Eureka 434: Vishen Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley 

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies, and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Vishen Lakhiani is the founder of Mindvalley, a platform that helps people grow in ways school perhaps never taught, from improving health and relationships to mastering leadership and even AI. He's also a best-selling author of three books, including The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, which has been translated into 25 languages. But before all that, he was a stressed-out 20-something working at a Silicon Valley startup until he stumbled onto meditation and everything changed.

0:56Today, Vishen's company is pushing boundaries with AI, using an in-house system to run the majority of its operations. Vishen predicts a future where we work less, live more, and let AI handle the rest. But with artificial intelligence evolving so fast, what happens to real human connection? And can we trust governments to keep up with the pace? Well, here is Vishen with more on how his journey began.

1:27I'm Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley. I'd say our biggest project is the Mindvalley app. It's been featured in every single Apple store in the world for its design, its aesthetic. And what the Mindvalley app is really about, it helps us become better human beings. Whether you're looking to improve your gym routine or eat better or improve your love life or the way you dress or your leadership skills or learn AI applied to work, Mindvalley app is designed to be everything that school forgot to teach you in one affordably priced app.

2:02I'm a computer engineer by training. And so I'm super enthusiastic about what I see coming with AI. I firmly believe that we are not here as a human species to toil and struggle and work crazy long hours. And I think AI is going to usher in a golden age where work weeks are going to slowly shrink. I mean, if you go back 100 years ago, we worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. That was the average labor person, the average factory worker. Now we're at a five-day work week. It's about to go down to four, three, two, and eventually one day of work for a week. And this is coming faster than anyone realizes.

2:42Now, why I say this with such confidence is because I'm deploying AI in my organization at a really rapid level. We have 80 engineers. We have built an AI that is slowly taking over more and more of our organization's duties. The AI is called Aura. And Aura is allowing us to grow, make more money, scale the organization with less and less and less people. And it's making everyone's life so much easier. and I predict that Aura will soon be able to do 80 % of the work of our organization. Every person is a unique individual with different motivations, different behaviors. When we saw how rapidly AI was growing, so one of the things that happened was this.

3:23I was using ChatGPT to help me plan a shopping spree in Dubai Mall. I moved into a new apartment. I needed a whole bunch of stuff, a backpack. I needed some soap. I needed toiletries. I needed all of these different things. And I put it in ChatGPT just for fun. I'm like, hey, you know, plan the optimal route because I'm tired. I don't want to walk and walk and walk. Dubai Mall is massive. And ChatGPT gave me the optimized route, where to start, where to enter, what stores to go to. But then it said something that stunned me. It said, and by the way, buy the backpack first because you can use the backpack to carry all of the smaller items and ensure that you save the heaviest items, my Wi-Fi router, for last so you don't have to lug around something heavy.

4:02And when I saw that, I was shocked because ChatGPT wasn't that smart just three months before. I immediately messaged my COO and I said, we're going to stop all hiring now, complete and immediate hiring freeze, because I could see where this was going. And now it's proven to be correct. We are finding that AI is getting smarter and smarter. We're about to enter artificial general intelligence. And so my biggest job as a CEO right now is to create a company structure where AI is at the center. The human's job is to set the vision, build relationships with other humans, but the AI is going to be running 80 % of our company's work.

4:47So AI has already snuck in, and it is causing problems for the world right now. It's affecting your children badly, but everyone is blind to it. The AI I'm talking about is the AI that's running the algorithms on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. The average American now spends over two hours a day on social media. And why they are hooked as opposed to TV is because social media, every single feed that you see is customized to you based on your behavior, based on what you like. It knows how to hook you. It has made you a commodity and its goal is to get you to buy, buy, buy. The side effect of that is comparison culture.

5:24Suicide rates among teenage girls, for example, is up 300%. Loneliness is skyrocketing. Social media is actually harmful for us, but we are giving up two hours a day right now to social media. Everyone knows this, that the problems are about to become more severe. Studies are showing that kids growing up in the social media age have lower focus, lower concentration, lower self-esteem. Why are we not doing anything about this? Social media is powered by AI. It isn't Mark Zuckerberg deciding what you see. It's his AI. So AI is already causing problems. But what we're about to see right now is good AI.

6:03And if governments leverage this correctly, now good AI takes away unnecessary work. Good AI gets you off your phone, connects you to people in your neighborhood that maybe you need to chat with. What we're building at Mindvalley is good AI. It helps you plan your food and nutrition for the day. It understands your goals as you converse with it. It understands your feelings. It speaks to you with empathy. It will connect you. If you're free at 4 p.m. and you feel lonely, it might connect you to a person in your neighborhood that has similar goals, has similar values, maybe has similar challenges in life because it wants to create friendship for you.

6:37Good AI is what we now have to be stepping into. What Elon is doing, however, one of the reasons I suspect he's cutting the U.S. government workforce is because he knows that everything the U.S. government is doing within one year, it will be able to do with 25 % of the people. 75 % of that work is going to disappear. And in two years, 90 % of that work will likely disappear with artificial general intelligence. So what should governments be doing? Right now, governments should, firstly, they should be trimming down their workforce. And one of the ways they can do it is taking the work week down in government bodies to about three days.

7:10But what they should also be doing is creating grand government initiatives to solve problems that corporates are not willing to solve. Let me give you an example. biodegradable plastic. Coca-Cola has failed since 1992 all its commitments to reducing plastic waste. Now, we regulate Coca-Cola in certain countries because it has high levels of sugar. So in certain countries, the more sugar, the higher the taxes. So Coca-Cola has to bring down its sugar content. In other countries, I believe Coca-Cola is not allowed certain advertising because Coke is one of the most destructive products known to man.

7:42It's basically poison in your body, just like we regulate smoking. What we got to do next right now is, number one, regulate social media, regulate the bad use of AI, but also launch grand government initiatives to incentivize entrepreneurs through incentivized price systems to create biodegradable plastic, to solve the clean water problem, to create new forms of education. Peter Diamandis of the XPRIZE Foundation has shown that when you create incentivized prices, like you give away$100 million to the company that solves this problem, you get 30x your return on capital, right? That's how private spaceflight was launched in early 2000s with the Ansari X price.

8:23So I believe government should be looking at that. Number one, getting more done with less people, leveraging AI, but number two, looking at all of the problems that are about to be happening. Don't wait for corporates, launch incentivized price competitions to solve these problems.

8:43That was Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley. And you can learn more by heading to mindvalley.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme was produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at monocle.com or follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your podcasts. To contact the team, do email Laura. She's on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.