Taylor Swift AI Deep Fakes, AGI, Sam Altman & the Latest in Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #84

In this episode, Peter and Salim dive into a new series: this time discussing the latest news in Tech, Taylor Swift deepfakes, Sam Altman, and more. 04:20 | The Impact of AI on Humanity 55:18 | The Power of AI and VR 1:00:08 | The Struggle to Update Institutions Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University, and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. Join Salim’s OpenExO Community ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:09Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  Twitter is essentially the global public square. And if you start acting out in a global public square, the police come and take you away.

• 1:08Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm gonna do. This is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe.

• 1:20Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome, everybody, to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with one of my dearest friends on the planet, an extraordinary thinker, someone who, you know, Salim Ismail, all I can say about you is we have fun together. And there's probably no subject we will not dive into. Sometimes we dive in and hit the bottom of the pool, and sometimes we fly. How you doing today?

• 1:44Speaker 03

  I'm very well. I'm doing great.

• 1:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, those of you who don't know Salim, he was the first president of Singular University. We can talk about how I conned him into running SU. He was the head of the incubator, was it Brickhouse or Brickworks?

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, Brickhouse.

• 2:01Peter Diamandis?

  Brickhouse at Yahoo. He's the head of OpenEXO. He and I are writing a book together on exponential organizations. It's the second book in the series. Salim wrote the first one. I was supposed to co-author, but my publisher wouldn't let me do it. Long story is there. Godfather to my two boys. Salim, where are you today, pal?

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I'm in Miami, dealing with the hurricane.

• 2:25Peter Diamandis?

  Oh yeah, that's right. I was talking to my mom and she's in Boca and dealing with the same thing.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, you know, it's a pain in the butt. Luckily.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  It is. In fact, it's one of the reasons we came to Miami eight years ago from the West Coast. I was because we ran a bunch of numbers and worked out that in about twenty, twenty-five years, Miami's gone. So better enjoy it while it's here was one of the rationales we had for getting here.

• 2:50Peter Diamandis?

  Oh my God. You know, I wanted to always create a map of the United States that had like the dangers laid out. Like, you know, Miami, you know, Florida would have hurricanes, California would have earthquakes, you know, the Midwest would have boredom as the major disaster that you, anyway.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  It's kind of incredible what you were doing. You know, people moved to the Pacific Northwest because they thought it was safe. Uh, and then you have wildfires unexpectedly, heat waves. I remember talking to climate gurus about the, the heat wave last year. And they said, we can't even create models that encompass that. Like, we're just, we just can't even replicate that.

• 3:28Peter Diamandis?

  Well, you, you know, uh, uh, Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest is in for a massive earthquake sometime soon.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:37Peter Diamandis?

  I mean.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  It's, it's one of my favorite stories of, of the inability of human beings to deal with systemic change. Um, it's worth telling the story if you.

• 3:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, go for it. I've got all the time in the world.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  So in seventeen hundred, there was like a nine-point something earthquake, one of the biggest ever. Uh, fifty miles off the coast of Seattle took out a thousand miles of the coastline from Vancouver all the way down to Oregon. And so, and there's been rumblings under the water recently. So they've been like going, hey, wait a minute. Uh, so they start researching and they go over to Japan because they worked out that this must have created quite a tsunami. Uh, and asked, hey, did you see a tsunami? And sure enough, at that time exactly, a stonking huge tsunami came over the Pacific and took out half of Japan. It's that big. So they're like, wow, this is so great. We found it fantastic. And they're starting to leave and the Japanese researchers go, uh, wait a minute. You know, this happens repeatedly, right? They're like, wait, what?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  And it turns out because of the Japanese have been keeping records for thousands of years. It turns out every quarter, every two hundred and fifty years like clockwork, this happens. And a giant tsunami comes over and takes that half of Japan every two hundred and fifty years. So they come back to Seattle, kind of really unnerved and start looking at tree rings and core samples. And find out, holy crap, this is the earthquake. It's been happening roughly every 250 years for 20,000 years, and the last one was 300 years ago.

• 4:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  So any minute now, this earthquake is gonna go off and take out a thousand miles of the.

• 5:05Peter Diamandis?

  So if this podcast releases on the day that happens, I don't know if it's gonna be prophetic or people are gonna blame us for it.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Well, you know what blows my mind is if you ask people in Seattle, many of whom know this story, you go, does this affect your decision to buy a house, whatever? No, they are, everybody's merrily going about their lives as if nothing happened. That part I don't get. That part, like, we're so bad at that.

• 5:25Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's, it's the human, it's the human challenge of we're dealing with, we don't actually value the disasters that are coming uh in any way, shape, or form that makes sense. And we, all we focus on is what's happening this morning, like in politics or on Twitter.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Well, as you're fond of saying, everything important happened within a day's walk, right?

• 5:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the brain, that's the mind, human mind evolved 100,000 years ago, a million years ago, and it was nothing that affected you that was not within a day's walk that you care about, and nothing changed generation to generation was always the same. And, and that innate wiring is a pain in the ass right now.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  It is a pain in the ass. We, we actually, I think the only way to solve humanity is an intervention into our brain chemistry and brain makeup. I mean, it's really the only way.

• 6:13Peter Diamandis?

  Is that plant medicine or is that?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  I think that those are the beginnings of it, but there's all sorts of uh other mechanisms, whether it's uh brain uh computing interfaces or something. But we need, we needed intervention because we're kind of operating off our limbic, limbic systems for so much of it, right? Like the news cycle that you like to talk about.

• 6:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's, it's still the animal brain. We're, we're operating from a position of fear and scarcity. And it's, um, it's a problem.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  I, I remember when I was researching this, um, we had this lizard brain, and then the neocortex evolved very, very fast. Um, and when you talk to anthropologists, it was literally like a tumor got created.

• 6:51Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's a couple of million years ago, uh, we created the frontal lobe and, and the neocortex. I mean, it's fairly recent.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  When you talk to those guys, it's what's amazing is how fast it grew. It didn't kind of evolve a layer by layer by layer. It went from half a liter to 1.5 liters almost overnight and in genetic terms. And, uh, and it didn't replace the old brain. It just sits above it. And so this is where religions are often called the ultimate marketing. Because all religions work by taking a young child with whose neocortex hasn't fully formed. You give them a bunch of absolute truths like Jesus is the son of God, Mohammed is the last prophet, Mary was a virgin, whatever. And then you bind it into them with ritual repetition and a lot of sweets. And once it's wired in, you can't get rid of it. You provoke it later, you end up with a fight or flight response.

• 7:42Peter Diamandis?

  We are so screwed. Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels, and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do. And sugar is not good for your brain, or your heart, or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar. For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to levels.link/peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership.

• 8:26Peter Diamandis?

  It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. Speaking of screwed, how are you feeling about Elon and Twitter these days? I mean, it's...

• 8:38Speaker 03

  You know, I could go both ways on this. On one level, it's a very, very complex problem that you can't just take a meat axe to, right? So you've got a one end, you want freedom of speech, in which case you get this vomit of racist and misogynist crap. And on the other end, you want advertisers. And so you can't have both. And so you have to pick which one you want. And managing that balance is very, very delicate. I think the way to think about this is Twitter is essentially the global public square. And if you start acting out in a global public square, the police come and take you away.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  You can't just stand there and throw out stink bombs or start shooting people.

• 9:25Peter Diamandis?

  You can't, because if the police don't come to take you away, the people who are worth hearing or, you know, speaking to go away. Either we keep some sanity or not. But it's interesting, I remember...

• 9:39Speaker 03

  So I think Twitter should be a utility. And it should be an open, it's the commons. And it shouldn't be owned by one company and it shouldn't be, uh, it should be delicately moderated by government, but not heavily.

• 9:51Peter Diamandis?

  What, you want to make Twitter a government organization?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Well, no, but, but if you have a town square, you need some governance around that to say you can't drive your cars through it at high speed. You can't just yell at everybody that goes by. You have, we have norms that, that operate and laws that, that work for this and you need some of those laws.

• 10:10Peter Diamandis?

  Let me, let me slow this down a second and, and talk about, um, the fact that Elon, on top of all the other things that he's doing. You know, launching rockets and, uh, and brain computer interface and reinventing the energy ecosystem and drilling tunnels. Decided to jump onto buying Twitter and I, but here's the other question. How, you know, I know he tweets. I, I've direct messaged and tweeted and, and all of that, but I mean, the volume, I, I can't imagine he's putting all of those tweets out himself. There's got to be an army of.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  No, there's, there's, I'm sure there's an army of tweets. The one person that I know that actually edits every tweet that, that, uh, he, uh, before they go out is actually the Pope. The Pope actually looks at every tweet put out under his name and unauthorized.

• 11:02Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, I thought you, I thought you're saying the Pope actually edits Elon's tweets.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  No, but, uh, there's, there's definitely an army or he's, he's so, uh, active on that, that he's not, you know, I, I think many of us with that brain of his would rather him focus on. The really hard problems, right?

• 11:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Well, listen, I'm an investor in, in Tesla and in SpaceX, full disclosure. So I'm not happy he's spending his time on, on Twitter. Though I remember years ago when I asked him, what would you, what would you want to, uh, conquer next? Uh, he did have a vision. He called it Pravda, which, uh, is sort of the, you know, the, the Russian version of truth. Yeah. Um, and, and so if you could advise him, would you go back and say, don't buy Twitter?

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Oh, I think i- if he could go back and undo it, he would do it. He would choose or trying to do forty five billion is a ridiculous amount. I think the actual value. So um I know a bunch of the ex Twitter engineers and at Burkhouse, many of my guys went and worked at Twitter and vice versa.

• 12:07Peter Diamandis?

  So what are they, what are they saying?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  They basically think it's really worth about ten to twelve billion. Um so forty five billion is absurd at one, at one level from a revenues type, type of thing. However, however, let me spin the other way. If there was somebody that could take on Twitter and go after it, it would be Elon. Right? Because he's got the gumption. He doesn't give a damn. He, he can focus on what's the best thing to do and just do it. Uh but I think that, that, that tension between free speech and advertisers will, will kill it.

• 12:38Peter Diamandis?

  So the question is, how many things can he give a damn about is the biggest challenge. I remember back in two thousand and four, uh he joined my board of trustees at X Prize. I was on my way to go get Larry Page to join the board and I called Elon, who I, you know, could call on a regular basis back then before he became techno god incarnate. Um and I, and I asked him, would you join the board? I'm about to go meet with Larry Page. I want him to join our board and if you're on the board, he may likely join. He said, yeah. And that was it. And Larry joined the board. It was great. Uh uh fast forward eight years later, he calls, he says, listen, Peter, I need to, I'm jumping off all boards other than SpaceX and Tesla because I need to focus on those companies.

• 13:24Peter Diamandis?

  And he did, um until now he's on everything, doing everything at the same time. So how many things can, I mean, the guy is, people don't realize how extraordinarily brilliant he is. He's not just the CEO of Tesla. He's the chief engineer, right? I mean, the Merlin engines, the uh Falcon nine Falcon heavy starship. They have emanated from his mind. Uh he is a, you know, genius extraordinary. And, and Tesla, while he didn't originally found the company, much of its vision, its execution.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 13:59Peter Diamandis?

  Is is him. So.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:01Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the question becomes if he's not building spaceships and reinventing our energy ecosystem.

• 14:08Peter Diamandis?

  You know, what is he? What is he? How does he spend his time?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  I mean, look, solving the public discourse problem is a worthy problem. But it it it's not an engineering problem. It's a cultural problem. And so, given the incredible engineering nous and gumption and capability he has, he's better off focusing on brain computing interfaces or avatars or getting us to Mars. Uh, we need an off-planet strategy desperately the way we're doing it, right?

• 14:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  And so, uh, my, if I could, you know, something we could do is put together a cabal of ten or fifteen people. And and he he has to do what the vote, what the connective vote is of what he should focus on. Don't focus on that. Focus on that.

• 14:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the challenge is he's never found anybody who he would have be the CEO of Tesla.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:59Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, I mean, he's he's, I've had these conversations where he said, like, you know, if I could find a CEO to run Tesla who is a great CEO that I could trust, please, I would love to have him do that so I can focus on SpaceX. You know, going to Mars is in fact his number one objective, making humanity a multi-planetary species. So, uh, it's the the biggest challenge is not the value of Tesla. It's it's the uh, it's the time division multiplexing of Elon's brain.

• 15:27Peter Diamandis?

  You know, and I don't know, uh, I hope he settles it. I hope he finds somebody who can run it for him. Uh, talking about current, uh, sort of massive, uh, situations going upside down. Uh, FTX, holy shit.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, uh, you know, Abe, uh, when I had a bunch of my people who are kind of deep in the crypto web three world, they've been saying to me for about a year and a half that FTX is is not going to work. Um, they're offering insane interest rates. And at that level, you get into a Ponzi scheme. So that's great for short-term market penetration. But at some point, that that's going to come back to roost and you burn through your cash reserves. So it's kind of, uh, there's a few big hand grenades left in the crypto world to to deal with, Tether being one of them. And the and the creditworthiness of the USDC and Tether. But once we're through those, I think then we actually see this as a positive thing.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Because it's clearing out the the the crud for all of the incredibly worthy projects that are out there. So I think we'll hit bottom at some point in the next two, three months. I think there'll be one more big sell off as we hit end of year tax. Things where people have to reconcile taxes, there'll be a bunch of selling and buying. I think January, we start a new bull market in crypto that'll be incredible.

• 16:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I was watching some of the predictions, both from Kathy Wood and from, um, uh, who is our buddy? Uh, well, besides Michael, our buddy who bought all the Bitcoin in the auction, um, uh, Draper.

• 17:09Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's we're gonna hit quarter million, a million dollars. And and so, you know, people keep on predicting these highs. But no one holds their feet to the fire when they keep on missing their uh, missing their predictions. It's like it's, I guess it's just easy to predict it's gonna be, uh, you know, a hundred thousand, a quarter million, a million dollars of Bitcoin. I mean, I hope it is.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  I'm in I'm in the maximalist camp, right?

• 17:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  The it it either goes to a million dollars of Bitcoin, it goes to zero.

• 17:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I agree. I agree with that. I agree with that.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  If you've got something that's ten thousand, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars, and it's either gonna go up to a million or down to zero, this is the biggest asymmetric bet you could ever make.

• 17:52Peter Diamandis?

  That's a good point.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  So so you put in a hundred grand, it's gonna go to zero, or it's gonna go to ten million. I mean, it's a really easy, it's a really easy equation to put some money against.

• 18:03Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, would you mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yes. Now, I I say that, um, and I may be completely wrong, just because a a bet on Bitcoin is a bet against the existing monetary system.

• 18:17Peter Diamandis?

  Well, that's easy.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  And then therefore, it's the question is not if, it's when, right?

• 18:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  And so when you have that kind of an equation, as long as you're willing to hold for the long term. Then you're fine. So I think that's the way to think about it. And I'm I'm super fascinated by the different experiments. And it's worth actually touching on why Bitcoin is interesting right now with the three triangle points.

• 18:40Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, let's do it.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Um, so there Jeff Booth talks about this. I think of Jeff as the kind of the patron saint or the chief economist of the abundance world, right? And he thinks about monetary systems and the transition between them. He gave me a great framing. He said, you've got three things you have to hit from a crypto perspective. Uh, security, decentralization and scalability. And those are three important uh kind of uh bullet points to hit. The uh Bitcoin, for the first time in history, solved decentralization and security. And nobody had ever done that before in a in a in a digital currency. That's that's huge to be able to solve for security and decentralization. Uh, but it didn't handle scalability very well initially.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  And so that's where you got the rise of all the altcoins. Cause they handle secure the scalability very well. So people got very excited. But in doing so, they all compromise on one of the other two. So you get all coins that are scalable, but not decentralized. Um, you get all coins that are scalable, but not secure, but decentralized. You don't get any of all three. So you had this problem was and so they're often called shitcoins by the Bitcoin world for that reason, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, but now with the Lightning Network and Liquid, we now have the engineering capability to make Bitcoin scalable. Uh, and and when people were moaning about Bitcoin scalability,

• 20:06Speaker 03

  my my thing was always wait, that's an engineering problem. It's not an invention problem. Right? We've solved the invention problem. That's huge. Engine scalability is an engineering problem. We'll we'll solve that. We always do. And so now we've solved the engineering problem. So now Bitcoin hits all of those three layers. That's why there's people that are so excited by Bitcoin. What's fascinating for me is the smartest people I know are the most excited about Bitcoin. The goddamn smartest. So that's an interesting indicator. One of them actually told me um, your ability to invest in Bitcoin is is your ability is literally an IQ test for the future.

• 20:42Peter Diamandis?

  I I was gonna say that. It's uh it's it's definitely uh something I think about.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Egotistic, of course, right? But still.

• 20:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, you and I were both I this year I gave the Ayn Rand Award. The Atlas Award to Michael Saylor and you were there as my my guest and that was fun. I mean, seeing Michael Saylor on stage at Calamigos, accepting that incredibly beautiful award and waxing beautifully about Bitcoin. I mean, I think at the end of that evening, everybody wanted to pull out their Coinbase wallets and to start buying.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Yes, and if for the people listening, if you've not seen the Michael Saylor and Rand acceptance speech, absolutely go see it. It's a brilliant piece of oratory because he talks about the fact that we now have freedom. It gives you freedom, right? No government can take it away, no, no company can take it away from you.

• 21:38Peter Diamandis?

  I was talking to to a dear friend, a mutual friend of ours, Dave Blunden, who's on our board at XPRIZE. We're talking about the future of using cryptocurrencies in African nations, both to replace their currency, but also to create contracts for for land ownership and real estate ownership. You know, the reason I wouldn't go and invite and invest in beautiful real estate on the coast in in various African nations is I don't know whether I'm going to own it at the end of the result, whether it's going to be a revolution.

• 22:16Peter Diamandis?

  But if there is, you know, a cryptocurrency that is secure, if there is a ability to track ownership on the blockchain, I think that could open up massive investments.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  It does, you know, so I was talking to Hernando de Soto, the famous economist who's done a lot of work on property rights, especially for the poor, right? And he, he, so there's 280 trillion of global real estate value. And he worked out that if you put land titles on the blockchain, just did that, you'd release about 10% of value. Because they would be analyzable, transferable, look upable, referenceable, etc. And that's a massive number to to think about. The challenge you have there is the immune system problem. Because when you say the blockchain will be authoritative of who owns what land, and you take that providence away from governments, they really, really don't like it.

• 23:12Peter Diamandis?

  No, you'd have to have a government that wants to do this.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:15Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, so look at what happened with El Salvador, pal. So El Salvador goes and adopts Bitcoin.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:21Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and it it was a huge fanfare at the beginning, and we don't hear much about it anymore. Success?

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's because, in my opinion, it's because it's working. Okay? What you hear is a lot of negative stories. The IMF is going bananas on this. Because if a bunch of other countries start adopting it, you have massive change in the hegemony of the US dollar. And that's a big challenge. Um, it's when you talk to people on the ground in El Salvador, uh, it's amazing. It's actually working really well, transferring Bitcoin around for payments and stuff. Uh, there's a bunch of corruption at the government levels, as there is always. But it has enabled microtransactions at a very local level in a very powerful way. Um, I I know a bunch of small countries that are looking at this very aggressively for this, for exactly that reason.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  It's it's this is a this is the biggest inflection point in 500 years, right? Where we're taking

• 24:13Peter Diamandis?

  For sure.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Power, monetary power away from a centralized government, and giving it to a peer-to-peer environment. And so, uh, this this is, you know, when you talk about scarcity to abundance, it's that level of a transition. I think it's, in my opinion, this, what we're going through right now is the biggest transition in the history of humanity. Like, this next 30 years will dictate the next 300 years of humanity.

• 24:36Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's it's everything. I mean, we're reinventing fundamentally what it means to be human and what it means to have a society.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:44Peter Diamandis?

  Every, everything.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  That's why I like your framing of we must be living in a simulation because it's too goddamn interesting.

• 24:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're we're at the 99th lay of the level of a 100 level game. And it's all playing out during our lifetimes. All right. And it truly is, but we'll get to simulation later. So, uh, we watch F FTX just skyrocket, right? And Sam Bankman-Fried becomes a hero for every MIT grad and every, uh, you know, techno entrepreneur out there. And then it crashes. We've seen, uh, you know, NFTs and entire

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Luna.

• 25:16Peter Diamandis?

  Systems, you know? So, I mean, Easy come, easy go. Is it, is it just basically if it's moving, if it's skyrocketing too fast in value, should people be, you know, do you sell at the top and diversify?

• 25:30Speaker 03

  I, I think there's, I think you have to look at two reasons why things are exploding out of the gate, right? One is that the fundamentals are unbelievably strong and therefore track those carefully. And there's a long-term commitment by the project founders, et cetera. And then there are the quick get rich, quick schemes and things that are, that are engineered for short-term massive value creation, but not long-term sustainability. And from what I've heard, the FTX model fits into the latter. They, they did, they were offering massive interest rates for people to put money into FTX, et cetera, which is essentially you're creating a Ponzi scheme. At some point, that has to come home to roost. And when it does, then the whole thing tumbles down like a house of cards.

• 26:12Peter Diamandis?

  But you know, it's easy.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  So that's one, one big challenge. The second is, there's a lot of, the crypto world is very much the Wild West. There's a lot of manipulation. Luna got taken down by a bunch of manipulation by vested interests that didn't want an algorithmic model like Luna had.

• 26:30Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you, you invested heavily into the NFT world in the, in the early days.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:36Peter Diamandis?

  Was it, you know, hype or was it real? I mean, whenever there's something that is not providing real value, when it's all perceived value, I get concerned. You're minting bananas.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes and no. So, so, yes, there's a ton of hype. Here's the thing, you have something new. Let's take the 99.com boom, right? Everybody and their grandmother creates a website, you know, pet food online and, and, you know, grandmother's shoes online and whatnot. And then you have this massive culling of the herd because you, you, it's that Gartner hype cycle.

• 27:11Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And you go through the trough of disillusionment. And this is what we're in now called a crypto winter. So a lot of the projects that are crazy flame out. And I'll give you an example of one. I won't say the name, but there was an NFT project that launched about a year ago where the guy said, the guy got up and said, listen, I buy, I'm selling 2,000 NFTs, buy them for an Ethereum each, and I'm going to do such amazing stuff for the community that you will, it'll blow your minds. Okay? That, that was it. You didn't say what he was going to do. He raised 2,000 Ethereum in 50 minutes.

• 27:46Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Okay, now, uh, two thousand and four thousand dollars, that's like eight million dollars or something insane like that.

• 27:53Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Yep. Um, uh, in fifty minutes. Okay, now, the thing, you look at that and you go, okay. Um, if you apply the smallest common sense filter to this, A, he's, it's basically, it's a security because he's promising returns. B, uh, um, he's not saying what he's gonna do. Uh, and C, this is full use car salesman mode, right? So.

• 28:16Peter Diamandis?

  For sure.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  A project like that, you kind of go, yeah, not, not into, into it. Okay, uh, you take, say, the Board Ape Club, which is also has elements of the hype, but.

• 28:25Peter Diamandis?

  Of which, of which you're a, of which you're a member.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  I have a board ape, uh, number fifty-three oh four, right? Now, when I have a board ape, A, it's mine in perpetuity, B, I have all the IP, uh, rights to that, so I could go create a movie or put it on T-shirts or do whatever I want with that character, which is kind of surreal, but you get connected into a community. Right? Um, then they start offering things to that community. And what they're doing is what they, what the crypto economics for these projects that are good is they offer high rewards over, for the early adopters. And then they tail off over time and now you've built a thriving community. Okay, now, the Board Ape Yacht Club is still with like something like a billion dollars in a year and a half.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Um, I've, I, I took some lessons from my guru, Michael Johnson, who's been guiding me through this. And he said, the minute you get land or you get ape coin, whatever, sell it. Right, so I've paid back all my initial investment twice over and I'm still sitting on my board ape and it's a, in a fascinating community to be a part of, to see what's going on. Now, the reason I'm excited about NFTs is that you can program the NFT. So for me, digital currencies and cryptocurrencies are not interesting because they're digital. The US dollar is digital and has been for quite a while. The fact is I can program the money. And I can program a dollar bill. Right? So imagine I buy your sweater that you're wearing. This looks like a very nice sweater.

• 29:53Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  A price of a hundred dollars. Okay? And a system in the future can say, right, I'm gonna send you the hundred dollars in crypto, holds it in escrow. You now know that I've sent the money. You send me the sweater. I receive a sign for the FedEx receipt. And then it releases the money to you. So we can programmatically manage that transaction and no fraud is possible in that transaction. Which is kind of an incredible thing for two parties that don't know each other. Right? So now we can scale. This is a hugely important point.

• 30:25Peter Diamandis?

  Without, without a, without a central authority.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Without a middleman.

• 30:28Peter Diamandis?

  Like eBay or whatever. Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And if you, if it's worth it, I can, I can touch on the Byzantine generals problem for which for me is the magical. Piece of gold.

• 30:37Peter Diamandis?

  I remember in two thousand and eleven or twelve. When you started talking about Bitcoin, I mean, we were on stage together all the time for.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:46Peter Diamandis?

  At Singularity University, running the executive programs and running the, the. A GSP program. And. I remember the first time exactly where I was sitting when you went over the Byzantine generals. Uh, problem and explain Bitcoin to me. And the only problem was we need our time machine to go back and say, Peter, just put. You know, five hundred bucks in.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  You know, I didn't do it.

• 31:10Peter Diamandis?

  I know you didn't.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  I did it a bit later.

• 31:12Peter Diamandis?

  Otherwise you'd be buying dinner next time.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  I'll probably be buying dinner anyway, but the, the. There are, you know, the enthusiastic, you know, for example, I watched real time the Ethereum ICO.

• 31:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  And there's a piece of me that's like, throw a thousand bucks into this. Why not? Like, go for it. Right?

• 31:30Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  And there's another piece of me going, what is this thing? I don't get my head around this, this Turing. Complete system. I, and my brain was just not the size of italics and it wasn't young enough. Right? There's some bylaw. You have to be under twenty five years old to understand.

• 31:44Peter Diamandis?

  Well, there's, there's, no, I think you have to be under twenty five to have not seen all the things go wrong. That people, you, you become more dubious. And also the agility and the what the hell factor.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Well, think, let me, let me flip it the other way. Take somebody that's a banker. And they've been, they're sixty years old. And they've been in banking for, you know, forty five years or forty years, okay? Their brain is so entrained and all the neurons are so entrained on fiat currency, et cetera. When you show them Bitcoin, they literally get hives.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Right? And this is the, we all have that to some extent. You know, we had that famous interaction about SU a few years ago.

• 32:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  We had an offsite and you said, hey, uh, um, and I asked the question, you know, we should think about what would SU look like if we had to recreate it today? And it was about eight, nine years. And you said, okay, and the board said, okay, go think about that. What would it look like? And I tried four times to do that exercise and I failed miserably. Because we were so successful in what we did initially, that my brain kept going back to that. Right? And so that's, and that's clearly the wrong answer because Facebook didn't really exist and, and e-commerce, e sites didn't exist and moocs didn't exist. And there was no, we, we would do things incredibly differently. And it's incredibly difficult to step outside your old paradigms. This is why psychedelics are interesting.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Uh, it gives you a, a accelerated path to break through some of these old mental and structural cognitive traps that we have.

• 33:15Peter Diamandis?

  So we're recording this on the day after, uh, November eighth, after the US midterm elections. And talk about a system that has been sort of, uh, ossified and stuck and that's democracy. Uh, so we're, we're voting through a representative democracy.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:36Peter Diamandis?

  And we're, we're doing it in, using a system that's hundreds of years old. And I'm, I'm just sitting here, uh, thinking about how archaic the process is. Uh, you know, it's, it's better than any place else almost, but, uh, still archaic. Um, what do you think about the future of democracy here, pal?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Um, where to start? Okay. Um, uh, so important for people to rec- uh, just hear a couple of things. I, I have lived in eight different countries for more than a year each.

• 34:15Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Right? I've lived ever from India to Europe to the US.

• 34:18Peter Diamandis?

  To California.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  All, all California and Florida, which is a separate world of its own. Um, and, and, um, so I've seen different systems. Yeah. And across the wide spectrum of socialism to pretend democracy in India versus here, et cetera. And I think the US Constitution is the most important document created in the last half thousand years. Uh, because it enshrines individual rights, uh, into that. And then in, in, and kind of dictates to Congress and Senate to pass laws around it.

• 34:51Peter Diamandis?

  Almost all individual rights, not.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Almost all, but at least it makes an attempt for the first time in history to do that. Now, what I go bananas over with the conservatives today is that they go, they have this concept of rationalism. And they want to go back to what the founding fathers thought. And that's actually completely wrong because they intended it to be a living document that should be amended from time to time because they recognize. And I think of the Constitution as the software that runs the country. Right? You have to upgrade your software now and then.

• 35:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Uh, times change, values change, but you know, slavery is an obvious example, et cetera. So, so having said all of that, um, uh, the challenge that we have with democracy is the metabolism of decision making and change in a democracy is too slow for the change of technology.

• 35:37Peter Diamandis?

  For sure.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Almost all policy is defensive and reactive. Right? Something happens and we, we kind of go, oh my God, you know, drones or Bitcoin. And what do we do about it? And we try and tamp down on it.

• 35:48Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, policy.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  FAA with getting.

• 35:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Uh, um, vertical flight rights.

• 35:54Peter Diamandis?

  Zero, yeah, zero G flight and, and space flight. I mean, the reality is most laws are in place to maintain the status quo.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:02Peter Diamandis?

  And to keep the, uh, the primary players, uh, as the primary players. Any, this, any, any revolution, any breakthrough fundamentally disrupts the existing socioeconomic structure that exists. And puts everybody who's funding the politicians in danger.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  And, and let me do a shout out here, right? You and, uh, Stephen did something incredible in, in abundance and bold where you recognize that. People see something new as danger.

• 36:29Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Because they've never seen it before and it triggers the lim- the, the, um.

• 36:33Peter Diamandis?

  Amygdalas, yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  The lim- the amygdala, right?

• 36:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  And then you go, oh my God, we should autonomous cars, oh my God, it might kill somebody, let's ban the car. Right? As Brad Templeton says, we, people don't wanna be killed by robots, they'd much rather be killed by drunk people. Right? And, and, and that's a terrible response to a new idea that clearly has incredible value. So we, we kind of block the entrance of new ideas. Then we open that tap slowly and it takes twenty years to get the value of that technology. And that cycle we have to break. Um, and we were better at it than we used to be, but it's still too, too goddamn slow with all of the twenty Gutenberg moments that we talk about are asteroid impacts that are changing the world, the

• 37:18Speaker 03

  advent of CRISPR and crypto and, and solar energy, et cetera. We have to get better at implementing this. So my view on democracy is big nation-state democracies are going to fail.

• 37:31Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  I think what succeeds is micro-democracies at a city-state level.

• 37:36Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, so this is, is this Balaji and, uh, his, his, uh.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  I, I disagree with Balaji on the network state in a couple of important ways.

• 37:47Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  Uh, it's brilliant thinking, it's very important thinking.

• 37:50Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  But I think when the idea of city-states, um, um, and the, the rise of city-states came to me via Paul Sappho from Singularity, right?

• 37:59Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Paul, forecaster, futurist, and he talked about this in detail ten years ago. And he got up on stage and said, I don't expect the US to exist as a country in thirty years.

• 38:09Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, that's a pretty provocative statement.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Pretty provocative statement, so everyone, wait, wait, wait, hold on. He was getting offstage and we had to like yank him back and go, you can't, you can't make that comment and walk off. And he said, if, look at the discourse that's happening, the country is literally pulling itself apart. And he gave us a couple of really interesting nuggets. I'll give you two of them. One was, everybody in the world knows who the mayor of New York City is. Nobody in the world knows who the governor of New York State is. Even New Yorkers don't know who the governor is. And so there's this importance of the city. And he gave a second anecdote when Schwarzenegger was governor. The Dalai Lama wanted to visit Hollywood, visit LA. And George Bush said to him, please don't receive the Dalai Lama. It causes me massive problems with the Chinese. Right?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  And the sitting governor of California said to the sitting Republican president, and they're both from the same party. Screw you, I'm receiving the Dalai Lama because it's important to my constituents that he comes. And he's like, that tells you that there's a gap that's increasing.

• 39:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  And we're, we're moving to city-states as the future. When you think about Brexit or Trump, it wasn't left versus right, it's urban versus rural. Completely Brexit was completely London versus the rest of the country.

• 39:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  And you look at the map from yesterday, right? The election map, all the urban centers are blue.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  And everything else is red. Right? It's completely, that's the fundamental tension of the 21st century. So in that model, city-states, micro-democracies work. National democracies don't work because they're too slow. And it's too hard to bring in a whole population along. And then you have fake news and all the other things, difficulties in this. So India, Brazil, the US, all a mess.

• 39:59Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the conversations you and I have had as well is which countries are going to be best suited for an AI-enabled future? Right? So communism did not work when it was humans. Actually trying to decide how much supply and demand would be done in different places. Because there was no way, it was, it was the marketplace that enabled incredible rise of capitalism. And in full disclosure, listen, I'm a libertarian capitalist. I love capitalism. I'm an entrepreneur. It's my art form. I love starting companies. And I love democracy and all of that. Having said that. If we're getting to human level AI by 2029, I just had a podcast with Ray and Ray Kurzweil.

• 40:44Peter Diamandis?

  And you know, Ray sticks very much to his 2029 date. We're going to have human level AI, which means 2030, we have superhuman level AI. And it doesn't slow down after that. There's no on off switch, no velocity meter. It is on a tear. And so what happens if the the leadership of a city, state or nation says to the AI, listen, come on over, be my partner, you run the situation over here. You know, that that might be an interesting future for for running a nation. But it's not going to work in a democracy where no AI is going to wait for to get a human opinion. It's going to say, no, no, no, this is the answer.

• 41:27Peter Diamandis?

  I've done five billion simulations and it's come out the exact same every time. So just, I don't care about your wetware opinion on the situation. This is what you should do.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:37Peter Diamandis?

  What do you think about that?

• 41:39Speaker 03

  So, oh God, where to start? Okay, so I publicly disagree with the idea that AI is dangerous.

• 41:46Peter Diamandis?

  I agree with you. I think AI is the single greatest tool we have for solving the world's biggest problems.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Yes, and I think when you have, if you get AIs that are human level and you end up with AIs that are conscious or whatever, I think they look at human beings, they transcend us and they go, oh, nice people over here. And a nice little species over here.

• 42:06Peter Diamandis?

  Little puppies.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  And they go off. And the best move, the best representation, I think of this is the movie Her.

• 42:11Peter Diamandis?

  Her, yes, Her was amazing, right? They got bored, they got bored with us and they left.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  That's right, the guy dates an AI and he falls in love with, of course, it's Scarlett Johansson. I wish you could do that better, but okay. He dates an AI, falls in love, and after a while, the AI breaks up with him. Why? Because she can now interact with 10 million other AIs in real time at scale. And he's one little limited brain talking about what he ate for breakfast, right? And and so I think what will happen is the the speed of evolution will move so fast that it'll just go and they're gone. And they'll live in the internet, etc. I remember talking to Dan Barry, who is our robotics. Yes, our astronaut. We asked him a question in one of these sessions of, is there a system today? Because the challenge with AI and consciousness is when will you know?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Because we don't have a definition for consciousness. We don't have a test for it. Right? You look like you're self-aware, so I attribute self-awareness to you. Thank you. I think I'm self-aware, but my wife Lily disagrees. It's like, where do you even start that conversation?

• 43:14Speaker 03

  And, and so we asked the question to Dan. He's watched a ton of animals in labs because NASA does experiments with free-floating animals, etc. And he said, huh, I think the, I think a frog is where is the boundary point. We're like frog. He goes, in his opinion, a frog is sophisticated enough just about to know that, oh, I'm a frog.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Look, a dog definitely knows it's a dog, right? A dolphin definitely knows it's a dolphin. In Dan's opinion, a mosquito doesn't know it's a mosquito. Okay. It's just an automata wandering around. But a level of a frog kind of gets you to the boundary condition of, oh, I'm a frog. Okay, so that's one observation that the level of a frog is the kind of. Level of consciousness. Awareness of the thing. Okay. Now, it won't be that hard for an AI to get to that level, right? Now, so we asked him, is there a system today out in the world that has a requisite inputs, outputs, processing? Where it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a system and generate self-awareness. And he went, huh, let me think about that. So he goes off for a day and comes back and goes, I have an answer.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  I've thought about the different systems in the world. And his answer was traffic systems. Okay. In his opinion, traffic systems have the input-output feedback loops and the processing that one day it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a traffic system. Right? And that begs two questions. Okay. One, what would it do? And B, what would we, how would we find out that it did that? Like, we would not know. We have no mechanism for, for seeing this. So I tend to be less paranoid about the AI side when I think about the HUR vector. It's going to be utterly fascinating to see where this goes. And there's so much unbelievable benefit that will come. I think it's incredible.

• 44:59Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. Let's tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter. Put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforest.com/peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode.

• 45:44Peter Diamandis?

  So going back again to the question of democracy and AI. Talk to me about, you know, in the future, we have human level AI.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:56Peter Diamandis?

  How do you feel about turning over leadership to an AI and saying, these are the things that matter to our society? I mean, let the humans sort of set the objectives, like we want maximize happiness. We want maximize health. We want maximize whatever and run the nation state for us.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Let's use an analogy, which is the Google energy conserving AI that they applied to their buildings, right? So they deployed a machine learning intelligence to analyze all the sensors and lights and energy usage and said, we want to optimize for energy conservation. And the AI, because it's got access to so many different inputs, outputs, calculation capabilities, was able to what? Drop 40% their energy needs, which is a massive amount. A human being can't do that because it can't monitor this stuff in real time, et cetera. So when you think about what AIs could do, if you said, hey, maximize for conserving human life, you basically take the Constitution, the US Constitution, right?

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Say, go generate the policies that will, and the legal structures that will maximize for these things, right? And I think you come up with something quite incredible where the AI could. So I think that's one side of it, which is policy and regulatory generation. And you could create policies around this. Okay, I'll give you one that I would love to throw at this AI, which is stop signs. The amount of fuel we waste coming to a full stop at a stop sign and the brake power and the energy wasted of a million cars coming to

• 47:30Peter Diamandis?

  Of no, no humans, no dogs, no car. I mean, you could know, you can have imaging better than the human.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Not that hard, right? You need two sensors, one at the stop sign and one in the car and you're done. And we should really solve that problem. And AI could kind of go, oh, fricking, just go do that.

• 47:47Peter Diamandis?

  Well, this is the autonomous car solution, right? Where cars are actually able to drive closer to each other at higher speeds and have far more efficiency.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 47:57Peter Diamandis?

  And we'll get there, but it's the idea, first of all, that we're turning over decision-making capability to an AI in a car. And then even turning it over to an AI in a government and leadership, right? Because I, I, listen, if you believe, and I think you do and I do, that we are going to reach a human-level AI. I would, I personally would rather have, if I knew the AI was able to maximize for a set of human desirments and safety and health and all of those things. I'd much rather have an uncorruptible AI that isn't influenced by the color of my skin

• 48:38Peter Diamandis?

  or my gender or my age or anything be making decisions.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  So I would, it's very, for me, it's very simple, okay? We have Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

• 48:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Okay. You basically say to the AI, these are your constraints or something similar, right? Don't kill or allow a human being to be killed, et cetera, et cetera. And then do the instructions that we give you, as long as they don't interfere with the first two, okay? And then you trust. Now, we trust our existing human beings with those things. We trust our police not to kill people. Not always successfully. I'd much rather have an AI policeman than a real policeman who's got all his regular biases. He's having a fight with his wife at home. He had an army wound and was shot at there for his trigger response. You have no idea what they're going through and the stress of being on the job with guns everywhere.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Right? Um. And and then basically the AI should be able to say something like for for sake, why do you need guns? Get rid of all guns?

• 49:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  And could make some good decisions that way as.

• 49:45Peter Diamandis?

  You and I see the the same on those politics. So when do you think we will have? Uh, have this. Let's go to the to the Ray Kurzweil, uh, twenty twenty nine prediction a second. Human level AI by twenty twenty nine. We're seeing the rapid rise of, uh, large language models, GPT three, GPT four is coming. Uh, Deep Mind made its announcement about Gato, you know, I think the tweet was game over. Uh, AGI, uh, artificial general intelligence is coming. Uh, what's your what's your thinking on this?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  So let's really be careful not to trigger the amygdala. Yeah, because the first thing that happens if people go, oh, my God, this bad, it must be bad, etc. Okay? Let's notice, let's take as a fa- uh, an important principle, Ray's commentary, that technology is the most important, is is a major driver of productivity and progress in the world. Actually, technology might be the only major driver of progress we've ever.

• 50:39Peter Diamandis?

  We're not getting more intelligent. Political systems aren't becoming better. So it it.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Um, I would argue with that.

• 50:45Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, how would you argue with it?

• 50:47Speaker 03

  So if you look at, uh, your all of the stuff that you track on abundance, right?

• 50:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Um, poverty and mortality and maternal mortality, infant mortality. The big challenge with technology is how do you get the promise without the peril?

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Right?

• 51:01Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  You want to have fire that will heat your house and not use it to burn down your ri- we've overall done a pretty good job of it.

• 51:07Peter Diamandis?

  We're still, we're still here.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  We're still here and we're overall pretty like thriving, you know, I I'm, I I so love the positivity framing you have in abundance and all your talks. Because it's so important for people to see the real reality that we're better off today than we ever have been in the history of the world.

• 51:25Peter Diamandis?

  By.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  By such a lot, huge factor, right?

• 51:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Just go back five hundred years ago, somebody goes off, uh, uh, husband goes off to do something and never comes back because he got killed by a bear. And the wife never knows, no idea if he's ever coming back. Has he run off or has he been killed? Kids are being raised. Now, what do you do? Do you remarry or not? I mean, there's a million chaotic things like this. I I have a a very banal example that I like to use, uh, for today's world. Um, people go, oh, my God, technology, we know, you know, etc., etc. Cell phones are bad. I go, you know, if you're waiting, if you're a couple and you're waiting for your babysitter to show up twenty years ago. And they're late. You have no idea, are they coming? Are they not coming? Should we cancel the restaurant reservation?

• 52:10Speaker 03

  There's all this consternation and uncertainty and unknowing around what's happening with the babysitter because you can't do much until the damn person arrives, right? And now we have infinite knowledge. They're running three minutes late and ways.

• 52:23Peter Diamandis?

  You're you're you're tracking their Uber, right?

• 52:26Speaker 03

  We have exact, I know, I we can say call a restaurant. And we have, people don't recognize the unbelievable peace of mind that a million examples like that give us in the form of technology. Uh, and so now we accelerate that radically. And I think when you look at AIs able to look at the complexity of policymaking and say, listen, uh, Mr. Mayor, you're allocating resources in the wrong way. Uh, you could achieve this by doing this, this, this. I I think initially it starts off as a a guide by the side and a a reference check. And over time, people go, it's great that you want to make that policy. Have you checked with your AI yet?

• 53:03Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, before we got to babysitters and policy changes, we were talking about what made the world better. And I said, yes, a hundred percent is technology. We haven't been improving ourselves cognitively or whatever you said you disagreed. But putting that aside, technology is making the world uh rapidly better at a rate that is staggering. The problem is, of course, and I'm going to do my rant that I have to, which is the crisis news network, the all the negative news bombarding us constantly with every murder, every problem on the planet.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  That we did actually. Real time to 20 devices in each.

• 53:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, over and over and over again. Yes. Times not, 10 times an hour. So, uh, when are we going to see this AI uh that is going to help us govern? And when are we going to see it accepted in society? Is there, is there a pivotal moment that people are going to say? Yeah. I think I'm going to allow it um to govern because.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Let me let me use an example.

• 54:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Okay, so let's use a real example. Pandemic hits and there's a bunch of uh news and stories and misinformation about masks. Should we wear a mask or not, right?

• 54:16Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Massive like consternation. Governor DeSantis over here in Florida is like masks never work. Uh chuck the mass, I mean, uh et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Now, uh I I would have a really interesting. It would be a really interesting use case to have an AI. Jarvis call it.

• 54:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. It's my favorite.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Depending on.

• 54:41Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, no, let's stick with Jarvis.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Jarvis, let's stick with Jarvis and the Jarvis goes, hey, I've done the clinical. I've researched this already. I've scoured the web for this. I've looked at it. The clinical trials and the experiments are very clear. If you wear a mask, you prevent seventy five percent infection outward. And somebody else wearing a mask present uh is able to stop twenty five percent of inward affection. The combination gives you ninety percent effectiveness, but at least we're a mass to prevent outward.

• 55:09Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  That's very clear that there's no controverting that evidence. If better evidence emerges, great. The problem is that we are, we've we've used to operate policy and so on on an evidentiary basis.

• 55:24Peter Diamandis?

  Well, even worse than even worse than that, we would ignore the evidence and and state what was what was most politically uh efficacious for us.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. And almost always you go to the you're affecting the person's limbic system.

• 55:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Right, they're taking away your freedom. We're all about freedom, right?

• 55:42Peter Diamandis?

  Fear and scarcity.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  And I and I love getting into arguments with Republicans on this, and I'm not don't mean to harp on Republicans, but everybody sits there and goes, we need freedom. Like, if I drive three miles over the speed limit, I get pulled over by a cop in the US.

• 55:57Peter Diamandis?

  Where's your freedom now?

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Because it's a free country. In Europe or Canada, I never even see a police car, ever. Like, you want freedom? Let me drive a little faster, for God's sakes, right? Um, so there's, there's, there's, uh, there's such bullshit around the, the kind of the pat generalisms like freedom or whatever, and goes bad, just as bad on the left in its own way.

• 56:22Peter Diamandis?

  So, going back to the question.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  So no, so go back to Germany.

• 56:24Peter Diamandis?

  When, when are we gonna see the system, uh, enabled and, and adopted? Now, humans don't adopt new systems until they're ten times faster, ten times cheaper, and the switching cost is worth it, right?

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so I think we're almost there. So, think about this. Uh, I, I have my, uh, mobile phone, right? And I'm sitting in Miami and a hurricane's coming.

• 56:46Peter Diamandis?

  You are, and it is.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Right, and I can say, um, Hurricane Nicole Tracker, uh, show me when the hurricane will hit Miami Beach.

• 56:56Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Right, and the, the AI says to me, um, uh, it's coming at, tonight, and that'll be the danger point, and maybe that's when you move your car to the second level of the car park, or whatever, in case there's a storm surge. Is there gonna be a storm surge? I don't know, but the, but the AI will know.

• 57:12Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Right now, so you take one step further, we're only one hop away from the, from an AI, tracking our behavior and looking at our world of activity, and going, hey, he's sitting in Miami, his car is parked on a ground floor, a thing, um, there's a storm surge coming, he will need to move his car by X.

• 57:31Peter Diamandis?

  Or, or better yet, I will move your car for you, you know, take over and optimize, protect me. It's, it's ultimately, take care of me, is right?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  And, and, and we're, we're there, I'll give you another example. Um, I wake up one morning and my left big toe is blue. And I'm like, why the hell is my toe blue? No blood circulation, what the hell happened? What do I do? I look it up on Google, and, and research it myself. I figure out what the condition is, it's some Latin sounding name, uh, and this is how you treat it. And I literally, you will print that out, take it to a doctor, and the doctor will go, what the hell is this? And how did you figure all this out? Because we now have better understanding, and we can analyze all these conditions better than a doctor can. And self, self-treat for the vast majority, right? So if, if I just put in AI. Go AI, my toes blue, what the hell do I do? And it scours around and comes back.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, even better, or my bodily sensors will go, hey, dude, your toes about to turn blue. Please do these three things to prevent that. So we're like, we're like right there and and Ray said something very profound in one of the recent talks. He said, look, we talk about implemented uh, uh, hardware that can connect. But your phone can iterate much more effectively. So all you need is the communication capability uh, between you and the phone.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  And we're just about there between voice and other sensors. We're just about there.

• 58:53Peter Diamandis?

  So uh.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  So I give it a year.

• 58:55Peter Diamandis?

  You, you give it a year before what?

• 58:58Speaker 03

  A year. Before you have a Jarvis type AI that can handle initially basic things. We do calendaring now with AI pretty well.

• 59:05Peter Diamandis?

  All right, all right. So let me, let me piece this down for everybody listening, because it's really important. Uh, I talk, I, I say to all the CEOs that I mentor, listen, there are going to be two kinds of companies by the end of this decade. Those companies fully utilizing AI and those out of business. And I think it's that black and white. Um, so uh, let's begin with Ray's prediction, twenty twenty nine for human level AI. Do you believe that that is correct?

• 59:32Peter Diamandis?

  By whatever measure, you think it's going to be sooner or later?

• 59:35Speaker 03

  No, I disagree because I disagree with the premise. Let me explain what I mean by that.

• 59:39Peter Diamandis?

  Dude, it's so hard to get an answer from you.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, I don't, you can't just take, put out a thing like, a path thing like human level AI. The problem is, we don't know what AI, what intelligence is.

• 59:50Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Right? So there's about a dozen facets of intelligence. There's spatial intelligence.

• 59:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, there's many, many different.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  The eastern concept of presence or awareness, that's a whole other form of spiritual intelligence. Uh, we have our, we, with the IQ test, you measure two things, uh, speed of thought and the ability to match concepts across frameworks. Okay, but you don't measure any of the other things. So what the hell do you mean by intelligence is number one question, right? And the second question, which is why I go even doubly more crazy is what would you, you know, we talked about the technological similarities. Intelligence, machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence. So number one, I have an issue with what do you mean by intelligence? Number two, the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, a robot or AI is going to do a much better job of it anyway.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  So it's a non-techno. So, so when you say human level AI, I come back to you and go, what aspect of humanity are you talking about? Now, if I can have an AI that makes me more present, that's really valuable or or wraps around my emotional biases.

• 1:00:52Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, I want that I want that AI, you know, we have all these cognitive biases that we don't actually notice that we're hitting. Like when I look at somebody or I hear something, an AI that is simply saying, Peter, you're being biased about here's the actual data and the way you should see it. I mean, most people will turn it off, I think.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  But but think about that. How far are we from that? We're we're we're literally, that's not a difficult thing to to do to track my language. And go, look, you've got a positivity bias. You think everything's going to be so goddamn rosy. You need to tone it down much.

• 1:01:23Peter Diamandis?

  Well, we you and I don't have that. We're we're not.

• 1:01:28Peter Diamandis?

  We're we're obviously unbiased and we're not techno-optimist.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you know, when you see things that can transform the world for better, how can you not get enthusiastic? Like the water abundance machine X Prize or the Avatar X Prize, like amazing.

• 1:01:42Peter Diamandis?

  We just had it. We just had it won in in Long Beach. A team out of Germany. Uh, won the ten million dollars from A and A Airlines. So so we've got. Human level AI, however you define, multi-dimensional human level AI coming. Um, and I have you been trying, speaking about Avatar, you've obviously been tracking Optimus Tesla Bot.

• 1:02:09Peter Diamandis?

  Right, and there's other companies like Beyond Me and Sanctuary.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Boston Dynamics.

• 1:02:16Peter Diamandis?

  Boston Dynamics, Boston Dynamics is sort of large scale. These other companies are focusing on a human labor marketplace, right?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Peter Diamandis?

  Being able to create a bot for, you know, Elon says 20,000 or less, less than the price of a car that can be available to do labor for you. So I want to transition, I want to talk about that, but I want to transition as well to the idea of universal basic income, because I've been thinking about this a lot in the world of abundance.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, can I, can I just cover, to say a final comment on the robot side before we move to UBI?

• 1:02:49Peter Diamandis?

  Well, yeah, let's talk about robots first.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:02:51Peter Diamandis?

  And then my premise is that we're going to need to have AI and robotics change the global economy, and then we can afford UBI. But let's.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Okay. Yes, I totally agree.

• 1:03:04Peter Diamandis?

  Let's talk about robots.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Okay, robots. So I think it's coming for sure to have a general robot that can do household tasks and work tasks, etc. But I think it's further away than people think. And I'll use the analogy of autonomous cars, right? Maybe the biggest predictive failure that we had at Singularity is we thought autonomous cars would be there in five years because.

• 1:03:28Peter Diamandis?

  Brad Templeton was just, just sure about it.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Technology is there, like it's there, you know, and his concept was workable. He said, look, you don't have to be, you don't have human intelligence to drive a car. You need a horse level intelligence to navigate around. We kind of have that. The problem is that it turns out to be deceptively difficult because you're often driving and riding around a pothole, or there's a bike and who's overtaking another bike. And so you need to, you watch that and you see that. There's like a million little adaptive situations that you drive that you don't realize. And trying to counter for all of those without a sensor-based road system is very difficult. I think once you have sensors in the, in the roads, then, then driving becomes, autonomous driving is a piece of cake, right? And a sensor.

• 1:04:13Peter Diamandis?

  I, I disagree with that, by the way. I mean, I think our eyes. Are just two human eyes, not radar, not lidar, not ultrasound, just two human eyes are what enables a human driver to drive.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  I, so I, so I dispute this with experience because I've now driven a Tesla four times from Toronto to Miami and back.

• 1:04:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  So I've done something like eight thousand miles in autonomous, with the Tesla in autonomous driving mode. Okay.

• 1:04:45Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, I'm, I'm not saying that autopilot on Tesla is anywhere near ready, but I do believe that we're, we're going to be able to get there. It's, it's a data processing issue, it's not a data collection issue.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Yep, it could, it could be, could be.

• 1:05:01Peter Diamandis?

  Right, so, so, so if it's, if it's not data.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Let me give you one more.

• 1:05:05Peter Diamandis?

  We don't need sensor, we don't need sensors in the road if it's not a data collection issue.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Okay, fair enough, but you need a ton more data processing and a lot, a lot more use cases and interpretive things, right? For example, I would normally overtake the bike, but my wife's in the car and she gets a bit nervous, so I'm going to take, or hold it back a notch. Right, these, these little, there's a million little nuances that we don't take, but let me, let me go make the point in a slightly different way.

• 1:05:30Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  One obvious thing for a home robot is folding laundry.

• 1:05:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Right, and, and we've struggled mightily with a, a, a robot that can fold laundry.

• 1:05:40Peter Diamandis?

  You, do you remember the videos of Scott Hassan's Will Garage?

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. It can do a T-shirt.

• 1:05:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  But really hard to do anything else, right? Like, it's, it's, it turns out even.

• 1:05:51Peter Diamandis?

  I, it's typical for me to do anything else.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  I'll give you a third one, which is the vacuum robot, right?

• 1:05:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  People buy a Shark robot or a Roomba, and it's great in, in like twenty percent situations, but the minute you have a curved stool with a base that's a little odd, it doesn't work. And you end up spending more time arranging the furniture so the robot can do, then just vacuuming yourself, and people kind of go after a while, ah, I'm just gonna do myself.

• 1:06:17Peter Diamandis?

  Wait, you're, you're telling me that, that that's a problem, but governing is going to be here, here from now?

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Because, because government, because it's so language oriented, right? An AI can read a policy, uh, paper and make way more sense of it than a human being can. Right, like, so show me any congressman or senator that's actually read the eight hundred page legislation on any bill they actually.

• 1:06:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's not go, let's not go there.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  You need AI to kind of get your head around that.

• 1:06:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. By the way, it's the same thing for, same thing for medicine. I think the daily number of, of medical publications is like seven thousand a day. You tell me how many your doctor has read.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  The Daniel Kraft one is, there are two thousand five hundred research papers on cancer published per day.

• 1:07:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Right? So if you're a, if you have a cancer doctor, you can ask him, has he read the two thousand fabric that came out yesterday, the day before the? No, obviously you need AI right there to, to think about it. I just want to make one last point and let's move on to UBI because I think it's so important.

• 1:07:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  I, you know, the, the part that I find most interesting and fascinating around this is, I use the example of PageRank. Right? Google's AI that's scanning webpages and it's developing a unique intelligence.

• 1:07:29Peter Diamandis?

  For those who don't know, PageRank was the algorithm that Larry Page came up with while he was a grad student at Stanford that Scott Hassan wrote and then he and Sergey created into Google. It was called PageRank.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  And, and scours a million webpages and scores them and, and tags them and categorize them. PageRank has developed its own kind of unique intelligence of how to scour the billions of webpages in real time around the world. That's an orthogonal effect and complementary to human intelligence. It's not replicative of human intelligence. Right? We are localized sense-making machines. So I think of AI will be, for the vast, vast, most majority of use cases will be complementary. And that should take a lot of the fear out of it. They're not there to replace human beings. They're there to amplify and augment, just like my phone augments my humanity. I can video with my son. I can project empathy around the world, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  So I think AIs are gonna massively add to productivity and labor automation in a magical way coming. And the general thesis leading to UBI is that we've been increasing productivity with machines for thousands of years. And now we get to a point where the productivity gains of technology allow us not to have to work for a living.

• 1:08:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's um, so uh, let me hit on a couple of things on on on humanoid robots. I mean, I love the fact that Optimus is a humanoid, meaning five fingers, two legs, you know, bipedal, and it fits and operates in our human-built environment, uh, doorknobs, uh, car pedals, all all those things. And if, in fact, he's able to achieve it, uh, and the thesis is he's gonna be using AI and sensors and capabilities built for for Tesla's autonomous driving, um, it's a massive market. I mean, how many car manufacturers are there, you know, well over a hundred? And there are how many humanoid robot manufacturers are there, like, none?

• 1:09:35Peter Diamandis?

  And if he can get it, I mean, I'd want one. Would you put one in your in your closet?

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  Uh, sure. I would love to.

• 1:09:43Peter Diamandis?

  You know, you want. I mean, especially especially if you lease it out, right? So, uh, think of a, think of a twenty thousand dollar car. What's an, what's a car at least gonna be, like, four hundred bucks a month? So for four hundred bucks a month, you've got a slave robot. Now, be nice to it, because the world, you know, the robot overlords are coming. Um, but for four hundred bucks a month, you've got something that does anything you want, anytime you want. I mean, that's the, that's the vision.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Peter Diamandis?

  And it's, it it is going to, so it it solves a labor issue. Now, uh, we're living in a time today in which the numbers, when I last looked at them a few weeks ago, we have twice as many job openings as we have people looking for jobs.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Peter Diamandis?

  Um, now, that will change. But uh, but the notion is, most people don't take work because they love the work. People who are cleaning up hotel rooms and, uh, you know, cleaning toilets or, uh, working at a, uh, you know, cash register, they didn't dream about doing that. They're doing that because they want income for their family, they want insurance for their family. So is there a future in which, uh, the work that no one wants, uh, going back to Dan Barry, it's dull, dangerous, or dirty? Remember those three's?

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:10:58Peter Diamandis?

  Um, you know, can we get, can we get robots to do that?

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think we've been doing that anyway, like mining robots and agricultural robots, right?

• 1:11:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, shop floor robots.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  It used to be ninety-eight percent of human population was employed in agriculture. And now it's like one point eight percent.

• 1:11:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  Cause we've automated the hell out of it and because you don't need um um strawberry pickers and apple pickers, you have machines to do it all and that is uh difficult and uh house uh so I think that definitely will be automating our our assembly lines have done a lot of that for us. I think what's more powerful is things get to cognitive abilities where people can handle most day to day task call centers and routing call centers, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:11:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're almost there. Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're almost there. Uh and I love the the writing software even is being automated pretty fast right now. I love the uh the there's a great example of bank tellers uh around this. It used to be that when we created ATM machines, everybody freaked out saying, oh, my God, we'll have millions of bank tellers out of the work. What will we do with all the bank tellers? Right? And so this is massive concern about robots taking all the jobs. Um which the first article that appeared about robots taking all the jobs appeared in nineteen sixty four, by the way.

• 1:12:11Peter Diamandis?

  I like but I love I love this story. I love this story. Uh can can you tell it a different way?

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Go ahead, tell it.

• 1:12:17Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, so there was this letter written by a group of Nobel laureates and top scientists sent to the president saying technical automation is going to destroy the banking industry. And that letter hit the desk of Lyndon B. Johnson. Right? People think about it as a recent event, but no, it occurred in, like you said, nineteen sixty four, thereabouts. And it was people concerned about replacing room filled mostly with women copying ledger to ledger to ledger. Uh and we have more bankers and accountants than we've ever had on the planet.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the the the the second half of that is people got concerned, what will happen with all the bank workers if you automate banking? Um the actual outcome was that because of cost of bu- building and running a branch drops so dramatically, the banks just created a ton more branches. And the number of bank workers has not changed at all. So it turns out, and we have multiple examples of this, the Germany, the factories in Germany are all automated. Uh there's nobody on the factory floors and it's not like unemployment has dropped. We just move people to higher value work. And so it turns out when we automate, we don't lose jobs, we increase capacity. And with the increased capacity, we have that much more economic activity and productivity.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  And the idea behind UBI is you get to a tipping point where you can now, people don't have to work for a living.

• 1:13:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, it this is, so UBI stands for universal basic income and it's the idea that you get a check and you can do with that money what you want. If you live in Alaska, you have UBI already. Uh, the permanent fund, Alaska takes all of its oil money and it makes, you know, it distributes a portion of that to everybody. I don't know what the, I don't know what the, uh, the, the check size is. It used to be like $5,000 a year per person. Uh, if you live in the Middle East, uh, there are equivalents of that in Saudi and the Emirates. I was having dinner with, uh, uh, with Reid Hoffman two days ago. Uh, and I asked him about UBI. And, uh, I said, what do you think of it? And, you know, who should I be speaking to about it? We've had this conversation. I want to bring someone to talk on the subject at Abundance 360 this year.

• 1:14:22Peter Diamandis?

  And, and he said he's been, he sent me an email yesterday saying, I've been asking around regarding UBI. He said, most smart people think that the numbers are still off and could be solved if we get the kind of massive increase in productivity that we hope for. Um, and so if we've got robotic labor and AI labor, uh, the first time I heard something around this was, uh, Jeff Bezos said in the future, we should tax the robots. So if you replace a job, a, a labor job, uh, that's normally held by a human with a robot, then you should tax the robot and that part of that money should go to pay the human who's replaced.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:15:01Peter Diamandis?

  It was something like that.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  I've heard something similar. If you automate truck driving, then you, you tax the truck driving companies and that goes to pay for the drivers to find some other work over a period of time. Um, now the, the, it, it turns out the, the, the financials are very close to working. Cause it, the key is the key, and then you, let's talk about two issues around UBI. One is people get fat and lazy and don't want to do anything. And that's the, people worry about socialism and you're paying for the do nothing.

• 1:15:33Peter Diamandis?

  That's the, that's the, that's the concern. Will people use, use the money for beer and tobacco?

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  And the second concern is we can't pay for it and we'll have to raise taxes and it's just, uh, this is a stupid idea. Those are the two. Now, increasing productivity will solve for one. And the second one is actually solved because of the fourteen major experiments that we've seen around UBI. It turns out if you find the right balance where you give people enough to survive but not be happy.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  That's the level, right? So you give people enough that they can make it and they don't have to work, but it's not enough that they they they wanna buy the new TV, they wanna buy the nicer car. So they go, so then you have a still have a thriving economy and a job market, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:16:15Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, they're gonna use they're gonna use the money to further their education, get better training and go and get the job.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  I mean, what's the number? Forty percent of the US cannot put four hundred dollars together in an emergency today.

• 1:16:26Peter Diamandis?

  That's insane.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  That's the most ridiculous commentary I've ever heard for the richest country in the world, right? It's it's a travesty. So I think the UBI side will solve for a huge amount around that and the case studies are we have a lot of data now. Entrepreneurship explodes under this model because people find their passion and follow it.

• 1:16:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it it and you you made a point, it's important. These studies have been done in the US, in Canada, in parts of Africa, parts of Europe, where a government has given a population of people who are at the substance level, if you would. It was done in Stockton, California. The mayor, Mayor Tubbs, gave five hundred dollars a month to a population of a few thousand people. And ninety-nine percent of it of them use that money to do further their careers. Less than one percent used it for, you know, beer and tobacco. Amazing. I mean, you would bet against.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  And we've seen the same thing in India. There was a famine. And they gave four thousand people a UBI because they had to give them some money. And the the the government workers freaked out and said, you can't just give people money. How would they will spend it on alcohol and gambling? How do we extract bribes if you just give it directly? So but they were starving, so they had to do it. So they said, just do it. And they tracked it for two years. And they found in the similar to the stock Stockton, ninety-five percent or ninety-four percent went to clothing, housing, healthcare, food.

• 1:17:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  And the attendance of those kids of those families at school doubled.

• 1:17:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Because they were fed and clothed. I mean, it's the the challenge is that once you run it for a while, a government realizes, oh, we're not needed anymore, and then cancels the program because then you need government. It's literally what happened in Canada in Manitoba. They ran the program unbelievably successfully and the government came in and went, oh, wait a minute. Well, this is terrible. We don't, you know, literally don't need government. The challenge I think we have with UBI is to go from a taxation, labor, employment, job model to this is such a huge leap. I have no confidence in our public sector to get this.

• 1:18:29Peter Diamandis?

  Well, the AIs will. The AIs will do it all.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  The AIs will propose it and then we'll have a big fight.

• 1:18:35Peter Diamandis?

  Well, yeah. I I bow to our AI overlords. Um, so there's a term that a mutual friend, Harry Clor, I gave us of technological socialism.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:18:48Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So we talked about communism earlier on, uh, being failed when humans were doing it. Maybe when AI is doing it will be more efficient. Socialism in the same fashion where the where the state is taking care of you uh, has failed, that experiment's failed over and over again, but technological socialism, where technology is taking care of you, right?

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  Um, yeah.

• 1:19:12Peter Diamandis?

  Is something that I think is most definitely going to come, right? Where you're.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Not just going to come. I think it's here already. You know, so so socialism fails because you have centralized allocation of resources, which is A inefficient and B leads to corruption.

• 1:19:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Inevitable, right? I'm dictating who which family should get what food. I'm in a huge position of power. Right? Um, as a bureaucrat or technocrat. So that fails. Um, um, the other side of the coin, when you look at the free market, free markets also kind of don't work over time because they get corrupted in their own way. But if you have an algorithm matching in Uber, matching driver and passenger, um, uh, optimized for close proximity to the driver and star rating of the passenger, driver, etc. Uber is actually a socialist application. It's the sharing of assets amongst a large group of people. And this is, I think, is a profoundly fascinating opportunity to bring in collective

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  use of assets that gives us hyper-leveraged in terms of productivity and repeated use of it, etc.

• 1:20:19Peter Diamandis?

  But it's not only the sharing economy, it's the shared use of assets, it's the crowd economy, which is shared using of cognitive assets.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Peter Diamandis?

  Right? I don't employ a person 100%.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. My favorite example of a socialist application is a restaurant.

• 1:20:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  When you go and eat at a restaurant, you're sharing the table with other people that have just eaten in the cutlery the people have just used before you. It's not your cutlery or your plate. The food is coming from the same chef. It's actually a socialist environment. And we don't, we do that without thinking. We sit on an airplane seat that millions of other people have sat on. We don't freak out about that. I think this is definitely there for the taking and creating a capitalist or a market-based environment that's algorithmically driven gives you the best of both worlds in many, many environments.

• 1:21:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So AI and communism, technology and socialism. Let's talk about the elephant in the room here, pal. We are living in a simulation, aren't we?

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  So, as a Buddhist, life is an illusion.

• 1:21:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  So, on first principles, yes, right? David Roberts, I remember giving this point, that he said if you stretch the electromagnetic spectrum, X-rays to visible light to microwaves, and you stretch it out to the width of the US.

• 1:21:49Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  Okay, 3,000 miles across. The visible light that we see entering our eyes is two feet.

• 1:21:56Peter Diamandis?

  Oh my god.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  Out of that 3,000 miles. So we live in that little narrow spectrum of reality. When the full spectrum of electromagnetic is that much, right? I think it's just a great example of how narrow our pathetic little eyes are compared to what's, you know, you've very things operating with X-rays and other things operating with sonar and all sorts of infrared sensing, etc. So we, we are by, so that's one. Secondly, when light comes in, your eyes reverted and our brain flips it back around. So it's an, it's an, it's an image that appears at your brain anyway.

• 1:22:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and, and, and of course, we only, we only process a fraction of 1% of all of our sensory input because we can't possibly handle it. And we, we fill in the blanks with our own imagination of what we think is actually happening versus what really is happening.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  I remember a couple of years into Singularity, Lothar Lomur, who used to run the web, said, "Come and do a talk and pick whatever topic you want." So I picked neuroscience. I said, "All right, let me do a talk on the brain." And it forced me to go talk to Divya and a bunch of neuroscientists around. Okay, so first I question I asked them was, "What is the brain?" And it was unbelievable. They couldn't agree. I finally came up with a, a sentence that they all agreed on. I'm going to try and remember it. It said, "A brain is a fractal, chaotic, sense-making machine that may or may not result in consciousness."

• 1:23:28Peter Diamandis?

  Obviously.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  That was it. Like, oh my God. And that was the only one they could roughly agree on. So we've got so much amazing investigation analysis to do, right? On our, on our, on our brain. What got me interested in psychedelics was the fMRI studies that showed you can now see exactly what dosage of what psychedelic does exactly this to this circuit. And now we have a feedback loop that makes it amazing.

• 1:23:55Peter Diamandis?

  I was listening to a program this morning on the idea of does consciousness impact our quantum universe? And it's, we know so little. We are, we are so filled with ourselves and our, you know, our bullshit every day in politics in the world. We're just scratching the surface.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's amazing.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  You know, I did my degree in theoretical physics.

• 1:24:24Peter Diamandis?

  No, I didn't know that.

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, my degrees, my bachelor's degree is theoretical physics. So you do three years of Newtonian classical physics relativity. And in third year, you get quantum mechanics.

• 1:24:35Peter Diamandis?

  Tilt.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  And, and then the first thing that they tell you is, okay, so you know that last three years, uh, just chuck everything. And now everything is a probabilistic environment where an electron has an 80% tendency to exist. It's just, it, it's such a hard shift. It's such a hard pivot. Uh, it's, it's impossible. I've been fascinated by the domain ever since with entanglement and, you know, spooky action at a distance. And it really is true how, how absurdly little we actually know.

• 1:25:10Peter Diamandis?

  But I want to, I want to close out with, uh, uh, two questions. They may be the same answer for you, but, um, I ask all my guests, uh, if you were to launch an X Prize, if I were going to say, you know, uh, I'm going to say Elon's going to fund it, I'm going to fund it. Salim, what is an X Prize that you would want? What's a grand challenge problem that you want solved? And you're, you know, full disclosure, uh, Salim is on the board of directors at the X Prize and has been on this journey with me for multiple years. Is there an X Prize that you would love to see launched? What is a challenge you want solved?

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  Yes. I would like to see an X Prize that improved emotional intelligence by 10x and, and, uh, and by doing so, um, um, kind of cleansed out all the emotional trauma that we grew up with.

• 1:26:04Peter Diamandis?

  Scratch the surface a little bit more. What does that look like? What would a team have to do to solve this thing?

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  So the problem there is a little bit the diagnostic. What's the before and after test, right? The Ansari X Prize is easy. Take a plane to suborbital twice within two weeks. Great, very clear metrics. It goes back to the hard question, which is we struggle often at X prizes. How do you define the domain properly? What do we mean by emotional maturity? And how would you measure it to increase a 10x, et cetera, et cetera? So there's some work to do in defining the boundaries. But for me, you know, there's two major problems that I see in humanity. One is in the West, we tend to be very logically driven and operate on just pure rationale and Western medicine, Western thinking, objective reality.

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  And so that's one danger point because you lose the subjective and the softer side, the spiritual side, et cetera. And the problem in the East is you do what people call a spiritual bypass. Like in India, you grow up, you have all this family baggage that nobody deals with. You jump straight to praying at a temple and you never deal with the emotional baggage.

• 1:27:15Peter Diamandis?

  You go straight to enlightenment.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  You try and go straight to enlightenment. And yet there's this carcass of family skeletons in the closet of crap that your grandfather was an alcoholic and epigenetically you're now an alcoholic and you don't even know it. And yet you have tendencies in that direction in lots of different ways. And you have no idea and you don't know what you don't know. And yet you skip straight through to trying to achieve enlightenment, right? You can't do that without cleaning up all the rest. So I would think a prize like this would balance both these out. It would also solve the problem of techies in Silicon Valley trying to go for technological supremacy without really understanding the human nuances along the way, et cetera. So that would be the prize I would go after.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  It would make human beings infinitely happier and more peace with themselves if you could achieve it.

• 1:28:05Peter Diamandis?

  Your moonshot, what are you working on right now that is in the realm of moonshot, buddy?

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Uh, moonshot is can we create a new model for society that creates a layer of resilience uh, in, in our systemic global human society? So we have, if you look at the history of civilizations, every civilization got to a very complex level. The Incas, the Mayans, the Romans, then they had some boundary condition and they instantly collapsed. Right?

• 1:28:33Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  Um, I like just literally hit a cliff and boom, uh, every single one of them, by the way. Okay. This is, and if you talk to the Yuval Hararis and Neil Ferguson's of the world, all those conditions are there now where we're like, we're at that tipping point, we may have been sliding down and we don't know. Our monetary systems are an easy example of the crash in crypto today is one example. It looks like, by the way, Solana may be being wiped out today.

• 1:28:58Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it's crazy. It's, uh, it's, um, uh, it's down a massive amount today. Um, so, uh, when you, when you look at what's happening in, uh, global human society.

• 1:29:09Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, Bitcoin's down to sixteen something.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great buying opportunity.

• 1:29:14Peter Diamandis?

  That's my mindset.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, by the way, this is an entrepreneur's mindset, everybody. This is how the judo move when it goes down, it's a buying opportunity, right? Big problems, fantastic opportunities to start a company to solve those problems.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  The biggest problems are the biggest markets. That's your stock phrase. I, I think it's such an important, um, way to think about the world as hope. Huge problem, huge opportunity. Um, it, and I think this is maybe the biggest gift that you've brought to the world, Peter, is having people think at a global scale of via X Prize or Singularity. I remember I was, I got together with a bunch of the Singularity alumni in Spain when I was there and they're like, you, we hate you. And I said, what happened? He goes, you infected us. You get us to think at a global level and then you can't go back to thinking, how do I create a better mobile ad network? You just can't. We're stuck trying to solve systemic global issues, which is what we wanted anyway.

• 1:30:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I know. It's, and by the way, I can't believe we were both in Spain the same day, in Madrid. And we missed each other by like, like hours.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  We had the opposite. Remember, we were, I was at the New York Hilton or over Grand Central. And I was typing an email to you, kind of going, really need to talk to Peter directly about this. And you were literally walking across the lobby by accident. Uh, I, I, so.

• 1:30:31Peter Diamandis?

  I know. And how many times have we done that and didn't even know it? So.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have a teaser for your people.

• 1:30:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Yes.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  For all the viewers. John Hegel and I, you know, we're talking about serendipity.

• 1:30:41Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Uh, John Hegel and I, who does a lot of work in writing around engineering serendipity, have been working on a model. Uh, and we've come up with like a very simple two by two diagram. Where we define luck. And we can measure it.

• 1:30:58Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  And I'll leave that there.

• 1:31:00Peter Diamandis?

  We're, we're, we're gonna talk about this some other time, or you're gonna?

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  Happily can.

• 1:31:04Peter Diamandis?

  All right. We'll, we'll come back to that.

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's worth, it, it needs a reveal because we need to finish it up, et cetera, et cetera. But it's, it's there. We like, because think about how much our lives run on luck and serendipitous events, right? Uh, every single one of us, the most meaningful things in our lives were, were weird coincidences for the rest. There's no normal explanation.

• 1:31:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And we have plenty of those between us.

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  We have plenty of those between us, right? And so, so can you prescriptively create luck? In fact, the EXO book was actually a practice book for me. Had a crack at writing a book on luck.

• 1:31:37Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Which is, which is, which is gonna come out? You're gonna write a book on luck?

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  At some point, we, we, John and I need to agree on the final framing and definitions. But, um, think about the exponential organizations. The first half is analytical. What is it? And EXO, what are the attributes? Second half is prescript, then we have a diagnostic test. And the second half is prescriptive. How do you start one, apply to mid-market and big companies, et cetera, right? And it was actually the practice run to say, could I get a meme into the world? Because luck is a really hard topic, right? Rookie author, I'm probably gonna make some stupid mistake and screw it all up. Let me, you know, exponential organizations is so obvious, needs to be done. And then the book took off and I've not been able to get away from, from the paradigm yet. But John and I have been working on the side on this other topic.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Because all of us, to think of any of us, our lives run on luck.

• 1:32:27Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, well, they, they run on hard work and caffeine and.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  Those are the table stakes.

• 1:32:32Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  Think of any Silicon Valley company. You have to be talented. You have to work your ass off.

• 1:32:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  Then you need that lucky break to hit the right strategic relationship, hit the market at the right time with the right feature footprint. And that's actually what makes you successful. So how do you generate serendipity?

• 1:32:49Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, so you know, the, uh, there's a great Ted Talk and a DLD Talk by, uh, by Bill Gross.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:32:58Peter Diamandis?

  Where, right? And it has to, it has to be related, right? Where he says, listen, he analyzed like a hundred companies that succeeded, a hundred companies that failed. And he said, what was the parameter that was the number one thing of all the companies that succeeded? Was the amount of capital they raised? Was, was it the experience of the, of the CEO? Was it the field that was they were in? And you know, the answer to this.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's totally luck.

• 1:33:23Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it was, it was luck by virtue of their ability to stick around. In other words, the companies that were able to last the longest intercepted a lucky event like the space shuttle, space shuttle crashing and being shut down.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Peter Diamandis?

  Was what launched SpaceX. The 2008 fiscal crash is what launched Uber and Airbnb.

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  Zoom.

• 1:33:48Peter Diamandis?

  Zoom. Oh, my God.

• 1:33:49Speaker 03

  I was on a panel with Eric, you're on the CEO of Zoom, a month before the pandemic. And he's saying, Jesus, you know, I've been working my ass off for several years building this, and I need that one thing to happen to help us take off. And then a month later, boom.

• 1:34:03Peter Diamandis?

  Coincidence? I think not.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Well, it is and it isn't, you know.

• 1:34:07Peter Diamandis?

  I'm joking, I'm joking.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  The Seneca definition that preparation meets opportunity is the best definition we've ever seen. Right? And so the question that becomes, how do you increase preparation? How do you increase opportunity?

• 1:34:19Peter Diamandis?

  And can you live long enough to live forever? Which is paraphrasing Rick Chriswell on longevity, but it's true for companies.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Peter Diamandis?

  I, I tell all my companies, listen, get the cash flow breakeven as soon as you can. Right? Make sure you've got years of lifetime because you're going to screw it up over and over again. And you're going to run, if, if you're dead and you do not exist, there's no way to run into that perfect investor or customer. But if you're able to hang on long enough. You'll intercept the pandemic, you know, or the big business opportunity.

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  You know, this is maybe the hardest question is something is not working. Do you keep struggling or do you shut it down and start?

• 1:34:55Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God, it is one of the hardest questions.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  This is the black hole.

• 1:34:58Peter Diamandis?

  We should talk about that next time because it's it's a, you know, I've I've had um now my twenty seventh company, I think, and there are those companies that I look back and say, man, I should have killed them far earlier.

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  I I'm terrible at that.

• 1:35:11Peter Diamandis?

  Right, but I've taken I've taken money.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  I'm the worst bit of a fast guy ever.

• 1:35:13Peter Diamandis?

  I've taken money.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  My company's later forever and I should just like be merciful and shoot them in the head. And I'm just, I'm bad at that. The ones that the successful entrepreneurs are the ones that just go Astro Teller, right? Google X, they have a very specific thing. It's having these metrics or it's not. What will make it fail and test those first and then kill it?

• 1:35:34Peter Diamandis?

  So we'll we're gonna do this again, right? You and I on this on this podcast.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  Happy to.

• 1:35:39Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, we'll add that when you talk about luck, we're gonna talk about how do you, you know, when do you kill your your favorite child or company as a case maybe? And lots of other subjects. In fact, we'll we'll ask people who are viewing this what they want us to talk about and we'll do that. We'll catch up on where Twitter is and F T X and democracy, where A I is. And, you know, pal, I love you and I'm thankful to have you in my life.

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  Likewise, I mean, the serendipity that brought us together is pervasive in everything that happens in my life right now.

• 1:36:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, all right, brother. Have a see you soon.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Talk soon, Peter.