"Life Will Get Weird The Next 5 Years!"- Build Wealth While Others Lose Their Jobs | Peter Diamandis

I think it will play out something like this: I think that the rate of change is going to cause a lot of people a lot of turmoil. They will get addicted to things like social media and the dopamine cycle. Their sense of well-being will be tremendously disrupted by losing a sense of purpose to AI. The reason that even in the face of all of that I consider myself wildly optimistic about the future—I am very aggressively a techno-optimist—is because I don't think that evolution, and that's probably the right word, though I don't just mean it from the sort of standard perspective of your DNA mutations accumulating and you getting better. I mean technological evolution, societal evolution. I don't think it cares about any one generation, and it will gladly create a period of 15 to 20 years of just absolute brutality. But on the other side of that will be a generation that grows up with just, "Oh, this is all de rigueur," and "Yeah, I have a quantum computer in my pocket, and there's fusion energy, and it's abundant. Anything I can imagine becomes real."

The person that I want to speak to is the person that wants to map out where this goes and how to ride this wave well. To your point, and I don't know if this is what you meant by power, but to me, power is the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, and acquire the skills to actually make that world come true. When I think about, as a filmmaker, my entire journey to getting into business and growing Quest, and spending 20ish years of my life doing something sort of to the side of what I really wanted to do, it was because I had no idea how to break into the industry. Making a film, a no-budget film, was $100,000. Now, if I were to have kids today, my kids would grow up in a world where you just type onto your phone the kind of movie—in fact, they're not even going to type; they would go, and the thing that they are most likely to want to see in that moment would exist.

Yes, and as long as we're able to understand our baser natures and not be a slave to algorithms, but instead go, "Okay, I understand how I have to distance from this. I can't allow myself to get addicted. I want to use these things in order to experience whatever thing you want to experience," then I think that that will be okay. So I'll make a prediction; I think you agree with this. I think I've heard you talk about this, but if not, let me know. The reason that the Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox is I don't think people end up exploring space; I think they explore virtual worlds, which will be far more interesting than anything that's a slave to physics. That's the reality that I think that we're moving towards.

Between here and there, many people will be broken emotionally, and they simply won't be your competition. For those that are paying attention and figuring out how to leverage this technology, you will create the next wave of opportunity, and you will thrive. I agree with all of that, and I do agree that there's going to be a period of turbulence over the next 5 to 15 years. That turbulence is going to come because we're in the midst of a phase change in society. You know, you've had Mo on the show, right?

Twice.

Yeah, and Mo has become a dear friend. We're working on a documentary together around "Scary Smart," his book, which I commend to everybody. I've had this conversation with him: on the flip side of AGI, we do have abundance, defined as access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, and education that you want. Everybody has access to it; it's completely democratized and demonetized. I think that's a more peaceful world as well. If you can have what you want, you're also somewhat in a post-capitalist world, but we can talk about that separately. Then you're less likely to blow yourself up in a suicide vest. If everybody could be expansive and they almost in their own light cone, so to speak, instead of having to oppress other people, you just go and you build and you create.

How do we cross the chasm, though? Because there's a b—so that's the issue: is the chasm over the next 5 to 10 years when AI comes in in the near term? I think we're going to see this. Mo and I have talked about patient zero being the 2024 presidential elections.

Right. Why?

Because I think it is, you know, in 2020, Cambridge Analytica moved the needle and caused a disruption with a massive budget. In 2024, a kid in their garage using generative AI can do that by creating deep fakes, creating social persuasive arguments that get traction and sway people's thinking, whether they're true or not. I mean, say something enough times to somebody in enough ways, and they believe it and stop asking, "Well, is this true, and where did it come from?" We have all of these cognitive biases, which are fascinating. It's a whole field. I'm fascinated by that our brain takes all these shortcuts because we can't process all the information.

I've got a recency cognitive bias; I give more value to something I recently heard. I've got a familiarity bias; if someone dresses and looks like me, I give it more credence. I have a negativity bias; I give much more credence to negative information than positive information. This sort of stuff saved your life on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago. Today, you can be manipulated by them.

So, I think I forgot where I was going. Let me ask: what is the thing about the 2024 election that you're most afraid of, besides who might become president?

Well, if that's the thing you're most afraid of, I think it's going to become—I think we have a divisiveness coming, and people are playing full out. It's no longer gentlemanly politics. Part of this is a post-truth economy where you can't tell whether something is truthful or not. One of the things I'm afraid about is more civil war than anything else.

Yeah, right.

So this next—I'm the person who the glass is not half full; it's overflowing. But yet I do see this period of turbulence. We have a whole population, we have a whole generation having gone through COVID, who are now going to step into a world where they're not getting the jobs they expected because AI is coming in and taking a number of those jobs. So there's going to be youthful social unrest, sounds like Arab Spring almost over again.

So how do we navigate that? I've been thinking about that. My wife, Kristen, and I have been talking about what do you teach people? How do you navigate this? Part of it is how do people survive traumatic experiences? Because it's going to be traumatic for a lot of people. But yet on the flip side of this, we're going to see, I think, tremendous abundance. So it is something we have to navigate, but humanity navigates these things over and over again. We navigated World War I, World War II. Do you have any rules or insights? I'm not sure what the right moniker to put on it is that you want people to understand about themselves or whatever to help us navigate this.

Well, I want to have those. I'm not sure I have them formed yet. I think that the most important thing is having hope about the future. You know, if you ask yourself the question, "In the year 2023, would you rather live here now than in the year 1900?" do you have an answer for me?

Yes.

Yeah, obviously, right? I think the vast majority, when I ask people, and people who say the good old days in 1900, they're fooling themselves for sure. You know, the first time they got an infection, they'd be like, "Whoa, yes, I'm dead." The streets of any major city stank from urine and manure from horses. Life was short and brutish; the average age was 40. You were dead from tuberculosis by then. I mean, it was really brutal, and you would work 70, 80-hour work weeks, and your kids were working to try and make ends meet. Child labor was prominent back then.

So we romanticize the past. Between the year 1900 and today, I did the work. I have a book coming out in the first half of next year called "Age of Abundance," which is my follow-on to my first book. I looked at what were the number of needless deaths over this last century, and if you look at disease, warfare, and starvation, it was about 240 million people died from those. Whoa, right? So you had 50 million people dying from just the Spanish Flu in World War I. I mean, it's pretty—we lived a pretty brutal life over the last 123 years. The 20th century was rough, and yet we got here.

So I think ultimately it's about the human spirit overcoming these things, and so I am hopeful that the human spirit will allow us to evolve to this next level. We are evolving as humanity; we're evolving technologically and societally, and we are also going to evolve in other ways. We're going to go from evolution by Darwinism, natural selection, to evolution by human direction, and it's moving fast. This is what Ray Kurzweil talks about in "The Singularity."

That, you know, in his—there's lots of singularities. Singularity comes from physics as an event horizon you can't see beyond, right? And so we're really close to the AI singularity, which is I can't tell you what's going to happen in 5 years, let alone 10 years with AI. It's moving so incredibly fast. And then Ray talks about the singularity as the convergence of all of these bio, info, nano information technologies from AI, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, which is transforming life at such a rapid pace.

How real is nanotechnology?

I think it is definitively real right now, today. There are people working on elements of it. A good friend of mine has dropped off the planet to go invest his wealth in building it.

What does it do today?

So today, we are building molecular machines versus atomic machines. So now, what is nanotechnology in the first place? Nanotechnology is the ability to assemble things atom by atom. Eric Drexler wrote a book in 1986 called "Engines of Creation," in which he looked at nanotechnology and the ability to—the physics and the energetics of being able to build things atom by atom. He writes about an idea called an assembler, which is a machine that's able to grab a silicon atom or an oxygen atom or a nitrogen atom and bond it and assemble things. An assembler—I could have an assembler in my hand, and I can command it to take atoms from my skin and manufacture an assembler and give it to you, and now you have one, and you can have that assembler replicate itself.

These are atomic machines, and now I can drop it in the soil and I can say, "Produce me an electric Lamborghini," and it can go to open source and find a design for an electric Lamborghini, and then it will take the atoms out of the soil. It'll need energy; energy is abundant in the universe, and it'll say, "I need a kilogram of titanium or a kilogram of lithium or whatever the case might be," and you'll provide that raw feedstock, and it will manufacture this for you.

Now, we know this—like an oak tree seed is a—if you would, nanotechnology. You take a seed for an oak tree, you plant it; it just does it very slowly. It takes the atom; it has the information set inside of that oak seed, and it grabs atoms from the soil and then energy from the sun, and over time, it builds a mighty oak. It just does it at a very slow time frame.

So the question is, can you build atomic machines that can manufacture things at a much faster time frame? There is nothing that has been ever shown that says it's impossible from the laws of physics, and we're building things now at a molecular level and in some cases an atomic level. I believe, you know, Ray Kurzweil's prediction is that it is, you know, in the next 15 years that we'll see these coming into existence, and AI will become probably our most valued tool for being able to produce those atomic assemblers.

Then it's between AI and nanotechnology; the universe is reinvented instantly. We're in a post-capitalist society at that point. What has value anymore? Very few things.

So is a post-capitalist society then—do that like, "God, you really want to go there?" It's—so Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called "Zero Marginal Society," which talks about this. It's a world of massive abundance where you can have almost anything you want. There is wealth accumulation for the people who get started earlier in that, but I would rather just focus on the notion that in this world, you can have access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education—everything you want; it's available.

I know, listen, I can tell you the world's going to get very strange very fast. My concern, going back to the nearest term strangeness, would be the 2024 election.

That's his name.

Okay, Richard Feynman, professor. Yes, wrote about this. He wrote a—in, I think, 1958, he wrote a very famous paper, gave a lecture called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," and he said, "Let's look not at macro structures and the universe, but let's look at atomic structure." Richard Feynman wrote effectively the first paper on nanotechnology, and then Eric Drexler wrote the first book on the subject and really explored the physics of it.

Interesting.

Yeah, I don't know a lot about Feynman, but certainly, he's somebody that comes up a lot. So the thing that I'm most concerned about in the immediate term, the 2024 election, the thing that I'm worried about is that people will do deep fake videos, and it is distressing to me, one, how good they are, and two, if you know what you're looking for, you can usually tell pretty quickly what's fake and what's real, but the average person can't. They don't know, and I'll see a video come across my feed that clearly is a deep fake, and people are riled up in the comments as if it's real.

I have to tell you a funny story. So, you know, my podcast is called "Moonshots," and it's been fun. I focused mostly on interviewing entrepreneurs who are taking big moonshots in the world—folks who want to do amazing things and their stories of getting there and the difficulties and how they overcome them and such. About three months ago, my team created an avatar of me. I saw the interview, and I interviewed myself, and I was blown away. I called it "Peter Bot," and it's both visual; it looks like me, it moves its arms around, it sounds like me, and it's trained on all of my books and all my blogs.

I'm really proud of that interview, and I said it did a better job as an orator and as someone communicating my ideas than I did. It was amazing. I asked it to talk about what were the downside scenarios of deep fakes and tell me a story, and it instantly whipped up a story about a young female politician who is running for election, and the opponent creates a deep fake of her, and information gets out there. Despite the fact that it's not true, the story starts spreading virally, and her ability to overcome it when it's out of the gate was impossible.

That is problematic.

Yep, lies go around the world faster than the truth can put on its shoes.

I love that saying.

Oh my God, that's terrifying.

Yeah, I think that's exactly what's going to happen. You said something earlier; you said people are playing for real or for keeps, or I forget the exact phrase you used, but that is true right now. People are playing for all the marbles.

So one, I would like to see the blockchain used to watermark somehow, signify this thing is real. I think it's the most important technology for that, and it's actually the most important use of blockchain. You know, I've always been like, "Okay, besides Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and so forth, what's blockchain really going to be valuable for?" I think it's truth authentication.

Yes, correct. This thing is real. Obviously, cryptocurrency and blockchain have become incredibly divisive. Some people are totally for it, and again, somebody developing games, I'm like right at the intersection of people hating or loving this technology. But if I could get them to understand it's just a technology; it lets you do a thing.

Yes.

And so what is that thing that it lets you do? What it does is it brings the laws of physics to the virtual world. If tomorrow is going to be more virtual than today—and it is—then you better have something that brings some of the laws of physics, like the ability to say, "Okay, I can authenticate this thing."

So sitting across from you now, I obviously don't have any concerns about whether you're real or not. For a very long time, it was, "Well, a picture or a video, that's easy." Then it became, "Well, a picture you can fake, but video is still real." Now it's, "Okay, even video, man, is super easy to fake." That becomes really disconcerting, and if we don't have a way to market and say, "This thing is real; this thing is not," and make it ubiquitous so that when it shows up on my feed, it is self-evident this one is real and this one is fake.

What, the blue check equivalent?

Right, exactly. So that, to me, becomes really, really important. To your point about the election being patient zero, it's like this is coming right now. Right now, this is not a tomorrow problem; this is a today problem. Given who's running, this is going to be a nightmare.

I am super worried, and when you look at the—Rio, the last prediction I saw was 40% likelihood of civil war in the U.S., 50% likelihood of a global world war. These are terrifying odds.

Yes, they are, and it's the human element that's at stake here, right? It's humans doing this to themselves. One of the important things people need to realize is that technology is not inherently evil; it's how humans utilize the technology. We have so much to live for and so much potential ahead of us—right? Infinite adjacent potentials.

When I think about why AI is important, it may well be to navigate all this stuff. I don't know that we humans are able to. Given all of the complexities of politics and social beliefs and distrusts, is there some means by which a more brilliant, more capable, more gentle AI is able to step in and support us during this transition period? It's a conversation that's out there, and we're one we're thinking about. We talk about AI being the massive disruptor; can it be the massive stabilizer as well?

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Let me paint a scenario for you, and as somebody with—are your kids 11 now?

My kids are 12.

12. For those listening, they are two fraternal twin boys.

Yes.

As somebody that has kids who this will impact, I'll be very interested to get your take on this. So, I am actively building an artificial world with artificial characters that, as the technology matures—we can't do this yet, but this will be real very quickly—I want to build characters that you have a real relationship with, that you get to know. They get to know you; they react differently to you. They have memory.

When I think about it, I think technology has really created a loneliness epidemic for a lot of people, but ironically, I think technology is going to be the solve for that loneliness. Now, the question becomes, will it be a better or worse world? That remains to be seen, but with my optimistic hat on, I think people's best friends, certainly in 10 years from now, most people's best friend will be an AI. In 20 years, barring just absolute nuclear catastrophe—like for sure, biological weapon—that's probably more likely—that seems a certainty.

So people will have friendships that are AI, but they'll also have romantic relationships and even potentially—this one freaks me out—but potentially sexual relationships with AI. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think that we're going to have relationships with AIs that are intimate because they know you better than you know yourself—literally. I'm writing—I just finished my chapters on AI in "Age of Abundance," and I'm working on the humanoid robot chapters today. AIs will, in fact, you're going to give permission to your AIs to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, watch what you're eating, watch what you're doing. You're going to do it openly because when you give it that permission, it can help you in an amazing fashion, right?

So it'll remember everyone you've forgotten. When the person's approaching you, it'll be, you know, "My favorite," right? Your kid's birthday and so forth. If you want to follow my diet recommendations, it will, for your AR glasses, tell you, "Don't eat that," or it'll have pre-ordered for you at the restaurant. It'll listen to your conversation, so it'll remind you for everything.

People go, "I don't want it knowing this stuff." I mean, come on, be serious. I mean, Alexa is listening in your bedroom right now. Google knows everything you've searched for. Microsoft knows everything on your email. Apple knows all of your—you know, I mean, if you think you have privacy today, don't fool yourself.

Also, here's what I would invite people to think about: imagine, because right now they're thinking about Jeff Bezos knowing what they're up to or Larry Page knowing what they're up to. That doesn't feel good. But if you think of it this way: "Hey, Peter, you just got into an argument with your wife, and I see from your Oura ring that your blood pressure has gone up. You know, I obviously you've invited me to listen into these things. Here's a perspective you might want to take: if you remember, she's very sensitive to this, and you said that, and that might have been what set her off. But look, hey, I totally understand where you're coming from. I see your position 100%. Super empathic."

Exactly. Super empathic. In fact, there was a study recently done; it was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, something like that, in which, in a study of humans and AIs giving advice to patients, the AIs were like 10 times more empathic than the humans. In another study looking at therapists, you're more likely to be open and honest with an AI than a human therapist because the AI is not going to judge you.

You can also tailor the AI. "I don't want you to try to solve the problem, AI; I just want you to understand my feelings."

Yes, yeah, and it will do as told. So we're going to be—it's going to be interesting, but I think you're going to—that AI, if it has access to the backward-looking cameras on augmented goggles, it can see where your eyes are looking. If it sees me staring for an extra micros at a logo on your shirt, that shows curiosity, or if it sees my eye avert from something that I don't like, that is so much information—that's almost subconscious information to you.

If you're looking to buy clothing and you see it knows from a conversation you had with a friend that you're looking to find a blazer, and you look an extra few seconds at a guy's blazer as they're walking by, it may say, "Do you like that?" and you're like, "I do." I say, "Okay, I'll order it for you."

So it's like knowing—the ability for it to know you more intimately than you are honestly willing to know yourself is there, and that will build an extraordinary relationship.

Yeah, and to, you know, for better or worse, here is the human psyche at work. If you have a friend who effectively lives to understand you, to feel your pain over and over again, you will feel seen. There is something so wonderful about feeling seen. Go to that conversation about, "Is there someone in your life who knows you intimately and doesn't judge you?"

It's exactly right.

Yeah, it is a level of connection that few people know. I think we'll also be able to give the AI a personality so that it isn't—I was thinking about this when you were talking about how we will all become the Borg.

Borg?

Borg.

Borg.

Borg.

Yes, and I was thinking, you know, it's interesting because the way that we individualize ends up being a really cool part of the human experience. My wife has a unique perspective; she sees the world in a certain way that is complementary to the way that I see the world. It makes her an incredible partner, and I don't want her to be exactly like I am.

So I don't want my AI companion to be a mirror; that's not interesting. I want my AI companion to be that perfectly tailored, complementary thing to me so that they're siding with me at times, but then other times they're sort of pulling me along. And by the way, you can fracture that AI into five different personalities, all who know you well.

All so true.

Wow, is one sensual and sexual? One is funny, God. One is funny; one is pushing you to do better; one is commiserating with you.

Here, this is going to get weird.

It is going to get weird very fast.

I love that you just gave me an idea for a story.

That is so interesting.

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I want to see this world. For those who say, "Oh my God, slow down; I don't want to see it. I like the way it is right now," you know, I hate to say this: there's no velocity knob on this technological world. There's no on-off switch. It is moving at lightning speed. Our job is to steer it, to navigate, to inspire, and guide it, right? To avoid that 40% civil war, 50% world war—all of those things.

Because on the back end of this, I do believe there's a stabilizing society and a world of extraordinary abundance out there. I don't think we have a—I don't think we have a choice. We're evolving; we're evolving very rapidly.

So, you know, bringing this back, I mean, the work that we do at the XPRIZE Foundation is trying to evolve, to guide, to create that positive world of the future and guide us and guide where entrepreneurs invest their time and energy in a positive world.

I mean, it's fun. We've launched now $400 million in XPRIZES.

Wow.

Which have driven at least $4 billion in R&D. What we're trying to do at the XPRIZE is say, "This is what's possible in the year 2040 in energy, in health, in education." Right? Education is another massively about to be transformed world. I'll come back in a minute and say, "Okay, what's the roadmap to get there, and what are the breakthroughs we need to get there?"

You know, so I mentioned earlier I have two 12-year-old boys. I don't think the educational system is getting them ready for the world that's coming at them. What would they need to be ready?

Not the stuff they're learning in school right now. I've set up a meeting; I won't mention it. My kids go to a very super high-end, amazing private school in Santa Monica, but it's based on the traditional old educational system.

Right.

So this past year, they learned the 50 capitals of the U.S. states, and I'm like, "Huh? Why?" I mean, that's why God created Google. I mean, I would rather you—and so I wrote a blog. I put out two blogs a week, and folks can get it at DMAndis.com. But I put out a blog on what the schools need to be teaching kids today, and part of it was this is what I think, and then I asked, you know, ChatGPT what we need to teach our kids, and it was very, very similar.

It's not memorization, right? So it's how to ask great questions. It's finding your passion, discovering that, and really diving deep into that, whether it's developing video games or whether it's, you know, space, which it was for me. I mean, video games is for my kids. It is learning how to argue your point, how to be a great leader, how to be empathic, right? These are some fundamentals. Maybe it's more philosophy than anything else, and it's not what we're teaching our kids today.

So what is the world like? My dad didn't want to buy me a calculator when I was growing up so I could learn, you know, basics, and I ended up getting a calculator and learning how to program on it. But what's the world like in like inside of five years where everything is intelligent? Everything is imbued with intelligence. You're talking to your refrigerator, your car, your desk chair, whatever it is, right? Intelligence is innate in all physical things.

And where, even more than that, AI has achieved and exceeded human-level intelligence, right? So this whole concept of AGI, artificial general intelligence—Ray Kurzweil predicted we would have it in 2029. He made that prediction in 1999, 30 years early, and guess what? Everyone is agreeing on that date.

Wow.

His predictions are amazing. So Elon is predicting like 2028. I just saw yesterday the CEO of Nvidia predicted it's within five years.

So what happens when AI—human-level AI—your best teachers, your best diagnosticians are all AIs? An AI teacher knows your child's favorite color, movie, star, sports, understands their grasp of language, understands that they're tactile learners versus visual versus auditory, where I can enter a virtual world that has spun up instantly.

We just saw Stability AI, right, with Stable Diffusion being able to create imagery instantly from just typing, and I'm learning about Plato or Socrates or ancient Saudi Arabia or ancient Egypt, and I'm living in a virtual world for me, and I'm walking around and meeting people, and my inquisitiveness is driving me to want to learn more.

It's going to be awesome, but it's very different from today. It's very different from today. One of the things that when you were talking about the calculator and your dad wanted to make sure that you were able to do the basics in your head, do you consider AI cheating?

No, no more than having a book is cheating compared to what we had before books, which was memorizing texts. Right? When the printing press came out, you know, this art of storytelling started going away. I think AI is a new superpower, and how we utilize it—now the big challenge is how do we reconnect purpose in our life?

I think what you're jumping to there is if AI—if you love writing, which I do, I get up every morning and I write for an hour. It's like my precious time. If I can write for two hours, I will, before hitting the gym or before taking the kids to school. So I love writing, and I love that experience of like a well-written paragraph.

But what happens? I can say, "Hey, listen, write a book called 'Age of Abundance.'" Click. Yep, it's like, it's kind of empty. It's like, "Okay, yeah, I published a book along with the other trillion books that are published today," and it's meaningless. So we're going to have to reconnect meaning in other ways.

So a purpose-driven life is so critically important. How much do you think the world is going to fragment? So when everybody can publish a book, when everybody can make a video game, when everybody can write their own movie, it becomes less—it becomes less valuable.

So what happens then?

I think we have to find value in different ways. I think we have to go after bigger challenges. I do believe we have bigger challenges because it will reaggregate people because it will re-inspect in game universes.

Yeah, I think "Ready Player One" is the inevitable future.

Yeah, so—but I'm talking about something slightly different. So here's the thing: as an entrepreneur, I think about this a lot. You say if you want to make a billion dollars, help a billion people. I don't know that that will be a thing in the future. I think 10, certainly 20 years from now, everything is so hyper-individualized that when I log into Netflix—which of course won't exist, but let's just pretend for it to be easier for people to think—when I log into Netflix and I'm scrolling, it's going to be making the movies based on where my eye lingered for a little bit longer, what the conversation you had an hour ago, right?

So you're pissed or you just had the most amazing day. What's your emotional status right now based upon your emotional feelings or who you're with? You want to pick a movie that is going to relax you or inspire you or make you laugh, whatever the case might be, and this process of Googling or randomly walking into it—instead, you know, the movie will be teed up and ready to go.

Correct.

And it will be so individualized. There won't be this sense of shared experience except for the fact that I'll create a sense of shared experience because my 17 AI personalities will all have experienced it with me and watched it and have their take. But now I'm not—you know, going back to the—I, as when I'm thinking as an entrepreneur, I started thinking, "Whoa, it's going to be very hard for me to build a big business because I'm going to pick it."

It will inevitably be just a really deep niche. So I'll make something for, you know, to use Kevin Kelly's idea of a thousand true fans, and now everybody is making something just for a thousand true fans because everything is bifurcated.

So I'm making video games in an anime style for fans of vampire fiction that's in rhyming couplets. And by the way, your AI is producing 10,000 of those individualized variations for the 10,000 raving subgroups.

Exactly.

Yeah, so what do you think that does to entrepreneurship in general?

I wish I knew. I think we're going from mind to materialization. I think we're going from deciding you want something to seeing it instantly created, and it's going to get there hyper-fast. Whatever you desire is going to be enabled in ways that are shocking.

So how do we give value? Because a lot of times we give value to the struggle. "I worked really hard to find this thing, and I found this unique piece of whatever it is," or "I worked hard to get to that point." And when the struggle is gone, what does that mean?

I think you've already answered the question. This is why I think "Ready Player One" is inevitable. So "Ready Player One" imagines a world that is dystopian, and so you create a far more enjoyable reality. But I think there's also—let's say that you make a utopian world; you will still end up in "Ready Player One" because you're going to need to create a world that's hard.

Because until you augment the human mind, I think there's a formula that evolution is guaranteed: that we will pursue which is that you must work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you for whatever reason that allow you to serve yourself and others, and you will need all of those pieces, and you will pursue anything and everything until you get those things slotted in place.

Which is exactly why video games are the all-consuming medium.

Let me take you on a short journey over three billion years, please, and give some vision of where things might go on a single trajectory. The Earth forms 4.5 billion years ago. The early life forms were somewhere in the 4 billion to 3 billion single-cell life forms without a nucleus. These are prokaryotic life. As they advance, they become—they go from prokaryotic life to eukaryotic life. That meant they incorporated technology into them: mitochondria, Golgi apparatus, endoplasmic reticulum, nuclear structures. They became more capable as individual cells of supporting energy and information.

Then those prokaryotic cells, now more capable individual cells, became multicellular, and then those multicellular life forms started differentiating into life forms that were not just multicellular but subspecialized cells, tissues, and organs, and eventually evolved to us. So there's a direct line between these very simple individual cells and you and I at 40 trillion cells.

I think in the same way that we went from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life by taking technology in mitochondria and plasmic reticulum, nuclear structures, and so forth that allowed us to use energy and information more effectively, we humans are the equivalent of that early prokaryotic life. We're about to take in technology into ourselves that's going to allow us to connect with each other the same way those individual cells became multicellular lives.

So we're going to become this meta-intelligence where I'm going to connect with 8 billion people, and my experience of life is no longer a single ego. I'm now part of a much larger intelligence, a meta-intelligence that's conscious on a brand new level.

When I think about the dangers related to AI—and I'm not going to, you know, I think AI is the most important tool humanity has ever created to solve all of our biggest problems, no doubt, period, exclamation point, you know, big bright letters. Having said that, are there dangers?

So the dangers can simply break down into three different groups. One, at one end, is AI becomes conscious and decides to squash us and step on us. I find that very unlikely and a ridiculous thesis. I think people have just seen this in Hollywood way too much. I think the more intelligent something is, honestly, the more loving and kind and pro-life it will be.

Why?

Why would—that's my belief. I have other than—I see humanity becoming, as a whole, over time. If you look at the numbers, right, and we've looked at this from abundance, warfare reducing massively over time, violent death reducing massively over time, access to freedom increasing over time. I mean, the numbers over a thousand years, not over the last 5, 10, 20 years, but over a thousand years, and that's come from educating each other with books and transportation connecting us across the world and globalization and interdependence. All of these things have led to—it's hard to remember this watching the crisis news network, right? CNN every day that's broadcasting every murder on the planet to you over and over and over again.

It's shaping our neural nets. Our brains are neural nets that we teach from example after example, and I don't watch the news. I don't want some editor telling me about yet another murderer or crooked politician.

Got it.

And it isn't showing us a fair and balanced view of what's actually going on in the world—the incredible science and technology and humanitarian acts—all these things.

Yeah, anyway, so one phase is AGI, you know, artificial general intelligence.

Before you move off that, though, so what you're describing is human intelligence and social intelligence. I don't quite know what you mean by that.

What I mean is that societal norms organizing around the United Nations, born of this—meets suit the brain works in a certain way, and computers will not—AI will not work in that same—I have no reason to believe that AI very likely won't. It works differently.

At the end of the day, you know, when we have these crazy Hollywood scripts that AI is going to usurp us for our heat from the Matrix—I love the Matrix—they failed on that use of human bodies.

I'm sorry; I don't know if you agree with me on that.

I do agree with you, and I don't know well enough what their original intention was, but according to them, yes, they were by the studio to give a more simplistic answer, so I let them off the hook for that.

Okay, right. But, you know, other—we're coming to get your water on this planet. Listen, whatever we have on this planet is infinite in the universe. We are a speck, a crumb in a universe filled with resources, and so AI doesn't need to squash humanity to get these resources.

So AGI, at its extreme—artificial general intelligence at its extreme—I don't believe is going to be dystopian in itself. In the middle term, what I would call the terrible twos or the teenage years, maybe there is a case to be made that in the beginning, AI hasn't reached full sentience, doesn't understand the power of its tools.

Maybe there's a case that, you know, it's the baby picking up a rock and throwing it at the window, not understanding what it's—you know, the teenager with a BB gun and a squirrel.

Yes, that's the best.

But the third element, which is the most likely, is the benevolent individual. It's the bad actors using technology. So sometime in the next 18 months, two years, there may well be not a retrovirus released but an AI virus that goes out and shuts down power plants or shuts down Wall Street and causes an economic hurdle.

That's not the AI; those are the humans using that tool, just to be very clear. There's a great book by Mo Gawdat called "Scary Smart" that came out about a year ago. Do you know the book?

I haven't read the book, but I had Mo on the show recently.

Yeah, Mo is fantastic. He basically says, "Listen, I want you to think about AI as a child we're giving birth to as humanity." That child is being taught by its parents. Now, if you think about Superman, who lands in Kansas, wherever he landed, and he's picked up by the Kents, and it's a loving family, he learns good ethics and morals, and he becomes a superhero for good.

What if Superman had landed in the Bronx and part of a drug lord ring?

You make me want to write that story.

As soon as you started, I was like, "Wait a second, there's a great plot there."

So the question is, we humans, how are we teaching this new life form coming into existence? I like Neil Jacob's time framing, which is he goes, "Okay, you're worried about an AI getting more and more access to information, becoming autonomous, making its own decisions, and starting to run amok out in the world." We go, "Yeah." He goes, "We have a precedent for that; we call them children, and we raise kids."

We figured out ways of giving them timeouts or jail or whatever, and he thinks constructively that we think we'll find ways of bounding what AIs can do.

Now, wrong—how may—wrong, I'm not sure I agree with them.

Yeah, that seems super naive to me.

So when I—I am optimistic by nature, and my default setting is just, "Hey, this is all going to work out somehow." As soon as we wrap this episode, I'm going to be pushing my team to integrate AI more. I'm going to be paying more money for AI and just feeding that beast.

But at the same time, it does give me pauses. I try to think through how you really deal with the alignment problem. So to me, there's two really big dangers for AI. Danger number one—and this is the one that scares me the most, but I'm going to set it aside for a minute—and that's just humans lose meaning and purpose. Just AI can do everything better than they can. It just becomes so defeating that you're just like, "Oh God, like I've worked really hard to get good at this."

Say like this, I tell this story all the time. I can't remember if I've told it in an episode, but I employ a bunch of artists, and I once sat with one of them, and for like an hour, he was just trying to get the perfect semicircle. He was just doing it over and over and over and over. At the time, I thought, "Oh man, yeah, like you've got to do that." To be able to articulate what's in his mind, he has to be able to control his hand.

And I was like, "Wow, I really get that." Now I'm like, "You wasted your time. Like, hey, I can do that. I don't even have to think about it."

And he is an anomaly, so he runs out, and he's now learning how to use AI to do some of the tasks that we want to do artistically.

Okay, amazing. We'll set that aside for now—meaning and purpose. The other one is the paperclip problem.

So now you just have—like when I think about what will a machine end up optimizing for, my gut instinct is unless you go way out of your way to get really clever, they will optimize for efficiency of reward. So whatever you tell it is the thing to go for, we'll call that the reward, and then it's just going to find the most efficient way to get to that.

So we have to be so careful about how we define, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but don't XYZ." And then to the idea of it being like a child, yes, but it's like a child that has access to nuclear capabilities. You need to build in ethics and morals as a fundamental in that situation so it doesn't use world supplies to build an infinite number of paper clips.

And it's true, and we have a limited time to do that. You know, I think Google developed sort of large language models in 2017, 2018, and didn't release them, right? They were worried; they wanted to build the framework first, and they were maybe overthinking it.

It's interesting. We were talking about YouTube just before the show here. You know, Google had Google Videos going way before YouTube, and Google Videos wasn't succeeding, I guess. I think it was just too many lawyers involved in, "You can't show that; you can't do this."

Then Chad Hurley starts YouTube on a credit card, and then Google buys it 18 months later for $1.65 billion.

Right.

Why? Because, you know, videos was like a linear, and YouTube was like exploding exponentially. They jumped on that.

So there's a question of, you know, which path do you take? Do you take the careful path, or do you take the path of least resistance? Unfortunately, we humans tend to take the path of least resistance.

Yeah, I don't know if I'd say unfortunately.

And this is where I really get—I don't know how to think through the problem of AI because when I heard Elon's assessment of it, which is that AI is basically a demon summoning circle, and we're summoning it like crazy despite his best efforts to get people to slow down.

I can't bring myself—like when people sign the, "Hey, we should stop" thing, my immediate response was the—this is a one-way street. It's so far out of the bag.

Yeah.

Like it does not make sense. Like you could slow it down in a region, but you're not going to be able to slow it down full stop.

And so I'm really of two minds. I am both like, "I think this is going to be amazing," and yet how does this not end the human race?

Well, the question is whether the human race is the end-all and be-all, right?

Yeah, but don't you feel weird even saying that out loud?

Well, no, because we've been evolving on this planet for three and a half—you know, life started a half a billion after the Earth started, so four billion years.

So, man, oh man, the Drake equation comes into play.

Yeah, tell me more.

Well, Frank Drake was a scientist at NASA in the '50s. NASA commissioned him to say, "What's the probability of life out there somewhere?" So he came up with what's now called the Drake equation, which was, "Okay, take—most two-thirds of star systems seem to be binary stars; they don't host a stable orbit, so ignore those. Of the one-third that's left, how many might have a planet in a Goldilocks where water doesn't permanently freeze or boil? Let's say that's one out of a million. Out of those, maybe one out of a billion gets to primordial ooze level, and one out of a million of those lightning bolts hits and you spark life. One out of a million of those may get to radio technology level—radio-level technology. And one out of a million of those hasn't wiped itself out with nuclear weapons before it gets to the next stage of escaping the Earth type of thing."

He came up with a bunch of factors saying, "What's the likelihood of carbon-based radio technology life forms out in the universe?" The pessimistic answer is there's 100% chance of radio-level carbon-based technology life forms out in the universe. The optimistic one is it's actually right in our galaxy.

Right.

And every time we learn more about the universe, how many stars there are, etc., it turns out there's a hundred times more stars that have stable planets around them than we thought. Every factor turns out to be a thousand times better than we thought, and therefore you really end up with a Fermi paradox of, "If there's intelligent life out there, why haven't we seen it?"

Yeah, yeah.

So the interesting—your guess is the interesting code, interesting variable on the Drake equation was between the time that an intelligent species developed the ability to transmit interstellar—which is like "I Love Lucy" leaving the Earth and heading out towards the galaxy—how long would that species exist before something happened to it?

The dystopian point of view is that it blows itself up, and it's only like 100 years or 50 years, so forth. The positive point of view is that they transition to where radio is not—it's like we don't use smoke signals anymore because radio is so backwards.

The theory I like the most is called the transcension hypothesis by a guy called John Smart, who figures we'll get the AR level capability and VR level capability, and instead of going out in the universe, we go inwards.

100%.

And that's, I think, that's probably the likely—

This strikes me as—and look, AI complicates things dramatically, and so folding space-time becomes trivial. Maybe what I'm about to say isn't true, but it seems self-evident to me that once you can attach the nervous system—truly like your own nervous system—and you can manipulate your neurochemistry, that you would create dream states, infinite worlds.

Yeah.

That you just go inward. Why would you bother projecting out, which would take so much more energy?

That's right.

And so you just go in, and you have these incredible experiences. That strikes me—so let's go back to your question of purpose now, because that's—I link it back to that. I think purpose is so important for all of us to have. It's driven everything of significance done.

But let's say that we end up in a world in which one of the implications of exponential organizations is that we have what we call what a friend, Harry Klor, called technological socialism, where technology takes care of you versus the state, right?

In that world, where you're taking care of, what's your purpose?

Maybe your purpose is to have fun. Maybe your purpose is to play. Maybe your purpose is to—and this, we go back to "The Matrix" again, because without the challenge, you know, the question is, is that empty? You know the old "Twilight Zone," right, where the guy goes to Las Vegas, and he's winning all the time, and he thinks, "I know of 'The Twilight Zone,' but I haven't seen the episodes."

So in this episode, this guy dies and goes—and he's been a mafioso, and he goes to heaven or hell, and he shows up, and there are beautiful women every place. He's in the Las Vegas casino, and he's winning every night, and he's winning, and he's winning, and he's winning, and all the riches, and it's anything he wants 24/7, and it's like amazing, right? His dream's coming true.

But like a month later, he's like, "I am so tired of winning all the time. God, there's nothing challenging. There's nothing—no challenges at all."

And he turns and he says, "This heaven, man, it's terrible."

He goes, "What makes you think you're in heaven?"

So good.

I knew that was a punchline. You still gave me the chills.

Yeah, that is—that is a real thing, man.

Yeah, and I do think about that, the sort of optimal—like what's that optimal level of friction? And there was a really fascinating time in my life in building Impact Theory where I needed to get good at Japanese-style storytelling, so manga and anime. I was reading manga like a fiend and watching as much anime as I could. I was getting up super early and working out and then watching like an hour, hour and a half of anime.

It was awesome. It was one of the most fun times I've had as an adult. The second I felt like I understood the art form, I couldn't—I couldn't let myself do it anymore. Like, I couldn't enjoy it. I was just like, "I already understand it. Now you're just doing it to like pass time doing something that's enjoyable."

And it had that same feeling of like winning all the time, where I'm like, "This isn't interesting." It needed to be moving towards something. It needed to add up to something—like progress.

Yeah, like this is the very reason that Lisa and I did not buy an island and retire and not engage. It's like I knew I would end up sitting on that island.

I can tell you other reasons not to buy an island, by the way.

I bet you can.

I mean, look, life is about growth, right? And even if we have plentiful—and today, relatively, we have plentiful—go back a thousand years; we were all spending 28 hours a day in the fields just to put three meals on the table, right? We've steadily shrunk the amount of time as we move towards probably some structure like a UBI.

We then have an equal opportunity to do lots of interesting things. When we've studied abundance, say the Romans taking over and creating the Roman Empire, the Moguls taking over India and encountering abundance, societies very clearly go to four things that they do: food, art, music, and sex—not in that order.

And so that's essentially where you will end up, and you end up looking at self-expression and the artistic realm much more than you did before, whether in whatever realm you choose. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And by the way, we've done this for thousands of years, right? Buddhists sit in contemplation; they reach enlightenment, and their life is spent contemplating, and that's where they get the most joy.

And this is something that I think we'll get to as a species. I'd like to bring it back to the following: one of the reasons we wrote this book is to help entrepreneurs and businesses understand that they can make a much bigger dent in the universe than ever before.

And while it's not about making money, it's about how do you build a significant company that is transforming the planet and is making the world a better place? What we're finding is that there are a number of ways that companies do this reliably with the biggest dent.

And so we want to get that information out there. The reality is if you're building a company today, you need to start with this as your playbook in order to succeed because it's table stakes.

And if you're running a large-scale company, if you don't use these attributes, if you're not using these, you are not going to survive the rest of this decade. You know what I say? There are two kinds of companies by the end of this decade: those that are fully utilizing AI and these exponential technologies and those that are out of business.

That's it. It's this decade where all of this is happening. So, you know, we talk about the first step in building an EXO is having a massive transformative purpose, and it's going to be that passion-driven need to make a difference in the world that's going to carry you through.

Doing anything big and bold in the world is hard unless you're driven by awe on one side of the emotional curve or pain on the other side of the emotional curve. You're going to give up before you get there.

No doubt.

Yeah, when I'm teaching entrepreneurs, I always tell them that success is a game of attrition. Most people give up, and you've got to stick it out long enough to figure this out.

So that would be the old paradigm.

Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say, you know, in looking at what you're doing and what you've been building in Impact Theory, you do use a lot of the 10 attributes that follow an MTP, and it'll be fun to actually see which ones you're cranking on.

Yeah, no, MTP is definitely our lead engine. We know what we're doing, and we know why we're doing it, and that's a big part of the way that we attract talent, which you guys have talked a lot about.

But tying it to this idea of Buddhism, so there obviously—all of us get to make a choice every day effectively as to whether we recognize that all of suffering comes from attachment and desire, and thusly we go live a monastic life, and we remove ourselves completely from that stream, or we say, "I'm going to do deep engagement in a way that's thoughtful, in a way where I'm not sort of blindly chasing something."

It's not want; it's not greed, but it is...

Very much leveraging the human desire for progress, you talked about that earlier. To see how much I can do with my life, that's something that really drives me. I just want to see—I feel like I was given sort of an average hand at cards. I want to see how well I can play it, and that's extremely intoxicating for me. It's just like, whoa! But that's just as powerful, right? If you're, let's say, an enlightened monk, there are two ways of doing it: you can go and meditate forever, or you can go into the world and be of service. That's a richer path—a much harder path—because you've got to do stuff and interact with the world, which is messy and ugly. You put yourself at risk, and you put yourself out there. But when you can make a major difference in a particular problem, like you are doing, many of our communities are making unbelievable changes and transformations in their societies, their companies, their governments, their countries. This is where the beauty of life comes out.

We think that over the next decade or so, every company, every nonprofit, every government department, every impact project will be structured along these lines of these attributes because it's just better, and we now have the data to show it. I don't know if you came across the Fortune 100 data that we mentioned. I mean, unbelievable, right?

So when we wrote the original book, I did a segment on CNBC Squawk Box, and we ranked the Fortune 100 against the EXO model. We gauged to what extent Walmart is purpose-driven or not, to what extent IBM is using lean startup thinking and experimentation, to what extent GE is decentralizing decision-making or not. We came up with an index ranking these organizations by this model, essentially ranking the purpose-driven, scalable, flexible, adaptable quotient of each of these. The bottom is the least flexible, least adaptable. Over seven years, we tracked which 10 used those attributes the most and which used them the least. Then we compared the two, and seven years is a pretty decent amount of time to account for temporal blips in the stock market, etc.

We found that the top 10 most EXO-friendly compared to the bottom 10: revenue growth was three times higher, profitability was 6.4 times higher, return on equity was 11 times higher, and shareholder returns compound annual growth rate was 40 times higher. Literally, we had to scour the numbers like four times over because it was just too big. How could this be? Now it's pretty clear that as we enter a more volatile world, your ability to adapt is going to drive market value, and we can measure this now completely. Therefore, every organization going forward needs to be architected along this way to deal with the increasing volatility in the world.

The other side of that volatility and disruption is the unbelievable opportunity that's sitting out there, right? This is where I think the work that you're doing, Peter, is so important because you're non-stop showing people the world is unbelievably abundantly full of opportunity. Freaking go get it! Go have some fun!

So walk me through why adaptation returns so much more to shareholders and what one has to do to be adaptive.

Okay, so let's take the car industry, right? You're chugging along making combustion engine cars and you're incrementally improving those cars—eight valves to 16 valves, okay? You add turbo, you add anti-lock braking systems, etc. Along comes Elon with the Tesla and goes totally different paradigm. Now you have two choices: you can go, "Ah, this is a joke. It's never going to work. Look at it! It's like the Kodak camera." The first version is clunky and it doesn't work so well, etc. If you keep trying to do things your old way, over time you're going to get wiped out because you're not adapting to where the world actually is.

There are so many hundreds of reasons why an electric car today is much better than a combustion engine car. Now, it's taking the car industry 10 years. I would argue that until the Taycan came out last year, the Porsche electric car, I would argue that the 2012 Tesla Model S was still the most advanced car in the world until the Taycan. Right? So it took them 10 years to respond. Well, the market cap—you can see the result there—the unbelievable loss of capability, leading-edge thinking, etc. You have the same thing happening in drones and in aircraft and other things. All industries are geared towards the status quo and trying to make incremental improvements. This is where you devolve.

Meanwhile, you have breakthrough thinking, breakthrough opportunity, and the recent explosion in AI capability just adds a rocket booster to all of that. Now we're going to see new companies emerge that are creating unbelievable value in very little time. If you're a legacy organization, you have to figure this out. We've actually figured out a toolset for this. We have come up with a 10-e engagement that we've run in big companies that hacks culture scale, and we're able to solve what we call the immune system problem.

When you try anything disruptive in a big company, the antibodies attack you, right? Finance, legal, HR, branding goes, "You can't do that!" The general answer in a big company if you're trying to do anything crazy is "no." We've learned how to switch that to a "yes."

Don't just gloss past it because even so, a company of my size, which has contractors, etc., is a little over 100 people. There are times where I want to headbutt my own teammates, yes, because theistic we have is if you're over about 50 people, you have an immune system. I've had that at the X Prize; I've had that at every place, right? Because you're a quick start; you want to try things.

One of the things that's critical that a lot of companies that are built as EXOs have is they begin with an experimental culture and a data-driven culture with dashboards, and the tyranny of confidence isn't given a place to grow. The tyranny of confidence is where I'm confident I know the right answer versus let's run the experiment and see what the right answer is, right?

Because we've lived in this as humanity, you hire the expert; you hire the guy or gal who's been in a competitor, and you bring them in, and you base what you're doing on their experience level. But that is so limited compared to the world we're living in today.

So how do you build a data-driven, experimentalist organization? I had one other feature on top of that, which is a founder-led company. You get companies like Tesla, SpaceX, or Amazon, where you've got, you know, where Jeff Bezos in this very famous shareholder letter of like 2008 or whatever was saying, "I'm not going to optimize for profitability; I'm optimizing for growth, and if you don't like it, invest someplace else."

So how do you have that kind of benevolent dictatorship? That's where you're then looking at the data to decide—not the way all your competitors are doing it. If you want to scale your business, you absolutely have to have the right data in order to understand what's really going on.

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Given the state of AI and quantum computing, do you think that we're on the brink of human immortality?

I think we're on the brink of a health span revolution. I think immortality comes when we can scan the brain and upload you into the cloud. You think that's the only way we have to transcend biology? People have to realize we're constantly replenishing all of the cells of our body anyway, right? Like the oldest cells in your body are your fat cells that are an average of eight years old. Given AI and quantum technology, we're going to start to understand why we age, how to slow it, stop it, maybe reverse it. I think those things will get us north of 100 years.

The bowhead whale, the largest mammal, can live 200 years. The Greenland shark can live 500 years and have pups at 200 years old. The question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? For me, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem, and we're getting the tools to be able to deal with and edit our software, edit our hardware.

For people who are saying, "Well, am I going to be part of that? Am I going to live for hundreds of years? Am I going to have the chance to be immortal?" I'm going to put aside the immortal part. Again, I think your mission should be, "How do I live long enough, healthfully enough, to intercept the breakthroughs that are coming?"

It's interesting; someone asked me a question like, "How long do you want to live?" I remember when I was in medical school, I set a 700-year lifespan, which is a ridiculous number. It's ridiculous because if I can live, I think another 30 years from now, the breakthroughs we're going to see are going to buy you the next 30 or 100 years. So your goal is to live long enough to intercept what's called longevity escape velocity. That, to me, feels very plausible when I think about the magic trick that is AI.

Walk me through what you think is the rough timeline. I fully acknowledge that looking into the future when you're talking about something as revolutionary as AI becomes a little bit comical, but I think that it helps to map. You think about how this is going to work, like what the problems are that we're going to solve. Where's the intersection of AI and quantum computing? You're the only one I really hear talking about that and its importance in this revolution. What is it about quantum computing you think is going to help?

Are there qualities of AI that are only going to be possible with quantum computing? What are the next steps?

Let me define, first of all, lifespan and health span. Lifespan is how long you live, how long your heart is beating, how long your brain is processing. Health span is how long you've got the vital energy to enjoy life, you know, get up in the morning, play with your kids or your grandkids, go for a hike, enjoy yourself, have the mental and physical vitality, right? That's health span, and that's really what we want.

If someone says, "I don't want to live to 120 years old," it's because they have a mental image of being in a wheelchair, drooling, right? That's not what we're speaking about here. If I said to you, "At 120, your mind was as sharp as it ever was, you could hit the ground and do 40 push-ups," would you want to live to 120? I think anybody who is loving life would say yes. So that's our goal—it's that level of vitality.

AI is going to play in this by helping us understand such a complicated situation. Why do some people live to 100 or 115 or 120 and smoke, you know, and still get that far out, right? Why do some people die at 50 or 60? Aging in human biology is so complicated that we're still deciphering it; we're still untangling this process. There's so much data we can now get.

We've talked about, you know, one of my companies, Fountain Life, is sort of like the most advanced diagnostics you can do. So when I go to Fountain Life, and we've got centers around the U.S., I will be digitally uploaded. In the course of a day, I will have a full body MRI, an MRI of my brain, brain vasculature, brain blood flow, a coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, 120 blood biomarkers, metabolome, microbiome, your genetics—everything. It's 150 gigabytes of data, and that data, over the course of thousands of individuals, can only be analyzed by AI.

Then we can start to say, "Look, the people who were the healthiest and didn't have disease, or we can look at presymptomatic disease, and the people who developed this over time had this genetic sequence or had these blood biomarkers." It's the incorporation of massive data aggregation and AI that's going to help us understand why some people survive and thrive and others don't.

Then what are the therapeutics? Look at everybody who took rapamycin or metformin or, you know, was on, you know, whatever drug combinations. It's so complicated, but we're running this massive experiment, and AI is going to help us to untangle that and get some insight and say, "Yes, for your genetics, for your age, for your objectives, these meds, these supplements are the best for you."

That's one of the things I'm really working to build out for myself and our members at Fountain Life is that kind of correlation—like what you want to do in life, your upload, your genetics, the number of pills you'll take per day—this is the right combination for you.

Yeah, I think N of one is going to be a big part of this.

Okay, I'm going to lay out my thesis. Tell me where I go wrong, please. So one, I want to say that I come at this the way that a sci-fi writer would come at it. I understand enough of it to get the gist and to be able to prognosticate. The specifics will be filled in by people that really know the science.

But the way I see this playing out is that, okay, we need—this is a game of pattern recognition. There is a reason why we age. So step one is going to be, I think, by getting into synthetic data very, very quickly. So we'll upload whatever the first 10,000, 100,000 people that go through something like Fountain Life, and we begin to speak the language of DNA, let's say.

We probably need to feed into the AI not just human DNA but across all kinds of species, feed it as much DNA as we can. It goes in, it learns the language of DNA, it begins to feed itself data, and begins to try to predict different outcomes based on, okay, this environment with this genetic code, this drug interaction, whatever. Again, looking for the massive amount of data but trying to parse out the different patterns in it so that it can isolate what the problem is.

Now, with my very sort of lay understanding of all of this, my again just guess at this point is that what's really going on is the epigenome is where all this breaks down. You know David Sinclair's study as well as I do, which showed that even if you breed a mouse to just get a massive amount of breaks in its DNA over time, the DNA still looks the same. We are able to repair the DNA. It isn't what we used to think it was, which is you're getting these mutations in the DNA over time and the DNA is effectively getting corrupted.

But something is happening, and so if that something is the epigenome, where we're just mistagging it—again, this is my layman's explanation of how this works—but they're going in and putting in the wrong bookmarks. For people that don't know how this works, your DNA is basically really tightly wound, and a little bit of it gets exposed to say, "I'm an eye cell, I'm a skin cell, I'm a heart cell," whatever. As you age, you're dedifferentiating, and so your eye cell maybe now isn't purely an eye cell because parts of the DNA are unraveling.

So it's a little bit of a skin cell, a little bit of a heart cell, a little bit of an eye cell, and so now this is where the function begins to degrade over time. If the AI can figure out, "Okay, cool, that really is the problem. This is exactly what's going on. Here are the Yamanaka factors or whatever that you need to put to work to rewind the cell so that it resets," and so now we're getting the bookmarks in all the right places.

That part, once that's figured out, again, my gut instinct is that's going to be handled through the AI using quantum computing to be able to crunch just an unbelievable amount of synthetic data. So we don't have to feed in millions or billions of people. I just worry that that's going to take way too long for somebody of my age. But if we can do this via synthetic data, then the odds that it goes faster go way up.

Where's the flaw in that thinking?

Listen, you know, when I was in medical school, I don't know, 35 years ago, I went arguably to the best medical, you know, university and engineering schools on the planet, and none of this was being talked about, right? All of this is really—this entire conversation is the last five, six years, and it's moving very fast. It was heresy before I talked about longevity or age reversal, and now it's one of the hottest subjects on the planet because it's the biggest marketplace. I mean, what would you not pay for an extra 20 to 30 health years of life?

So yes, we are— to echo what you said—if you think about it, each of us get 3.2 billion nucleotides or our genome—3.2 billion letters from our mom and from our dad. You've got that same genome when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100, maybe when you're 150. But why don't you look the same if you've got the exact same instruction set? Why don't you have a, you know, a 12-pack if that's a thing, or a six-pack, whatever, when you're 80 like you had when you were 20?

That one I can answer, but the face, I think, is because the six-pack has everything to do with your lifestyle. If you're just too much fat, it is what it is.

Yeah, I mean, my point simply being is why don't you have the physique or the ability to build muscle or everything of your youth when you're 100? Why is there a difference? And it isn't your genome; it isn't your 3.2 billion letter instruction set. It is what you just said a minute ago—your epigenome. Epi for the Greek word for "above," and it's the control system.

You're right. When you're just born or when you're 10 or when you're 20 or when you're 80, different genes are on and different genes are off. The epigenome is the control of which genes are on and which genes are off. At the highest level, it is the control of the genes for skin that are on in your skin cells, and the gene for your hepatocytes that are on in your liver.

So they're different cells; they've differentiated, turning certain genes on, silencing certain genes, and saying, "Your genes aren't needed here in the skin cell. You don't need to be purifying out urine." As you age, what apparently is going on is that the control of which genes are on and which genes are off are beginning to blur. As you're getting older, the genes that should be off are turned on, or the genes that should be on are turned off.

I'll give you an example: skin. You know the supple skin of a child, of a newborn, right? Part of what's going on is we have something like 23 collagen genes, and we express multiple collagen molecules that make your skin give it the texture and so forth. But as you grow older, we begin to silence some of those genes, and so the collagen molecules of the 23, maybe only eight or nine are expressed, and so you start to get, you know, wrinkles, and your skin starts to look that of an old person.

But can you turn them back on? One of the companies my venture fund, Bold Capital, is an investor in is Marble. Marble Bio is using genetic engineering, epigenetic reprogramming to turn back on those genes, right, to take back the look and feel of your skin 30 years.

So can we do that across multiple parts of the body? Can we rejuvenate you in that regard? That is definitely one of the hottest topics out there right now. Can we turn back the clock? In December 2020, David Sinclair wrote a very famous paper in which he demonstrated turning back the clock in the retinal visual systems of mice, basically reprogramming the epigenome to go back to where it was earlier and giving mice that had lost their vision renewed vision.

One of his companies, like Biosciences, is now doing that in primates, right? And they already done it; they're doing it in primates right now. Have they shown that it has the same retinal impact?

I believe they have, and you know, we're then a fraction of a step away from humans, right? So this is the hot conversation of epigenetic reprogramming on one element, AI on the other, and I really fundamentally believe that we're within striking distance to making a dent in human aging.

I mean, you know, that's why you and I are here in this moment. We just announced our $101 million Health Span X Prize, challenging teams around the world. It's the largest prize ever in human history, challenging teams to restore function in muscle, immune, and cognition. Hopefully, this is an age reversal therapeutic that teams will deliver.

We're just looking at three systems: if the teams going after this Health Span X Prize are doing something that at the root cause is hitting aging, then they're likely to hit aging throughout the body. We're only going to measure immune, muscle, and cognition because those are easy to measure. For me, as I get older, I want to have the immunity to fight infectious disease and cancer. I want to have the muscular vitality to hike and play with my great-grandchildren, right? And the cognition to be sharp for decades to come.

Okay, so one of the things that I care deeply about is the timing of all of this.

Yeah, me too. With the prize, they have seven years, right? We announced this now in what month? November? December of '23, and it's a seven-year time frame.

Why seven years, do you think?

I think I set seven years originally because if an X Prize, you know, the original X Prize—the first one I launched back in 1996—was a $10 million prize for space flight. Again, these X Prizes are not for a paper study; they're not for an idea. A team has to actually demonstrate the thing, and then they get the money and they keep their IP. The world gets the benefit.

The first X Prize took eight years. It was launched in 1996; it was won in 2004 when Bert Rutan, backed by Paul Allen, built SpaceShipOne that Richard Branson then bought the rights to and created Virgin Galactic. Since then, our prizes have typically taken anywhere from, you know, two to eight years. We had one prize, a $30 million Race to the Moon that Google funded; it was at a 10-year horizon. It did not get won; it got shut down, though two of the teams actually made it to the moon shortly thereafter but crashed on landing. Interesting, but they still, you know, got to lunar orbit and still made it, which is a big, big deal—a Japanese team and an Israeli team.

By setting a deadline on a prize, you force teams to actually do something versus sit back. If it's there forever, they'll take, you know, the race element does help them accelerate. But a deadline—when you're facing a deadline, you're going to take even more aggressive action. So seven years for me felt the right length.

The second thing is one of our largest donors in this prize is a group called Evolution, which is a global nonprofit based out of Riyadh and out of the U.S. Saudi Arabia has a 2030 vision of really—they have a lot of projects culminating in the year 2030. It just so happened that that is the culmination of this prize as well, so 2030 works from that perspective as well.

When I think about AI and the rate of advancement, I come at things from an entertainment perspective. When I look at what's happened in the last 11 months—quite frankly, it hasn't been a full year that I've been paying attention to text-to-video—the leaps are pure insanity. It's insane! I was just looking at Emad's latest, Stability AI, which as fast as you're typing, you know, there's an ape with an orange on its head hanging from a, you know, bouncing on a trampoline. As you add words, the images are changing. It's insane!

We're a micro-step away from Hollywood movies being produced by describing them in words. Given the rate of change in the last 11 months, I'm going to guess in the next five years you will see commercials and things done entirely just text-to-video.

I think it's the next two years, five years. I mean, it certainly could be in the next three, just given the amount of UI changes they'll have to do. My gut instinct is that you're looking at at least three years.

When I think about the advancements in longevity, when I look at what humans have been able to do just in the last 10 years, it's already incredible. When you slap AI onto that, then it gets nuts. What do you think is going to be the contribution of quantum computers? How real is that right now?

So we're in the early days of quantum computing, to be clear. Quantum computing is a complicated subject, which I'm not going to do service to, to be very clear. Classical computing is basically computing that uses ones and zeros on integrated circuits, and a typical binary language. Quantum computing uses qubits that can basically be anything—a zero, one, or anything between a zero and a one.

What we find is it really represents the real world we're living in—a quantum world. We're not living in a binary digital world. We model the world using very advanced binary systems; we model on a molecular level. For example, DeepMind, which is part of Alphabet now, created a program called AlphaFold.

I remember when I was in medical school, or maybe I was in undergraduate at MIT at the time, the big grand challenge of the time was could you predict how a protein would fold? A protein is the basic building structure of the body; it's a structural material, it's an enzyme, it's muscle tissue. It is a sequence of amino acids—there are 23 essential amino acids.

These amino acids, when they're assembled in a ribosome, read from DNA to RNA to a protein—the sequence of amino acids. They're like Lego blocks strung together, and they begin to fold into a very predictable 3D structure. That 3D structure is everything; that 3D structure determines what that protein does, how it functions, how it interacts in an antibody.

It was always considered if you could go from an amino acid sequence—like I can tell you the sequence of the amino acids in this thousand amino acid sequence—and if you could tell me how it would fold, that would be the most incredibly powerful predictive engine on the planet. It was a supercomputing problem, and it was a couple of years ago now that AlphaFold, an algorithm out of DeepMind, cracked that problem.

It was able to go from an amino acid sequence to predicting a protein within a single atomic diameter accuracy. Whoa! Then it went on to predict every protein and how it folds in the human body. Then Meta created their own version of that and was able to predict every protein in the biological ecosystem. It's gone insanely fast, right?

Now we can start to design proteins versus just find out what nature wants. A protein that is a certain shape that interacts with a certain, like, you know, key and lock on the surface of a cell. But that's all being done in binary; that's all being done with AI algorithms operating on GPUs at an atomic molecular level.

We are quantum systems, and the belief is that quantum computers will be able to enable us to model what's going on at a much higher level of fidelity, much faster, so that we can start to understand the fundamental elements of how life itself works in a much deeper way and start to model things, you know.

I don't know what factor to use—trillions of times faster than the classical computer—because it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time to model things. But quantum is going to be able to model chemistry and model biology at lightning speeds.

I believe we're going to see, you know, 2023, 2024—we're seeing the inflection point of AI.

What does that mean? It means we're seeing AI growing at unbelievable speeds. What you said a few minutes ago—that it's awesome, it's unbelievable how fast it's moving. Typically, an inflection point is like a slow, slow, you know, like AI.

So AI began—the first conversations in AI were in 1956 at Dartmouth University. A group of a dozen people came together to talk about this idea of can we model intelligence and spent like a summer trying to do it, right? They tried to get the theories and think through it, right?

Neural networks were proposed not very long after that, but we didn't have the computational power until this past decade to actually start to put these algorithms into play. While AI is, what, 56, you know, 60, 70 years old, it's only now that we're seeing this massive inflection.

It's the knee of the curve; it's the point where its speed is so fast, right? Now we're going to start to see AI programming AI, and it becomes self-referential and accelerates even faster.

So quantum is still slow, meaning we're getting systems; we're beginning to learn how to utilize it. There are like two or three public quantum compute companies. A friend—I don't know if you know Jack—Jack is on my Board of Trustees at X Prize. He spun out of Google a company called Sandbox AQ. Yes, right? Eric Schmidt's the chairman, and Jack is the CEO.

A stands for AI, and Q stands for quantum, and it's a company that's really bringing together AI and quantum computing. His belief is it's going to be most impactful in a few key areas, and biology and chemistry is one of those key areas. That, to me, is really fascinating—the fact that we're going to be able to manipulate the building blocks of biology is pretty crazy.

Where do you think that our ability to predict the folding of proteins goes? How do we use that? What comes of it?

So now the question becomes, what drug do you want in order to handle a certain situation? Drug discovery up until now has been you go to the Amazon forest and you forage for different leaves and stuff, and you take it back to the lab and you see what you got, right? Like rapamycin, which is one of the longevity medications out there, was discovered in a soil sample from Easter Island, which is known as Rapa Nui, and that Rapa got its name from that.

This random process of finding stuff and trying to purify it and see if it has an effect on anything is going to go—we're going to flip the model to saying, "Okay, what exactly do we want to interact with this receptor on this cell or block this chemical process inside of the mitochondria?"

We're going to design it, and then we'll see, does it interact with anything else? We're going to start to create in silico models—computer models of cells at high fidelity to understand what's going on and how you want to tweak it.

Do we already have the ability to manufacture this stuff?

Absolutely, 100%. There's a company called Insilico Medicine. Alex Zhavoronkov, who is the CEO there, is a friend. My venture fund is an investor, full disclosure. Insilico Medicine, as the name says, we're going to create medicines in simulation on computers and then manufacture it and then show that it works. They have drugs in Phase 2 or Phase 3 right now that we're designing on a computer for a particular medical condition, and it's working out.

How does drug discovery work exactly using AI?

You're going to understand a molecular process inside a cell that is causing a disease, and you're going to say this particular molecule is a waste product that's accumulating that is causing this disease. Can we create a protein that might go bind that molecule in a highly accurate fashion that when it's bound, blocks the disease from occurring and allows your immune system to clear it?

We're going to start to tinker with—and the question then becomes, does that molecule you've designed to block a particular reaction or a waste product have a secondary negative effect that you don't want, right? So you're still going to go through clinical trials to determine that there's no downside to that.

Will that be more of a—we have to do it, but in reality, we've already run the simulation six ways to Sunday inside?

There will be a point in the future. For example, when SpaceX launched the Dragon capsule to the space station for the first time, it worked perfectly. They're great engineers, but the reason it worked fantastically is because they had a highly accurate computer model of the entire system. They modeled it in high fidelity, and it performed like the model said.

More recently, we see Starship making serial advances as it's going towards orbit. Of course, you know, the crisis news network and all the media say, "Oh, Starship fails!" Like, [expletive], it was an amazing incremental success. The first ship got to a certain point; the second ship got further. The third one will probably work perfectly because those ships are highly instrumented, and all the data is coming back.

The data is being used to advance the models and saying, "Aha! This is actually what was going on, and so let's change this engine or this structural energy." We're going to start to do the same thing in biology, where we're going to start to gather enough data and instrument and understand what's going on, where we can eventually get to a point where we have a highly accurate model of the human cell.

Not just a cell, but maybe it's an organ, maybe it's a thousand cells or a billion cells, and we're going to know that this particular designed protein or medicine, whatever, might work perfectly. We'll get to a point where you don't need to go through a massive clinical trial.

How far is that away? It's probably not the next five or 10 years, but it is probably 20 to 30 years out. But the cost of these—by the way, this drug works for me, not for you.

By the way, do you know—I don't know the exact number, but it's pathetic. When a drug is approved by the FDA and you take your—you’re prescribed that drug, what percentage of the time does the drug actually work for you?

I've heard this before; it's either 40% of the time it works or 60% of the time it works.

It's like under 20%.

No way!

Yeah, it's—and I want to check that number so I have it, but it's—the drug discovery process, you know, the first goal is do no harm. Yes, and by the way, most of the drug discovery process for the last century has been done in—or safety trials have been done in men only.

Yes, and there's a good reason for that, though.

Well, the reason was that drug companies didn't want to deal with menses and menopause and so forth, right? It was inconvenient. There are just so many more complications. But what happened was when drugs were taken off the market because they failed, it was because they hadn't tested them in women.

Because you—I mean, why assume that this drug that we developed for a particular condition that was safe in men is also safe in women? Anyway, so first is do no harm, and then does it work? When the FDA approves a drug, it worked in enough people that it was worth approving, but it doesn't work at 100% in the current circumstances, and it's a minority number.

I'll have to check on that.

I have an obsession as an entrepreneur, which is that as a human—but this really manifests in action—people need to stop trusting themselves so much. Yes, people are so convinced they know that they don't even recognize that they have a worldview. And if they do recognize that they have a worldview, they are utterly convinced that it is simply a reflection of what is objectively true.

And so they're like, "No, the way that I see things is the right way." And I'm like, "Oh my God! Is that your view?"

Yeah, exactly. Confirmation bias—that's my view, and it's right.

Peter, we have all—I mean, one of the big things that AI is going to give us as a gift is the ability to overcome all of these biases we have, right? All these cognitive biases—recency bias, negativity bias, confirmation bias, etc. All of these things which our brain really sucks at processing.

We have all these hacks, right? You trust someone who looks like you; you give higher weight to the most recent information you got; you give higher weight to negative information over positive information. There's going to be a version where you go to Jarvis, your AI, and you say, "You know, I want to put cognitive bias alert on. Tell me if I'm being biased."

You know, when we were building Singularity University, I was the founding executive director there. A few years in, I was—I’d written the book, and I was off, and Peter asked me to come to a board meeting and say, "What should SU look like in five years or 10 years?"

I made a comment; I said, "You know, you should shut it down because you build an organization, and over time you spend more time trying to sustain the organization than trying to solve the problem that you set out to solve in the first place."

DARPA is the big organization; they do every role—even the CEO is three years long, and then you have to rotate out. You're not allowed to hold any role for more than three years, and then you're measured—worried about things eating stale. Therefore, they keep things fresh, and your legacy is what did you do three years ago, and was it good or not?

So now you're always focused on the long term; you take out all the politics, etc. I think in today's world, if I had to kind of boil it down, I would say you build a company, and after three to five years, you just go, "We're going to shut it down after," and force us to reinvent or reinvent the company.

When the X Prize got won and we had SpaceShipOne fly, we held a meeting and said, "Do we shut it down or do we reinvent ourselves into a platform?"

Yeah, and we did. Now we're getting ready to launch X Prize 3.0, which happened during COVID. I pulled the board together and said, "This is a perfect opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves."

We've reinvented X Prize, and I'm excited about that. You need to be constantly disrupting yourself, and it's tough because we're lazy in some ways.

You tell a story in the book about Elon walking in, seeing him all long-faced, and saying, "What's wrong?" Walk me through that moment.

So I was amazed. I've known Elon for 23, 20, 23 years now. When Falcon 1, which was their first vehicle, failed the first time, the second time, the third time, and it succeeded on the fourth time, they miraculously—and timing is everything—got a contract for the Falcon 9, which was a billion-dollar contract. Had they not won that, they may not be here today.

But they did, and Elon made an incredible decision that took guts. He shut down the rocket line that had just begun flying, and there were very few successful operations. He said, "Focus on Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is our future."

That went on for some number of years, and I was coming into SpaceX in Hawthorne to have lunch with him, and he was kind of, you know, like you said, long-faced. I'm like, "What's up?" He goes, "I just figured out." Now Falcon 9 had been up and operating and doing damn well. It's the most successful launch vehicle on the planet by a huge margin, right? Very few countries compete with him; he's like the number one space-faring power.

I said, "What's wrong?" He goes, "I just figured out the Falcon 9 is not going to get us where we need to go," meaning to Mars. He's driven by this MTP—this massive transformative purpose—making humanity multiplanetary, getting humanity to Mars.

He said, "I need to start Starship." He goes on to make a comment that when Starship begins successfully operating, he's going to shut down the Falcon 9 line, which again is like, I don't know what the analogy is, but it's like you're the most successful at the top of the heap, and you're about to shut down that entire revenue flow.

Now, whether or not he does or does not, that was the statement he made. But it's that mindset of focus—absolute focus. I'm going to do whatever dedication to the big goal.

As somebody who knows this intimately from the inside, the need to disrupt yourself or somebody else is going to do it—the willingness to look at something and go, "Okay, we're going to have to start this all over." How do you get your organization on board with that? Because the normal human is going to rebel against that massively.

You don't. The only model we found that works at all is to go to the edge of your organization and build a new capability aiming into an adjacent area or a totally separate area.

I remember one of the events of Singularity, Larry Page came to me and said, "Hey, I was the head of innovation at Yahoo before building out Singularity." He came to me and said, "Hey, your unit at Yahoo is successful. Should I do an incubator model at Google?"

I said, "No, you'll have this immune system response. The more disruptive an idea we came up with in this incubator, the less Yahoo could handle it." You're like, "My job description is not workable."

The part of the result of lots of other inputs was Google X, which is separate, going into it. They use hardware to go into adjacent spaces—Google Car, Google X, contact lenses, etc. The master of this model of going to the edge and doing something different is actually Apple.

Yes, they have a great design capability and a technology supply chain. I argue that Apple's real innovation is organizational because what they do, unlike anybody else, is they will form a small team that's really disruptive, put the team at the edge of the company, keep them secret and stealth, and they'll say to them, "Go disrupt another industry," whether it's watches or retail or payments or glasses or whatever.

Now they have a portfolio of teams looking at different industries at the edge in secret. When they see something, they go and do it, and that becomes the new gravity center. There are hundreds of examples of this.

Nestle for years tried to run espresso as a line of business, and it just failed. They finally set it up as a separate entity on its own, and boom! Every hotel room in the world has an espresso machine.

That's the only model that we've ever seen. There is one more, which is the dictator. It is the larger-than-life leader who says, "This is what we're doing. If you don't agree with me, leave."

Do we have a good example of that?

Well, Elon and Bezos as well. Steve Jobs, for sure. It's like, you know, it's the founder leader. It's very hard to do it in an older legacy company that's, you know, hired a CEO.

But it's people—when you have a strong enough MTP and the visionary has a strong enough MTP and they come to work for you, when they come to work for this vision, then they will have faith in you to make those right turns.

All right, going back to mindset. How does somebody cultivate that in themselves? If you want to become that guy or gal, what do you do? What is it that an Elon has or a Steve Jobs has that other people can replicate?

We close out the book with mindset, and it's the area I'm spending most of my time. I'll phrase it like this for everybody listening: if you look at the most extraordinary leaders on the planet—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos—I don't care who's on your list. If you asked what made them successful, was it the cash they had, the friends they had, the technology they had, or was it their mindset?

I think almost everybody would say it was their mindset. Your mindset is how you deal with challenges and opportunities; it's your reaction; it's how your neural net is wired. So the question is, if your mindset—if you agree that mindset is the most important thing a leader can have, an entrepreneur can have—what mind do you have, first and foremost? Where did you get it?

Then ask yourself the question, what mindset do you need for the world ahead? I posit there are a few key mindsets, and these are what I teach in my abundance community.

First off, a curiosity mindset is fundamental. I know you believe this through and through.

Can you go into a little detail on that? When you say curious, what do you mean?

So curious is a willingness to actually dig and ask and have conversations. In the ChatGPT world, it's everything, right? It's like, how do I use ChatGPT? Open it up and ask it, "How do you..." and then ask the next question, the next question, the next question.

When you have a kid who is asking you questions, go to your 8- or 10-year-old self in that and just be openly curious and asking as many questions as you can and going down the rabbit hole. Steve Wozniak calls it tinkering, right?

Where in the organization can you just tinker and play? What stops people from tinkering or being curious? Time constraints, quarterly targets, doing stuff that they were told is important, not having the time, you know, and I think falling into ruts.

So a curiosity mindset, especially if you're an entrepreneur, is like one of the most important things that you can incubate and have. The second mindset for me is an abundance mindset.

The abundance mindset is there is nothing truly scarce. We can talk about this also as first-principle thinking. You know, and this is one where Elon and I have had lots of conversations about abundance and that there is nothing truly scarce, right?

Your ability as an entrepreneur to take something that was scarce and make it abundant is what entrepreneurs do great. The perfect example is energy, right? We used to kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil to light our nights. Then we ravaged mountainsides for coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ocean, right? Then we fracked natural gas.

But we live on a planet that's bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. Here's the key point: the energy is there; it's just not in a useful form yet.

So technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it usable and abundant. Water is another example. We live on a water planet, for God's sakes, right? Two-thirds water, but 97.5% is salt, 2% is ice. We fight over a half a percent, but there are technologies transforming scarcity into abundance.

First-principle thinking—I wrote about this in "Futures Faster Than You Think." When Elon decided to make Tesla, he basically looked at what was the spot price of lithium and nickel and could you get the cost of batteries down from first-principle thinking. The answer is yes, we can get it there, and therefore the cars don't have to be that expensive, and that led him to go forward.

Long story there. So that's abundance thinking. Instead of if you have a pie, my favorite example is if you have a pie and friends are coming over for dinner, instead of slicing the pie into thinner and thinner slices, which is a scarcity mindset, you bake more pies, which is an abundance mindset.

We're living in a world where you can bake more pies. Everything can be abundant. My whole mission on extending the healthy lifespan is about making time more abundant for people.

Probably going to take pies out of that equation.

Yeah, if you're okay. Anyway, so an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, a purpose-driven mindset, and a gratitude mindset are other mindsets I speak to, and we could talk forever about those, but there are mindsets that are important for us in this day and age.

I want to go back to curiosity. When I think about what derails my team, I love them to death, but one thing that I've encountered over and over is when people's ego gets tied up in being right, and they're not just obsessed with finding the right answer.

It's because I think they have not yet accurately identified the way the world works, which is that if you are obsessed with being right, you will be wrong most of the time. If you're obsessed with identifying the right answer, then you can actually make progress.

This is certainly the trap that fell prey to in my early 20s. That is a demarcation line in the sand—my life before I realized that if I built my ego around being willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies and figure out what the right answer is instead of trying to position myself to look smart, that I could actually move forward.

That switches everything because there's not only no emotional friction to admitting that you're wrong; there's like a little twinge of excitement of like, "Ooh, I've gotten this far being wrong, and now somebody's going to remove the scales from my eyes. Now I really can make this forward momentum."

But man, I really—like for all the time that I spend on camera telling people how to think in this way, I find it very hard to get somebody who isn't ready for that to hear it, make that switch, and change. If you guys have the magic words, I'd love to hear them.

Actually, this is music to my ears in a sense because organizationally, individuals are pretty good. We have a lot of toolsets for transforming individual thinking—Tony Robbins, NLP, psychedelics nowadays, etc.—to change your own mindset.

But the groupthink that comes inside an organization is really hard to change. What we've found in EXO is the characteristics that add up to an exponential organization by default have it be embracing of this mindset.

One of the ways we talk about what we've done in the same way that a Tony Robbins, you go in there and you completely change your subconscious state from A to B, right? From a scarcity to an abundance mindset, whatever.

We're able to do that at the organization level. We can take an organization that is old thinking, stuck in particular markets, etc., and you open it up using a combination of these characteristics—the mindset, the MTP, etc.

Learn how you introduce the ideas, but how do you get them to actually—let me give you the hack. I learned this from Astro Teller. I had him on stage at A360 a few times, and he shared something that I love.

You're in the midst of developing a product; everybody's absolutely sure of what's going on and how you're going to launch it, how it's going to work, and you hand out a piece of paper to everybody and you say, "Listen, guys, it's six months from now, and the product has just failed, and you know why it's failed. Write it down. You know exactly why it's failed. Write it down right now."

You are incentivizing someone to actually flip their situation and look at the flaws and elevate those. Then you go around the room and review why people say it's going to fail, and if you've got two or three people saying the same thing, you know it's maybe you got to look at that test that one first.

The other one we've come across that's a great hack is Amazon. They created something called the institutional yes. Have you ever heard of this?

So they realized in any big company, it's really easy to say no. One of 20 people can say no; it'll kill the idea. If you're in a startup and you go to one investor and they say yes, you're off to the races.

So how do you deal with that impedance mismatch? They came up with a policy so that if you're inside Amazon, you come to me with my idea, and I'm your boss, I'm not allowed to say no. My default answer must be yes. If I want to say no, I have to write a two-page thesis as to why it's a bad idea and post it publicly.

Brilliant, right? So they've created friction and embarrassment to saying no. It's much easier for me to go, "Huh, go ahead. You'll fail at the next level anyway," and out.

Actually, one of the outcomes of this policy was Amazon Web Services—nothing to do with their strategy, not on the roadmap—but nobody could figure out how to say no to it. Now it's one of the most successful products of all time, delivering, I think, 75% of their global profits.

Wow, because nobody could figure out how to say no to it, right?

We've had the luxury of watching hundreds of big companies deal in different ways, right? It used to be that big companies were terrible at this, and then about five years, seven years ago, they started getting better.

Instead of a Google or Yahoo or somebody saying, "We're just going to compete with that little startup," they would just buy them. Zuckerberg saw that he was going to get disrupted by Instagram and WhatsApp, and he bought them instead.

In general, you should leave them alone over time. The corporation can handle it, gets as grubby fingers as mess, and then they tend to typically kill it.

But we're starting to learn now. If you look at, say, Google with LLMs, they were actually too scared to release them, and Amazon just went, "Let's just go for it!" Boom!

And OpenAI—oh, sorry, Microsoft. I was like, "Wait, Amazon?" Sorry, sorry. Microsoft just—what about Bard? What do you guys think about Bard? How's it doing?

Very impressive. I haven't touched it. We've been playing with it. It's very impressive. It's early days yet, but I'm finding it fun doing stuff on OpenAI and Bard at the same time and comparing them. There are a few places where OpenAI failed and Bard succeeded and vice versa, so they're both useful.

What I'd like to mention, if I could, just because I want to go back to the thesis on the book, you know, again, our mission is to give people who are running large-scale companies how to survive the next 10 years a series of, "This is what you should do if you want to reorganize your company."

If you're a startup, this is what you should do to be able to thrive in this decade because the world has changed. I mean, fundamentally, how you start a company today and how you succeed today is very different than 30 years ago.

It's very different than six months ago.

Well, yeah, true. AI scares me for real. We've really just lived through the most disruptive six months. Nothing has ever more instantaneously impacted my business model, the way that I approach my employees, ever than the release of—

Yeah, I mean, honestly, that did not impact my business nearly. It did, like, the day-to-day as you're not seeing people, but the fundamental way that we ran our business—

Yeah, I do. I mean, we're in the world right now where every doctor in the world is freaked out if they see this, and every lawyer in the world is freaked out, every teacher in the world is freaked out.

I love the fact that OpenAI's ChatGPT passed the U.S. medical licensing exam two months after it was launched, right? And the bar—crazy! It passed the Turing test. That was the one I didn't see coming—the signing of the "Hey, let's slow down" letter.

I had Yoshua Bengio on the show, who is considered the godfather of AI, and I said, "Hey, your name was on that. What made you sign it?" He said in no uncertain terms, "I did not expect it to pass the Turing test as fast as it did. That set off every alarm bell that I have, and like, pump the brakes."

This is the thing that we find most interesting because we've known Emad and all these guys for a while. They are blown away by the success of these models, right?

So that's really fascinating that the folks themselves are just blown away. And still early days, ladies and gentlemen. It's still early days. You know, we're going to see so much more coming, and the recursive nature of self-improving capabilities.

You know, I showed this work done where a group of physicians were shown these case studies to diagnose a patient, and it was like they took 55 minutes and got 60% right, and the AI took like 12 minutes and got 85% right.

The physicians are going to change next year, but the AI will get much better and will be, you know, seconds and 100% right.

Bro, yeah, yeah. This is where this gets really interesting. So I know you have another company, Fountain Life. You guys are using AI. Are you open to talking about that?

Yeah, sure. So longevity—I couldn't be more obsessed with the idea. As you were talking about it, my first question is, how are you guys going to start getting the patterns down? Because to me, this is the big thing.

You talk to somebody like Peter, and he's like, "Look, it is just next to impossible to do really good studies on diet and nutrition—what works, what doesn't work. There are just too many confounding variables."

I was like, "AI is going to answer that!" It can pull a pattern. Anything that can be reduced to a pattern, it can figure it out, regardless of the amount of variables. If there is a pattern to be had, it will suss it out.

Given that we have some people that live to 120 and some that don't, there is a pattern.

Yeah, and I'll put it this way: there are a lot of interesting things. Not only are there some people who live to 120 and some people who make it to just 65, there are large species on this planet, like the bowhead whale that lives to 200 years or the Greenland shark that lives to 500 years.

My question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? I said it's either a hardware problem or a software problem.

We're going to understand that this decade is the decade we're going to understand that it's going to be AI and quantum technologies that give us that insight.

So Fountain Life—it's just FountainLife.com. We have these 10,000 square foot facilities. We have four of them right now. We have a waiting list of like 50 that we'll build out globally. You come, and we digitize you. It's a full body, 150-gigabyte upload of you—full body MRI, brain vasculature, brain function, a coronary CT—all of this with AI overlay, 80 blood biomarkers, genomics, metabolomics, your gut.

Then we do this year on year. This is not a one-and-done, right? So in the first time you do it, we're going to see, is there anything going on that you should worry about? Most of us are optimists about our health, and we don't actually know what's going on inside our body.

Yeah, and by the way, the body is really amazing at hiding disease.

Yeah, I'm going to put myself—it's like you think you're fine, but you know 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent.

Dude, that one freaks me out—that the first symptom of heart disease in most men is death.

Yeah, crazy, right? And 70% of cancers that kill you are not screened for. So it's this [expletive] that drives me nuts, and so it's like an idiot not to be looking inside your body.

We used to not look because, "Well, if I find out, can I do anything?" The answer is yes, you can. So you want to know.

We screen people first, and then every year we upload you every year, and it's looking for the patterns and what medicines. We have a large corpus of data and the AI ability to analyze that to say, "With your genome, with your microbiome, with these meds, with this..."

There's going to be huge learnings out of this, right? I'm trying to build Fountain Life into an exponential organization, so I'm building around this book that we've built. Every company I'm involved with is like, "We need to use these 10 attributes in the book; otherwise, we're not going to be able to have the impact globally that we want."

What are you going to tell the AI to look for?

So right now, you don't have to tell it to look for anything. You have to ask it to find any kind of anomalous patterns. You're looking for changes. Tell me what's changed, tell me what's changing, and tell me—

I'll give you one of the examples. We're building this—this is a fun part about Fountain Life. We're building a brand new health insurance company on top of it.

So if you get Fountain Life insurance, which is available today, your employees' insurance is a perverse business. Fire insurance pays you after your house burns down; life insurance pays your next of kin after they're dead; health insurance pays you after you're sick.

What we've done instead is when you sign up, your employees go through a set of pre-testing for us to discover any kind of disease and prevent it from a big payout later down the stream, right? So it's keeping your employees healthy.

What we want to—wait, wait, wait. How does that model work, though? So is the employee paying roughly what they would pay?

They're paying exactly the same or less. The numbers are the same, and the insurance company is actually saying we're going to do preventative testing.

Yes, preventative testing. Here's what we're doing: one of the interesting things is there are a number of expensive tests we can do and a number of cheap tests we can do. One of the things we're doing with AI is correlating which of these lower-end tests correlate highly to the expensive tests.

So you'll do the lower-end cost test to find a signal in the noise, and then you'll verify with the expensive test.

Did you see recently both DeepMind and OpenAI released weather prediction models that were accurate 11 days out?

Whoa!

So this is fascinating. I saw this morning a prediction model on Bitcoin.

So tell me more, Peter.

Yeah, well, it was trending up to the end of the year—not a huge amount, but it was trending up. I'm a Bitcoin believer.

But anyway, the point being interesting, right? Can AI make accurate predictions in seemingly massively complex systems like weather? I mean, I can't think of anything more complex than weather or the financial markets.

I mean, now it becomes fascinating if you're actually able to predict. Then the question becomes, well, if you can predict that, and I know—is that going to change my behavior?

When that in weather? No. In financial markets? Yes.

I mean, this goes back to, you know, I'll ask you the question. My thesis is we're living in a simulation, and it's an nth generation simulation.

We're living within the simulation, within the simulation, within the simulation because I think we're going to have the technology to be able to do that, and we will because we can.

If that's in fact the case, I would do nothing different than I'm doing right now.

We're in a game. How do you feel about that?

It's interesting. I'm actually wearing the shirt right now. I'm wearing a shirt for the video game that I'm building called Project Kaizen, which takes that as its hypothesis, which is everything you've ever known is a simulation. You have no body anywhere; there is no biological you.

This is a simulation, and then once you know it's a simulation, then you can begin to manipulate it effectively. That is me, again, as a sci-fi writer, trying to explore what it will mean to understand the rules by which all of this apparent complexity is born out of.

For a long time—and look, honestly, it's only been in the last month or two that I've started thinking maybe this really is a simulation—just because the more I do thought exercises probing at the edges of what would it mean for this to be built on a set of rules and why would it be built on a set of rules and what built it on a set of rules?

You just start asking things back recursively. I map to what I understand, and since I understand simulations and video games, I map it to that.

There could just be a fundamental flaw in my thinking, and I'm perfectly happy with that. But it does get harder and harder for me to exempt from the likelihood that this actually is a simulation.

So I believe it inherently, and I can't prove it. Even though I believe it, it doesn't change anything. I remember I had a—I was at years ago, I was at a birthday party that Elon had, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Elon, and I are having a conversation before the falling out.

I was having a conversation about whether we're living in a simulation, and I think—I don't know if it was Larry or Elon who said, "Yeah, the only way we're going to find out is if you try and tamper with it, and the system resets you."

I mean, it's fascinating. I wonder if this has been a subject of conversation in ancient philosophical times as well. Have you ever seen any references to that?

Plato's Cave.

Yeah, very much the same idea. Again, mapping to what he knew—he knew campfires and shadows, two dimensions and three.

Yes, exactly. So that becomes the way that you think about it. But I think as people really begin to investigate the human mind, it is inevitable that you start going, "Hold on a second. You're seeing the world differently than me."

Then you go, "Wait a second. Are either of us seeing the world the way that it actually is?"

Once you understand that we're not—that we necessarily couldn't be—that my Umwelt is different than a bat's Umwelt, and therefore we are going to perceive everything very differently.

Then you start going, "Wait a second. We're perceiving the world instead of just encountering it as it actually is."

So the technology that's going to come to make a dent in that is going to be BCI—brain-computer interface.

Right? So if I'm able to connect my mind to your mind, I think there's going to be an interesting set of—can I—so there are dozens of companies right now working on this.

You've got 100 billion neurons in your brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections, and the neocortex—the top layer—is your sensorium and your locus of action and all your visual cortex, auditory cortex, and such.

One can connect the digital signals in your brain or the electrical signals in your brain to electrodes and connect them to a computer, and those things are happening right now. You know, Elon's got his Neuralink; there's a company actually here called Paradromics, which is doing that as well.

There's a lot of amazing companies, and so we're going to start to be able to understand visually. One of my favorite recent AI blow-your-mind examples was a group took subjects and put them inside of a functional MRI machine, which is looking at blood flow going through different parts of the tissue in your brain.

The more the blood flow, the more the neurons are active because they're using more glucose and oxygen and so forth. They took the output of the MRI and they fed it into Stable Diffusion, and they gave the subjects in the functional MRI machine an image to look at—look at an image of an airplane, look at it and think about that.

Then they took the signals out of the fMRI and were able to see the person was looking at an airplane.

That's crazy, right?

And they did—so it could interpret the brain signals to say, "This is what you're looking at."

Yes!

Awesome! That's mind reading!

Yes, it is mind reading!

And so we're heading in that direction. One of the things I think about is you and I both are not a single living organism.

All right, you have to think about that. We're a collection of 40 trillion human cells, 30 trillion if you're smaller, 50 trillion if you're bigger. Those human cells are each individual living organisms working together—collaborative, competing for resources.

Competing, yes, and supporting each other in the distribution of resources. You also have more than those 40 trillion life forms in the form of bacteria and virus and fungi as an ecosystem in your body.

But you're not—you know, we think of ourselves as Tom or Peter, but we're far more. I think we're heading towards a point where if I can connect my brain to the cloud and you can connect your brain to the cloud, all of a sudden I've got godlike powers with a small g.

I'm omniscient, omnipotent, I'm omnipresent. I can know anything; I can think and Google. I can look through your eyes, you know, or through the eyes of someone watching a sunrise in Tokyo.

It is—we're now a meta-intelligence. We're at a new level of empathy and connection between humans.

You know I love Star Trek, as you all know. Are you Trekkie or Star Wars?

Star Wars.

I'm so sorry for that.

You're wrong. You picked the wrong part, but it's okay.

You know, the only thing—and I, you know, the only thing that Robert got wrong was the Borg. You know, the Borg are the, you know, the evil networked minds.

But I think we're going to head towards a level of consciousness on the planet as we start to connect millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of individuals.

I think we become conscious at yet another level. I call that a meta-intelligence, and I think that's coming as well, enabled by AI, enabled by this brain-computer interface.

You can imagine if I gave you the ability to connect your brain to the cloud and you plugged in for that moment, and all of a sudden you could understand what you want. You knew anything you wanted; you were connected to this new envelope of infinite knowledge.

Then I unplugged you. How would you feel?

I think you'd feel so lonely and disconnected.

So I think once you plug in, you know, this is more The Matrix than not.

So we can get to one of your favorite genres, but I think that's coming, enabled by AI.

Let me go one other slight subject, and then you can take it back where you want.

We just had Visioneering at X Prize. X Prize, we hold an annual event called Visioneering where we brainstorm ideas that would become great X Prizes.

This past Visioneering, we had a couple of good AI X Prizes. One is AI for truth. When someone makes a statement, can you have an AI algorithm that's able very rapidly to say factual truth? Here's the roots of that; this is opinion or this is information.

I think that would be very useful in our coming world. The other one, which was AI-mediated communication between any two species.

Wow!

Right? Can I talk to whales or dolphins in a consistent, accurate, two-way fashion?

That would be nuts!

That would be amazing!

Yeah, I'd love that for my dog.

That would be a trip!

I know! Be a trip! Take me out, food! Pee me! But, you know, on a consistent basis.

I mean, you can imagine, like, if you could talk to whales and dolphins, they would help you explore the oceans or talk to birds.

There's a kid that's missing in the forest here—help me find them!

Dude, so that's very interesting, and I know the way your brain works, and you take a very beautiful, optimistic look at that.

It would be utterly fascinating. So killer whales are vicious, vicious, and they will go eat a great white liver just because they can.

And they will toy with dolphins. There are dolphins that will kill other dolphins, and they'll mess with them—dolphins that try to have sex with humans.

I mean, just on and on, like it's crazy. I have a feeling that were we to actually be able to communicate with animals, it may be a little more distressing than we want to believe.

I read a story a long time ago, and I did find this very interesting. This speaks to your interpretation of the Borg as being a misread.

It was these creatures that had these tails that had like these almost fiber optic tendrils, and when they would connect them—

Sounds like Avatar!

Yes! I would be shocked if he hadn't read the story because it is very similar to that.

But this was years ago; I read this probably 30 years ago, 35 years ago. They would connect their tails, and they would instantly know the entire history, emotional milieu of the person they were connecting.

What was interesting was how once you could no longer lie or hide anything from anybody, there was a relaxed sort of acceptance—this is who I am, like it or not.

This is who I am. You got your own [expletive]; I've got mine.

I mean, honestly, when I think about it on a relationship side, and this is something that, you know, I talk to Lisa more about—the ability to be absolutely brutally honest about your feelings, about your desires, about everything you've ever done.

I mean, how many people actually have people in their lives that know everything about you, where there's zero to hide?

I mean, it's like in a relationship, and you look at a woman and go, "Wow, she's gorgeous," and you're willing to say that.

Or, you know, something that you were ashamed of having done, but everything is fully disclosed. I think that level of intimacy would be amazing.

Amazing!

It would be! You—oh man, the symmetry that would have to be there, though, because if there's even slight imbalance—

For sure!

And therefore, a lot of relationships would not work. But when they do click, and there's full disclosure, and your deepest likes, deepest fears are fully known to both sides, it is a level of complete honesty.

I mean, someone who knows you as well as you know yourself.

I mean, that—I mean, we're going in a very different conversational subject, but I think that is something I would desperately love.

I have a few friends in my life where it's like they know almost everything possible, and it's not that I wouldn't disclose things to them; it's just we've never had those conversations.

Those are people who are to me right for whatever dysfunction I have.

Only my wife knows me like that.

Mhm.

I don't know why I—I don't—

Well, just share them with—share it with me now, right now!

Yeah, there you go! Live on camera!

The funny thing is I don't actively hold things back. Like, I'm a pretty open book, but it is like there's something about sharing your life with somebody where they see all the—like, what do you like when you're sick? What do you like when something goes really well? When something goes poorly?

There's just too much intimacy for there to be any posturing whatsoever because they just see you too often.

Yeah, it's interesting. So these are the things that AI are going to enable. Imagine with this level of BCI where you can't lie.

I mean, interesting, right? Because you could probably make up simulated truths that you honestly believe, and people do do that anyway.

Going back, where do you want to take this back to?

Let's rewind the tape here.

Well,

Of their, of you're going to spend it anyway at the end of your life. Yeah, right. Trying to deal with when you give 100%. I think people would, but then they say, "Well, I'm going to leave it to my kids," or "I'm going to leave it to my philanthropy," or whatever the case might be. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to paint a scenario. You are before a credible source—let's call this credible source God, just to make it easy—and God is like, "Hey, bro, button on the left: you get 20 extra years, but you're going to give me every dime, all of your assets, everything. Button on the right: you die tomorrow, but you get to give your family all your assets." Yeah, you're telling me that there are people that hit the button 100%? Who? Because people want to leave a legacy. Why the hell do you give a billion dollars to Harvard? Do they really need another billion dollars? You know, you want a legacy. People want to know that their legacy is going to live after them, whether it's in the form of their kids or the form of their name. And so, yeah, there's a balancing act. Maybe it's 20% that they would hold back. Those are not the buttons before you. There is no 20%. There's all or nothing. But you—wow, okay, that's crazy to me.

But going back to your question, I think longevity is one of the largest business opportunities that's going to materialize over the de—how you take advantage of it. What are you doing to be ahead of the curve? Well, building companies there in that. So Fountain Life is my biggest company. I'm building for a global footprint for enabling everyone to have access to the best therapeutics and the best diagnostics. Right? The diagnostics are: is there anything going on inside your body right now you need to know about? If there is, you want to know because you can take action. We find 2% of the people who go through Fountain Life have a cancer they don't know about, 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about, and 14.4% have either metabolic disease, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease—something you need to take action on right away. And so the thesis there is your body no longer needs to be a black box. Yes, the thesis is your body is amazingly good at hiding disease—incredibly good. And you're better off confronting; you're better off knowing as early as you can because you can do something about all of these things.

And why now? What is now? Because the tech is there to image in high fidelity without the false negatives, and the tech is there to understand what the data means. Right? So a friend of mine, a super successful individual, who I'm doing business with in Fountain Life, and he wanted to go through the experience. He goes through the experience, and we discover two aneurysms in his brain. Wow, serious aneurysms. He's in surgery a week later; they're clipped and blocked, and he's fine in that threat. But had he not, it was a ticking time bomb for him. Right? We all know people who have, "Oh my God, they died in their sleep," or they go to the hospital and the doctor says, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but you got stage three or stage four," whatever it is. It didn't happen that morning; it's been going on for some time. You just don't know how.

So the stats are the following: 70% of people who have a heart attack had no previous symptoms. Right? You don't detect cancer until it's stage three or four from a pain or something going on. It is slow. Your body is amazingly good at hiding it. You don't develop a Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of the substantia nigra neurons are gone. And so you need to look. And people say, "I don't want to know." I say, "Of course you want to know as early as you can." Fully know because there are now things you can do about it. For sure, medicine has progressed incredibly well, and it's moving. And if you're wealthy, you want to know because I want to fund the research to solve that thing. Right?

So in Fountain, the two questions are: Is something going on you know about today? And if there isn't, fantastic! I go every year for my upload, and then I'm tested throughout the year on stuff that I'm incrementally improving. The second thing is: What are you likely to develop, and how do we push that off? How do we solve that? How do we reduce your chance of heart, neurovascular, whatever it might be? So that's what I'm building. I've built a couple of companies—one in stem cells with Bob Huri, who's the CEO there called Cellularity, and the one called Vaccin that's developed vaccines.

So vaccines are amazing things. Your brain is the most complicated machine in the universe that we know of; your immune system is the next. Your immune system is protecting you against infectious disease and against cancers. Right? We're all developing cancers all the time, and your immune system, your natural killer cells, find those cancer cells. Right? Because cells replicate a certain number—it's called the Hayflick limit, you know, 50, 60 replications—and then they should have the decency to die. If they don't, they can become senescent cells putting out inflammatory factors, or they can become cancer cells—immortal cells—and they grow. And your natural killer cells detect those cancer cells and zap them. But as you grow older, you have something called immuno-exhaustion. Your immune system starts to slow down, and you don't detect it, and they can start to grow.

So if you can find cancers on MRI, there are things called the GR test, which take a liquid biopsy, blood biopsy, and look for cancer DNA in your bloodstream. And so you can do something about these now. So, vaccines—I was—that's where I was. I was talking about vaccines. So vaccines, we know about it from mRNA vaccines for COVID and such, but we can now develop vaccines to activate your immune system to fight cancer. Like, go attack that! You can vaccinate against cancer. There are cancer vaccines now being developed. The first one that was approved by the FDA was for melanoma, which is one of the most deadliest cancers. One of my companies, Vaccin, has a vaccine in phase two for Parkinson's, going to phase three for Alzheimer's. We have a phase one asset in hypercholesterolemia.

So going—a vaccine, which goes—you vaccinate yourself, it activates your immune system to go and go after a particular enzyme in the liver called PCSK9, which creates the bad cholesterol, LDL (low-density lipoproteins). And that vaccine, which you'd vaccinate yourself twice a year for two injections a year, might be 20 bucks, 50 bucks, basically drops your cholesterol level down. So I have hypercholesterolemia in my family. My dad had very high cholesterol, a whole slew of medical stuff, so I'm very sensitive to it. I don't want to do statins. I take a very small amount of statin for an anti-inflammatory effect—that's a different story. But I take something called a—I take something called ratha, which is an antibody that's manufactured in a vat. And I get a few mLs of this, and I have to inject it every two weeks. That antibody goes to that PCSK9 enzyme in my liver and blocks it from producing LDL.

Now, it costs me $10,000 a year, and I have to do it every two weeks, but it drops my LDL level down into a beautiful green zone. I'm using these antibodies produced in a manufacturing plant. And to me, what we built in Vaccin was a vaccine that I inject, and it causes my own immune system to manufacture that same antibody for free to block that PCSK9 enzyme. That make sense? Yes, and you're doing that now? Yes, I'm not—well, we're developing the vaccine right now. The first results were amazing. We're going from phase one into phase two. Long story short, the ability—there are these monoclonal antibodies, which are like the top-selling drugs, and it's using these antibodies, which are proteins, to go and block a certain process. We talked about that a little bit earlier, but they're expensive.

But the idea now is instead of manufacturing these monoclonal antibodies in a vat in a pharma manufacturing plant, can you just teach your own immune system to produce that same antibody? And that's the future of vaccines. Your vaccine—the vaccine is playing your immune system like an app. Okay, let me see if I can boil that down to a thesis. So for somebody that is trying to figure out where the opportunities are right now, because we're living in this hyper-disruptive time, I want people to be aware of the ways in which things are being disrupted so that they can go in and take advantage.

So, okay, so I'm going—we're going back to the investment side here. So listen, we're in the middle of a biotech winter right now, just to be clear. There was—if you look at all the biotech companies out there, they're significantly depressed. So if you're playing the public markets and you find companies that have good cash positions and have strong potential drug candidates, it's a great time to buy because the stocks are all like 10 or 100-fold depressed. So I just put that out there. One second. I think health—I think the medical system, the healthcare system, is so broken it's pathetic. I think we're going to—I think it's going to crumble under its own weight, and so we're going to reinvent how we deliver healthcare.

I think at home, you're going to—all be—we're all going to be monitored. So I'm wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now. I've got my Oura ring. I've got my Apple Watch. There's going to be a whole slew of wearables. All of that wearable data is going to monitor me 24/7. So one of the things we do at Fountain as well is we bring in all your wearable data. So in between your annual uploads, which are deep dives into you, we're monitoring what's going on. So we're going to see—are you making recommendations based on what you see? Absolutely, absolutely. So for supporting your sleep, for supporting your diet.

So my continuous glucose monitor, right? And there are companies like Levels or there's Free Libre, there's others that measure how your body reacts to eating those peanuts or that Snickers bar and how quickly your blood sugar elevates and how quickly it goes back down. And based upon that, you know, going into pre-diabetic or becoming a diabetic, your glucose is a poison in the body. I don't know if people realize that. Our bodies were never designed to eat as much sugar as we do, and glucose sticks to proteins, and then your immune system sees that glycosylated protein as a foreign and attacks it and causes inflammation. So a lot of cardiovascular disease and neuroinflammatory disease is a result of people's diet, but you don't talk about that. No one talks about that.

Okay, so I was going somewhere slightly different when I said thesis. So I don't necessarily mean investing, but I mean if I can create an overarching thesis on what it is that links all this stuff together. Your interpretation of where we are in the world right now, as I understand it, is your body no longer needs to be a black box. Yes, we now have the imaging capacity to see what's going on. We have the ability to do something about it. There are therapeutics that are advancing now very rapidly, yes, where you can leverage the body's own systems in an intentionally triggered fashion, whether that's through vaccines, whether that's through some other mechanism. But we're getting—we have a deep enough understanding of the body's mechanisms that we're able to trigger those and get them to go in and clean up, whether it's LDL or something else.

And people need to realize that your health is something you can do something about. And if I think about having a longevity mindset, what does a longevity mindset mean? It means I believe—and I do believe this—that this next decade we're going to see incredible progress, and 10 years from now we're going to have the ability to live an extra 20 healthy years. What do you think that progress is going to be in the ability to manipulate the immune system?

So I think it's a lot of what we're doing on this exercise. We just announced, right? So we get $101 million from Evolution, from Chip Wilson, who is the founder of Lululemon, who put up, you know, $26 million plus another $10 million purse for his disease called FSHD. It's a muscular dystrophy, and we're asking teams to reverse the functional loss in muscle, immune, and cognition. Right? So you're moving well, you've got great immunity, and you're thinking clearly. And so over the next seven years, we're going to have incredible progress in those areas. That's one of the thrusts that I'm focused on moving the needle forward.

And so if you believe that we're going to have this progress, your longevity mindset needs to be: I'm going to do whatever it takes to live long enough to intercept these other breakthroughs. So I arrive at this point in reasonably good health. So for me, that's the thesis—that we're going to have these breakthroughs from biotech, from cellular medicines, from gene therapies, from CRISPR technologies, from all of these things, from AI. And if I'm able to keep myself in good enough health, I'm going to intercept these, and it's going to buy me the next 20 years. And during that time, there are going to be additional breakthroughs that will buy me the next 20 years. If you want that, if you love life and you want to see what's coming in the next, you know, century, there's good reason for you to take care of yourself.

What does that look like, taking care of yourself? Right now, there are things that people need to be doing. And I just—you know, I wrote a book that just came out called "Longevity: Your Practical Playbook." I've—you know, I just wrote a book last year with Tony Robbins called "Life Force." We did a conversation about that. Great book, and it's 700 pages, and it's amazing, and very few people get through a 700-page book. So I wanted to write a very practical book that looks at and says, "This is what I'm doing, and this is what I think is science-backed." And I put it into a few very simple chapters.

Number one: what to do about diet, because there are fundamental things. We can come back to that. Sleep, exercise—like the most important thing, right? You think exercise is more important than diet? And I'll come back to that. So they're all important: diet, sleep, exercise, mindset—super important—not dying from something stupid, which I call doing your upload at Fountain, like knowing what's going on inside your body—and then meds and supplements. So the book looks at that. I actually made a reduction—that was the word—a reduction of that into what I call my practical, my, you know, Peter's longevity practices, which I have a copy of over there, which is free for people. It's a 25-30 page, like, "This is what I'm doing and why," at DMAndis.com. DMAndis.com/longevity, and you can get my book there; you can get this PDF download, and it's very definitive.

So listen, there's no one diet for everybody. I've been a vegan. I've been, you know, keto diet. I'm mostly Mediterranean. But the things I've discovered are, number one, sugar is a poison. Minimizing your sugar—and why whole plants are critically important. Even the order in which you eat your food matters. Like, if you're given—like, you go out to dinner at a restaurant, when they bring you the bread and the wine, ask them to bring it back during the dinner course. If you're going to eat the bread, at least dip it in olive oil first. Glucose—talking about not spiking your glucose immediately, right? Which is the worst you can do. It really drives you to—so why bring it back? Is it eating proteins first?

So what you want to do is on your plate eat your vegetables first. If it's asparagus, if it's broccoli, if it's a salad, the fiber slows down your digestion. Eat your protein next, and then eat your carbs last. It slows down your sugar spike; it actually allows you to absorb the best nutrients out of your plate of food first. So even making that small—you'll lose weight, you'll get better nutrition, and you'll actually feel full having eaten the best stuff first. Right? It's just a really small trick that I'm just like, you know, once I learned that, it's like, "Okay, I need to tell everybody about it." It's a small—the order in which you eat your food matters. Right?

So there's a whole bunch about diet there. Exercise is probably the single most important thing. I have stepped up my exercise from like 2 or 3 days a week to 5 days a week. Your physique has changed dramatically. Yeah, I've added muscle. It's my goal to add muscle. Muscle is one of the most important parts of your life. Are you doing TRT? I am. I do take a certain amount of testosterone, and it's simply—I don't actually feel different. I am taking a small amount of testosterone simply to support muscle growth based on blood levels. I do—I’m staying in like 800 range and sometimes up to a thousand. But does it increase your libido? It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't touch my libido. I mean, my libido is fine, but I don't—if I'm off it or on it, it doesn't make a difference. And you know people who've got—you know, I don't think I exhibit grouchy old man syndrome, so I'm, you know, I'm like the most positive person I know, no doubt.

But I'm using it specifically for supporting muscle mass. But then I'm doing 150 grams of protein a day. I'm having creatine. I'm taking amino acid supplementation. I'm focused on adding muscle mass. As you grow older, adding muscle becomes harder and harder. Yeah, and one of the unfortunate mechanisms that a lot of people die as they go into their 70s and 80s—I'm 62 right now—is you fall because of muscle weakness. You break a pelvis or a hip; you end up in the hospital. It's painful to breathe; you get pneumonia, and you're down for the count. Right? It's happened to my dad; it happens to a lot of people. And the survival rate post-hip or pelvis fracture if you're over 70 is like really low. So you don't want to do that; you want to maintain muscle mass. It also maintains your stem cell population and your blood in your muscle.

So there's an interesting stat—I memorized this one because it was important. If you're over 60 and you can exercise, it doesn't have to be super intense, but some resistance exercises can be with or without weights twice a week; it reduces your all-cause mortality by 50% and reduces your chance of cancer by threefold. Wow! Yeah, your body—the signals you give your body from exercise and moving is that I'm still useful; I still want to be here. Right? The other thing in the mental game is don't retire. You know, Google the correlation between retirement and death. It's like five years. What? It's really—so, you know, when you retire and you don't feel purpose in your life, you know?

I'm going to read something from this is the Longevity Practices book, and there's a section on mindset here, and I just think it's really so important. So I'm going to read this to you. It says, "In a study of 69,744 women and 14,829 men"—this is unusual because it's more women than men—"published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," you know, super high-end peer-reviewed publication, "it was found that optimistic people lived as much as 15% longer than pessimists." 15%! Wow, pretty amazing. Your mindset matters, and you know, making use of your body and being out there and having purpose and all of these things are subtle clues. Right? We all know people that are very close to their husband or wife, and their spouse dies, and then they die weeks later.

Right? Here's another story here—one of my favorite stories illustrating the power of mind over lifespan comes from the annals of American history. As it turns out, in an extraordinary demonstration of the will to live, two of America's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both willed themselves to live long enough to see the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, even though in the early 1800s the average lifespan was only 44 years old. Jefferson, who was then 83, and Adams, who was 90, made it to July 4th, 1826, both dying on that exact date—the 50th anniversary of the nation's founding. Wow, amazing! I didn't know that. Yeah, I love that story.

Having purpose in life, being optimistic, making use of your body—all of these things are fundamental. And when I think about a longevity mindset, it is really, you know, I live with this every day. I care about this every day. I think this is the most exciting time ever in human history to be alive with what's going on and opening up the space frontier because of the rate of change. Because of the rate of change. Because of the rate of potential, it's like an infinite—you know, I mean, if you were born 100 years ago and every year—right? At my Abundance 360 Summit, I look back 100 years, and I look at like what was life like 100 years ago and what was the rate of innovation 100 years ago. And the numbers and the examples are crazy slow.

And I don't remember 1923; I remember 1922. There were seven breakthroughs in that year. Not like seven in a week or seven in a month; it was seven in the entire year. And I searched everywhere—patent filings, headlines, write-ups—and so it was like the water ski was invented, the mechanical garage door opener, a retractable roof for the Ford Model T, vomit was on the list. I mean, I was searching for stuff. I was searching for stuff. One of the seven is a blender—a blender for making malts. And it was like the pace of change was so slow. And we're living in a world today where there's like massive breakthroughs, you know, every hour of the day.

It's a rate of change, though, that I think now is giving people anxiety. How do you help people navigate that? Because I think that the ability—I define entrepreneurs as people who find problems and solve problems, and I think entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever before to solve problems. And that they are—entrepreneurs are in our world creating a better and more capable world. I mean, I think we take for granted the fact that, you know, on our phone, we've got what we would have spent tens of millions of dollars, if it was even possible, 20 years ago for two-way free video conferencing. All right? Every game, every book, every piece of music accessible for free. And we forget the incredible world we live in.

I think people who are more in teaching meditation and spirituality are going to help people deal with the anxiety. But I want folks to realize the magical universe they're living in. You know, I think about creating a world in which every mom knows her kids have access to the best healthcare, education, all the food, water, energy. Right? This is the world of abundance. I, you know, when I first wrote "Abundance" with Steven Kotler 12 years ago, IAL about creating a world not of luxury but a world of possibility. Right? And I still believe that. And there's no velocity switch; there's no on/off switch to this technology. It's happening.

So what do you dream about? What do you wish you had? What do you want to do? I mean, you can put it all away and go live in the forest. People will, but most choose not to. I am very much—what do they call that? Where materialist? Like, it's all cause and effect. The odds that our sense of that I control my life is probably an illusion. And yeah, that just all makes sense to me. Like, if you had a computer that could track every atom since the beginning of time, you'd be able to predict where we're going to be in 10 years, and you'd be able to replay the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. That just makes sense to me, and that doesn't diminish my sense of awe in this.

Like, I look at—and by the way, I asked the question: if you knew with certainty that you were living in a simulation, would it change anything? And the answer is no. A no B. So you were talking about Project Kaizen before we started rolling. That's its premise—that this is a simulation, and it doesn't matter; it's still all the same. I think it's great. You know, so if I could finish that story with this weird coincidence, I got to a point about five, seven years ago where I was having—not this insane kind of coincidence used to happen about once a year in my life—started happening quarterly, and then it started happening every two weeks. And I can barely process one in the next ridiculous coincidence on me, and I was freaking out because I was like really messing with things.

So I have a cousin who's done 40 years of DS meditation in the woods, etc. So I said to her—she's my resident understanding the universe person. So I said, "Help me with this." She's like, "Well, listen to me for a bit." She goes, "Well, duh, you've told the universe you're ready for anything. They'll give you everything." I'm like, "Wait, what?" She goes, "You have to come to an agreement with the energies in the universe to only give it to you when you're ready for it." I'm like, "Where's the manual for that?" So she coached me on this, and you can do this. You can do it. It's, you know, if you did it at the fully reductional level, it's creative visualization. Right? You visualize what you want, and things can happen, etc.

And there's a—we all do that. You do that. That's what the MTP is all about. Right? You program yourself in your surroundings, your subconscious, to out for the outcomes you want, and then those things happen. But there's a—but those outcomes occur to a large degree because I'm outwardly communicating my massive transformative purpose. I'm telling the world; those people who gravitate to it are coming to me, and they're bringing things to me that are in line with that MTP. It's not like I'm just meditating in silence and the world is changing. But what you're actually doing is you're programming reality, or I'm programming how I deal with reality—both, right? Reality is happening, and again, a mindset is how I deal with opportunity or scarcity.

Someone comes to me with something that someone would be scared of, and I'm like excited about it, and I go in a different course than the other person. So I didn't know you'd done psychedelics. What was your response? So you guys have both done it, I assume? Yeah, I went into a—you know, psychedelics, not for joy or pleasure, but with a shaman guiding. And I have done ayahuasca a number of times. I've done a combination of psilocybin and MDMA. But for me, it was my DMT journeys that were the most significant. Have you done DMT? I haven't done any. I've micro-dosed to virtually no effect.

So the DMT, which is also called the toad or bufo, dimethyl tryptamine, I think is dimethyl tryptamine, was extraordinarily compelling. And it is a dissolution of the ego, which is—and a connection with the universe that lets you know that love is a pervasive force, and we're all connected in that regard. And that I had my most significant visualization about—if you ask me the question, "What do you think happens after we're alive, after we die?"—that was my—that was it. First of all, it got rid of the fear of death 100%, which is probably the most extraordinary because it gave you—realize everything is connected. Everything is connected, and we're just part of the universe, and it's a transitory.

So I want you to imagine this is the visualization I had, which gives me goosebumps still to this day. I'm coming out of my journey with—in these DMT journeys, they're very short, you know, 20 minutes thereabouts unless you're—because they last longer there. But let me finish. So I'm seeing this sea of energy, just like a frothing sea of infinite energy, a plane of energy in every direction. And I see coming out of the sea of energy two double helices, and they come out of the energy, and they're there, and then they go back into the energy. And that was it. And it was the realization—I can see it like it was yesterday. It's a realization of this infinity of creation and energy, and life emerges from it. Consciousness emerges from it, and then re-enters it.

I can—you know, listen, this is my mind giving it meaning. We are meaning-making machines. But so let me—so you've had that; you're just kind of rationalizing it in your previous experience. That's fine. That's fine. But let me give you—tell you why I got excited by this whole world. Twelve—we had a lecture at Singularity. I think it was Chris Disarm, and what he'd been doing was doing a whole bunch of clinical trials with people taking different dosages of MDMA, psilocybin, etc., and putting them through an fMRI machine.

So in the 60s, when Timothy Leary and all these guys were taking drugs, they had no idea where they were just chucking it down. Right? But this now, we know exactly that this dosage of substance A will do this to neural circuit B and know exactly the emphasis and how much of an impact it'll have, etc. And I found that fascinating because now we have a feedback loop. What got me interested in DMT? A feedback loop to what end? Well, because now you can see what neural circuits are being amplified or impacted. You can now play with—play with—okay, so I have to ask then, so knowing how you're creating that state by manipulating certain neurons in your brain, how do you see an allergy or a scar?

I don't know that. I wish I did. I don't, but it's fascinating that that's there. The numbers that it's there—if it happened three, four times, you go, "Ah, three, four times, 3,500 times, I got to start looking at that." And that's just the sheer numbers compel you to look at it a little more deeply. But so for me now, look, let's look at what DMT does. DMT, what it does is suppress the parietal lobe, which is where your sense of self sits. When you can take a dosage of it, you suppress that parietal lobe, and you are now free to explore the higher realms of your consciousness that you didn't have access to before.

Is so when DMT is going, is that all that's happening? Are there any areas that are more active, or is it literally just shutting off the sense of self? Unclear, but it seems the primary function is that it reduces the activity in the parietal lobe. I'm so fascinated by—and then you start looking at other areas. And now what's really interesting to me on top of that is we—it turns out there's lots of old practices. Whirling dervishes, when they do their Turkish spinning, end up with a DMT release. They now know that DMT is naturally occurring in your brain. It gets released twice in your life: once at birth, once at death. So when people have a near-death experience, they see the white light—that's DMT releasing in the brain. Interesting.

So now they've found religious experiences—almost all religious experiences are essentially you work the physiology of the body to a point where you have a DMT release. Tantra and Kundalini work results in that—they take ground energy, lift it through your body, and you end up with a DMT. I don't take the DMT journey lightly at all. It's one of the most insightful, and again, I experience it with reverence and awe and as a means to explore myself and the universe in a different way, and I'm very thankful for it. Yeah, I'm very intrigued. I ask about this a lot. And by the way, you know, I got to a point afterward where I said, "I'm just going to open share it openly. I don't plan to run for president, and I don't care what anybody thinks about it. It was critically important to me."

Yeah, beautiful. You met Michael Jansen a couple of days ago. So one of the most fascinating things about him—he's one of the most present people I've ever met. And I said, "How do you maintain this?" Like, you have this incredible ability to just let things go, not worry about stuff. Things happen; everything just passes through them, and it doesn't stick. It's amazing. He just kind of releases instantly, and he—I kept wanting to pull it out, and he goes, "Oh, I've done a hero dose a few times." I go, "Hero dose?" So a normal dose, I guess, is 100 milligrams of psilocybin. A hero dose is when you do like five grams. It's like a factory reset on your nervous system. I'm like, "Holy crap, you've done that?" He goes, "I do it every year."

And all the cognitive biases that he may have built up, etc., are constantly getting released, and therefore he operates in this unbelievably present form. I think that's just amazing, and I'm completely impressed by the younger generation micro-dosing all the time. You know, one of the conversations I've been having at home recently is, is the human species waking up? Right? You've heard of these conversations—Sam Harris and all. I was going to ask you guys if you've heard him describe his heroic dose. And so when we talk about becoming conscious at a species level in the next foreseeable future, one of the questions that Kristen asked was, "Are we becoming conscious before AI becomes conscious?"

So this is an interesting conversation that would be—I mean, it would be very interesting. I don't know if I can imagine an entire societal level awakening, but certainly as humans continue to progress, as we are able to share ideas so much faster, in the same way that culture has stacked on the technological side, if it stacks on the insight side. And well, imagine having a brain-computer interface connection to the cloud along with a billion other people and sharing one's thoughts. I call this the meta-intelligence, where we become conscious on a large level. Right? You and I and Saleem are all collections of 40 trillion human cells. You're not a single life form; you are 40 trillion human cells and then trillions of bacteria, fungi, and so forth. But you operate as one.

Right? And so are we going to become conscious yet on another level? To bring it back to exponential organizations, a traditional 20th-century organization we would think of as unconscious. It's trundling along, trying to get profits, etc. And an EXO is a very conscious organization. What makes it conscious? MTP—it's massive purpose. Plus, it's constantly sensing with a feedback loop; it's constantly experimenting. It's allowing its people to operate in a decentralized, autonomous way to make decisions on their own. It's like an amoeba moving around, sensing the world, and little by little evolving.

So there are—I want to bring this back because I really want the community here to hear this, and I want to use—I use Impact Theory as the example here. So there are 10 attributes that make an exponential organization. They have the acronym SCALE and IDEAS. And if we could, I just want to take off the ones that you hit. So let's begin. Staff on demand? People—continue. We do a bit, but I actually don't love that. It was one of the things in your book I want to talk about. But so, okay, staff on demand? Yes, we do.

Okay, second, community? Yes, very much. Community is massive for you, right? Third, AI and algorithms? Yes, aggressively, aggressively. Fourth, leveraging other people's assets? Don't know what you mean by that. Cloud computing? Yes. You don't have computers, servers in your closet that you're using? We do have some of that, but not nearly as much as we leverage the cloud. The prototype there is Airbnb—that entire business model is tapping into other people's bedrooms, making them available. And the fifth one in SCALE is engagement, gamification, incentive prizes, which is your whole thing, right? You're like a master of that.

So those are the five externalities, and EXOs use one or more of them, allowing them to keep a very small resource footprint and then scale very quickly. Right? TED uses community very effectively, for example. Then there's five internal mechanisms that allow you to manage culture and drive the dashboard and the control framework of the organization. The first is interfaces to those externalities. So think about Uber's interface with its drivers or Apple's interface with its App Store developers. It's an automated API-driven interface that allows you to programmatically manage the abundance on the outside and then add value to it.

The second one is dashboards, and this is real-time business metrics to track what's happening in the—I assume you use dashboards left, right, and center? Not as much as we should, but for our funnels, yes. For your funnels, sure. And then OKRs for team performance and team management, we found as so—those are dashboards. The E is experimentation, which is lean startup thinking—constantly testing assumptions, non-stop running of experiments. And the A is a culture of risk-taking inside the organization—constantly testing the edges and seeing what works, what doesn't work, etc.

The I is autonomy—decentralizing decision-making and allowing people to self-select what they want to work on as much as possible, which is one of the hardest things for a CEO or an entrepreneur to do. It's to say, "Listen, here's our mission. Our mission is 10 million viewers, whatever it is, doing this and this and this. We want to give you the authority and autonomy to go and work on projects that are aligned with our MTP." Go Google does this a bit. The master of this—I should tell this quick story. There's a Chinese appliance manufacturer called Haier. They make like 55 million fridges and ovens.

Jesus! Yeah, it's a huge company. And 880,000 people operating in a classic pyramid form—command and control, hierarchical. The CEO one day decides, "Can't meet my corporate goals with this structure." Blows it up, turns 80,000 people into 2,000 teams of about 40 people each. Each team has a P&L target; each team elects their own leader. And most insane, each team decides to do whatever they want to do. Now, you go to any business school in the world and say, "I want to make 55 million fridges," and they'll tell you you need a ton of centralized demand forecasting, inventory management, supply chain, etc. Turns out you don't.

These literally—these 2,000 teams work autonomously like a beehive. Every team is deciding what they want. How do they decide what teams to keep? They don't. The teams decide on their own. You can't get fired if you—you can't—if your team doesn't meet its P&L targets, you have an issue. And the way they meet the P&L targets is they work on a product, and the products are—the revenues are pulled against that product. So when they—I literally can't imagine this. There's a whole book written on this. It's an amazing case study. What's the book called? I'll get you the title of the case study. It's Haier.

And when they want to vote on what—when—what decide what features should we go into the new fridge, they vote. And 2,000 teams that are constantly outwardly facing with vendors, suppliers, partners, customers come up with a much better decision than some product strategy team holed up with market forecasts and research groups. Right? And so GE Appliances actually gave up and sold that whole division to Haier because they couldn't compete because you can do so much more with a decentralized organization. We're not quite ready for DAOs, but we will be over time, and you're kind of building one in its—I'm not—I'm violently not building a DAO.

Well, think about what you're doing, right, with your metaverse environment. Anybody can come self-provision and play in that environment. They can play in that environment. They're certainly trying to build things so that they can build in that environment, but that is—that's a platform play. Like, I get platforms. And so our fantasy would be on a long enough timeline where like the YouTube of video games. That's right. So people can come in and build—not—we could go down a rabbit hole about how we're going to be different than Roblox, but we have a vision.

But leveraging some of that—but this is like—I literally wrote before you started talking the thing I want to talk about is how you leverage autonomy. So the way that we think about it at Impact Theory is I want people to be able to make decisions in their area. Like, okay, your function is art, for instance. I'm not going to come in and turn you into a pair of hands. I want you to think for yourself. You understand our objectives? Go do the art thing. But we set the objectives as a company, then the department sets their own objectives, and then the individual works with their supervisor to set it.

Yeah, but this is not, "Hey, you're in a team of 40, and like, oh, I hope you meet your P&L." Like, I can't fathom how you get to that. I have to imagine that this is never going to be the standard. It's non-trivial to implement, but when you can implement, it's very powerful. Let me give you two examples that bridge the spectrum. One is if you're an employee and you join Google as a new hire, okay, you're not placed on a team. What they do is go, "You've got six months. Float around, meet different teams, work with them, da-da-da-da."

How do they decide to hire you? You—you have to hire—they hire basically super smart, and we know we need Python developers, so hire the Python developer. Now, do you work on Gmail? Do you work on Google Maps? Etc. What you do is you float around as that developer or front-end person or designer, whatever your skill set is, and you float around, you meet the different teams, you see where you have chemistry. You go, "I really love what they're doing on the Google Maps team. Seems to like me." They go, "Sure, come and join us." Now, if after six months you haven't found a team, bigger conversation—you probably don't fit there for some reason.

But if you found a team after choosing over six months all of a bunch of different options, you're probably where you really, really like being. Right? So now off they go. So that's one example of implementing this in the new hire model. The full extent of autonomy—I’ll give you the example of Tangerine Bank in Canada, which used to be in direct. So they operate on this fully autonomous basis. They have no CEO, no reporting lines, no management teams, no middle management, no meetings of any kind. They literally operate on a beehive where each employee self-selects as to what they want to do.

Okay, now you're a regulated bank. Canadian banks are very regulated. Right? So what happens is when the marketing guy goes, "Oh, let's do an online promotion," because he's self-selected, wants to focus on that, and they launch an online promotion, everybody floods to the phone banks and helps out getting phone calls. When it's regulatory reporting time, they all flood to the regulatory systems and fill out all the paperwork to fill out all the forms to show the Canadian government that they're viable. The most amazing example I've seen of this is Valve Software out of Seattle that makes the Steam platform by 400 people. Same ethos—no CEO, reporting lines.

So if I spot a bug in the software, I grab three people; we go fix the bug; we disband. Every employee self-selects what they want to work on. And it sounds completely like a joke, but they get more revenue per employee than Microsoft. They make a fortune. So it's very doable. You have to start it—you have to start it with that principle in mind. Yeah, this is—I don't know what I find harder to believe: reincarnation or that you can do this. But look, I don't shut down emotionally. I'm very open. I just—everything that I know, with perhaps just my limited skill set, that is a recipe for chaos.

Or you have to hit a certain size. Like, when I think about Google being able to do that, there's no way that you can start like that. I get how it can get so big. You have so much surplus money that you can let a person wander around for six months with no real specific job or that you can hire somebody, "Oh, you know Python, and you're smart. Great." You know, Valve Software is about 400 people. It's not that over—they're also the company—when you said, "Oh, we're doing a case study on Valve in the book," I was like, "Oh, you mean the company that couldn't get Half-Life 3 or 2, whichever it was, out for 15 years?" I was like, "Yeah, I'm not surprised."

But then you said that they make more per employee, so I was like, "Ah, [ __ ] yeah." So it directed execution turns out to be non-trivial in these organizations. It's like DAO governance, right? It's an oxymoron. It's very hard to—right? So, but in terms of resilience, unbelievable because you cannot break that organization because everybody's self-selecting. When there's a problem, they naturally find the problem; they go fix it. I think you need to still—you need to hire for that. People need to have—you absolutely have to hire. You can't have, you know, Tony Hsieh tried for three years to implement that into Zappos, and it just failed.

You can't bring it into—this is why we say when you're an existing organization and you want to turn into an EXO, don't go through the nightmare of trying to transform yourself. Put up—create new EXOs on the edge and let those slowly become the new gravity center. What was the example of the company? Maybe it was the washing machine company or the fridge company, but they literally were like, "H, we're firing everybody." And then a third of them left, and they restarted with two-thirds, and they did just fine. It was Haier that—in the book, in fact, Zappos, when Tony Hsieh first suggests, he voluntarily said, "Who wants to move to this model?" And everybody was like, "Yeah, this is crazy; we're not doing that."

So then he went, "We strongly suggest that you move to this model." Then finally he said, "If you don't move to that model, you're fired." And even then, it failed. Very hard to implement into a legacy organization. Did we finish the attributes? Oh, so autonomy. And the final one is social technologies—Asana, Slack, Zoom, Chatter, Yammer, etc., etc. We found—we have really good evidence today that peer-to-peer collaboration is much more powerful than traditional top-down command and control thinking. So what do you guys think about what Elon is doing at Twitter? He recently was interviewed, and he said, "It is immoral to work from home." And I was like, "Wow."

Yeah, we had this conversation yesterday about, you know, listen, I miss having an office setting. I do, and I miss—and I recognize and realize that the intensity of the amount of work that gets done when a group is together is substantially higher than alone. But, you know, the flip side of that is the geographic arbitrage that I can get access to talent that I might not otherwise get to move to Santa Monica. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my CEO lives in the Bay Area; my VP of finance is in Spain; my head of community is in Cape Town. We have a totally distributed organization, and yes, we're less efficient than if everybody was in one place, but I can operate across multiple time zones seamlessly. People are living where they want to live; they're living with their families, etc., etc.

So I'm a believer in the remote work side. Yeah, I also think we're going to see a transition as the next generation of metaverse systems come online. You know, if we're—there will be a point where we are sitting in the metaverse, and I feel like I'm here with you and having this conversation. And hopefully, the glassware becomes light enough and easy enough where it's very interactive. The key heuristic, I think, when you think about Elon with Twitter, etc., and people is: do you trust them? Do you trust your people? Right? And most corporations operate out of mistrust. You're like checking things, and you have to file travel expense reports, etc., etc., and the entire structure is set up to mistrust you.

And when we move to this new model of EXOs, by default, you tend to trust the teams to do what they're trying to do the best. You're trying to trust over control, right? Trust beats control is one of the key implications. Jerry Molski, who is one of our community members, said this brilliantly: he said, "Scarcity equals abundance minus trust." It's interesting for me; it doesn't come down to trust. I don't even want to have to think about the people on my team. I want to play my position; I want them to play theirs, and I never want to have to think about it. It really comes down to results and focus.

And like, you need—this is going to be interesting saying to you guys, but you need some variation of the immune system, and that the immune system will detect cancer. So yes, it can say no to things that it shouldn't say no to, but it can also stop the free riders. And the reality is that you will get people using game theory to be like, "Oh, you can hide in this company, and everybody can just do whatever the hell they want." You will get people that then just become selfish, and then other people look at that, and resentment builds. And so you get other people—how do you—you know, there's a—my—I'm moving all of my companies onto something called EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

And is this formal? It is. It's a—it's something you can go look it up: Entrepreneurial Operating System. And what we do is we meet, and it's a process of thinking and running your organization sort of like an operating system for a company. And we have what's called a 10x meeting every week with the entire group. We're reviewing our rocks, our action items, our dashboards, and everybody's got assigned specific actions. And it's not possible to hide in that regard. If you properly implement OKRs, you really can't hide. And yet you can give people a lot of autonomy, and they can go do their thing.

But whether it's EOS or whatever the model is, it brings it together. So we have today very modern team and individual performance structures that allow us to handle that. You can hide in traditional organizations because there's 20 developers on some team, and nobody knows really who the rock stars are. HR never knows. Okay, one thing we've noticed—the particular indictment I would have is today's most big corporations are structured in a matrix structure: products on the verticals, and you have legal, HR, branding, privacy, etc. And Terry Semel, when he was running Yahoo, made the mistake of putting in a matrix structure into it, and it's like that structure is great for kind of command and control, but it's terrible for risk-taking, and it's terrible for speed.

Because every time you try to do something, you want—you have to clear all those levels. So it was taking us close to a year to release some feature on Yahoo Personals, and MySpace was released, and Facebook was the killer here, where they came along, and Zuckerberg said, "If you feel your code is ready, take it live on the live site. We'll give you access to the live site. Your code better be good; otherwise, if you take us down, you're fired." But the developer has got such a sense of empowerment and autonomy from that, and wow, he trusts us to let us take our code live. They were rolling out features every week.

Do they still do that? I'm not sure if they still do that, but that was what got them—that was what blew MySpace away, blew Yahoo away at the time. The early days of high-risk taking for any entrepreneurial company is amazing. We don't have a legal department yet; we don't have an HR department. And over time, power grows to the horizontals because they have no incentive in saying yes. And so when we coach CEOs, we basically say take all those horizontal layers and every three, four years, just blow them up and reinvent them.

Watch this conversation with Emad Moav to learn exactly how AI will disrupt the entire world. How do we make sure it doesn't kill us? Or how does it make sure that it doesn't enslave us? Or how does it make sure that it doesn't give us eternal suffering? And I realize this could be the real thing that unlocks humanity. AI is not going to replace humans; humans with it.