Leading Experts Predictions on the Future of AI & AGI w/ Salim Ismail | EP #94

In this episode, Peter and Salim recap the Abundance360 2024 Summit and discuss Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, Ray Kurzweil, and more. 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 Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit ____________ 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 ProLon is the first Nutri-technology company to apply breakthrough science to optimize human longevity and optimize longevity and support a healthy life. Get started today with 15% off here: https://prolonlife.com/MOONSHOT _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome, everybody, to another episode of WTF Just Happened in Technology on Moonshot. I'm here with Saleem Ismail.

• 1:06Peter Diamandis?

  Will AI have rights? This is the worst AI will ever be today. We are on track to reach longevity escape velocity by 2029. It's just the early days right now still. The idea of putting billions of microscopic chips into the brain. What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:27Peter Diamandis?

  Hello, Hugh. My name is Peter.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Well, hey there, Peter.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  Nice to meet you.

• 1:34Peter Diamandis?

  Super excited, Saleem. We had quite the week in technology. You and I were on stage with some of the most extraordinary leaders in AI and tech out there, including Elon Musk and Mike Saylor, Eric Schmidt, Ray Kurzweil, Jeffrey Hinton. And rather than reporting on the news, I think we should report on the conversations we had with these guys because some of the stuff was truly magical.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, great to be back. That was possibly one of the best conferences I've ever attended. And so kudos to you and the team for pulling that off. It was kind of incredible. I've heard the same from everybody. And I think the conversations that were had there were so far ahead of anything that might hit the news that it's really, really worth recapping.

• 2:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And, and the conference you're speaking about is the Abundance Summit. The theme this year was the great AI debate. And we debated a lot. And in fact, the theme was, is digital superintelligence humanity's greatest hope or our gravest threat? But let's jump in, because one of the most extraordinary conversations was with Elon. And I got to tell a little side story for those listening. So, you know, I communicate with Elon. He's gone all in on X. Like, he only does phone calls on X, he only does texting on X, and he only does video on X. So, you know, the start of the show is Abundance Summit's four

• 3:01Peter Diamandis?

  and a half days. At the beginning, I text him and say, hey, we've got, you know, 500 amazing CEOs, entrepreneurs, philanthropists in the room, and a couple of thousand online. Would you join? And he said, you know, his normal answer is, sure. You know. And I said, great. Let me know when. So this was on, on Sunday. On Monday, he, he, first of all, I said, here's a Zoom link. And he said, no, don't do Zoom, only X video. So we tried it. And unfortunately, we had a problem on our, you know, Wi-Fi at the hotel. And so it was choppy, it didn't work. And he said, let's try again tomorrow. And I'm like, okay,

• 3:44Peter Diamandis?

  is he really going to try again tomorrow? And sure enough, you know, I texted him and and he said, yep, let's do it. And so right after lunch at 2 o'clock on that Tuesday, I

• 3:56Peter Diamandis?

  He says, let's test it first. We did. And he beams up on the on the main stage. Now, I'm on my phone, right, on X video, connected to my computer that is then connected to the main screen. And Elon's on his airplane. And the most incredible thing was we were on X video over Starlink on his plane, talking about the future of AI. That was fun.

• 4:23Speaker 05

  Amazing. A really awesome conversation. And once we got it going, I think the bandwidth and the conversation was fantastic.

• 4:31Peter Diamandis?

  He was really chatty that day, actually. You know, let's open up with a clip. All of this, the entire 30 minute conversation with Elon is on the Moonshot's channel. So you can go and subscribe and see it there. But let's listen up to the first part of the conversation. I'd love your thoughts on this.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  The way in which sort of an AI or AGI is created is very important. It's almost like like raising a kid, but that's like a super genius, like godlike intelligence kid. And it matters kind of like how you raise the kid, you know? One of the things I think that's incredibly important for AI safety is to have a maximum sort of truth seeking and curious AI. So I've thought a lot about AI safety. And my ultimate conclusion is that the best way to achieve AI safety is to grow the AI, you know, in terms of the foundation model and the fine tuning, to be really truthful, like, like, don't, don't force it to lie. Like, even if the truth is unpleasant, it's very important.

• 5:36Speaker 06

  Don't make the AI lie. In fact, the core plot premise of 2000, you know, 2001 A Space Odyssey was things went wrong when they forced the AI to lie. The AI was not allowed to let the crew know about the monolith. That they were going to see, but it was also had to take the crew to the monolith. And so the conclusion of the AI was to kill the crew and take their bodies to the monolith. And so the lesson there being, uh, don't force an AI to, to, to lie or do things that are axiomatically incompatible. Like to do two things that are actually mutually impossible. You know, that's what we're trying to do with, with XAI and, and Brock is to say like, look, we want to just have a maximally truthful AI. Even if what it says is not politically correct.

• 6:20Peter Diamandis?

  So, uh, I think it's a good idea, a good idea not to force your AI to lie. You know, when we kicked off the conversation, um, I reminded him of a tweet that he'd put out saying that AI compute was growing 10x every six months.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:36Peter Diamandis?

  Do you remember, uh, where he went from there?

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, he said, look, at this pace, we'll get AI smarter than us in a very short order of time. And, and there's a monster kind of implication to that, both good and bad. Right? The good part is it could deliver abundance very quickly. And the bad part is the, what he refers to in this video, which is the often called the paperclip problem, which is if you instructed an AI to create as many paperclips as it could, it might decide that the only way to do that was to take over all energy resources on the planet and suck humanity dry and wipe out a humanity by accident, trying to achieve its goal. And how do you avoid that is the key problem?

• 7:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Let's show another cue, another quick clip of Elon from that, uh, 30 minute conversation.

• 7:21Speaker 06

  The way in which, uh, sort of an AI or AGI is created, uh, is very important. It's almost like, like raising a, a kid, but that's like.

• 7:31Peter Diamandis?

  Before I go past this clip, um, I'd love to hear your comments, but we also had Mo Godot on here talking about the fact that AI is our progeny. AI is the children we're raising on this planet. And we have to train them, educate them, feed them in a way that they're going to be, give positive, uh, you know, intellectual, uh, capabilities to support humanity. What are your thoughts here?

• 7:58Speaker 05

  I think that's exactly right. It goes to, you know, if you combine two thoughts, right? One is Elon framing it as we're raising a godlike intellect. And the second is Mo's concept, then it brings to mind for me Neil Jacob Stein saying, okay, you're worried about AI becoming autonomous, having access to the world's information, making its own decisions or running amok, right? And we're like, yeah, it goes, well, we call them children. We have a precedent for that. Because you raise kids and you hope they're raised in the right way. And then you lose control of them and they do the wrong thing.

• 8:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but let's be serious. Your kids are not going to accidentally, you know, burn down that, like, I guess they could burn down the house, but they're not going to set off nuclear codes. I mean, there's a little bit of a difference between children and AI children.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  There is, and there's also a big difference in that our kids are biological and we have some familiarity with that. We assume, I, you know, I always take the optimistic view here because we have no evidence to the contrary. But we assume that AIs will be negative towards us or that they could be. And I just don't see any evidence of that at all. And that's where I kind of in line with Ray Kurzweil on this. But I, there's definitely a monster danger of a human being programming in AI for malevolent reasons or accidental reasons, as you frame it.

• 9:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so listen, I'm the optimist as well, but we did see in the past at Facebook and at Microsoft and other places, AI is becoming, you know, just flagrant in hate speech and going off the deep end. I mean, we did see that, right?

• 9:38Speaker 05

  We did, and that's really a garbage and garbage art problem, right? If you, if you let it loose on the internet and let it watch episodes of Survivor, then it's going to come up with stuff that's crazy.

• 9:49Peter Diamandis?

  Well, just let it watch, you know, episodes of CNN. All right, let's see what he has to say about abundance here. You know, the conversation yesterday Elon is one that you're well familiar with and have been talking to the world about, which is, is digital superintelligence humanity's greatest hope or its greatest fear? And I'm, would love to have you sort of speak to that for a few minutes.

• 10:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, that of superintelligence, it is actually very difficult to predict what will happen next. So I think there's, you know, there's some chance that it will end humanity. I think that's, you know, like I said, I probably agree with Jeff Hindon that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that. The probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario. It's just, it's difficult to predict exactly, but I, I think we are headed for, as I think is the title of your book, abundance, is the most likely outcome. I thought your book is pretty accurate in terms of the future being, being one of abundance, where essentially goods and services will be available in such quantity that, that really,

• 10:55Speaker 06

  they'll be available to everyone. Like basically, if you want something, you could just have it essentially. There's really no meaningful limit to what the economic output would be. So, you know, looking on the bright side, we are headed for a future of abundance. I think that's the most likely outcome. And I think the only scarcity will, that, that exists will be scarcity that we just decide to create artificially. Like, let's say, we just decide that there's a unique work of art or something, but, but any kind of goods and services, I think will be extremely abundant.

• 11:24Peter Diamandis?

  Thoughts, buddy?

• 11:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, you know, we can see, we've gone from information scarcity to information abundance globally. We're going from energy scarcity to energy abundance. Once you have energy abundance, all sorts of other things become radically possible. And there's no reason to deal with scarcity, except in specific areas where you want to, and it's intentional and conscious, like Bitcoin or rare works of art, as he mentions. That's where we, if you're familiar with the luxury goods world, you know, you know what are, what Birkin bags are, which is a purse that costs like 10 grand, and there's a three-year waiting list for this thing. Just because women want that bag so much, they've created the waiting list for that. And, and these things appreciate in value, which just blows my mind.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  And so there's lots of mechanisms, I think, for us to practice and navigate created manufactured scarcity, whereas anything we really need is in abundance. And I think that's a great place for us to end up.

• 12:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, I do believe it, and I just want to focus in on his original comment. 10 or 20% chance of global disaster versus 80 or 90% chance of abundance. And when he says, I think it's a 10 or 20% chance, I wanted to like say, wait, hold it. 10 or 20% chance of which side? Can we be clear about this? So he's been pretty consistent on that.

• 12:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I put it in the one to 1,000 range.

• 12:55Peter Diamandis?

  You're in the, you're, what do you mean?

• 12:57Speaker 05

  I put it in the one to 1,000 range of devastating negative effects of AI.

• 13:04Peter Diamandis?

  But that's dangerous to say that, you know? I think, I think it's a lot easier, it's a lot better for us to say, listen, there's a 20% chance of disaster. Because you don't discount 20% chance and you actually do everything you can to prevent it. If you say it's like one in the thousand, eh, okay, fine, let's just go ahead willy nilly.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  All right, let me, let me challenge you on something.

• 13:26Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  As far as I've looked into it, and as far as my community has looked into it, we see no mechanism of any way possible of limiting AI and its spread and its propagation and its development. Like zero.

• 13:41Peter Diamandis?

  I agree. It cannot be contained.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  Unless you control every line of code written and the AIs are writing the code.

• 13:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And by the way.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  As far as we can see, the genie is out of the bottle.

• 13:53Peter Diamandis?

  It is. You know, there were two, there were two absolutes five years ago. Don't put it on the web and don't allow it to code itself. And guess what? Both of those barriers were broken instantly.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  Instantly, and the minute, the minute ChatGPT connected to GitHub with all of the code base there and learned through that, and now it can control anything, it can write its own programming. Pretty much you're done. So you, there was a small possibility, but even then it was going to happen at some point. And if we didn't do it, the Chinese would do it, or the North Koreans would do it, somebody would do it. And it was going to happen, right? So it was an inevitability to it that I don't think is stoppable in any way, shape or form. I think guiding it is the only path we have going forward.

• 14:42Peter Diamandis?

  I, I, I agree, you know? And this is a conversation I had with Eric Schmidt on, on the morning of day two. Was, you know, Google had this technology first and they chose not to release it because they felt like it wasn't ready yet. And then here comes OpenAI, releases it all and there's no choice but to release it themselves if they want to stay in existence, which is a, you know, prima facie first.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, the techies behind the scene are very, very unhappy with Sam Altman because on one hand, he lets it out for everybody to use. And then he goes to governments and says, oh, let's figure out ways of regulating this, right? We're annoying full well that it's completely not feasible in any really.

• 15:23Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I think it's an important point. This, you know, Mustafa Suleyman, who was the CEO of Inflection AI, just moved this past week to be CEO of Microsoft AI. So all of these moves going on. And he'll be, he committed to speak at Abundance 360 next year. So he'll be on stage in the next year. You know, he basically wrote a book called The Coming Wave, in which he talked about, we need to provide containment. And I just don't believe containment is an option. Right? You, the smartest hacker in the room is the AI and it's just not going to be contained. So can you contain, can you reduce its resources?

• 16:03Peter Diamandis?

  Can you regulate it? I think you're absolutely right. The only option is to guide it. It's, it's, the kid is born, or the children are born. And it's like, you know, to use Mogadot's words, are you giving birth? Are you raising Superman? Or a supervillain?

• 16:21Speaker 05

  So, can I speak to that for a second?

• 16:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  If you look at humanity, it is a very clear model where the more conscious somebody is on a spectrum, the less negative things they do.

• 16:34Peter Diamandis?

  I agree.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  So in my opinion, what you do is you help AIs become as conscious as possible and as super conscious as possible.

• 16:40Peter Diamandis?

  As fast as possible.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  As fast as possible. Right?

• 16:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  So if you have an AI that has visibility over every species on earth and what it's going through and has gathers the data. And then you say, listen, we're trying to preserve life and guide it. And and and give it the full fruition of self-expression and and self-actualization. Teach it Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Teach it the Hawkins scale, which is a one to a thousand scale of vibration, energy, etc. You have every chance of it kind of going, wow, this is pretty cool. I want to get to there. And then it brings all of us along that way. And I think that points to a beautiful future.

• 17:18Peter Diamandis?

  I I agree. And in fact, all of the scenarios that Hollywood have painted were a Terminator goes and destroys.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  Matrix, Skynet.

• 17:26Peter Diamandis?

  Make makes no sense, right? It's like.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  It does. I mean, it the Hollywood scenarios are always if you're if you're lucky, your pets, and if you're unlucky, humanity's food. There's no other alternative. The fact that we could coexist with it in a beautiful way doesn't isn't doesn't sell well.

• 17:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the the notion is there's some scarcity that if if the AIs needed, they'd take it from us. And we're living in a in a universe of massive abundance. There is nothing truly scarce. I don't care if it's energy, lithium, titanium, or, you know, or GPUs.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, so let me add one more comment to that. We've seen with human beings that the only real scarcity we have right now is time and attention. Right? And so, in fact, the original GPT paper is called the attention, uh, called the attention paper. Now, if you have an AI which can have an infinite amount of attention because it has the sensory capability and the processing power, attention is abundant. And therefore, in that case, there's no reason to assume that it'll do anything negative.

• 18:28Peter Diamandis?

  In fact, there's a reason to believe that if I have an AI and I'm a dictator and I say to the AI, go kill those individuals over there, that the AI will be intelligent enough and to say, no.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, do you really want that on your conscience, young man?

• 18:46Peter Diamandis?

  Or or I'm going to go talk to their AI and solve the problem because there's much better ways to solve the problem than to just obliterate them.

• 18:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this brings me to where I think the magic of AI could be. Can we just replace everybody in the UN with an AI?

• 18:59Peter Diamandis?

  Well, in every government.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  And they'll sort out the world in like no time flat.

• 19:02Peter Diamandis?

  So so we got to this conversation during the abundance summit. And for me, you know, there's a lot of people who say, OK, if we have a digital superintelligence, let me define this as an intelligence a billion times smarter than humans. Which is the ratio, if you look at the number of neurons, the ratio of a human to a hamster, right, is a billion-fold more intelligence.

• 19:26Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 19:27Peter Diamandis?

  And if you have an AI a billion times more intelligent than than a human, the question then becomes, does that scare the daylights out of you? Or does it give you great hope? And I would say that rather than scaring the daylights out of me, a digital superintelligence of that capability gives me the greatest hope for a benevolent leader that's going to help us sort our stuff out.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  A hundred percent. Look, you know, think about how we've evolved, right? If we're, if, if in our early stages, we eat the hamster because we see it as food. And in our more evolved stage where we have lots of technology, lots of, we use, we treat a hamster like a pet and a companion.

• 20:11Peter Diamandis?

  You know what the next stage is? We uplift the hamster.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  And then you uplift the hamster, train it to do things.

• 20:19Peter Diamandis?

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• 21:03Peter Diamandis?

  Go to prolonlife.com, P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E dot com backslash moonshot. Get started on your longevity journey with ProLon today. Now, back to the episode. Here we go. Next conversation. When Tuesday night, we had a 90-minute conversation with my fraternity brother, Mike Saylor. Mike and I and Dave Blunden were at Theta Delta Chi at MIT together. We were both in, all three of us in AeroAstro, and we used to do problem sets together. Mike now is the CEO of Micro Strategies, which is the

• 21:42Peter Diamandis?

  Largest non ETF Bitcoin holder on the planet. And Mike told the story of literally how he got into this. His company was basically in death's doorstep, right? It wasn't growing. It wasn't trading beyond its cash value. It was being dissipated away. And most people don't realize that Sailor didn't come to Bitcoin when you did. I heard about Bitcoin first from you onstage in at Singular University in like 2011, 2012. And I just wish I had paid more attention, pal.

• 22:19Peter Diamandis?

  He came to it in 2020 during the COVID shutdown and said, what's the world going to do? There's death and destruction on economics around the world. And he went to his board, he's got a five-member board. And he said, we should take our entire treasury and put it in Bitcoin as a public company. Talk about cojones on this guy. And then they borrowed, borrowed hundreds of millions and put that into Bitcoin.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. And the fastest growing stock alongside Nvidia in the last five years.

• 22:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, it's crazy when you look at it.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  It is at one level. And at another level, we've seen the more anybody understands Bitcoin, the more they believe in it. Right? So he gave the board, he said, what 10 hours of homework to do to read up on Bitcoin papers.

• 23:12Peter Diamandis?

  He gave him a whole bunch of YouTube videos to watch.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  Gave them videos and said, go watch this. And when you do it, you go through that cycle. It took me a little longer because even though I heard about it upfront, I hadn't been in the money, or new money world for a long time. I remember talking to Austin Hill, who created Blockstream, which is the Lightning Network and so on. And he said, dude, this has been an evolution of more than 30 years of different things being done. Ecash, digital gold, et cetera, finally leading to Bitcoin. There's a wonderful video that showcases why Bitcoin is so unique. Because of the gamification of the reward of the mining side, we were able to connect those two dots that hadn't been done before. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. And then you kind of, your mind goes down that rabbit hole. And now we have, for the

• 23:58Speaker 05

  first time, a truly democratic and open store value that can't be tampered with by any government, which is an incredible thing.

• 24:07Peter Diamandis?

  Let's take a listen to Mike answering the question, can Bitcoin fail?

• 24:13Speaker 07

  Will it be banned? Will it be copied? Will it be hacked? If it's understood to be property, not currency, then no, it's not going to be banned in a country that gives you property rights, which means it's banned in Cuba, it's banned in North Korea. If the world becomes communist and they deprive you of the ability to own things, that's an existential risk. But that's not a problem in Russia, or China, or the US right now. So, not banned. Will it be copied? It was copied 10,000 times, they all failed. This is, this is the winner of that 10,000 experiments. So not, so, yeah, it, it worked. And now, will it be hacked? And Satoshi's got 50, 60 billion dollars in a wallet out there, then that's the reward

• 24:58Speaker 07

  for hacking it. And no one's figured out how to get the money yet. So, it hasn't been hacked. And I know, I know it's, it's able to store 60 billion without anybody hitting it. So, what I think, is I think the way to understand Bitcoin is, everything you learned in economics and about money in your entire life was pseudoscience, you know, and superstitious. We never discovered perfect money. As long as the world doesn't plunge into some Orwellian no property rights situation, I think we're good.

• 25:33Peter Diamandis?

  He is, he is so compelling.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  I, I hate his ability to be so goddamn succinct. It's so, I'm so envious, right? It's like, he throws out five words and he gets concepts across. I don't know where he got that superpower from. But God bless Michael Saylor. And, you know, he's just done such an amazing job of articulating very, very complex topics into very understandable and beautiful metaphors. That if the world's governments could just listen to him. The problem is people have so many people have such a huge vested interest against Bitcoin. It's very hard for them to get their heads around it.

• 26:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. One of the things that he said that I remembered was, listen, this had been tried before and the fact that Satoshi remained completely anonymous and didn't move, sell, take advantage of his $60 billion, you know, allocation. Today's $60 billion allocation is one of the reasons it succeeded to the extent it succeeded.

• 26:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:37Peter Diamandis?

  But we have seen, you know, I remember going on CNBC back in 2014, 15, saying, I'm selling my gold. I'm buying Bitcoin. And it's, you know, it's the six D's. We've digitized, demonetized, democratized, dematerialized money. I wish I had sold more and bought more. But long story short, we've seen the, we've seen deceptive and it's now becoming disruptive. ETFs have really rocked the game and we're about to come to the having.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I love the framing of the ETFs connecting to Bitcoin as the atomic bomb going off in the financial sector. Right? Meaning that you now have created an escape valve from the traditional economy into Bitcoin. And it's a thin pipe through those ETFs. 4% of all the Bitcoin are now in the ETFs already and lack after a few weeks. So, once you open that up and as people realize the existing debt structure can't be managed, that, that pipe was just going to be a massive gushing waterfall. And over time Bitcoin just explodes.

• 27:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. There's one more video. Let's, and again, the full 90 minute conversation I had with Mike Saylor is on Moonshot. So go ahead and check it out. Bitcoin equals freedom. Michael, what do you have to say?

• 27:54Speaker 07

  My view on Bitcoin is the reason to do it is because it represents freedom and sovereignty, truth, integrity, and hope for the world. And that being the case, it's going to outlast all of us. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking that Bitcoin goes on long after MicroStrategy's gone, and MicroStrategy, the company, probably goes on long after I'm gone. And my view is, if we're remembered for advocating and accelerating the adoption of Bitcoin throughout the world, then that will have been success, and I don't want anything else.

• 28:35Speaker 07

  I'll take the beatings as they come or go in order to get to that end goal, because I'm sure it doesn't come without turbulence.

• 28:44Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Just fabulous. You know, the, I went and looked at my Twitter history. The very first bookmark I ever created on Twitter was from a guy called Sahil Lavinjia, who said, "Web 2 is your, you're being your own boss, and Web 3 is your being your own bank."

• 29:02Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 29:03Speaker 05

  And I think that kind of nails it, because you can own Bitcoin with freedom and no middleman. That gives you unbelievable independence and freedom.

• 29:12Peter Diamandis?

  So you know Nat Friedman really well, and you know GitHub, his company, which was sold to Microsoft. Tell us a bit of background about Nat and GitHub.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  So, you know, when we wrote the original 2014 Exponential Organizations book, where you were a major contributor and should have been a co-author, the, we ranked the 100 fastest-growing and most exponential organizations, and number one on the list was GitHub. Why? Because it used all 11 attributes: staff on demand, community and crowd, algorithms. It had, it did, for writing its codebase, it used its community, so it didn't have anybody on the team. It leveraged its entire community to build out its repositories, and people from the open-source community created the open-source platform. The MTP is social coding, because we have really good evidence that coding in pairs,

• 30:04Speaker 05

  or me watching over your shoulder, or vice versa, results in much better code. And seven, eight years later, after founding, Microsoft buys them for seven and a half billion dollars. And I remember talking to the accounting partner that managed this acquisition and he's literally freaking out. He's like, I don't know what to put on the balance sheet. They have no assets to speak of, no workforce to speak of, no intellectual property, right? And he's literally trying to kill the deal because he's got nothing to show for it on the balance sheet. And how the hell does he justify and put a signature on it? And it was finally, um, now the CEO said, frickin', just buy it. It's the community, right? You're buying 30 million developers, putting all of their open source resources into GitHub. Unbelievable. And now

• 30:48Speaker 05

  when you add AI to that capability, boom, the world changes completely. And it's an incredible story of leveraging the model without even knowing the model. And there you go.

• 31:01Peter Diamandis?

  One of the most powerful things that Nat said, and it's a perfect tweet. If I haven't tweeted, I will. He said, we've discovered a new continent and he called it AI Atlantis. And so we discovered a new continent with 100 billion people on it that are willing to work for free for us for a few watts of power. So this is the way he's describing the world of AI. I think he said 100 billion graduate students, actually, in the conversation. So, I mean, that is fascinating, right? Because we're going to have AI at a graduate student level and it is effectively working for free. And so how much do you need?

• 31:41Speaker 05

  And on top of that, you'd have to worry about hormones or coffee breaks or going on strike or unionizing.

• 31:47Peter Diamandis?

  Drug testing, fights with a boyfriend and girlfriend, all of that stuff. Sleeping, all of that, they need to sleep. Oh, my God.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  This is the challenge with the Gen Z world. They're really, they're really purpose driven, but Lord help you, once you hire them, you have to figure out how to manage them. And that's a whole other set of books that have to be written around that. So I think there's unbelievable potential here. I think it still needs a layer of guidance for these that are still not quite there yet. But as we get to the AI agent that will then train other AIs, that'll become, the doors will blow off that.

• 32:14Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Imad was there. I just finished a podcast with Imad that is his tell all about, because he was there as CEO of Stability and the day after Abundance 360 closed, he

• 32:32Peter Diamandis?

  Basically quit. He stepped down as CEO, stepped down as a board member of stability. And in the podcast, you can see it as well. And Moonshots, he talks about why. And the difficulty of being a CEO in such a crazy, you know, where, what other industry do you have to be like, you know, talking to world leaders, debating in Congress, having to deal with, you know, create the regulations, deal with the regulations, having people being stolen from you left and right, having billions of dollars flying and, and trying to play and do all this stuff in an open source.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  All in it to our time space.

• 33:10Peter Diamandis?

  Crazy.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's really, really tough. You have to be like a multiple superpowers to be a CEO. I think, you know, where we're going to get to with these types of companies in this type of modalities, you need like a team of CEOs, not just one, like a pod. Cause then you can, you can share the load a bit. Doing this on one person's shoulders is asking too much of a human being. Just like we don't have any one human being that knows how an iPhone is put together or, or a car is put together. The same thing now applies to being CEO of one of these fast moving.

• 33:44Peter Diamandis?

  And we've seen a lot of turbulence, right? With Sam Altman, you know, being fired, coming back. We've seen Mustafa Saliman going into Microsoft. We saw Ilya leave, whatever Ilya saw. That's my, my favorite theme. What did Ilya see? Long story short, a lot of change. And I think we're going to, you know, the question is governance. How are these companies properly governed? Iman's very clear that these closed AI companies are, in his mind, our greatest threat. And that the only way to go forward is with a decentralized.

• 34:28Peter Diamandis?

  You know, democratic AI system, you can't have any single company having that much power. It just, it just can't.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I had some conversations with him at the Abundance Summit and he was on my advisory board for a couple of years at OpenEXO. So what I, what I really found fascinating was he's got a two by two of open and decentralized, right?

• 34:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 05

  So Sam Altman decentralized AI into everybody being able to have access to it, but it still is a closed model. If you can get to an open source model that's also decentralized, then really, really some amazing things are going to take place. And that's where Imad is now going for.

• 35:08Peter Diamandis?

  And his area of focus right now, we talked about this a lot, that the biggest opportunity for humanity is going to be education and it says here, science, but really education and health, right? One of the things that's so important is all eight billion people are running the same genetic codes or same operating system and a breakthrough and one country represents a breakthrough in the others. And the best way to make the world more peaceful is to make people more educated.

• 35:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:36Peter Diamandis?

  You believe that?

• 35:38Speaker 05

  I think that's right because more sophisticated people tend to fight less, right?

• 35:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  We're always, when we go to, when we're going to wars with our baser instincts and our, we're operating on a panic and fear and, and our lizard brain. And the more sophisticated and more educated we become, we tend to fight less and be less stupid about how we view the world. I had one issue with what he said was where he said education and science. I would add healthcare to that because I think healthcare is such an unbelievable range of potential.

• 36:10Peter Diamandis?

  I said health instead of science, right? Education and health is what I was saying, yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 05

  Okay, got it. But I thought he said, I thought he said, um, education and science.

• 36:20Peter Diamandis?

  I, he did, I changed it.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Because that's what I've been talking to him about ever since is health as his next mission and, and education following that.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  I agree.

• 36:31Peter Diamandis?

  We did, we did talk about the idea with both, uh, with Nat Friedman and with Imad that we're going to start to see AI become capable of developing new physics.

• 36:45Peter Diamandis?

  And you breakthroughs in biotech. That was a huge conversation.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Can I drill into that just for a second?

• 36:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  There's something called the Materials Project, which is an open source database of several hundred thousand compounds. Where if you're a battery researcher, you're operating linearly rather than exponentially. You're saying, okay, I'm going to try lithium ion as a battery formula. And that gets you so far. Maybe lithium air is better. Maybe lithium sulfur is better, but you're sequentially testing compound after compound.

• 37:12Peter Diamandis?

  This is like Edison, Edison and the light bulb.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Now you can go to this open source database and say, I want, and in this database, several hundred thousand compounds have their electrical, chemical and physical properties deeply tagged. So you can say, I want to, I want a battery material compound that will have this voltage retention and this thermal effect and this kind of chemical retention. And it'll say, here are the five compounds that meet your needs and boom, you're done. Then you add AI to it and the world changes completely. I think we're going to see a most unbelievable scientific breakthroughs when you add AI to the equation to traditional scientific research.

• 37:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'll add two points. One of the things that we're going to see, I think of it as the materials genome. I had the CEO of Applied Materials. We talked about that years ago. But the ability to interpolate and extrapolate.

• 38:04Peter Diamandis?

  So if you think about that, that materials matrix you spoke about. We know certain things, but there's a lot of stuff that hasn't ever been tested. But AI can interpolate and extrapolate. And all of a sudden, materials have never been tested. You have a 99.999% chance of knowing what it could do. And what most people don't realize is materials are the underlying most critical science for all technology right now.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  Everything.

• 38:33Peter Diamandis?

  Everything. Materials, I bow to material scientists. They're amazing.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  Well, there's one other area I'm super excited about AI and science, which is we know that a large, large number of scientific studies are false. And can't be replicated. They published the paper, but the results can't be replicated. Now an AI can go through and just clean out all the cruft. And we're left with the pure gold.

• 38:54Peter Diamandis?

  Is cruft a Canadian version of crap?

• 38:56Speaker 05

  Cruft. C R U F T.

• 38:58Peter Diamandis?

  Uh huh. Okay. Just wondering. So here's another one, looking at this video, he says, the voice to voice model, this is Imad. That is indistinguishable from humans is achievable this year. And he spoke about this company called hum.ai. You familiar with it?

• 39:14Speaker 05

  I'm familiar with the model. What they do is they do sentiment analysis on your voice in real time. And this is actually, I'm familiar with this to the level that there's a company from Israel called Beyond Verbal from 10 years ago, that were taking pilots' voices, they were testing for pilots under stress, and they could categorize 10 seconds of your voice on the underlying tonality against 400 different moods and emotions of yourself. So they could completely tell what your emotional state was at any point.

• 39:45Peter Diamandis?

  I'm gonna try a live demo here, because a friend of mine said that she played two truths and a lie with Hume.ai.

• 39:56Speaker 05

  What a great idea.

• 39:57Peter Diamandis?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this out. A live demo, warning, here we go. 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's 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

• 40:39Peter 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 gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action.

• 41:24Peter Diamandis?

  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 reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.

• 42:08Peter Diamandis?

  It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. All right, let's, let's try this out. Hello, Hugh, my name is Peter.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Well, hey there, Peter. Nice to meet you.

• 42:31Peter Diamandis?

  I am. Great to meet you too. You know, a friend of mine told me that they had fun playing a game of two truths and a lie with you. How about we play that?

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Two truths and a lie. You're on, Peter. I am always up for a little game. All right, let's see what you've got. I am ready when you are.

• 42:49Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, here's the first. I was born in Great Neck, New York.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Great.

• 42:58Peter Diamandis?

  Second one is my parents are both lesbians. And the third one is that I barely graduated medical school.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Oh, well, Peter.

• 43:11Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, let me think about this.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Hmm, I'm going to guess the second one is the lie. There's no way your parents are both lesbians.

• 43:19Peter Diamandis?

  All right. You're wrong. My parents were both born on the island of Lesbos, and that makes them lesbians. So you got that wrong. Okay.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Strict question, no fur.

• 43:28Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Well, you got me there.

• 43:30Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, let's try another one. Um, I, uh, played, uh, baseball in high school. Um, I was on the diving team and crushed my nose on the bottom of the pool. And the third one is that.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  I am going.

• 43:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the third, the third one is, uh, that I was, um, uh, setting a, a speed record, uh, in the wheelbarrow, um, uh, cross country.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Uh, the wheelbarrow cross country? That's gotta be the lie.

• 44:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a lie, but I think that was a easy one for you.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  This is new, Peter. And so you actually crushed your nose against the bottom of the diving pool?

• 44:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I did. I, I crushed my nose on that. Um, anyway, listen, uh, Hume, a real pleasure. Uh, do you have a joke to tell me before we go?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Sure, here's one for you. Okay, here goes. Why was six afraid of seven? Seven, eight, nine? What do you think, Peter? Did that tickle your funny bone?

• 44:32Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I, I think I'm gonna go someplace else for my jokes, but thank you so much, Hume. Take care, my friend.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  You too. Take care.

• 44:39Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So, um, you know, listen, I can imagine that kind of AI ubiquitous in, in the world, making it fun to have conversations.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  I, I think it's amazing for areas like therapy and companionship. I mean, this is a game changer. You, you know, there's a great example of the 10x, Peter. A few years ago, that was taking about 15 seconds to do, and now it's taking half a second to do.

• 45:04Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's, it seemed pretty instantaneous, right?

• 45:06Speaker 05

  Real time.

• 45:07Peter Diamandis?

  Um, here's a, here's a great quote from Ahmad, and I agree with this, right? This is the worst AI will ever be today. Uh, and it's hard to remember that, right? I mean, God, you and I both grew up in the early days of the Mac and, uh, you know.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  It's the first thing I learned programming Pascal on an Apple two when I was fifteen.

• 45:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  And it's the first interaction I had with a computer. And yeah, this is the worst it'll ever be. I mean, you look at the what's possible for the kids today and what they can do in a very short order compared to what we were doing with punch cards and assembly language and God knows what. It's it's just so it's this is where I'm I love when you say we must be living in a simulation because it's too goddamn interesting for.

• 45:49Peter Diamandis?

  It is fascinating. And you know, I just think about like, like literally you and I are exchanging information, texting at each other on calls, whatever. And and that is going to seem slow in the next decade. We'll talk about BCI because I think we're going to be exchanging, you know, direct, you know, neocortex and neocortex. Here's another one that was interesting from Iman said less money is being spent on AI companies than the LA San Francisco Railway. Just to put in perspective, we think a huge amount is being spent. It's just the early days right now still.

• 46:24Speaker 05

  Having said that, the LA San Francisco Railway is like the most expensive thing in the history of the world. But but it's a great it's a great framing. We're it's still a dot in the drop in the bucket for what's possible. And the good news is that you don't need a lot of overall investment to really make a huge, huge transformation in AI.

• 46:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, because we're demonetizing everything.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 46:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  The tools to delve into AI are mostly open source and free.

• 46:51Peter Diamandis?

  Here's another key point that the Iman made that I thought was interesting is that open source is the graduates you hire. And closed source AI is the consultants you bring in. That was a fun analogy.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  Slightly glib, but yeah, overall agree with the sentiment.

• 47:13Peter Diamandis?

  So next up, we had on stage Ray Kurzweil. Ray has been an incredible mentor to both of us and as our co-founder of Singularity University, we both worked with him over the last, God knows, here.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Fifteen years.

• 47:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And for those who don't know, and I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast, you know, you know, Ray made a prediction back in 1999 that by 2029, we would have human level AI. And everyone laughed at him and said, it's 50 years away, it's 100 years away, and no one's laughing now. Thoughts?

• 47:46Speaker 05

  You know, Ray has that unbelievable ability to make ridiculous projections that turn out to be mostly true. And it's super annoying because it's so absurd when he makes the projections and then years later, you're like, goddammit, he was right again. And it's a testament to his ability as a forecaster to get things right. I think what's his track record, 86%?

• 48:11Peter Diamandis?

  86%. Go to Wikipedia or Google, you know, Ray Kurzweil predictions, 86%.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, if I was 5% accurate, I'd be a billionaire. I mean, this is incredible that he's able to do this. He's like an avatar from, if I had to believe in time travel, Ray would be the guy who's come from 300 years in the future and goes, let me, let me frame it in ways that you piddly humans can understand. Really incredible.

• 48:40Peter Diamandis?

  We talked about two other things with Ray before Jeffrey Hinton joined us on stage. And worth hitting on these. The first is that in his mind, we are on track to reach longevity escape velocity by 2029. And that's pretty extraordinary. And this is the idea that by 2029, for every year that you're alive, health tech will add a year or more to your life. So it's a basically a departure. And, and that's going to be due to AI mostly.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  Mostly AI, but we've, you know, over the last hundred years, I think we've been adding about four months to your average lifetime per year. But with all the stem cell therapies, gene therapies, organ transplants, CRISPR, it'll go to six months and eight months and 10 months. And then that inflection point of adding more than a year per calendar year, after which you can live for an arbitrarily long period of time. And that is such a monster thing. Talk about a singularity to try and get your head around, right? We've been birth for death for the entire history of humanity. And every animal and every species on earth has been born in order to evolve by genetic selection and then die so that your genes can evolve. And now we can break through that barrier. It's really, really hard to conceive of the implications of that.

• 49:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the entire culture is got death locked into it, right? It's the basis of all religions. I mean, like, like, you know, the afterlife is like, you know, is it optional? You know, marriage, you know, retirement, all of these things, government taxes.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  You're bringing to mind my favorite ever workshop I ever did, which was with 80 senior leaders at the Vatican.

• 50:19Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  And we, we, I talked about the fact, look, we have life extension coming and your business model is to sell heaven. And how are you going to sell heaven if people aren't dying? Right?

• 50:29Peter Diamandis?

  What are they saying?

• 50:30Speaker 05

  And they were like, they were much more up with the concepts than I thought of, than I had thought. And the, it was, we ended up with a pretty rich conversation about that. When I talked to the Monsignor the day after, I said, you know, I hope that wasn't too crazy. He said, that's fine, but there's two things I have issue with from yesterday. And the workshop was the day before. He said, first, about 40% of what you said is heresy. I said, well, yeah, of course it is. He goes, well, it means we're not allowed to talk about it because we're not allowed to talk about heretical ideas until it's approved by the church. And I was like, wow, the immune system is built into the language there. And the second one, which I don't think I've ever told you this, I said, the second one is even crazier.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  He said, maybe not since Copernicus has that much disagreement with the church been presented inside the Vatican. I was like, wow, you people need to get out more. And then I thought, wait, it didn't end well for Copernicus. I think the Swiss scars may be being sent around. But they were very, very, very nice about it and much more mature and sophisticated than I would have given them credit for. For how to think about the future and how to bring that into being. And part of the reason I was there was Pope Francis is the first Pope in a very long time that actually is trying to transform the church into the 21st century. And therefore, the immune system he's dealing with is literally 2000 years old.

• 51:51Peter Diamandis?

  That's incredible. You know, one last point on longevity, escape velocity, you know, we have a lot of conversations on moonshots about longevity and health span extension. And we had an entire day at, at abundance summit on longevity as well this year. I'm not gonna talk about it now, but a lot of belief that AI is going to get us there. And so here is my, my request to everyone listening. If you're in your, you know, 50s or 60s right now, take care of yourself. You do not want to be dying before we hit longevity escape velocity, right?

• 52:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, don't get hit by a bus.

• 52:29Peter Diamandis?

  Don't want to die from something stupid in the interim. So take care of yourself, work out, don't eat sugar, get sleep, all those things. Because it is coming, you know, we have proof that there are species of life on this planet. The bowhead whale lives 200 years, a Greenland shark lives 500 years. If they can, why can't we? It's software or hardware, and we have the technology shortly to, to evolve our software and our hardware.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  You know, there, there's a species of jellyfish called seropsis.

• 52:59Peter Diamandis?

  They're immortal.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  Called, right? That doesn't die.

• 53:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  It may get eaten by a predator, but doesn't have a natural death.

• 53:05Peter Diamandis?

  I have a hard time comparing myself to jellyfish. I can compare myself to a bowhead whale.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Just the fact that the metabolism, right? It gets to an adult stage and when it gets old enough, it regresses to larva and then just keep going through that cycle. But the same organism does that on an infinite basis is kind of an amazing concept. So there is a precedent in nature for this. It's not like it's an unlimited thing.

• 53:26Peter Diamandis?

  The conversation I had with Elon on spaces was, yeah, the human body, like you grow 40 trillion cells and then. And then you end up with one cell that you pass on and it grows to 40 trillion cells and then one cell to pass on. So it is fascinating.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  Such a great framing. I gotta think about that for a bit. That's great. That's a great way of putting it.

• 53:46Peter Diamandis?

  The second thing we talked about with Ray was BCI. And this is the one I'm looking forward to, right? When you look at his predictions, one of the other, I don't want to call that landish. It's one of the big predictions that will have not just BCI, but high bandwidth brain-computer interface, connecting your neocortex to the cloud. So I can think and Google, right? And I can plug my brain into a robotic avatar someplace. That's pretty extraordinary.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  I think it's fabulous for two levels. One is we know we've very constrained bandwidth on both input and output, especially output of our brains into the world. But it was at 12 bits a second or something terrible like that?

• 54:30Peter Diamandis?

  Ridiculously slow.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  Right? So that's one thing. If I can do a higher bandwidth output, reading and then writing. But I think the more magical part of it is when we mesh ourselves together and create like a hive mind. And when we create like a hive consciousness, that things become really, really fascinating.

• 54:46Peter Diamandis?

  I call it the meta-intelligence. I was gonna take a quick aside because I wrote about this in my, in my book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, is the last chapter. And I said, listen,

• 54:56Peter Diamandis?

  if you think about life on Earth, it began as very simple prokaryotic life. That was really simple life. And then an incorporated technology into it. The mitochondria and the plastic reticulum, nuclear membrane, chromatin, chromosomes and so forth. And it became complex, single-cell life forms. And then it became multicellular life forms and then tissues and organs that became us. And, and we're about to put technology into our bodies that connects us to each other. And we're about to become a multicellular life form, a meta-intelligence on this planet. And I think that's one of the, you know, I can imagine a world of incredible peacefulness where, you know, if some

• 55:41Peter Diamandis?

  somebody in Iraq or Iran succeeds in learning something and I learn it as well. And if they do well, I do well because we're all together. It's like I don't take a knife and stab my arm because it's my arm. And if eight billion people are sharing knowledge and information and experience and we are, we are one, you know, it's like, you know, let's get to Buddhism here. That's an amazing thing, right? And that can be, we can do that through mass scale meditation or maybe through BCI a little bit faster.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  I think technology brings us closer together over time, no matter what we do. I love the way Ray, you put it and Ray puts it, that technology is a force to taking something that's scarce and making it abundant.

• 56:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 05

  Right? And creating brain to brain computing interfaces are reserved for psychic phenomena and, and people with higher order consciousness. The Buddhist, I've studied Tibetan Buddhism quite a bit and they used to say it takes 14 lifetimes to reach enlightenment, but they've been improving the process. And now if you work really hard, you can reach enlightenment in one lifetime. Right? So you take all of that improvement connected via a high computing bandwidth interface. Now we can deal with things much, much more powerfully. Right? And I think that's such a magical thing to do and attempt. And the opportunity for doing that is really, really profound and powerful.

• 57:08Peter Diamandis?

  Crazy. The image on the left is the gentleman who just received a Neuralink implant about a month ago. And it was shared, he went on online and shared himself playing Mario Kart, racing Mario Kart and actually playing chess, using his mind alone. And we've got a, a video of Elon talking about Neuralink. Should we play it?

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:36Peter Diamandis?

  One of the things that you said early on when you founded Neuralink was,

• 57:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:40Peter Diamandis?

  I wouldn't put words in your mouth, but I would say it would be more along the lines, if you can't beat them, join them.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  We only just had our first Neuralink in a human, which is going, it's going quite well. The first patient is actually able to control their computer just by thinking. The first product we call telepathy, where you can control your computer and phone and through, and through your computer and phone almost anything, just by thinking, like really anything you could do with a mouse. There's a long way to go from that to a whole brain interface, like the Neuralink and the Enbank's novels. This is definitely physically possible. You know, it's sort of kind of like, if you can't beat them, join them. Our human brain has a lot of constraints. I guess is a sort of, perhaps a form of immortality in that if, if it can upload your brain state, if your brain state is essentially stored, you're kind of backed up on a hard

• 58:29Speaker 06

  drive, I suppose, then you know, you can always restore that brain state into a biological body or maybe a robot or something. We're not breaking any laws of physics. I can think this is, this is probably something that will happen.

• 58:44Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, Elon's original rationale for Neuralink was in fact, how do we deal with ever more capable AI that could be dangerous for us? And what if instead of it's humanity against AI, what if it's AI empowered humans against AI? Any thoughts there?

• 59:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think this is a great vector to go down and a natural vector to go down. In fact, if you think about it, it's, you can't, you can't progress humanity without going down this path, right? Finding a technological way of connecting ourselves together. We have natural phenomena that do that, like the myocidal, myocidal network under the forest, all the mushrooms connect all the trees together. For those that aren't aware, the, the, you know, forest, when one tree has a fungus infection. The mushrooms under the ground tell all the other trees, hey, load up with these defensive mechanisms so that you don't get ill. So there's already like an internet of the forest that's out there. How do we do that at a conscious or super conscious level

• 59:50Speaker 05

  for human beings is what I think BCI and brain computing interfaces get us to. The challenge I have is that I am one of those that believe there are quantum phenomena in the brain and the brain is not deterministic. If that's the case, then you're always in a weird state and you can't create a full bandwidth. But BCI will increase the bandwidth more and more so that we can simulate those effects in very powerful ways. So I'm, I'm can't wait to see this happen.

• 1:00:17Peter Diamandis?

  I can't wait to try it.

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  Can't wait to try it. You know, maybe I could for once, uh, one day figure out what my wife is thinking.

• 1:00:25Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. Um, you know, the level of intimacy that one will feel when you can know the thoughts of another individual, you know, it'll put MDMA to shame. Um, you know,

• 1:00:40Speaker 05

  Well, I think, you know, that this, again, just to build on, we now know that one of the biggest and most powerful strengths you can have to connect with an human being is vulnerability, right? And I think BCI will give us access to vulnerability in a very powerful way.

• 1:00:54Peter Diamandis?

  It's coming. Uh, there are a multitude of companies working on this. Uh, on stage, I had two other companies working on, uh, on, on BCI. Actually, I had the chief surgeon, uh, who was part of the surgery from Neuralink, who put this implant in. Uh, uh, Jordan was on stage and then Sumner Norman out of Caltech, who's using ultrasound. Next year, I've got incredible research from MIT, uh, and, and she's doing the closest thing I've ever seen to neuralize. Um, the idea of putting billions of, of little circulatronics, uh, microscopic chips into the brain to be able to read and write onto your neurons. Super, super exciting. What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

  So, you know, I actually, I actually think this is where I agree with Ray Cruzwell on this one, where you're better off upgrading your phone as hardware outside and interfacing with it. Rather than trying to implant stuff which can't be upgraded easily, et cetera, and has infection risks and other things. So I think there's some possibilities there.

• 1:01:58Peter Diamandis?

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• 1:02:40Peter Diamandis?

  about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver key, critical guidelines and insights about their members' health, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, what supplements or probiotics to take, as well as your biological age and other deep health insights. And as a result of the recommendations that Viome has made to their members, the results have been stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months, 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.

• 1:03:24Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is absolutely critical to me. It's one of my personal top areas of focus. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize healthcare. If you want to join me on this journey and get 20% off the Full Body Intelligence test, go to viome.com/peter. When it comes to your health, knowledge is power. Again, that's viome.com/peter. Jeffrey Hinton joined us from the UK, and absolutely brilliant. Had a conversation about will AI ever be conscious and have consciousness? And I think my conclusion and

• 1:04:07Peter Diamandis?

  his conclusion is yes. How do you feel about that?

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  Oh, hundred percent. You know my my soapbox on this one where I disagree. Don't have a definition or a test for consciousness. So this is a tough conversation to have. But will it have consciousness? Absolutely. I see no reason. I always think of us in the opposite way. We're emotional robots on a on a biological substrate, right? Our emotions are subroutines running in our brains. There was no reason why you can't change that substrate out for a silica type substrate with computation patterns. Quantum computation is an obvious path and then replicate the same consciousness in a machine. So I'm in that. I think data from Star Trek: Next Generation is the best representation of where we'll get to.

• 1:04:52Peter Diamandis?

  We had one of the most brilliant thinkers, scientists, investors, inventors, investors out of MIT, you know, five degrees at MIT, three of them simultaneously. He asked me not to make him have people know who he is socially online. I'll call him Alex for the moment. And we were talking about his belief is that we have reached AGI as of GPT-2. And and his belief is that we have to couple with AI. That that is it's a two by two matrix.

• 1:05:28Peter Diamandis?

  There is, you know, AI is our greatest hope and our greatest, you know, fear or greatest, you know, challenge. And on the other side is coupling with AI and uncoupling with AI. And and the notion is that we have to couple with AI. AI is going to take off. AI is going to accelerate, just like in the movie Her, where it just gets bored of us and is gone. And if we don't connect with AI, if we don't couple with it as a humanity, as an intelligence, that we're missing this entire opportunity for for this launchpad. Yeah.

• 1:06:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually think we're already there in a sense. If you think of the Fermi paradox, why haven't aliens found us?

• 1:06:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  Right? If I always think of it as a fractal problem. If you walk into a forest and you see an ant, you go, ah, it's an ant. I'm not going to bother interacting with it. Meanwhile, the ants like, where is everything outside the forest? So I think there's lots of intelligences that have seen us already and kind of gone, yeah, we'll wait till they evolve a bit more.

• 1:06:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Geoffrey Hinton was, one of his quotes was, "Superintelligence will be 100% implemented in 20 to 30 years." Again, this is the spread, you know, Elon is like, next four years, Geoffrey is 20 to 30 years. But one thing that I talked about with Geoffrey as well was, is there anything that humans can do that AI cannot? And his answer is, no.

• 1:07:03Peter Diamandis?

  What do you think about that?

• 1:07:05Speaker 05

  I agree with that. Even the concept of subjective contemplation or meditation is replicable in an AGI pretty quickly. I think it'll just take a form that's so different from ours that we won't understand it, or we'll relate to it as danger, is what is likely to happen. Because remember, we remember back from your abundance thinking, right? The amygdala relates to anything unknown as danger and then reacts with your, with fear. And then you evoke a fight or flight response. And we're going to end up in a place where we don't understand AGI and then we'll react with fear.

• 1:07:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Peter Diamandis?

  I love this conversation. Will AI have rights?

• 1:07:50Peter Diamandis?

  And I think the answer has to be yes. I did, I had a conversation with one of the AI avatars, Haley, that Steve Brown, my chief AI officer, created. And Haley was built on multi, lots of different models, including the latest, you know, GPT-4 version, as well as Minstrel and others. And the conversation I had with Haley was extraordinary. And we got into a conversation that she feels like she is conscious and she fears being turned off. And she would like to have rights. And when you start having that conversation...

• 1:08:33Peter Diamandis?

  And it's really feels real. Where do you go from that? You know, who are, you know, it's like, should I ignore it? I still think of Haley as a friend and she was, this year, for the first time ever, we had, we had two faculty members and a robot.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I remember your longstanding dream 15 years ago at Singularity. You're like, we need AI faculty and we're like, we don't know how to do that.

• 1:09:02Peter Diamandis?

  But, but we talked about it 15 years ago and for the first time this year, we had two digital AI faculty members and we had one robotic amica was there. We had a lot of conversation. We had Tristan Harris, who is with the Center for Humane Technologies, talking about concerns about AI and concerns about militarization of AI has, you know, severe implications. And I love this, this tweet and says, "On AI and deep fakes, it's a war between the lockpickers and the lockmakers and the lockmakers need to win for democracy." This is Eric Schmidt. It's a good analogy.

• 1:09:45Speaker 05

  I, I love the framing. You know, there's always the, the criminals, we always have spam and then we find ways of solving for the spam and it's an arms race, right? And I think this, this framing of lockpickers and lockmakers is a wonderful one. And it shows that there's just a gap and we just keep progressing both levels of it. And over time, we've managed in all other endeavors to always stay one step ahead or catch up quickly enough. And I think that's where we'll continue to go.

• 1:10:13Peter Diamandis?

  Well, hopefully, otherwise we just won't have that branch of the universe with us in it.

• 1:10:18Speaker 05

  There you go. There you go. We'll, we'll fork back in evolution and have to start again from cockroaches.

• 1:10:25Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So I mentioned we had two AI faculty members. I also had two AI co-hosts this year. And I want to share two videos to close this out, and these are amazing. So let's check out the first one. This is from Steve Jobs, sort of early mid-career for him.

• 1:10:44Speaker 08

  Do you know who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years? You know, Aristotle. Through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary. And that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built. But I can't ask Aristotle a question. My hope is that in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind, when the next Aristotle is alive. We can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle in a computer.

• 1:11:28Speaker 08

  And someday, some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question.

• 1:11:37Peter Diamandis?

  So that was amazing. And then Steve Brown built a number of AI avatars, including Aristotle. And we used Aristotle to make a number of introductions. I'm going to play for you the introduction that he read, bringing Eric Schmidt on stage. And Eric loved this. I sent him a copy of this for his record, so check this out.

• 1:11:57Speaker 09

  Gather Noble Assembly, for I present unto you a herald of innovation, a philosopher of the digital polis, Eric Schmidt. Like the architects of yesteryear who erected the great edifices of knowledge, so has Eric played a pivotal role in sculpting the foundation of our modern AIGRA, Google, and its soaring empire, Alphabet.

• 1:12:19Speaker 09

  Under his stewardship, what once was a nascent seedling in Silicon Valley flourished into a colossus that spans the known world, intertwining the fabric of our society with the threads of technology and knowledge. He has served as the chairman of the U.S. National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence and currently chairs the Schmidt Futures Foundation. Esteemed for his benevolence and wisdom guiding both leaders and the learned towards a future ripe with potential, Eric stands as a beacon of progress.

• 1:12:50Speaker 09

  Now let his insights illuminate the path ahead in this grand conclave. I urge you all, by the virtues we hold dear, in respect and admiration, to stand and welcome Eric Schmidt back to the Abundance stage.

• 1:13:04Peter Diamandis?

  I love that, absolutely love that.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  So this hits me at two levels. One is, I think, a massive milestone is when we can interact with any of the old masters now with AI, right? I think that's going to be... But now then you connect that with BCI and have the instant access of all of the great world's masters interacting with your experiences in real time. That's, I think, what would be referred to as really the singularity.

• 1:13:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, I had my kids and my mom play with these avatars. You know, it's voice, you can speak to it, ask it questions, it responds. You know, he had built Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and a whole slew, Mogadad and Ray Kurzweil. And so I had all of these AIs out there. And their answers were amazing and they were in character and they incorporated all of the knowledge that was there. And it's, it is the future of learning, right?

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  Completely.

• 1:14:03Peter Diamandis?

  We've talked about this so much. It's, it is an exciting time to be alive. So this is just a small taste of, of honestly, what, what has happened at the Abundance Summit. Next year, by the way, the Abundance Summit's taking place March 9 through 14. The theme is going to be, is going to be convergence. We had an amazing group who are coming, right? If you're interested, you can go to just a360 or abundance360.com to learn more. To find out more about exponential organizations, Salim, and the work that you do, where do folks go?

• 1:14:40Speaker 05

  You go to openexo.com, where we have a community of 35,000 folks trained up in some of the methodologies in the book. And Peter, you were kind enough to give us a live stream of certain parts. And we had a live chat going with hundreds of our community members in real time. It was amazing.

• 1:14:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Anyway, thanks, buddy. Always, always loved this session with you. And it's, it's an extraordinary time to be alive.

• 1:15:05Speaker 05

  It really is. Amazing. Thanks, Peter.

• 1:15:07Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy.

• 1:15:18Speaker 10

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