Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - AI, Tech, and Exponential Organizations Q&A | Exponential Organizations 2.0 | Q&A

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

In this Q&A, Peter and Salim discuss a variety of questions regarding the power of Exponential Organizations, which examples we can follow, and how to scale your business by billions. Salim Ismail is a sought-after strategist and a renowned technology entrepreneur who built and sold his company to Google. He’s been featured in the most prominent publications such as NYT, Forbes, Fortune, and Bloomberg and has led lectures at the world’s greatest companies and about the future of Tech. Currently, he’s the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J _____________ Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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that's it, please print and the speed of going from mind to materialization is just exploding onto the scene. exploding onto the scene. Let's go to Q and a let's begin. Okay. So Peter Bailey is asking where and how do micro small and medium sized businesses find their space in the EXO paradigm. So the smaller, the better in a sense, and they actually adapt more naturally. Think about the biggest companies in the world today. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, all started out as small startups, adopted these characteristics over time, and boom, they're the biggest companies in the world.

I mentioned already MercadoLibre out of Argentina. The biggest companies in the world in the next decade are going to be EXOs. They already are for the most part. But small companies can adopt this model much more effectively than bigger companies because there's no immune system. You can jump to these new models. If you think about most business school thinking, right, in the US or Europe or Japan, we've learned 50 years of Harvard MBA thinking.

We have to unlearn all of that and then relearn these new models whereas emerging markets, small companies are much more flexible and risk accommodating. They can take small teams and take on more risk. You talk about all that time. And therefore, small teams are much more adaptable to EXOs than large companies. All right, let's go to the next question here. Arvind says, how does one protect downside while building EXOs?

So here, if you're building an EXO, notice we said that you can have a very small resource footprint and then you staff on demand or leveraging other people's assets so that your risk profile is very, very low. You can put much less capital at risk, right? Talk about the cost of running a company or building a company, because you've been tracking some of that. If you go back 20 years,

if you were starting a tech company, it was on the order of $5 million for the servers, for the software, for the landlines, for the access to bandwidth, for all of that. That has dropped down orders of magnitude to the point where you can start the equivalent company today for 500 bucks. And what we're seeing in particular is with the generative AI world is that entrepreneurs are starting new generative AI-based EXOs with zero dollars. It's based on evening and weekend time because you have access to everything you need

Effectively for free. So it's an extraordinary time. Yeah, let's go the next question here Well, actually you have one of your interns is building like oh my god. Yeah What am I? Andre when he joined as one of my junior strike force members I said so are you playing with Jeremy? I said, yeah, I've got three startups. I was like, it blew me away. Yeah. All right. Next question. Lucas is asking when you have less financial capability, is it better to team up with investors to grow an idea or better to test while small and bootstrap? 100% our bias is to test while small and bootstrap. The more you can de-risk it, the more value you

create and the less dilution you take when you bring investors on board. Also, as soon as you bring investors on board, you become risk averse because you've made promises, your ability to be agile and to switch to a new idea. Remember, it's not what you think is right. It's what the data is showing you. And how many companies out there started in one area, had an amazing team, passion, had a vision in MTP, but what they exactly did shifted as they learn more and more. And sometimes your investors will be sort of a lead keel and anchor. If you're bringing investors, make sure that they're backing you in particular, not your idea. There's three kind of market things. One is the technology risk,

the market risk, and the execution risk. So investors look at those three. Today, almost everything comes down to team risk. How cohesive is the team when you inevitably go through the pivots and right turns to kind of navigate success? And investors are typically betting on that. The more you can make those right-hand turns and find your sweet spot, the ideally you get the product market fit before doing that. We'll talk more about this when we talk about building an EXO. So let's go to the next question. Michelle Mick Lee, thank you for your question. Do you see a need for a change of the social contract between workers and organizations. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I mentioned

that statistic, right? I'll repeat this 2005 to 2015. 94% of new jobs in the US were in the gig economy. So this totally breaks pension planning, unemployment benefits, retirement plans, all of that healthcare benefits, etc. So you need platforms like say say mbo partners that will handle some of that for you and handle that social contract so you can focus on just the gig economy etc when you have a platform like that or fiverr or upwork etc it allows you to focus on the work that you love doing the most right so most people in the gig economy are doing that work because they really want to rather than not can i I tell a funny story about Uber? Okay.

So a few years ago, one of our alumni in France said, hey, can I talk to you? I've got a meeting with the finance minister in France. I'd love to your help. I said, okay, what's the meeting about? He was like, well, he wants to know how to shut down Uber. I'm like, what? He goes, can't stand these independent contractors doing their thing, etc. And he wants to shut it down because the taxis go on strike the airport goes on strike and then the president yells at the finance minister

so we did like 10 minutes of research and we found the most amazing anecdote outside paris you have the suburbs called the banlieue which is full of north african immigrants uh it's like south central la in the 80s if you go in you may not come back out drugs gangs the whole lot the French government has spent 40 billion dollars trying to solve that problem okay over the decades Uber comes in in 18 months the crime rate drops by 10 times why because they're all out driving right because the labor liquidity offered by a gig economy like Uber or any of these others makes it so that anybody can go work when they have the time. A single mother can drop their child off at school, drive for a few hours, come back and make

a viable living. That is the future that we're going to be living into. And the platforms that support that, and note that most big companies don't still, that's where we're going to go. Today, most big companies have about 3% to 4% independent contractors. We think that's going to go to about 30% over the next decade contractors. We think that's going to go to about 30%. All right, let's go to some more, squeeze a few more questions here. Max says, is it a good idea to start an EXO that uses large language models to ask what a user wants to do in life, then maps a career path, daily tasks toward goal completion? So, Max, we're going to be talking about the steps for creating an EXO.

It begins with having a massive transformative purpose, an MTP, and then you're going to pull in the tools that you need to use to achieve that MTP. Listen, large language models are a tool usable across the board but I wouldn't start with a shiny widget and build a company around that. I really what is the problem you want to solve? Yeah it's you should focus on your MTP and then figure this out. Let me just touch on this this is really really important we'll touch on this more in the building an EXO segment but the traditional model was find a great idea and then try and push it into the marketplace, right?

And we recommend strongly that you start with an MTP and then find the technology, skills, capabilities that will satisfy that. Because the technologies are changing all the time, but your MTP, the problem you want to solve until you solve it is going to be there for a while. Let's go to the next question here. Adam asks, clean energy,

solar panels, batteries is showing exponential growth over long term. How does this fit within the EXO construct and approaches? So listen, solar and fusion and wind are technologies. The EXO construct here is really about what kind of a company you're going to build and who you're going to serve around that. But note that you are correct Adam, there's unbelievable potential happening. Why? Because solar energy is on a doubling pattern, it's doubling every 22 months. Okay and by the way it's been doing this for 40 years. So at this pace we will be able to deliver the entire world's energy needs in four doublings. We're like eight years away. 50% of the U.S. solar new energy is, I'm

sorry, 50% of all electric new energy on the grid this year in 2023 is from solar. Lithium-ion batteries have dropped 90% in costs over the last 10 years. what Elon Musk I'm going to touch on this this is the fundamental trends that are exponential when you build a company on an exponential trend say drones that are doubling every nine months that your company will grow along with the underlying technology right when Jeff Bezos was scanning around to start a company he noticed the internet was going 2300 percent a year so he said all, I'm just going to sell books over the internet. And the bookstore grew 2300% a year along with that. So you really want to piggyback these exponential trends and build a company, but start with the MTP. Let's go to Paco here for one last question before we go to our next

segment. How to include 10x social and environmental exponential impact as well as 10x growth in the EXO model? So this should be taken care of by the MTP. If you have an MTP, right, of solving transportation like Elon or others, basically the social and environmental aspects are built into that MTP. By definition, you're a very ethical company. You're trying to do good in ethical company. You're trying to do good in the world. You're trying to solve a fundamental problem. If you have a negative MTP or your MTP is not inspirational enough or contributory enough to solving some of the

big problems, you won't attract a community. And if you don't attract community, then you can't scale very effectively. So it all starts with the MTP. There's a question that popped up that we want to kick off with because both of us are dads. We actually both have kids turning 12 right now. And and J Dev says, Hey, Suleiman Peter, how have you applied this to your parenting styles? I want to raise my kids with an EXO mindset. Fantastic question. He's friends with Joe Paulus, John, and Missy Butcher.

So I think about this a lot. And I have three things I want for my kids. One, and it has nothing to do with technology. One is I want them to find their purpose. I want them to have, I won't call it an MTP at age 12, but when I was growing up, my passion of space, like Apollo and Star Trek, drove everything. So that MTP, that passion. The second one is the idea of asking great questions. I give this advice to the top CEOs in the world and my kids, ask great questions. It's the quality of

the questions you ask, right? So important. And the third is grit, not giving up. How about you, pal? I think there's a fundamental sea change. It's almost like linear to exponential or scarcity due to abundance. All of us grew up doing education and parenting on the supply side. So you were told become an engineer, become a doctor, become a lawyer, become supply side. So you were told become an engineer, become a doctor, become a lawyer, become an accountant. So you trained in on the supply side on a set of skills, and then you went to the job market to sell those skills, right? Many of us, I started engineering school because my dad was an engineer. And I went to medical school because my dad was a doctor. Right. So all jobs came from the supply side. Now we're shifting

over to the demand side, which is the MTP. What excites you? What gets you most passionate? The best parenting we've seen is where you go, what problem do you really want to solve, young child? What really excites you? And let them follow their passion and they'll figure it out. And give them the belief that they can, that the tools they have access to are extraordinary. There's no problem that cannot be solved. And I mentioned this, by mentioned this by the way your abundance 360 conference was one of the best conferences i've ever been to in my life and i've been to quite a few there was a comment that came up when we were chatting with ray kurzweil somebody talked about parenting if you went back 20 years ago or 30 years ago and you had a parenting problem right your child was doing

something or something happened you had like no resources to get any help. You could basically ask three friends that were also useless parents because they had no idea. And you ask your cousin and your buddy and your mother who also had no idea. Now, when you have a problem with your child, look at all the resources online,

parenting groups, support systems, unbelievable people, gurus around the world who've studied this. The amount of available information to do parenting properly today is 100x what we had two generations ago, right? So this is why the kids today are so unbelievable. They're going over just much better parenting. They've gone from a scarcity to an exponential point. From John, he says, why has blockchain enterprise adoption been so slow? What's the catalyst team to change this?

So all of these new technologies, right, come with risk. Can I go back just a second? The most insightful thing that you and Stephen put in abundance was the fact that we have an amygdala. Yes. And that amygdala is there for scanning for danger. So when we were running around on the plains of Africa, if you heard a noise in the bushes, you ran. Why? Because bad news can kill you. Good news doesn't kill you. So if I miss some good news, I might miss some fruit that I could eat. If I miss some bad news, I died. So we're

10 times more likely to pay attention to bad news than good news because of the danger factor. When we come across a new technology, autonomous cars, drones, the first reaction is the amygdala going, oh my god, that's dangerous. Autonomous cars might kill somebody. Let's ban the cars until we understand. We saw Italy banning, you know, chat GPT, right? Why do you ban that? Because you don't want a robot killing people. We'd much rather have drunk people killing people than robots killing people. So this is why you have to be very evidentially based around this. The reason blockchain is tough in an enterprise is it's new, it's uncertain, and it entails a risk.

And big companies are really, really bad at risk. The catalyst that's going to solve it is EXOs growing up and supplanting the big companies. That's what's going to solve it is EXOs growing up and supplanting the big companies. That's what's going to happen. Or it'll get to the point where the blockchain tools like Casper, the new blockchain, is one of the most sophisticated enterprise grade ones that we've seen. And that will allow enterprise adoption with all the resilience and security that enterprises need and want. So it's going to take some time for enterprises to get in. We're still in the crypto winter as far as enterprise blockchain adoption is concerned. Let's go to the next question. Zarni says 10x organizations are focused on leveraging technologies to create impacts,

but according to data, most of the exponential impacts are felt in the global north. Yeah, so this is true for now, right? So let's talk about EXOs. The birthplace of these are probably Silicon Valley, whereas Peter mentioned we relate to risk as experience. Okay? In most parts of the world if you take a risk and you fail, you're a failure, etc. And I'm going to tell another quick anecdote here because I have a friend who's done eight startups. Seven venture-backed startups. The eighth one is a billion-dollar company.

So when I was researching for the book, we went and interviewed the VCs that funded this guy. I said, this guy failed five times already. And you funded him on attempt number six. He fails. You fund him on attempt number seven. You fail. And you finally got jackpot. What had you fund him through attempts?

Let's note that this would not happen anywhere else in the world, right? In most of the world, if you fail once or twice, you're done. You're never getting funding again. Silicon Valley, these guys funded him eight times before he finally succeeded. And the answer from the VCs was incredible. They said, that guy is so crazy. The one thing we know is he's never going to stop. He's going to keep plugging away until he gets there. And at that point, we want to be

there when he succeeds. So that repetition and that resilience for keeping is what made Silicon Valley successful. And essentially, these patterns are now going around the world. I want to give you an example of what's happening around the world in terms of democratization and dematerialization. The third fastest electric car in the world is called the Vega. It's 900 horsepower. You can go look it up in your separate browser window that you've been browsing while we've been watching this webinar. And go check out the Vega. It's a car, 900 horsepower.

It's being designed, engineered, and built in Sri Lanka. I've been to Sri Lanka twice. That hotbed of automotive innovation. Elephants. If you can, they have no ecosystem, no expertise, no experience, no funding, and they've never done this before. I'm going to suggest to you that if you can build the third fastest electric car on an island of fishermen and farmers, you can do anything anywhere. So right now, all of the major breakthroughs that are going to happen in the next decade

or two are going to come from emerging markets. Because of what I said earlier, you don't have to unlearn 50 years of industrialization. You don't have a huge immune system there, right? You can be the leader. We're seeing this in Africa, right? Nigeria in particular is a hotbed of entrepreneurialism. And it's just what we're seeing. And I want to make two points. I forgot to say this earlier. When Peter talked about linear to exponential, there are two pieces of this that are unbelievably important. For the first time in history, human

history, we have a dozen technologies moving quickly. In the past, throughout history, maybe one technology is accelerating or another. We've never had a dozen all double at the same time. Now, each is doubling when you intersect them. That adds a whole other multiplier. Second, and more importantly, especially for this question, is throughout history, throughout human history,

it's always been true that advanced technologies cost a lot. And only a government lab or a big corporate lab could do R&D, launch new products and services. Today, for the first time in human history, advanced technologies are very cheap. Solar energy is cheap, sensors are cheap, the AI tools that we use are basically free, the blockchain is open source and free. It means anybody can get into a legacy industry, come in with a beginner's mind, leverage new ideas, and completely disrupt it. So we're going to see an explosion of innovation coming from everywhere in the world, more from the global south and emerging markets because they're hungrier, and that's going

to completely change the world. Take Vitalik Buterin, 18-year-old kid, middle class kid growing up in Toronto, gets together with a few friends, they ignore their professors and boom, we have Ethereum, a $300-$400 billion ecosystem with eight guys, right? Now, I will suggest to you that no banker in the world can get their head around Ethereum. All right next question here akshay from kenya and by the way there's some um bylaw that says you have to be under 25 years old to program the blockchain i don't know what that's written but that's true not true at all okay from kenya says what happens to businesses that can't be digitized and dematerialized for example farming food production medication and i would say akshayhay, that we're not going to eat bits.

I agree with you in that regard. But there are elements of the farming business that can be digitized and dematerialized. I'll give you an example, and it's not all the way, but we're heading towards stem cell grown meats, where we're going from cellular agriculture, instead of growing an entire chicken or cow or pig, we're taking a stem cell, we're growing it in a vat, we're reinventing how we're doing it. We're also going to vertical farming, where these vertical farms are operating 24-7,

and the growth cycle is continuous, and there's no pesticides, the pH and the micronutrients in the water, we have to realize just because we did something the same old way for a hundred or a thousand years doesn't mean we can't do it better and more efficiently in a brand new way. I want to touch on agriculture, right? The second oldest industry in the world. For thousands of years, we've been doing horizontal agriculture, right? 70% of our freshwater globally goes towards agriculture. 99% of that runs off and gets wasted, right? Now we're seeing vertical farming, hydroponics, aeroponics just tip over into economic viability. And now we're going to see explosive exponential growth in that domain.

So vertical farms deliver five times the yield of traditional farming. The best calculation we have seen is if you took 35 skyscrapers in Manhattan, turned them into vertical farms, and ran that, just that would feed the entire city sustainably. So you don't need millions of square kilometers. I just want to make one more crazy point. But then I'm going to continue. Go ahead.

The five most prolific food-producing countries in the world are the ones you'd expect. U.S., Brazil, China, Russia, the biggest countries in the world, right? Because they have the most land. Guess what the five most top food-exporting countries in the world, okay? So the number one country in the world that exports food is the U.S. Number two is Holland, the Netherlands, okay? Look on a map. It's like this big. It's like nothing. But they export the second most food of any country, the Netherlands. Look on a map. It's like this big.

It's like nothing. But they export the second most food of any country in the world. Why? Because they've completely technology enabled all their agriculture, greenhouses, etc. And they export $70 billion worth of food a year from this little country that's barely the size of a city. So that's what's possible. Agriculture completely changes going forward. You need to look at the intersection

of these exponential technologies with farming, right? So genetics is another one. There's a new breed of cows out of China that produce 50% more milk per cow. There's a new strain of rice, PR23, I believe it's called, that is able to provide eight yields of rice, PR23, I believe it's called, that is able to provide eight yields of crops, reducing labor by like 60%. And then finally, it's how do you use drones and robotics and other things, right? The growing of the plant, the cellular elements isn't going to change,

but everything wrapped around it to make it more efficient of how you produce it, how you collect it, how you distribute it is the digitization. Let's go to one more question. Wait, I want to say one more thing about this. This is what we're seeing also in agriculture and around all of this. You see the immune system response. For example, France banned GMOs being shipped to Africa. They banned Uber as well. They banned everything. But not to pick up, every country has this immune system. So I remember this is costing lives because people are starving in Africa and they're banning the shipments. I remember talking to the agriculture minister of one of these countries and she just said this so powerfully. She said, it's really great to talk about GMOs, but can we eat first? Right?

And that just like lands completely. And we've now served a trillion meals around the world using GMOs. How many deaths from those trillion meals? And we've not seen any issues or public health problems. So you get this immune system response, the amygdala response, and we operate at a group level, a country level. And unless we have the data, this is why the evidentiary part of this is so powerful and so important. Gather the data, run experiments, and that will tell you the way to go. Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices.

It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual found upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time. Hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life, to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, it's free. Just check out the link below and download it right now.

All right, last question here. Yannick says, what are the essential aspects that make up a team of exponential entrepreneurs? You know, at the end of the day, we're going to be talking about this in the mindset section, but it is a group that are united by that massive transformative purpose. It's a group that is going to build a culture

of data-driven decision-making, a group that is going to build a culture of data-driven decision-making, a group that's going to be focused on experimental, you know, creating experimental culture inside the organization, all of these. And it's a group that's, you know, using the attributes in this book. But I would say the top three things for me is the MTP, data-driven, experimental. And mindset. And of course, yeah. All right, Max asks, what tools do you use to improve the quality

of the questions you ask? What metrics do you use to measure their utility and relevance? So first of all, Max, I hope along with everybody else here, the instant response is chat GPT is, I mean, even if you don't know uh what question to ask going in and saying i'm trying to learn about this area what are the top 10 questions i should ask is an amazing beginning

to your journey um i was i was doing a presentation to the top c-suite of one of the biggest consumer products companies in the world and i I asked ChatGPT four questions. What would disrupt this company? If I was a startup, how would I attack this company? What disruptive technologies could I take advantage of if I was the company? And I showed it to them. And they're like, holy crap, that's like half a million dollars of consulting. So I said, I'll send you an invoice. But this is critical because the key when you can get into the routine of it is you get into the habit of just asking ChatGPT to help you ask the question. Here's the challenge. We don't know how to think other than the way we know how to think.

It's obvious, but we're limited in that regard. So ChatGPT, the other option is obviously getting a group of people together who are knowledgeable and brainstorming. Believe me, at every executive meeting, every board meeting I have, I've got ChatGPT open in a window and I'm having a side conversation. It's an extraordinary superpower that's only going to be getting better. All right. Juan asks, given the most finance and tech improvements are mainly led by financially stronger countries, is it really possible for developing countries to launch a successful EXO? Yes, without question.

Not only is it more possible, I think it's more likely going forward. Why? Because the cost of launching an EXO has dropped to near zero, right? So there's no limits now to barriers to entry. You can basically get the product market fit for a few hundred dollars. And you have less competition. You have a green field to start. You also have the potential to have a regulatory arbitrage. In some countries that don't have laws against something, perhaps able to go in there and create a regulatory structure that supports you easier than in a

crowded field. Crypto not allowed in the U.S. basically. I mean, come on. So lots of possibility there. I want to mention one more point about this is that in emerging markets and developing countries, number one, remember what I said earlier, you don't have to unlearn 50 years of Harvard MBA thinking you can leapfrog straight to new models, right? I'll mention again, Mercado Libre, the biggest company on the Buenos Aires stock market is an EXO right so now we're gonna see the most successful companies so what we're now going to do because we have that fortune 100 data Chandra Nagpal just finished scoring the public companies in the Indian stock market right now we can

go and show every company where there where are they missing stuff and create an investment thesis around that over time investors will not invest in you if you're not an exo because you're just going to do that much better if you're organized this way i'm going to say it again by the end of this next decade every company impact project non-profit government department will be structured this way just because it's better and we have the data and evidence to show that the opportunities in emerging markets are a thousand times what they are in the Western world and the industrialized world. And you're hungrier and you're closer to the problem. If I try to create a future for water solutions in Silicon Valley, I'm like 5,000 miles away

from the problem. Whereas if you're in Mexico City or in a favela in Rio, you're 10 steps from the problem. So you're going to create much better solutions going forward. Alexandru asks, can you have a personal MTP and an MTP for each company project you have, or does the MTP need to be unique? Alexandru, absolutely uh i have an mtp for myself it's the same as the mtp for abundance 360. and if you're the founder a lot of times your mtp will translate into mtp of your the company that you're starting you can have an mtp for your family or for a family foundation or a country when i was with the prime minister of greece I was saying, you know, Greece needs a massive transformative purpose. It's that banner that literally lights the world as a beacon to come and support that MTP. My commentary to some of the Greeks when I was

once over there was that you were the birthplace of democracy, civics, education. They all need to be radically reinvented. Rebirth them. Let's reinvent education, civics, education. They all need to be radically reinvented. Rebirth them. Let's reinvent education, civics, democracy in Greece, because that's the place to do it. Yeah. So please, if you go through the moonshotplanner.com platform, you can go through multiple times and develop one for yourself and develop one for your company, your startup. And if you're inside a large organization, a company that doesn't have it, and believe me, it's not a value proposition.

It's not a pitch proposition. It's not, you know, we want to increase shareholder return. You're, go to your CEO and talk about the importance of getting a massive transformative purpose and if they don't listen then you leave yeah and start there's no point go start your own do what eric you wanted and go off and build your own now that that's why you need the mtp it turns out when you do things for the money it never works when you do it for the passion for solving that problem nothing will stop you um Just a quick shout out again to startups and the resilience needed by startup teams.

Very few people know Google seems very successful right now. But at the time, there were 12 other search engines, right? So we actually did some research and we found out for some of the big products out there, how many times did they have to do an investment pitch before they got funded? And this is in the book. So for Google, it was 340 investor pitches. So Larry and Sergey got told, no, we will not invest in you 340 times

because there's a dozen search engines out there already until, what if they'd stopped at 330? How many other entrepreneurs stopped like one pitch too early before they got funded? It's an unbelievably difficult thing. You need an unbelievable amount of resilience, meaning you have to have an MTP to keep you excited over time. Yeah.

Same for me. An XPRIZE, 150 pitches of no, no, no, no until I met Anusha Ansari. And you have to come back to it each time with that same level of passion and enthusiasm. And so unless it's core and in your heart and soul, it's not going to succeed. And definitely one per project. Like if my MTP is transform civilization, that's not an obvious project. But I could have a moonshot of let's update all of our institutions. Let's create a category of entrepreneurs that can go transform the world.

Because this community, you people on the call, are the only people that are going to change the world. Governments aren't going to do it. Big companies are too interested in the status quo. So you're the folks, right? So let's give you the tools and the inspiration. That's the reason we're doing this. Yeah. By the way, if you go to learn.openexo.com, there's a full kind of training modules on how to learn how to be an EXO, etc. that's available through the EXO Pass. All right right let's go to the next question. Polkit says what will happen to the masses of the population who don't upskill themselves? Will they be replaced by AI? How will that affect unemployment? All right let me crack.

All right there's a lot. Yeah there's a lot here. So think about this as having a slide rule to a calculator. If you're still trying to do calculations as a slide rule and everybody else has a calculator, you're going to be left behind, right? As Peter says, it's not going to be AI that takes your job. It's somebody using AI that will take your job. Now, unemployment, we have very strong feelings about. When we've seen major technology injections into society,

everybody freaks out and goes, oh my God, there's going to be mass unemployment. We've never seen it before. I'll give you a specific example. I'll give you two examples. One is when we created ATM machines in the 1970s, there was all this hand-wringing. What will we do with millions of bank tellers? We'll have mass unemployment. Thousands and millions of bank tellers will be out of a job. Except what actually happened was the cost of running a branch dropped

by 10 times. The banks created 10 times more branches and the number of bank tellers has not changed at all. The three most robotics prolific countries where they use the most robotics automating the human manual worker are South Korea, Sweden, and Germany. The lowest unemployment countries in the world are South Korea, Sweden, Germany. So automation does not take away jobs. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins

and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the U.S. today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full-body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan,

a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Found Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter.

When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. All right. Fleming says, given how important IP is in exponential technologies, how do you keep trade secrets while using staff on demand? So let me hit this. There is going to be a point in the not too distant future where IP is really immaterial.

I remember having Astro Teller and Steve Jervitz, and Steve was at DFJ, now he's in his own venture fund, probably one of the most successful venture venture capitalist on the board of Tesla and SpaceX. We're having a conversation. There's a point in the near future where AI is so powerful that when you launch a product, the likelihood is that we're going to have technology that can reinvent it and improve on it in a half a cycle. a half a cycle if you're dependent upon intellectual property to protect you instead of going out there and marketing and reinventing yourself constantly you're gonna lose that race yeah um second thing is the world is changing so fast that IP becomes less and less relevant now the third part of it is the execution okay whatever my IP is let's say I've got the greatest search engine crawling thing in the world.

If I have the passion to go execute against that, nobody's going to beat me. If somebody else grabs that, they have to have as much passion as me and over out-execute me. So it always comes down to how fast and how aggressively, how much passion can you bring to the table on how well can you execute against the idea, not the intellectual property around that? You can't rest on your laurels. You need to have an amazing team, an amazing MTP, and constantly disrupting yourself. All right. Anna asks, what are some pitfalls or misconceptions that companies should be aware of when embarking

on their journey to become EXOs? How can they overcome those? So something we didn't touch on today because we didn't have time is between the attributes of an EXO, there are a lot of interdependencies. So for example, you can't implement autonomy and decentralize your decision making if you don't have an MTP guiding thinking and guiding experimentation etc etc ge implemented the largest business training or corporate training exercise in history they trained 60 000 managers on lean startup thinking and it failed because they didn't have autonomy okay so if you wanted to implement lean you better implement autonomy to give people free to run

the experiments that are most exciting to them. So we document these in the book. We've got sections for each attribute on what are the requirements, prerequisites to implement this attribute. Make sure you have these things in place. If you have experimentation, then you need dashboards to constantly tell you whether the experiments are working, are you running enough or not, etc. So those are then the context of running an EXO. If you're a small company and you're trying to turn into an EXO, follow these steps, pick an MTP and just turn completely into an EXO.

If you're a large company, do not implement EXO inside your organization. You will have an immune system response, the antibodies will attack you, you'll get a bunch of error. Talk to anybody that's been in corporate innovation and ask them to turn around and you'll see all these arrows in their back, et cetera. Big companies cannot innovate. What you do is you take the crazy people in your big company, put them at the edge of the company and build one into adjacent spaces the way. So I'll give you a specific example.

Nestle built Nespresso for years trying to run it as the line of business inside Nestle, and it failed because the value proposition, go-to-market product was completely different from the big food processing company. CEO finally put the team on the edge, brick wall between them and the rest of the company, and boom, every hotel room in the world has an espresso machine. So the way big companies innovate is they create EXOs off the edge. They run an EXO sprint to break the immune system. And then over time, ideally, the EXO becomes a new gravity center for the company. So that's how big companies do it. AstroTeller tells it in a similar fashion. He says, listen, you're gonna have your employees break into two different groups. There's the group that's responsible

for delivering 10% annual growth, right? They're the economic engine of your company. You don't wanna break that engine, it's fueling everything. But then you wanna take those moonshot thinkers, those individuals who are driven by an MTP, put them on the edge and they're responsible not for 10%, but a thousand percent, 10X. You want to say to those individuals on the edge, listen, I don't want you thinking about 10%. You need to be only focusing on things that are

10X bigger. And that group on the edge needs to report directly to the CEO. And that CEO needs to have coverage from their board because you're going to have a lot of experiments that are going to fail, right? You have to realize you're going to have a 90% mortality rate on these. And if you're failing and reporting failure after failure after failure, your board's going to fire you as a CEO unless you've got the top coverage. But it's that one out of 10 that yields an extraordinary success. Yeah. This is a really critical point that's only possible today. Not even five or 10 years ago was this possible. It used to be that if you're a big company and you want to do some disruptive innovation, you had to make what was called a big bet and put a big chunk of resources and

initiatives behind it. The CFO hated it, would try and defund it the minute they could, etc., etc. Now, because the cost of attempting and experimenting is so low, you can run a portfolio of investments on the edge of the company. Don't even tell the CFO, and ideally you don't, and only double down when you see success. If you have a little startup on the edge that's growing 10x and you go to the board and say, I want a little investment, they're going to go, yeah, here. So there's a whole set of... And remember, we have a community of 25,000 people in the OpenEXO community ready to help and advise all your companies, et cetera, because we're passionate about transformation

and solving this. And Peter has the same with the Abundance360 community. All right, let's go to the next one. Max says, I'm just starting my EXO. Which skills should I learn? What do I outsource? And what do I outsource to other companies? So first of all, Max, if you're the CEO of this, again, getting your mindsets in order

is fundamental. It's understanding you know how you're thinking about this having an abundance and exponential mindset a moonshot mindset a curiosity mindset it is getting your MTP organized now to be clear you don't need to be an expert in all of the technologies you want to be an AI expert what you need to know is what are you good at what do you love doing and then finding partners that are good at other areas, right? If you're great at fundraising or great at marketing be the best at that and then bring in the complementary skill sets

That are going to support you as part of your founding team. Hmm two points I want to add one as Peter mentioned if you're the founder MTP and mindset is all you should focus on because that's going to drive culture. Outsource everything else if you can. Second thing that's really important, I want to comment on Elon Musk here, maybe the most successful entrepreneur in the world today. Look at his methodology. He takes an MTP, solve transportation, right? Then he finds what exponential technologies will inform that MTP, battery storage, solar energy, et cetera. And where will that technology be on a 10-year exponential curve?

And then aim for that point. Aim to, because it takes like 10 years to build a company, 11 in some cases, et cetera. So you aim to invest in that. He has no expertise in the space industry, the car industry, or the energy industry. If I can add to that. And he's created market leaders in all of those because of his mindset and this methodology.

He calls it first principle thinking. So when he started on Tesla, and I was there at the early days of both companies, he made himself convinced that the battery technology would be viable when he looked at the spot cost of the metals involved, of the cobalt, of the nickel, of the lithium, and said, okay, here's the cost per ounce, per gram, and so I know I can get it down to this cost. It was nothing that would stop it. When he started SpaceX, he went toussia to buy expendable boosters and

found them ridiculously ancient 50 years and ridiculously expensive and he came back and he got himself convinced that there's no reason you could not create a fully reusable first stage that could be fired over and over again with that first principle thinking he started literally with an aerospace textbook he had a physics background first all, he's brilliant beyond belief. Just let's begin there and don't underestimate that, right? Having extraordinarily intelligence in yourself and in your founding team is super important. But with the fundamentals in place, then methodically started building step by step by step. in place, then methodically started building step by step by step.

There's something I want to touch on here. When Elon set out to build SpaceX and wanted to do the reusable rockets, I remember seeing a panel, you can find this on YouTube, a panel of astronauts that are in their 70s that went on the Apollo program, Buzz Aldrin, etc, etc. They got on a panel publicly, and they begged the government to stop elon they said he's going to destroy the space industry because he will fail they literally had tears running down their face saying we spent our entire lives dedicated the space industry and and and he had to deal with this and and then he succeeded why because if you constantly every time they launched a rocket they were testing 65 different things and learning every single time. Those rockets are wired with thousands and thousands of sensors.

And just like the recent relativity launch of Terran 1, which made it to space but not to orbit, you get massive data. You update your AI model, your algorithms on the rocket. You improve. And that was never the case in the past aerospace industry. You had to have the experts guess right on the first time with their slide rules. All right, let's get one more question here. Daniel, what methods or approaches have you implemented to foster a mindset of abundance? And how has this influenced the trajectory of your organizations? Daniel, that insight of abundance came to me first at Singularity University, and it

was the realization that technology was able to take things that were there but not accessible and make them usable, right? So we're bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun every day than we consume. And technology, solar, now perovskite, is making it more and more usable. The transformation of available, not accessible, to accessible is where it's going. And I collect, and you can go to diamantis.com

and see all of the abundance charts. I collect all of this constant evidence that is showing us increasing abundance. And I train my mind by what I read, what I write about, who I hang out with. Right. And that's, you know, so if you consider coming to Abundance360, that's our mission. A360.com. We are training your mindset year round around these fundamental mindsets that enable you

to become an exponential entrepreneur. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our

world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandist.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. All right, Rodrigo is asking, how does the EXO model either address cybersecurity ethics, sustainability challenges associated with exponential technologies? Okay, so I'll answer this in a couple of ways. One is when you look at cybersecurity,

if you go back 5, 10, 15 years ago, we were worried, oh my God, the internet is about to collapse with phishing. Then we thought, oh my God, email is about to be destroyed via spam, et cetera. And we found algorithms to solve for those okay and people get freaked out going oh my god i can have cyber security and ai going after cyber security to crash my servers what am i going to do about that we forget that we also have the good side of it remember that amygdala

freaks out about negative things we have the good side so it becomes an arms race so cyber security deals with that now um i forgot the rest of the question. Let's go back here. Oh, yeah. Sustainability. Note that by default, I want to just talk about the economic thesis behind an EXO because it's really important. When you're running a business, you worry about demand and supply, specifically the cost of demand, the cost of supply. Hopefully, you're on the right

side of that equation. The internet came along, and for the first time in business history, allowed you to drop the cost of demand of customer acquisition exponentially. Online marketing, referral marketing, every Silicon Valley company is trying for a viral loop, in which case your acquisition costs go to zero. And for the first time in the history of business, you can acquire customers at no cost. Magical. Boom. All these things, platforms pop up, Facebook, et cetera, leveraging that side. I'll just mention one.

Hang on. Exponential organizations have figured out is how do you drop the cost of supply exponentially? Take Airbnb. The cost of adding a room to their inventory is near zero. If you're Hyatt, you have to build a hotel. So now you have the ability to go into any legacy industry with a very low marginal cost of supply, and then your market cap explodes because that's the denominator. as humans tend to see the negative first. It's just the way our brains are programmed for survival. And the way that I flip that in a Juno move is I say, listen, the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. So if there truly is a huge issue there, think of it as an incredible opportunity for starting an EXO to solve it. The other thing is that, like it or not,

we tend to see the problems way out in the future and we accelerate it to today. And we see what's coming and then, oh my God, it's going to doom us. But we forget that we have a period of exponential growth. We're going to see more progress in the next decade than we have in the past century. And so during the decade ahead of us, we're going to have breakthrough after breakthrough

after breakthrough, enabling us to deal with a lot of the challenges that we're concerned about. Gil asks, how does the scale formula apply to manufacturing, equipment, installation, where lots of experience, relationships, and customization is needed? where lots of experience, relationships, and customization is needed. So again, look at the rocket launch business and notice, which is a lot of expertise and experience needed, right? And note the 100x drop in costs, and we'll see another 100x drop in costs. The same thing applies for agriculture and vertical farming,

where the yields are five times what they used to be. Even horizontal farming, we now have drones scanning fields do with infrared to scan for where there are disease centers so that we can pocket out and treat those plants specifically so all of these exponential technologies each of them is adding a 10x capability and benefit to the legacy environment yeah we're going to see ai and and vr reinvent how we design and manufacture. I'm going to describe something I have in my mind. It's going to go to a virtualized 3D studio and the AI is going to build something. I'm going to look at it, spin it around and say, yes, that's it. Please print.

And the speed of going from mind to materialization is just exploding onto the scene, right? Yeah. 3D printing. We have a dear friend, Avi Reikenthal, head of Nexa 3D, been looking at a 10X increase in speed, 100X increase in material strength, full color, mixed materials. We're truly reinventing how we manufacture stuff. We are so locked in to how we've always done stuff,

whether it's farming, whether it's farming, whether it's manufacturing, whether it's designing, and all of this is changing rapidly. All right. Sai, you said, question is, that was a refreshing point you made about our system, education system being outdated. I'm not sure it was refreshing. It was kind of saddening and tragic. But yes, a fair point.

What key subjects should we add to update our education system? I've got a blog coming out about this in the next few days. Go to chat GPT and ask it a question. Ask the question, you know, in order to deal with accelerating future and oncoming of AGI, what should we be teaching our kids? Fascinating answers, right? Has nothing to do with what we normally do. It's really about agility. It's about great question asking. It's about morals and ethics. It's about a whole range of soft skills. It's how to make a compelling argument, how to lead. These are the things that we're not currently teaching in our schools. Yeah. I mean, you know, you could, we could spend a day just on education, right? But just to summarize, all our education systems are push-based systems. You get

a bunch of kids into a classroom and you try and cram algebra into them. Meanwhile, most of them are thinking about lunch, right? But today, if you think about how the world works, you pick a topic that you want, you're interested in, you pull down the information you need to solve that problem. For anybody that's a college graduate and out in the workforce, how much of your college education are you actually using in the workplace? Answer is almost zero. And that gives you a hint of where things are going. So we're going to go from push-based education systems to pull-based learning systems driven

by an MTP. Our kids are 12 years old about. I'm desperately hoping the entire university system collapses in the next 6 years before they have to go there because I hope they don't have to go through what I went through at university and be structured more and more you put it really well when you're doing a master's

degree in biotech or in a brain you're getting more and more narrow. Today as someone who's got a doctoral degree I was in abundance I talked about describing to my grandfather what I was working on and I say look you see the dirt over there He says oh you're an expert in the dirt. No, no, no in the dirt. There's these little microorganisms called Called bacteria. Oh, you're an expert in those no, no, no in the bacteria. There's this thing called DNA that codes for life Oh, you're an expert that no no in the in there. There are these little things called plasm Oh, you're an expert in that? No, no. In there, there are these

little things called plasmids. You're an expert in that? No. There's this enhancer sequence, and I'm an expert in that. So, I mean, at the end of the day, we've gone so narrow because that's what was needed. AI is going to enable us as our co-pilot to go much, much broader. But we, as as Salim says both high school and university is going to need to be reinvented if you're doing a master's degree in neuroscience today by the time you finish your master's degree you're you're out of date okay and so this is a structural issue our ability to teach something is being outpaced by the changes in that subject area.

And so we need a completely new model where we're going to pull down the learning as we need it for whatever job that's going on. Forget the 20 years of education and then you're out productive in the workforce for 60 or 50 years and then you retire. We're going to have to be online, nonstop, practicing learning. The most valuable colleagues and employees you have are the ones that learn the fastest. All right. Last question from Alexandru. Peter, you've shared a model of ChatGPT-like platform that you can personally use for creating an MTP and Moonshot. Can you please share more on how you run it and feed it? Sure, Alexandru. When you go and use it, and again, there's a free version of it right there for you it's going to prompt you it's going to prompt you on your mtp it's going to start to ask you

questions but as you answer the questions based upon what you've put in so far it's going to generate a variety of different options for you and then you can pick the options and so it's really a thinking partner it's a thought partner so when i design my MTP, I'm clear about who do I want to be a hero to? And then what are the action verbs? And what is the end goal? So again, it's an iterative process. It's fun. It's easy.

And again, one of the things that is important for me inside of my Abundance360 community is that every member has created a massive transformative purpose. By the way, it doesn't have to be transforming the world. Your MTP can be narrow and specific, but it's what wakes you up in the morning and gets you excited, right? And then once you have that MTP, my A360 members have their moonshot they're working on as well. And at OpenEXO, we now have an entire community, 25,000 people in 140 countries, ready to help you build your EXO and build your moonshot with advice, experience, etc., etc.

We curated this book with the help of that entire community. So come join us. It's free to join. There's an unbelievable amount of resources available. Pick your MTP and go solve for that area. So a pleasure, buddy. I'm off to catch a flight. Peter, it's been an absolute honor to share this journey with you. We almost got through, got into it with the original book, but now we're really in it. And as usual, it's just so inspiring watching you.

You've been such an inspiration to me and so many millions of people with the abundance thinking plus the mindsets plus the moonshots. So thank you for everything. And thank you for what you've built and spawning the original idea of an exponential organization. And thank you to our Singularity University community as well for all the support, inspiration. Check out su.org as well. Take care, everybody. Be well.

Take care.