Our Lives After the AI Revolution - Answering the Hard Questions | EP #155

In this episode, Peter answers the hardest questions about AI, Longevity, and our future at an event in El Salvador (Padres y Hijos). Recorded on February 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. _____________ 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.

• 0:05Peter Diamandis?

  Please, we have, yes, well, thank you, thank you.

• 0:15Peter Diamandis?

  We have some questions in the back over there, two young ladies.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  I am not a leader, I am very confused.

• 0:29Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, good, you're confused, we'll shed some light.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  You know, watching and listening to you,

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I ask myself, why I want to live a decade more? If I'm not gonna do anything, because robots are gonna think for me, robots are gonna do the job 24 hours, and I mean, I studied physics, so I'm not a person that only works by hands. My mind had to work too. But I see all this, and it's perfect to find out about diseases for people not suffering, but then, what are we gonna do with the people that last their life for longer? And we have numores, and we have the robots that are gonna work.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  So what are all those people going to do?

• 1:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  How they will live, I cannot understand that. I am very confused.

• 1:33Peter Diamandis?

  Two thoughts for you, and I appreciate what you're saying, because I think the greatest challenge we're gonna face is one of purpose coming forward. And I think one of the things we have to do is to up-level our ambitions, up-level our purpose. First of all, the majority of the world, we're lucky. The majority of the world are doing jobs that they don't love, they never dreamed about. It's what puts food on the table for them. It's what gives them insurance. They didn't dream about, you know, whatever the job might be. And so, one of the goals is how do we allow people to separate what I love doing

• 2:18Peter Diamandis?

  from what I have to do to survive and work?

• 2:23Peter Diamandis?

  The second thing that's important to realize is our lives today are extraordinarily different. If you've gone back to somebody 100 years ago who had to plant their own foods and raise their own livestock, their life, if you said this is the lives we have today, they would have a hard time understanding the purpose of our life today compared to what it was like, maybe not 100 years, maybe 200 years ago. You know, work is a recent invention. Before, for most of human existence, life was about survival. You know, technology

• 3:08Peter Diamandis?

  is the means by which we take a vacation from survival. We're going to have to learn how do we partner with technology to set objectives and goals far beyond our current expectations. I don't have an answer, but I do know that it's on our watch. This is our responsibilities. This is coming. There's no on-off switch. There's no velocity switch. This progression is happening, like it or not. And so we have to be focusing on how does it impact our families, our nations, and humanity as a whole. Please.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Hi, thank you. I have a question. You said AI is taking all the information from data, from Instagram, Twitter, and information that everyone puts around. And that's where my worry comes, because the information that's coming there, it's not necessarily confirmed, verified, or credible. And most of the people that put a lot of information there have enough time to put information that it's sometimes, as they say in the IT business,

• 4:25Peter Diamandis?

  Garbage in, garbage out.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Garbage in, garbage out. And that's where I'm worried, that some of the data that might come in a lot of internet, of artificial intelligence data that we take as a base might come with trash. What are we doing about it? Or what are the people involved in that world right now assuring us that what's coming out is really credible?

• 4:52Peter Diamandis?

  I hear you. There's a friend of mine, Mo Gudat, he wrote a book called Scary Smart. And one of the analogies he talks about is that we are raising a new child with these AI systems. And the values you teach that child, the knowledge you give it, the food you give it, shapes its life. He says, for example, in the story of Superman, Superman lands in Kansas, he's raised by a very loving, God-fearing family, the Kent family, he becomes a superhero. If that same super-being from Krypton had landed in the Bronx in a drug den, he would become a supervillain.

• 5:36Peter Diamandis?

  It's very important what we, how we teach our AI systems, what values we give it. I do believe, in the final result, this is how I think about it, that the most intelligent systems, as they mature to digital superintelligence, will be abundance-loving, will be peace-loving. I think with greater intelligence comes a greater appreciation for life. My concern is not artificial intelligence, it's human stupidity, first and foremost. And it's, it's the next five years that I'm the most concerned about, as these AI systems are coming online and people are beginning to use them for nefarious reasons.

• 6:20Peter Diamandis?

  I think in the long term, we're fine. I think it's the next five, six, seven years that we have to be critically careful about. There is no answer there, right? Elon says we need to build our AIs to be maximally curious and truth-seeking. Sounds great, not sure what that really means. Okay, please, over there, and then we'll come, yeah. You guys will cut me off when you, when you... Okay.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Can you hear me?

• 6:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  You spent a lot of time illustrating us about human intelligence and longevity. I'd like just to hear a couple of your thoughts on our interaction with nature, with the environment. If we extend life by 10 or 50 years, do you see the way things are going as human life sustainable in the long term in the planet?

• 7:18Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. So, yes, I spend my life deeply in the tech world and in the biotech world. And I'm a... I think one of the things that we have the ability to do is use technology to reduce the burden that humans have on the planet and to maintain our planet. Today, for example, 1/3 of the non-ice landmass, 1/3 of our land is used to grow crops to sustain our livestock. Right? And so, I could be onstage, and I am onstage, for five days

• 8:01Peter Diamandis?

  talking about how do we produce the next generation of foods with vertical farms, with cultured meats, right, from a stem cell to... Instead of growing an entire cow, an entire pig, an entire chicken, we're just going to grow the meat product and we're going to make it the best protein with the best fats. And so, we can have this positive impact. I think we are emotional beings and being in nature is critically important. The challenge is, I don't know how many folks here have teenagers or young kids, I'm curious how many folks here, how much do they spend on video games? Right? That's the world they're living into and it's our responsibility to create that balance for them.

• 8:52Peter Diamandis?

  I'll leave it at that if I could.

• 8:55Peter Diamandis?

  Please, yes, and then we'll come here.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Hi Peter.

• 8:58Peter Diamandis?

  Hi.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  Great talk.

• 9:01Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Love what you shared. I think you have seated here a lot of people that have the potential and the opportunity to change the future for Latin America. And if you were to start a country or a set of companies, knowing what you know now and what's coming and the age and the era that we're living, what would be the things that you would focus on to maximize this opportunity?

• 9:28Peter Diamandis?

  Great question. I have two answers. First, last week Abu Dhabi announced they're going to transform their nation state to an AI governance. So AI is going to be driving all the decision making. So if you were starting again, I would start with AI as the fundamental basis for the governance and operations of a country.

• 9:54Peter Diamandis?

  Let's start there. The best educators in the world will become AIs. If you think about this, Google is the identical for the wealthiest children and for the poorest children on the planet. It's fully democratized, right? In the same way, we're going to see AI being the most powerful teacher on the planet. It's going to know your children's favorite colors, their language skills, their movie stars, they'll customize everything. And so the ability for an AI to become your educator, an AI will become your best physician. And the cost of education and the cost of medical care will precipitously drop towards zero.

• 10:36Peter Diamandis?

  If I were building a nation, I had this conversation with El Salvador's amazing president last night. I would build this as a longevity health country. I would basically say, let's bring, it's got the regulatory capabilities, let's bring the best scientists here, the best entrepreneurs here, let's create a regulatory arbitrage that makes this the place that the world's billionaires and the world's greatest leaders come to because the best health services are here. Alright, that the, the cutting edge of longevity science takes place here.

• 11:16Peter Diamandis?

  And, and the environment of this beautiful environment, because mental health and being one with nature is so important. So, those are the two areas. It comes back to me, you know, AI and longevity are the two most trillion dollar markets coming.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 11:32Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. Please.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  Thank you, Peter.

• 11:39Peter Diamandis?

  Please, please. Ladies first, ladies first, please.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  Alright.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  Talk, talk to us about the economics of longevity. Right now, it seems like this is a conversation that only the upper class can entertain.

• 11:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  It is so expensive.

• 11:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  Like, how much does it cost to go to Fountain Life for a full body checkup?

• 12:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 06

  Many tens of...

• 12:02Peter Diamandis?

  So, let me, let me, let me address that. So, right now Fountain Life is nineteen thousand five hundred bucks, twenty K for the upload, but you get a medical team with you for the year. You get a, a functional medicine doctor, nurse, dietitian, and health coach.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  No, right.

• 12:18Peter Diamandis?

  So, it's a whole team. Expensive. We have a version of it for sixty five hundred dollars. It will demonetize over time.

• 12:25Peter Diamandis?

  To answer your question specifically, the current belief is that when we get to real longevity treatments, real treatments that can reverse your epigenetic age, it is likely to be a gene therapy.

• 12:40Peter Diamandis?

  It's a mechanism by which we're going to come into the cells of your body, forty trillion human cells, and we're going to modify your genetics to set you back to a more youthful state. Today, gene therapies for rare diseases is expensive. It's like a million dollars, two million dollars. However, we have a proof point of a gene therapy that was made for a dollar. And this is the mRNA vaccines. When you are producing something at the scale of billions of doses, the price drops down to near zero. And so the mRNA COVID vaccines are gene therapies.

• 13:22Peter Diamandis?

  There was introducing nucleic acids into the cells that were modifying your genome. Forget about the issues of vaccines for a moment. And there's one thing we have as an advantage. All eight billion people on earth have the same disease of aging. And so if something works for someone in Manhattan, it's going to work for someone in El Salvador and someone in Mozambique. And so the belief and the goal is that these therapeutics, when they actually work, are going to be cheap and available to everybody. Same thing happens in technology. The first cellphone is a briefcase and it costs, you know, a hundred thousand dollars

• 14:05Peter Diamandis?

  and it drops a call every block. Then when it gets really good, there's eight billion of them, seven billion of them, and it costs forty bucks.

• 14:13Speaker 06

  So by when do you think longevity for all would be possible?

• 14:18Peter Diamandis?

  I think we'll see this by 2040. I think we'll see this in, I think, the first few years when things don't work so well. The richest people in the world will try it. They'll be the guinea pigs. And then by the time it starts working really well, that the prices will drop precipitously. There was a study done by London School of Business, Oxford and Harvard, that said adding one productive year of longevity is worth thirty-eight trillion dollars to the global economy. And so imagine if at the top of your game, you're not forced to retire, you have, you feel amazing, you've got the energy, you've got the best network you've ever had.

• 15:03Peter Diamandis?

  Why would you ever want to retire? And so you remain productive in society. Whatever that means with the robots and the AIs, I don't know yet. Thank you. Please.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  Thank you, Peter. My question is around what's your perspective around education, the future?

• 15:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  And how do we prepare our kids for a life of abstinence?

• 15:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  Ensuring they have critical thinking, they have the emotional part. Can you shed some light on that, please?

• 15:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, and this will be our last question. I think our educational systems are massively broken. I think they are not preparing our kids for the future that they are about to inherit.

• 15:47Peter Diamandis?

  When you ask me, if you ask me, what am I teaching my thirteen-year-olds?

• 15:52Peter Diamandis?

  It's very different. I'm not teaching them about AI or biotechnology. The number one thing I want them to learn is what their passion is.

• 16:02Peter Diamandis?

  Because if they're clear, I, at age nine, my passion was space. You know, I saw Star Trek, the Apollo program, and that was it. I was off. And everything I've ever done was driven by that eternal, innate motivation. So helping your kids find their purpose is... Because technology is going to get better and better and better. And at the end of the day, they'll use whatever the latest technology is to enable their purpose. And this is true for families, it's true for CEOs, it's true for everybody. The second thing is asking them to learn how to ask great questions.

• 16:39Peter Diamandis?

  In a world where you can know anything,

• 16:42Peter Diamandis?

  in a world of a trillion sensors, where AI enabled, and you can know anything,

• 16:48Peter Diamandis?

  asking the best questions differentiates you. It's not what you know, it's the questions you ask. So I teach that to my kids, and I teach that with the CEOs I mentor. And so, for me, those are like the two fundamental things. Having said that, I think that, uh, that schools should not fear the use of AI. AI is not, uh, you know, a shackle, it's a rocket ship. But what happens is if you're teaching this, and you say, "I'm going to use AI," and it makes it really easy, well, then, no. Let's teach this and use AI to get here. Right? So it's, how do we, how do we reinvent the educational experience?

• 17:32Peter Diamandis?

  In the future, I'll give one last example. We're gonna be living in virtual worlds. And so my, my parents and great grandparents and family comes from, from Greece. And if I wanna someday understand my Greek heritage, or my, my kids understand Greek heritage. Today, they can open up a book and, and read about it. Boring. Or in the future, they put on a pair of Apple's Generation 10 VR glasses. And they're in ancient Greece. And they're in the Acropolis, in the Agora. And there's a guy sitting on a block of white marble over there in a toga. And he says, come over here. And I go over and he says, hi, I'm Socrates. Let me show you around.

• 18:15Peter Diamandis?

  And I live the experience with them. I mean, this is where we're gonna go with education. Whatever you wanna learn. I'll, I'll leave you on this last thought. Please, this weekend, tonight, not tonight, this weekend, next week. Open up Gemini 2, or ChatGPT, or Claude 3.5. And have a conversation. Take a chance to educate yourself on anything. Like, tell me about AI. Tell, and then just go down the rabbit hole. Infinitely, infinitely patient. Anyway, an honor to be here. I look forward to meeting all of you through the day.

• 18:55Speaker 07

  One, one last question, please.

• 18:56Peter Diamandis?

  All right, please, it's your, it's your event, so, yes.

• 18:59Speaker 07

  As you know, ChatGPT is my bestie.

• 19:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  So obviously, I have to bring her to your wonderful presentation. And I ask her, what would you ask Peter Diamandis if you had the opportunity?

• 19:10Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  And she said, here's what I ask, my dear. You often talk about abundance and exponential technologies solving humanity's biggest challenges. But given geopolitical instability, regular, regulatory barriers, and societal resistance to change. What do you see as the biggest obstacle preventing this future from happening faster?

• 19:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. So, human stub, human stub, tell your bestie, I appreciate.

• 19:42Speaker 07

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 19:44Peter Diamandis?

  So I appreciate, I appreciate your question, ChatGPT.

• 19:50Peter Diamandis?

  So, human stubbornness and human pride and human emotions are probably the greatest block that we have. You know, one of the things that I love about the large language models is their ability to help us think differently. One of the experiments I did, I don't know, a month or two ago, I said, listen, I'm about to go into Israeli Palestinian negotiations. How would you negotiate that? How would you provide me a, a logical construct? And it's amazing, right? If you're on the right and someone's on the left, you can ask the AI to help, how would

• 20:33Peter Diamandis?

  you explain this to someone on the other side to make it so that they understand it? Or, how can I explain this to my wife in a way that she'll appreciate it?

• 20:44Peter Diamandis?

  And we don't know how to think, other than the way we know how to think.

• 20:50Peter Diamandis?

  But the AI models can help us think about things differently. You can tonight go and say, this is my company, this is what we do.

• 21:01Peter Diamandis?

  How would I, how am I most likely to be disrupted? And what should I do to prevent that? How would Steve Jobs solve the problem I'm facing? The ability to have an AI system help you think differently is one of the greatest assets that we're going to be using it for. So again, with, thank you so much for your attention. I'm grateful.