AI, Elon, Abundance, and Longevity — With Peter Diamandis

0:00One of the biggest thinkers in tech and innovation joins us to talk about AI abundance, Elon Musk, and extending your life span. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Peter Diamandis. He's the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation. He's a multiple times best-selling author. He's also the host of the Great Moonshot Podcast. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you, Alex. Great to be here. Great to have you here. I've been following your work for quite some time and know you recently held this Abundance Summit where you talked a lot about artificial intelligence.

0:38You had some great speakers there. And I think the main question there was whether AI is going to help us boom or AI is going to be the end of us, this boomers versus doomers framework. And you just wrote on X right before this, I reiterate that AI will be humanity's greatest hope or will be our gravest threat. There is no in-between. So I really wanted to, we talk about the nuance here. Why is it one or the other? and if it's one or the other, and I know, of course, we have some determination on which way we go, but which way do you think we're headed? Yeah, so it's one or the other because it is so extraordinarily powerful.

1:14It's not a little bit more powerful than an intelligent human. Claude III was at an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT-40 released that exceeds Claude III. But there's no boundary level here. There's no boundary for human level. It's going to continue to increase. And there's no reason to believe it's not going to get 100 times or 1 ,000 times or a million or a billion times more powerful than the average human, what's typically called digital superintelligence. And once it's there, if it is in support of our society, of humanity, of Homo sapiens, it's our greatest hope ever. It's a boomer opportunity, right?

1:58It's helping us cure all of our ills, explore the stars, up-level our dreams. If it's used for dystopian purposes, I don't think AI on its own is going to be dystopian. I think it's the human use of AI that could be dystopian. Then you've got a tool that is the most dangerous tool on the planet. So that's the debate. You know, I had my I have my abundance summit every year where I, you know, support and coach 400 CEOs. And that was the theme this year, the greatest hope or the greatest threat for humanity. Right. And so what are you leaning towards right now? I'm, you know, I'm not only the optimist.

2:42I'm the guy who says the glass isn't half full. The glass is overflowing. I truly believe that as systems become more and more intelligent, they get more abundant-minded, more loving of life, more supportive. You know, if you look, there was a study done by a friend of mine, Alvin Graylin, in his latest book, The New Reality. And he looked at leaders around the world who were sort of the despots and the greatest leaders. And there was a direct correlation with the amount of school they had, how much learning they had, how open-minded they are. Because if you've got a digital superintelligence who you tell go and destroy these people, I mean, honestly, there are ways to get your solution without killing.

3:32And I think we're going to see digital superintelligence potentially help society really survive over the decades ahead. That's interesting. So your belief is that the more education we get, the more empathetic we're going to be. And as AIs get more educated, then therefore they will resemble the same qualities? I think I put it a different way as well, which is if you think about wisdom, right? We talk about our societal leaders being wise, right? Our elders being wise. And, you know, you ask, what do they, why are they wise? Well, they've seen so many things in their life. If you go to them and say, you know, Village Elder, what do you think is going to happen here?

4:14What should we do? Well, I saw that 40 years ago, whatever. Can you imagine a digital superintelligence that is able to play out a billion simulations of every scenario and see where they lead? That is the ultimate wisdom. And, you know, people say, well, people are going to fight over things that are scarce and rare resources. I don't think there's such a thing as scarcity. scarcity is contextual right we think of energy being scarce but we're bathed in 8 000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species in a year and we're about to really bring fusion online you know we don't have you know taught food scarcity but we're reinventing how to produce food in vertical farms or cultivated meats so there are ways to really use technology to turn scarcity into abundance over and over again.

5:06And that's what intelligence can do. Right. But also, I mean, evil people are, you know, the most evil people have been very smart. And the thing that makes them so dangerous is that they don't have, let's say, the morals that would keep them from doing the damage. So you can have one very smart evil person doing way more damage than a bunch of really smart, benevolent people. So how do you square that in the equation here? So listen, there is most definitely that risk, right? I'm not worried about, you know, artificial intelligence. I'm worried about human stupidity, to put that in juxtapositioning.

5:42The only way to guard against that is it's white hat, black hat in this scenario, the ability to use AI to guard us. You have to ask yourself the question, in your heart, do you believe on the whole human nature is good or evil in the majority of humans? We have more and more individuals, which we can call entrepreneurs, who can find and solve problems. The more people finding and solving problems, the better the world gets. I like to say in the work I do in my Abundance Summit, you know, the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. And so we're going to have more and more people trying to solve big problems.

6:26Are we going to have people using these technologies for selfish, you know, reasons for, you know, reasons that could injure society? A hundred percent. Do we have the ability to detect it and fight it? we do. And let's talk about governance quickly, because we've been talking right now with this kind of amorphous, like, what will AI do? And I think that so many conversations about AI tend to sort of, and I think we've kind of already touched on it, remove the humans from the equation. But you, at the very beginning, started talking about we have Anthropic, we have Google, now Elon is trying to build superintelligence.

7:04Who do you think is going to control it? And should we, let's say one organization, let's say, for instance, Google is able to achieve some form of super intelligence, right? For instance, let's say they create AI that can improve AI and it just continues to accelerate and we have liftoff. What are the risks of having a single entity control this super intelligence, whether it's a company or a government? Alex, there's good news here in that we have seen not a single company, but we've seen five, six, seven, eight companies all in parallel delivering similar generative AI capabilities and they're all priced either free or like 20 bucks a month right no one was so far ahead that it's like this is a million bucks um if you get a chance to use it right so the fact that there are multiple players um and they're all starting at or near zero is a super positive indication of the future.

8:05I don't think you're going to have people all of a sudden, all eight of them getting into a cabal and saying, okay, let's all charge a thousand bucks a month because we can. You also have great business models like Google and Baidu, which has been available for free around the world. And these companies are making money on secondary and tertiary implications of that free business model. And I think you're going to see that here with AI as well. I think AI will become ultimately the best educator on the planet and the best diagnostician on the planet available on your mobile phone. And I think that educator, again, the best on the planet will be available for free to the poorest child and the wealthiest child.

8:56And it won't be like it's a little bit better for the person who's wealthy. Just like Google for Larry Page's kids is not different than Google for a kid in a favela using it. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing. So my wife and I were just talking about like how much time it takes to tutor kids and like help them do their homework. And now you can, I guess you can ostensibly just turn over a lot of this to a world-class tutor that's going to be able to look at their homework, work with them on their homework, even attend PTA meetings and get the notes so you can be better parents. And that is pretty interesting to me.

9:33Yeah, it is. And you've got Saul Kahn with Khan Academy with Khan Amigo, which is a GPT-4 powered version of it. And this year at Abundance 360, I showed a video of Steve Jobs years ago saying, I'm so jealous that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. And so I said to the audience, let me introduce you to Aristotle. And Steve Brown, my chief officer, had created a digital avatar of Aristotle based on all of his works. And I had conversations and I used Aristotle as a co-host. and that is now true which all the great educators of all time and their works and their knowledge and their philosophies are available to you and your kids to have a conversation or debate with be taught about iliad and the odyssey by homer directly i mean this is the world we're heading and it's free right okay one last question about ai then we're going to move on to elon I want to ask you where you think the economic benefit is going to be here, because you brought up a very interesting point that, you know, you think about the OpenAI's and the clods is 20 bucks a month or it's free.

10:55And OpenAI recently said, all right, you're our latest model, GPT-40, free for everyone. So who's going to make money here, Peter? I think it's going to be based on up-leveling the values and services. So I have a company called Fountain Life, for example, which is what I consider the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics company. And we employ the best functional medicine doctors and put you through a full-day diagnostic and then take all of the data, analyze it, and deliver it back to you. and we can do it without ai in the loop it's just more difficult and more complicated and is not as good as having ai in the loop so we will make money by delivering a better service that is made more accurate faster able to service more members by using ai yeah the application So it's going to be the application.

11:57When I tell people, entrepreneurs, I say, listen, do you want to start an AI company? You need two things, unique data and a relationship with a marketplace that you can offer to. So the AI is becoming democratized and demonetized. The data and the market and the AI together create new businesses. Yeah. All right. Let's go to Elon. You know, it's always interesting speaking about Elon on this podcast when we bring out the critics, like we had some Elon critics on a couple of weeks ago and the inbox flooded with negative comments because people love Elon. And then we bring on people that support Elon and then the inbox floods with negative comments because there are people who hate him.

12:45You've been friends with him for 20 years. So I basically, this is sort of the way that we're approaching Elon on the show is we're going to talk with the people who love him and the people who have critics, who critique him. And hopefully over time, listeners will get a nuanced picture of him because that's sort of what we're and basically come to their own conclusions. Right. Like we're not going to tell you how to think on this show. And Peter, you've been friends with him for 20 years. 24 years. Yeah. You were there at the very beginning of SpaceX. So I'm curious, I'd love to hear, A, like your reflection of what makes Elon different than others as an entrepreneur, and then also why you think it's so difficult to have these nuanced conversations about him.

13:25I think he's extraordinarily brilliant. He is a genius level IQ, and he's got incredible conviction. So Elon's what he would call a first principles thinker. You know, he will evaluate a situation to first principles like the physics of what's going on, reach a conclusion. And then what he does that very few others have done is he puts it all on black, right, or all on red. He bets everything, including his reputation, including his health, including his time. And he goes all in. And I find that extraordinary. We have so many billionaires out there that are just sitting on their wealth. They built a company, they made money and all of that, but they're not reinvesting it in other moonshots.

14:20They're sitting on$100 billion of wealth and using that to buy more houses or more yachts or to make more money with their wealth. It's like, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to give it to your kids and ruin their lives? Are you going to give it to your lawyers to give away? Or why don't you use both your wealth and your intelligence to go and pick problems and solve them? And Elon's done that over and over again. So kudos to him. You know, on, I remember January 7th of 2021, he became the wealthiest person on the planet. I think that was the date. And he was getting a lot of criticism about not being philanthropic.

14:59Now, he had funded a few years earlier a$15 million global learning XPRIZE to teach kids in Africa reading and writing arithmetic without any adults just on an app on a tablet. And it was a great success. And so I texted him and I said, Elon, a lot of critique on philanthropy. How about funding another XPRIZE? And he said, what do you have in mind? And I said, we have a$100 million gigaton carbon removal prize that we need someone to underwrite. And he wrote back, sure. That was it. Two months later, we were launching this$100 million prize. He donated like, I don't know what it was,$130 million for the purse and for the operations.

15:44and again he's when he's clear about what he wants to do the decision process of making it happen is is amazing you know and if you remember he is a consummate engineer right uh starship falcon one falcon nine falcon heavy starship um amazing engineers that follow him and he he is able to to get the best, including Gwen Shotwell, who really, as president, operates SpaceX. But he also has got a clear fundamental vision. And I just salute the guy. The world is a much, much better place because of him. And then what do you think about this, about how polarizing he is? I just think that I'll just give you like one perspective here.

16:33I think he so often just kind of steps in it unnecessarily. and you think about some of like the the tweets he's done um you know the paul pelosi tweet or this fauci prison tweet that he did which was you know unnecessary i agree with you yeah i mean it's as a friend you want to protect him um and say don't do that yeah there's a lot of friends who do but he's what you see is what you get he speaks his mind always most of the times that's brilliant some of the times it gets him in trouble. Do you think that, I mean, people, I'm curious if you have context on this. People, it seems from the outside that he's like pretty impulsive in terms of the things that he does.

17:16It seems like Twitter was an impulse buy. Even the most recent where he fired a good chunk of the, or I think the entire Supercharger team. Now he's trying to hire some of them back. And people were like, okay, is this the end of Superchargers? But maybe he just needed, It seems like when he wants to just redo something, he just kind of clears the deck and tries to start over. Is he a little bit too impulsive? He's very impulsive, but there's always a fundamental underneath that. I mean, the Twitter purchase, while it was an impulse, I think he had a clear vision of what Twitter could be. He had a clear vision of X when he had built PayPal.

17:55He wanted the ultimate banking institution. And X now, X.com, will become not only a platform for communications and for conversations like this. It'll become a bank. It'll become, you know, wallets. It'll become crypto. It'll become all of those things, one layer at a time. And he'll turn it. You know, Elon will be the first trillionaire out there. He'll turn X into an extraordinary platform, SpaceX and, you know, and Starlink, which I got to admit, Starlink is brilliant, right? It's been tried so many times before with Globalstar and Iridium and Teledesic, and they all failed. Yeah, well, I mean, he's definitely, he realized, I think, with Starlink that he had the rockets.

18:44When you got the rockets, it's not that the notion of building a global internet based on satellite is trivial, but it's much more feasible than if you're trying to ride somebody else's. It had been tried before by companies that own rockets, like Orbital Sciences with Orbcom. It's just not only did he have the rockets, he had the engineering brilliance to create something that has dominated the field. And I know of many people who have tried to do this and just failed. So it's the combination of, what's the Greek word? Chutzpah? yeah cohonus and brilliance and capital and also you know he has the ability to do something which is biblical which is speak a vision right and literally create it by being able to aggregate the capital and the talent and the marketing and birth it right the same here x.ai i mean from zero to a huge valuation by virtue of his involvement.

19:56I want to talk to you about that, about Neuralink, but I just want to ask one more follow-up here, which is, do you think that saying like Elon is who he is, is that letting him off the hook a little too easily? I think he has got responsibility given the platform he has and the people who follow him and worship him to have some clear thinking before he makes some statements he makes. I do agree with that. And, and he is who he is. Meaning I have, I have, I've been in conversations or seen him in conversations where when a person said the wrong trigger, a different Elon comes out. Yeah. And again, on the whole, it's not like he's a little bit better for humanity.

20:53I think he's a thousand X better for humanity and the things that he's taking on. The world's a better place because he's here investing his brilliance and his mind. One thing I'll say is I think that he doesn't operate from fear, which is and I think we're going to talk about that a little later. But just it is it is interesting how so many people say this can't be done. And and he's like, basically, when he gets an idea, he will try it. He's like the bullshit. I'll just make it happen. If he's if he's done the mental physics from a first principle thinking standpoint, he will take it on. And a lot of times he'll see things that others don't see.

21:29Other times he will just brute force it into existence. So on Neuralink, it seems interesting because we've obviously seen like the first Neuralink device implanted. It looks like it's had some pretty impressive results already. One thing I think you brought up to him is that is there is there going to be this moment where Neuralink is going to connect our brains with AI and effectively couple us with it. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about like whether that's the direction it's going to go. And, you know, should we be excited about something like that? The answer is without question, we're going that way, right?

22:07So here I've got my cell phone. It does a lot of capabilities on board, but when it wants to do something difficult, it uses the 5G network to go to the edge of the cloud, do the calculations there, and send the answer back. Our brains are limited in their abilities, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. and there's going to be a time in the not too distant future. Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2033 right for a high bandwidth brain computer interface where I think it and that thought goes through Neuralink or whatever company to the edge of the cloud where the processing gets done and then the answer comes back to my brain.

22:55You know we can't make our brains any bigger. our neocortex this folded layer on the brain was an was an attempt by evolution to increase that outer layer of the brain it folded onto itself to get increased surface area but our brains can't get any bigger because we would not be able to be given birth through mom's birth canal so the only way to expand it is what we do with our cell phones ray predicted a high bandwidth brain computer interface in 2033. We have Neuralink. We have, you know, a half dozen other companies out there that are up and operational. And, you know, this year, for example, on stage at my Abundance Summit in March of 25, I have an amazing woman from MIT who has a brand new approach with these microscopic circulatronic chips that are less than the size of a red blood cell that will be introduced into your, you know, your arterial system and go and flow into the brain and give you millions of connection points, right?

24:06So these sorts of technologies are coming. It's fantastic voyage from the movie and the book. You know, there are companies like Paradromics, they're doing amazing work right now and BlackRock and others. If you think about what is the most valuable thing you could do to increase the capability of your employees or your country, it would be to increase the intelligence of your people. And so AI is part of that, but also BCI is part of that. And ultimately, the merger of humans and AI coupling, as we talked about it, is likely where we're going. Are you going to be an early adopter on that stuff?

24:51Listen, I cannot, I can't go any place without this thing, right? It's my augmented, I'm on stage in front of, you know, 5 ,000 people. And I will ask the question, is there anybody here who does not have their cell phone? And there's not a hand that goes up. The last time a hand went up, I said, do you not own one? He goes, no, no, I lost it in my Uber on the Y here. So it's like, we all are dependent on this. This is an extension of our brain. So I think that's reality. So that's a yes to the early adopter. Yes, yes. Yeah, early adopter. Okay. We've talked so much. We've used the word abundance so much today.

25:28And you have this Abundance Summit. You've talked about getting to abundance. It's one of the things you talk about a lot. But for those who haven't heard about it before, what is abundance? Like, what is your definition of it? Do we have it? We have it to an extraordinary amount compared to humanity 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1 ,000 years ago. Abundance is access to the fundamentals of life. It's not about a world of luxury. It's about a world of opportunity. I define technology as a force that takes whatever is scarce and makes it abundant. Let me give you some examples. So we used to kill whales to get whale oil.

26:10to light our nights. That's how we got energy, right? Then technology allowed us to ravage mountainsides and get coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ground for oil and natural gas. Now we can use photovoltaics and soon perovskite to convert sunlight into electricity. And there's 8 ,000 times more energy that hits the surface of the earth than we consume as a species in a year. So this energy is there, it's just not in a usable form yet. And so technology takes what's there and not usable and makes it usable. Another example is water, right? We talk about water wars or water scarcity, but we live on a water planet, right?

26:52We have two-thirds of our planets covered by water. But unfortunately, it's 97.5 % salt, you know, 2 % is ice, and we fight over a half a percent. We just launched an XPRIZE. I'm very proud to be chairman of the XPRIZE. We have launched 30 XPRIZES in 30 years, about$600 million in competitions. And we just launched $120 million prize, our largest ever, out of Abu Dhabi for large-scale desalination. can we improve the process of giving everybody access to clean water so abundance is access to food water energy health care education you know ultimately more time even can we get time abundance right well working on that through longevity we get time abundance by i don't know if you remember the old days i used to go to the library to research a report i would spend you know So our getting there, looking through card catalogs, trying to find the book, not finding the book, going to another library.

28:00Now Google gives us back those two or three hours. There's more time abundance that way. So all of the charts are up and to the right. Unfortunately, we have an abundance of empty calories, too, leading to obesity. We have an abundance of carbon in the atmosphere. So it's not all positive, but we majority, vast majority of this abundance is giving every man, woman and child access to the fundamentals of that we need. And if we have so much abundance, why do you think people are so unhappy or are they not? Yeah, you know, it's fascinating. One of the primary reasons is we judge ourselves against our neighbor.

28:43Uh, there is a, um, there's a concept, um, uh, which all of us have in our minds, 150 people that we consider our peers. Um, and they are your friends. They're people you see on TV all the time. They are people that, that you have a relationship with and you judge yourself not based upon how far you've come or how far you've come from your great-grandparents or how far you've come since the Middle Ages. You base yourself on how you compare yourself to the Cardassians, you know, or how you compare yourself to this billionaire or that billionaire. And that's a way for, you know, a path for disaster.

29:36So instead of realizing, amazing, I have a cell phone with free music and entertainment and education, and I have air conditioning and heating and light, and I can talk to anybody on the other side of the planet for free. We don't value those things because we don't have a private jet or whatever it might be. What do you think it says about the human condition that we're so quick to take these things for granted? I mean, I'm thinking in particular, we talked about AI models where like chat GPT came out and everyone's like, this is the most incredible thing ever developed. And then a year later, they're like, this is a piece of shit.

30:17When is GPT-5 coming out? Yeah, it's a fickle part of human nature. We tend to accept everything as baseline, and we're always looking for change. We're always looking for how do we improve ourselves? The other side, though, equally interesting, Alex, is that everybody likes, I mean, no one really likes dramatic change, right? You like waking up in the morning knowing the world is the same way it was as when you went to sleep the night before. And when there is dramatic change, people resist it. And there's a lot of dramatic change coming. Yeah, that is for sure. I mean, I guess it's already upon us.

31:06And accelerating. And we're going to now shift a little bit into health and medicine, the world of medicine. But just to bridge those two worlds, talking about things that are changing. So in preparation for this conversation, I went back and watched your 2012 TED Talk. Do you remember how you ended that talk? My abundance TED Talk in 2012? Protein folding. Ah, yes. And you mentioned that there's a human. Humans are the best protein folders. And that it used to be the work of supercomputers. Yes. But now it's the work of AI. Yes. Things like AlphaFold. So talk a little bit about the significance of that, right?