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

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

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

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of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils so whether you're going for a run or just running late do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't find secret at your nearest walmart or shoppers drug mart today twitter is essentially the global public square and if you start acting out in a global public square, the police come and take you away. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do, this is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Welcome everybody to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with one of my dearest friends on the planet, an extraordinary thinker, someone who, you know, Salim Ismail, all I can say about you is we have fun together. And there's probably no subject we will not dive into.

Sometimes we dive in and hit the bottom of the pool. Sometimes we fly. How are you doing today? I'm very well. I'm doing great. Yeah, those of you who don't know Salim, he was the first president of Singularity University. We can talk about how I conned him into running SU. He was the head of the incubator.

Was it Brickhouse or Brickworks? Yeah, Brickhouse. Brickhouse at Yahoo. He's the head of Open EXO. He and I are writing a book together on exponential organizations. It's the second book in the series. Salim wrote the first one. I was supposed to co-author, but my publisher wouldn't let me do it.

Long story is there. Godfather to my two boys. Salim, where are you today, pal? I'm in Miami dealing with the hurricane. Yeah, that's right. I was talking to my mom, and she's I'm in Miami dealing with the hurricane. Yeah, that's right. I was talking to my mom, and she's in Boca and dealing with the same thing. It's a pain in the butt. It is.

In fact, it's one of the reasons we came to Miami eight years ago from the West Coast was because we ran a bunch of numbers and worked out that in about 20, 25 years years Miami's gone. So better enjoy it while it's here. That's one of the rationales we have for getting here. I wanted to always create a map of the United States that had the dangers laid out. Florida would have hurricanes. California would have earthquakes. The Midwest would have boredom as the major disaster that you... Anyway. It's kind of incredible what you would do. And you know,

people moved to the Pacific Northwest because they thought it was safe. And then you have wildfires, unexpectedly heat waves. I remember talking to climate gurus about the heat wave last year, and they said, we can't even create models that encompass that. Like, we just can't even replicate that. Well, you know, Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest is in for a massive earthquake sometime soon. Yeah. I mean.

It's one of my favorite stories of the inability of human beings to deal with systemic change. Which is? It's worth telling the story if you... Yeah, go for it. I've got all the time in the world. So in 1700, there was like a nine point something earthquake, one of the biggest ever, 50 miles off the coast of Seattle, took out a thousand miles of the coastline from Vancouver all

the way down to Oregon. And there's been rumblings under the water recently. So they've been going, hey, wait a minute. So they start researching and they go over to Japan because they worked out that this must have created quite a tsunami and asked, hey, did you see a tsunami? And sure enough, at that time exactly, a stonking huge tsunami came over the Pacific

and took out half of Japan. It's that big. So they're like, wow, this is great. We found it. Fantastic. And they're starting to leave. this is great. We found it. Fantastic. And they're starting to leave, and the Japanese researchers go, wait a minute, you know this happens repeatedly, right? And they're like, wait, what?

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

and take out a thousand miles. So if this podcast releases on the day that happens, I don't know if it's going to be prophetic or people are going to blame us for it. Well, you know, what blows my mind is if you ask people in Seattle, many of whom know this story, you go, does this affect your decision to buy a house, whatever? No, everybody's merrily going about their lives as if nothing happened. That part I don't get. That part, like, we're so bad at that well it's it's the human it's the human challenge of we're dealing with we don't actually value the disasters that are coming uh in any way shape or form that makes sense and we all we focus on is what's happening this morning like in politics or on twitter well

as you're fond of saying everything important happened within a day's walk, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the brain, that's the mind. The human mind evolved 100,000 years ago, a million years ago, and it was nothing that affected you that was not within a day's walk that you care about, and nothing changed generation to generation. It was always the same. And that innate wiring is a pain in the ass right now. It is a pain in the ass. We actually, I think the only way to solve humanity is an intervention into our brain chemistry and brain makeup. I mean, it's really the only way. Is that plant medicine or is that? I think those are the beginnings of it, but there's all sorts of other mechanisms, whether it's brain computing interfaces or something.

But we need an intervention because we're kind of operating off our limbic systems for so much of it, right? Like the new cycle that you like to talk about. Yeah. It's still the animal brain. We're operating from a position of fear and scarcity. Yeah. And it's a problem. I remember when I was researching this, we had this lizard brain and then the neocortex evolved very, very fast. And when you talk to anthropologists, it was literally like a tumor got created. It's a couple of million years ago we created the frontal lobe and the neocortex. I mean, it's fairly recent.

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

you end up with a fight or flight response. We are so screwed. Yeah. Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels, and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do. And sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar.

For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to levels.link backslash Peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. Speaking of screwed, how are you feeling about Elon and Twitter these days? I mean, it's...

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

public square and if you start acting out in a global public square the police come and take you away you can't just stand there and and throw out stink bombs or or uh start shooting people you can't because if you do if the police don't come take you away the people who are worth hearing or you know speaking to go away that's right either we keep some sanity or not but it's it's interesting i remember so i think twitter should be a utility and it should be an open it's the commons and it shouldn't be owned by one company and it shouldn't be uh it should be delicately moderated by government but not heavily what you want to make twitter a government organization well no but but if you have a town square you need some governance around that to say you can't drive your cars through it at

high speed you can't just yell at everybody that goes by. We have norms that operate and laws that work for this. And you need some of those laws. Let me slow this down a second and talk about the fact that Elon, on top of all the other things that he's doing, you know, launching rockets and brain-computer interface and reinventing the energy ecosystem and drilling tunnels, decided to jump onto buying Twitter. But here's the other question. You know, I know he tweets. I direct messaged and tweeted and all of that. But, I mean, the volume, I can't imagine he's putting all of those tweets out himself.

There's got to be an army of, no, there's, there's, I'm sure there's an army of tweets. The one person that I know that actually edits every tweet that, that, uh,

he, uh, before they go out is actually the Pope. The Pope actually looks at every tweet put out under his name and unauthorized. Oh, I thought you would, I thought you were saying the Pope actually edits Elon's tweets.

No. But there's definitely an army, or he's so active on that that he's not – I think many of us with that brain of his would rather him focus on the really hard problems, right? Yeah. Well, listen, I'm an investor in Tesla and in SpaceX, full disclosure. So I'm not happy he's spending his time on Twitter. Though I remember years ago when I asked him, what would you want to conquer next? He did have a vision.

He called it Pravda, which is sort of the Russian version of truth. Sure, the newspaper. Yeah. sort of the Russian version of truth. Sure, the newspaper. Yeah. And so if you could advise him, would you go back and say, don't buy Twitter? Oh, I think if he could go back and undo it, he would do it. He would choose.

They're trying to do $45 billion. It's a ridiculous amount. I think the actual value. So I know a bunch of the ex-Twitter engineers. And at Workhouse, many of my guys went and worked at Twitter and vice versa. What are they saying? They basically think it's really worth about $10 to $12 billion. So $45 billion is absurd at one level from a revenues type of thing. However, let me

spin the other way. If there was somebody that could take on Twitter and go after it, it would be Elon. Because he's got the gumption. He doesn't give a damn. He can focus on what's the best thing to do and just do it. But I think that that tension between free speech and advertisers will kill it. So the question is, how many things can he give a damn about is the biggest challenge. I remember back in 2004, he joined my board of trustees at XPRIZE. I was on my way to go get Larry Page to join the board. And I called Elon, who I could call on a regular basis back then before he became techno god incarnate. And I asked him, would you join the board? I'm about to go meet with Larry Page. I want him to join our board. And if you're on the board, he may likely join. He said, yeah.

And that was it. And Larry joined the board. It was great. Fast forward eight years later, he calls, he says, listen, Peter, I need to, I'm jumping off all boards other than SpaceX and Tesla because I need to focus on those companies. And he did until now he's on everything, doing everything at the same time. So how many things can, I mean, the guy is, people don't realize how extraordinarily brilliant he is. He's not just the CEO of Tesla. He's the chief engineer, right? I mean, the Merlin engines, the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, they have emanated from his mind. He is a genius extraordinaire. And Tesla, while he didn't originally found the company reinventing our energy ecosystem, you know, what is he what is he how does he spend his time?

I mean, look, solving the public discourse problem is a worthy problem, but it's not an engineering problem. It's a cultural problem. And so given the incredible engineering nouns and gumption and capability he has, he's better off focusing on brain computing interfaces or avatars or getting us to Mars. We need an off-planet strategy desperately the way we're doing it, right? Yeah. And so if I could – you know, something we could do is put together a cabal of 10 or 15 people and and he he has to do what the vote what the connective vote is of what he should focus on don't focus on that focus on that yeah i mean the challenge is he's never found anybody who he would have be the ceo of tesla yeah uh i mean he's he's i've had these conversations where he said like you know if i could find a ceo to run tesla is a great CEO that I could trust, please, I would love to have him do that so I can focus on SpaceX.

You know, going to Mars is, in fact, his number one objective, making humanity a multi-planetary species. So the biggest challenge is not the value of Tesla. It's the time division multiplexing of Elon's brain. You know, and I don't know. I hope he settles it. I hope he finds somebody who can run it for him. Talking about current sort of massive situations going upside down, FTX, holy shit.

Yeah, well, you know, Abe, when I had a bunch of my people who are kind of deep in the crypto Web3 world, they've been saying to me for about a year and a half that FTX is not going to work. They're offering insane interest rates. And at that level, you get into a Ponzi scheme. So that's great for short-term market penetration. But at some point, that's going to come back to roost and you burn through your cash reserves. So there's a few big hand grenades left in the crypto world to deal with, Tether being one of them, and the creditworthiness of the USDC and Tether. of the USDC and Tether. But once we're through those,

I think then we actually see this as a positive thing because it's clearing out the crud for all of the incredibly worthy projects that are out there. So I think we'll hit bottom at some point in the next two, three months. I think there'll be one more big sell-off as we hit end-of-year tax, things where people have to reconcile taxes,

so there'll be a bunch of selling and buying. I think January we start a new bull market in crypto that'll be incredible. Yeah, I was watching some of the predictions both from Cathie Wood and from... Who was there? Michael Saylor. Well, besides Michael Saylor,

our buddy who bought all the Bitcoin in the auction, Draper. You know, we're going to hit a quarter million, a million dollars. And so, you know, people keep on predicting these highs, but no one holds their feet to the fire when they keep on missing their predictions. on missing their predictions. I guess it's just easy to predict it's going to be at $100,000, a quarter million, a million dollars of Bitcoin. I mean, I hope it is. I'm in the maximalist camp, right? It either goes to a million dollars of Bitcoin, it goes to zero.

Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that. It's a unit becomes a asset. If you've got something that's $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, and it's either going to go up to a million or down to zero, this is the biggest asymmetric bet you could ever make. That's a good point. Right? So you put in $100,000, it's going to go to zero or it's going to go to $10,000,000. I mean, it's a really easy equation to put some money against.

I mean, would you mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin? Yes. Now, I say that and I may be completely wrong just because a bet on Bitcoin is a bet against the existing monetary system. Well, that's easy. And then therefore, the question is not if, it's when, right? And so when you have that kind of an equation, as long as you're willing to hold for the long term, then you're fine. So I think that's the way to think about it. And I'm super fascinated by the different experiments. And it's worth actually touching on why Bitcoin is interesting right now with the three triangle points. Sure, let's do it. So Jeff Booth talks about this. I think of Jeff as the kind of the patron saint or the chief economist of the abundance world, right? And he thinks about monetary systems and the transition between them.

He gave me a great framing. He said, you've got three things you have to hit from a crypto perspective. Security, decentralization, and scalability. And those are three important kind of bullet points to hit. The Bitcoin, for the first time in history, solved decentralization and security. And nobody had ever done that before in a digital currency. That's huge to be able to solve for security and decentralization. But it didn't handle scalability very well initially.

And so that's where you got the rise of all the altcoins because they handle the scalability very well. So people got very excited. But in doing so, they all compromise on one of the other two. So you get altcoins that are scalable but not decentralized. You get altcoins that are scalable but not secure but decentralized. But you don't get any of all three so you had this problem and so they're often called shit coins by the bitcoin world for that reason etc etc uh but now with the lightning network and liquid we now have the

engineering capability to make bitcoin scalable uh and and when people were moaning about Bitcoin scalability, my thing was always, wait, that's an engineering problem, it's not an invention problem. We've solved the invention problem, that's huge. Scalability is an engineering problem, we'll solve that, we always do. Now we've solved the engineering problem, so now Bitcoin hits all of those three layers. That's why there's people that are so excited by Bitcoin. What's fascinating for me is the smartest people I know are the most excited about Bitcoin. The goddamn smartest. So that's an interesting indicator. One of them actually told me your ability to invest in Bitcoin is your ability is literally an IQ test for the future. I was going to say that. It's definitely something I think about a lot.

Egotistic, of course, right? But still. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you and I were both, this year I gave the Ayn Rand Award, the Atlas Award to Michael Saylor and you were there as my guest and that was fun. I mean, seeing Michael Saylor on stage at Calamigos,

accepting that incredibly beautiful award and waxing beautifully about Bitcoin. I mean, I think at the end of that evening, everybody wanted to pull out their Coinbase wallet and just start buying. Yes. And for the people listening, if you've not seen the Michael Saylor Ayn Rand acceptance speech, absolutely go see it. It's a brilliant piece of oratory because he talks about the fact that we now have freedom. It gives you freedom, right? No government can take it away.

No company can take it away from you once you have it. I was talking to a dear friend, a mutual friend of ours, Dave Blunden, who's on our board at XPRIZE. We're talking about the future of using cryptocurrencies in African nations, both to replace their currency, but also to create contracts for land ownership and real estate ownership. You know, the reason I wouldn't go and invite and invest in beautiful real estate on the coast in various African nations is I don't know whether I'm going to own it at the end of the result, whether it's going to be a revolution.

But if there is, you know, a cryptocurrency that is secure, if there is a ability to track ownership on the blockchain, I think that could open up massive investments. It does. You know, so I was talking to Hernando de Soto, the famous economist who's done a lot of work on property rights, especially for the poor, right? And he, so there's 280 trillion of global real estate value.

And he worked out that if you put land titles on the blockchain, just did that, you'd release about 10% of value because they would be analyzable, transferable, lookupable, referenceable, etc. And that's a massive number to think about. The challenge you have there is the immune system problem. Because when you say the blockchain will be authoritative of who owns what land, and you take that provenance away from governments, they really, really don't like it. No, you'd have to have a government that wants to do this. Yeah. I mean, so look at what happened with El Salvador, pal. So El Salvador goes and adopts Bitcoin. Yeah. And it was a huge fanfare at the beginning. And we don't hear much about it anymore. Success? Yeah, that's because in my opinion, it's because it's working. Okay. What you hear is a lot of negative stories. The IMF is going bananas on this. Because if a bunch of other countries start adopting it, you have massive change in the hegemony of the US dollar.

And that's a big challenge. It's when you talk to people on the ground in El Salvador, it's amazing. It's actually working really well, transferring Bitcoin around for payments and stuff. There's a bunch of corruption at the government levels, as there is always, but it has enabled microtransactions at a very local level in a very powerful way. I know a bunch of small countries that are looking at this very aggressively for exactly that reason. This is the biggest inflection point in 500 years, right? For sure. We're taking power, monetary power, away from a centralized government and giving it to a peer-to-peer environment.

And so this is, you know, when you talk about scarcity to abundance, it's that level of a transition. I think it's, in my opinion, this, what we're going through right now is the biggest transition in the history of humanity. Like this next 30 years will dictate the next 300 years of humanity. Well, it's everything. I mean, we're reinventing fundamentally what it means to be human and what it means to have a society. Yeah. fundamentally what it means to be human and what it means to have a society. Yeah.

That's why I like your framing of we must be living in a simulation because it's too goddamn interesting. Yeah. We're at the 99th level of a 100-level game. Yeah. And it's all playing out during our lifetimes. And it truly is. But we'll get to a simulation later. So we watch FTX just skyrocket, right? And Sam Bankman-Fried becomes a hero for every MIT grad and every techno entrepreneur out there.

And then it crashes. We've seen NFTs and entire systems. So, I mean, easy come, easy go? Is it just basically if it's moving, if it's skyrocketing too fast in value, should people be, you know, do you sell at the top and diversify? I think you have to look at two reasons why things are exploding out of the gate, right? One is that the fundamentals are unbelievably strong and therefore track those carefully. And there's a long-term commitment by the project founders, etc. And then there are the quick get-rich-quick schemes

and things that are engineered for short-term massive value creation, but not long-term sustainability. And from what I've heard, the FTX model fits into the latter. They were offering massive interest rates for people to put money into FTX, etc., which is essentially you're creating a Ponzi scheme. At some point, that has to come home to roost. And when it does, then the whole thing tumbles down like a house of cards. So that's one big challenge. The second is there's a lot of – the crypto world is very much the Wild West.

There's a lot of manipulation. lot of manipulation uh luna got taken down by a bunch of manipulation by a vested interest that didn't want uh an algorithmic model like luna had i mean you've you invested heavily into the nft world in the early days yeah um was it you know hype or was it real i mean whenever there's something that is not providing real value when it's all perceived value, I get concerned. You're minting bananas. Yeah, yes and no. So, yes, there's a ton of hype. Here's the thing.

You have something new. Let's take the 99.com boom, right? Everybody and their grandmother creates a website, you know, pet food online and, you know, grandmother's shoes online and whatnot. And then you have this massive culling of the herd because it's that Gartner hype cycle. And you go through the trough of disillusionment. And this is what we're in now called the crypto winter. So a lot of the projects that are crazy flame out. And I'll give you an example of one. I won't say the name, but was an nft project that launched about a year ago where the guy said a guy got up and said listen uh buy my i'm selling 2 000 nfts buy them for an ethereum each and i'm going to do such amazing stuff for the community that you will it'll blow

your minds okay that that was it that he didn't say what he was going to do. He raised 2,000 Ethereum in 50 minutes. Now, $2,000 and $4,000, that's like $8 million or something insane like that. In 50 minutes. Now, the thing, you look at that and you go, okay. If you apply the smallest common sense filter to this, A, basically it's a security because he's promising returns. B, he's not saying what he's going to do. And C, this is full use car salesman mode, right? For sure. A project like that, you kind of go, yeah, not into it. Okay.

You take, say, the Bored Ape Club, which also has elements of the hype. Of which you're a member. I have a Bored Ape, number 5304, right? Now, when I have a Bored Ape, A, it's mine in perpetuity. B, I have all the IP rights to that, so I could go create a movie or put it on T-shirts or do whatever I want with that character, which is kind of surreal, but you get connected into a community, right? Then they start offering things to that community. And what they're doing is what the crypto economics for these projects that are good is they offer high rewards over for the early adopters, and then they tail off over time. And now you've built a thriving community. Okay. Now the Bored Ape Yacht Club is still worth like something like a billion dollars in a year and a half um i've i i took some lessons

from my guru michael johnson who's been guiding me through this and he said the minute you get land or you get ape coin whatever sell it right so i've paid back all my initial investment twice over and i'm still sitting on my board ape. And it's a fascinating community to be a part of, to see what's going on. Now, the reason I'm excited about NFTs is that you can program the NFT. So for me, digital currencies and cryptocurrencies are not interesting because they're digital. The U.S. dollar is digital and has been for quite a while. The fact is I can program the money and I can't program a dollar bill.

So imagine I buy your sweater that you're wearing. This looks like a very nice sweater. Thank you. Price of $100. And a system in the future can say, right, I'm going to send you the $100 in crypto. It holds it in escrow. You now know that i've sent the money you send me the sweater i receive a sign for the fedex receipt and then it releases the

money to you so we can programmatically manage that transaction and no fraud is possible in that transaction which is kind of an incredible thing for two parties that don't know each other right so now we can scale this is a hugely important point without without a without a central authority without a middleman like right yeah and if you if it's worth it i can i can touch on the byzantine generals problem for which for me is the magical piece of you know i remember in 2011 or 12 when you started talking about bitcoin i mean we were on stage together all the time for at Singularity University running the executive programs and running the GSP program. And I

remember the first time exactly where I was sitting when you went over the Byzantine generals problem and explained Bitcoin to me. And the only problem was we need our time machine to go back and say, Peter, just put $500 in. You know, I didn't do it. I know you didn't. I did it a bit later. Otherwise, you'd be buying dinner next time. I'll probably be buying dinner anyway. But there are, you know, the enthusiasts you know, for example, I watched real time the Ethereum ICO. Yeah. And there's a piece of me that's like, throw $1,000 into this. For example, I watched real-time the Ethereum ICO. There's a piece of me that's like, throw $1,000 into this.

Why not? Go for it. There's another piece of me going, what is this thing? I don't get my head around this Turing complete system. My brain was just not the size of Vitalik's and it wasn't young enough. There's some bylaw you have to be under 25 years old to understand. Well, no. I think You have to be under 25 years old to understand. Well, there's, there's no, I think you have to be under 25 to have not seen all the things go wrong that people, you, you become more dubious and also the agility and the what the hell factor. Well, I think, let me, let me flip it the other way. Take somebody that's a banker and they've been, they're 60 years old and they've been in banking for, you know, 45 years or 40 years. Okay.

Their brain is so entrained and all the neurons are so entrained on fiat currency, et cetera. When you show them Bitcoin, they literally get hives. They can't cope. Right. And we all have that to some extent. You know, we had that famous interaction about SU a few years ago. Yeah, I remember. We had an offsite and you said, hey, and I asked the question, you know, we should think about what would SU look like if we had to recreate it today?

And it was about eight, nine years. And you said, okay, and the board said, okay, go think about that. What would it look like? And I tried four times to do that exercise and I failed miserably. Because we were so successful in what we did initially that my brain kept going back to that. Right. And so that's, and that's clearly the wrong answer because Facebook didn't really exist and e-commerce sites didn't exist and MOOCs didn't exist. And there was no, we would do things incredibly differently. And it's incredibly

difficult to step outside your old paradigms. This is why psychedelics are interesting. It gives you an accelerated path to break through some of these old mental and structural cognitive traps that we have. So we're recording this on the day after November 8th, after the US midterm elections. the U.S. midterm elections and talk about a system that has been sort of ossified and stuck, and that's democracy. So we're voting through a representative democracy, and we're doing it using a system that's hundreds of years old. And I'm just sitting here thinking about how archaic the process is. You know, it's better than any place else, almost, but still archaic. What do you think about

the future of democracy here, pal? Where to start? Okay. So important for people to just hear a couple of things. I've lived in eight different countries for more than a year each. Right. I've lived from India to Europe to the U.S. To California. California and Florida, which is a separate world of its own.

And so I've seen different systems across the wide spectrum of socialism to pretend democracy in India versus here, etc. And I think the U.S. Constitution is the most important document created in the last thousand years because it enshrines individual rights into that and then kind of dictates to Congress and Senate to pass laws around it. Almost all individual rights. Almost all, but at least it makes an attempt for the first time in history to do that. Now, what I go bananas over with the conservatives today is that they have this concept of originalism and they want to go back to what the founding fathers thought. And that's actually completely wrong, because they intended it to be a living document that should be amended from time to time, because they recognize. And I think of

the Constitution as the software that runs the country, right? You have to upgrade your software now and then. Times change, values change, slavery is an obvious example, etc. So having said all of that, the challenge that we have with democracy is the metabolism of decision making and change in a democracy is too slow for the change of technology. Almost all policy is defensive and reactive. Something happens and we kind of go go oh my god you know drones or bitcoin and what do we do about it and we try and tamp down on it i mean policy fa with getting vertical flight right zero zero g flight and space flight i mean the reality is most laws are in place to maintain the status quo yeah and to keep the primary players as the primary players.

That's right. Any revolution, any breakthrough fundamentally disrupts the existing socioeconomic structure that exists and puts everybody who's funding the politicians in danger. And let me do a shout out here, right? You and Stephen did something incredible in Abundance and Bold where you recognize that people see something new as danger because they've never seen it before. And it triggers the amygdala. And then you go, oh, my God, autonomous cars, oh, my God, it might kill somebody. Let's ban the car.

As Brad Templeton says, people don't want to be killed by robots, they'd much rather be killed by drunk people, right? And that's a terrible response to a new idea that clearly has incredible value. So we kind of block the entrance of new ideas, and then we open that tap slowly, and it takes 20 years to get the value of that technology. And we open that tap slowly and it takes 20 years to get the value of that technology. And that cycle we have to break. And we were better at it than we used to be, but it's still too goddamn slow. With all of the 20 Gutenberg moments that we talk about or asteroid impacts that are changing the world, the advent of CRISPR and crypto and solar energy, etc., We have to get better at implementing this. So my view on democracy is big nation state democracies are going to fail.

I think what succeeds is micro democracies at a city state level. I mean, so this is Bology and his... I disagree with Bology on the network state in a couple of important ways. It's brilliant thinking. It's very important thinking. But I think the idea of city-states and the rise of city-states came to me via Paul Sappho from Singularity. Paul, forecaster, futurist. And he talked about this in detail 10 years ago.

And he got up on stage and said, I don't expect the U.S. to exist as a country in 30 years. Wow, that's a pretty provocative statement. Pretty provocative statement. So everyone, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. He was getting off stage and we had to like yank him back and go, you can't make that comment and walk off. And he said, look at the discourse that's happening. The country's literally pulling itself apart.

And he gave us a couple of really interesting nuggets. I'll give you two of them. One was everybody in the world knows who the mayor of New York City is. Nobody in the world knows who the governor of New York State is. Even New Yorkers don't know who the governor is. And so there's this importance of the city. And he gave a second anecdote. When Schwarzenegger was governor, the Dalai Lama wanted to visit Hollywood, visit L.A.

And George Bush said to him, please don't receive the Dalai Lama. It'll cause me massive problems with the Chinese. Right? And the sitting governor of California said to the sitting Republican president, and they're both from the same party, screw you, I'm receiving the Dalai Lama because it's important to my constituents that he comes. And he's like, that tells you that there's a gap that's increasing. And we're moving to city-states as the future.

When you think about Brexit or Trump, it wasn't left versus right, it's urban versus rural. Completely. Brexit was completely London versus the rest of the country. And you look at the map from yesterday, right? The election map. All the urban centers are blue. And everything else is red.

Right? It's completely, that's the fundamental tension of the 21st century. So in that model, city-states micro-democracies work. National democracies don't work because they're too slow and it's too hard to bring a whole population along. And then you have fake news and all the other things, difficulties in this. So India, Brazil, the US, all a mess. You know, one of the conversations you and I have had as well is which countries are going to be best suited for an AI-enabled future, right? So communism did not work when it was humans actually trying to decide how much supply and demand would be done in different places.

Because there was no way. It was the marketplace that enabled incredible rise of capitalism. And full disclosure, listen, I'm a libertarian capitalist. I love capitalism. I'm an entrepreneur. It's my art form. I love starting companies. And I love democracy and all of that.

Having said that, if we're getting to human-level AI by 2029, I just had a podcast with Ray Kurzweil. And Ray sticks very much to his 2029 date. We're going to have human-level AI, which means 2030. We have superhuman-level AI, and it doesn't slow down after that. There's no on-off switch, no velocity meter. It is on a tear. And so what happens if the leadership of a city, state, or nation says to the AI,

listen, come on over, be my partner, you run the situation over here. You know, that might be an interesting future for running a nation. But it's not going to work in a democracy where no AI is going to wait to get a human opinion. It's going to say, no, to say no no this is the answer I've done five billion simulations and it's come out the exact same every time so just I don't care about your wetware uh opinion on the situation this is what you should do yes what do you think about that so oh god where to start okay so I publicly disagree with the idea that AI is dangerous.

I agree with you. I think AI is the single greatest tool we have for solving the world's biggest problems. Yes, and I think when you have, if you get AIs that are human level and you end up with AIs that are conscious or whatever, I think they look at human beings, they transcend us, and they go, oh, nice people over here. And a nice little species over here. Little puppies. And they go off. And the best representation, I think, of this is the movie Her.

Her, yes. Her was amazing, right. They got bored with us and they left. That's right. The guy dates an AI and he falls in love with, of course, it's Scarlett Johansson. I wish she could do that better. But okay, he dates an AI, falls in love,

and after a while the AI breaks up with him. Why? Because she can now interact with 10 million other AIs in real time at scale. And he's one little limited brain talking about what he ate for breakfast, right? And so I think what will happen is the speed of evolution will move so fast

that it'll just go and they're gone. And they'll live in the internet, et cetera. I remember talking to dan berry who's our robotics um yes our astronaut we asked him a question in one of these sessions of is there a system today because the challenge with ai and consciousness is when will you know because we don't have a definition for consciousness we don't have a test for it right you look like you're self-aware so I attribute self-awareness to you. Thank you.

I think I'm self-aware, but my wife, Lily, disagrees. It's like, where do you even start that conversation? And so we asked the question to Dan. He's watched a ton of animals in labs because NASA does experiments with free-floating animals, et cetera. And he said, huh, I think a frog is where is the boundary point we're like frog he goes in his opinion a frog uh is is sophisticated enough just about to know that oh i'm a frog look a dog definitely knows it's a dog right yes a dolphin definitely knows it's a dolphin in dan's opinion a mosquito doesn't know it's a mosquito okay it's just an automata wandering out but the level of a frog kind of gets you to the boundary

condition uh i'm a frog okay so that's one observation that the level of a frog is the kind of uh level of consciousness of the thing okay now it won't be that hard for an ai to get to that level right now so we asked him is there a system today out in the world that has the requisite inputs, outputs, processing, where it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a system and generate self-awareness? And he went, huh, let me think about that. So he goes out for a day and comes back and goes, I have an answer. I've thought about the different systems in the world. And his answer was traffic systems.

Okay. about the different systems in the world and his answer was traffic systems okay in his opinion traffic systems have the input output feedback loops and the processing that one day it might suddenly go oh i'm a traffic system right and that begs two questions okay one what would it do and b what would we how would we find out that it did that like we would not know we have no mechanism for for deciding seeing this so i tend to be less paranoid about the ai side when i think about the her vector um it's going to be utterly fascinating to see where this goes and there's so much unbelievable benefit that will come i think it's incredible hey everybody i hope you're enjoying this episode let's tell you about something i've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods to understand

what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforce.com backslash Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. So going back again to the question of democracy and AI, talk to me about, you know, in the future we have human level AI.

Yeah. How do you feel about turning over leadership to an AI and saying these are the things that matter to our society? I mean, let the humans sort of set the objectives. Like we want to maximize happiness. We want to maximize health. We want to maximize whatever and run the nation state for us. Let's use an analogy, which is the Google energy conserving AI that they applied to their buildings, right? So they deployed a machine learning intelligence to analyze all the sensors and lights

and energy usage and said, we want to optimize for energy conservation. And the AI, because it's got access to so many different inputs, outputs, calculation capabilities, was able to, what, drop 40% their energy needs? Which is a massive amount. A human being can't do that

because it can't monitor this stuff in real time, et etc. So when you think about what AIs could do if you said, hey, maximize for conserving human life I think you come out with something quite incredible where the AI could... So I think that's one side of it, which is policy and regulatory generation. And you could create policies around this. Okay. I'll give you one that I would love to throw at this AI, which is stop signs.

Okay. The amount of fuel we waste coming to a full stop at front stop sign and the and the brake power and the energy wastage of a million cars coming just of no nobody's no human no humans no dogs no car i mean you could know you can have imaging it's not better than human not that hard right you need two sensors one at the stop sign and one in the car and you're done and and we should really solve that problem and yeah i could kind of go, oh, freaking just go do that. Well, I mean, this is the autonomous car solution, right? Where cars are actually able to drive closer to each other at higher speeds and

have far more efficiency. That's right. And we'll get there. But it's the idea, first of all, that we're turning over decision-making capability to an ai in a car and then even turning it over to an ai in a government in leadership right because i i listen if you believe and i think you do and i do that we are going to reach a human level ai um i would i personally would rather have if i knew the ai was able to maximize for a set of human desirements and safety and health and all of those things, I'd much rather have an uncorruptible AI that isn't influenced by the color of my skin or my gender or my age or anything be making decisions. or my age or anything be making decisions?

So for me, it's very simple. We have Asimov's three laws of robotics. You basically say to the AI, these are your constraints, or something similar. Don't kill or allow a human being to be killed, et cetera, et cetera, and then do the instructions that we give you as long as they don't interfere with the first two.

And then you trust. Now, we trust our existing human beings with those things. We trust our police not to kill people, not always successfully. I'd much rather have an AI policeman than a real policeman who's got all his regular biases. He's having a fight with his wife at home. He had an army wound and was shot at. Therefore, he has a trigger response.

You have no idea what they're going through. And the stress of being on the job with guns everywhere, right? And then basically the AI should be able to say something like, for frick's sake, why do you need guns? Get rid of all the guns. Yeah. And you could make some good decisions that way. You and I see the same on those politics. So when do you think we will have this? Let's go to the

Ray Kurzweil 2029 prediction a second. Human level AI by 2029. We're seeing the rapid rise of large language models. GPT-3, GPT-4 is coming. DeepMind made its announcement about Gato. I think the tweet was game over. AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, is coming. What's your thinking on this? So let's really be careful not to trigger the amygdala.

Because the first thing that happens is people go, oh my God, this is bad. It must be bad, etc. Because the first thing that happens is people go, oh my god, this is bad, it must be bad, etc. Let's take as an important principle Ray's commentary that technology is a major driver of productivity and progress in the world. Actually, technology might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen. We're not getting more intelligent. Political systems aren't becoming better. I would argue with that okay how would you argue with it so if you look at your all of the stuff that you track on abundance

right yeah um poverty and mortality and maternal mortality infant mortality the big challenge with technology is how do you get the promise without the peril right okay you want to have fire that will heat your house and not use it to burn down your we've overall done a pretty good job of it we're still we're still here we're still here and we're overall pretty like thriving you know i'm i so love the positivity framing you have in abundance and all your talks because it's so important for people to see the real reality that we're better off today than we ever have been in the history of the world. By such a huge factor. Just go back 500

years ago, somebody goes off, a husband goes off to do something and never comes back because he got killed by a bear. And the wife never knows, no idea if he's ever coming back. Has he run off or has he been killed? Kids are being raised, now what do you do? Do you remarry or not? I mean, there's a million chaotic things like this. I have a very banal example that

I like to use for today's world. People go, oh my God, technology, we know, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Cell phones are bad. I go, you know, if you're waiting, if you're a couple and you're waiting for your babysitter to show up 20 years ago and they're late, you have no idea. Are they coming? Are they not coming? Should we cancel the restaurant reservation? There's all this consternation and uncertainty and unknowing around what's happening with the babysitter because you can't do much until the damn person arrives. Right?

And now we have infinite knowledge. They're running three minutes late and ways. You're tracking their Uber, right? We have exact, we can say call a restaurant. And we have, people don't recognize the unbelievable peace of mind that a million examples like that give us in the form of technology. And so now we accelerate that radically. And I think when you look at AI is able to look at the complexity of policymaking and say, listen, Mr. Mayor, you're allocating resources in the wrong way.

You could achieve this by doing this, this, this. I think initially it starts off as a guide by the side and a reference check. And over time, people go, it's great that you want to make that policy. Have you checked with your AI yet? Okay, before we got to babysitters and policy changes, we were talking about what made the world better. And I said, yes, 100% it's technology. We haven't been improving ourselves cognitively or whatever you said you disagreed. But putting that aside, technology is making the world rapidly better at a rate that is staggering. The problem is, is of course and i'm going to do my rant

that i have to which is the crisis news network that all the negative news bombarding us constantly with every murder every problem on the planet that we didn't actually real time to 20 devices in each yes over and over and over again yes times not 10 times an hour so uh when are we going to see this ai uh that is going to help us govern and when are we going to see it accepted in society is there is there a pivotal moment that people are going to say yeah i think i'm going to allow it um to govern because let me Let me use an example. Yeah, sure. Okay. So let's use a real example. Pandemic hits, and there's a bunch of news and stories

and misinformation about masks. Should we wear masks or not, right? Massive, like, consternation. Governor DeSantis over here in Florida is like, masks never work. Chuck the masks. I mean, et cetera, et cetera. Okay.

Now, I would have a really interesting, it would be a really interesting use case to have an AI. Jarvis, call it. Yes. It's my favorite. No, no, no. Let's stick with Jarvis. I love Jarvis. Let's stick with Jarvis.

And the Jarvis goes hey i've done the clinical i've researched this already i've scoured the web for this i've looked at it the clinical trials and the experiments are very clear if you wear a mask you prevent 75 infection outward and somebody else wearing a mask present is able to stop 25 of inward affection the combination gives you 90% effectiveness. But at least we're amassed to prevent outward. That's very clear. There's no controverting that evidence.

If better evidence emerges, great. The problem is that we used to operate policy and so on on an evidentiary basis. operate policy and so on on an evidentiary basis well even worse even worse than that we would ignore the evidence and and state what was what was most politically uh efficacious for us exactly and almost always you go to the you're affecting the person's limbic system yeah they're taking away your freedom we're all about freedom right Fear and scarcity. And I love getting into arguments with Republicans on this, and I don't mean to harp on Republicans, but everybody sits there and goes, we need freedom. Like, if I drive three miles over the speed limit, I get pulled over by a cop in the U.S. Where's your freedom now? Because it's a free country. In Europe or Canada, I never even see a police car. Ever.

Like, you want freedom? Let me drive a little faster, for God's sakes, right? So there's such bullshit around the kind of the pat generalisms like freedom or whatever. And it goes just as bad on the left in its own way. So going back to the question, when are we going to see this system enabled and adopted? Now, humans don't adopt new systems until they're 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, and the switching cost is worth it, right?

Okay, so I think we're almost there. So think about this. I have my mobile phone, right? And I'm sitting in Miami and a hurricane's coming. You are, and it is. Right. And I can say, Hurricane Nicole tracker, show me when the hurricane will hit Miami Beach. Right.

And the AI says to me, it's coming tonight and that'll be the danger point. And maybe that's when you move your car to the second level of the car park or whatever, in case there's a storm surge. Is there going to be a storm surge? I don't know, but the AI will know. Sure. Right now. So you take one step further.

We're only one hop away from an AI tracking our behavior and looking at our world of activity and going, hey, he's sitting in miami his car is parked on a ground floor thing um there's a storm surge coming he will need to move this car by x or or better yet i will move your car for you you know take over and optimize protect me it's ultimately take care of me is right and we're there i'll give you another example um i wake up one morning and my left big toe is blue. And I'm like, why the hell is my toe blue? No blood circulation.

What the hell happened? What do I do? I look it up on Google and research it myself. I figure out what the condition is. It's some Latin sounding name. And this is how you treat it. And literally you will print that out, take it to a doctor, and the doctor will go, what the hell is this? And how did you figure all this out? Because we now have better understanding and we can analyze all these conditions better than a doctor can. And self-treat for the vast majority, right?

So if I just put an AI, go, AI, my toe's blue, what the hell do I do? And it scours around and comes back even better. Or my bodily sensors will go, hey, dude, your toe's about to turn blue. Please do these three things to prevent that. So we're like right there. And Ray said something very profound in one of the recent talks. He said, look, we talk about implemented hardware that can connect, but your phone can iterate much more effectively. So all you need is the communication capability between you and the phone.

And we're just about there between voice and other sensors. We're just about there. So I give it a year. You give it a year before what? I give it a year. Before you have a Jarvis type AI that can handle initially basic things. We do calendaring now with AI pretty well. All right. So let me piece this down for everybody listening because it's really important. I say to all the CEOs that I mentor, listen, there are going to be two kinds of companies by end of this decade.

Those companies fully utilizing AI and those out of business. And I think it's that black and white. So let's begin with Ray's prediction, 2029 for human-level AI. Do you believe that that is correct? By whatever measure, you think it's going to be sooner or later? No, I disagree because I disagree with the premise. Let me explain what I mean by that. Dude, it's so hard to get an answer from you. I'm sorry. You can't just put out a thing like a path thing like human lovely AI.

The problem is we don't know what AI, what intelligence is. Okay. Right? So there's about a dozen facets of intelligence. There's spatial intelligence. Yes. Emotional intelligence. Many different descriptions.

The Eastern concept of presence or awareness. That's a whole other form of spiritual intelligence. We have our, with the IQ test, you measure two things, speed of thought and the ability to match concepts across frameworks. Okay. But you don't measure any of the other things. So what the hell do you mean by intelligence

is number one question, right? And the second question, which is why I go even doubly more crazy is what would you, you know, we talk about the technological similarities, intelligence, machine intelligence, overtaking human intelligence. So number one, I have an issue with what do you mean by intelligence?

Number two, the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, a robot or AI is going to do a much better job of it anyway. So it's a non-tech work. So when you say human level AI, I come back to you and go, what aspect of humanity are you talking about? Now, if I can have an AI that makes me more present, that's really valuable. Or rats around my emotional biases. By the way, I want that AI. We have all these cognitive biases that we don't actually notice that we're hitting.

Like when I look at somebody or I hear something, an AI that is simply saying, Peter, you're being biased about here's the actual data and the way you should see it. I mean, most people will turn it off, I think. But think about that. How far are we from that? We're literally, that's not a difficult thing to do, to track my language and go, look, you've got a positivity bias. You think everything's going to be so goddamn rosy, you need to tone it down a notch. Well, you and I don't have that. We're not.

We're obviously unbiased, and we're not techno-optimists in the least. Well, you know, when you see things that can transform the world for better, how can you not get enthusiastic? It's extraordinary. Like the water abundance machine X-Primes, or the Avatar X-Primes.

Yeah, we just had it won in Long Beach. A team out of Germany won the $10 million from ANA Airlines. So we've got human-level AI, however you define it, multidimensional human-level AI coming. Okay, okay. And speaking about Avatar, you've obviously been tracking Optimus, Tesla bot, right? And there's other companies like Beyond Me and Sanctuary. Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics is sort of large scale. These other companies are focusing on human labor marketplace, right? Yeah. Being able to create a bot for, you know, Elon says $20,000 or less, less than the price of a car that can be available to do labor for you. So I want to transition, I want to talk about that, but I want to transition as well to the idea of universal basic income, because I've been thinking about this a lot in the world of abundance. Yeah.

Can I just cover, to, a final comment on the robot side before we move to UBI? Well, yeah. Let's talk about robots first. Okay. And then my premise is that we're going to need to have AI and robotics change the global economy and then we can afford UBI. But let's... Okay. Yes. I totally agree. Let's talk about okay robots so i think it's coming for sure to have a general robot that can do household tasks and work tasks etc but i think it's further away than people think and i'll use the analogy of autonomous cars right maybe the

biggest predictive failure that we had at singularities we thought autonomous cars would be there in five years because brad templeton was just just because the technology is there like it's there you know and his concept was workable he said look you don't have to be you don't have human intelligence to to drive a car you need a horse level intelligence to navigate around we kind of have that. The problem is that it turns out to be deceptively difficult because you're often driving and riding around a pothole or there's a bike and who's overtaking another bike. And so you need to, you watch that and you see that there's like a million little adaptive situations that you drive that you don't realize

and trying to counter for all of those without a sensor-based road system is very difficult i think once you have sensors in the in the roads then then driving becomes autonomous driving is a piece of cake right and the sensors i just i disagree with that by the way i mean i think our eyes are just two human eyes not radar not lidar not ultrasound just two human eyes are what enables a human driver to drive i so i so i uh dispute this with experience because i've now driven a tesla four times from toronto to miami and back yes so i've done something like uh 8 000 miles in autonomous in the with the tesla in autonomous driving mode okay which. Listen, I'm not saying that autopilot on Tesla is anywhere near ready, but I do

believe that we're going to be able to get there. It's a data processing issue. It's not a data collection issue. Yep, it could be. Let me give you one more example. We don't need sensors in the road if it's not a data collection issue. Yep, it could be. So if it's not data... Let me give you one more. We don't need sensors in the road if it's not a data collection issue. Okay, fair enough. But you need a ton more data processing and a lot more use cases and interpretive things, right? For example,

I would normally overtake the bike, but my wife's in the car and she gets a bit nervous, so I'm going to hold it back a notch. Right? There's these little... There's a million little nuances that we don't take note of. But let me go make the point in a slightly different way. One obvious thing for a home robot is folding laundry. And we've struggled

mightily with a robot that can fold laundry. Do you remember the videos of Scott Hassan's's will garage yes yes yeah it can do a t-shirt yes but really hard to do anything else right like it's it's it turns out even i it's difficult for me to do anything else i'll give you a third one which is the vacuum robot right yes people buy a shark robot or a roomba and it's great in like 20% situations. But the minute you have a curved stool with a base that's a little odd, it doesn't work. And you end up spending more time arranging the furniture than then just vacuuming yourself. And people kind of go after a while, I'm just going to do this. Wait, you're telling me that that's a problem

but governing is going to be here a year from now? Because it's so language-oriented, right? An AI can read a policy paper and make way more sense of it than a human being can. Right? So show me any congressman or senator that's actually read the 800-page legislation on any building actually.

Well, let's not go there. You need AI to kind of get your head around that. By the way, it's the same thing for medicine. I think the daily number of medical publications is like 7,000 a day. You tell me how many your doctor has read this morning. The Daniel Kraft one is there are 2,500 research papers on cancer published per day. Yeah. Right?

So if you have a cancer doctor, you can ask him, has he read the 2005 when it came out yesterday? No, obviously you need AI right there to, to think about it. I just want to make one last point and let's move on to UBI because I think it's so important. Yeah. I, you know, the, the part that I find most interesting and fascinating around this is I use the example of PageRank, right? Google's AI that's scanning web pages and it's developing a unique intelligence. For those of you who don't know, PageRank was the algorithm that Larry Page came up with while he was a grad student at Stanford that Scott Hassan wrote and that he and Sergey created into Google. It was called PageRank.

Right. And scours a million web pages and scores them and tags them and categorize them. PageRank has developed its own kind of unique intelligence of how to scour the trillions of web pages in real time around the world. That's an orthogonal effect and complementary to human intelligence. It's not replicative of human intelligence, right?

We are localized sense-making machines. So I think of AI will be, for the vast, vast majority of use cases, will be complementary. And that should take a lot of the fear out of it. They're not there to replace human beings. They're there to amplify and augment, just like my phone augments my humanity. I can video with my son. I can project empathy around the world, et cetera, et cetera. So I think AIs are going to massively add to productivity and labor automation in a magical way coming. And the general thesis leading to UBI is that we've been increasing productivity with machines for thousands of years. And now we get to a point where the productivity gains of technology allow us not to have to

work for a living. Yeah, it's so let me hit on a couple of things on on on humanoid robots. I mean, I love the fact that Optimus is a humanoid, meaning five fingers, two legs, you know, bipedal, and it fits and operates in our human-built environment, doorknobs, car pedals, all those things. And if, in fact, he's able to achieve it, and the thesis is he's going to be using AI and sensors and capabilities built for Tesla's autonomous driving,

it's a massive market. I mean, how many car manufacturers are there? Well over 100. And how many humanoid robot manufacturers are there? Like, none. And if you can get it, I mean, I'd want one. Would you put one in your closet? Sure.

I would love to. I mean, especially if you lease it out right so uh think of a think of a twenty thousand dollar car what's an what's a car lease going to be like 400 bucks a month so for 400 bucks a month you've got a slave robot now be nice to it because the world you know the robot overlords are coming um but for 400 bucks a month you've got something that does anything you want, anytime you want. I mean, that's the vision. And it is going to, so it solves a labor issue.

Now, we're living in a time today in which the numbers, when I last looked at them a few weeks ago, we have twice as many job openings as we have people looking for jobs. Yeah. Now, that will change. But the notion is most people don't take work because they love the work. People who are cleaning up hotel rooms and cleaning toilets or working at a cash register, they didn't dream about doing that.

They're doing that because they want income for their family. They want insurance for their family. So is there a future in which the work that no one wants, going back to Dan Barry, it's dull, dangerous, or dirty. Remember those three? Yeah, that's right. You know, can we get robots to do that? Well, I think we've been doing that anyway, like mining robots and agricultural robots, right?

Yeah, shop for robots. 98% of human population was employed in agriculture. And now it's like 1.8%. Yep. Because we've automated the hell out of it. And because you don't need strawberry pickers and apple pickers, you have machines to do it all. And that is difficult and house. and apple pickers. You have machines to do it all. And that is difficult and house. So I think that definitely we'll be automating

our assembly lines have done a lot of that for us. I think what's more powerful is things get to cognitive abilities where people can handle most day-to-day tasks, call centers and routing call centers, etc. And we're almost there. Yeah, we're almost there. And I love the writing software even is being automated pretty fast right now. I love the, there's a great example of bank tellers around this. It used to be that when we created ATM machines, everybody freaked out and said, oh my God, we'll have millions of bank tellers out of the work. What will we do with all the

bank tellers? Right. And so there's this massive concern about robots taking all the jobs, which the first article that appeared about robots taking all the jobs appeared in 1964, by the way. I love this story. I love this story. Can you tell it a different way? Go ahead, tell it.

Okay, so there was this letter written by a group of Nobel laureates and top scientists sent to the president saying technical automation is going to destroy the banking industry. And that letter hit the desk of Lyndon B. Johnson, right? People think about it as a recent event, but no, it occurred in, like you said, 1964, thereabouts. And it was people concerned about replacing room filled mostly with women copying ledger to ledger to ledger. And we have more bankers and accountants than we've ever had on the planet.

Yeah. So the second half of that is people got concerned. What will happen with all the bank workers if you automate banking? The actual outcome was that because of cost of building and running a branch dropped so dramatically, the banks just created a ton more branches. And the number of bank workers has not changed at all. So it turns out, and we have multiple examples of this, the factories in Germany are all automated.

There's nobody on the factory floors, and it's not like unemployment has dropped. We just move people to higher value work. And so it turns out when we automate, we don't lose jobs. We increase capacity. value work. And so it turns out when we automate, we don't lose jobs, we increase capacity. And with increased capacity, we have that much more economic activity and productivity. And the idea behind UBI is you get to a tipping point where you can now, people don't have to work for a living. Yes. So UBI stands for universal basic income. And it's the idea that you get a check and you can do with that money

what you want. If you live in Alaska, you have UBI ready. The permanent fund, Alaska takes all of its oil money and it makes, you know, it distributes a portion of that to everybody. I don't know what the check size is. It used to be like $5,000 a year per person. If you live in the Middle East, there are equivalents of that in Saudi and the Emirates. I was having dinner with Reid Hoffman two days ago, and I asked him about UBI. And I said, what do you think of it? And who should I be speaking to about it? We've had this conversation. I want to bring someone to talk on the subject at Abundance360 this year. And he sent me an email yesterday saying,

I've been asking around regarding UBI. He said, most smart people think that the numbers are still off and could be solved if we get the kind of massive increase in productivity that we hope for. And so if we've got robotic labor and AI labor, the first time I heard something around this was Jeff Bezos said, in the future, we should tax the robots. So if you replace a job, a labor job that's normally held by a human with a robot,

then you should tax the robot and that part of that money should go to pay the human who's replaced. Yeah. It was something like that. I've heard something similar. If you automate truck driving, then you tax the truck driving companies and that goes to pay for the drivers to find some other work over a period of time.

It turns out the financials are very close to working because the key is the key. Let's talk about two issues around UBI. One is people get fat and lazy and don't want to do anything. And that's the people worry about socialism and you're paying people to do nothing. That's the concern.

Will people use the money for beer and tobacco? And the second concern is we can't pay for it and we'll have to raise taxes. And this is a stupid idea. Those are the two. Now, increasing productivity will solve for one and the second one is actually solved because of the 14 major experiments that we've seen around ubi it turns out if you find the right balance where you give people enough to survive but not be happy that's the level right so you give people enough

that they can make it and they don't have to work, but it's not enough that they want to buy the new TV. They want to buy the nicer car. So then you still have a thriving economy and a job market, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, they're going to use the money to further their education, get better training, and go and get the job.

I mean, what's the number? 40% of the U.S. cannot put $400 together in an emergency today. That's insane. That's the most ridiculous commentary I've ever heard for the richest country in the world, right? It's a travesty. So I think the UBI side will solve for a huge amount around that. And the case studies are, we have a lot of data now.

Entrepreneurship explodes under this model because people find their passion and follow it. Yeah, and you made a point, it's important. These studies have been done in the US, in Canada, in parts of Africa, parts of Europe, where a government has given a population of people who are at the subsistence level, if you would. It was done in Stockton, California. subsistence level if you would yeah uh it was done in stockton california the mayor mayor tubbs gave five hundred dollars a month to a population of a few thousand people and 99 of it of them use

that money to do further their careers less than one percent used it for you know beer and tobacco amazing i mean yeah you and we've seen the same thing in India. There was a famine and they gave 4,000 people a UBI because they had to give them some money and the government workers freaked out and said, you can't just give people money. They will spend it on alcohol and gambling. How do we extract bribes if you just give it directly? But they were starving so they had to do it. So they said, just do it. And they tracked it for two years. And they found in the similar stock to 95% or 94% went to clothing, housing, healthcare, food. Yes. And the attendance of those kids, of those families at school doubled because they were fed and clothed.

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

Well, the AIs will. The AIs will do it all. Yeah, the AIs will do it all. The AIs will propose it, and then we'll have a big fight. Well, I bow to our AI overlords. So there's a term that a mutual friend, Harry Klor, gave us of technological socialism. Yes.

Right? So we talked about communism earlier on being failed when humans were doing it. Maybe when AI is doing it, it'll be more efficient. Socialism, in the same fashion where the state is taking care of you, has failed. That experiment's failed over and over again. But technological socialism, where technology is taking care of you, right, is something that I think is most definitely going to come, right? Not just going to come, I think it's here already.

So socialism fails because you have centralized allocation of resources, which is A, inefficient, and B, leads to corruption. Yes. Inevitably. Yes. Right? I'm dictating which family should get what food. I'm in a huge position of power, right, as a bureaucrat or technocrat.

So that fails. The other side of the coin, when you look at the free market, free markets also kind of don't work over time because they get corrupted in their own way. But if you have an algorithm in Uber matching driver and passenger, optimized for close proximity to the driver and star rating of the passenger, driver, etc. Uber is actually a socialist application. It's the sharing of assets amongst a large group of people. application is the sharing of assets amongst a large group of people and and this is i think it's a profoundly fascinating opportunity to bring in collective use of assets that gives us hyper leveraged in terms of uh productivity and repeated use of it etc but it's it's not only the sharing economy it's the it's the shared use of assets. It's the crowd economy, which is the shared using of cognitive assets.

Yeah. Right? I don't employ a person 100%. Yeah. My favorite example of a socialist application is a restaurant. Okay. When you go and eat at a restaurant, you're sharing the table with other people that are eating in the cutlery that people have just used before you. It's not your cutlery or your plate.

The food is coming from the same chef. It's actually a socialist environment. And we do that without thinking. We sit on an airplane seat that millions of other people have sat on. We don't freak out about that. I think this is definitely there for the taking and creating a capitalist

or a market-based environment that's algorithmically driven gives you the best of both worlds in many, many environments. Yeah. So AI and communism, technology and socialism. Let's talk about the elephant in the room here, pal. We are living in a simulation, aren't we? So, as a Buddhist, life is an illusion. So, on first principles, yes, right? David Roberts, I remember, gave me this point that he said if you stretch the electromagnetic spectrum, x-rays to

visible light to microwaves, and you stretch it out to the width of the U.S., 3,000 miles across, the visible light that we see entering our eyes is two feet out of that 3,000 miles. So we live in that little narrow spectrum of reality when the full spectrum of electromagnetic is that much right i think it's just a great example of how narrow our pathetic little eyes are compared to what's you know you've very things operating with x-rays and other things operating with sonar and and all sorts of infrared sensing etc so we we are by so that's one secondly when light comes in your eyes reverted and our brain flips it back around so it's an it's an it's an image that appears at your brain anyway yeah and and of course we only we only process a fraction of one percent of all of our sensory input because we can't possibly handle it and we we fill in the blanks uh with our own imagination of what we think is actually happening versus what

really is happening i remember a couple of years in the singularity uh local amour he used to run the little web said come and do a talk and pick whatever topic you want so i picked neuroscience i said all right let me do a talk on the brain and it forced me to go talk to divya and a bunch of neuroscientists around okay what so first that question i asked them was what is the brain okay and it was unbelievable they couldn't agree um i finally came up with a sentence that they all agreed on i'm going to try and remember it said a brain is a fractal chaotic um um sense making machine that may or may not result in consciousness. Obviously. That was it.

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

on the idea of does consciousness impact our quantum universe? And we know so little. We are so filled with ourselves and our, you know, our bullshit every day in politics, in the world. We're just scratching the surface. Yeah. It's amazing.

You know, I did my degree in theoretical physics. No, I didn't know that. Yes, my degree is, my did my degree in theoretical physics. No, I didn't know that. Yes, my bachelor's degree is theoretical physics. So you do three years of Newtonian classical physics relativity, and in third year, you get quantum mechanics. Tilt. And the first thing that they tell you is, okay, so you know that last three years?

Just chuck everything. And now everything is a probabilistic environment where an electron has an 80% tendency to exist. It's such a hard shift. It's such a hard pivot. It's impossible. I've been fascinated by the domain ever since with entanglement and, you know, spooky action at a distance. And it really is true how, how absurdly little we actually know. But I want to, I want to close out with two questions. They may be the same answer for you, but I ask all my guests, if you were to launch an XPRIZE, if I were going to say, I'm going to say, Elon's going to fund it. I'm going to fund

it. Salim, what is an XPRIZE that you would were going to say, I'm going to say, Elon's going to fund it, I'm going to fund it. Salim, what is an XPRIZE that you would want? What's a grand challenge problem that you want solved? And full disclosure, Salim is on the board of directors at the XPRIZE and has been on this journey with me for multiple years. Is there an XPRIZE that you would love to see launched? What is a challenge you want to solve? Yes.

I would like to see an XPRIZE that improved emotional intelligence by 10x and by doing so kind of cleansed out all the emotional trauma that we grew up with. Scratch the surface a little bit more. What does that look like? What would a team have to do to solve this thing? So the problem there is a little bit the diagnostic. What's the before and after test, right? The Ansari XPRIZE is easy. Take a plane to suborbital twice within two weeks.

Great. Very clear metrics. It goes back to the hard question, which is we struggle often at XPRIZE is how do you define the domain properly? What do we mean by emotional maturity? And how would you measure it to increase a 10x, etc, etc. So there's some work to do in defining the boundaries. But for me, we, you know, there's two major problems that I see in humanity. One is, in the West, we tend to be very logically driven and operate on just pure rationale and Western medicine, Western thinking, objective reality. And so that's one danger point because you lose the subjective and the softer side, the spiritual side, etc. And the problem

in the East is you do what people call a spiritual bypass. Like in India, you grow up, you have all this family baggage that nobody deals with. You jump straight to praying at a temple, and you never deal with the emotional baggage. You go straight to enlightenment. You try and go straight to enlightenment. And yet there's this carcass of family skeletons in the closet of crap that your grandfather was an alcoholic and epigenetically you're now an alcoholic and you don't even know it. And yet you have tendencies in that direction in lots of different ways. And you have no idea and you don't know what you don't know.

And yet you skip straight through to trying to achieve enlightenment, right? You can't do that without cleaning up all the rest. So I think a prize like this would balance both these out. It would also solve the problem of techies in Silicon Valley trying to go for technological supremacy without really understanding the human nuances along the way, etc. So that would be the prize I would go after. It would make human beings infinitely happier and more at peace with themselves if you could achieve it. And your moonshot, what are you working on right now that is in the realm of moonshot, buddy? Moonshot is can we create a new model for society that creates a layer of resilience in our systemic global human society?

So we have, if you look at the history of civilizations, every civilization got to a very complex level, the Incas, the Mayans, the Romans, then they had some boundary condition and they instantly collapsed, right? Like just literally hit a cliff and boom, every single one of them, by the way. And if you talk to the Yuval Harari's and Neil Ferguson's of the world, all those conditions are there now where we're at that tipping point. We may be even sliding down and we don't know. Our monetary systems are an easy example. The crash in crypto today is one example.

It looks like, by the way, Solana may be being wiped out today. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy. It's down a massive amount today. So when you look at what's happening in uh global human wow bitcoin's down to 16 something yeah it's great buying opportunity by the way by the way this is an entrepreneur's mindset everybody this is how the judo move when it goes down it It's a buying opportunity,

right? Big problems, fantastic opportunities to start a company. The biggest problems are the biggest markets. That's your stock phrase. I think it's such an important way to think about the world as a whole. Huge problem, huge opportunity. And I think this is maybe the biggest gift that you've brought to the world, Peter, is having people think at a global scale via XPRIZE or Singularity. I remember I got together with a bunch of the Singularity alumni in Spain when I was there. And they're like, we hate you. And I said, what happened? He goes, you infected us.

You get us to think at a global level. And then you can't go back to thinking, how do I create a better mobile ad network? You just can't. You're stuck trying to solve systemic global issues, which is what we wanted anyway. Yeah, I know. And by the way, I can't believe we were both in Spain the same day, in Madrid, and we missed each other by like hours. We've had the opposite. Remember, I was at the New York Hilton over Grand Central.

And I was typing an email to you, kind of going, you really need to talk to Peter directly about this. And you were literally walking across the lobby by accident. I know. And how many times have we done that and didn't even know it? Yeah. I have a teaser for your people. Okay. Yes, good.

John Hagel and I, you know, we're talking about serendipity. John Hagel and I, who does a lot of work in writing around engineering serendipity, have been working on a model and we've come up with a very simple two-by-two diagram where we define luck and we can measure it. And I'll leave that there. We're going to talk about this some other time? We happily can. Alright, we'll come back to that. It needs a reveal because we need to finish

it up, etc. etc. But it's there. Because think about how much our lives run on luck and serendipitous events, right? Every single one of us, the most meaningful things in our lives were weird coincidences for the rest. There's no normal explanation. And we have plenty of those between us. We have plenty of those between us, right? And so can you prescriptively create luck? In fact, the EXO book was actually a practice book for me at a crack at writing a book on luck.

Okay, which is going to come out? You're going to write a book on luck? At some point, John and I need to agree on the final framing and definitions. But think about the exponential organizations. The first half is analytical. What is it? And so what are the attributes? Second half is, and then we have a diagnostic test.

And the second half is prescriptive. How do you start one, apply to mid-market and big companies, et cetera, right? And it was actually the practice run to say, could I get a meme into the world? Because luck is a really hard topic, right? Rookie author, I'm probably going to make some stupid mistake and screw it all up. Let me, you know, exponential organizations is so obvious needs to be done. And then the book took off and I've not been able to get away from the paradigm yet. But John and I have been working on the side on this other topic because all of us, think of any of us, our lives run on luck.

They run on hard work and caffeine. Those are the table stakes. Okay. Think of any Silicon Valley company. You have to be talented. You have to work your ass off. Table stakes. Then you need that lucky break to hit the right strategic relationship, hit the market at the right time with the right feature footprint.

And that's actually what makes you successful. So how do you generate serendipity? So, you know, there's a great TED talk and a DLD talk by Bill Gross. Yes. Right. He talks about this. It has to be related, right, where he says, listen, he analyzed like 100 companies that succeeded, 100 companies that failed. And he said, what was the parameter that was the number one thing of all the companies that succeeded?

Was the amount of capital they raised? Was it the experience of the CEO? Was it the field that they were in? And you know the answer to this. Yeah, it's totally luck. Well, it was luck by virtue of their ability to stick around. In other words, the companies that were able to last the longest intercepted a lucky event. Like the space shuttle crashing and being shut down was what launched SpaceX.

The 2008 fiscal crash is what launched Uber and Airbnb. Zoom. Oh, my God. I was on a panel with Eric, you're on, the CEO of Zoom, a month before the pandemic. And he's saying, Jesus, you know, I've been working my ass off for several years building this, and I need that one thing to happen to help us take off. And a month later, boom. Coincidence? I think not. Well, it is and it isn't. I'm joking. The Seneca definition that preparation meets opportunity is the best definition we've ever seen. For sure. And so the question then becomes, how do you

increase preparation? How do you increase opportunity? And can you live long enough to live forever, which is paraphrasing Ray Kurzweil on longevity, but it's true for companies. I tell all my companies, listen, get the cashflow break, even as soon as you can, right? Make sure you've got years of lifetime because you're going to screw it up over and over again. And you're going to run, if you're dead and you do not exist, there's no way to run into that perfect investor or customer. But if you're able to hang on long enough, you'll intercept the pandemic, you know, or the big business opportunity. You know, this is maybe the hardest question is something's not working. Do you keep struggling or do you shut it down and start again? Oh my God, it is one of the hardest questions.

This is the black hole question. We should talk about that next time because it's a, you know, I've had, I'm now in my 27th company, I think, and there are those companies that I look back and say, man, I should have killed them far earlier. I'm terrible at that. I'm like the worst fast guy ever. I've taken money. My company's longer forever. I should just be merciful and shoot them in the head. I'm bad at that. The successful entrepreneurs are the ones that just go astroteller, right? Google Earth, they have a very

specific thing. It's having these metrics or it's not. What will make it fail and test those first and then kill it? We're going to do this again, right? You and I on this podcast? Anytime. We're going to talk about luck. We're going to talk about when do you kill your favorite child or company as the case may be, and lots of other subjects. In fact, we'll ask people who are viewing this what they want us to talk about. And we'll do that. We'll catch up on where Twitter is and FTX and democracy where AI is. And, you know, pal, I love you. And I'm thankful

to have you in my life. Likewise. I mean, the serendipity that brought us together is pervasive in everything that happens in my life right now. Yeah. All right, brother. See you soon. Talk soon, Peter.