And, and this is this tweet. And he says, we're so fucking back. Right? So this is a tweet from the US Department of Energy that confirmed a discovery of thirty four, uh, thirty four hundred kiloton reserve of lithium in California's Salton Sea, making one of the largest exploitable lithium deposits in the world. So for the last ten years, it's like, oh, my God, running out of lithium, zonoff lithium.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:56Peter Diamandis?

  And this is the abundance thesis.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  It is.

• 43:59Peter Diamandis?

  That there is, there is nothing truly scarce.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  You know, it goes.

• 44:03Peter Diamandis?

  Within the right context.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  It goes into the same thing around technology and energy scarcity. Right? We were worried about, oh, my God, limiting oil reserves. And then technology came across, figured out fracking, and that expanded radically the scope of it. And, and the, the, the whole ability with technology, something like forty percent of oil discoveries today are AI driven.

• 44:27Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Forty percent of oil discovery. Right? That's kind of massive. And, and that's a game changer in this. I think there's, there's hundreds of these examples we're going to come across. And it's, it's not even. So I'll give you one of my other favorites. There's a, there's a, a project called the Materials Project.

• 44:44Peter Diamandis?

  Materials Genome?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Materials Project.

• 44:46Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Uh, Saul Griffith talked about this at one of our sessions with. And what they've done is putting together a diet database of about a million compounds. And cataloged in great detail the chemical, electrical and physical properties of these compounds.

• 45:00Peter Diamandis?

  And these are, these are multiple.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Lithium ion and different molecules, different, different material compounds, right? Now, this goes to the linear exponential thing. If you're a battery researcher and you're trying to figure out, okay, what's an alternative lithium ion? Well, okay, maybe sodium ion. So you run some experiments and you find, okay, that does or doesn't work. Maybe it's lithium air, maybe it's lithium this. And you test sequentially, compound after compound.

• 45:25Peter Diamandis?

  Very linear approach.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Very linear and you may fail at each time and you don't know when you're going to succeed.

• 45:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's the way Edison, Edison did it with his light bulbs.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Now you can go to his database and go, okay, give me a compound that meets this voltage and this thermal resistance and this retention. And boom, it'll say these are the five that meet your needs.

• 45:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I, I call that, I call that the materials genome and it, the concept. I had on my stage at Abundance, the head of applied materials, amazing company, right?

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:52Peter Diamandis?

  So first of all, I think material science is like the most underappreciated field in technology. It's like all the progress we have is a result of new breakthroughs in materials.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, huge.

• 46:04Peter Diamandis?

  Huge, like another era, if you want to be, you know, material science is, is amazing. Course two at MIT, but I never went there. Um, uh, that wasn't course two, damn it. What was it? Anyway, long story short. Uh, the materials genome was being able, once you know. Like in a Sudoku board, once you know the properties of different, you can start to extrapolate. What materials that have never been made might have the properties of.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 46:30Peter Diamandis?

  And that is extraordinary.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And now you can then design those. So I think what's going to happen now is you let a generative AI loose on the materials database. Which is open source and free, by the way, the materials project. And let's start at thinking about that and say, what alternative do I have for this or this or this? That's a game changer for materials research. That changes the game, again, another level of.

• 46:52Peter Diamandis?

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• 47:37Peter Diamandis?

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• 48:22Peter Diamandis?

  Here's another story that breaks this past week. It's Neuralink. And in particular, you know, the ability to connect your neocortex, the outer layer of your brain, to the cloud. Yeah. Right, I'm going to show a couple of tweets from Elon and talk about those in a moment. But, you know, Ray Kurzweil has been talking about this forever. Yes. And Ray's prediction, if I remember correctly, is high bandwidth brain-computer interface by 2033. Okay. All right, so that's like nine years out. Hmm. And I believe it. Yep. I believe it. You know, most people don't realize.

• 49:02Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, we're constantly bombarded by so much information, right? Our optic nerve, our, our, our, you know, touch and hearing.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:12Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I think the number, uh, uh, that I had looked up earlier was e- eleven, uh,

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Million?

• 49:19Peter Diamandis?

  Eleven megabits per second of data.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:22Peter Diamandis?

  Coming into the brain.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Um. And the, and the problem is our brain processes that at sixty bits per second.

• 49:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Right? So it has to use all these filters to reduce.

• 49:31Peter Diamandis?

  Noise.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  The noise. And, and this is why we're so geared to see certain things, facial.

• 49:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  We, we don't see much else.

• 49:40Peter Diamandis?

  Dangerous.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Change in the face.

• 49:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 49:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So our amygdala, for example, filters, I mean, we're so inundated that we have to make very quick decisions. And so anything dangerous goes to the amygdala and puts you on, on red alert.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um. So, so as kind of cautious as I am about making predictions about robots.

• 50:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  I'm unbelievably excited about this because every percent increase, I can increase my brain processing power. That's just a game changer.

• 50:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  In terms of the interfacing with various things, right?

• 50:14Peter Diamandis?

  If you.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  The ability to think things into existence is going to be powerful. So, uh, we were talking about this earlier. I could go, I really want a chair that has this type of a shape, da, da, da, da, da. And you let an AI design six versions of it and you go, I want that one. And then a separate three D printer goes off and goes off and builds the thing for you. And you're done. That's just amazing. I think this is go- going to be a huge, uh, uh, multi- force multiplier for humanity.

• 50:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure. Um, the ability to have brain computer interface, BCI, uh, also brings us a lot of other things. It brings us telepathy.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:53Peter Diamandis?

  Right? My ability to communicate with you, right? Omniscience, able to know through the trillion sensors out there, what's going on in the world. I mean, it is godlike powers. If you connect your brain to the cloud.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Well, I think, so I'm, I have a spiritual tilt to my.

• 51:11Peter Diamandis?

  Of course. Buddha.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Well, when, when you, when you connect all the brains together via BCI. Right, now you have a hive mind and you have a hive consciousness.

• 51:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  And that I think is really.

• 51:23Peter Diamandis?

  That was my final chapter of uh of uh futures faster you think. I call it a meta intelligence. Can I tell a story here one second? So I think this is uh just a step in human evolution. And the reason I believe it's a step in human evolution is I look back at time. So if you look back, uh you know, three and a half billion years ago when life first came into existence on the planet. It were these very simple uh cells called prokaryotic cells. They were bags of cytoplasm. And they were not energy efficient. They were not, the DNA was free floating inside. And over the course of a half a billion years, they went from these prokaryotes, what are called eukaryotes.

• 52:08Peter Diamandis?

  And the eukaryotic cells um brought in mitochondria for processing energy. They put a nuclear membrane and chromosomes for processing the information. And they brought in endoplasmic reticulum and liposomes. They brought in all of this tech inside the cell.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 52:24Peter Diamandis?

  And so they became tech-enabled cells.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:26Peter Diamandis?

  And then the next step was that they went from single cell to multi-cellular. And then from multi-cellular to tissues and organs. And then you and me, we have thirty trillion human cells. You might, you might have thirty-five trillion human cells. I'm not calling you fat, just saying, just saying you're bigger than I am. Um, so uh the process has been that in incorporating technology, going multi-cellular and then and then connecting to another higher level. And so I see that happening right now, right? So we are the equivalent of those simple prokaryotic cells. We're we're connecting this technology into ourselves. And as soon as that gets connected, I connect with you

• 53:10Peter Diamandis?

  and with a million other people, and we become conscious at another level. And I call that a meta intelligence, and it is making me one with the universe. Now here's where it gets interesting. I wonder if we become conscious on a global level. And then we look out in the universe and we see all these other meta intelligences.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  What sensors would we detect that with?

• 53:35Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Okay, for when you think about, you know, the, the, uh, the paradox, um, what's the paradox?

• 53:46Peter Diamandis?

  Fermi paradox. Where is everybody?

• 53:48Speaker 03

  Where is everybody for? I, I actually believe the most in the, so just for people listening, if you look, run the numbers, the Drake equation, et cetera, there should be a million other intelligences out in the universe that have advanced things, so why don't we see them?

• 54:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  That's the Fermi paradox. And I believe the most in, there's a number of answers to it. One is, uh, everybody else died ahead, we're the most advanced, or we can't detect them.

• 54:11Peter Diamandis?

  Or they, they didn't pass the great filter, they had nuclear weapons, they blew themselves up.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Uh, my, my favorite hypothesis is the transcension hypothesis.

• 54:21Peter Diamandis?

  I agree.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Which is, you've gotten evolved enough that you have virtual reality to do everything, you don't need to go out, you go inwards.

• 54:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and therefore you don't need to broadcast outwards, and there may, we may find there's a billion of those types of things.

• 54:34Peter Diamandis?

  And we do broadcast outwards, but not intentionally in a focused fashion, but I do believe that, uh, as we are, we are going from evolution by natural selection, Darwinism, to evolution by human direction. We are evolving into something brand new.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  I mean, natural selection's been dead for quite a while.

• 54:57Peter Diamandis?

  True.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Because we've been farming species and, and guiding evolution for quite a while, right? Um, there's inflection points around all of that that I think are interesting. Uh, for me, when you think about the evolution of the world, when, you know, we talked last month about the, the, uh, multi-dimension, other parallel universes.

• 55:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  For me, things will get interesting is when I can bridge between universes. That's, that's when I'll be interested.

• 55:25Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I think there are drugs that can do that for you.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  That could do this. Um, and, and, but the, the ability to sense the world in one time and the ability to process that, that collective consciousness is going to be essentially the Buddha. That is, that is the oneness.

• 55:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know the joke, right? A guy, monk goes up to the street vendor in New York and says, make me one with everything to the hot dog vendor.

• 55:54Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So Elon tweets out, "The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection." At Abundance this year, I've got the surgeon who does all of Neuralink's implants.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 56:17Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, it was interesting, I'm like, I've done two podcasts with Elon. One was a couple of years ago, one was early in 24, and we talked about when he was playing pong against a macaque monkey that was drinking a banana smoothie and playing pong with its brain, right?

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:40Peter Diamandis?

  And that's crazy because where we're going to go is we're that game of playing pong. Because I mean, pong was like the earliest video games that you and I played, right? And how far they've come now. So that same trajectory, right? So you'll be plugged into a, into some advanced Neuralink and playing a virtual world. I mean, we're in a virtual world right now. We'll be playing in a virtual world within our virtual world.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have a question for you that you may have an answer to because you're closer to this.

• 57:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Why do you have to have an invasive procedure to implant a BCI? So you don't wear a helmet that reads your neurons and then writes to your neurons?

• 57:19Peter Diamandis?

  So it's resolution. It's your resolution. So your brain is wrapped in a material called a dura, and your dura then has on top of it a skull and then your scalp.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 57:31Peter Diamandis?

  And if you're trying to read individual neurons, it's very difficult. There are a lot of approaches. So one other approach, another company I'm going to have this year because we're going to go into BCI at the Abundance Summit, is a company that puts

• 57:50Peter Diamandis?

  Not into your brain, but under the dura. Um, but on top of the brain, it puts these ultrasound, focused ultrasound and steerable ultrasound.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 58:02Peter Diamandis?

  That can go and actually stimulate.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:06Peter Diamandis?

  Individual neurons.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:07Peter Diamandis?

  Idea is.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  By the way, there was a story on sixty minutes last weekend.

• 58:12Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  They use focused ultrasound to to treat people that are addicted. And they were able with one treatment of focused ultrasound.

• 58:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's huge.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  To treat can completely cure addiction.

• 58:22Peter Diamandis?

  So here's here's where.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Unbelievable. So that's kind of stuff I get super excited.

• 58:26Peter Diamandis?

  Here's where this company wants to go. Imagine an app.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:30Peter Diamandis?

  Where if you have this implant in, uh, fairly easy to put in, but an app that says, I want to go to sleep.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:38Peter Diamandis?

  Or I want to wake up.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:39Peter Diamandis?

  Or I want to feel good.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:40Peter Diamandis?

  Or I want to have energy.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  I want a better tennis forehand.

• 58:44Peter Diamandis?

  That's going to come to you, but I think the earlier apps are going to be uh states of emotion.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:49Peter Diamandis?

  Um, the uh, the stuff that Neuralink is doing, and there are other companies, BlackRock. There's another company run by a friend, uh, Matt Angle called Paradromics, and they're in sheep right now, and they could well be in humans very shortly, and they're actually have much more, uh, there are more advanced number of ways compared to Neuralink. Um, all of these companies, Paradromics and Neuralink, uh, a surgeon puts in these small filaments that are going into the neocortex, and they are able to read and write off of individual neurons, right? But it's not really individual neurons, it's groups of neurons.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:30Peter Diamandis?

  Um, cause even even a thin, even a thin wire is much, much bigger. So, uh, they put them over the motor cortex and over the sensory cortex, and then you can control things, listen to things and such.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  I mean, when we get to nano wires, that's totally going to be a game changer, because there'll be atoms that can you can put it anywhere.

• 59:50Peter Diamandis?

  Well, there is another amazing tech, uh, this comes from Mary Lou Jepson. Do you know Mary Lou?

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:55Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Open water. So Mary Lou, who's brilliant, uh, God almighty, she was at Facebook and at Google and at, you know, MIT and one laptop per child, and she's one of our abundance members. I love her. Um, uh, she has built.

• 1:00:14Peter Diamandis?

  A technology that allows you to use red laser light.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:00:18Peter Diamandis?

  Which penetrates skin and skull. And able to use red laser light and ultrasound to actually target an individual neuron. And stimulate that neuron to fire. Or be able to sense if there's a ruffle on the neuron's surface of whether it's firing. So you can read and write onto individual neurons. And that's amazing.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:00:42Peter Diamandis?

  Do you remember that that movie Brainstorm?

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Peter Diamandis?

  And.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  It's literally like that.

• 1:00:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so you're a little put on a cap and can record memories and listen to memories. So here's the point, it's the point you just made. The single most valuable thing that any country or any company has is the intelligence of its employees or its its citizens.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Peter Diamandis?

  And so if you've got technologies like Neuralink or Paradromics or Open Water or BlackRock.

• 1:01:12Peter Diamandis?

  Able to increase the intelligence of your of your individuals, I can think and Google, right? That's amazing.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  I I you know, where that goes becomes I there's a there's a spectrum of intelligence going to collective intelligence and then you get to collective consciousness.

• 1:01:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Uh now you get into a definition problem. But that's where I think things become really interesting, aware at scale of what's happening in the world. For me, one of the uh one of the applications of this that I'm super excited about is uh implanting this in the animals and then being able to talk to the animals.

• 1:01:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, or at least feel and also feel what the animals say.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Peter Diamandis?

  Now, we are, we have talked about at X Prize this year at Visionary, we talked about a uh a an AI that can translate.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was there was a project in twenty seventeen out of Sweden, I don't know where it's at right now. But they they predicted by about now, they would they were using machine learning to uh understand dolphin language.

• 1:02:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  And they figured within five years they would be able to do it. I'm I my responses, I'm really not sure you want to hear what dolphins have to say.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Pretty pissed at us. Uh but in general, that ability to then, because now you can you when you can communicate with other species. That then things get interesting.

• 1:02:31Peter Diamandis?

  That.

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  So forget the human or.

• 1:02:33Peter Diamandis?

  When I can communicate with other people.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Right. There's that. There's that too.

• 1:02:37Peter Diamandis?

  This is another tweet you want to put out. It says, uh, uh, the first uh Neuralink product is called telepathy. I mean, he does do. They have great marketing.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Peter Diamandis?

  Right. Telepathy is what a great name. It says enables control of your phone or computer and through them almost any device. Just by thinking, initial users will be those that have lost uh the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking uh could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is his goal. And you know, I I knew Stephen Hawking well.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I flew him into zero G back in twenty uh two thousand seven. And I remember just the painstaking rate of communication.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and just well, he's he's using his eyes on a on a screen to be able to select a single letter at a time.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Peter Diamandis?

  And today, uh, using AI, you can get to sixty words per minute. Uh, which is pretty amazing. And this will this will be even even further. So listen, I'm I'm super pumped about this. Let me ask you a question. How, let's say it's available. Are you in as soon as possible?

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  For for something like this?

• 1:03:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I'm I I prefer not be invasive.

• 1:03:48Peter Diamandis?

  But let's say it is. Let's say it's a it requires surgery. You know, it's going to be, by the way, Neuralink's. Uh, I've seen that the tech, it is a fully robotic surgeon.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Peter Diamandis?

  That, you know, anesthetizes you, you know, cuts it open, drills a small hole, places it in, places the, you know, the thousand filaments on your on your neocortex. Seals it up with glue. Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  I'd be in.

• 1:04:11Peter Diamandis?

  You'd be in.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's way more interesting than getting a chip planted in between your knuckles.

• 1:04:16Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, like I do?

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  That tells the reader right of the thing. Uh, but that's true functionality that augments human capacity that really. And then the application, you know, software, right? And whatever you can program it to do, you can do that.

• 1:04:32Peter Diamandis?

  Software upgrade, it's like wake up smarter every morning.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Peter Diamandis?

  You know, um, bringing it full circle as we wrap here to robots. Uh, the thing that is going to happen and is going to be incredibly cool is when I have my Neuralink in and I can occupy my Optimus.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Well, not just the Optimus, but five of them around the house, right? You clean up the kitchen and by the way, I can see through one optical nerve what you're doing. So do it this way. And over here, oh, by the way, put the, put the jam in this drawer, not over there. If the kitchen of the fridge and do that in parallel.

• 1:05:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Right? And now you can do things in, at scale and each human being gets augmented like a thousand times.

• 1:05:15Peter Diamandis?

  Have you ever read, uh, Ramesh Nam's books?

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. A huge.

• 1:05:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So I'm just rereading them again. By the way, listening to this, if you've not read, uh, Ramesh Nam and A A M, uh, he's.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Trilogy called Nexus.

• 1:05:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, it's Nexus, Apex and Crux. Amazing. It's about a, uh, a product, uh, a sort of neural lace called Nexus. That allows you to, uh, have telepathy, allows you to connect to the cloud and he explores everything here.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Peter Diamandis?

  Beautifully written. It's incredible. I'm jealous for people who are reading it for the first time. It's that good.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  It's really good and it's already been, uh, being made into a movie, et cetera, et cetera. It's crazy.

• 1:05:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  Um, yeah.

• 1:05:59Peter Diamandis?

  All right, buddy. Well, listen, I expect, uh, a chip in you as soon as possible. And robots that are following you around doing your bidding.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  That, that, let's do the second part first and then we'll put the chip in later.

• 1:06:10Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:06:12Peter Diamandis?

  Good to see you, buddy.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  You too.

• 1:06:13Peter Diamandis?

  Take care.