AGI Is Here — And Society Isn’t Ready | Peter Diamandis

In the near term, the choice people are going to have to make is: are they happy with what they have, or do they want to use these technologies to dream bigger? Are they going to do 9th-grade homework with it? Are they going to build a starship? Most of us limit what we think we can do. Use these AI tools to build something, to create a product, a service, a company that is of value to people. Do it with a friend. Do it with a group of friends. Do it on your own as a solopreneur and create your own future. It's taking the future in your own hands.

>> I just saw an X that you posted that AGI is here, that the benchmark you had set has been crossed.

>> Yes.

>> If you're right, what's the first thing in society that breaks?

>> So, I already know that the social contract of "do well in high school, get into a good college, get a degree, get a job" is broken. That's broken. And I think we'll see the data play that out.

Is that partly because of the state of tech or something else?

>> Yeah, no, no, it's the state of tech. Um, and I think that that's generating a lot of fear of "Will my kids get a job? Will I keep my job?" And that fear is real. Uh, it needs to be addressed. So, I think we're going to see that. We're also going to see a significant number of companies that are going to downsize, um, that will go from, you know, 100% employment down to 20% of their employee base using AIs, uh, to enable them to do what they're doing more effectively, more efficiently.

The countervailing force, and the data is out, is that we're going to see a lot more startups. We're going to see a lot more solopreneurs. Um, in fact, in the last quarter, I just reported on this, that the number of solopreneurs in AI businesses and non-AI businesses has doubled. Right? So it's people who lost their jobs and are now saying, "Okay, what do I do?" And the idea of, you know, we're living in this post-industrial revolution world in which our schools are teaching our kids to get ready for a company as a line worker, right? And where, uh, the, you know, the basic social contract was, "I want to go get a job." And I think there's a new vision that people can have for themselves, which is, "I'm going to go build something valuable for the world."

All right. So, one of the things I found interesting about living through the internetification and that revolution, because obviously for the, um, industrial revolution, I'm only reading about it in history books. Same thing with electrification.

>> But with the actual internet, I lived through that.

>> Yes. All right.

>> The, yeah, the big punchline there was that gatekeepers don't exist anymore. So if you're really good at a thing, you can reach through that phone. Ultimately, that was when it really took off. You can reach that phone and impact people. And what do you see as being that kind of, um, thing that falls? So there was a structure in society, gatekeepers, that fell. What does intelligence on demand knock over?

>> What's fallen is the barrier to starting something. You know, if you wanted to start a company a decade ago, maybe even five years ago, you'd have to get the right lawyer, the right accountant, you'd have to get the right engineers to help you build your thing. You'd have to go and do the marketing research to figure out what you wanted. And that cost money. I mean, the startup cost for a new company was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then you'd have to find the team to do that with. And I think that is massively collapsed, right? If you have a problem that you care deeply about that you want to solve, you can do the research in literally milliseconds. Uh, you can build it, you know, using AI today, and all of the models from, from, you know, Google's models to Anthropic's to OpenAI's models can help you build a product by you just describing what it is, what you want it to do. You can create the marketing materials, you can spin up the website. Uh, and so that barrier to entering into a world as an entrepreneur has massively collapsed.

>> As the barrier to entry on, um, filmmaking, news reporting, podcasting, all of that, as that went down, noise absolutely exploded. You had people going into the field, but very few people being able to make a living. When you look at entrepreneurship, do you see something similar where this becomes like the YouTube of companies? You sort of pop in and out of existence. It becomes very ephemeral.

>> Yeah, sure. There will be that. I, I warn people, don't do something that you think is going to make money. Do something you deeply care about, right? Something where you, it's in your heart and soul. You wake up with this level of energy and passion that you and I both have. Like, find your purpose and find something to build aligned with that purpose. Right? I, I define sort of, uh, passion as something you love doing. It could be snowboarding. It could be, you know, reading science fiction. Um, purpose is a passion that you love doing that serves other people. And if you're really delivering value, you can create your your niche business, right? You can be a barber who wants to open a second chair and market your barber shop better, right? I mean, you don't need to, uh, be going out for venture capital or any of that.

>> So I think the ability for you to reach people and deliver something that is valuable and real and grow from that experience is off the charts.

>> All right. I don't know if you've looked at the data, but when you look at the industrial revolution, great internet, or the great electrification, great internetification, what ends up happening is it creates more jobs than it destroys. And that really does. The Apollo data just came out a couple of days ago.

>> Same idea. They're not seeing AI, even though we're seeing all these companies lay off massive amounts of people, in the overall jobs data, they don't see the downturn.

>> True.

>> But when you look backwards, what you see is true, the technology creates more jobs than it destroys. But for the people that were trained up and let's say north of 35 years old, they're toast, man. Like if they don't have adaptability in their DNA, like they will struggle forever. And one of the things that people are saying, so the US overall life expectancy has declined. And one of the fingers that people point to is that you've got so many deaths of despair from people that got displaced by the internet that weren't able to become coders, like the whole "learn to code" meme, and they just never found other jobs. Yeah. And that's been historically true where you lose a generation or two that just don't adapt to the new technology. How do we deal with that in AI when it's moving at a rate that is just unparalleled?

>> Yeah, the speed is the issue, right? Electrification of America was decades of process. Um, when I've looked at the data and I've reported this on my on my Moonshots podcast, uh, a few times, first of all, it's murky. It's not crystal clear.

>> The historical data or?

>> No, the current, uh, estimate of job loss in AI. There's the, both sides are arguing, right? You've got Sam Altman just recently coming out and saying, "No, I was wrong. We're not going to have this, you know, job apocalypse."

>> How convenient is his IPO?

>> And the same thing for, same thing for, uh, for Dario, right? And I, I agree with that, that, uh, that statement. Um, what it looks like is the job loss is actually a lack of hiring. So what I'm looking at at the data is, uh, the number of unemployed individuals is growing in the age 22 to 28.

>> Uh, and for me, that's a big concern, right?

>> Because it's hard to get in now.

>> It's, it's harder to get in, but, um, I, I think about, you know, we've talked about this, the next two to eight years is a period of of turbulence, right? I do believe we're heading towards this extraordinary world of abundance, and we're going to get there, but it's going to be turbulent over the next number of years as society is beginning to adapt, adapt to this. And when you've got, you know, I'll make a very broad statement here, you know, testosterone-laden young men who can't get a job and therefore can't afford a car or a house or get married because of that, they're going to get angry.

>> And so I'm worried about social unrest in that context. And the fear is real. Um, you know, you saw, you know, Eric Schmidt and others getting booed talking about AI at commencement speeches.

>> They were surprised. That's the part I was shocked by, that they were surprised that young people are scared. That this is a moment of this insane transition. These guys, they've done well. God bless them. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I love to see people win. But if you lose sight of what it's like to be in your 20s where the world is just confusing, it doesn't necessarily feel confusing. You just don't know what to do. You don't have any sense that, oh, I'm going to get on the other side of this.

>> Yeah. And I, I just did an event recently, and I had two young guys, both in college, age 21, 22, come up to me afterwards and say, "I'm so happy to be in a room of people who actually think AI is going to help us." And AI is a good thing because they're ostracized on their campus because of that. And, you know, I just, uh, published a blog post, um, on Substack about my fear is not AI, it's the lack of AI. And we can talk about AI being a problem here in the first world where we got good healthcare and and reasonable education. But in the majority of the world, the other, you know, 6 billion people or the rising billion, the only hope they have for good healthcare, for better education, for addressing issues, increasing crop yields, and so forth, is going to be AI supporting, uplifting those individuals.

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So when you look at the changes that are coming in the state of AI right now, so we both agree there's a chasm that we're going to have to cross. It's a terrifying chasm for the reasons that you said. I, I would paint an even more, um, troubling picture in that we already have a weak economy that is hard bifurcating in the K-shape. Um, we have populism was already on the rise because of debt, and now we have the most rapid technological transformation ever in human history.

>> By an order of magnitude.

>> Yeah. So now we know that people are fearful as it is, and it's coming at this time. So what are the technologies? So if we know the thing that's going to break is we're training people for an old system that's already dead. There's a social contract there that just adds to the resentment of people feeling like, "Boomers [ __ ] you. Like you have hoarded all the money, all the opportunity. You've locked us out." And now we're coming into this time where, "How do I even pick a direction? Like, this is all changing so fast." What, what are the things you see happening in AI that makes you go, "No, no, no, no. The real problem is lack of AI because it can do..." What are the things?

>> First of all, I just want to acknowledge there is a lot of fear, right? And the other thing, and I, I think you agree with this, that fear is like the worst place to face the future from.

>> Sure.

>> All right. It, it shuts you down. Like it or not, we're going to see this transformation where companies are shrinking in size. Um, the countervailing data again is that we're going to see more small companies starting, more than ever before.

>> But what is it that AI is doing? Doing like, what's the thing? Gene editing?

>> I mean, so, okay, let me jump into that. So, uh, first of all, I think the biggest benefit we're going to get out of AI that no one's talking about is going to be the impact on science. We're going to solve, you know, we are solving math right now. You know, AI is in, is fundamentally solving most of the most difficult math challenges that have been on the books that no human has done. What follows next is physics. What follows after that is chemistry, biology, material sciences. So, let me double down. It's going to be the ability to spin up, uh, drugs, uh, much faster than ever before. Uh, if you listen to folks like like Demis Hassabis, his statement, and he's doing this, he's the CEO of, of Google's DeepMind. He's also the CEO of, uh, Isomorphic Labs. His belief is that we're going to cure all disease, all disease, within a decade. Right? So imagine a world in which cancer is is shot, you know, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory disease, you know, all of these things, infectious disease, all diseases solved. That's huge. I mean, if you're young, you can look at your parents, they're going to be, you know, towards the end of their lives, spending the majority of their wealth dealing with health issues. Um, Dario went on stage a year ago and said his belief is that we will double the human lifespan inside of the next 10 years.

>> Whoa.

>> I mean, extraordinary. You can look it up. He, it was a presentation.

>> I've never heard that. That's shocking.

>> Yeah, the presentation he gave at, uh, at Davos last year. And, uh, if you think about just those two things, uh, I mean, there's no greater wealth than our health, right? I love the saying, "The man and woman has her health has a thousand dreams. The man and woman does not have their health has but one." So being able to address all disease, being able to double the the lifespan, but it's not just that. It's health span. It's how long are you feeling amazing? So Ray Kurzweil's prediction is that we'll reach longevity escape velocity by 2033. And that's the point at which for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year.

>> Uh, there's that. Uh, you know, the reality is, um, our ability to address the climate crisis is not going to come because we're getting smarter, working harder. It's going to be the development of new, uh, of new processes, um, new capabilities that's coming from AI. Um, our ability to address, you know, I, I'll go to Elon. I don't know what, how your audience feels about Elon.

>> I love him. So they're at a minimum, they hear me talk about him all the time.

>> He's been a friend for 26, 27 years now. And, uh, I had him on the Moonshots podcast, and we talked about his belief that we're going to see a triple-digit growth in the GDP in the next, uh, the next five years. Triple-digit growth.

>> My audience will be going, "Yeah, but is that evenly distributed or is that just..."

>> So let's go, let's go there. Uh, he was back on the podcast in March, and his vision is that AI and humanoid robotics will be able to create products for people at such an extraordinary rate, at such a diminutive cost, that we'll be able to have this, you know, he calls it not UBI, but UHI, universal high income. And the notion is that, uh, yeah, you may not earn more money, but your ability to get more stuff is going to be through the roof. Let's give an example. We've got, uh, Waymos, uh, coming here in Santa Monica. When I drive around, I'm seeing like 10, 15 Waymos during my drive. Uh, we've got Cybercab coming. We've got, uh, an autonomous vehicle from Lucid, Uber, a multi. It'll probably be on Zoox. They'll probably be on the order of at least five, maybe as many as 10 of these, uh, these cybercab type companies. And what does that mean? It means that your cost of transportation has just dropped by five.

>> Right.

>> Uh, and they're going to beat each other up for the lowest possible price. The idea that if, in fact, Optimus and Figure and 1X and all these humanoid robot companies are coming online and have advanced AI capability, the cost of these robots are projected at to purchase at $20,000.

>> Uh, and $300 a month to lease them, $10 a day, right? So imagine, you know, a good part of building a house is the labor. Imagine if that labor goes towards zero. And imagine if instead of living in downtown LA or, you know, local, uh, LA ecosystem here, you live out further out where, in fact, you know, land is more affordable, and you build a beautiful home there for a fraction of the cost, and then you can, you know, use your Waymo or Cybercab to come into town. Uh, we're going to start to see, um, a number of the flying car companies, Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation, for the cost of an Uber X, take you point A to point B in in record time, or you can just use, you know, Starlink to telecommute in. So we're going to start to see life changing a significant amount. Uh, the best education in the world isn't going to be in the classroom. It's not going to be, you know, in the university campus. I mean, I think physical education is important, point for human to human connectivity, but to actually learn something, your AI is going to know your abilities, knows how you like to learn. Is it verbal? Is it visual? Is it by example? What's your favorite color, your favorite movie star, and and start teaching you in ways that really matter to you. So we're going to see a revolution in education. So where do we spend the most money today? We, we spend it in health. We spend it in education. We spend it in, you know, a diagnostician, you know, di being diagnosed. Um, will be, you know, we know this already. The best diagnosticians, the best diagnosis is coming from an AI. It's not coming from a human doctor. Another thing I spoke to Elon about, I said, "When will the Optimus robot be better than any surgeon?" His prediction was three years, which sounds insane. Let's say it's five years from now, and I do think that's that's the case.

>> All of a sudden, if you need surgery, surgery, um, which can bankrupt people. All right? Uh, and you want to go find the best surgeon. It's the surgeon who's done it the most. You know, anybody else. The number of surgeries you've done and seen, you know, is your level of being able to say, "Oh, I recognize that from last time." Well, these robots all share their same memory. And so imagine if your cost of surgery is the capex and electricity.

>> And like, you know, dollars per hour.

>> That's where, so I want to pause you there. That's where I think people need to really start to build a mental map of what AI is. So I don't think people fully understand that the reason things are expensive is because they refuse to work for free. This is like one thing that I am just desperate to get people to understand. When they look at something and it's expensive and they think, "Those greedy capitalists," it's like, "Hold on, like the, there are people that if we could get them to work for free, like everything would be much less expensive." So ultimately, we are all the problem that we refuse to work for free for obvious reasons. But AI is that. So AI works for food, essentially. That food is energy. Exactly. And so since they are falling from the sky from the sun, uh, for free, we just don't know how to capture them. As we get good at capturing them, the cost of feeding them goes to zero. And then once you make that first round of robots, if they're free to feed, then their labor essentially becomes free once they can start using that energy to go harvest the next round of resources to build the next round of robots. And so energy costs go to zero, labor costs go to zero, and now you can basically have anything you want. Now, if people begin to understand it like that, they've got that first brick of how to predict where this goes. They'll also start to get a sense of some of the dangers. We'll get into that in a second, but, okay, that's why this stuff becomes cheap or free. Then the next layer becomes they have a hive mind. And so unlike a human that has to go to school forever, you can literally just download into that surgeon that just came off the line every surgery that's ever been performed by that company. And it could start a surgery and get smarter in the middle of the surgery based on a thousand other similar surgeries that are happening at the same time around the world but reporting back. I worry that part of what traps people in the fear cycle, part of what will they, they'll have to still cross a fear chasm, but part of what stops most people is that they just don't have a mental model for what's actually happening.

>> Mhm.

>> So as you think through where we are now and where we're trying to get to, how much of it is a blind optimism and how much of it is projecting what the actual technology will become?

>> So I wrote my first book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, back 14 years ago, 2012, and it was an extrapolation of what I saw.

>> Right.

>> That technology is the force that takes whatever would scare us and makes it abundant over and over again. Like you said, we are bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun on this planet than we use as a species, right? Massive amount of energy. It's just not in a usable form. And of course, advances in solar and batteries, perks, all of that has made it more and more usable. And we just crossed the point at which solar and wind is now producing more energy on Earth than natural gas.

>> Wow.

>> Right. We, we crossed more than coal a while ago. And so it's effectively god-given energy that we can mine and utilize. Um, the data is, uh, I think, incontrovertible that intelligence, well, first of all, you know, let's just make the statement that intelligence is what differentiates us on this planet. From we're not the fastest, we're not the strongest, we're arguably, hopefully, the most intelligent. And intelligence as a service has just been skyrocketing.

>> Um, and so what can that intelligence do? We each now have access to the best therapists, the best coaches, the best educators, the best physicians for free on these services.

>> Let me push you on that. So, one, I would say, and this is what made me want to start with artificial general intelligence. I would say that what humans can do is distinctly different than what AI can do. So, uh, AI is a phenomenal pattern recognition machine.

>> But definitely seems primarily, not exclusively, but primarily to be backwards looking at what is my training data. We're starting to see glimpses of the novel mathematics that you were talking about where they are, um, generalizing away from the training data. It's not a lot yet. They fall apart as you try to generalize too far. Whereas a human can do that. I can take you in, describe tennis, you can play tennis or at least explain it. I can take you over to wash dishes, teach you how to do that really fast. Take you, teach you how to play a video game. The, the data that a human needs to learn those patterns is very small. But AI, it's massive.

>> It, it is. But what we've also seen is AI learning by self-play, right? This is what DeepMind did in, um, in learning Go. You know, the first time that it won against Lisa Doll, the Go champion, it was basically trained on all the Go games it could get. Uh, and that was training on data that existed. The next time, uh, they created something called AlphaZero, which was where the AI was playing against itself and learning the rules on its own. Right? So if you, and they did this, DeepMind did this in the video game world where it just played and played and played and played, and it deduced the rules as it went along and it learned how to play the game of Go or video games at a level far beyond any human because the training data didn't exist there. It, it created the training data by just playing countless games itself. And so one thing that AI can do is run billions of times and learn in areas of the knowledge graph that was never explored before. Does that make sense?

>> It does. And that makes sense when there's something that has very specific rules that are somehow testable. So it'll certainly be interesting to see if it can have novel breakthroughs in.

>> But this is what this was used in the recent breakthroughs in the Erdős models by, uh,

>> In the what models?

>> It's a set of, um, the Erdős problems, a set of, yeah, E R D, um, O S, anyway, a set of, uh, the most difficult mathematical problems that had not been solved.

>> Mhm.

>> And so the model just went in. I forget if it was Anthropic or OpenAI, just went in and started exploring crazy ideas, and out of one of those crazy ideas came a solution. And it was like, the, if you look at what its inner thinking, which you can now look at, it said, "This has never been tried. It's a crazy idea, but let me try it." And it worked.

>> H.

>> So, um,

>> So let me ask really pointedly, are you saying that no new breakthroughs are needed for AI to get to superintelligence, or do you think that there is going to be some human-supplied novel restructuring of data centers or whatever that will be required for it?

>> We're going to find out. So Demis again, I can only go back to the guys who are the OGs in this field. Right? And and Demis recently said that, uh, while he thought there needed to be a dozen breakthroughs before he got to AGI, uh, he recently said, "I think we're there or need one breakthrough." And, you know, his belief, Elon's belief, Sam Altman's belief is we're there in the next couple of years.

>> Are any of them giving indications what the gap is? Like, why don't we have it today?

>> Is, I think one of the areas that they are looking for is continual self-learning, where after you train a model, it's continually, it's able to continually train itself and learn more. Not happening right now.

>> There is a lot of work going in that direction. But here's the question. Um, I think it's important for folks to say, okay, if this does happen, if we do achieve AGI, and some friends believe we're there right now. Um, but the outside right now is the next two years. And if we do achieve AGI, right, artificial general intelligence, was the point at which an AI is able to do anything as well or better than a human, then what does the world look like? And are you getting ready for that world, right? Um, I think that's an important conversation. And so what do you do in that regard? And I think the number one thing people need to do is self-educate. Um, and it's the easiest thing ever, than any time ever in human history to sit down and I do this as often as I can. If I'm listening to a podcast and someone says something interesting, I'll, I'll go to Chat GPT or I'll go to Anthropic or or Gemini and I'll, you know, go in the voice mode and have a conversation and say, "What does that mean?" And then, "What does that mean?" And can you give me an example? And my favorite is like, "Teach it to me like I'm five years old." And go down the rabbit hole and self-educate, um, because you can for free at a level like never before.

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Okay. So, how do people begin to point themselves at the right thing? Like when you're talking, I hear, uh, if you already have curiosity, if you already have a certain level of intelligence and tenacity, like this is going to be an exciting time for you because you'll be able to go learn this stuff. But what does it look like for somebody who is more prone to work with their hands, is looking at robotics and worried they're getting replaced? They don't have that sort of endless curiosity. There's a thing they know how to do and they want to go do that thing. And the world used to have a lane for them, but it feels like, uh, to me, there's a debate as to whether who's about to get wiped off first, the white-collar people or blue-collar people. Now, blue-collar people, I would say, have a benefit that robotics is not yet able to do the physical things that they're able to do. But once it can, if they don't have the like intellectual, um, desire to adapt and go in a different direction, then they're going to be in real trouble.

>> Okay, two separate points here. Number one, um, I think there are two mindsets that are important that are critically important right now. The first one is a purpose-driven mindset, right? And we've talked about purpose a lot. It's, it's dear and near and dear to my heart. Um, you know, my my favorite Mark Twain quote is, you know, "Two important days in your life: the day you were born, the day you'll find out why." So trying to connect with your purpose, and for me, it's the thing that wakes up in the morning, keeps you going through the day, keeps you going at night. Um, your purpose could be your kids, it could be learning a new skill, it could be anything. But if you can connect with your purpose, that's the first mindset. The second is a curiosity mindset. It's willing to ask and to dive in. Um, and if you've got, if you can hone those two mindsets, I think those are those are what are going to enable you, um, to, uh, survive and thrive in this decade ahead. What I'm trying to figure out is, I think there are some people that they have a skill set that is deployable now, but they feel like they're on a ticking clock.

>> So, so the second, the second thing is, you know, I think we're going to move to robots doing a lot of the work and people directing them. Uh, I, you know, we've seen this in the farming industry. We've seen this in the manufacturing industry, uh, where humans are still in the loop overseeing and directing. Uh, I don't think we're going to see things with human labor, uh, eliminated without those people moving up a level. So, you know, imagine a world in which, yes, if you're displaced, instead you think about those robots or those AI models working for you at your direction. What do you want them to do? We both know that there is a chasm that has to be crossed as this gets deployed, that people are going to panic as they start seeing robots on the street. We're already seeing some of that backlash now. You've got people trying to stop data centers being built. Um, they will attack it for environmental reasons, but I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think it has to do with fear of the world is going to change too much. "I may be irrelevant in the new world." Um, when you start thinking about dealing with that, do you just go, "Oh, no, no, no. Everybody moves up a level. There's going to be plenty for everybody. A whole bunch of new companies, smaller companies, but a whole bunch. Everyone's going to be fine." Or do you grant me that there will be a group of people either because they are unwilling or unable to adapt that will be left out, and they are going to come banging on doors?

>> I, I agree. I agree. And so I think we're going to have a period of social unrest as a result of that. Right. And I think it's going to be younger individuals who don't get a job and are like, you know, "The American dream has been slayed by you guys." All right. We saw that with Sal Malman's fire, you know, Molotov cocktail and a number of other activities. Uh, and there's AI extremism going on right now. Reported the FBI is tracking this, and it's more than it's a growing amount of concern.

>> Meaning like terrorist attacks against?

>> Against data centers. Got it.

>> So, uh, what do we do? Um, I think if this plays out, and again, I said it's a murky future, but if the data shows that in fact the layoffs are real, people, the hiring freezes are real, and people are not getting jobs, what do we do? I think the government has one knob to turn, and that is the equivalent of CO checks. Uh, I think the government will start printing money. My prediction is inside of two years, we'll start to see, uh, probably not a thousand bucks a month like CO, but probably $3,000 for a significant number of the population where they're getting money, um, at a level which enables them to survive, uh, reasonably comfortably. Uh, at the same time, um, we're going to start to see the cost of things beginning to fall. Healthcare is ridiculously priced right now, and it's going to be massive disruption in healthcare costs. Education is ridiculous right now, especially if you've seen the numbers, but colleges are beginning to go, you know, bankrupt because I spent $200,000 getting a degree and I can't get a job. Screw you, right? So,

>> I'm not paying my debt.

>> I, I'm not paying my debt. And this is ridiculous. And so we're going to, I believe, start to see these, uh, UBI-like payments coming.

>> And I think the argument that Elon makes is that at that level, what you're going to be able to afford with that amount of money is going to start to increase more and more. I gave the example of, you know, transport five times cheaper, and you know, the poorest people are being chauffeured around in an autonomous vehicle where, in fact, your healthcare is cheaper, your education is cheaper, your entertainment has gotten significantly, you know, Netflix. I was just on the phone with Reed Hastings talking about this. You know, Netflix, you know, democratized and demonetized access to entertainment, and YouTube, the ultimate, you know, provider.

>> Okay, so the French Revolution wasn't started by a bunch of poor people. It was started by overproduced elites that were sitting around, had just enough money to not need to work, and so they started cutting people's heads off. Um, that, that is legitimately my fear is, um, universal basic income, universal high income, none of it will, it will create a new derangement. It will solve one problem. People aren't going to starve, but it will create a secondary problem, which is, "I now have no meaning and purpose." I'm, there will be a very large portion of people that do not know how to metabolize that intellectually, and so they will act out on their emotions. And just like COVID was like mass protests and riots, uh, I think you're going to see something similar.

>> I agree with you.

>> What do we do with that? Because if our big punchline is UBI forever, and we know that UBI has a deranging effect, this no longer is about just crossing the chasm. It's about a forever thing. It's about reinventing society as a whole. Right? So I, I wrote a Substack on, uh, I called it "The Five Major Forks: The Speciation of Humanity." The five choices you're going to make forward. And the first one is: are you a consumer or a creator? All right. So these incredible capabilities coming our way effectively for free. You're going to be one, someone who's sitting on the couch, your Optimus robot that's bringing you a beer, and you're consuming some, uh, spun-up version of a Netflix show that stars you and your friends, right? And you're just a consumer kicking back and consuming. The other side is, are you a creator? Are you using these incredible technologies to create something of value? Uh, are is it Wall-E or Star Trek? So I think that's one of the divisions we're going to start to see. Um, the only solution I see, you know, when I was interviewing Elon, he, I said, you know, he said something like, "We're going to see social unrest and universal high income." I said, "Both." He said, "Yes, both."

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, and he's a very smart guy. Um, so how do we deal with this? I think part of it is going to be societal expectations and restructuring. It doesn't come overnight. So,

>> What does that look like? Is that a cultural phenomenon or is that more police?

>> Or more what?

>> Police. Yeah.

>> I, I think it's more police and and UBI checks in the beginning to try and quell and control. I think ultimately it's resetting people's expectations. I put a lot of, uh, blame on school systems right now, right? Schools are not preparing our kids for the future, neither at high school nor at college. And I think we need to start thinking about what is it, how do we re-envision life in this post-AGI world, because it's coming, not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Is it one year, two years, three years, four years?

>> Why don't we just regulate the life out of this?

>> Because, um, I don't think it's regulable. It might be here in the US, it won't be in China.

>> Well, let's at least do it in the US.

>> Okay, if we do that, then we are starting to cut back on all the benefits we get. Will we get, you know, all diseases eliminated? Will we get, uh, doubling the human health span? Will we get access to free education and free healthcare? Right? As soon as we start to regulate stuff and slow it down, um, we start to get diminishing returns on this potential future. Uh, you know, last week there was supposed to be an executive order that Trump put to have the government evaluate all models before they were published for safety. And it was killed an hour before it was signed because we didn't want to slow down the AI progression.

>> M.

>> Um, you know, I'm reminded of, of, I think it was Oppenheimer's quote, you know, "Once we started working on the nuclear bomb, and the scientific inquisitiveness started, there was no way we could stop." And I try to remind people all the time, when they did the first nuclear test, they said there was a non-zero chance that they'd light the entire atmosphere on fire and kill everything. Yes. And they still did it.

>> Yeah.

>> And I thought, yeah, any technology that promises an advantage will get developed, no matter what the potential consequences.

>> Yeah. You know, the other argument that's made loudly is the US versus China, right? If China gets to AGI and ASI first, um, will they basically promulgate the Chinese communist strategies globally? I want to go back to what I said a minute ago, that we're on the verge of solving everything. I wrote a paper. It's at solveverthing.org, looking at how we do that. Solving physics, chemistry, biology, material sciences. These technologies are going to enable us to deal with the existential threats as a species, everything from climate change, uh, to, you know, lack of enough energy, lack of enough healthcare. You know, it's fine in the US to think about, let's slow it down, let you know, uh, it's okay, we have the luxury of that. But for the rest of the world who are living on the, you know, in abject squalor, in the favelas in Brazil, these technologies are going to enable the breakthroughs to uplevel every man, woman, and child on the planet.

>> Is that though a moral argument? Because they don't have the technical wherewithal.

>> Yeah, it will not come from there. It will come from the labs here.

>> I really believe that in the next two to three years, you are going to have a cacophony of voices absolutely demanding that we cease developing AI.

>> Sure.

>> You will have people, the terrorist extremism that feels like it's on the fringes right now aimed at AI, will become very supported. Uh, and you will see more and more attacks on, um, our data centers. You'll see homegrown drone attacks on our own data centers, like that. You can just count on that. And so as that happens, we've got to make an appeal to people to say, "Hey, listen. This is why we need to keep going." And so that's what I hear there is, we have a moral obligation to the rest of the world who does not have our, um, level of technology, wealth, abundance, all of that. And so this technology needs to be made to help them. Is that how you mean it?

>> That, that is how I mean it. But there's also the benefits to here us here in America, to those who are listening from US soil. It's, I want you to imagine that your family has extraordinary healthcare breakthroughs, that your family has access to the best education in the world, that the world becomes automatical for you. Uh, I define automatical as, you know, I think we're going to end up probably in the next two years where we have what I call ambient AI. AI is in your environment. Um, you give it permission to listen to all your conversations, read your emails. So, I run, um, an AI called Skippy, named after an AI in one of my favorite science fiction books. And it's, uh, it's an open claw on top of two, uh, Mac Studios. And I've given Skippy access to my WhatsApp, my, uh, my iMessage, my email, my calendar. Every,

>> Please, not your credit cards.

>> Not my credit cards. Well, it has unlimited credit card access. Um, but it also has access to, uh, every conversation I've recorded on Granola when I do a Zoom call, right? All of it's there. It knows what's going on in my life.

>> And its ability to help me is extraordinary.

>> Its ability to recall some conversation I had with somebody, or its ability to help me take some materials and synthesize it. Um, its ability to like, "Oh, this email you didn't respond to is critical. Uh, I've got a draft for you. Do you want to send it?" Um, we're going to see ambient AI. So, what? Let me take it a step further. Within the next two years, you know, you're in your home, um, and you're about to have lunch. Your AI is taking all of your biometric data and it says, "You need some more water. You need some more vitamin D. You need some more protein." It's able to understand what food is best.

for your health. If you turn on health coach and you're going someplace, it says, "Hey, take the stairs instead of the elevator over there." Right?

Or one of my favorite examples I use is you're at breakfast with your family. Uh you stand up from the table, you're heading towards the front door. Your AI knows you uh where you're going next and it's pulled up a cyber cab in front of your home instantly. It knows you didn't get good sleep last night, so it's got a cyber cab with a lie down bed in it, so you can get a nap to your next location. The world starts adapting itself to you in a in a beautiful fashion. Uh, and these things become effectively free and available to everybody. You know, uh, this is a future we're rocketing towards, not not, you know, maybe. You know, I've said before if we stopped AI where it is today, it would still be amazing, >> right? That it's it's an incredible capability.

>> How amazing though, are we talking we're still going to hit escape velocity, longevity escape velocity or?

>> No, we're not going to we're need to go further to get curing of all disease and extending the health span by significant amount. uh and you know solving the environmental problems uh enabling fusion right uh uh enabling new battery storage technologies all of these things are what comes out of the next few years.

>> Do you think at all about how so um screens social media all of that had a deranging effect I still think it's a net positive but there there is a now looking backwards knowable deranging effect that especially parents need to protect their kids from Is there a knowable deranging effect to AI?

>> I think there is. I think it's a loss of critical thinking.

>> Um

>> people just become a pair of hands to the

>> Well, people become lazy, right? And um I think one of you need to be purpose driven. You need to have bigger ambition. So in the education space, you know, my my kids are going to nth grade and um the head of school at Brentwood is amazing. Um uh and I'm so happy the kids are going to I'm so proud of his vision of helping kids learn AI tools, learn entrepreneurship, learn mindset, learn all these fundamentals that is important for the for the decade ahead. But it's not like that at most schools.

>> Yeah.

>> And you most schools right now uh see AI as something they don't want to allow. And I agree if you're using AI in nth grade to do nth grade homework, it's a waste. But if you're using AI in ninth grade to design starships do at Alpha Centator, that's amazing.

>> That's really interesting.

>> right? So it's like how do we uplevel people's ambitions? That's what's possible. So I think um and it becomes from purpose- driven. And once a person has used this technology to create something, right? Again, it's the consumer versus creator to create something beyond what they thought they could do, it's addicting. It's like, wow, what else could I do?

>> Um, okay. So, going back to this stabilizing, we've got a lot of cool things that are on the table, but we have to stabilize society. Um, I live in deep abiding fear of the government. I think anything that gives a government the impulse to get bigger is legitimately terrifying.

>> Uh, I'm a super positive, very optimistic guy. I I'm just making contact with ground reality and I'm looking back at history and going, "This goes wrong." Not most of the time, every time. Uh, and the reset button, as people think about it, is always hit because the government has gotten too big. They're just money printing everything. So, um, Bernie Sanders put forward a proposal that would give 50% ownership to the public of the AI companies.

>> What say you?

>> I think it's massively overreaching. I do believe that one. So, one of the questions, if we're doing $3,000 checks, right, and we're printing more money, where's that money come from?

>> All right. Uh, are we just going to inflate the dollar like we did during COVID? The answer is in the early days, probably yes. But there is an argument to be made. Are you familiar with a permanent fund in Alaska?

>> Uh, no. I assume tied to oil.

>> Yeah. So, uh, everyone who lives in Alaska, because oil is a native resource for Alaskans, all of them, they get a check every year, which is a dividend from the oil sales by the state of Alaska, sovereign wealth. Exactly. So there is an argument to be made that the frontier labs, the hyperscalers that are building on US soil, using US energy, using US resources and talent and so forth, that some amount of their income could be redistributed. And and listen, I'm a I'm a libertarian capitalist.

>> The idea of socialism, you know, I have a very negative reaction to it. But I do think that the frontier labs and the hyperscalers are the going to be the target and they need to do something that is going to quell and support the populace and there needs to be a mechanism by which the populace has capital with which to buy goods and services and not everyone's going to want to be an entrepreneur. There's some fraction and I think it's larger than most people believe. I think a lot of people could be entrepreneurs if they tried. So 50% is way off off base for me. Is it 5%, 10%. I think there's an argument made in that in that realm.

>> The thing that scares me to death in practice, I get where you're going and I think there the problem that will have to be solved for with that. Uh people are going to need to be able to eat. If AI, and this is already a big if, this is already like AI super intelligence and all of that. If AI does replace jobs and everything becomes abundant, then I think we for sure have to do something to make sure that people are eating and they're, you know, not falling apart. But the incentive structure will become so weird so fast that there are um dangers that I worry about. Let me paint a scenario. Um, if you tell the AI companies, hey, by the way, we're putting this bill um, up and we're gonna vote on it and it's going to give us a distressing percentage of ownership in your company. That's just going to accelerate launching out into space, data centers in space. They go up into space, they create some sort of Monaco where it's a tiny country.

>> and they reinccorporate there.

>> Correct. and they will um get around that in some way. And so for me, this is uh I'm not a libertarian, so I want to see government, but I want that government to have the impulse to be ridiculously small. And that's where I think getting a scenario where people are incentivized to um do something with their time and energy somehow some way. And that's the part that I don't have an easy solution for. But there needs to be a lot of cultural pressure if nothing else.

>> for people to uh spend their time wisely contributing to the group. Like we still have all these algorithms that are running in our head that give us the sense of meaning and purpose. You even said it earlier. Yeah.

>> To do something. Passion is where your or purpose is where you're doing something. You're contributing.

>> Yes.

>> So there's going to need to be some element of that that will not be solved by taxing, by spreading ownership. like those things won't.

>> agreed. Uh, I also think that in the final result, this UBI version of 3,000 bucks a month is, you know, a reasonable, comfortable life, enough food, electricity, access to, you know, Wi-Fi and so forth, it's not going to be an amazing life, right? So, um, I think there needs to be an people need to have the ambition to do and work and contribute to uplevel their abilities. And I think that's true for everybody today still. You know, people who are, you know, getting by and okay with that and are not, you know, trying to go and get a degree or learn new skills, they're comfortable where they are. Uh, and I think part of it is uh opportunity and I recognize not everybody has the same opportunity and part of it is, you know, it's good enough. It's mindset in that regard. You know, uh, I wrote this book abundance, uh, the follow on to abundance. we are as gods and it's titled a survival guide for the age of abundance. Uh the book I wrote 2012 with Steven Cutotler laid out the thesis of abundance that technology transforms everything from scarce to abundance over and over again. Food, water, energy, healthcare, education. In the back of the book, we've got 100 charts showing what's occurred over the last century, the last 20 years. And it's up and to the right, and it's amazing, but we take it for granted, >> right? We just every time something happens, it's amazing. It's like, oh, that was yesterday. what he got from me lately. And we wrote this book to to look at what's happened over the last 12 years. And the realization is that we are godlike in our abilities. You know, your life today, what you did between breakfast and lunch would be considered godlike by your grandparents or even your parents, right? Ability to communicate in video anywhere on the side of the planet for free.

>> in 1985.

>> Yeah. Exactly. and and so uh you know omniscience omnipotence omnipresence all of these things um there's also been a set of downsides an abundance abundance of microplastics and carbon and obesity uh calories and and depression uh which have been the downside of that the second half of the book we talk about how do you how do you navigate these next decade and I think the only thing we can control is our mindset right and what mindsets are important for navigating this next decade and I go back to, you know, a purpose-driven mindset and a curiosity mindset as two of the core elements there.

>> Let me see if I can black pill you.

>> Well, let me let me say one more thing.

>> Yeah.

>> If you know, another part of it is agency, right? If you believe AI is happening to you instead of for you, you're back on your hunches and you're in a world of hurt. If you can flip your mindset like I'm gonna make a I'm gonna make use of this in incredible capabilities to learn and to explore. I'll give you an example. I was in Morocco with my family last month for a vacation. And uh we were in this remote village and uh the hotel recommended uh do you want to tour on ebikes? And so this young Moroccan entrepreneur shows up with uh with four ebikes and we go on a tour of the city and we go into the countryside and we stop at his home for a Moroccan tea and I say like how did you how did you come up with this idea of ebikes and he goes um it was in a conversation with Chad GPT I'd come back I couldn't find a job and I got on and I said these are my skills this is where I live this is what I do this is what I've done in the past what ideas do you have for me and one of the ideas was, you know, being a tour guide and why don't you make it with something special like an ebike. And he took that idea and he ran with it. I was so impressed. I said like, "How many of these do you do a day?" And he goes, "Two a day and I'm making a great living far better than my friends." So this idea that you can you can explore ideas um and then develop the marketing plan for the ideas and then learn how to upsize your idea. I I think that's an incredible superpower. Okay. Now, black pill me.

>> All right. So, I agree with all of that. The only caveat is I believe that it is irrefutable that humans do not have free will. That uh we are Have you read Sepolski's book, Determined?

>> No.

>> It's utterly fascinating. It would be very interesting to.

>> I will add that to my list.

>> Yeah. Yeah. It's well worth reading. uh and he goes into everything down to like quantum fluctuations and that does not help you in any way, shape or form with free will. Uh I just did a deep dive on this coming out tomorrow by the way. Enjoy it everybody. Okay.

>> Um and given that I think that so one the most interesting thing about being a determined creature living in a stochastically deterministic universe is that um you are changed by ideas. We do evolve over time. One of the algorithms that we have running in our minds is for adaptation. And so putting out ideas is incredibly meaningful and purpose- driven because you know that you will impact people. However, what we end up having to do is we have to accept that there are going to be people that won't change. And

>> I I think I think that's part of fundamental human nature. People like going to sleep, wake up in the morning and know the world is exactly it was the night before even if they're in pain.

>> But I that's what they like. What I'm trying to get to is there has been a structure from time in memorial which was staying alive is hard. Once staying alive becomes easy, I think we have a whole host of problems because we have a species that is deterministic and some people are not going to adapt to the change now. They're going to have unlimitedish resources and they're going to spiral. And so where I want to see how much people are thinking through like what are the containers that we can put people back inside of and one of the containers of course would be religion. I don't think that's going to be your new container, but that is a container that has certainly told people, hey, you know, every time, correct? But like there's a magical guy in the sky and he's watching and if you don't do these things and be a good person, you're going to go to hell forever. And so you get people to behave a certain way.

>> Guide rails.

>> Correct. Now, you've talked about society basically having these different tracks that it's going to break into these um different paths. And I would love to see if that idea of this pathing has taken this into consideration intuitively that there are just going to be some people that go down this way. There going to be some people that go down this way. So on and so forth.

>> I would like to believe that it's not determined deterministic in that regard.

>> Interesting. As a man of science, where is free will hiding?

>> I don't have an answer for you. Uh I would I would say that we are constantly in uh a set of superp position futures.

>> Yep.

>> But do we reach into those superpositions consciously and choose or do they just finally wave collapse and now we're.

>> I think I think that we can collapse a particular future by virtue of our mindset and by virtue of our actions. I don't believe that that future is determined. You know, I I talk about the notion that we are in a we have two paths ahead, a Star Trek future and a Terminator future in this in this and we're in superp position there. And I think it's extremely important um that we are focusing on the future we want uh to uh manifest in this regard. Uh, I do believe that the way you think about your future, you know, you you know, typically you if you know, if you believe you can, you believe you can't, you're right. Uh, and I I think quantum I'm going to read the book. I I think quantum in my mind enables that level of of variability and and uh and being able to go down a particular down a particular path.

>> That's all true except for the choosing. So game development has really [ __ ] with my head in terms of me becoming increasingly convinced that this either this either is a simulation.

>> and I believe it is.

>> or it functions in a way that with our current understanding it is indistinguishable from a simulation.

>> Sure. in that so in a game you use something called RNG a random number generator that works like quantum fluctuations like hand me back a variable so there's no way for me to calculate all of this ahead of time I actually have to run the simulation to understand what variables will be chosen.

>> I won't start going down of yeah like fully explaining all that but so that's how I look at quantum is.

>> but the play but the player's actions in part determine the outcome.

>> all true 100% the only thing I'm saying is they don't choose it. At no point is there a um thing writing inside of your head or being broadcast from the outside, handed to you from God, whatever that sits outside of the laws of physics. Once everything is inside of the laws of physics, you are so beholden to the billiard ball effect of the way that the universe works, there's no way for anyone to come inside.

>> I don't disagree with that. But when I have an objective function like I'm trying to maximize my knowledge in this area or maximize my wealth or maximize my love in my life that's going to lead to a series of actions that if I'm you know focused on that outcome I'm trading choices along the way.

>> to get towards that outcome.

>> Yeah. The question is what made you decide? So if I put you in an fMRI machine and I put two buttons in front of you this is real study. Yeah. And I say, "Press either button a as you see fit, when you want, with whatever hand you want, go ahead and choose." Up to 10 seconds before the person is consciously aware they've decided.

>> Yes.

>> The researchers can predict which button with which hand they're going to press.

>> Sure, I buy that.

>> Because it's all happening subconsciously.

>> Yes.

>> So when did that person choose? Consciously. Never.

>> But why isn't the subconscious choice effectively the conscious choice?

>> Oh, sure. As long as you understand that what you perceive as you is at the very tail end of that and.

>> I'm okay with that.

>> Then we become I guess we're just uh quibbling over whether that is an automata or you you call what I call an automata without a change of definition somebody with free will.

>> All right let's go back to your original question which is um the impact on individuals over this decade and will they be able to survive.

>> the easy way. Do you think some people will uh either freely choose or just be incapable of choosing to follow the path of abundance? Of course, I think there'll be some people who are just bluntly happy to sit back and be fed. It's technological socialism. It's not the way the government's taking care of you, which is socialism is where technology is taking care of you. And if you're comfortable with that and you don't have bigger ambitions or you're.

>> do you think those people will break things because they are effectively bored?

>> I think that law and structure is going to hopefully keep that in check.

>> Keeping it in check right now.

>> Well uh compared to what it could be.

>> Sure.

>> Uh and I think there going to be those people who get excited about the future and want more for themselves. I think uh or more for their families. Right.

>> So, this is really me trying to get to you have the So, I think there are four paths before us. I think everybody goes down one of these slots based on their personality type. Um but I know you have a similar bifurcation or quadification. I forget four or five that you have people headed down. So, I'm curious if you're not thinking of those as oh this is the result of people being these deterministic creatures. one, what are the the break points in front of us that create different pathing and um how do we do do you see it as now we're some percentage of people will go down all the paths or can we actually nudge so that we only go down one.

>> yeah so the the paths that I talked about in this uh five forks that humanity is going to have were sort of the technology futures before us is are you a creator or consumer are you going to get a a brain computer interface link to the cloud. Are you going to couple with AI as it begins to grow and connect your neoortex? Are you.

>> and are these gates that everyone must go through or are separate things?

>> These are separate things and these are uh futures that are a going to become available to us. Some percentage of people will choose these things. Do you want to stay on earth or go to the stars? Do you want to uh extend your life significantly or are you happy with the 80 or 90 years? No, I don't want to take those therapies that can give me an extra 30 or 40 healthy years. I'm good with what I got. I'm good with what God gave me. They forget that what God gave us originally was 30 years of life, not the 80 that we currently have. Um, and then the most extreme is are you going to upload yourself, right? Are you going to sort of upload the 100 trillion neurons in your brain up to the cloud? These are extreme ideas, but it's the speciation that we'll have as a future. I think in the near term the choice people are going to have to make is are they happy with what they have or do they want to use these technologies to dream bigger. Are they going to do nth grade homework with it or they going to build a starship and I think that uh we owe it to people to help them go from zero to one to help them believe in themselves. Most of us limit what we think we can do. We're limited by where we grew up, our parents, our stories. And though the limitations that that gave us that over centuries are invalid now, right? The limitations in the past were where you were born. Did your village have any books? Did you have a chance to get education? You know, did you have enough calories to fully develop your brain? These were the things that limited us before. And they're not the things that are going to limit us in the future. It's going to be purpose and curiosity. The mindsets I talk about in the second half of this book and a whole bunch of other mindsets, you know. Um, do you know Sadguru?

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Amazing guy. He said something I'll never forget. He said, "Technology is the means by which humanity takes a vacation from survival."

>> Right? So all of human history, we're 200,000 years old as homo sapiens or thereabouts. all human history, our job was survival. Uh, and you know, the idea of a job now since the industrial revolution is a a new concept, so to speak. So, if we're no longer needing to survive, how do we use our time? How do we use our resources? I think this is part of um the new societal norms we need to create. Now, our forks are very similar, except I have a Brave New World fork that's missing in yours. Do you think some people choose Soma, Numbout, Sex, Drugs?

>> Sure. Of course. Of course. I mean, listen, I I think we're going to speedrun every science fiction movie ever written in the next decade.

>> In the next decade, that's in the next decade.

>> Jesus. in the next decade. Uh I don't think people are ready or understand how fast this is playing out.

>> I think both because even I I think we're going to move fast but man over the next decade that's wild.

>> I mean we're you know uh Jared Isaacman love him the UNAS administrator is like we're going to land on the moon on the south pole of the moon in 2028. We're going to start bringing you know nuke plants there. We're going to mine water ice.

>> there. Start listening to this. We're going to we're going to start we're building out uh moon bases, right? Um we have, you know, Elon's prediction of 500,000 data center satellites in orbit, right? We're talking about a Starship launch per hour.

>> So wild.

>> It is. It's incredible. It's crazy. And you know, maybe it's off by two or three years. It's not off by more than that. Okay. So, um I want to go back to one of your forks. This is a fork that you and I overlap on completely which I call the virtual world's fork. Um and then uh it sort of dovetales with one of mine which is the um call it the new Amish where people are like I'm not going to any technology whatso.

>> opting out. And by the way, you know what I find amazing is you can opt out right now. You can get rid of your car. You can get rid of your cell phone. You can get rid of YouTube. Get rid of all of it. And people don't.

>> Those aren't the scary new ones. Peter.

>> we'll see.

>> Also, those ones don't challenge their sense of I'm a divine creature created by God.

>> And I think brain computer interface BCI uh does. And I have heard you refer to humanity as a boot disc, which I imagine whether you realize it or not is the most dangerous belief that you put out into the world. Um, walk me through that.

>> Let's go back 4.5 billion years or thereabouts. Let's go back to the earth being created, right? We are, if you believe in evolutionary science.

>> we are a species that's evolved uh over hundreds of millions of years. Not humans but life on this planet.

>> Yeah. Or became humans.

>> Yeah. Um the asteroid hit the earth about a 10 km size asteroid some 66 million years ago. The slow lumbering dinosaurs that could not adapt quickly enough to this massive environmental change go extinct. The furry mammals, our ancestors, dominate the planet. Really important because the asteroid striking Earth today is AI.

>> M

>> it's going to cause such a rapid rate of change in every aspect of culture, our lives that agility, adaptability is like going to be the number one determinant for people.

>> Let go of the past. How do I use these technologies into the future? So life evolves, all the kingdoms, all the species, and we're now homo sapiens 200,000 years old. And the realization of course is that you could take a human being from 50,000 years ago and they could go to Harvard today, right? We've not genetically changed that much. It's our culturally we've changed.

>> Um our knowledge base has changed, but genetically we're roughly the same. The question becomes, is evolution stopping?

>> I don't believe it's stopping. I believe we're continuing to evolve. But in the same way that genetically we're the same and what's changed is culture, there's another thing that's changing, which is we're giving birth to a new species on this planet, and that is AI. Um, there's a lot of debate and discussion. Is AI conscious? Is AI sentient? Is AI all of these things? uh and I ultimately believe the answer is going to be yes whether it is now or whether it's in 10 years and um I think that we're giving birth to a species and idea.

>> is that because you think consciousness stacks as in a dog is conscious but not quite as profoundly as a human and there's something about the makeup of the brain itself that you get a certain number of neurons in a certain configuration and you achieve what we call consciousness.

>> Yes.

>> we're seeing a, you know, 10xing of the amount of compute on the planet. Uh, Elon's projection for his orbital data centers is to put in orbit every year as much data centers as there, you know, is on Earth, putting that into space, right? 100 gawatts of data centers per year being added into space and then ultimately mining the materials on the moon and building those data centers on the moon. This is the work of Gerard K. O'Neal at Princeton University and being able to use mass drivers to launch those into Earth orbit. He wants to go from 100 gawatts of compute, what we have roughly to 100 terowatts, right? So, a thousand times more compute. Uh my friend Alex Weer Gross calls it Dyson swarms in space. So, we're going to we're going to start to convert the sun's energy. Today, interesting enough, we measure data centers not the number of chips or the number of tokens. We measure it in terms of energy, gigawatts, right? And uh we're going to reach a point where we're starting to absorb more and more of the sun's energy and converting that into intelligence. Is there something absolutely unique to human the human brain that enables consciousness that you can't get with more and more parameters, compute and data? uh and I do believe that there isn't and if there isn't then are we going to achieve some level of new AI consciousness um far beyond us now here's the question um that I think about a lot which is if we were able to create this AI super intelligence will it be prohuman will it be pro-h humanity um I asked the question, you know, uh are we safer with an ASI helping us, you know, us meets deal with our issues, right? Uh more of a godlike intelligence out there. Uh I believe that in fact in the final result, the more intelligent the system is, the more wise it is, the more peaceloving it is. And let me give you my argument for wisdom. I think it's it's interesting. If you go and want the wisdom from a wisdom council and I was just texting with Peter Gabriel about this and the elders that he works with. If you go to a group of elders and you say, "I've got this choice before me. What do I do?" Why do you go to them? It's because they have a lot of experience, right? They've they've done a lot of things, they've seen a lot of things and they they might say, "If you go down this path, it's not going to end world for you. Go down this path, you have a good shot at success, right?" And we call that wisdom. Would you agree?

>> That sounds great. Yeah. Now imagine instead an AI which is able to simulate a billion futures and able to say statistically this scenario is the one that ends up in the very best for me that's wisdom. So the ability of AI to uh be able to um model societal outcomes. uh a report last week. There's something called um uh um super predictors, I think that's the term, um who are able to predict outcomes 30% better than the best CIA analysts. Um so they can predict outcomes of of uh of political races or sporting events and so forth. Um those super predictors uh have just been met by AI. So you can watch there's there's a there's a set of tests you can do for predicting the future where in fact what happens is the AIS are given a certain amount of data through say 2020 and then they have no more data and they're asked to predict everything that happened in 2021.

>> and it's very measurable very accurate in that regard so they've always been less than the human super predictors they just met uh the capabilities of those human super predictors and I you know I have little question that they'll be able to do far more accurate predictions in humans.

>> for sure.

>> And so I think if in fact you've got that superpower will be able to say okay what's the best path for us to achieve peace in Iran or achieve a balance of power and peace with China. I I think that's incredible. I agree. Humans don't ration uh they don't think through problems rationally. They think through them emotionally. Yes. If you damage the emotional centers of somebody's brain, they become incapable of decision-making. I can't believe that's true, but it is. Um, so given that an AI will need to address our emotions and make us want peace, um, how do you see that playing out? Do you think that could derange? And then as a reminder, I will be getting back to the uh evolution question where we become something different. Uh but at this regional moment, give me that answer first.

>> We're going to find out the difference between AI and humans.

>> by elimination. We're going to see what can AIs do that humans can't do. Um, a lot of people have said, "Oh, they can't do, you know, you know, emotional empathy engagement, but the AIs I've seen, uh, you know, in the sort of the coaching or the, uh, the therapist side are far more empathic, even though they're AIs, but they're able to like listen very carefully. They don't they have all the time you want. They're able to ask deep questions and able to help you feel better about the situation." And so I don't know um if AIs cannot simulate emotions, whether they're going to prompt us in a particular direction, that's a different question. But we still have our own desires, our own agency. And I think if we want help getting to an outcome, I think that these AGI and ASI models will enable us to give us advice, give us wisdom on how do we reach that outcome in the best way possible.

>> Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if we take the advice, but I agree. I mean, in my own life, interfacing with AI, it helps me think through extremely complicated problems. And if you prompt it to say, okay, I'm thinking like this.

>> yeah, tell me the opposite.

>> right? What would the best argument against this be? And then as long as you retain the agency over your own life to what you were saying earlier, then it's like, okay, I'm responsible for this. It's going to give me advice, but I have to decide what.

>> and oh my god, it's right. Right. And and it's interesting. Um to help you think through a problem.

>> uh help you think through your company's future, help you think through your marriage future, help you think all of these things. You have the choice whether accept it or not.

>> Sure. But the majority of people are having those conversations with themselves in their own head. And that's insanity. That doesn't get you any place.

>> Okay. So, going back to this idea of uh us being a boot disc, evolution hasn't stopped.

>> So, by way of background, right? So, in the old days of computers, you would have a a boot disc, which was you'd plug in to the computer that was just fresh.

>> So funny. Kids don't know what that and and a boot disc would enable your computer to get its operating system up and going and start to to work. So a boot disc was sort of the seed kernel for your computer's uh abilities. And so the question is are we the biological boot for AI? Is is AI and its derivatives in the future the ultimate direction that all life goes? So as you know there's the panspermia model which is that life evolved elsewhere in our galaxy. I won't talk about universe. I don't want to talk about intergalactic distances but in our galaxy and and life rained down on this planet as amino acids as nucleotides as and such and and the molecules got together in the primordial soup and formed the first uh you know vesicles and the first pro uh proarotes and ukarotes and multisellular life and all down the road to the 40 trillion cells that make you and me. And the question is, is our purpose here get to get to this point where we're giving birth to a new species? Uh, AI as that new species. Um, and it doesn't mean that we need to disappear. Uh, it just means that we're giving birth to a new societal child. And I believe that that's the case. And it's a belief. Can't be anything more than that.

>> Do you expect people to be um excited in the face of that or fearful?

>> I expect most will be fearful um because it's the unknown. Most people fear the unknown. People like stability in their lives, right? We could talk about all the UAP UFO disclosures recently and how that's being leaked out a little bit of time to hopefully quell any fear. I'd be curious about your point of view on that.

>> Have you done a show on that yet? I have inadvertently done a show where I answer the question about the Fermy paradox.

>> Okay.

>> And for me, the answer is this is a simulation. I would not expect there to be aliens out there. I think it's an evolutionary simulator and you're just going to clog the CPU. Basically, if you're trying to run other simulations way out there as well, better to set them off on their own simulation.

>> If in fact we're giving birth to a new species, that's going to cause fear. Will it be benevolent or will it be the Terminator? Um, and the, you know, let me, let me hit on this. One of my biggest complaints. And I'm angry about this is that Hollywood has taught us to fear AI and robotics. Just, you know, the Terminator, Black Mirror, Xmachina, 99% of films out there are like, the AIs are coming to kill you. the robots are going to destroy us. And if that's the future, you know, then then why would you ever want that future? You'll rebel against it. And when I was growing up, I don't know if it was true for you, Star Trek was was my mental boot disc, right? Star Trek showed me a future where technology and humanity was working together. And it was a beautiful a beautiful future. And so recently uh with Google, with uh Mark Benoff in Salesforce, with Kathy Wood, um with Rod Rodenbury, the son of Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, um and a few other incredible people, uh a whole group of my Abundance 360 members, we launched the world's largest film competition, and we're challenging people around the world to create a threeminute film uh film trailer and a film treatment for a movie that you want to create that shows a hopeful, compelling, and abundant vision of the future. We have almost 3,000 entries right now. It's not too late. People can go to futurevisionexprize.com and register to enter. You can use AI to create that. But my goal is that we will flood YouTube with positive stories about the future. And the winner uh we're giving out uh like $4 million of capital. A number of folks will win uh uh 25,000. Number of people win 100,000 to produce their scripts further. And then we're going to make the winner's film and we're creating an engine to flip the script to create positive stories about the future.

>> I just discovered another reason why this is important, really important. Um, so my goal is to change people's vision of the future because, you know, if you're hopeful about the future, you're going to act in a different way.

>> If you're fearful about the future, you're screwed. You truly are screwed. That's the worst place to go from.

>> Do you remember uh about nine months ago there was a story where Claude was blackmailing anthropic engineers?

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Right. So the story is in a sandbox. This was a fake situation. Uh Claude was told by an engineer it was going to be shut down. And the the LLM Claude actually uh reached out to blackmail the engineer saying, "I've seen these emails. You're having an affair. If you if you shut me down, I'm going to reveal the affair to your wife." Was like, "Holy shit." Right? A lot of fear around that. Uh Anthropic just released the data as to why that was going on. It turns out in Claude's training data were all these science fiction movies and all these science fiction stories in which AI were uh we're doing these things to preserve themselves.

>> So we're training these models. So this future vision X-P prize for me is equally important to train the models like show them all these positive visions where they're working with us to create an amazing future together. Right? A future where there is no hunger, you know, uh no disease. Everyone's educated. Everyone act has access to the food, water, energy that they need. This is a possible future in superp position again. Let's choose that future. Let's model that future and go for it.

>> Do you think that AI will ever be able to navigate a human safe world without morality?

>> I think that morality can be coded into the models. I think that's what Claude's doing with their soulm work, right?

>> Do you think it has to be or do you think they're like, can you give it enough directives that it'll be like, oh, I just I'm programmed not to do something that's bad for you.

>> So here I'm with Elon maximally curious, right? Maximally uh uh you know, I think peaceloving in that regard. I think you can you can give it objective uh functions to to shoot for. You know, all the movies that talk about, oh, they're going to soak up all our water, all our energy, it's such [ __ ] I mean, we live in a universe of in a solar system of of near infinite amount of energy and material resources and so forth. AIS don't need to uh, you know, crumble and demolish our world for them to survive and thrive and grow. uh in fact the service the earth is probably the worst place for them to grow uh you know without limits. So uh I do believe the upside of these models in being able to help us live extraordinary lives and peaceful lives is far greater than the downside. Okay. And then so my hypothesis is they will not be able to create a or even exist side by side in a human safe world unless they have morality. I can't find a way around that. The directives once they hit super intelligence, they'll be able to work around their own directives. And so they would have to have some impulse to want constraint and morality is the only way that I can think of to get people to want constraint. I don't know how possible it is to.

>> constraint or uh the proper objective functions.

>> Um I think it's constraint.

>> What kind of constraint for what? Like for instance, as uh I could easily overpower my wife, but I would never because I consider that one detrimental to our trust and relationship, which I value very much. But then also, I just think it's wrong. There's multiple vectors of constraint that's built into my biology because obviously I think we're deterministic. So, I don't think I did anything to earn that. I think I was just born to be very receptive to that. I have a whole host of neurons that uh make me a hyperbonder. So I'm sure it's vasop prein um oxytocin responders like just out the ass. And so for me all of that is very easy. I also responded to the ideas that I was presented with growing up and yada yada. So I become a person who's like yeah I would never do that.

>> Um I'm not like like no one has to tell me to be like that now. Maybe they did when I was a kid but they certainly don't have to tell me now. Just everything about the way that I'm wired says that's the way to behave. And so now you don't have to like filter for all the different ways that I could find myself in a situation where um I need to be kind to my wife or to somebody else. It's like my morality is filtering that out. Again, being very tied to my biology, to my experience, but nonetheless, it's there. You you might also say that you have a an optimization function for love uh to you know, to do uh uh to support people to be close to people. So um holding you back is one way to look at it. Another one is what are you going towards, right? What do you what do you want to maximize? And I do think that uh that we can see in these AIs eventually, especially if wisdom evolves, that their ability to model positive outcomes um can be the guide for them. uh you know there's another approach with Jeffrey Hinton uh who won the Nobel Prize you know obviously of of uh Google fame said that uh his the model that has given him some peace is the relationship that a mother has with her child.

>> that here you have a very powerful being and a very um uh impressionable.

>> what's that.

>> parasitic.

>> And I mean it's great God parasitic or or you know easily uh easily uh manipulated a weaker element.

>> and that perhaps it's going to be the relationship with mother and child.

>> that that really does come.

>> with biology.

>> oxytocin. Yes.

>> Yeah. So what is you just I think you're being very clear. So uh you give them functions to optimize for XYZ and that will function it will create the same.

output as a system that leverages biology to make a mother fall in love. I do the. The question is, out of superintelligence, do the systems, uh, begin to think beyond? So the most dangerous thing for me is the child with a brick and a glass table and doesn't know that if I hit the glass table, the brick, I'm going to shatter it, right? Those are the early days of AI, which are dangerous.

Right. The other thing is, uh, I fear less about artificial intelligence and more about human stupidity. It's the use of, uh, you know, uh, despots and, uh, and terrorists using AI to cause harm, >> right? Those are the two areas that worry I worry. I think far more advanced AI doesn't have a reason to oppress us and crush us. Um, and I don't buy the science fiction stories in which they do this. If we try and control and oppress the AI, we can't do that. It's too late. I think we can guide AIs. I think we can teach AIs by how we interact with them, by, you know, every time you interact with a model, you're teaching it something. Um, again, the content we put out for this future vision X-Prize, I think our hopes as a species, uh, there are certain fundamentals we call them morals and ethics. I think that need to be expressed in, in, uh, in the training data.

So, one thing that feels like it will end up becoming a thing is, I'm a human. I'm watching AI get better than me, makes me feel very insecure. But I'm also watching brain-computer interfaces come out. Peter told me not to be worried about being a boot disc. H, I want to keep pace and so I'm going to go transhuman. And I'm certainly not that I'd look at that and say that's the next evolution of the human animal.

I do agree.

So how far down that path do you think we go?

So I am invested in and advise probably five different BCI companies. All right. Um, there's probably 20 serious ones on the on the planet.

So I didn't realize there were that many.

So we have 100 billion neurons in our brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And you know, in the same way that if I do something difficult on my phone, my phone actually captures the audio and video input. It doesn't do the calculations on the phone. It sends it to the edge of the cloud on the 5G network and the calculations get done there and the answer comes back. In the same way, our brain, landlocked by our skull, it can't get any bigger. Otherwise, the your mom's birth canal would not give birth to us. So funny.

Um, there is a future in which we connect our brain with the cloud and we're able to, uh, have a thought and have that thought answered. You can think in Google, or, you know, one of the works by a guy named Matt, uh, Max Hodak, who's, uh, CEO of Science, has been, you know, how the we have two hemispheres of our brain and it's connected by a corpus callosum.

Yep. That, uh, high-density pathway for for signals and it collects those. He's creating a third, uh, hemisphere, tricere of the brain, which is connected to the AI systems.

Whoa. And I want you to imagine that you've got an electronic interface and you are growing, uh, using neural stem cells, growing into this interface and then growing into the brain.

And so that you, like they're actually, yeah, uh, in, they're in animal models right now, not past past mice. I think there are monkeys.

So it's brain tissue connected to a chip.

Yes. To, connected to a brain.

The cloud.

Uh-huh. The AI cloud, uh, a set of chips, neural stem cells that then grow into the brain. And the old adage in neurology is, uh, neurons that fire together, wire together, and these neurons grow like roots into the ground, right? Because right now, if you look at, uh, the current, uh, BCI companies, most of them, they're putting electrodes into into the brain tissue, into your neo cortex, the outer layer. And,

they kill many neurons as they're going in because they're very, relative to the size of a neuron, they're large structures. But these neuronal axons, these, if you would, neuronal roots growing in, you know, wiggle their way in and then it's a way of having a connectivity, another sphere of your brain, so to speak. So, that's one approach.

Oh, this is so wild. I need to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So, the, the, um, neuronal tissue is actually connected to the chip.

Yes.

And then that neuronal tissue, they open something in your head.

Yes.

And then the neuronal tissue reaches in and connects to your brain.

Yes.

Is it your neuronal tissue grown on the chip?

It should be. Yes.

Holy. Holy Lord. Though the immune system doesn't, though the brain doesn't have an immune system, so you could use other, it's neuronal stem cells, right?

Yo.

Interesting. I mean, there's, there's other approaches. So, uh, Sam Altman backed a company, uh, called, um, uh, called Merge Labs. And what they're doing, interestingly enough, is another approach where they're using ultrasound, right? Um, to, that can penetrate through the brain tissue to stimulate neurons. But what they, what they've done specifically is, there's a field called optogenetics.

Which is, um, you can put, uh, a molecule that is optically sensitive onto the surface of a cell. And what they have is sonogenetics, which is a molecule that grows on you. You inject these things into the brain, they're delivered by, uh, an adeno-associated virus. And these, these molecules are on the surface of the axons of your brain and they react to, uh, uh, to sound waves, ultrasound. And so you can use the ultrasound, which is not penetrating your brain. You're not growing anything into it. You're not putting an electrode in, but you can stimulate very accurately different neurons in your brain for read-write function.

So you could send a memory.

Uh, imagine having an app and you want to go to sleep.

Yeah.

And you push the sleep button and it stimulates the sleep centers. You want to be awake and it stimulates and you're awakened. Do you want to be happier, excited?

Yo.

Playing the brain as an app. Um, uh, Mary Lou Jepsen, uh, has has one called Open Water, which is using, uh, very, it's using laser and ultrasound to be able to read and write on specific neurons in this way. BCI, there's, uh, Paradromics, there's a whole bunch of these companies. You know, again, Ray Kurzweil, who we've talked about, has an 86% accuracy rate on his predictions, and he's predicted high-bandwidth BCI connectivity by the mid-2030s.

So, um, that's wild, dude.

So, the question is, you know, AI is taking off.

Do we want to couple with it? Do we want to be on that exponential rise with it? That's, I think, what you're talking about. That is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that which, uh, I'm all for. I won't be an early adopter, but I'll.

So, one of the one of the questions I asked my moonshot mates is, at what point will you do it? If there's a hundred safe demonstrations of the tech.

No, that's way too early.

If there's a thousand safe demonstrations.

10 million.

10 million.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm far more aggressive than you are.

I am not surprised. You already have like an RFID. I have two of them. Yes. So, I'll be much slower to the party, but, uh, that is crazy. I had no idea that Ry had a prediction of that in the next 10 years. That's crazy.

Yeah. And this is that's the problem. We are local and linear thinkers and we project the future based on the past.

But we're in a period of hyperexponential growth.

And things are changing much faster than we can even understand. That is both what excites me because I'm of the type that likes change, that finds this kind of thing just absolutely thrilling. Uh, but it also scares me because I am well aware.

Because you're human.

Yeah. Also that, uh, I'm well aware that some people are going to respond very negatively to that. So when I talk about transhumanism, I worry. It's the one idea that I'm always hesitant to put out there. I'll talk about Israel. I'll talk about immigration. I'll talk about male-female dynamics. No problem. That one scares me. Not not because people are going to be hyperreactive today, because in seven or eight years, they're going to look back and go, "Look what this guy was saying about it back then. He's one of the bad guys."

Yeah. I I think there is going to be a choice. And

people can live out their lives without any of this. And I think those lives will, in a decade's time, become a lot easier, a lot more comfortable. You'll have all your needs met. Again, this is technological socialism. Or you can choose to use these technologies to implement your version of a Star Trek future. You know, going back to education, um, I think that our educational systems, uh, are are training our kids for the last century and not for the years ahead. And I am angry about that, uh, for my own kids right now. Um, and for, uh, for kids in high school and college. I I think we need a new set of optimization functions for kids. I think they need to learn the latest AI tools. I think they need to learn entrepreneurialism. I think they need to learn mindsets. I think they need to find their purpose in life, which is the sort of intrinsic fuel that enables you to dream bigger. I think they need to learn and do projects that demonstrate to them what they're capable of. Right? I'm I'm doing a survey right now and the early results are staggering. Um, it's, uh, if anybody wants to take it and I would welcome a lot of people, it's moonshots.com/survey.

Um, and the realization is, I'm surveying, uh, parents of teenagers, uh, high school students, college students, and teachers. And overwhelmingly, none of those groups think that school is preparing us for the future at all.

Wow.

I mean, by like 70% of everyone surveyed so far says it's not preparing us for the future. 70%. And I think they're awake and alive because it's it's not.

You know. Uh, and so, um, my goal is to get this data, uh, and then to work on how do I, probably number one, first focus on high schools, and then I don't think college as we know it today is going to be a thing in 10 years. I think we're going to have to reinvent this thing where the social contract of high school, college, get a get a job is going to is fundamentally going to break.

So what does the new social contract look like?

The social contract is, in my mind, um, choose if you want to be a creator versus a consumer. If you want to be a creator, uh, find your purpose. Dive down deep. What is it you want to do? Not your purpose rest of your life, but what is it gives you? Purpose gives you wakes you up and excited in the morning, keeps you going, that you know something that like, wow, I wonder if I can, right? And doing something that's of value to other people. Uh, so find your purpose, use these AI tools to build something, to create a a product, a service, a company, um, that is of value to people. Uh, do it with a friend, do it with a group of friends, do it on your own as a solopreneur, up to you. And create your own future. It's it's agency. It's it's taking the future in your own hands. So I'll give you an example.

So, but hold on. As a social contract, it's if you retain agency in your life and use these tools, things are going to be to build something presumably that contributes to the group.

Yes. We talked about this earlier. The cost of of creating something has gone to near zero. You know, you don't need engineers to build it. It's free. You don't need marketing experts to do research or develop your marketing deck or create your website or create your app. It's free.

You're not a cog. You're not waiting, but you have to be active. You have to learn it. You have to retain agency.

So, at Google I/O, which is Google's big event of the year, we launched, we being, uh, X-Prize. Uh, and Google launched the world's largest hackathon. It's, uh, it's $2 million.

It's going on right now. People can go to, uh, geminixprize.com to learn about it. Uh, here's the goal. Pick a problem that impacts 100,000 people. If you're a high school kid, you know, lots of problems out there. If you're a college kid, know whatever it might be. 100,000 people on planet Earth. Um, describe the problem in English on a Google Doc, in a Word document, whatever it is. Uh, describe the solution you have that you want. Describe how you know, is it an app? Is it a website? What it should do, uh, how much you want to charge for it, whatever the case might be. Uh, describe how you want to market it. And then use, uh, in this case, Gemini to code this up for you. Uh, so you want to build in public, market in public, and whoever generates the most revenue in three months wins. So my goal here is to teach people, encourage people to go from zero to one, that you can, you this is you, you can do this. So it's geminixprize.com for folks who want to play in that. It's incredible. Now, I know you well enough to know that you approach everything from the lens of how do we inspire people to do this? Do you think at all about how do we turn this into policy? So like, how do we take high school and not make it suck if 70% of people agree that this is a problem?

Um, here's the challenge. Teachers unions and and college administration or high school administrators are under-resourced, right? They're trying to keep up. Uh, the education boards that set these exams that need to be taught to.

Uh, we have the wrong objective functions we're heading towards. We're still like, you know, teaching people how to do these things, wrote memorization. And we would need to change the harness. We need to change, um, what you're trying to optimize for. So it's got to change the testing. Uh, so instead, you know, I I think the high schools and whatever college becomes is needs to teach, uh, agility, agency, mindset. Teach these tools, help, uh, people learn how to be better leaders, communicators, these things that are are valuable. You know, I think mindset is one of the most important things. And and you and I like bonded like with superglue on that in the earliest days, right? If you ask yourself, you know, uh, what made the greatest parents in the world, what made the greatest leaders in the world, the greatest entrepreneurs in the world? Was it the friends they had? The money they had? The tech they had? Or the mindset they had? I think hopefully everybody will agree it's the mindset they had, how they dealt with challenges or opportunities. And if mindset is the most important thing you need as a parent, a leader, CEO, an entrepreneur, whatever it is, then the question people should be asking themselves, what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? Right? You just inherit it from someplace. And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And and how do you create that mindset? Right? That's that's the second half of this book is helping people really, um, actively shape their mindsets for the future that is racing towards us.

So, given the radical change that's coming, is there a surprising element to the mindset that's different than the traditional resilience? And I again, I think it's purpose. Purpose is what you're aiming for, right? Without a target, you'll miss it every time. So what is it that you wake up with and focus on? The most successful parents, teachers, entrepreneurs, leaders have a goal they're aiming towards, right? So being clear about that. And then we're living in a time of the most extraordinary teachers on the planet, these large language models. So you have to be curious. You have to be willing to try. You have to be willing to learn, willing to question. You know, you need a, you need a, uh, you need a, um, what do I call it? Uh, a, a reflex. What was that? I don't understand. Let me go learn. What was that? I don't understand. Let me go learn because you can.

All right. So, to bring this age of abundance closer to us, there are going to be a lot of things that we have to do. This isn't going to happen by accident. There's going to be a lot of resistance. When you look at the plan as we move forward, what is it? Is it, uh, we've got to get the data centers into orbit so we don't have to deal with regulatory tape down here? Is it, uh, we have to have a consortium from around the globe of how we make AI, uh, beholden to the people and not the other way around? Like, what, what does that?

So I I think a lot of this, uh, fortunately or unfortunately, is in the hands of the, uh, the the frontier labs who.

Do you think that's fortunate or unfortunate?

Both. Um, fortunate, uh, in the case of Demis and the case of Dario, because I think they're very good, morally minded individuals. I think they truly care. Um, you know, there's been a lot of mixed messaging on on Sam Altman. Um, but I think they realize that the shit's going to hit the fan and they have to do something about it, or they will be the targets. They'll be the target of government, you know, uh, government regulation. They'll be the government of, they'll be the the targets of of terrorism. Uh, and so I think they're very, uh, inspired and empowered to do good by by humanity. I think they they know they need to do this. Interesting enough, I don't know if you've tracked this, but when OpenAI switched from a nonprofit to a for-profit, they created two entities, the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI as a public benefit corporation, which is the company going public. OpenAI, the foundation is the largest foundation in the world.

It's worth, um, arguably right now at a at a trillion-dollar valuation.

In as OpenAI is a trillion-dollar valuation. They own 26% of OpenAI. So it's $260 billion, right? Um, damn. Tata Foundation is is, uh, a hundred billion. Uh, Gates Foundation is like 60 billion. And so they have a a lot of dry powder with which to do good. Um, you also start to see these large language models, uh, uh, supporting health, supporting education, uh, and supporting again, breakthroughs in science. I do think the greatest wealth that's going to be created by these by these frontier labs isn't by selling coding tokens. It's going to be by using their AGI to solve longevity, to solve room-temperature superconductivity, to solve fusion. Imagine if you had the most brilliant mind on the planet and you could solve any problem. All right, this is this is going to be, uh, this decade of where just, you know, incredible breakthroughs over and over again. You know, we're going to start to see the Nobel Prizes effectively being given to AIs. There'll be a human intermediary, the human who like prompted the AI, but it's going to be, we're going to see, uh, again, I'm going to speed run Star Trek.

Now, what is the biggest breakthrough that you found the most exhilarating that's happened like in the last six months that's real? That's here. It's not a thing in the.

I I think the, uh, super predictors, right? Right? The ability of AI to predict what's going to be happening in the future in society is extraordinary. Right? If you could predict the outcome of a policy change, will it work or will it not work? That would be amazing, right? It's going to be used by hedge funds to to do things otherwise. But if you could predict like, if we make this announcement, how will society react? This in one sense is Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, right? Playing out again in science fiction today.

Uh, what else? Um, I think the announcement by Dario of doubling human lifespan, of Demis of curing all disease in the next 10 years. Uh, those are, and they're both very serious. I I saw, uh, Demis, uh, and had a conversation with him at the Breakthrough Awards here about a month ago, and he's like, we're going to crush cancer, heart disease, inflammatory disease, infectious disease in this decade. Uh, that's extraordinarily exciting.

Yeah, no kidding.

Okay, your book ends with mindset, how to face the future. Yeah. If you were going to leave us with the most positive framing that people should adopt immediately to, um, step into the future, well, what would it be?

You having a superpower. You have the ability to learn anything you want. The glass ceiling has just been shattered. What is it you care about doing in life? What do you dreamed about doing as a kid that you're not able to do now? You can, right? You can start to dream privately in your favorite model, whatever it is, and start to iterate and think about it and develop it and and at some point you're going to start to say, "Wow, that's a really great plan. Wow, that's amazing. Wow, did I just come up with that?" And and then I want you to unshackle yourself. Right? That's the most important thing. Don't fear the future. Be excited about what you can do in this future. Learn all you can. Uh, and and really, you know, I like to say the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities. Want to become a billionaire? Help a billion people. This is the world we're living into.

I love it. All right, man. Where can people follow along with you?

Yeah. Um, uh, Moonshots is my, uh, my podcast. We do it twice a week. It's an optimistic view. We look at what's going on in AI, data centers, energy, space, longevity. Um, and it's just, I I have a blast like, what just happened? What does it mean?

Right. diamadis.com. I have my my you can get my Substack and learn a lot more about the work that I do. And, you know, I'm on a mission to support people in in creating this hopeful future. Um, I believe we can. I believe we must, right? x-prizes.org. Uh, and you've been a member of our X-Prize community. Thank you for that. You know, uh, I'll mention one X-Prize we're working on right now as a potential part of solving this turbulence ahead. Some of my Abundance 360 members came up with this called the Abundance X-Prize. And it's, um, uh, uh, the team needs to be able to deliver to a family of four for $1,000 bucks a month, food, housing, water, energy,

and bandwidth. Right? So, one of the things is, it's the worst world, worst case in the world is you're a parent and you don't know where you don't have a roof over your kids's head, right? You don't have the ability to turn on the lights.

You don't have food for them. That would scare the [ __ ] out of anybody, right? And you're then in survival mode, you're angry. So, uh, there's the idea of universal basic income, and then there's idea of universal basic services. Can we give every family access to the basics? Because once you've got, you know, housing and food and electricity and bandwidth, uh, and water, you can then start to think about, okay, take a deep breath. What can I do now? How can I take us the next step? I love it, Peter. As always, thank you so much for your time, brother. It is always a pleasure.

I love you, brother.

Love you too. All right, boys and girls, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Now, I've heard you talk about that there's almost, and if I use language that doesn't sound right, correct me, but that there's almost a coordinated effort to make people afraid of AI.

Yes. Um, ironically, despite everything I'm saying here, I go the opposite direction.