The AI TSUNAMI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Explains What Assets Go Up Most In This Age

0:00What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very special treat. I have a conversation with Peter Diamandis. Peter is one of the forward-thinking leaders when it comes to artificial intelligence, longevity, technology in general. He's one of my favorite people to talk about innovation and where the world is headed. Peter's got a brand new book called We Are As Gods that's coming out in April, and he's here to break down how to prepare for the age of abundance and what you should be thinking in artificial intelligence, in all of the different longevity things, Bitcoin, and in your investment portfolio.

0:28I always enjoy talking to Peter and this conversation is no different. Here we are with Peter Diamandis.

0:45All right, Peter, I thought a great place to start the conversation is I was listening to the Moonshots podcast. You did it with Elon Musk and he said something that is seared in my brain and I cannot forget. I have borrowed it. I have stolen it. I have repeated it time and time again, which is a supersonic tsunami is coming. And he was specifically talking about AI and robotics and the impact it's going to be on society. What is your take in terms of what should we be prepared for? And what are the things maybe we should be concerned about as the supersonic tsunami comes? Yeah, the concept of a supersonic tsunami that that Elon coined and I've been speaking about as well is the fact that everything is changing everywhere all at once.

1:27And the speed of change is something that we've never seen as a species before. Right. It's not just AI, but it's everything underlying AI. We have, you know, what differentiates us as humans from every other species on the planet? We're not the fastest. We're not the strongest. arguably, hopefully, with the most intelligent. And this unique capability of intelligence is being democratized and demonetized, right? Anyone with a cell phone has access to not just intelligence, but arguably, very shortly, super intelligence, Einstein in your pocket. And so when 8 billion people have that kind of capability delivered effectively for free on their phone, that changes everything.

2:13But at the same time that AI is growing exponentially, and by the way, it's not slowing down, it's accelerating. We also have a multitude of other exponential technologies, right? Humanoid robotics, robotics in general, are coming online, powered by AI. We've got fundamental breakthroughs going on in biotech and health tech, leading towards something that I'm passionate about, longevity, escape velocity. How do we add decades onto our health? Lifespans and health spans exceeding 100, 120, 150 changes. A lot of the global economics changes how we see our lives going forward. At the same time, we're reinventing transportation with autonomous vehicles, flying cars.

3:03We're about to tokenize the entire financial stack of society. And all of these things converging at the same time because of massive increases in computation, that is a tsunami, right? A wall, if you would, of water racing towards us. And that can lead to some level of fear for people. Am I going to have a job? Is what I care about still relevant? And people have to make a decision. Are you going to surf on top of this tsunami or be crushed by it? And that's the underlying conversation I have literally every week on my Moonshots podcast. And I think society and in particular governments, which are very linear organizations, aren't ready for it.

3:56Now, when we think about this rise of AI and robotics, I think a lot of people are trying to figure out where does it show up first. So people have seen the charts that show, you know, what the capabilities are. But I think that originally folks were yelling, hey, everyone, go learn to code. And that was kind of the trope, you know, just a couple of years ago. Now you don't need to because the machines learned English. And so anyone can use this kind of software. And so when you start thinking about, you know, preparing for this, I know you put together an entire book about how to prepare as a society and as an individual.

4:29What are the things that you are suggesting to people they should be doing more of? And what are the things you're suggesting they should be doing less of? Yeah. I think, first of all, fear is a terrible place from which to face the future. And so you need to actively pick what mindsets you're going to be choosing to engage as you start learning about this, as it starts impacting our lives. So very first thing that everybody needs to be doing is using AI. And we all, you know, people are using it today. I mean, every morning when I get up, I have my morning routines, you know, from red light and meditation to sitting down with one of my favorite AI models, whether it's Gemini Pro or whether it's Claude or GPT or ChatGPT, whatever it might be, and engaging with it, having a conversation.

5:21Right. Like, you know, you know, yesterday morning I gave a presentation to the leadership of New York Life because life insurance is going to be massively transformed, disrupted, reinvented as we start hitting towards, you know, super extended health spans. and so I had a conversation to learn about the company and ask questions. You know, if anybody's, you know, and I think should be curious about AI and you don't know about it, have a conversation with AI. It's the most patient, infinitely patient instructor out there. And if you're in voice mode versus in texting mode, you can say, hold it, stop.

5:59I didn't understand what you just said. Can you explain that to me and slow it down? And then you can investigate in these conversations and we need to be learning one of the most important things we need to be constantly learning and less in fear um yeah so i'll start i'll start with that uh and the realization is we can learn anything we want right now if we're willing to have the judo move of like oh my god i don't get it to okay i want to learn about it um you know let's go let's start with that. When you start looking at this technology, one of the aspects that seems to be true is it's the classic paradox, right?

6:40On one hand, it's supposed to automate work. It's supposed to free us up to do other things that are either more productive or frankly, make us happier. But at the same time, every single person I know that is anywhere near AI and robotics, they are working harder than they've ever worked before. And they also are frankly not spending as much time on easy problems because those are the easiest to automate away. The density of hard problems that they have to tackle on a day-to-day basis is way more dense than it was, you know, five years ago. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, right now I am working 6 a.m.

7:16to 9 p.m. seven days a week, but it's also work that I love doing, right? And it's just all of a sudden, rather than doing the menial work, I'm able to ask AI to do that menial work for me. And I'm able to think about problems at a much higher level than I ever have before. And I think that's one of the most important aspects. It's like, if you've got to do something, your first reaction, I mean, You and I grew up in this world where if you had some work you had to get done, you had to do it. Or you had to find somebody in your organization, call them and say, listen, I need you to get this body of work done for me and come back to me with the answer.

8:02And historically, I think even a smart person would take days to come back if it was a complicated task. That's no longer the case. Now, if I need something done, my first reaction, and it's, I've got to change my behavior. My first reaction is going to an AI model and saying, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I'm thinking about. Here's what I need to get done. Here's the raw data. Please do it for me. And then, you know, sometimes if it's long, you know, requires a significant amount of work, it might come back in 10, 15, 30 minutes with the answer. Sometimes it's simple and it comes back very quickly.

8:45Editing a document. It's like I ask a lot of people for feedback on a particular document. I'm writing a piece right now on going from UBI, universal basic income, to universal high income, UHI, in three steps. And I've been working on this paper. I sent it out to a few different people. And I said, please give me your comments. I took my paper and all of their comments from, you know, a number of different reviewers, put it into, I forget if I was using Claude or I was using Gemini 3 Pro. And I said, look at all the comments, look at my paper, come back with a review and address those comments and re-edit the paper with those comments in mind.

9:27And instead of me doing integration, all I had to do is now get the final result, review it, see if I agree with it. But what would have been a day of work is basically down to 30 minutes for me. So this is one of the behavioral changes we need to make as mothers and fathers, executives, employees, just anybody. of rather than just grinding and doing the work yourself, can you have an AI do the work for you? And then you're in the process of reviewing it, evaluating the work. Same thing that's true for legal documents. A lot of times when I need an agreement on a particular contract or particular memorandum of agreement I need, I will just speak to my model, give it all the data, feed any preexisting documents, and say, please draft a detailed agreement dealing with all these things.

10:28And I'll get back to the agreement in, you know, literally a minute, two minutes. And then if I want, I'll have my lawyer review it. Most of the time I'll review it. And I might actually take the agreement that, you know, that GPT gave me, that chat GPT gave me, and then I'll give it to Gemini and say, evaluate this agreement. Tell me, you know, if there's any holes in it. And so our ability to move these things much faster and play a supervisory role is key. And then it frees us up to do more because it's so much fun, the amount of stuff you can do that it drives, at least for me in my life, my ability to do a lot more versus doing the grind.

11:14So it's how do you start to integrate this technology in your life in a way that gives you superpowers and is more fun than doing the hard work of reading that paragraph, thinking about it, finding an answer, plugging it in. One of the most interesting parts to me is the speed of innovation right now has a lot of people feeling like they're falling behind. How do I possibly keep up? But at the same time, the models are getting smarter, the products are getting better. And so in a weird way, it's the models that are having to keep up with all of the recent breakthroughs and you get the benefit of that.

11:54But I don't think that's a good enough answer for a lot of people. They want to mentally, but you know, we're still stuck in this world of like, I want to understand all the things that I see going on around me so that then I can hopefully use these tools to be more productive, whether it's at work or solve problems in my personal life. Yeah. I mean, you're right. First of all, all the different models, whether the Chinese models, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, you know, OpenAI, they're all basically leapfrogging each other. Every week, there's a new model coming out. Not every week, but it's getting close to every week.

12:28It used to be every, you know, every year. Then it was every, you know, six months. Now it's every two months. We'll be down at every month where a new model is being released. And the models are really converging. The difference between them is diminishing. And so, you know, you're probably going to get basically the same kind of capability out of these models. And a lot of times, again, I'll use multiple models to evaluate the work. And you can try and keep up with all of the nitty gritty, or you can say, listen, I'm going to be the expert in the area of my company. I'm going to be an expert in this problem space and not in the solutions, but in the problem space.

13:15And I'm going to, as the models get better and better, I'll be able to use these better models to solve the problems I have more efficiently and deliver more value to my customers, my clients. So it's, you know, I think that people should keep up in general with what's possible. but I think ultimately, again, it's using the technology and not being fearful of the technology, but utilizing and playing with it every single day. You mentioned universal high income, which obviously is a play on words for universal basic income. What is universal high income and what will be the impact? Yeah. So, you know, let me give some context here.

13:59One of the things, So I'm, you know, as optimistic as you can get about the future, right? My first book was called Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think, published back in 2012. I'm just publishing a new book I'll mention a little bit. But we're heading towards a world where we're going to see a lot of job disruption. And we're going to see a lot of fear coming from that. Right now, the group of people out of work the longest are recent college graduates. And we're starting to see the idea that getting a college degree may not be the best approach because you're saddled with debt. And at the end of it, if you're not getting a job, what was the purpose in that?

14:47The old social contract was always do well in high school, get into good college, get a degree and get a job. And that is going away. That's cooked. That's effectively gone. And so we're going to start to see the consequences of that. are young adults, a lot of young men not getting jobs, not being able to afford that house, not sure if they want to have a family yet because they don't have a... So that's going to cause a lot of concerns. At the same time, we're going to start to see a number of companies basically using AI to trim the workforce. And as a result of that trimming the workforce, people losing their jobs, some of the predictions on unemployment are downright scary.

15:35and at the end of the day the question is what can the government do about that and i think you know what's likely is same way we saw with uh during covid where the government started printing money and issuing you know thousand dollar checks i think that uh in the near term what we're likely to see is the government beginning to issue larger checks you know i'm doing a blog or one of my newsletters right now, my Metatrends newsletters on going from UBI, universal basic income, to UHI, universal high income in three incremental steps. The first that step is, I think, in the one to three year time frame, as these jobless rates start going up, we're going to see the government writing bigger and bigger checks.

16:22I think that's the only knob the government has to write to try and reduce social unrest. But where that leads to ultimately, and I can walk through the steps if you want, but ultimately, and this is the conversation I had with Elon on my podcast. And again, I just did, I had my Abundance Summit, Eric Schmidt opened, Elon Musk closed. And we talked about this again, that we're heading towards a world, and this world is, you know, eight to 10 years out, where AI and robotics are going to be able to deliver almost everything we need at a massively demonetized cost. So healthcare, which we spend a lot of money on right now, will ultimately be free.

17:08The best diagnosticians in the world will be AI is being able to look at all your data and give you a very accurate diagnosis. We're there right now, by the way. AI can do a better job at diagnostics measured over and over again than the best physicians can. The conversation with Elon was about the future of robotic surgery with Optimus. As an example, there's many great robot companies. You know, Tesla with Optimus is by far one of the top in the world. And his prediction was that within three or four years, we're going to see robots able to do surgery better than a human surgeon. And so what's the cost of surgery then?

17:49It's the cost of the CapEx, the cost of the robot, which is going to be something like a dollar an hour if you do the economics on it, and the cost of electricity. So imagine the best surgeons in the world are these humanoid robots. And let's say it's not three or four years. Let's say it's five, six, seven years. But the idea is that these robots will be the best surgeons in the world because they've seen and they share memory. They've seen every surgery out there. And so medical costs start to diminish significantly. Secondly, the best educators in the world are going to be AI models that know your child's favorite color, sports star, know their language skills, and are able to engage them in an educational experience far better than any human teacher can.

18:37So transportation, right? We're heading towards electric autonomous vehicles that are four or five times cheaper than owning a car. At the same time, we're going to start to see humanoid robots replacing labor in the home, replacing, you know, and so this begins to transform the economics where all of a sudden individuals have access to all the goods and services they want delivered by these, you know, these exponentially growing digital services. at a massively demonetized cost. And so the idea of universal high income is a point in the world where whatever you want, whatever you need, is now deflated in cost.

19:29And, you know, it's a detailed set of sort of economic projections of where we're going. And if I had time, I'd write another, I'd write an economics book. I don't. But this is ultimately where we're heading. But we're going to have some rough patches along the way over the next, you know, one to six years. And this is the one, these are the areas that I'm personally focused on. I'll mention one thing. I think that we're going to see a lot of fear in society, a lot of the social unrest coming from two different areas. One area, Anthony, is that, again, people concerned about their livelihood and for good reasons until we transition and the government and the large hyperscalers, the frontier labs have to play a role in cushioning this process, helping us get through this transformation.

20:29because we've seen this before with the industrial revolution, the agriculture revolution, but it happened over much longer periods of time. The challenge here is it's happening over a very compressed time. And so I think UBI from the government is going to play a role in that. The other thing that's causing us a lot of consternation, and this hit me about six months ago that every science fiction movie, every movie we're watching from Hollywood right now is dystopian, right? We're seeing Terminator, Ex Machina, Black Mirror. All of these are like painting this vision of the future that is very negative.

21:10It's all about, you know, rogue robots and killer AIs. And if that's the vision of the future that you see and the only vision that you know, it's like, why would you want to live there? So, you know, when I was growing up, the story that impacted my life the most, the movies and the TV that impacted my life gave me this, wow, amazing future was Star Trek. Star Trek really showed me what this incredible future in which humanity and technology were collaborating to make this amazing future for all of us. And like, where is that? I have two 14 year old boys. Where is that for my kids? And so I reached out to a friend of mine, Rod Roddenberry, who's the, uh, uh, the son of Gene Rodby, the creator of Star Trek had a conversation with him.

22:00Then went out to Google, uh, Mark Benioff from Salesforce, uh, Kathy Wood from, uh, ARK invest. And I came up with an idea, uh, I call the future vision XPRIZE. And so I raised about$5 million of capital to launch this XPRIZE idea. And what we're doing is we're challenging teams around the world to write a film, to produce a trailer for a movie that they would want to make that shows a hopeful, compelling, abundant vision of the future. Right? I want these creators, these filmmakers to create a movie that inspires us where you can say, yes, that's the future I want to live in. That's an amazing future.

22:45So we've launched that competition. We have over a thousand entries right now, still plenty of time. It will go through end of August. So any creators out there who want to be part of this, you go to futurevisionxprize.com. We're giving away three and a half million dollars in prize money. And then the winner that's going to be chosen by the world and by directors and producers from Hollywood, we're going to make their movie. And so we're going to create an engine for positive storytelling, for movies that show us what the world could be like and give us a vision to go for, give us a target to shoot for.

23:25So super excited about that. And I think that's really important. Humanity needs these, we survive through storytelling. We always have from the earliest tribes. And so what's the story that we want to tell that inspires people to create that future, right? Star Trek told the story and, you know, the creator of the mobile phone saw Kirk on Star Trek talking to a device and that inspired him to create the mobile phone. And so a lot of the technology we have was inspired by science fiction in early days. So I'm pumped about this X Prize competition. When you think about longevity in particular, what is the ramifications on society?

24:11If people started living to 120, 150, I mean, these are big numbers that are nearly doubling life expectancy. There's been talk about, you know, there's too many humans. Now there's talk of there's not enough humans. And how do you think through this? I think about it as follows. First of all, yes, in the 60s and 70s, there were books like The Population Bomb that scared the daylights out of us that we're going to run out of resources, run out of food. But of course, that never happened. Technologists, scientists learned how to make more food, learned how to get more resources. And so the reality is right now, and you hinted toward this, that in fact, the bigger problem isn't overpopulation.

24:52It's going to be underpopulation of planet Earth. the replacement level for any country is 2.1 children per family, 2.1. In the 50s, when we peaked, globally, we're at 5.4 children per family. Today, that's come down to 2.3 children per family. The US, for example, is below the replacement rate at about 1.8 children per family. Places like Japan and Korea, even China, are below one child per family. Italy is below one child per family. And what happens is these countries are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. There are a few places, you know, like Middle East and Africa, which are still above two children, 2.1 children per family.

25:40Some are at three, three and a half. But what we found is as a country begins to embrace technology, begins to live healthier lives, the number of children they have reduces. So we are likely to peak at like nine and a half billion people on planet Earth and then very rapidly decrease. And so we need humans on Earth as a species, but also to keep up our economy. Robots and AI will help there. But I think the bigger problem on this is, are people saving enough money for an extended health span? Again, UHI will help that. And then ultimately, are people remaining youthful enough, not biologically, but mentally?

26:32Is there a purpose? When I ask people, what would you do with 20 extra years? They have a good answer. I'm going to go travel. I might start another company. I might have, you know, go and learn new areas, go get a degree. When I say, what do you do with 50 extra years? People's minds break. So we really need to be driving a purposeful life. If I could, my next book called We Are As Gods, a survival guide for the age of abundance is coming out mid-April. and I wrote Abundance, the Future is Better Everything in 2012. And this was before people were talking about abundance and now every tech CEO is talking about we're in the age of abundance, sustainable abundance, abundance is coming.

27:21And it's true, technology is taking whatever was scarce and making it abundant and it's accelerating. And so I partnered with Stephen Kotler with whom I've written a number of New York Times bestsellers. This is probably our best book ever. And this book tells a couple of important points. Number one, it shows us how we're getting increasing abundance across food, water, energy, healthcare, education, materials, all of these things in a positive sense. It also shows people where the negative externalities of abundance are too much carbon, you know suicide rates depression microplastics looking at those negative elements in the back of the book i've got 120 charts that show how abundance has been increasing in these areas and what the drivers are but what the book also does is as a survival guide it's like what is the mindsets you need to get ready for this coming next five years?

28:28And it really is about, you know, first of all, if you think technology like AI is happening to you and it's like it's a shock, then that's the worst place because you're in fear, you're back on your heels, in fear, you're retrenching, you're not in the right mindset. But if you realize that this technology is happening for you, that you have agency, that you have the ability to use this technology, we show people how. And having the right mindset, like a curiosity mindset, where you're constantly curious, you're constantly going to the AIs and trying to learn. Or a purpose-driven mindset, like what's your purpose in life?

29:11Because whatever it was, you can up-level that purpose. Right. It's like, no, I can go bigger. I can start to dream even bigger, powered by these technologies. So what we lay out in this book is the mindset and the way to think about what's about to hit, you know, this supersonic tsunami to tie it back in. How do you get ready for that? And so, you know, people go to weareasgodsbook.com. They can learn about it. We have a whole bunch of products and programs we're giving to people who buy the book. I'm doing a half-day seminar with Ray Kurzweil about exponential technologies as well for people who are buying the book.