Returning to the Office Won’t Work in the Age of AI - Jack Hidary & Nadia Harhen | EP #135

In this episode, Jack and Peter discuss the future of work and whether returning to the office or working from home will be more successful in the age of AI. Recorded on Dec 7th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Jack Hidary is a leading entrepreneur and visionary at the forefront of AI and quantum technology as the CEO of SandboxAQ, raising over $500m in funding. He is the author of forthcoming book AI or Die and the influential textbook; Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach. A serial entrepreneur, Hidary co-founded and led EarthWeb/Dice from inception to IPO, and co-founded Vista Research and sold it to S&P/McGraw-Hill. Jack studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Stanley Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience at the NIH where he applied neural networks to brain imaging. Nadia Harhen is the General Manager of AI Simulation at SandboxAQ, where she harnesses the power of AI and quantum simulation to revolutionize drug, material, and chemical discovery. With over 15 years of experience spanning R&D, product management, and regulatory operations in the life sciences and technology sectors, she has driven innovations from combination device R&D at Johnson & Johnson to AI-based medical devices at Google. Nadia’s leadership has secured regulatory clearance in 70+ countries, advanced groundbreaking therapies, and opened new markets for cutting-edge technologies. Learn more about SandboxAQ: https://www.sandboxaq.com/ Sandbox AQ’s 3C Success: https://www.sandboxaq.com/press/sandboxaq-publishes-scientific-and-technical-milestones-for-quantitative-methods Pre-Order my Longevity Guidebook here: https://longevityguidebook.com/ ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ 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: 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

  Unfortunately, the world of work now has painted itself into the following corner. Is it work from home or is it return to office? And we're seeing examples of both of those out there. Amazon announcing, of course, hey, you're not in the office. Jan one, you're out. Other companies saying, no, we're completely all remote. We think actually there's a new way, a third way. What's going to happen with jobs here? I believe that AI will produce literally millions of new jobs. People who want to quote unquote, play the AI space. What, how do I invest in the AI space? What company do I invest in? The bigger way to play AI is to look at the biggest sectors of our economy. Who are going to be the winners and losers?

• 0:44Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here and welcome to Moon Shots. On this episode, we're going to be diving into an important conversation that every entrepreneur, every exponential entrepreneur needs to be having right now, which is if you are running an organization or if you're joining an organization or if you're starting an organization, do you build it around a physical office? Do you return to the office? Do you allow your employees to work from home or is there a different way? I'm going to be joined by Jack Hidary, CEO of Sandbox AQ, an extraordinary entrepreneur out of Google. His chairman is Eric Schmidt. They, you know, broke out of Google with $500 million of startup capital and they're changing the world.

• 1:25Peter Diamandis?

  Sandbox AQ, A stands for AI, Q stands for quantum, and they're transforming a whole slew of different, different areas with incredible success. Part of the success, Jack Hidary states, is because of their work model, their agility. So we're going to be doing an interview to understand how does Sandbox AQ do their work? It's the how versus the what. Again, if you're an entrepreneur, this is an episode that you're going to want to think through to decide how you're building your company or how you manage your company going forward. We just saw Amazon with a return to the office requirement. Is that the right way to go? Other companies may be following. Is this right for you? All right, let's jump into this episode.

• 2:10Peter Diamandis?

  And if you enjoy conversations like this, please subscribe. It helps me know that I can serve you, which is my goal. All right, on to the podcast. Before we get started, I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible breakthroughs coming on the health span and longevity front. These technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live, how long we're healthy. The truth is, a lot of the approaches are in fact, cheap or even free. And I want to share this with you. I just wrote a book called Longevity Guidebook that outlines what I've been doing to reverse my biological age, what I've been doing to increase my health, my strength, my energy. And I want to make this available to my community at cost. So longevityguidebook.com. You can get information or check out the link below.

• 2:55Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's jump into this episode. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Moonshots. Today, we have a really fun conversation, something that can impact all moonshot entrepreneurs, all exponential entrepreneurs, which is, what should you be doing? Should you be going back to the workplace? Should be working virtually? What is the new way of work? I'm joined with one of the most extraordinary exponential entrepreneurs, Jack Hidary, a dear friend. He's been on this podcast a number of times. He's the founder of Sandbox AQ, happens to have an incredible chairman of Eric Schmidt, who's been on this podcast as well. They've gone from zero to infinity faster than most any company I know. He is also joined by Nadia Heron, who's the general

• 3:38Peter Diamandis?

  manager of AI simulation at Sandbox. As I've said before, we're going to see the emergence of three-person billion-dollar startups faster than ever. These are exponential organizations that are being driven by the convergence of computation, AI, robotics, 3D printing, all of these technologies. And the question is, how should these companies be materializing? You get an office these days? Do you find office space? Do you go into an incubator? Are you starting a virtualized company? We're going to be diving into all of these things. We've talked about in the past, what Sandbox AQ does. Now, we're going to talk about how they do this magic. Jack, Nadia, welcome.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Peter, great to see you, my friend. Nadia, great to have you with us. Peter, I think this is a really exciting moment, as you just pointed out. A lot of breakthroughs coming out of our company and other companies. And people often just focus on what is that next breakthrough? What's the next frontier that we're going to explore with AI? Both on the language model side and on the quantitative model side. We'll get into that a little bit today. But what's not focused on enough, Peter, as you pointed out, is how we do what we do. And at Sandbox AQ, we've really put a big focus on paving a new pathway in that as well. How we actually organize ourselves? How do we get this collaboration done? How do you get a lot of creative minds from so many different disciplines, Peter?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Physics and AI and chemistry and biology and pharmacology and mathematics and cyber? I mean, all these things. How do you actually get creatives to work together in a way that produces, on a systematic basis, breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough?

• 5:22Peter Diamandis?

  And you've just published an extraordinary list of breakthroughs. I hope we'll get to that as well. But I do agree that how is so important because we have a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs watching this who are diving deep into AI and utilizing it. They've got huge world-changing dreams. But the question is, do you go back to the old model of how it was done, you know, pre-COVID, 10, 20, 30 years ago? It's got to be different now.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Absolutely, Peter. And I think very often, as humans, we know this. This is one of the Kahneman and Tversky 25. The biases that Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for. Cognitive biases in our head that we fall into. The bias of anchoring and other kinds of biases. One of those biases is the false binary choice. People often paint themselves into a corner, Peter. As you well know, that, oh, it's either this one or that one. And unfortunately, the world of work now has painted itself into the following corner. Is it work from home or is it return to office? And we're seeing examples of both of those out there. Amazon announcing, of course, hey, you're not in the office, Jan 1, you're out. Other companies saying, no, we're completely all remote.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  We think actually there's a new way, a third way.

• 6:34Peter Diamandis?

  And I'd love to hear about that. But I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard from two different CEOs is, thank you, Amazon, for forcing people to come back to work. Because I get to steal all those amazing employees who don't want to go back to the office.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  We're actually seeing that already, Peter. We're seeing that. We're seeing actually, we literally just hired somebody from Amazon who did not want to go back to work. And so we did not, you know, seek out to get that person, but that person became available once that return to work, a return to office policy kicked in, and they themselves put themselves on the job market. So we're seeing the impact of that. And I think this false choice of either return to office and everyone's in the old way of doing things, or remote first. I want to say that even before COVID, we were already on this track of doing things a different way. This was not just because of COVID.

• 7:29Peter Diamandis?

  Technology enables it all.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Technology enables, but also we have to think about the person themselves. You know, we call it three Cs. We think about collaboration, Peter, and collaboration is about all the different disciplines. I'll ask Nadia in a minute to elaborate on that, different disciplines we break together. We talk about customer. You know what it means when you don't have to be in an office? It means you can actually embed yourself with the customers. Recently, a five-person team from our company embedded itself for two weeks at one of our customers inside their offices. You know what it means to a customer for a team to go and take the time and live essentially with them? With another one of our partners, we're actually going to permanently embed

• 8:13Speaker 00

  about 10 of our employees in their various offices around the world. Permanently. That's going to be their place of work. It's going to be the partners' offices, not one of our hubs or locations. And then, of course, you have community. Our mantra, Peter, here is work where you thrive. That is, don't uproot somebody and have to bring them over to Mountain View to eat burritos every day when they were in a great city in their country or their city where they have their support structure. They have their in-laws to take care of the kids. They have the university that they know that where they cultivate new talent to bring into our company, where they have their community and they can engage with that community and bring in new ideas and customers from that community.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  That's about work where you thrive. So maybe if it appears okay, I can turn it over to Nadia.

• 9:04Peter Diamandis?

  I would love that.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  To talk about collaboration first.

• 9:07Peter Diamandis?

  Nadia, hello. Good morning. Nadia, maybe you want to introduce yourself a bit more. Talk about your background as a bench scientist.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Sure thing, sure thing. Thank you so much, Peter. It's a pleasure to be here with you and Jack this morning. I'm Nadia Herr and I'm the General Manager of the AI Simulation Group here at Sandbox. And funny enough, when Jack spun this company out of Google, he called me up and I had just had a baby and I just bought a house. And he said, hey, we're doing this cool new thing. Do you want to come join us? And I'm like, Jack, I'm not moving.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  And one of the things he told me was that, don't worry that this company is completely remote. We are gonna work together to do amazing things in a collaborative fashion. And you know, you are not going to have to move like you did when you went to go work at Google. And that was music to my ears. I remember relocating. I live in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey, right outside of New York City, yeah.

• 10:10Peter Diamandis?

  So it was like, give up this amazing opportunity or have to relocate the entire family 3,000 miles to the west?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  That's right. And I had done that before, like many folks do, to take these amazing tech jobs. And you have to find new doctors, you have to find new schools, you, you know, you uproot your whole family. Your partner doesn't have a sense of community. And so your support structure, which I think we all realized during COVID was very, very necessary, is completely missing. So that is a big part of thriving. I mean, here we have access to our network, our people, you know, friends, family, et cetera. The whole family is happy. And so I think that community, yeah, please.

• 10:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I would say, do you mind if I ask you, what does a General Manager of AI Simulation do at Sandbox AQ? Because that's a, that's a pretty wicked title.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  It's a job that did not exist five years ago in the world. Yeah, go ahead.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I work on leading an extraordinary team that is globally based to create new drugs, new types of molecules, impact the biopharma industry, and also the material science chemistry industries primarily. So, as you might imagine, we have folks from all different disciplines that need to collaborate to do this amazing work. And we work across many, many different time zones in order to do that. And it is truly being able to hire the talent where they are in the corners of the planet is really key to what has helped us be successful in putting these people in a virtual room together to collaborate and get the job done.

• 11:51Peter Diamandis?

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• 12:34Peter Diamandis?

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

• 13:14Peter Diamandis?

  Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. Amazing. Jack, you said something a few minutes ago. There's a false dichotomy here between return to work or work from home. Each has its problems. And I just want to, for the entrepreneur who is thinking about which route they go, can we just dive into that one second for each of those? And then talk a little bit more about your third option here.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let me just be very provocative and explicit. Return to office as a total policy, fail. Work from home as a singular policy, fail.

• 14:07Peter Diamandis?

  Why?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Just to make it super clear. I hope I'm not being too subtle, Peter.

• 14:11Peter Diamandis?

  You never have been, buddy. You never have been.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  And I'll kick off, and I'll ask Nadia also to talk about some of the ways that we collaborate. For example, bringing people together in collaborative gatherings and things like that. What we realize is, yeah, there's problems with going with either of those as your singular focus and policy. What you want to do is you want to be outcome-based rather than be time-based. People get obsessed about, are we going to have this number of hours in the workday? How about this? How many vacation days do I have? Do I need to be in the office this day, that day, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 o'clock on a leap year? I mean, this is ridiculous. Let's be outcome-based. One of the reasons why I think we've had breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Recently, the team, Nadia can talk more about it, had a breakthrough with PFAS, the forever chemicals. People may know that they're called forever chemicals for a bad reason, because they don't leave our bodies, they don't leave the environment. And I'll ask Nadia in a minute to talk about that breakthrough. But how do we get these breakthroughs from multiple disciplines coming together? What it means is you have to think about the collaboration part. Then you've got to think about the customer part. Who's your partner? Who's your customer? Don't just once in a while have a Zoom call with them. Go visit them. We have a, we have a sizable travel budget, Peter, because we have to go visit these folks in person. Now that we can post COVID, visit people. Now's the time to go and do that.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, we use some Zoom, of course, but we like to go physically see the customers, see the partners, work with them, understand what their issues are, how they're working together.

• 15:50Peter Diamandis?

  So you're effectively trading, you're effectively trading real estate expenses for air miles.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  That's correct. So net, net, we're actually saving millions of dollars, Peter. Our CFO did the numbers. He's the numbers guy. Thirty plus years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. This guy knows numbers. Uh, and he was an auditor of a public, public companies before that. This guy is really, really solid. And what David said is that we're saving money. Look at the numbers. By not having all these permanent offices all over the place, we're actually saving millions of dollars. And we're taking a portion of that, uh, and we're spending it on the collaboration gatherings, the offsites, visiting customers. But net, net, even with all that, we're saving millions of dollars a year. So this is a great way to boost your company's productivity and output.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  And it's also a way to save money. But Peter, the most important thing, the theme is outcome based and treat people like adults. And so, for example, you know, we have, uh, in the U.S. unlimited vacation policy. We're not here to say, oh, teacher, can I please take a vacation day? Can I take, you know, Thursday, 3 P.M. off? I have a doctor's appointment. Treat people like adults. Keep people know what to do. And if you're outcome based, if you use the OKR system that we learned so well from Google, let's remember John Doerr's book, right? On OKRs. Let's remember the early days of Larry and Sergey and Eric thinking about the OKR system. Uh, that is a powerful system to communicate what?

• 17:23Speaker 00

  To communicate we're outcome based. We're looking for that breakthrough. How you get there? That's you, for you to shape. You as a team, for you to shape. We give budgets to teams like Nadia. Nadia is empowered to decide what to do with that. Nadia, maybe you want to jump in and talk about, why do we meet in person here and there in different cities? Often with universities in mind who are in that city.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you know, we're we're outcome based and what that means is that we have very ambitious goals. We're trying to revolutionize drug discovery. We're creating chemicals and matter that hasn't ever existed before. And how do you get a group of people that are, you know, located all across the planet on that singular mind share? And that is really the purpose of an offsite, is to have this purposeful mind share around strategy, around goals, around sprint cycles. And I will tell you that, you know, that there is research that shows that you you have to bring people out of their comfort zone, take them out of their environment, their their kind of regular office space to boost that creativity, to

• 18:28Speaker 02

  enhance that problem solving. And we come out of these offsites and we tend to do them in locations that are inspiring. We go to the mountains, we go to the sea, we go to universities where there is a lot of mind share and inspiration and things to draw upon. And when we leave these offsites, people are so impassioned, so excited, you can see that there's all this momentum. Everyone is rowing in the same direction. And it really carries us through to the next offsite. And so you end up having a few of these over the course of a year. And you don't need an office. An office is very casual, you know, people come home from the office, they're tired, you know, people leave offsites are

• 19:12Speaker 02

  excited. So it's very different.

• 19:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I just want to ask you a quick question. Why do you think Amazon is is literally forcing people to come back to work? What's their thesis there? What do they believe?

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, not to comment on Amazon specifically, but in general, I think why we're seeing a lot of large companies go with RTO is that number one, they have a sunk investment, right? In other words, they have some sunk costs in huge infrastructure.

• 19:38Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Often, they own these buildings or have very long term leases to these massive buildings all around the world and certainly in their headquarter locations. And that is an asset that needs to be used, or something's going to happen to it. It's not a great time right now to try to sell these things, because of course, many other companies are not using these kinds of things. of platforms and so you know one one reason I think we're seeing it is people want to leverage the investment they've made prior to covid and then during covid you know things continued number two I would say is there's a lot of traditional thinking really just to be honest with you around you know people need to be in one space and I understand people say hey there's a spontaneity when you're physically in the same place we agree with that that's

• 20:23Speaker 00

  why work from home alone is a fail we agree Peter with the contention that just working from home just working really does not work

• 20:32Peter Diamandis?

  I mean when you're working from home you're lonely you're cut off um you know

• 20:38Peter Diamandis?

  it's it doesn't give you a through line in the keel but at the same time returning to the office doesn't I mean I loved your point about actually assuming everybody is an adult and that they can you know if they've got key objectives they have to hit allow them to manage themselves if you don't if you don't have that belief of them they shouldn't be working for you

• 21:02Speaker 00

  exactly Peter and also let's talk about cross pollination so it's one thing and if you look at most return to office what are they returning to the returning to offices where their team is there but how about cross team how about the fact that a place like sandbox AQ we've got a team working on biopharma we've got other teams working on chemistry we've got other teams thinking about AI and new and in very exciting ways we want to get those teams also cross pollinating with each other so some of these gatherings might be with some parts of one team and some parts of another team coming together and by the way who also shows up at one of those offsites we have our HR folks we have our recruiters let the recruiters listen in let's see what's happening have the recruiters imbibe so that they know the kind of talent and let me

• 21:47Speaker 00

  come back to talent Peter because part of what fueled our thinking about breaking through not just on what we do but how we do it was the talent issue when we started getting resumes both when we were inside of alphabet and then post spin out we realized the talent is everywhere Peter the talent is in Europe The talent is in

• 22:08Peter Diamandis?

  There's a geographic, you know, opportunity here of massive scale.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. Now, you say to somebody, hey, I know you have a great support system around you, uh, living in Austria, living in France, living in Spain, uh, living in, uh, other countries around the world. But by the way, we're going to upgrade you now and you've got to live, you know, 10,000 miles away where you don't know anybody and to Nadia's point before, don't have that support structure. Is that a good recipe for a great work environment?

• 22:39Peter Diamandis?

  Well, just like you, just like with Nadia, you would not have gotten her if you'd been, uh, made that demand.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 22:45Peter Diamandis?

  Nadia, how big is your, how big is your team and how distributed are they? And how often do you meet?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So our team is about 60 or so people at the moment, uh, and we work across six, seven different time zones. And, you know, it is, uh, we, we are intentional about where we hire depending on where our customers are as well. So we can also organize ourselves to service our needs a little bit better. So we have folks out in Europe to service our European customers. It has allowed us to scale much quicker because we have these pods everywhere. You know, we didn't have the hub and hire people into the hubs. We created the hubs around the people, which I think is another key distinction here as well.

• 23:25Peter Diamandis?

  And, and Jack, I want, I just want to, you said it in passing, but I want to just take a second to spell it out. Your triple C strategy, your third way, not work from home, not return to office, but the triple C, what do those C's stand for again? And just take a second to hit those beats.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  So Peter, there's a third way. We, we do not have to fall into the false dichotomy of either return to office or work from home. The third way that we are pioneering, that others I think are taking a cue from, from us. Uh, we literally have people calling us, asking us to visit, uh, and understand this third way is the three Cs. The first C is collaboration. Uh, we have so many different disciplines and the work of today and the future, Peter, in all companies is going to be collaboration across disciplines, uh, both in the workplace and also in academia. Look at some of the most Dynamic universities. Look at Arizona State with Mike Crowe. Look at Michael Crowe, what he's done there, breaking down barriers of departments, breaking down silos. The same thing in the most successful companies,

• 24:28Speaker 00

  breaking down barriers and having people collaborate. In our particular company, it's even more pronounced because we've got 80-plus PhDs in our company. We have another 70 engineers in our company. They have come from many different disciplines. Pharmacology, chemistry, physics, engineering, AI, all these different areas, and of course, software coding, and taking that domain expertise of the PhDs, putting it into reusable, scalable, software code. This is a whole workflow that involves many different disciplines. So collaboration is the first C. The second C is about the customer. Jeff Bezos talks so eloquently about customer-first thinking. We agree with him.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  I think he was one of the pioneers to really focus on, how do you really put yourselves in the shoes of the customer? And that's something we take from him. A lot of what we talk about, Peter, in our company is, take the best from all the different cultures you've been in, and let's bring it together. And that's kind of the birth of the three Cs. We kind of got around people from many different companies. Many of us came from Google. We took the best of Google, but also we thought about other cultures. So the second C is about the customer. Not just treating the customer like a transaction, but really thinking about what's their point of pain. And you know how to find that out? You gotta go and be with them. You gotta go spend time with them. Not just in their workplace, but also, for example,

• 25:56Speaker 00

  let's say you're both going to a conference. Set up a time, a special dedicated time on the side of that conference, to have your team and their team go out, have a dinner together. Spend a lot of time understanding what they're up to. And the final C is community. Community and connection. So maybe it's two extra Cs, but we'll put them in one. But community and connection, what is that about? That's about work where you thrive. It's about, what is your support structure, Peter? You know, very often, a company says, "We're here to support you." And, you know, they might have great benefits and so on and so forth. But the fact is... Supporting someone means that you want to recognize and respect where they are going

• 26:39Speaker 00

  to work best, where they're going to live best, where they're going to thrive as people, where they're going to realize their potential. An example, they may have a local university that they love, that they want to take more courses at. They may have a set of family and friends around them that can support them. Let's say they want to have kids. You know, if you're having kids and you don't have a support structure around you, God bless. Okay, that's going to be difficult. That's going to be difficult.

• 27:04Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it's a happier employee, it's a more fulfilled employee because you can't support all the stresses at the same time. And if you've got, you know, if you're able to have your home life and your emotional and social life thriving, it gives you more capacity to give to your company.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And let me say, you know, a number of things that people have said before is that we think of company as a community. Sometimes people say it's a family. I think that's not the right term. Families are different. You have your crazy uncle who comes for Thanksgiving all the time. You can't uninvite them, unfortunately. But workplace is more like a community. We respect each other, we treat people like adults, we are outcome-based, we set forth clear goals. And by the way, where do those goals come from? They don't come from on high, from Mount Olympus, okay? They come from the conversations and the offsites themselves. It bubbles up. Nadia has been running a great process with her team. What is going to be our outcome goals for 2025?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Once a year, Peter, once a year, we gather the whole company. We're still small enough, we can do that, and we choose a university city. Last year, we did it in Palo Alto at Stanford. This past year, right now, this past few months, we just did it in Cambridge, Mass, at Harvard, MIT. We're choosing some new cities now, so if you're a city out there, you want us to come, let us know.

• 28:29Peter Diamandis?

  How frequently do you have these meetups, these...

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Go ahead, Nadia. You want to talk about that and your team?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, we have our company-wide offsite, as Jack mentioned, once a year. Just because we're getting so large. We used to have them twice a year when we were only, you know, three people. Then we became 50 people. But now we just do that once a year. Our team itself, so we meet, and our team is becoming so large at AI simulation, we meet once a year as well. But what the, the sub-teams do, so our engineering and product and UX team will meet together. In fact, they just had an offsite out in Vancouver. Our drug discovery team will meet together. That's about a group of 20. And so we have these little pods. And so there's always touchpoints going on. And depending on what work is being accomplished,

• 29:16Speaker 02

  we have different cross-functional teams that also are invited to those meetings. And so there's not a lot of time that actually passes when you're not interacting in person with your colleagues. It may seem as though, wow, you know, you're always at home, but you're really not. You're with a customer, meeting and understanding their pain, or you're with your colleagues solving for that, or you're with your family. And so people are just able to be a lot more well-rounded and taken care of and accommodated in this sort of setting.

• 29:43Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. 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 time. But because we never look, we don't find out.

• 30:25Peter Diamandis?

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

• 31:09Peter Diamandis?

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

• 31:50Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Peter, if I can talk about another innovation, which is that,

• 32:06Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  What is the role of the senior executive in this new 3C structure, in the third way? What is, is the senior executive supposed to sit in some ivory tower in Mount Olympus and send out commands? No, that is a prescription for failure. The senior executives, we believe in service leadership. And that's something that's embedded inside the third way, which is flipping the whole pyramid. It says that as a senior leader, my job is to ask Nadia, Nadia, what do you need to succeed? We've agreed on outcomes. We've agreed on outcomes for 2025, let's say. Nadia, what are the resources you need? And along the way, how do we adjust and make sure you have those resources? Resource doesn't have to be just money and budget.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  It could also be Nadia telling me, hey, Jack, I really need your help opening the door to that partner. I need your help opening the door to that particular customer. I need advice on how do we work in this universe?

• 32:57Peter Diamandis?

  Your job is to help her succeed.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  That's right. That's my job. And so that means that the senior leadership, we've got to be on the move. Yes.

• 33:04Peter Diamandis?

  And then Nadia's job is to help her team succeed.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  In the same way.

• 33:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, in the same way. Agreed. And I love that. It is a service mindset from, from leadership. And I've seen so many companies. Absolutely fail when the CEOs got this massive plush real estate office. And it's like, you know, come and pray at the temple of.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't have an office, Peter, on purpose because my office is typically traveling. And recently I just flew to New York in order to be with one of the team offsites. It was a really exciting time. They're dealing with a number of different ideas about what's their next roadmap. They're not sure whether to put this feature first or that feature. They're having a lot of very good discussions, not my job to decide, by the way. I did not opine on that particular point. I was there just again to support and understand how could I be helpful to that team? And then a few weeks ago, I flew to a different offsite to pop in there and see how it could be helpful there. And so as senior leaders, what I tell my senior leaders when I bring them aboard.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  You got to sign up for this. This is something that is not typical. You're not going to be showing up in an office and clocking in and once in a while. As a senior leader, we have a bigger burden.

• 34:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Do you make an investment in the employees' home office?

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So we make a lot of investments when people are on boarded. The first thing we do is make sure they're set up well in a home office. I can ask Nigel to talk more about that. I want to talk about something else, though. There's also skill sets that we invest in. I'll give you an example. Every single person that gets on boarded into our company gets media and presentation training to give speeches, to give talks. Why is that? Here's another part of the third way, Peter. In the old way, in the big companies of the world today, you are not allowed to just go and give a talk on behalf of the company if you're not the CEO or one of the senior leaders. You've got to go get permission, fill out three forms. I've been involved in several large companies in my career,

• 35:06Speaker 00

  and it would take months sometimes for me to get permission to go give a talk. And Peter, I've had some experience giving talks, as you know, from your conferences.

• 35:14Peter Diamandis?

  And you do a beautiful job of it.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  And thank you. And so it was a frustrating experience because I wanted to represent the company. I wanted to let people know about the incredible things that company was doing. Flip that script again. What we do is we say to everyone, the default position is, yes, go give that talk. Don't ask permission, don't fill out forms, go give that talk. By the way, we're treating you like an adult. Here is a folder on our drive that has all the materials that you can use in your, in your talks. And sure enough, we've had hundreds of talks given by our folks over the past two, three years.

• 35:50Peter Diamandis?

  That is a stark contrast to a number of, let's call it the trillion dollar companies out there today. I won't name names where, you know, I'm speaking to a, a division president or a senior VP or whatever. And it's like, come and speak at this event. I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to. It's kind of insane.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  I'm sure people, you get that, you get this when you ask people to come to your podcast. Be like, oh, I have to go get permission, right, to come on your podcast. And why, why are people doing that? We consider everyone in our company, our advisors, our full-time employees, ambassadors. In fact, not just the people, we also have this residency program. And I asked Nigel to talk about that and we consider them ambassadors. Maybe Nigel, you want to talk about that a little bit in terms of, you know, how we empower people to go out and speak on behalf of the company and also the residency program.

• 36:40Peter Diamandis?

  And let me just, let me just frame this one second before you jump into that for everybody listening. If you're an entrepreneur, if you are a senior executive, an employee at a company, the whole conversation here is to show you a, a third option, a new way. And especially if you're a founder, CEO here, the value of, of becoming an exponential organization. And Salim and I wrote about this in Exponential Organizations 2.0. And talking about, you know, the speed of change is not, there's an impedance mismatch with the old ways of doing things, the old ways of, of working from the office. And if you really want to create a truly exponential organization,

• 37:25Peter Diamandis?

  it is this geographic, you know, arbitrage, getting access to employees around the world. It's setting up the infrastructure to enable that, that agility, which is probably the single most important asset you can have. Highly overstructured organizations will fail as there is rapid iteration and change in how we do things.

• 37:48Peter Diamandis?

  And just that's the frame I really want to bring this for folks to listen to. Nadia, please, over to you.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the really incredible things about Sandbox and it's part of our core values is that we have this incredible learning culture, which is, I think, fits into that community and connection C. And as part of that, we really, like, we believe in continuous education. We love to hire the folks that are tinkering and are, you know, experimenting with AI or at the edge of things. And so we often find ourselves, you know, like, having our offsites at these universities, recruiting from these universities. We have programs, because we're at the edge of technology, we actually have to train the next set of folks that might want to come work for us because these skillsets don't naturally exist. They're not learning this stuff.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  And so we have an entire education team that works on creating coursework and various degree programming at NYU is an example of this. And so this, you know, this learning culture and creating a community around it is really deeply rooted in who we are.

• 38:57Peter Diamandis?

  I appreciate that. You know, Jack, first of all, I hope that you'll write this up as a third, you know, the third way and get this out. Let me, let me dive into a, to a slightly different direction here, which is, you know, Jamie Dimon recently said the next generation of employees will work for three and a half days a week and live to 100 years old. I agree with the 100 years old part and more.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  At least 100, please, Peter.

• 39:21Peter Diamandis?

  At least 100, yes.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 39:23Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, don't get me started there. I'll take you on, buddy. But, you know, the three and a half days of work, if you love what you're doing, I don't know. I mean, I play seven days a week in what I do. And, and it's always a balance between home and, and work and, and everything. But as I was onstage with Tony at one of the Abundance Summits, Tony Robbins, one of the Abundance Summits recently, we talked about, it's not life work balance, about life work integration. And I think that is really what you're talking about. How do you integrate this in a way that's meaningful? What do you think about these predictions of, you know, Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week and productivity jumped 40%.

• 40:08Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Jamie Dimon's comment about three-and-a-half-day work weeks. What's your thought about that?

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Here's my prediction, Peter. I think that the best organizations, the exponential organizations, the organizations that have breakthroughs, be it in our tech sector or be it in other sectors, will be organizations that treat people like adults, that are outcome-based. And when you're outcome-based, you know what falls away? Nursery school games, like, how many hours should I be working today? How many days and which days and so on and so forth? We really consider this very, very old language. That's a signal. When someone is talking about that at a company, I'm like, okay, I get where you're coming from. You're coming from the old idea of periods in schools and ringing bells and bells in factories. And, you know, why do we have periods and bells ringing in schools, right?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  We know that. We know because it came from the industrial age, from the factory and so on and so forth. Is this really where we want to go as humans? Is this unleashing the human potential? I don't think so. So, sure, there may be some roles and jobs, but I think those are going to change also. Maybe we can jump and leapfrog also, Peter, now into talking about humanoid robots. Because, you know, when people say, okay, Jack, that's all well and fine for the kind of skilled work that you all are doing with physics and chemistry and breakthroughs in new medicines for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. But how about these distribution centers and warehouses? How about light assembly? What are we going to do there in terms of hours and so on and so forth? What I would say is, hold on to your seat, Peter,

• 41:43Speaker 00

  because big change is coming. People are underestimating, underestimating the impact of humanoid robots. It's moving very, very quickly. Amazon has got a pilot right now with three or four of the robot companies. We'll see announcements, I'm sure. I have no information from Amazon, but I'm sure we're going to see announcements in the next 18 months from Amazon.

• 42:05Peter Diamandis?

  I actually know a lot about that. I just wrote a report called the Metatrader Report, and folks can get it at metatraderreport.com. Which is, I looked at probably about 40 of the humanoid robot companies and reported in more detail on 16 of them. And the predictions, right, there are billions of dollars flowing in, obviously Optimus 2 and Optimus 3 from Tesla, we've got Figure AI with Figure 2 and Figure 3 coming online right now, we've got Apollo, we've got Digit from Agility. These are robots that are working in industry today. The numbers folks should realize are the following, right?

• 42:48Peter Diamandis?

  These are, you know, two arms, two legs, 10-digit robots able to do most all things. They're enabled by multimodal AI, meaning they can see and understand what they're seeing, they can have a conversation with you, understand what you're asking for, communicate back. And the price points, these level of complexity, you can get to a price of typically dollars per kilogram of weight for a system of that complexity. And both Elon and the CEO Brett Adcock of Figure AI predicts at 30K for a robot that you could buy it at. Translation, that's leasing it for 300 bucks a month, which is 30, you know, 10 bucks

• 43:32Peter Diamandis?

  a day, 40 cents an hour. What's it like if you have a minimum wage job at 20 bucks an hour and you're competing against a robot working 24/7, no drug testing, no problems with their boyfriends or girlfriends? I think we're going to start to see a lot of those jobs, you know, sort of transformed into some other job.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I do think that we have to get ahead of this. Amazon has put together a billion-dollar fund to get ahead of this proactively and say this is a retraining fund. They're going to start training the hundreds of thousands of people. I'll let them speak for themselves, but just as an observer, I'm impressed by the fact that they're taking a proactive stance. I'm sure Walmart will be doing that pretty soon. Walmart's got 2.5 million people in that company, of which 2 million are folks working in the warehouses and distribution centers, and we know where that's going. When we look at Zara and other companies who do fast fashion and have factories in just Five spots on earth. What's gonna happen is you're gonna start seeing

• 44:37Speaker 00

  basically new factories pop up in all kinds of places that didn't pencil out before, but now pencil out with humanoid robots. And guess what? Those plants, those factories will be very near the main street where they're gonna sell those goods, taking fast fashion from ten weeks now down to maybe five days, right? That's gonna be much faster fashion. I know people are very excited about that.

• 44:59Peter Diamandis?

  I believe that. So both you guys, I mean, Sandbox AQ, A stands for AI, Q stands for quantum, just for folks to realize that, deeply embedded in the AI world. So let's talk about AI employees. So, you know, there's predictions of I'm gonna be having conversations and working with individuals who are fully are AI agents, and I'm gonna communicate with them, I'll be on Slack with them, I'll be on Zooms with them, and they interact with me as if they are employees, but they're actually AIs. How far are we from that? And how do you think about integration into you, into your workforce?

• 45:39Speaker 00

  It's happening already. First of all, let's look at coding. Coding essentially is the parrot on your shoulder, the co-pilot.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  We and others are already seeing, say, a 10% increase in productivity. Microsoft is reporting greater percentage productivities across some of the customers who've really adopted it. I think that's gonna happen. I think I would expect a benchmark of 25% increase in productivity in coding, using a AI as your, as your co-pilot. So essentially, that's an AI agent that you're interacting with and is helping you create the code, but also, most importantly, debug the code. That's often what takes the longest in the, in the coding process. And also think about interactions. As you know, recently, there was a massive outage of more than eight million computers because of the CrowdStrike update. That's something where an AI agent, a little more sparts in the system,

• 46:31Speaker 00

  could have looked at that interaction of that update and those systems and realized, hey, I think we better not press this button on this update on a Friday and destroy the entire Entire planet. And so AI agents, I think, will help us in that way. And so on the coding side, absolutely. I think there'll be a lot of AI agents also that will be really good at brainstorming with us. I think it's really good as a Socratic dialogue to have an interaction with an AI agent as you're brainstorming a new feature, as you're brainstorming a strategy. You know, again, it's not that the AI necessarily comes up with a strategy. That's not really the expectation.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  But I do think it's really cool to have that dialogue, have somebody really push you who's not a human. You know, the studies show now, Peter, that people are more willing to open up to a robotic therapist, to an AI therapist than a human therapist. They feel less judged.

• 47:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, and also they're not rushed. You know, it's interesting, there was a, one of the American Journal of Medicine published a paper on empathy. And the AI agents were judged to be like, you know, I don't say, maybe it was Forex, maybe it was an order of magnitude, more empathic. Because that reason, you don't feel judged by an AI. And the AI doesn't say, I'm sorry, I've got another patient waiting for me. It just gives you as much time as you want. That's extraordinary. I, you know, I used to think that empathy was the last bastion of human uniqueness, but perhaps not.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then I think, you know, another way of looking at this is, as you know, Peter, the kind of AI that's being talked about right now, that's the obsession and the shiny object right now is large language models. And certainly it's going to have a big role, just like we said, it's going to have a role in talking to us in a dialogue, in helping us code. That's all the large language models. But we are pioneering and others now joining us in pioneering quantitative models. And maybe Nadia can talk about the interaction. How do you see these two coming together? The quantitative side that's so important and the language side. The language side, of course, trained on social media comments, Reddit, cat pictures, great for some things, but not necessarily right to create a new drug or those kind of innovations.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  So AI agents who are quantitative AI agents, Nadia, maybe you can help us there.

• 48:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please. Tell us about, what is an LQM? Yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  And LQMs. So the way I think about LQMs is

• 49:00Peter Diamandis?

  Which is large quantitative models, right?

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Well, large quantitative models, that's right. It's physics based, it's first principles based. And so you're calculating from the ground up, from first principles, the way atoms and electrons and molecular properties behave in the presence of other atoms next to them. It's simulating matter effectively from the ground up and using that data then to train ML models on. And that is what we do at Sandbox AQ. So we don't start with a corpus of information. And the key thing there is that it allows us to move into new spaces where data does not exist, right? So LLMs really rely on existing data. And it's wonderful. We have a ton of data and that is going to be a highly impactful space.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  And we've seen it already, but it will have its limitations. And that's where we really see the possibility of LQMs impacting new types of materials and batteries and chemistry and creating new types of, you know, drugs and various things that just can't possibly exist today.

• 50:06Peter Diamandis?

  Help us extrapolate way beyond what we know in the material universe. Jack, you published recently a paper on sort of the breakthroughs you guys have had in the recent past, which was impressive. Do you mind just taking some of those off with Nadia's support?

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll talk about one or two of them. And Nadia, please do so as well. Just my first pick up on Nadia's point on first principles. Elon is very famous for coming back to the idea of go back to first principles thinking. And others, I think, are now also focused on that. And that's a big mantra for us. Don't just start with data that's out there. Start to think about what are the principles? What are the equations that could generate data? Pristine data, data that then talks about that dynamic relationship of that electron to that electron. That is truly the first principle, the principle of down to that subatomic level. So really proud of the work of the team. I'll just cite a few, a few things that are happening right now with quantitative models.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  Take for example navigation. More and more in our world, Peter, and you know this, you are so focused on space and aviation and so experienced there. You know that GPS is brittle. GPS cannot be relied upon anymore. It's being jammed in large portions of the world. It's out here and there. And so pilots around the world are having difficulty, both in the civilian space and in the defense space. And the team, a very small team at Sandbox AQ, literally just about 11 people, again, using the three Cs, using this approach that we talked about, embedded themselves with various customers who have this massive point of pain. They've been on site with the United States Air Force again and again and again, flying up in their planes, particularly the C-17.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  The Air Force has spoken publicly about this, so that's why we can talk about this today. And just recently completed a two-year, two-year testing cycle that resulted in the final C-17 run, where they flew up with our AI and the sensors. The sensors are feeding a huge amount of quantitative data about the magnetic field of the Earth, coming from a quantum sensor. And that data has to go into a GPU, an Nvidia GPU in this case, and have that AI that we developed, reading that in real time, Peter, so that it can look at the map of the world, the magnetic map, and look at where the magnetic field is underneath that plane, and then figuring out where it is in space, in the airspace.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  And sure enough, we passed that test. What they do is they take you up in a C-17, Peter, and without letting you know when it's going to happen, they shut off the GPS four times in that lengthy flight. And you, your AI, has got to navigate that plane.

• 52:51Peter Diamandis?

  What most people don't realize is that GPS is being spoofed in some places. It's giving you the wrong signal, which can sort of drive you or fly you into territories that you don't want to be in. And no one's going to spoof in any way, shape or form the Earth's magnetic field, so.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'd have to have another Earth and bring it over here, which I don't think will happen anytime soon. But the point is that, that that's a breakthrough that happened with a very small team. You know, Margaret Mead said, "Never underestimate the power of a small team, a committed small team for change." And sure enough, and that's the only thing that will, and sure enough, that's what we have across Sandbox. We're split into smaller teams that have their own ability to innovate and collaborate. So that's an example where I don't see how either return to office would have resulted in that breakthrough, or work from home. There's no way that either of those would have resulted in this breakthrough, where we had to spend weeks on end at the customers. We had to bring in experts from all around the world to make this happen. There's not many people who know how to bring it together.

• 53:53Peter Diamandis?

  Agility is the key word you're looking for here, right? It's agility of your team, the ability to form and reform both in space and time as needed. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below.

• 54:37Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's get back to the episode.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Now, maybe you want to talk about PFAS or some of the other breakthroughs we recently announced.

• 54:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm worried about these forever chemicals. And people don't realize we're poisoning our world. And as a mom, and you know, I bet you that's something you think about. Please tell us.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It very much hits close to home because we know today that PFAS, it's a set of chemicals that are unable to be broken down. They're man-made, they're in the environment, they're in our drinking water. And we know today that babies are born with them. I'm nine months pregnant and my baby might be born with PFAS.

• 55:14Peter Diamandis?

  You are nine months pregnant right now?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  I am nine months pregnant right now.

• 55:18Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you for joining us, wow.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  But, you know, I mean, there, thank you so much. But it is such a problem for our industry. One of the things that we are extremely proud of at Sandbox is that we were able to break computationally for the first time in human history that bond energy of a PFAS molecule. And that is the first step in figuring out how to degrade this from our environment, but then also to create new alternative PFAS, right? That have the same properties that we know and love so much. We love our Teflon, you know, we love our waterproof coats and things like that when it rains. We love these materials. They're very useful, but they're extremely toxic.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we're very hopeful that with simulation technology like the ones we've built today and bringing together the teams to make these world records, to break them, to continue to collaborate in this way on these breakthroughs are really, it's a proof of our model here at Sandbox.

• 56:24Peter Diamandis?

  I want to talk about your predictions, Jack. You know, I spoke about this a little bit before. What are your predictions for the future of work here? And, you know, people are fearful of AI and humanoid robots taking their jobs. How do we deal with that? You know, interestingly enough, all the predictions thus far to date have proven false. You know, all of the ATMs that we thought were going to take away all the banking jobs, there are more banking jobs than ever before. All the computers are going to take away accountants' jobs, there are more accountants than ever before. How do you think about this?

• 57:01Speaker 00

  A few things. First of all, Peter, we're going to see huge divergence within every sector. We're going to see winners and losers, and we're going to see that happen on the basis of both The use of AI or lack of use of AI and also how they do the work they do. So in terms of AI, if we see a company out there, let's say, for example, take the automotive sector. And we see a number of companies out there and some companies will adopt AI and of course, most of the old companies will use large language models for customer service and they're going to have some productivity, some cutting of costs, probably measured in the single-digit millions to tens of millions. Great. Everyone, that's table stakes, Peter. Everyone should be doing AI-based customer service and those kinds of areas.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  Predictive maintenance, for example. Again, everyone should be, should be doing that as well. But there'll be some automotive companies who say, we're going to actually use AI in this deeper way to create the next product. We're going to create a new material. We're going to make the car out of a material, for example, using more carbon composite as one idea that's going to lightweight my car so that whether I'm using gas or whatever I'm using, it's going to be more efficient. The same thing could be said in the battery and energy industry. We're going to see that divergence as well. The same thing in pharma. There'll be some pharma companies that take hold of this AI and use it to cut it from eight, 10 years down to one to two years of pre-clinical work and really have a high success rate in clinical trial. And there's others that will be slow adopters.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  And so that's the first divergence. But the second vector of divergence is going to be how they do the work. I'm going to put a bold, you wrote a book called Bold, Peter. I'm going to put a bold prediction out here. Those companies in the big sectors of our economy that choose to either go down the rabbit hole of return to office only or work from home only, I think they become the Kodaks and Westinghouses and Polaroids of, of the future.

• 58:56Peter Diamandis?

  Blockbuster, blockbuster of the list here.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Blockbuster and so on and so forth. And, and so what I think is going to happen is companies that really want to thrive, companies that want a great workforce, companies that want to have a global footprint because that's what their customer base is, global, then they, they're going to choose a third way. We're putting out one idea for a third way. People listening here, Peter, should maybe think about their own third way and how to take the three Cs. Maybe combine them in different ways. I don't think there's one size fits all. This works for us and I think others can take some of the elements, but one big message we're trying to share, Peter, is don't get locked in. But so here's my big message to people who want to quote unquote, play the AI space. Well, how do I invest in the AI space? What company do I invest in?

• 59:44Speaker 00

  It's actually a red herring just to look at the AI companies themselves, Peter. What I would suggest to people is the bigger way to play AI is to look at the biggest sectors of our economy. Finance, pharma, energy, so on and so forth, and say, who are going to be the winners and losers? You're going to see a vast divergence over the next five to six years. If you're talking about something in the warehousing distribution space such as a e-commerce or retail, are they going to adopt humanoid robots faster than their competitor? Are they going to be more efficient in how they do that? Look how Amazon, yeah, have been back to agility. So this is what's not spoken about, Peter. People get obsessed with the AI companies themselves and great to get the attention. Thank you. Fantastic.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  But the bigger point not discussed is how are we going to see this divergence in the biggest sectors of the traditional economy?

• 1:00:37Peter Diamandis?

  I agree. I, I do want to take your, your prediction here. What's going to happen with jobs here?

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Oh, on, on jobs, let me start and then I'll turn to Nadia as well. Uh, look, I, I believe that AI will produce literally millions of new jobs. Uh, yes, there'll be some displacement within certain job categories where, for example, if right now you're somebody who's pick, pack and ship in a warehouse, I do think that an AI-driven humanoid robot will take that job. And by the way, that's going to save a huge amount of ergonomic stress and injury, you know, onto, onto humans. And we've got to get proactive. Again, Amazon being proactive, I hope others start to do that as well to say, hey, that person's job is going away. So there are specific jobs that will, will go away, but let's find a new role for that person. Net, net, over five to 10 years,

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  I think the net is millions of millions of new jobs, whole new job categories as well. So very optimistic about that. Nadia, get your opinion too.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Sure. I, I mean, you know what? The way I see this going is that we're just going to have more human-AI collaborations. It's just going to up-level everyone's thinking. It's going to up-level people's roles. It's going to create new roles as, as Jack mentioned. And it will have new products, right? We will have personalized technology solutions, personalized robots, personalized AI assistants, personalized agents. I think it's going to hit the consumer market in a pretty unique way in the future. But what that will do to the workforce, the employees, to really focus us on critical thinking and decision making and outcomes-based metrics, which are set up here with the three Cs, really empowers us to take advantage of.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Peter, let me add to that prediction, making even more pointed. Today's global GDP is roughly 110 trillion per year. GDP of the world, 110 trillion per year. U.S. is about 25% of that. My prediction to you is that as AI flows through, both on the language side and on the quantitative side, creating new value, new products, new pharma, we're going to see a doubling of the GDP of the world. Now, that's a bold prediction because what economists are used to is talking about a 2% increase in global GDP, a 3% per year increase. That would take many years, right, to get to a doubling. That doubling is going to happen pretty soon. This is something, Peter, you've talked about so many times at Singularity, in other exponential

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  and abundance and other places. We are not mentally prepared as a society right now.

• 1:03:10Peter Diamandis?

  I agree with you. This is the roaring twenties from a multitude of different reasons. As soon as you get labor and cognitive costs diminishing and dividing by zero leads you to infinity, it's an extraordinary world ahead.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So I do think that the best organizations, if I can make a prediction, Peter, are going to be outcome-based. They're going to treat people like adults. They're going to take the best of multiple parts of these models and move ahead in their own way. They're going to make use of AI in all its forms, physically embedded AI, physical form AI, which is robotics of all kinds. It could be a humanoid robot. It could be an arm that's used. And we'll also see revolutions in terms of the interaction of humanoid lighter robots, along with the big industrial robots that we're used to seeing. We're going to see the use of AI in all kinds of community and also again in

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  mental health as well. There's a mental health and loneliness epidemic in our country. When we think about older people, the idea of retiring has got to go away.

• 1:04:17Peter Diamandis?

  I agree.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I'm not saying people should work forever in the sense of the kind of work we think today. But the point, the kind of work you do, Peter, when you say you don't even feel like working, right? Because you're doing what you love.

• 1:04:28Peter Diamandis?

  Anybody who wants to, a good argument for not retiring, Google the correlation between retirement and death.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:04:36Peter Diamandis?

  As soon as you've given up on a purpose in life, you know, having a purpose is one of the single most important things and having something to look forward to. A friend of mine says, having a future that's bigger than your past, right? That's, that is a vibrant life. And hopefully, as we see the health span revolution materializing, that is able to give people the vital energy and you're not in pain, we'll see people wanting to desire to work because our birth rate's been dropping. We need that as well. I mean, it's an extraordinary world ahead.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  And Peter, let me just say, if we can marry that longevity that we're getting with the golden age of education, and I was not even talking about this.

• 1:05:16Peter Diamandis?

  Continuous education.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I have a friend, 54 years old, just became a doctor, started medical school at the age of 51, just graduated. She's going to become a practicing doctor now, not because this is the best way to necessarily for her to earn money per se. She wants to, she's dedicated to this idea of spending the next 30 years of her life practicing medicine. And that's, that's a beautiful thing. Let's encourage more of that, right? Where we want people to have second and third whole pursuits. I'm not even using the word career because I think that's an old term. Najee, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that?

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  I, I kind of think about it from the drug discovery side. You know, one of the key areas for us is in neurodegen and, you know, it's, it's sort of our near term beachhead. And as we solve for that, the next thing to go after is longevity, right?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Najee, explain neurodegen. Explain, what are the, what are the kind of diseases in neurodegen?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. So neurodegen diseases, I mean, these are Alzheimer's, Parkinson's.

• 1:06:17Peter Diamandis?

  Neurodegenerative.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Neurodegenerative diseases that affect us at the end of our lives and. You know, if you live long enough, you will be subject to them. And I, I think we will live through a world with the help of Sandbox where we see these diseases be treated very successfully. And so then you look at life expansion. And, you know, it's coming back to all the, all the things that you all were saying. I mean, that, that is the ultimate final frontier of medicine.

• 1:06:45Peter Diamandis?

  It is extraordinary.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  You know, Peter, we were very fortunate at Sandbox A Q to have one of our new partners and, and customers is the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. And they, they've asked us to use our AI to help the labs that they fund accelerate the breakthroughs, accelerate the treatments, accelerate biomarkers. And we had the opportunity and the privilege just a few weeks ago to attend the Michael J. Fox Foundation gathering where, where Michael J. Fox was there. I'm getting emotional talking about this because it is an emotional subject. It is very inspiring to see him, to see the 22, 23 years that he's dedicated to this.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  He's raised over $2 billion in this period of time to galvanize, to invest in research. And now AI is coming to help. It's coming to accelerate the work that he has funded, that others have funded. This is an incredible moment, Peter. Peter, if I could turn the tables for a minute and ask you, you're somebody who speaks to folks like us, you're somebody in touch with so many people at the edge. What are you seeing from your vantage point in the growth of the exponential organization? Be it a for-profit, be it a university, be it a nonprofit? What excites you about this moment in time to jump to the exponential organization?

• 1:08:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I, I appreciate that. You know, one of my funds is a group called Exponential Ventures out of, out of MIT with Dave Blunden. And what we're seeing, because we, we basically identify and find young teams out of MIT and Harvard because they're They pull in from around the world and they're there and they're what exactly you're saying, they're in a foxhole situation where they're finding out, oh, I like this gal, I like this guy, they work hard, they're smart, and they form sort of a nucleus. And today, the incoming MIT freshmen, seventy percent want to start a company, right? Which is extraordinary, it never was that way, and a lot of those are AI companies.

• 1:08:50Peter Diamandis?

  And so I think there is a, two different drivers today. One, that people want to do something that's meaningful. They just don't want a job, they want to contribute to society, they want to have the ability to be part of a massive transformative purpose. And the second thing is they want to have the agility to live their life where they want, how they want. And I think old-style companies trying to recruit into very structured formats are going to have a hard time competing, just very fundamentally. And I think the tools of collaboration that were, you know, listen, COVID gave us a gift,

• 1:09:33Peter Diamandis?

  and that gift was driving a new expectation of how we work, sort of breaking the old model and giving us a set of collaborative tools that everybody adopted. I think we're also going to see this transformation hitting education too, because today we still have a very old-school educational model in elementary, middle, high school, college, all of that. So a lot of transformation coming, how we work with each other. Agility, for me, is the number one sort of measure of success. You know, if you multiply intelligence times agility, you get magic.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  That's great, Peter. No, great, great to get that point of view as well. Also, a shout out to our friend Dove Sidman for writing the book called How. It was written before this period of time, so, but he really focused also on integrity, on the focus on making sure that when you're working with people, there's openness, there's transparency. I also got inspired by that that book as well. And I think you're right, Peter. It's probably time for us to write this up, to write up the three Cs, to write up the third way. And to show people there are alternatives. You don't have to jump into one bucket or the other and suffer the consequences.

• 1:10:52Peter Diamandis?

  I think you need to give the heads, the heads of HR, the the employee base, the executive base, a tool to use, a data.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Playbook, a guide.

• 1:11:04Peter Diamandis?

  Playbook, yeah, so that they have, because today we just default to the old ways of doing things. It's the cog, it's our cognitive biases you spoke about earlier.

• 1:11:14Peter Diamandis?

  Let me just say to both of you, thank you. Jack, I am grateful to call you a friend, a board member, trustee of the X Prize, one of our most, you're a nuclear power source. I call you that every time, the amount of energy, enthusiasm and.

• 1:11:30Speaker 00

  The plutonium is right here, right here.

• 1:11:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, buddy, I know it is. And Nadia, what a true pleasure to meet you. You're brilliant and I look forward to deepening a friendship with you as well. So everybody, here we are. There's a new way of work. It's the three Cs approach. You know, I agree with what Jack and Nadia have said, you know, return to office, very limited.

• 1:11:54Peter Diamandis?

  And working from home, very limited. The question is, how do you provide the agility to become an exponential organization, to really employ exponential entrepreneurs who are adults that you believe in? You give them outcome focuses, outcome focused objectives and let them do their work unencumbered. And I love what you said, Jack. You know, as a leader, whether you're running a division of AI simulation, what a cool name that Nadia has, or whether you're the CEO of the company, helping your team succeed, breaking down their barriers.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  Service leadership, yeah.

• 1:12:28Peter Diamandis?

  Service leadership. Guys, thank you for all. Excited to have you back on the Moonshots Podcast to hear the continued breakthroughs. And I love that forever chemicals are going to be broken down.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  Forever no more. Exactly.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  Well, great to be with both of you. Peter, thanks for hosting us. Nadia, thanks for joining today.

• 1:12:49Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  Thank you both so much for having us.

• 1:12:53Peter Diamandis?

  You're welcome.