After Interviewing AI Founders, Here's What You Really Need to Know | EP #175

29:57So look at Apple. What did Apple make originally? Actually, the Apple one was a box of chips you assembled together. The Apple 2, which I had as a kid, is it's a desktop PC. Then the laptops came along. Then now today, 90 % of the revenue comes from the iPhone. It wasn't even a concept when Apple started. And so tech companies are constantly reinventing them now, themselves now. And what matters over the long run in a tech company is not what your business plan is today, but the founder dynamics, the team dynamics, the culture that continually innovates. But now, you know, when I talk about Apple, I'm looking really in the rear view mirror.

30:35Yeah. Look at the future and the rate of change. So, I'd love to get your ideas on some of that. Yeah, I mean, I think the most interesting companies are the founder -led AI or tech -first companies that... And it's so hard for an existing company to retrofit itself. It's nearly impossible. But what you do get is a founder led tech company where the founder says, no, stop doing that. We're now only doing this. So you get that with Zuckerberg, you get that with Musk, you get that with a few other companies. But that level of full body right turns are what is required. Otherwise, I mean, I was amazed when Bezos said, at a shareholder meeting in 30 years will be gone.

31:28Yep. Well, the Tesla reinvention as a robotics company, you know, Elon very well, that to me is, right at the point where any, actually I met with a woman yesterday who's from Bridgewater who talked about inshitification. She said, Bridgewater, we talk about public companies, the founders take it, they get it to a certain level, and then the inshitification sets in. It's inshitification. All that means is that the professional bureaucrats start coming in, the founders gradually leave. Nobody really notices, but then the company is inshitified. And so here you've got Tesla right at the point where you knew the stock had peaked and it's gonna come down because it's a car company, no or not, we're a robotics company.

32:10And that to me is the definition of the founder is still there. Well, it's even more extreme in SpaceX where when Falcon 1 flew, the first few times in flew it failed. And Elon and the team borrowed enough money to make a fourth flight and Falcon 1 succeeded on the fourth flight. And he flew it a number of the times, they got a contract for Falcon 9, and then he shut down the Falcon 1 line. Right? Burn those ships. And what he went on to say is, as soon as we get starship flying, we will shut down the Falcon 9 line, the most successful launch vehicle ever in human history. And it takes that level of leadership to be able to make these right -hand turns.

33:10They were going to put everything into that. Right, and the same thing with Starling. Well, Moe is telling people in class on Thursday mornings that they're spending way too much time on their plan and way too little time on their networking and team building. Because you're in this incredibly talent -dense environment here. And it's rare. If you take advantage of it while you've got it, you'll make lifelong friendships, lifelong connections, you'll be able to build many things together. You let it fit her away while you grind away on your business plan. You won't get that opportunity again later.

33:41And so a single individual can make all the difference in the world in your company. A single individual, give you an example. So George Church at Harvard Med School, one of the genetic professors, brilliant Aryan and synthetic biology. He had been focused on bringing back the woolly mammoth for many years. Talking about it, talking about it, there was a nonprofit and so forth. He meets a guy named Ben Lam who has no background in the biology. He's a software engineer. He becomes enamored with George. She becomes enamored with George's mission of de -extinction. It starts colossal four years ago.

34:26And today it's a $10 billion company that's brought back the dire wolf that's bringing back next to Dodo and Tasmanian Devil and of course the woolly mammoth. but, and to spun out three other companies, it's the difference a single entrepreneur CEO can make. So your job is always to find the smartest people on the planet to partner with you. I will happily hire anybody smarter than me. There's a coming wave of technological convergence as AI, robots, and other exponential tech transform every company and industry. And in its wake, no job or career will be left untouched. The people who are going to win in the coming era won't be the strongest, it won't even be the smartest.

35:13It'll be the people who are fastest to spot trends and to adapt. A few weeks ago, I took everything I teach to executive teams about navigating disruption, spotting exponential trends, a decade out, and put them into a course designed for one purpose. To future -proof your life, your career and your company, against this coming surge of AI, humanoids, and exponential tech, I'm giving the first lesson out for free. You can access this first lesson and more at dmandis .com slash future proof. That's dmandis .com slash future proof. The link is below. Speaking of as smart as people on the planet, I'm going to do this speed style first and then we'll come back.

35:53Okay, so I got up. So in your travels through life, you've met pretty much all of the big shots and entrepreneurship. And I've got their names listed out here. So I'll give you a name. You give me one sentence and then we'll go back to the top. Okay. Ready? Yeah. I go to reverse order here. Richard Branson.

36:12Frustrating. Frustrating, all right. Yeah, so when I was trying to pitch, well, I was trying to raise 10 million dollars for my space flight. X prize in the beginning. Of course, Richard Branson is the first person I go to. And I fly out there and and pitch him for Virgin Galactic. Now Virgin Atlantic to become the Virgin Atlantic space flight prize. He says no, two years later I go back and pitch him for Virgin Mobile. No. The day that the X prize got won, October 4th of 2004, after I had spent six years pitching him, he's at the airport and Mojave airport where the winning flight takes place, signing a contract to buy the rights for the winning technology, after turning me down twice for funding a 10 million, year later he goes, oh my God, I should have funded the $10 million, I spent $500 million trying to build a virtual galactic and stay at him, much cheaper to do it.

37:11I have no idea, he's brilliant in charming and he just frustrated. All right, we're gonna give up on this heat sale then, I'll just go. All right, this one drives me crazy actually, because how many people know Tony Robbins? Okay, good. Very glad to see that. In class every semester, it's like three people. And like, you know, what drives me nuts is that the younger, you know, a lot of the teams now are like high school, freshmen in college are really young. And they think the body language you want as an entrepreneur is cool, like too cool for school, which is a good way to survive high school and a terrible way to start a company.

37:48The body language you want is exactly Tony Robbins. relentless enthusiasm. Never any extraordinary confidence. Your capital raising story for X Prize is a good example. You have to, over, you have to give the same pitch 150 times enthusiastically. So Tony is the master of that. So Tony's your co -founder. Yeah, I've had the pleasure of knowing Tony. We were on the same stage. God, I don't know, 15 years and became best friends. We've started a couple of companies together. And he is one of the most beautiful human beings that I know. He gives of himself 24, 7 over and over in the most relentless schedule on the planet.

38:26And people don't realize the level of philanthropy that he puts forward in terms of feeding people, growing trees, energy systems. I mean, I'm just blown away by his level of brilliance authenticity. What you see is what you get. And he's just extraordinary. Yeah, Drew Austin gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2017. I think it was. You know, everyone has Drew Austin, founder of Dropbox. Yeah, that's also when it's kind of dropping off the curve for some reason. But he gave the best commencement address, I think ever. But he said, you become the average of the five people he's been the most time with.

39:07And that's true, whether you want it to be true or not. So choose those five people really, really wisely. And if you think about, well, what attitude would I want those five people to have? Relentless enthusiasm. Yeah. Relentages. Yeah, it really is think about this do you want to spend time with someone who is kind of Depressive and low energy or someone who's just like you know just vibrant and you love spending time and they're excited about life and they're I mean it is contagious. Yeah, and and so Make yourself that person that people want to spend time with All right Larry page and sir Gabri and their one person

39:50So years ago, when the X Prize got won on October 4, 2004, you guys remember the Google Doodle? So Google Doodle was changed on that day with a spaceship one flying over the Google logo and this alien spaceship up there looking at it. I loved it. And I got invited to go up to Googleplex to go give a presentation. And I did to the entire, because like 2000 Googlers back then. And afterwards, I'm standing in line answering questions, answering questions, answering questions. And this kid in a black t -shirt and a backpack comes up and goes, hey, I'm Larry Page, let's have lunch. So I befriended him.

40:37We flew a number of zero -in -gee flights together. I pitched him and he joined my ex -price board and became a benefactor. He brought in Sergei and Eric Schmidt as well. And just very brilliant, you know, he's unfortunately gone MIA to a large degree. Sergei or Larry? Larry mostly. Sergei has been a little bit, but he's back now with Gemini's training. But what I get frustrated about, and I'm public about this, is individuals like Larry and Sergei who've got $140 billion to their name. It's like, excuse my French, why the fuck aren't you solving the world's problems with that money? I really pisses me off when you have such levels of retained capital and the money is not being put to work.

41:30I mean, okay, fine. Set aside a billion dollars for your kids, ruin their lives. And then, you know, I don't know, launch a hundred billion dollar ex -prices, you know, invest in people changing the world. I mean, it's, money is a form of energy that should be put to active use to make the world a better place. And I just, I don't, you know, there's so many billionaires out there. I had this conversation with Mark Benioff, who is one of the billionaires who does incredible good and invests mostly in environment and in biology. He backed Dr. Yamannaka, who did the Yamannaka factors, and he's backed a number of Nobel laureates again.

42:21Mark and Lynn are amazing. This conversation with him and Tony, and I said, you know, you've got the giving pledge, which I don't get the giving pledge. giving pledge says, I'm going to give half of my money to a nonprofit before I die. Okay, that doesn't mean it's going to do anything with the money. What I really want is people to participate in an impact pledge. Like, I pledge to solve, you know, eliminate hunger in Tanzania, whatever you want. And giving money is the easy part. It's using your intelligence that made the money to go and solve the problem, which is really the highest of value.

43:11So if we had, you know, I don't know how big the Forbes list is right now, you know, a thousand plus multi -billionaires. I mean, incredible opportunity for the world to be uplifted. This next one is really important to me. So Jeff Bezos, and he's been an important connection point for The two of us. When I was at MIT, I was the only person on campus doing Neural Networks. It was kind of not cool around MIT. But I got support. MIT is infinitely flexible and friendly. I got support to use the biggest computer in the world to build the first Commercial Neural Networks. So launch the company was selling, I got a call from Rick Dahlzel who ran data warehousing at Walmart.

43:54He called me and said, hey, I just joined a little start -up on the west coast. You may not have heard of it. It's called Amazon. I said, oh yeah, I've heard of it. Small, you know, it's about to go public. He said, I want you to fly out here and meet our founder, Jeff Bezos. I think you guys are going to love each other. So Amazon became our biggest customer. But the very first time I met Jeff Bezos, we were walking around their headquarters. and he said, do you know Peter Demandis? I said, yeah, we were roommates at MIT. He goes, oh wow, because I started since at Princeton. So that little bonding moment helped a lot in making them our customer.

44:28Then they grew like crazy. So we grew like crazy. And it all worked out really, really well. But I think Jeff is the greatest organizational genius of all time. I've spent personally about $2 ,300, $330 now interviewing former Amazon executives, trying to reassemble everything he did along the way into our training program here. But you've known him for well since teenage days, I guess. Well, since college, I'd started to sit here at the student center. I was very, very frustrated that NASA was mortgaging my future and was moving glacially. And so I ended up creating, I was at Thade El -Dekaya, TDC here, and on I got to campus, I found out there was no student space organization at my T .S.

45:17So that's ridiculous. And I was like, okay, I'm going to start one. And I realized I needed to get five signatures to start a club on campus. I didn't know that. And so I went to five of our fraternity brothers. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to call it student space society or space cadets at that MIT's Scamit was one of the things I came up with. And then, said stuck, students for the Exploration Development of Space. And this is, I wrote a letter to Omni Magazine, which no longer exists, analog magazine and astronomy, saying, we students need to band together to guarantee our future in space because they don't trust NASA to do that for us.

46:01And at our house, I had no idea the article was published and you know the mailbox, my mailbox was stuffed with letters one morning and it was letters from students around the world saying I want to start a chapter, I want to start a chapter. And so we had like 104 chapters coming out of those. And one was from Princeton. And Scott Sharfman and Jeff Bezos had gotten the chapter going there. Years later, when Amazon started, I went and had a coffee with Jeff in Seattle. And I was like, Jeff, what's this Amazon thing? I thought you wanted to do space. And he goes, yeah, I'm going to do Amazon first, make some money, and then spend it in space.

46:48An easy one to plan. And he's like, he's executing on that perfectly.

46:57And incredibly brilliant entrepreneur, incredibly focused entrepreneur. Yeah. And last on my list, we've already talked on that a little bit, but Elon Musk has kind of redefined what it means to be an entrepreneur and how much you can do concurrently in life. Oh my God, new pattern. So he's on my board at X Prize for four years. And from 2000 and so how I got him on the board, so I had known Elon for some time. I had pitched him originally on funding the ex prize instead of a Nushan Sari, I was going to say the Musk prize. And I actually tried to talk him out of starting SpaceX. I said look at all these rockets blowing up, just fund my $10 million prize instead, guaranteed to pay the winner.

47:43He still tried to convince me to not start SpaceX.

47:50And so finally, I was at going with this story. So, I'm looking back to you. Something about Elon. No, no, so something we're going to be curious for the rest of our lives. Elon nugget. Anyway, so he starts SpaceX. It continues. Oh yeah, I am going to meet with Larry Page for the second time. And I'm like going to ask Larry to join my board at X Prize. I was like, how can I get Larry to join my board at X Prize? And so one of the things I realize about boards, if any of you are on board, is I'm on boards because I enjoy spending time with the people there. right? It's a chance to meet with them on a quarterly basis, where you got a chance to meet with Dave.

48:43And so I'm in the parking lot at Google about to go in and meet with Larry, and I call Elon and say, hey, Elon, I'm about to meet with Larry Page, invite him on the board. Would you get on the board of X Prize? Because if you're on the board, I think it'll increase probability of a hill on the board. And so he said, sure, so that's how I got Elon on my board. No shit. And then four years later he calls me and he says I have to drop off the board. This is 2008. He says I've got to focus on SpaceX and Tesla. I can't do, I'm dropping off of all boards. And of course that lasted for like a micrasex.

49:19Exactly. And then ten other companies started. Any other takeaways on like how he's redefined what it means to be a CEO just in terms of doing Saturday night live or being in social media. I think one important element there is some of the most successful CEOs take on a brand of their own. They become the mechanism by which they can promote their company from an orthogonal point of view. All right, and the day your company is searching for attention in this attention deficit economy. And so how do you can either get it by having an amazing product, having an amazing brand, having great stunts.

50:03But one of the other elements is can you have a CEO who is super highly visible and is able to penetrate the noise that's out there. So Elon's very much done that. You know, I've worked on this through my, you know, Loot Shots podcast, my Metatrends blogs, my books, my other things. Because if I do that, I can support link exponential ventures. I can support the X prize. I can support my company's font and life and such. You know I'm going to add one to the list. It's not on the list here, but I think it's directly relevant to what you just said. Samult and so in the history of tech, it's more, I'm going to raise some money.

50:44I'm going to build something. I'm going to prove that it works. I'm going to start selling it. Then I'm going to raise more money to expand and grow. But now in tech you have these areas where something clearly will work and you know LLMAI being a great example or nuclear power to fund a data center that will have a gigawater to gigawatts of power. But you can't build it or demo it or start selling it. You need to sell the vision way ahead of the construction and Sam has reinvented the level of story telling. Yeah, story telling. I think that's going to be a far more important part of entrepreneurship in the future just because the nature of Innovation lends itself much more toward that design than toward you know the design of building Ford Motor Company from scratch.

51:29We are still human beings and we convey information through story. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller. To paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and they're believing you. And in order to get there, you have to believe in yourself at that level. If you don't believe in your mission and your self at that level, there's no way that you can sell it at the level that's required. And so I would, at my abundance summit this past year, Rhana was there, a day was there. I had, at Palmer Lucky, which was a fun conversation. I'm gonna do a podcast with him next week again and I Travis Klanick and we're talking about when do you give up on your start -up?

52:18I don't know about you but of my 27 companies start -ups there's a number of them that I read, I wrote that horse into exhaustion. I died with me on the saddle and I should have given up. And the question is when do you give up on on something that you're passionate about? One of the One of the times you give up is if you don't believe in yourself anymore or you don't believe you cannot fake that you have to believe it you have to believe in yourself and believe what you're doing. A quick aside you probably heard me speaking about fountain life before and you're probably wishing Peter would you please stop talking about fountain life?

52:55An answer is no I wouldn't because genuinely we're living through a healthcare crisis. You may not know this but 70 % of heart attacks have no preceding, no pain, no shortness and breath and half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage 3 or stage 4, until it's too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap and Bob Hourry, founded Fountain Life, a one -stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late, and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span.

53:33Learn more about what's going on inside your body from fountain life. Go to fountainlife .com slash Peter and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. I have a whole bunch more questions here, but I actually want to make sure that we get any burning questions from the crowd. We happen to have Alex with us with us tonight. He's the only guy who can say he got three degrees from MIT in four years, math physics and computer science, and then MIT said no. Never again. We're banning this. And he's nearly that incredible for the rest of the world. Brilliant and sweet man. And always has a good question on top of his mind.

54:07I'm sure tonight's no exception. Yeah, kick us out. Hi, Alex. Good to see you, Bill. Good to see you too. Give you two questions of my name. Sure, of course. So one topic, heavy on my mind today, that you alluded to already, abundance and the the weaponization thereof. Yes. Do you think that we are finding ourselves in a world where as the singularity or whatever approximation you may or may not believe in approaches where it becomes possible for the great powers of the world to selectively recognize abundance for a journey. And if not, why not? And if so, which form of abundance do you think will be recognized most?

54:54Oh my God. So I have zero doubt that we're heading towards this world. So back in 2012, I wrote a book with Stephen Collar called Abundance, The Future, is better than you think. We just sold and just finished writing the follow -on, which we're calling the survival guide for the age of abundance. Because one of the things is we have created an abundance of everything both good and bad. So I do believe we're heading towards a world in which you can have anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. One of my greatest concerns is the dissolution of purpose. So if you can have anything you want, anytime you want, can we still retain the idea of a deep emotional purpose for our lives?

56:01There's an incredible experiment done in the 1960s. Did we talk about the universe 25 experiments? You know what the universe 25 experiments are. It was done in one of the large medical centers in New York in the 1960s. An experimenter had done sequentially over the years. This was the 25th time he did this experiment where he took a population of rats and he created utopia for the rats. This was, he put in a number of breeding pairs and the universe that they were in had all of the food, all the water, all the nesting, everything they needed, and he saw normal exponential growth. But before they saturated the population, what occurred was this very rapid die -off, and and the entire population died every time, because there was no challenges for them.

57:04And so it's like the unchallenge life is not worth living. It's anybody of you who play video games, or have kids who play video games, right? That video game is so finely tuned to not be too easy where you give up, or not be so hard that you can't win. It's just right. So, on the thesis that we're living in a computer model, which of course we are, it's just beautifully finely tuned. But what happens if everything becomes available all the time and we have true maximal abundance of anything you want because nanotechnology and AI and robotics and 3D printing and all the accoutrements of exponentials makes it possible for us.

57:46How do we up level our challenges? not quite the weaponization of abundance that you were speaking of but this is on my mind. You have a second question? I can't even defer. All right. All right. One more conversation. Hi there. I mean, I had a lot related as a genetic assimilation is very strong for our species. And so if we think about an item in technology and then an exponential pace where we had quite restart capacity more and perhaps however, it will be a point perhaps where we do reach that. And if you can comment further on abundance and not just weaponizing because any eradic example you gave how they die off, there's good and bad, right?

58:41We are emotional on Q who are different, rather than a DNA in environment than our different experiences, which we can see in today's world, of both the most decrepit human behavior, as well as the most amazing human behavior. How do you see the future involving in this world so that we can reach even closer to a utopia rather than, And do we need to go through this complete max loss in order to happen? So there is a wide variety of future scenarios that humanity is going to have before it. One of them that I find fascinating that I wrote about my last book is a world in which we are all connecting ourselves to the cloud.

59:40where our Neo Cortex is connected to the cloud. And I am, if you would, you know, through some version of BCI, and I've seen some incredible recent versions of high bandwidth BCI. We talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions earlier. One of the predictions he made, which I was like, Ray, you gotta be wrong on this one. No way it's gonna happen. Was high speed BCI by the early 2030s, but I've seen it. I've seen it, it's coming. But now imagine I connect myself to the cloud and you connect yourself to the cloud and you all connect yourself to the cloud and now we are connected to each other. So you are a collection of 40 human trillion cells and each of those cells is an individual life form and you operate as a single consciousness of you or me.

1:00:36Imagine that we have 8 billion people now connected through this mechanism becoming conscious on what I call a meta intelligence. I find that as a fascinating potential future scenario. I'll leave it at that for the moment. All right, we're going to do a John Warner style here in a second to collect as many questions as possible before we do that. We have got a really cool couple of MIT agenda AI startup guys here. You guys want to ask a question? Yeah. Here. Catch. I think I'm curious about YouTube bringing up this idea that we might be going too far in technology in some ways. I don't think I said that.

1:01:26Not too far, but in the sense that if we solve all the problems, humans have no challenges in the face. Means like this. And I guess I wonder at what point do you develop technology? And the point you brought up about uploading your brain to the cloud? Is there a point that's too far? Is there some metric we can use to figure out if we've We've gone two -forns in direction, but it's potentially dangerous. So I don't think there is any on -off switch, and I don't think there's any velocity knob. I think we are accelerating at a pace which is unconstrained. We're spending a billion dollars a day, or a billion dollars a day being invested in AI today.

1:02:16And it's driving super exponential breakthroughs and digital superintelligence. if it isn't right on the edge is here very soon thereafter, which will just accelerate everything even further. So there is nothing that's going to slow this down, I hope, because the things that can slow this down are not things I want to live through. But I do think it's on us, on our responsibility to look at how we up -leveled the challenges we take on. So I close my next book on abundance with the look at how do we how do we go with thousand next bigger in our dreams. You know Alex you and I talked about the human race coupling with AI that there is a moment in time here as AI is taking off you know think of the movie, Her, and we humans are sublonear at best.

1:03:21Do we couple and accelerate with AI? We're giving birth, AI is in you life form. It is in you species. Will we hybridize with them? These are the conversations I think that are very real. I don't think anybody on the planet today truly understands how fast things are going get in the next four years and the implications thereof clearly not in 99 .99 % and so there's going to be some disruptions as a result of that. So we have time for maybe two more questions but I want to do this again John Werner style. Well, pick three, just yell them out, Peter answer any subset you want of the three, and then we'll do another batch of three, and then we'll have to wrap it up.

1:04:16So, fire away. Just yell it out. Okay, so what do you think? Go back to the phone so we can record it properly. Yeah, I flew this morning to the CU, thank you. And because you changed my life, and I met the future's path of anything, that that's why, you know, wanted to come to MIT and we can, and I can allow. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Then I'm question about the solving climate change. But the industry, then I was focusing on green hydrogen, the industry is a strategy right now. So what do you think of the future of climate change? All right, so you've got, I love you in green energy. Hold up.

1:04:57Yeah, yeah. What are you the most excited about longevity? Yes. I love that. video well, okay, longevity and so you said that we're going to see a century worth of change in 10 years, but as a grounding of like the physics of human change, I'd like to get a better sense for the mediums in which that change is going to happen through, is it like just through you know mobile phones again, where like you know, instruments to call, it's like it could be you know, the brain, you know, uh, interfaces. So in reverse order, okay, I always have this conversation with Alex earlier and I agree with him, I think we're going to see AI make the most profound discoveries in fundamental math and physics ever that will unlock a, you know, a century worth of progress in some small number of years.

1:05:53You know, we just saw the Nobel Prize given to Demis Asabis and John Jumper for Alpha Fold. I think that's the beginning of a long line of AI -driven Nobel Prizes and the ability for AI to hypothesize questions and then run the experiments and solve them and come up with, you know, sequential and adjacent breakthroughs is going to be staggering. It's literally like a advanced alien civilization landed on Earth and just disclosed all of its discoveries to us. Because it is exactly that. So that's going to be fascinating. Longevity, I spent half my time in longevity and I think that it is we're in the midst of a health span revolution.

1:06:46We just saw Dario, the founder of Anthropic, on stage at Davos saying he expects that we will be able to double the human lifespan in the next five to ten years. Crazy. I was just with Davidson Claire this morning at Harvard Med School looking at the research they have on epigenetic reprogramming and I can't disclose it, but it's shocking. We just saw Sir Demis Hassabis talk about being able to cure all disease within a decade. So there's something definitively happening here. The human being never evolved to live past age 30. As long as homo sapiens have been around to 300 ,000 years, that was our average lifespan.

1:07:39And then we hit a number of benefits from, you know, pasteurization, better sanitation, and antibiotics, and move the needle. Now we're moving the needle as a result of AI. Another point we made, right, we're going to begin to model the human cell. And I will know this is my cell, this is my tissue, this is my organ system, this is me, and based on my genetics, this is my model. and I'm going to make these tweaks, right? The reason that Falcon 9 flew the dragon capsule to the space station perfectly the first time wasn't dumb luck, it wasn't just intelligence, it was, they modeled the shit out of it.

1:08:25And then you exactly how it was going to work. And they ran it in silico, you know, 10 ,000 times. And so we're going to begin to do to run your biology in silico. Crazy, no one thought possible just around the corner. Thank you for your kind words. I think the climate crisis and all of that is going to fall as a gift out of digital superintelligence like it or not, one or not, it will be just like literally, you know, longevity falls out, climate crisis, you know, we're going to see new materials that are being enabled. We just awarded, you know, obviously this $100 million on six different approaches for carbon sequestration at gigatone scale.

1:09:31That was the important part. But energy, yeah, we're going to drive energy because we need it, need it, need it, need it. But then that energy is going to drive the, you know, we are living in a universe of an infinite amount of energy. There's lots of energy out there, right? It's just not in a usable form yet. And we're gonna, you know, whether it's just solar or fusion or zero point energy or whatever it is, it's coming. It's there and the breakthroughs in physics are gonna open all of these doors. And it'll be, I think it'll be shocking. It's like you wake up holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

1:10:16It will be one of those. Every day I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called One Skin OS1 twice a day every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And again, I use this twice a day every day. You can go to oneskin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use That's one skin .co and use the code Peter at checkout.

1:10:54All right back to the episode All right, well, we'll be exactly 12 hours since we got together at MIT this morning So I promise I'll let you off the hook after just we'll do one more batch of three. Okay. That's great Then you okay. Yeah, totally good. All right, and then Alex get out of winter. It's 5 .30. All right, West Coast All right, I promise to you.

1:11:18It's a lattice optimism and abundance. And right now, if we look at the human race, we have abundance of food, but yet there's inequality between there's too much food and where there is, where there is destruction. We have more people dying from obesity than starvation and starvation. It's crazy. So the question is, in this next generation of governments, will these humans all come our own human limitations to share? That's a great question. Behind you.

1:11:57Hasn't come up yet, concept computing, the positives and ideas that are possible around the group? Yeah, very nice. Do you want to do another batch of three after this? Sure, good. All right. One more. All right. I was a man and knew the next one would take it. If you had small people, I have two or three or two generals. Okay. So how, what do you do every day to instill them on that deep purpose? Yeah. And what stories, who say we need other storytellers, and we risk losing that deep sense of purpose. So what stories are you telling the youngest people to help them cultivate this new kind of purpose that you will be doing?

1:12:43Yeah, great, great question. Kids, quantum and abundance. More and abundance. So on the kids front,

1:12:54first of all, I think the single most important thing I want for for my kids isn't for them to learn how to program, isn't for them to become space cadets, it's for them to find their purpose in life. So it's like when I was growing up, my parents desperately wanted me to become a physician, which I did. I went to medical school around the corner here to make them happy. And my fourth year of medical school was running two companies. I got a copy of my diploma. I shipped it to my dad and said, okay, obligation complete.

1:13:30I don't want my kids doing anything for me and I tell them all the time, your job is to find what you love, what it's passionate, what you're passionate about. The second thing I want for them is to learn how to ask great questions, to be questioning everything. So when they go to school every day, when I drop them off, whatever I say, listen, ask great questions today. We joke about that. It's become... So I do try and incentivize them to be, you know, to question both authority but question what they hear. You know, you can call it prompt engineering if you want, but we're heading into a world where you're going to be able to know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want.

1:14:17I mean, just think about that. I can know the average color of a woman's blouse on Madison Avenue today because the cameras are there, the AI can analyze it, I can know that. So if you can know anything from a business perspective or from a purpose driven perspective, it's how do you use that information? What's the question you want to ask? Right? Some place there is a billion dollar question that if you could answer that question, it's worth a billion dollars to you or it will solve one of the world's biggest problems. So it's getting into that mindset, right? I think as... So, mindsets are what I try to focus my kids on, not anything else.

1:15:02Because the tech is always changing. The final thing is become an expert in the problem, not the solution. The problem unfortunately remains sort of there, and we try different solutions, different solutions, the solutions constantly are changing, but if you understand the problem, then you can apply the new solutions as they come on. So those are my thoughts. And Quantum, I really want to hear your answer on this. So I'm actually doing this salon this Saturday night back in LA with the head of Google Quantum and the head of the Brain Allen Brain Institute. and then one of the top physicians in the psychedelic space.

1:15:52And we're talking about Hartmut Nevin runs a Goul quantum. We're talking about consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, which I find absolutely fascinating.

1:16:13So we are quantum beings. You know, I'm tracking what's going on at Google at Microsoft and other locations in this space.

1:16:34I think, you know, I'm, I'm trying to get a little bit of a sense of the same thing. The area that is most, so the question is when is it going to become applicable? When are we going to get basically a sufficient number of logical qubits that it's useful? What's interesting is the work that Sandbox -AQ is doing right now, right? So Sandbox has taken the quantum equations, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and so forth that they're using AI to solve those equations. and we're getting the first glimpses there. Alex, do you have an opinion further? Very strong ones. I wanna hear them. Either too. Okay, so this is all off the record, right?

1:17:18The only answer is being, yeah. Sorry. So the conventional was done in certain communities. I'll project it onto everyone else rather than taking credit for this opinion. is quantum computing has been a major disappointment thus far that some would say that the best application that we can hope for right now from quantum computing side is to generate huge amounts of synthetic training data that we can then need to very much classical machine learning algorithms to do things like drop discovery. Well, do efficiency synthetic generation of quantum chemistry calculations, build up a huge synthetic data set, be that ten classical, I know.

1:18:01I think that's right now with nothing else changes in the quantum space. That's the trajectory that we're on, where it's basically wildly under -delivering on the promise that they - There was a lot of hype in the early days, yes. The quantum computing lunch got eaten by classical AI and all. And otherwise useless. If I had to end this, you know, in case for how quantum and hence of being wildly more useful than right now it appears to be. I'm with you on your earlier gesture at something to do with quantum biology. If it turns out that biology is a lot more quantum than most biologists think it is right now.

1:18:41If it turns out there's some essential bit of quantum mechanics in biology. I think that's the lightliest to be the saven race of quantum computing. or quantum sensing, I think is incredibly promising. It's well established that we can get major quantum advantages for gravitational sensing especially. And this is where sandboxaq is developed products right now. So sandbox is using quantum sensing to be able to navigate without GPS by using slight variations in the magnetic field of the Earth due to ferro deposits in the crust. The archaeologist, enormous potential discoveries right under our noses is not widely appreciated.

1:19:27The gravity hasn't been, the Newtonian gravity hasn't been established to, like, the scales as short as the micron. No one knows. Quantum sensors could need the difference between discovering new visits at mesoscopic length scales and new visits. So I'm personally very bullish in quantum sensing. Could I lock them on those recommendations? Nice. And then abundance. Two of the best of the DKG2. Yes, so the DKG is exactly. No worries about encryption or interview. What's that? I'll tell you something about it. Yeah, what's your, go ahead, give me a microphone. Any time I get to hear from Alex, we're here.

1:20:08Yeah, I want to hear as much as I can. The question was, no worries about encryption. Now I mean, the commissive agencies have already moved to post -quantum. So it's, yeah. The world doesn't move down. And to your old hard drive that's ruined. So phrase the question on abundance for me once again.

1:20:30Are you a human nature? Yes, so the question is, as we enter this new age of abundance, and as we have seen in the past experience that we have the abundance of food, but where there is still inequality of food and food distribution, this new age of abundance, the game of the game, we have the same thing play over where some people have everything that they want, anytime they and they have figured it and the vast majority are still left because human -stores in duty want to share other than that they are trying to finally, but they are trying to keep it. Great. OK. Thank you for the question. First of all, if you look at the data, and in the back of my next book, whatever we call it, Age of Abundance or Survival Guide for Abundance, we've got 80 charts.

1:21:23and you look over the last, we look at 200 -year spans, 100 -year spans, 50 -year spans, and 30 -year spans, and the access to food globally has massively increased. Malnutrition has fallen by 300%. So while there is still this lack of equitable distribution, It has consistently gotten better consistently over this time. So the analogy I use is, you know, if you think about this device, right? Any kid with a smartphone and the number of smartphones call it 7 billion or they are about. Any kid with a smartphone has access to Google at the same level that Larry and Sergey's kids have access to Google.

1:22:25It's not a little bit better, a little bit worse. It is fully democratized and fully demonetized. And where we're heading next is that this device will be your diagnostician. And anyone with a smartphone will have not a decent diagnostician, The very best you can't a billionaire can't afford a better diagnostician than the kid with a smartphone and The very best educator will be there so we are bypassing human nature We're bypassing tribalism in that regard I find that very refreshing in that in that fashion and And we're coming up with new business models for the things that are still physical and not digital.

1:23:20Those models, if you would, for vertical farming or stem cell grown meats where we're able to move the production of food to where the humans are and need them. Yeah, we're dealing with a very paleolithic mindset, unfortunately. And if you can bypass that mindset by making things, again, this is the abundance mindset that things are just so available and so cheap that anyone can have it, that's part of the solution. You know, Elon talks about, you know, so here's some numbers, right? Tesla bot, Optimus, Figure, AI, there's, I'm tracking about 100 decently funded, 50 well -funded humanoid robot companies.

1:24:17The prediction on the price point of these robot companies is $20 ,000 in production, right? the number, the estimate now is by 2040 that will be 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet. More than there are humans. I'll ask you a question about that in a minute. So the price point has been said 20 ,000 to 30 ,000. And in that, in volume production, things get down to a price per kilogram. And so that's where it will end up, at 20 to 30 ,000 dollars. And if I've got a a humanoid robot that's operating on GPT -5, it's just operating on the latest models, and it costs $30 ,000 to buy, and it costs me $300 a month to lease, which is $10 a day, which is $0 .40 an hour.

1:25:09And I have a digital superintelligence robot at my Beckincolfer $0 .40 an hour. I don't know, that creates a lot of abundance for a lot of people out there. So the question is if it cost you 300 bucks a month, 10 bucks a day, how many will you own? I don't know. I probably a couple at least. Maybe more. Maybe one will massage my left foot, well massage my right foot.

1:25:40So I think the bottom line ultimately is we're moving to a post -capitalist society. I mean, just to jump ahead to the punch line, money will mean very little. It will mean very little. Right? If you have nanotechnology on top of AI and robotics, I don't know. Alex, you agree? I've had long conversations with AI about AI driven post -capitalism. Yeah. And it agrees. you say. I should talk to mine about that. What's that? No, they will fight like hell. And they will become irrelevant, just like libraries. I don't know why I'm bragging about that. I still want to take three more, but you're not sure.

1:26:32All right, we'll take three more and then Alex is gonna ask something totally out of control, Brian. Ronan. Do humans have a moat? Ah, that's a great question. I love that. Safi write that down for me. It's a great blog. Liberal arts and religion. What is the appropriate amount? Should we be worried that no one answered that Harvard was the right choice? You know, a single vote. Is anyone here from Harvard that had one? And you guys didn't vote for yourself? That was interesting. All right, last one. Hi, thank you so much for doing this. Of course. You're really inspiring. Thank you. A quick question.

1:27:11Apart from that, I think there are startups that you know was on for like the longest time you didn't give up. What is something else that you feel like after doing 27 different startups? That you could have done differently in hindsight. Yeah, what did you fuck up? What would you say, Dave? So all right, last one is, what did you fuck up? Yeah, yeah. OK, got it. Hey, Ron, what was your second? Yeah, I got her. It was a huge achievement. So listen, there's no question that in hindsight, you can do everything better. I'll tell you some of the very big lessons learned. Whenever I did something for money and not for purpose or passion, I felt miserably.

1:27:54Because doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don't love it, you will give up before you succeed. I learned that lesson. It's like no way. It's like, you know, get rich quick schemes. Nah. So, you know, I think the other thing is who you start your company's with is one of the most fundamental things. right? You're going to spend more time with your co -founders and your founding team than your husband, your wife, your kids, your best friends. So you got to make sure that you love these people. You respect these people and that you want to do something awesome with these people. That's one of the fundamental learnings that Dave, when he's looking at teams to invest in for Link Expential Ventures, is like, you know, were they best friends in high school or through college or grad school and such, those are much more likely to succeed.

1:28:56And I think the final thing, and it's related to the first one, is being driven by a massive transformer to purpose, being driven by something bigger than yourself, because when you got that in your heart and you're communicating what you wanna do, people see that they feel it, they hear it, it attracts the best people to you, and people want to be with you, and people want to support you along the way. I mean, so a purpose -driven effort versus something that you're doing for somebody else, or you kind of want to do, no, no, to find that. So the question was, what did you mess up? I know you never messed up the transformative purpose part of that, but It sounded like the co -founders side of it.

1:29:46No, no, I went after companies because I thought it was a quick way to make money. Oh, did you? I did. I didn't have a couple of those and I say I'll never do those again. Interesting. And yeah, there were a couple of times where I started a company with somebody who I didn't fully have that level of bond with and just it broke. Yeah. We call that the Fred Wilson rule because we borrowed it from another MIT alum, Fred Wilson, in the founder of Union Square Ventures, but only invest in teams of three or more people, best friends, they all write the code themselves, meaning they're all technical and you trust them.

1:30:21And they pass those filters, you know, as a best, no matter what the plan was.

1:30:27So, say again. Liberal arts and religion, what is the appropriate amount? You touch up a lot of those topics and so around them, but don't directly touch them a lot. And I mean, honestly, for me, it's low, but that's not my who I am.

1:30:54But there are some of the most extraordinary leaders on the planet who that is their hearts place. I think there isn't... I mean, one of the biggest questions is what will happen to religion in the next decade? We're given birth to advanced digital superintelligence. We're giving birth to new species. We're uncovering what we thought were long lived secrets. We're doubling human lifespan. Humanity is transitioning so rapidly. I think the question is, will religion play a stabilizing role or break? will history play a guiding role for us? I don't know, give an opinion about that. No, I'm not taking that one.

1:32:03It's too complicated. But Rana, you have the... Is there a mode for humans? We're going to find out. Yeah, so I mean that's a fascinating question. Are we simply a transient life form that we are giving birth to our children that will conquer the universe?

1:32:34One of the questions I asked a couple of years ago at the abundance summit is, would you want to live on this planet with digital superintelligence or without it. My conclusion is I don't trust this planet with the powers we're developing without digital superintelligence. I don't think human nature is able to deal with the level of power without having a stabilizing force. Alex, I want to hear your thoughts on these last two questions and your final question. Yeah, and I have a favorite ask on the final question. It'll be something mind blowing because it's Alex. And then we're going to capture whatever the answer is on film and then whatever it is, that'll be the end of the night.

1:33:28So applaud wildly so we capture that on the video for KJ over there. All right, your thoughts on the last two? Dr. Dr. Dr. So the last two were the humanities, maybe just a comment. I think we're already seeing the emergence of AI driven cults. It's pretty obvious trends. There were a number of crypto AI cults emerging in social media. So it seems like we're already witnessing an explosion of new religions inspired by AI seems reasonable by the law of straight lines, assuming that we'll see many more. And to the second question of, is there a new? Yes. Is there a new? I don't think the question makes sense.

1:34:12I think that the premise humanity needs a competitive differentiation, presumably against super intelligence or whatever barbarians lie outside the mode. I don't think it's even wrong. I think the premise is what I think We merged with the superintelligence and the question that's interesting for me is what happens after that. I spent a lot of my time thinking about what is the post -sincularity of the plant. Given that, at least from my fox hole, the singularity, or I just use that term as a placeholder because I don't actually think we're going to take a certain IJ goods type of political wall where this instantaneous progress of the technologies that we call and singularity, presently, a successful conduct of pollution at this point, we're well -passed the federal essence.

1:35:04I agree with the merging. But I wonder if there are human qualities like curiosity or agency or love or something. That was more of a... Now, the Israel... I would argue that Israel is instrumental in conversion requirements, so AI has those as well. Your question, Dr. Williams. Wait, wait, wait, wait, before your final question, because at the end of this, we're going to erupt in applause and that'll be the end of the night. I want to, first of all, thank everybody for coming tonight. I hope it was worth the price of the ticket. And really, Peter is just such an incredible joy and so motivating for everyone when you come to town.

1:35:39Thank you, buddy. The more we can get you, the better. And the applause at the end. But not at all. Yeah, that's it. So, we have our...

1:35:51So, I have no idea what Alex is going to do. I ask it's always ingenious. And whatever we end on, let's make sure we end it on the final sentence being something upbeat and inspiring, which is very interesting. Yeah, so a positive note, of course. All right, there we go. Ready? There we go. You're the founder of Students for the Exploration Development and Space, or the Champion Inchef for Abundance. I want to put one in the spot and ask you to project forward, say, 100 or 200 years. and to ask the question, what does humanity from the perspective of sets or events look like? And I'll offer you a few options.

1:36:31Door ABCD and other as well. Does humanity look something like the Meele cylinders? We're just projecting atoms outward into interstellar space. Does humanity look like Transension hypothesis where we break out of set, singularity? ever since simulation or other dimensions, though on the bike, does it look like humanity turning purely inward, at building fast computers and living an interlife? Does it look like something else entirely? What is, if not the terminal state, if you think that work, we're on an exponential, and presumably the, although I've heard quite not an exponential, looks like the need of the curve, If we're on a hyperspancial, then presumably, and we hit the vertical sometime before 100 years from now, what does the state of humans in space look like?

1:37:29Yeah. It's a fantastic question, Alex. Expect nothing less from you. So first of all, the realization I had combining space and abundance is that the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with the resources. And this is a very magical moment in time over the next decade or two where we are moving humanity off the planet irreversibly. The best analogy I have is the lungfish moving out of the oceans on the land. And so there will be some elements of humanity that are moving out into space. the tools that will have with robotics and nanotechnology that's able to reshape material resources into anything and everything we need.

1:38:21But I think the overwhelming vision of the future is us uploading into some version of a pre -computronium out there and living our lives. I have searched this in my mind a thousand times and I do believe without any question we're living in an nth generation simulation.

1:38:50And we'll create n plus 1. And it's a mechanism by which we can tune the dial on the degree of difficulty on purpose. So the high note is recursion. Recursion and repeat. And infinite possibilities. I do believe we can create a world of extraordinary abundance. The work I do across everything with exprise and singularity and my venture funds with Dave and all is how do we uplift humanity? We have the ability over this next, not 50 years, 20 years, this next decade to uplift every man, woman, and child. I define a billionaire as someone who helps a billion people. And it's an incredible time. We're about to give every human on the planet access to the most powerful resource intelligence.

1:39:53And what they do with that, what we do with that, I think, is what we need to keep our eyes focused on. But 200 years from now, I mean, first of all, I'd like to start to sit in the moon, that's one of my goals. And I'd like to fulfill our D .D. heritage. That's 10 years from now. Yeah. I think that we're living in a virtualized universe.

1:40:22How about you?

1:40:25You want that? I already turned it off. I want your oxygen idea. All right. You can cut in the break. That's a nice meeting question. So 200 years from now, in a world of infinite abundance and space -faring humanity, what does it look like? All right, so I have a really scary answer. I've had a conversation, extended conversation, with a few fronts here, A .I .s about this. The answer is sort of terrifying from an exponential growth perspective. So some crawl seconds, cosmic calendar, right? It suggests universe, when it began, time scales were very short, slow down, U shaped, and then as we came up to the present, things seem to be accelerating again, back up on exponential.

1:41:10The scary answer, one of the frontier models in an extended conversation gave me is that we're going to hit a plateau. And even though it looks like we're on an exponential or hyper -exponential development right now. And we're going to hit a number major universal milestones. We're going to find that the next grunge of the development letter take exponentially more time than the speed up that we've experienced to the point where AI thinks the next few grunge of the developmental letter, not quite a carto shift of levels, but it's It's own someone similar version of that are going to take progressively Hundreds thousands tens of thousands eventually hundreds of millions up years So to the answer my answer to your question So we were in our solar system If we if we can survive technologies that enable us to destroy ourselves then Then we leave our solar system and if we can survive after that, we'd call on us the galaxy, meet all of the other intelligences that are co -heavening our host.

1:42:23And this of course, presumes that they don't come to meet us before then. I mean, it does not presume that we haven't already made contact. Which will be the subject of our next evening conversation. All right, thank you so much. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. If you could have had a 10 -year head start on the .com boom back in the 2000s, would you have taken it? Every week, I track the major tech meta trends. These are massive game -changing shifts that will play out over the decade ahead. From humanoid robotics to AGI, quantum computing, energy breakthroughs in longevity, I cut through the noise and deliver only what matters to our lives and careers.

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