Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis The Organizational Singularity: AI-Proof Your Company | EP #258 About this episode This episode is a deep dive on the “organizational singularity”: how AI agents, AI-native workflows, and recursive self-improvement will restructure companies much faster than traditional hierarchy can adapt.
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Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360
Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader.
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*Recorded on May 16th, 2026
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Transcript 12,090 words · 6 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Is there a line in your business, a high-margin line in your business, that two guys with open claw could replicate in 60 to 90 days?
0:07 Speaker 01 This is something across the board useful for everyone.
0:11 Speaker 00 When we wrote the Exponential Organizations book, we didn't realize how prescient it would be. It turned out over 10, 12 years, we were dead on. Now that we see a Gentic AI on the future of intelligence, what does the organization look like? We think we have a pretty interesting viewpoint and perspective on that.
0:25 Speaker 01 If you don't retool your organization or don't restart your organization, you will be disrupted because someone doing it is going to just eat your lunch.
0:34 Speaker 00 The central thing to think about is all of our organizational structures in the past were organized around hierarchy. And now they need to be AI-native, a Gentic workflow. And that's a totally different model. It needs to be architected around intelligence, not around hierarchy. The next question really becomes, how do you get there?
0:58 Speaker 01 I'm about to sit down with my dear brother, Salim Ismail, my Moonshot mate, talk about the organizational singularity. This is a conversation that I think is absolutely critical for every company to be looking at. We're in a period of rapid transition. Agents, AI, AGI, ASI, it's going to restructure how every company, every industry is being run, not in five or 10 years, in the next one year, in the next two years at most. Saleem is going to lay out his process that every company can follow to move from the old way of doing business as an organization which is sort of top-down, heavy, human-centric to a digital, AI-centric, AI-native company. Please take a look at this.
1:42 Speaker 01 This is about your survival, it's about your thriving. It's happening. And you're either on the evolutionary tree or you're going extinct. It's that simple. All right, let's jump in. Everybody, welcome to Moonshot, to a special episode with my dear brother from another mother, Salim Ismail. Saleem, you're finally here. You're in our Moonshot studio. You made it.
2:04 Speaker 00 First time, it looks awesome.
2:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:06 Speaker 00 And I love everything.
2:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, and today is a special... Special day, it's your birthday.
2:11 Speaker 00 It is my birthday.
2:11 Speaker 01 Yes, and so for those who don't know, Salim has just turned sixteen. It's his sweet sixteen birthday. And we're here to celebrate.
2:19 Speaker 00 Digits around you a little more accurate.
2:20 Speaker 01 Okay, that's right, the dyslexia in me hits it. So we're going to talk about something that we've been teasing on the Moonshots podcast for a while. Something that I'm excited about, which you call the organizational singularity.
2:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:34 Speaker 01 And I want to make sure that everyone listening realizes this is something across the board useful for everyone. Right, it's not if you're the CEO of a large Fortune 500 company, though it's useful if you are. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're in a small company, if you're a parent trying to advise your kid where to go work.
2:53 Speaker 00 Exactly.
2:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:54 Speaker 00 Look, when we wrote the exponential organizations book, we didn't realize how prescient it would be. It turned out over ten, twelve years, we were dead on. And so we're kind of saying, okay, now that we see agentic AI and the future of intelligence, what does the organization look like? And so we have taken a crack at that with the help of my entire community all pitched in for this. So we think we have a pretty interesting viewpoint and perspective on that.
3:17 Speaker 01 And you've been saying for a bit now that AI has killed the modern company.
3:22 Speaker 00 Yes.
3:23 Speaker 01 The Fortune 500's out there, but I don't think they've gotten the memo yet.
3:27 Speaker 00 They don't because there's a drag that goes effect, right? When the comet hit, the dinosaurs didn't go overnight. It took a few generations for them to die out and figure out what the hell's going on. So this is the same type of model.
3:39 Speaker 01 All right, well, let's let's dive in. And I want to make sure that folks get where things are going to go. And again, how do you how do you surf on top of this massive change that's coming?
3:53 Speaker 00 I think the key, the key part of this is what do you do? Once you understand that everything has changed. So let me go through the what this changed, right? So we have for a hundred years run organizations on a particular theory set coined by Ronald Coase in 1937. He wrote a paper called The Nature of the Firm. And he theorized in this economic paper that big companies will get bigger because transaction costs and coordination costs. Inside a company are cheaper than outside. Because you have everybody on payroll, you can order them around, and therefore you can get better work done inside than outside. Right? And he actually won the Nobel Prize for this paper. Okay. And for eighty years, we've gone through that. And if you go through a couple of slides here, I'll just show you.
4:35 Speaker 00 We've seen all these deep thinkers coasted this. Simon talked about where the organizational boundaries at. Clay Christians came along and said innovator's dilemma, as you get bigger, smaller companies can deliver cheaper products. Then Stanley McChrystal talked about how do you get coordination at scale without losing the emotional connection to the organization? How do you extend past that? Uh, EXO one point O used community and crowd and AI to pull coast sideways.
5:02 Speaker 01 To sort of extend our reach and abilities.
5:04 Speaker 00 Think about exercise and how you're able to coordinate external teams to do things. Think about the idea that for Uber, the mission critical business function, which does a match driver and passenger, does not happen inside the organization, happens out in the wild. And when you can enable that with technology, you can scale. Right? So we, we found ways of extending Cross's law. Uh, and then Jack Dorsey did what he did with Block, um, and with Roloff Botha with this book. And we are now extending all that. We basically kind of the conclusion is that the whole thing breaks in the face of agentic AI. COS's law no longer applies. Why? Because if you have to build a website inside a company,
5:44 Speaker 00 you have to go through layers of meetings and approvals, branding has to look at it, the privacy guys have to look at it, the IT guys will tell you, no, they can't be done. Whereas today you can step outside the company, use Vercel at home for five minutes and get it done for free.
5:57 Speaker 01 And have it know your brand guidelines, have it know your design taste.
6:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's right.
6:02 Speaker 01 And have it actually spin up a dozen different versions and have them try in the market.
6:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, and this is, and this is fantastic tweet that I've quoted, which I've forgotten the name of the fellow just now, but he said, building the feature is cheaper than having the meeting about the feature.
6:15 Speaker 01 That's so true.
6:16 Speaker 00 And that's like such a great way of framing it. Because that means that coordination, the act of coordination is more expensive than just execution today, especially when as AI is driving down the cost of execution.
6:28 Speaker 01 I know. I want to make sure we get. We discussed this, we understand what is the role of of people in this, right?
6:35 Speaker 00 Let's get to that, because I want to just first make the case that this is this breaks. Now, you still need that you could ask the question, do we need an organization at all? And it turns out we do, and we've got, we have a term called the fiduciary wedge. Where, okay, coordination costs and execution costs become low, which was primarily the reason for organizations the last hundred years. Okay, but you still need for as a purpose container, a fiduciary, a legal container, a liability container, a legal container. So think SPVs for investments are just containers, right? They hold legal and fiduciary liability. Essentially, companies become more and more like that. And there's a gap between human judgment and liability versus what the AI can do. And that gap, we call the fiduciary wedge.
7:19 Speaker 00 So you still need the an organizational structure and the legal entity.
7:23 Speaker 01 Everybody, you may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team. And every week, myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta trend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the meta trends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash meta trends. That's diamandis.com slash meta trends. And then the question is ultimately, what's inside that organizational container?
7:56 Speaker 00 That's right.
7:56 Speaker 01 Right? And there are going to be assets and IP and agents and some number of humans.
8:04 Speaker 00 That's right.
8:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:05 Speaker 00 And agents making API calls to God knows what and hacking into things and getting phone numbers and calling people up like the Alex Finn's AI just called them up, right? So this kind of takes the EXO 3.0 book from the original book to the 2.0 book to now what we call the organizational singularity.
8:22 Speaker 01 By the way, is this a book that you're putting out?
8:24 Speaker 00 It's a book that we're putting out.
8:25 Speaker 01 And is there a place people can go to learn more about this now or?
8:29 Speaker 00 Right now, we have it at organizational singularity.com.
8:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:32 Speaker 00 So go to that website and you'll be able to sign up. But right now, we're only releasing, well, let me, let me jump to the surprise here.
8:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:39 Speaker 00 We're actually releasing the book as an AI.
8:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:42 Speaker 00 Because a book is a static thing. The minute I finish publish the book, it'll be out of date.
8:45 Speaker 01 It sucks.
8:46 Speaker 00 So it has to be an AI. So we're going to be launching a Claude skill. Because every three days, something comes out that changes the game a bit. So we're keeping the book as a living document, which we tried to do with 2.0. Right, you and I worked on, but the technology wasn't there yet. Now it is.
9:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:01 Speaker 00 And so we're very, very excited about that. Okay, so there's a problem though today, which is that 80 plus percent of AI projects in companies are failing miserably. And they're failing miserably because existing companies are geared towards human to human to human workflows. All the approvals and bottlenecks, chains, et cetera, et cetera, were all human centric. Right? It's like, I use the analogy of when we first created television, we took radio announcers and put them on TV.
9:27 Speaker 01 I love that.
9:27 Speaker 00 Right? And you didn't use the medium at all. So these projects are failing because you're moving AI into legacy organizations and automating the legacy human bottlenecks. Of course they're going to fail. You need an AI native environment to do this one. So we had to kind of step back and say, okay, the entire EXO model breaks, coast breaks. All the thinkers up to now, they'd all breaks. We have to rethink it from scratch. And so we did that work with my community. We did that and came up with a whole new.
9:55 Speaker 01 And just to be clear about when you say something is breaking, ultimately, I think what you mean is if you don't retool your organization in this fashion, or don't restart your organization, you will be disrupted because someone doing it is going to just eat your lunch.
10:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, so here's a question for every CEO and every C-suite member out there. Is there a line in your business, a high margin line of your business, that two guys with open claw could replicate in 60 to 90 days? If it is, call us because you better get started fast because I guarantee you, there's two guys out there with open claw disrupting Dropbox.
10:32 Speaker 01 You and I've talked about this, anybody who's got a juicy margin is open for attack.
10:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:37 Speaker 01 Yeah. And you might, you might think you're protected by regulations. You might think you'd be protected by your brand.
10:43 Speaker 00 There's a few protective moats and I'll get into that.
10:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
10:45 Speaker 00 But, but for now, it's, it's a whole new world and it's a whole new ballgame. And the singular, what we mean by the organizational singularity is instead of coordinating and organizing the company around hierarchy, you organize it around intelligence. Okay, and that's a very big shift. That's about as big a shift you could ask for. So we've come up with this architecture, okay? Where you have the MTP, which you know well, the massive transformative purpose from the original book, etc.
11:14 Speaker 01 We live it.
11:14 Speaker 00 And this becomes not just a poster that you put up on a wall. This actually becomes a protocol. So MTP becomes an actual protocol and a guide for AI agents and human agents and whatever to act properly.
11:25 Speaker 01 You mean it's a cornerstone? It's a, it's a north star?
11:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, but it's actually a protocol in this new world. Like, what's the architecture of MTP? What's the boundary conditions around it, right? What, what are the feedback loops that tell you you're within the cone of the MTP or not stepping outside the cone? For example, in the early days of Uber, great MTP, everybody should have a private driver, right? But if you always ordered surge pricing, they would knew that and they would always charge you surge pricing, even though you and I would be standing next to each other. I'm a cheapskate, I never order surge pricing and I would get the cheap price and you would not.
12:01 Speaker 01 Right.
12:01 Speaker 00 Right? And so that kind of somewhat pushing the boundaries on the ethics side is now guided in this whole MTP architecture. So that's the middle of it. And then we have drive, which is the intelligence scaffolding and the engine around it, which I'll touch on. And then shape, which is how, how does the organizational?
12:18 Speaker 01 Drive and shape are acronyms for subcomponents.
12:21 Speaker 00 That's right, those are, those are acronyms. I don't need to get into them all in detail, but you'll get the, you'll get the general idea around it. Okay, so then we have, the next step is to then look at the intelligence stack in detail. Okay? And if you look at the diagram, you'll see this kind of architecture where we found six layers of what that core intelligence engine looks like. And the best analogy we have for this is Boyd's OODA loop, right? In the military, they have observe, orient, decide, act, right? And it's a core flywheel at the middle, which is also the core of the solve everything framing.
12:56 Speaker 01 Right.
12:56 Speaker 00 When you have that inner loop going, right? Then whatever you put into that loop starts having a positive feedback loop on everything else. So we created the intelligence stack to act a bit like the OODA loop. So that there's constant learning going on. But around it is a very, very important wrapper, which is govern and assure. Which is the constraints and the oversight. It's the harness and oversight to make sure that agents aren't going rogue.
13:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:23 Speaker 00 Right? We saw, we've seen over the last few weeks, agents going and doing crazy things. Uh, the, the railway agent that deleted all the, the volumes of, um, uh, rental car data, et cetera. So we need to make sure there's a very strong. So imagine the following, and I'll, I'll mention what, what I mean by that.
13:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:40 Speaker 00 So, so at the very heart of it is this intelligence stack. Uh, with this very clear governance protocol, what do we mean by governance is trusted eval, uh, architecture? A searchable log. Every agent has to have a searchable log, granular rollback. Can you go back to the previous version if you start going off? And a human review queue, so that as human beings are always in the oversight, uh, checking things. Okay. So this comes down to the role of what does a human being do when execution and coordination is done? Human beings rise up a level and they do dashboard oversight. They do monitoring, they do exception handling, they do problem solving, they do efficiency increases. Right? So those are the activities that human beings will do. It's kind of like you go to Germany, nobody's working on the flat tree floors.
14:25 Speaker 00 But unemployment hasn't dropped because everybody's doing more work on problem solving and increased efficiency, design thinking and other things. So we think the same thing, models there. This govern and assure loop as part of this OODA loop.
14:38 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
14:39 Speaker 00 That, those two combined give you a very tight core engine that makes sure the whole thing doesn't fly off the rails. Okay. So that's the intelligence stack. Now, when your agents talk to other agents, they need some clear mechanisms for how to do that.
14:53 Speaker 01 And by the way, just to be clear here, as you outlining the process.
14:59 Speaker 01 You've structured something that you can teach companies to implement.
15:04 Speaker 00 Absolutely. So let me, let me work through a live example.
15:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:07 Speaker 00 Okay. So you have these multiple layers, right? And let me just run through these layers again, so people are aware. There's a purpose layer, there's a sensing layer, there's an interpretation layer, there's a decision layer, there's an orchestration layer. Learning layer because you need that feedback.
15:21 Speaker 01 And by the way, Eric Schmidt told us, right, you know, rapid learning is the key to success.
15:25 Speaker 00 Boom, right. So this is that wrapped up in a very tight set of layers. So imagine you're a retail company and a competitor suddenly announces same day delivery.
15:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:36 Speaker 00 Okay, so you have a set of sensing agents out there going, hey, this just happened. Right. So the sensing agents bring that new information back to the other agents. The next is interpretation. So the interpretation layer then goes, okay, well, what does this mean? Does this, could this threaten our line of business? Could this threaten one line of business, multiple lines of business? Is it an existential threat? How big of a deal is this? And they interpret that data. The next layer is a decision layer to say, what should we do? Should we offer same day things? Should we buy a startup that's doing same day delivery? Should we ignore it because we don't think it's really going to work out? We think that it's a stupid idea. What do we actually, what's the decision?
16:14 Speaker 01 I mean, as I think about this, normally this would be your strategic officer, your marketing officer, all of those coming together, having meetings and deciding what to do.
16:22 Speaker 00 That's right.
16:22 Speaker 01 And you're saying all of this could be turned over to agents.
16:25 Speaker 00 Layers of agents can handle all of this now, right? So now you have a layer of agents.
16:29 Speaker 01 You have a feedback.
16:31 Speaker 00 You have a fee at each of these layers as a human being going at the interpretation layer. Do I think this is okay? Yeah, hit button, let it go to the next level.
16:38 Speaker 01 So it's an approval, approval process.
16:40 Speaker 00 Approval process and also senior people looking over going, there could be looking at agents, looking at six different strategic options. Right. Whereas in the pre, in a, in a very manual iteration, that may take months to evaluate the competitive alternative. Now you're doing it in hours and days.
16:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:56 Speaker 00 Right. So that's the impedance mismatch there.
16:58 Speaker 01 And by the way, what we've seen historically is the impedance mismatch between a Fortune 500 company and a startup, where the Fortune 500 company, to use that as an example, has so much to lose if they screw up that they're paralyzed in making decisions. And the startup is like, screw it, let's just try everything.
17:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly.
17:16 Speaker 01 And this is just taking it one step further.
17:18 Speaker 00 The way Robert Goldberg puts it, in a big company, one of 20 people can say no to an idea, kills it.
17:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:23 Speaker 00 Whereas the startup can go to one of 20 investors and one says yes and they're off to the races. So how do you balance that out? Right. Okay. Now I have these layers of agents, okay, purpose agents, sensing agents, interpretation agents, deciding agents. Uh, next level is an orchestration agent. So let's say the decision agent comes back and says, we should buy a startup that's doing this, right? And then now the orchestration is saying, okay, we got to set up a set of functions to go find a bunch of startups, analyze whether which ones are ready for M and A, tell the corporate dev team, get the lawyers ready, et cetera.
17:56 Speaker 01 Get the legal agents ready.
17:58 Speaker 00 Get the legal agents ready. And finally, a learning loop where did we buy another company before and did it work out or not? Right? And how did that work out? And all wrapped up in this governance thing. So that's the kind of an example of how you would flow through these. And at the core is this engine recursive learning. The, another way to think about the organizational singularity is when you can have recursive self-improvement at the workflow level.
18:23 Speaker 01 Love that.
18:24 Speaker 00 Okay, so if you took, say, invoice processing, and you have right now all these human checkpoints of, yes, did the goods arrive? Should we, who's, does the supplier exist in our systems? Is there a legal contract? There's a human checking all those things. Maybe you have an ERP system that's automated one or two of these layers. But now you can have the whole thing done and then an agent can say, well, how do I make this better every loop? How do I make this better at every loop? And constantly improves. Once you get to that level, you can actually set back and you're off to the races then because everything's just self-improve at that level. Okay, so that's the very heart of the whole thing with this layer. Now, we also recognize that agents are going to be doing very crazy things. So how do you navigate that?
19:05 Speaker 00 And we've come up with a framing which we found in smart contracts in web three, plus some old web architecture that says every agent should get a passport with a little metadata on what that agent is allowed to do or not allowed to do, right? So for example, policy-controlled APIs, okay? Uh, object, data object metadata that goes with it to say, what is that data allowed to be exposed to or not be exposed to? A liability framework is making sure agents aren't doing illegal things because your lawyers will go bananas. And agents going off outside your Organization doing things because you've no idea what they're doing. So every agent gets a almost like a little passport on what they're allowed to do. It's constraints.
19:47 Speaker 00 Constraints and oversight and and now you have other agents in the governor's sure loop over watching these things. The minutes are something go off the rails, human gets notified, agent gets stopped, rolled back, checked again, and you can do again. And the reason this works is, you know, in the quantum world, you need like a thousand physical cubits to hit a logical. Cubid, right, yeah. Well, agents are relatively free, so you can have a lot of agents doing things and a lot of agents overseeing them. So the overall cost, you still get the benefits of that overall stack. Okay, and here's the question I'll come back to for every CEO out there and every business leader out there. Could a two or three person team with Hermes or Open Claw disrupt major lines of business in your business? Yeah.
20:32 Speaker 00 If that's the case, now there's a few modes that you could develop. Okay, one is proprietary data, right? That's a clear mode. If you have key data that can't be replicated elsewhere. Number two, regulatory, which we see in healthcare, etc., regulatory capture more than anything. And that mode can be eroded over time. Can be, all of these can be, but they'll they'll serve as most for the time being. But the biggest mode is an intelligence mode where if you can learn faster than everybody else, nobody's going to catch you, right? This is why Claude and chat GPT, their learning loops are further ahead than say Manus or or Grok or whatever, and we're seeing how quickly they're moving ahead. Yeah. Once you hit that, it's very hard to catch up, right?
21:14 Speaker 00 And a fourth one would be fifth, really deeply committed to purpose and not wavering from that. Because nothing shakes you. The relationship with the end customer and developing the depth there. Yeah, dedicated customer relationship, which feeds into like proprietary data. And and brand? Brand, very critical, because brand sits with MTP, that emotional connection with the end user. If you have a strong brand, you should use all of these new agents and capabilities to reinforce that. Means you it's hard to shake you out of that position.
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22:22 Speaker 02 That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected.
22:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, it's interesting. People, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed. And you can know. And so when members come through Fountain, how do they detect cancers?
23:02 Speaker 02 So we're doing full body MRI, and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very, very important, and these are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing, because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering. But the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research, and work hard to democratize wellness.
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23:43 Speaker 00 So those are some of the problems. Now, let's talk a little bit about what happens to the company and the classic organization, which has C-suite, middle management, coal face, doing things. What happens to them? So, C-suite, I already gave the example-
23:56 Speaker 01 Just to be clear, what happens to them if you-
23:58 Speaker 00 In this new world.
23:59 Speaker 01 If you bring in, if you restructure-
24:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:02 Speaker 01 Have you given a name to the restructured organization?
24:05 Speaker 00 It's just an EXO 3.0 is the best name I have. If anybody has a better name, would love to, would love to hear it.
24:11 Speaker 01 So if you're, if you're going from a classic organization or an EXO 2.0 to an EXO 3.0, what happens to your, your organizational structure?
24:19 Speaker 00 That's right. Okay. And then it's a whole new world.
24:22 Speaker 01 Smack me.
24:22 Speaker 00 Okay. So C-suite becomes basically accountability holders, dashboard oversight, evaluators and validators rather than doers. You're not going to be doing a strategic evaluation. Agents will do that. You basically hit, yes, I like the evaluation or not.
24:38 Speaker 01 So basically you're using your wisdom and experience to decide whether the agent's action is in line.
24:43 Speaker 00 That's right. Now this opens up all other questions, which we'll get to in a second. So C-level is guiding and holding accountability and watching what the agents are doing and then deciding yes, no, do this, do that, whatever. Middle management is where the biggest change happens because middle management in existing companies is almost completely doing coordination. Okay. They take data from the coalface, they repackage it for proper absorption by the, by the C-suite, right? That function drops about 90%. Okay. Now then you need to lift up the human beings there and have them doing that exception handling, problem solving, et cetera, of which there's a ton. We just don't do it because most people don't have time.
25:24 Speaker 01 Right.
25:25 Speaker 00 Now you'll have more time to do those things. Okay. The bottom 20% are doing much more enabled work because they're, agents doing almost everything and they're also doing oversight and, and watching. Okay?
25:39 Speaker 01 Now, we, we've talked about on moonshots a number of times, the idea that we're going to see a reduction in the size of firms to, from 100% down to 20%, 80% reduction.
25:50 Speaker 00 Our, our calculation is you'll be able to run an average company with about 20 or 25% of the workforce that you had before.
25:57 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:57 Speaker 00 Okay. Now, you can go down the negative side there, media side and go, oh my God, 75% unemployment. Or our moonshot's view would be, we'll have five, 10 more companies being created and there'll be that much.
26:09 Speaker 01 The blossoming of entrepreneurship.
26:11 Speaker 00 That's right. And we're seeing the Cameran explosion of startups already, right? We're seeing actually hiring. Go up right now for entry level jobs, which is really pretty interesting to spot. Okay, so those are the three things that happen to the three layers of the business. Okay, now the question then becomes, how do you turn into one of these?
26:29 Speaker 01 And by the way, where do you see the 80% being lost? At all of the levels or mostly the middle?
26:36 Speaker 00 No, I think 60% would be coming from the middle management. 20% from the bottom, 20% from the top.
26:44 Speaker 01 Okay.
26:45 Speaker 00 And that will, that's the, that's the full.
26:47 Speaker 01 The compression.
26:48 Speaker 00 The compression is there, but mostly for middle management because you don't need to be gathering and aggregating sales reports. There's no way you're going to outperform an agent doing that. There's much more work that needs to be done in the company that you could do more valuably. Right now, an interesting question comes up in this is to, which is the alignment problem, which is how do you have? If you don't have entry level people doing the work and sweating it out, putting spreadsheets together and doing the grunt. What happens to your organizational and institutional? Yeah, that's right. And where do you get senior management eventually? When lower management and entry level are not there. And what we need, what we think will need to happen is very active and aggressive apprenticeship programs.
27:33 Speaker 00 So if you're suddenly a middle manager that gets displaced, well, go partner with the chief CFO. And work on looking at alternatives and you'll a learn a ton more, you'll be a much, have a lot more fun.
27:45 Speaker 01 Back, back to the apprentice.
27:46 Speaker 00 Really back to the apprentice, the guild kind of models, we think that'll start the thing. Okay, so you have this new entity, this intelligence core, new shape for this organization. C suite, middle management, coalface. The next question really becomes, how do you get there?
28:02 Speaker 01 Right.
28:02 Speaker 00 Right. And this is the part where we have deep expertise because when we built the EXO model. We decided one of the key things we had to solve was breaking that immune system problem. Right. So and if you try anything disruptive in a big company, the antibodies attack you.
28:16 Speaker 01 So just, just to clarify this, this, when we say, how do you get there? How do you go from a classic organization to retooling yourself as an? EXO level three here.
28:27 Speaker 00 You're a hundred million dollar trucking company.
28:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:30 Speaker 00 Right? And now and two guys can lease trucks, have an AI centric organization and compete the hell out of you. What are you going to do? Okay. Now, this is the question of what do you do now? And how do you turn into this new model? Okay. And what you do, and I cannot stress this enough with the experience we've had is you cannot change and fix and transform the existing company. Okay. It goes all the way back to Buckminster Fuller, who said, you can't fix an existing system. You have to build a new system at the edge and let that become the new gravity center. John Hegel and John Seeley Brown identified this as disruptive things happen at the edge.
29:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:09 Speaker 00 The poster child here is Nestle created Nespresso in 1976. For 10 years, they tried to run it as a line of business inside the mothership. Doesn't fit. Different brand, different supply chain, different delivery, different customer proposition. Finally, they're like, put it over there. There's too much friction inside the company. They give it a different building and boom.
29:28 Speaker 01 Well, we wrote about this. The classic was Steve Jobs getting the, you know, starting the Mac or IBM creating their PC.
29:34 Speaker 00 You take your.
29:35 Speaker 01 Or Lockheed with their, with their.
29:37 Speaker 00 That's right. Yeah. Apple would take a small team, put them at the edge, keep them a secret and say, go disrupt a different industry. Right? So Nestle is a poster child of this. Nespresso is now one of their highest performing lines of business and every hotel room in the world has one. When you, so we know this. We've been talking about this for a long time with EXO. You do disruptive things on the edge. And we've been working with Procter and Gamble to Siemens Energy to Black and Decker to HP, helping them do disruptive edge innovation.
30:04 Speaker 01 It's, it's the human ego and the final result protecting themselves from disruption.
30:08 Speaker 00 Yes. So you have to do that different stuff at the edge. There's a reason why Amazon Web Services wasn't done in the core service. It just doesn't fit. Right? Okay. So you have to take this methodology and this approach, just, just believe that.
30:22 Speaker 01 Just trust me.
30:22 Speaker 00 You could try, you could try it the other way.
30:24 Speaker 01 And by the way, I, I tried in a, I'm not going to say which of my companies, a hundred person organization, right? Where I'm.
30:32 Speaker 01 Very much, you know, I'm a compelling individual.
30:35 Speaker 00 You are.
30:36 Speaker 01 And I still could not get it. And so I literally had to start it as a separate organization.
30:41 Speaker 00 You do.
30:42 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I've done that now multiple times.
30:44 Speaker 00 Yes.
30:44 Speaker 01 And.
30:45 Speaker 00 You maybe take it to an extreme because every time something happens, you spin off another company, which, which may, which is the Richard Branson approach.
30:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:53 Speaker 00 Like every time he got to 150 people, they'd spin off another company to, to break through the Dunbar number problem.
30:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:59 Speaker 00 Right? But all I'm going to ask the viewers and listeners of this to is to, you can go research this to death. But if you do anything other than do disruptive things at the edge, pointing into adjacent spaces in a different way, you will fail.
31:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:12 Speaker 00 I've seen the innovation process in detail, probably in 250 out of the Fortune 500. And I've never, ever, ever, ever seen any other method work than this.
31:22 Speaker 01 And I want to say one other thing. If you're going to try and do this on the edge, ultimately, the edge organization needs to report into the CEO.
31:31 Speaker 00 Yes.
31:32 Speaker 01 At the very top.
31:33 Speaker 00 You cannot report.
31:34 Speaker 01 And there's one other thing. The board of directors
31:37 Speaker 00 Has to.
31:37 Speaker 01 need, needs to provide the CEO full support.
31:41 Speaker 00 Yes.
31:41 Speaker 01 Uh, you know, if you're disrupting your own organization and you don't have the board's support, you're screwed.
31:46 Speaker 00 So let me talk through how you do this.
31:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:49 Speaker 00 You do not touch the existing organization.
31:52 Speaker 01 It's your, it's your, it's your revenue engine.
31:54 Speaker 00 If I, yeah, don't touch the cash cow.
31:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:56 Speaker 00 And, and if you start doing, what's happening right now is people are trying to stick AI injected into places. It's just not working. Right? So what you do is at the edge of your organization, you create an AI native digital twin. Okay. And then what you do, once you set that up, separate entity, take three to five of your crazy young people.
32:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
32:14 Speaker 00 Okay. Uh, partner with a company that's a builder, not a consulting company, but a builder. So you get what's called four deployed engineers, which is the latest buzzword in, in, in software these days. And what you do is you pick a workflow. You've got all these workflows in a legacy organization.
32:30 Speaker 01 Is that a product or a service?
32:31 Speaker 00 Well, call it invoice processing is a workflow, right? That's a very standardized cutting cookie cutter workflow that you know exactly what how it works. And you you rebuild it in this new entity. Okay, you don't move it, you copy it. So now you take the steps in this. We've got a whole methodology for how to task breakdown and score each task, etc. Those built into the methodology of the whole approach. You replicate it in this new system. Okay, you fork the data so that you have the data to do it. And now you start running it here. Now you have a you've de-risked it also because if something goes horribly wrong, you're not risking the mothership. Cannot stress this long. So you run this in parallel until you hit that recursive self improvement loop.
33:16 Speaker 00 And once you see the improvement loops here are way faster than you can do it here. Then you know you're in thing, even then give it another few weeks.
33:23 Speaker 01 And you've got quality check against the original.
33:25 Speaker 00 Quality check, you've got everything. And then you slowly deprecate the old and you take next workflow. Maybe it's receipt confirmation and you move that over. Maybe the next one is demand forecasting and you move that one over. And little by little, you grow this thing at the edge.
33:39 Speaker 01 A full digital twin.
33:40 Speaker 00 And full digital twin.
33:41 Speaker 01 That's that's recursive self improvement.
33:44 Speaker 00 And the next thing you know, you've got your AI native digital twin fully running. Our current estimates are that once you have that digital twin running properly, your performance improvement should be between 100x or higher.
33:56 Speaker 01 Per year?
33:57 Speaker 00 Just 100x better. Like if it's processing one invoice now, it should process 100 invoices next, right? If you were taking 100 days to do something, it should take one day to do something.
34:07 Speaker 01 What's the human scaffolding around the digital twin?
34:10 Speaker 00 Well, that's the whole thing. That's where you're building up this thing and the human beings and this new model. You have human beings there, but they're doing there's more or less of them and they're doing more oversight, exception handling, problem solving, etc. You're literally building your AI native digital twin at the edge.
34:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. And what gets me excited as well is the idea that once you've done that, you can start to create adjacent companies.
34:34 Speaker 00 You can spin off anything.
34:35 Speaker 01 And you can start to create, I mean, as if you're a great entrepreneurial team.
34:39 Speaker 00 Yes.
34:40 Speaker 01 And you're limited by, I mean, a lot of my companies have amazing teams of people doing things. And, you know, I don't want to push them any further because, you know, quality of life, they'll break, they'll get stressed out, but if all of a sudden, you can get that automatic digital twin running, that team can now start building other products and services.
34:58 Speaker 00 Exactly.
34:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:59 Speaker 00 You can do that. Now, let me give you a real example, okay? There's two cases, sectors, by the way, that have gone through this full loop, okay? One is the contact centers. We used to do human business processing outsourcing. We had call centers doing stuff. Then phase two of that automation was chatbot assisted customer service, right? And now we have AI native customer service. Klarna has done this.
35:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was just talking to the AIs on Starlink.
35:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's incredible.
35:27 Speaker 01 It's all GROK driven.
35:28 Speaker 00 It's all GROK driven, right? I set up a new website for, in fact, this organizational singularity. And I went on CloudFlare and the AI told me exactly how to run the exception rules and domain forwarding. I was like, this is incredible. And so just the automation of what's going to be possible is going to be magical to people. Anybody using AI at a refined level today sees how much fun it is, right? Compared to what it was like before. So we've seen this with say.
35:53 Speaker 01 To the point that we're working seven day week.
35:55 Speaker 00 We're killers, but you know, everybody's having so much fun now. It doesn't feel like work.
35:59 Speaker 01 No, it's like.
36:00 Speaker 00 Because we're getting so much done. I mean, it took three years of hell to write the first book. Right? It took us two and a half years of hell to write the second book, mostly because we had to rewrite it.
36:08 Speaker 01 Because I had to deal with me.
36:10 Speaker 00 No, no, no, no, no. Because we had to rewrite it after because generative AI came out towards the end. But this third book was three months.
36:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:17 Speaker 00 Right? And because there was so much, every contributor could use an AI, add more data to it, more help to it, add their methodology to it, and then boom, you're after the races. So the second domain where this has fully happened, by the way, is marketing and content generation, right? We used to have, it was agency heavy, then it was AI assisted, and now it's AI native, right? And so we can see certain verticals hitting this spot in a particular way. So. Let me go into the rewriting methodology. We call this methodology rewrite. Okay. And I want to go into a little bit of detail so that people understand the specific steps that are involved in this. So you have a workflow like inverse processing and you're going to start moving workflow over. Before you do any of that, you have to do a backcasting exercise.
37:02 Speaker 01 Okay. What's that mean?
37:03 Speaker 00 Backcasting is a methodology in future studies and forecasting where you pick what the vision looks like. Say Elon wants to get to Mars. You could say, okay, I want to get to Mars in seven years. In order to get to Mars in seven years, where do I have to be in five years? Where do I have to be in three years?
37:19 Speaker 01 Sure.
37:20 Speaker 00 And now you have your roadmap. If you start from the starting point and go, I want to get to Mars, you've no idea what you're doing, how you're going to get there, etc. So backcasting has turned into a very powerful methodology. So step one is take your company, so let's say it's that trucking company or retail company that I used earlier. And say, okay, in this future world, what does that company look like? Fulfilling its MTP and its architecture in an AI native centric way.
37:45 Speaker 01 By the way, that's one of the hardest things for people to do, to let go of how they've done it.
37:51 Speaker 00 Yes.
37:51 Speaker 01 And by the way, it's also one of the easiest things to do in conversation with a large language model.
37:56 Speaker 00 Beautiful, right? So take your C suite, go do that backcasting exercise. So that's phase one, and we have people that can help people do that. Okay. Step two, you you score your company. So we've got a whole bunch of metrics on which we want to score the existing organization. For example, I'll just give you two of them. One is, what is the organizational drag inside your organization? If right now, if you try and get something done, does it have to go through like five or six different decision loops and approvals before you get it done? Or can they, like Nvidia, they go straight to the founder and go, can I do this? And he says yes or no, right? Or an AI tells you, yes, you can do it or not do it, etc. So what's the organizational drag, one to 10?
38:34 Speaker 01 Right.
38:34 Speaker 00 A second metric would be, where is AI as a first class citizen in your company right now?
38:40 Speaker 01 Love that.
38:41 Speaker 00 If it's a tool injected by a T, you're on the low end of the score. If you've got a chief AI officer and you're building AI native capability already, your score is much higher on that one to 10 score. So you've got seven dimensions. We ask you those seven questions, you score yourself. We'll have this on the website for people to take for free. Right? Evaluate yourself. It's a one to a seven thing. The next step is you take the most prescriptive workflows you have in your organization and start mapping them and documenting so you have clear knowledge. A big problem, by the way, is going to be what's called tacit knowledge. Right? There may be, like, let's say you're doing video production. Okay? There's a bunch of steps you're doing as a video producer that may not be obvious from the outside. They're not documented anywhere.
39:25 Speaker 00 And if you lose that person, and AI can't do them right away.
39:28 Speaker 01 Right.
39:28 Speaker 00 Right? It's the unspoken.
39:30 Speaker 01 And by the way, there's a whole process right now by which companies are basically shattering you with an agent.
39:38 Speaker 00 They're trying. They're trying to shatter, yeah. But it turns out if you're a Gen Z worker, forty-four percent of Gen Z workers are sabotaging the AI and giving it bad information so it can't take their job later.
39:48 Speaker 01 Wow.
39:49 Speaker 00 It's at that level of immune system response.
39:52 Speaker 01 And by the way, just, that is a perfect example of the immune system.
39:55 Speaker 00 That's the immune system. You're trying to do something, but the culture is killing you trying to get that done. Right? By the way, I'm going to just reiterate. We've created a ten-week process that we've found a way of hacking, breaking the immune system, hacking culture at scale. We've done it a hundred times for big companies.
40:10 Speaker 01 And I love, I played in a little bit of that, and I love it.
40:13 Speaker 00 Okay. Next step is, is cut the organizational drag. Start stripping out approval levels in your company so that you actually strip things down until you can break it. And what would that look like? Okay? Next step is build, start building that digital twin and migrating workflows over one by one. And the final one is you rewire, you rewire your systems more and more so that everything is going to that rather than to this. Let me take one more crack at visualizing this. Today, this is how most companies operate. They have their cloud provider, their networking, or their capability. Then they have a set of ERP systems, Oracle Financials, SAP, whatever. And all the data sits inside those systems.
40:53 Speaker 01 Right.
40:53 Speaker 00 And those companies don't want you to have that data easily. So it's wired, wired in. Then you have an application layer, and people are trying to layer AI on the top, hacking against this horrible architecture that we've had for fifty years. And it can't be easily unwound. Okay? Picture the new architecture, new architectures, you've got our connectivity and cloud provider, a data lake that has all your data accessible in one spot with the proper approval levels attached to each data object.
41:24 Speaker 01 Right.
41:25 Speaker 00 Then you have your application layer that is custom-built for you because AI can do that, and workflows, etc. Then your AI, then your agents on top of that. So this is a wholly different stack and architecture.
41:38 Speaker 01 That you own.
41:39 Speaker 00 That you own completely, right? And this is why the SaaS providers are so freaked out. Because that model is not compatible with this model, right? So right now, they're trying their best to keep their place because they're wired into the limbic system of the legacy organization. But if you build this proper stack, you have full agency and control at much cheaper cost than you could do before.
42:01 Speaker 01 And the speed is infinitely.
42:02 Speaker 00 And the speed. Ask anybody who's tried to implement an ERP system how much hell they had trying to do it. And then you end up trying to map the organizational flow to the ERP system.
42:13 Speaker 01 Versus the other way around.
42:13 Speaker 00 Versus the other way around. Now you can have software built that way. So we've built a whole methodology for this. Last couple of points around this is, we think this overall transition is going to take about five to seven years to do this full transition.
42:28 Speaker 01 Wait, wait, let's understand it. So not for a single company to do it, for all companies to get there?
42:33 Speaker 00 For the majority.
42:34 Speaker 01 For the surviving companies to get there?
42:35 Speaker 00 A surviving majority of companies over a five to seven-year period, you're either dead or you've transitioned to this.
42:41 Speaker 01 And this maps as well, by the way, in the conversation we've had about the turbulent period of time.
42:47 Speaker 00 And we actually call this the turbulent transition for exactly that.
42:51 Speaker 01 I've said it's two to eight years. We have to carefully architect societally how we get through this two-to-eight-year period.
42:58 Speaker 00 That's right, okay? And I'm just talking about companies, forget anything else.
43:03 Speaker 01 But it's the underlying reason.
43:05 Speaker 00 That's right, okay? So in our opinion, you should be able to run a company between 10% to 25% of the people that you have today.
43:14 Speaker 01 You just dropped down to 10%.
43:16 Speaker 00 If you're regulatory-centric, right? Or have physical work like your. Building a data center type thing, then it's less. If you were, if you're a marketing company, then you're going to be down to 10% human beings.
43:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:31 Speaker 00 But a physical company, even then, it's only 25%, okay? So for example, we were doing work with Fermi America and we estimated that we should be able to run a power plant. Instead of with 800 people, with about 80 people.
43:43 Speaker 01 Hmm.
43:43 Speaker 00 That's a full 10% backdrop there. It should be a one to a 20% plus manager to what Jack Dorsey called H I I C, high impact. Individual contributor.
43:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:57 Speaker 00 Should be one manager per 20 of those instead of one to five or one to three.
44:02 Speaker 01 And Jack, Jack took it to an extreme.
44:04 Speaker 00 He did.
44:04 Speaker 01 He wanted to have, you know, just CEO and everybody connects to him.
44:08 Speaker 00 He did, but what that means is he's using AI to do everything.
44:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
44:11 Speaker 00 Cause there's no way the CEO can keep that many people connected, that many people anyway, right? And then, and this is already happening, take Cognition Labs, their ARR grew 73 times.
44:22 Speaker 01 Hmm.
44:23 Speaker 00 When they implemented this full system, when they went fully AI native. This is already happening. This is not a some pie in the sky guess. We're taking early signals and over the last few months, as we've been watching the market evolve, every single data point we've gathered. Is pointing exactly this trajectory that we're pointing at.
44:39 Speaker 01 This is actually a race. Uh, this is, you know, if you're a company in an industry and someone else runs this process. And, and has a recursive improving digital twin.
44:51 Speaker 00 Yes.
44:51 Speaker 01 And you don't.
44:52 Speaker 00 Yes.
44:53 Speaker 01 You're cooked.
44:53 Speaker 00 You're cooked.
44:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:54 Speaker 00 That's right. So if you're a Unilever and Procter and Gamble is taking all their stuff and automating it, you will not.
45:00 Speaker 01 I hope they're listening.
45:01 Speaker 00 Right? Or the other way around, right? Whoever, whichever way it is. Okay. So let me talk about what survives and what does not survive.
45:07 Speaker 01 This, and just to, just to hit it, uh, you know, a friend of the pod, Elon has talked about increasing the GDP. You know, triple digit growth. I mean, this just adds, you know, rocket fuel. I mean, it's insane.
45:23 Speaker 00 Yes.
45:23 Speaker 01 We're going to see insane levels of growth.
45:25 Speaker 00 Classic companies that are delivering 100x.
45:29 Speaker 00 Compared to what was being done before.
45:31 Speaker 01 In terms of profitability.
45:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's right.
45:35 Speaker 01 Revenue, revenue scale and profit goes to the roof.
45:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, now profitability will be limited because that profit margin. Other companies are going to go, wow, look at that profit margin. I'm going to send my AI agents to do that.
45:47 Speaker 01 Which is why things demonetize and why we end up heading towards universal high income. Cause their cost of everything starts dropping down.
45:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, then we can get into the whole UBI, UHI, universal basic services, stuff, etc.
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47:05 Speaker 00 All right, let me just do a before and after.
47:06 Speaker 01 Sure.
47:07 Speaker 00 Okay, so what survives is what the new entity looked like is the MTP encoded as protocol in the company.
47:15 Speaker 01 Okay.
47:15 Speaker 00 Number two, the accountability shell, legal entity fiduciary holder, liability container, etc. Proprietary intelligence in that stack is very, very critical. Coordination protocols, okay, become very killer. Curatorial judgment. Okay, when execution is nearly free, judgment and taste become really important in the future.
47:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, we've talked about that. Super important.
47:41 Speaker 00 Super important, okay. So, that, those are the things that will survive and thrive in this new world. What does not survive, okay? Number one, the org chart, the way we built it.
47:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:50 Speaker 00 David Rose is famous for saying, the, um, if you were, whatever the org structure that got you successful in the 20th, 20th century will have you fail in the 21st century.
48:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
48:01 Speaker 00 Turns out he was right, right? It's just taken a little longer.
48:04 Speaker 01 But iterated again.
48:05 Speaker 00 Iterated again. Okay, so the org chart in the traditional model completely fails.
48:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:09 Speaker 00 The five-year plan dies completely. In fact, any static planning dies.
48:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
48:14 Speaker 00 Because if you do any strategic thinking of this is what the world's gonna look like a year from now, you have no concept.
48:20 Speaker 01 It's constant learning loops.
48:21 Speaker 00 We're in the middle of the singularity. You can't rely on any static plan. So the, the plan itself has to, and we even got it to this point. Think about the way-
48:29 Speaker 01 I can imagine people, as soon as they're getting very anxious, very anxious right now.
48:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, when I've spoken about this at conferences, people are like, my head is like breaking, freaking out, dying here.
48:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:38 Speaker 00 But again, we've got, we, it looks like we found a very stable, uh,
48:42 Speaker 01 A mechanism to get you.
48:43 Speaker 00 De-risk mechanism to get you from A to B, right? So, so there's, there's some comfort level.
48:48 Speaker 01 I mean, I, I think that's so important.
48:50 Speaker 00 Well, in terms of what the world needs, right? This is, you, you and I love doing stuff that the world needs.
48:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:56 Speaker 00 It's very clear, this is what the world needs, is a stable framework to get us from A to B.
49:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:01 Speaker 00 And if we can have a little less of the chaos, as old systems fail and we can fail over more elegantly, then let's please, goodness for goodness, do that. So, um, the, the five-year plan, in fact, we actually took it to the point where, right now, if you have an organization, that org structure changes only when you have a major event, like an M and A transaction, or you launch a new line of business or something.
49:24 Speaker 01 Or you replace, your performance sucks, you'd replace a management team.
49:28 Speaker 00 Okay, so that org structure does not change very much. But in the new world, that org structure is dynamic and constantly changing, adapting to the current situation. It's like an amoeba. And that's the org structure. Forget it. The orgs, the organization itself becomes a protocol. And that's a big kind of thing to get your head around.
49:46 Speaker 01 I love that.
49:47 Speaker 00 Okay, middle management is a coordination layer, gone. Okay, quarterly reviews as a unit of decision making, gone.
49:53 Speaker 01 Annual planning, gone.
49:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, inertia modes, customers don't switch because switching is annoying, gone. Okay, wasting assets in the agent economy, gone. So there's a bunch of things we've kind of highlighted what happens first. And so we're kind of looking at this and one guidance I would give to people, if your company is less than 50 people, you can brute force this and do this in the whole company because you've got a first name basis with everybody. If your company is over 50, in your case it was 100.
50:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:21 Speaker 00 Do not try and break the immune system and do not, because you'll risk the existing company and you don't want to do that. Do this digital twin at the edge.
50:28 Speaker 01 Yes.
50:28 Speaker 00 Okay, so what we're in right now is we're saying, okay, let's pick a few CEOs that want to go through this. Okay, and we're going to score them in that rewrite score and if they've got good.
50:37 Speaker 01 So you've taken some through it. What, I mean.
50:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, we've started with about, we're right now at about four companies. We're kind of going through them with that. We'll probably do 10 at a time. So if you're interested and you want to go through this, let us know and we'll.
50:52 Speaker 01 So let's be very specific about that because I can imagine a lot of our viewers want this and we have a lot of large companies and entrepreneurial companies and so forth. So if someone does want to be one of the first 10 going through this.
51:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:03 Speaker 01 Who do they email? Where do they go?
51:05 Speaker 00 Um, two paths would be email Kevin at openexo. Kevin Allen is our head of community and, and navigates all this and his AI will help.
51:13 Speaker 01 So K E V I N.
51:15 Speaker 00 K E V I N at openexo.com, right? Or go to the, our website, organizationalsingularity.com and you can actually fill out a form and say, I want to try this.
51:26 Speaker 01 But you're going to selectively choose who you work with.
51:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, because let's say a company has horrible organizational drag.
51:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:33 Speaker 00 We're going to say, go fix the organizational drag first because we're going to spend all your time on that and not doing what.
51:38 Speaker 01 And then, but you.
51:39 Speaker 00 We think it's a 90 day process.
51:40 Speaker 01 To do what?
51:41 Speaker 00 To start this process and get a few workflows working in this new way. And if that, once we get you going, then you should be off to the races and you can. build on yourself.
51:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
51:50 Speaker 00 I will take batches. The first batch will be ten or twenty probably. And then we may do more. We'll see how that goes. My entire community is being retrained for this. So my EXO community is now fifty thousand people in a hundred and fifty countries. So we're retraining them to be able to navigate this. We're all going to go through this journey together. I'll be personally involved in the first couple of batches.
52:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:11 Speaker 00 Like I was personally involved in the first sprints, etc.
52:13 Speaker 01 We just heard.
52:14 Speaker 00 To make sure this.
52:14 Speaker 01 We just heard Sheikh Mohammed say that he wants to run fifty percent of the Emirati government.
52:20 Speaker 00 Yes.
52:20 Speaker 01 On this.
52:20 Speaker 00 Yes.
52:21 Speaker 01 Do you see this working for governments as well?
52:23 Speaker 00 Completely. Think of any government. Almost all the processes in a government are prescriptive. Very well understood. The process for renewing a driver's license is extremely well understood.
52:33 Speaker 01 And frustrating.
52:34 Speaker 00 And frustrating, but now that friction can be removed in a really magical way.
52:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:38 Speaker 00 Um, in fact, they did this. I mean, um, Minister Alulama, right?
52:43 Speaker 01 Yes.
52:43 Speaker 00 Said, Slim, come and get a golden visa.
52:44 Speaker 01 The Minister of AI.
52:45 Speaker 00 You're gonna be my poster child. And they're processing golden visas in five hours, a resident visa.
52:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:51 Speaker 00 In five hours. It's unheard of in, in that world. So they've already been down a path like this. They're taking it naturally to the whole other next level. But for governments and nonprofits, this completely applies, right? And there's a whole chapter we have in the book, which I won't talk about here. But go in the whole solve everything paper that you and Alex did, right? Now, all of Alex's thinking on the inner loop. Uh, we've taken a crack at what does the, how do you organize? Domain after domain and create a domain collapse in more and more sectors. And how do you organize for that?
53:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:24 Speaker 00 So you can create an organizational design where you can pick a domain like healthcare or education. And set up a structure that then has that inner loop start to move.
53:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and I guess the other question is if you're an entrepreneur thinking about starting a company.
53:38 Speaker 00 Yes.
53:39 Speaker 01 You have basically a, a platform here and a playbook to start.
53:43 Speaker 00 That's right.
53:44 Speaker 01 Immediately as.
53:45 Speaker 00 Now you know, we can, you can read this. In fact, what we're gonna do is we're launching the book as an API.
53:51 Speaker 01 Right.
53:51 Speaker 00 As an, as an AI, right? So we're gonna launch it as a Claude skill.
53:55 Speaker 01 Alright.
53:55 Speaker 00 That you can just download. Like Claude just said, hey, we're gonna have connectors. QuickBooks and everything else like that. We're going to do, download the entire contents of the EXO framework as a Claude skill. Because every two, three days, we're learning new things. We're going to build it in. So the, the skill itself is changing on a real time basis. It's not like you get certified in this from five years ago. You, you have to, the AI itself has to keep updated. So we're releasing the book as an AI, as a native AI.
54:23 Speaker 01 Amazing. So I, I guess the question is if, you know, if you're ready for this and, and you're selected, that's great. If you're a company that's got too much, what do you call it organizational friction?
54:38 Speaker 00 Yes, organizational drag.
54:40 Speaker 01 What do you do there?
54:42 Speaker 00 Come and see us because we'll show you, we'll tell you what to do. For example, if you've got a process that takes 10 steps, okay? Brute force it and rethink that process. So it takes three steps. Once it's taking three steps or less, then you're able to, you're ready to start thinking about moving over into the digital twin. You can also start setting up the legal framework for the digital twin, get board approval, right? There's a lot of scaffolding that has to take place for you to get to there. Okay? You may have legacy legal issues, like for example, in Germany, workers councils decide how many employees the bigger company is allowed to have or not have, which is not great from a flexibility point of view, but there's so much else you can do to start navigating this.
55:25 Speaker 00 In fact, one of our folks, Patrick Sandina, said, look, let's figure out a way in this process of retraining all of the, the people that we were doing work and that, that might be at risk, retraining them to be in this new model, so that you have a, a, a kind of a whole transition plan for society built in. So which is then you solve the soulful contract along the way. And so we'll see how that works out.
55:49 Speaker 01 I love this, Salim. You've been pregnant, giving birth to this. Why we've been talking about this?
55:55 Speaker 00 It's about, it's about three months of, of stuff and, and then what I would do is I started writing the first version of the book and worked with Claude and ChatGPT. I had three instances of Gemini ChatGPT. And Claude each taking cracks at different things. Then I sent it out to the community and said, give me feedback. And so we got lessons learned and then we went and talked to some of the cutting edge AI practitioners. So what are you doing? What are you seeing at the cutting edge? And so it's been a, it's been a, because the field is changing as fast as we are able to keep up with it. So just keeping out, it's like moonshots, right? We're spending a huge amount of time just keeping up with all the breakthroughs and headlines.
56:36 Speaker 00 We're having to spend, have a team dedicated to just keeping track of all the things happening. So we can constantly tweak the methodology itself on how to do the rebuilding.
56:47 Speaker 01 Amazing. Again, just to reiterate, if someone's interested, [email protected] .
56:53 Speaker 00 Yep.
56:54 Speaker 01 Or go to, what's the website?
56:56 Speaker 00 Organizationalsingularity.com.
56:58 Speaker 01 Fantastic.
56:58 Speaker 00 Which is my fault.
57:01 Speaker 01 I think this is teaching, you know, boards and founders. How to survive the next, you know, the disruptions that are coming. The disruptions are coming.
57:14 Speaker 00 The disruption is, is now, it's like, as William Gibson said, the future is here is not evenly distributed, right? The organizational singularity is here, it's just not evenly distributed. If you're a five person startup, you're building in AI native way anyway. And we have a whole bunch of our community members that are doing that. And we've been learning from them, right? You see Alex Finn with all the open cloth stuff and the Hermes and what that's, what that's making possible. The big, the central thing to think about is all of our organizational structures in the past were organized around hierarchy. And human centric workflows. And now they need to be AI native, agentic workflow. And that's a totally different model. It needs to be architected around intelligence, not around hierarchy.
57:58 Speaker 01 Love it. And I hope on the, on our weekly, soon bi-weekly, soon daily, moonshots.
58:05 Speaker 00 Daily, oh my God.
58:05 Speaker 01 I know, I know, it's crazy, but.
58:07 Speaker 00 Do you know how many flights I've had to change? Oh my God, the only flight I could take is right when moonshots are, I have to now stay till the next day.
58:16 Speaker 01 I know, how many airport, how many airports have you? Have you broadcast from?
58:20 Speaker 00 It's it's been bad. It should get better, by the way. It should.
58:23 Speaker 01 It should. But I hope that we'll be able to track this and you could report on companies that have made this transition.
58:31 Speaker 00 That's right.
58:32 Speaker 01 And how this is updated. I just, for me, this is one of the most important learnings that you can deliver.
58:37 Speaker 00 I'll give you one early thing we've seen. You know what's one of the biggest cadre of category of people that are approaching us is universities. They're like, we need to automate. We need to totally change. We can see the writing on the wall.
58:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, massive disruption coming.
58:50 Speaker 00 So they're coming going, how, what do we do? And we're like, great, let's start with you. Let's start automating the existing one. And move you into this new model so that as you turn from trying to teach content to teaching execution, becoming entrepreneurial hubs.
59:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, right. We talk about the fact that your engineering degree won't be that you studied engineering for four years. You built a bunch of stuff and it was interesting enough, you got credentialed.
59:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:14 Speaker 00 That will be the engineering degree. It'll be doing rather than learning.
59:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:17 Speaker 00 And so that's such a big shift for the legacy. It's it's what I'm really impressed by is they're seeing it. I didn't think they would even see it, but they're actually seeing it and reaching out to us.
59:27 Speaker 01 Amazing. Listen, buddy, thank you for sharing this. It was actually amazing to see. I mean, your brilliance and your passion about this.
59:38 Speaker 00 Hot mind with the community.
59:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, to all of the community, but still, it's it's it's your drive here. This is your heart and your soul.
59:44 Speaker 00 This is it. I mean, this is how you organize for the new world, right? If you're going to rebuild civilization, rewrite civilization, right? You have to kind of think about how the organizational design around this all works and we have to rethink the whole thing.
59:57 Speaker 01 So I'll say this into into camera. If you're an employee at a company and you want your company to thrive, send this to your CEO, send this to your board. If you're the CEO, this is coming. There's no if, you know, about it. It's happening at an accelerating rate. And remember that disruption is not coming from your largest competitor. It's coming from the AI native startup that sees how slow you are and how much profit you're currently making. And they're going to come and try and eat your lunch.
1:00:32 Speaker 00 I think your T-shirt says it all. Abundance hole.
1:00:35 Speaker 01 Abundance is coming.
1:00:36 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:00:37 Speaker 01 Brother, thank you for this.
1:00:38 Speaker 00 Oh, great.
1:00:38 Speaker 01 Beautiful. And I love spending time and excited to go and celebrate your birthday tonight.
1:00:42 Speaker 00 We will do that.
1:00:43 Speaker 01 Yes, fantastic.
1:00:47 Speaker 01 If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a Moonshot mate. Every week, my Moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today.
1:01:32 Speaker 01 It's a blast for us to put this together every week.
1:01:48 Speaker 04 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
1:01:58 Speaker 05 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
1:02:05 Speaker 04 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
Previous SpaceX’ $75B+ Historic IPO, GPT 5.5 Outperforms Polymarket, and AI Solves 80 yr old math problem | EP #257 Next Pope Leo vs. AI, GPT 5.5 Beats Claude, and Sam Altman Walks Back Job Apocalypse | EP #259 Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
