Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - After Interviewing AI Founders, Here's What You Really Need to Know | EP #175

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://bit.ly/METATRENDS   This talk was recorded at MIT in collaboration with Dave Blundin’s Link XPV Fund.  – Offers for my audience:  Get the first lesson of my executive course for free at https://bit.ly/diamandisfutureproof  Test what’s going on inside your body at https://bit.ly/FountainLife  Reverse the age of my skin using the same cream at https://bit.ly/OneSkinPeter    –- Learn more about XPV: https://www.linkventures.com/xpv-fund  Connect with Peter: X Youtube Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on April 24th, 2025 *Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don't love it, you will give up before you succeed. If mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly,

what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? If you don't believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there's no way that you can sell it at the level that's required. 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. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for coming tonight. I get to do a lot of really fun things in my role here, but this takes the cake. It doesn't get any better than this.

So where you are right now, you're in Link Ventures office space. We're about a billion-dollar venture fund. We invest almost entirely in MIT and Harvard teams. Everything is AI now, it's been at least 90% AI for the last couple of years. Most of the teams are upstairs above us, they're all sprinkled around, it's like a high energy factory up there.

And then downstairs here we have events like this, and I really appreciate you coming to hear us tonight. So I'm Dave Blunden, Peter and I founded the Venture Fund together. You see it there, Link XPV. So we have a rare opportunity to hear from one of the true luminary visionaries in all things technical. When I was at MIT many, many years ago, I was undergrad getting a computer science degree.

Peter had already gotten his bio degree from MIT, then went off to Harvard, got a HST degree, so MD, PhD, then came back to MIT to take an aerostro, to get an aerostro degree. And so he was taking unified engineering, which was the hardest class that MIT has, having already gotten multiple degrees. So true glutton for punishment while I was getting a computer science degree.

So we lived together on campus, and I've been inspired by a few people in my life. But at that age, Peter was by far the most inspiring person that I had met. And so it's been like a lifelong dream having Peter as a best friend all these years. So Peter, you know, he's in town every now and then. Today happens to be one of those days. While he was on campus as an undergrad, he started Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS,

which is still, I think, the biggest club at MIT. Pretty sure it is. And his good friend, Jeff Bezos, heard about it at Princeton and copied it and created SEDS Princeton. Then he graduated. He started the International Space University, which is thriving today. This is gonna be a long introduction. It is, because you've done so much. I'll only add one more thing then. So then after that, he was the founder of XPRIZE. XPRIZE is, I'm on the board of XPRIZE. I get a

firsthand view into what he's created there. But it's changing the world in, actually I'll just use that as a way to hand off the mic to Peter to tell us about why you're in town this week in the first place. Yeah, usually I'm the one doing the interviewing on my podcast, so it's nice to get someone else to do the work now.

I was in town yesterday at the Time 100 Awards. We were announcing our largest cash prize ever we gave away a hundred million dollars of Elon's money yesterday it was the carbon removal XPRIZE so we challenged back in 2001. We had had, so the X Prize Foundation's been around for 30 years. I started it in 1994 after reading, before many of you were born, after reading a book called The Spirit of St. Louis. And I found out that Lindbergh in 1927, coming up on the 100th anniversary of that shortly, flew from New York to Paris,

not on a whim, but to actually win a $25,000 prize. And I'm reading this biography of Charles Lindbergh and I'm like counting the amount of money spent to win this $25,000 prize. And it's crazy. It's $400,000 is spent by all the teams cumulatively to try and win this guy's $25,000 prize. And it's crazy. It's $400,000 is spent by all the teams cumulatively to try and win this guy's $25,000 prize. And the most likely aviators to cross the Atlantic, New York to Paris, don't pull it off. In fact, Admiral Byrd, who was one of the great aviators at the time, first person to

go to the North Pole, crashes on takeoff out of Roosevelt Field on the way to Le Bourget because he had overweighted his airplane with champagne in China so he could celebrate when he lands in, as if France would not have champagne in China. But Lindbergh, and no one would sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so worried that he would not succeed and they'd give their airplane or engine manufacturer a bad rep. So he goes to Ryan Aircraft in San Diego, which was building only building airmail aircraft, and he bought one of those to convert it. So that was the origin of the

XPRIZE. I read this book and said okay I want to go to space. You know I was born in the 60s. It was the Apollo program and that scientific documentary called Star Trek that was inspired me and I wanted to go, spent a decade here at MIT, and then realized I didn't want to go as a government astronaut. I said, you know, my dream of space flight is not I get to go once during my career after five years of praying.

I want to go every weekend. And so the only way to do that is commercial. And when I read Lindbergh's book, I said I'm going to create a prize for private spaceflight. And so long story short, organized and launched a 10 million dollar prize for the first person who could build a spaceship carrying three adults up a hundred kilometers, come back with the same ship, do it again within two weeks. And that launched the commercial spaceflight industry. Before that, the capital, the regulatory industry,

none of that was there. Elon, Jeff Bezos were there early on supporting XPRIZE. And we've launched 30 prizes since then, about $500 million of incentive purses that have driven about $10 billion in R&D. And yesterday, so every year we go through this process of designing prizes, voting up prizes, and many years ago we said we need a carbon prize

to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean at scale. And year on year on year, it was designed but wasn't getting funded. And I remember on January 7th of 2021, putting aside all the political bullshit going on, Elon became the wealthiest human on the planet and was getting a lot of flack for not being philanthropic. So I texted him and said,

hey, how about doing another X Prize? He had funded an X Prize for teaching kids in Tanzania reading, writing, and arithmetic at scale. Long story, successful one. And he said, what do you have in mind? I said, how about a carbon removal prize? He goes, how much? I said, $100 million.

He goes, sure. That was it. We got the contract 30 days later. And so four years later, we had 1,300 teams enter that competition, approaching every Darwinian evolution in carbon removal. And we awarded six finalists and a grand prize winner who I gave a check for $50 million yesterday, which was amazing. You left out a really...

Yeah. Yeah. Nice, Peter. You left out a really interesting nugget in that story, which is Elon is the first prize funder who said here, I'll just give you the money up front. Yeah, he gave us not only just $100 million, but the operating budget, about 30 million, and gave us us the capital which is sitting in a bank account until yesterday accruing interest

And funny at the next X Prize board meeting Peter said I want to put all that into Bitcoin. I did And I wish I had yeah, the board said no. No, we don't think we're allowed to do that. Yeah, if they'd said yes Yeah, it would be a different story. But we do have we do have three hundred million dollar level prizes so originally the first prize was ten million and people laughed at that amount of money you'll never raise it an amazing woman Anusha Ansari who is now the CEO of the XPRIZE very quickly quickly, she's worth speaking about for a second. I came up with the idea of the XPRIZE in 1994.

Two years later, in 1996, I took a risk as entrepreneurs do, and I announced the $10 million prize without having $10 million. I had two of my board members resign on the spot. We announced it under the arch in St. Louis, and we had TV cameras. It was an incredible event.

I had raised $500,000, $25K at a time, and we decided to spend the entire half a million on this massive PR launch event to announce this to the world and it was incredible. Here's another idea I want to share as entrepreneurs here that how you announce an idea to the world really matters. You see in our minds each and every one of us have a line of credibility. If you hear an idea below the line of credibility, you dismiss it out of hand. Like your neighbor's kid wants to go to Mars tomorrow, not going to

happen. Great. If you announce it above the line of credibility and this person has a possibility of pulling something off, you're going to follow and see what happens. But then there's this line of super credibility. If you can announce something above the line of super credibility, people go, oh my God, when's it going to happen? How do I get involved? So I wanted to do that. And what I did was we stationed under the Arch in St. Louis. I didn't have one astronaut on stage. I think I had 20 astronauts. I had Buzz Aldrin, a bunch of Apollo astronauts and shuttle astronauts. It was amazing. I had the head of NASA, the head of the FAA, the Lindbergh family.

And when we announced this prize, it was like, oh, my God, no one asked you have the money. I did not. Give me teams. No. But we announced it. And then reality started hitting as I went out to try and raise the $10 million because my pitch was, listen, you don't pay the $10 million until after someone has won it. You get to name it, you get all the publicity, you only pay on success. How great would that be?

And it was like, no, no, no, Why isn't NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off? And the clincher was, isn't someone going to die trying? That's what I would have said. No, you would have said you would fund the whole thing, the Blundered X-Files. It would be great. I didn't have the money, so I didn't have to take the question. So, I, five years in, and I literally was getting calls from the team saying, do you have the money? We're building our ships. Do you have the money? We're building our ships.

And I was like, okay, trust me. There's an incredible book called How to Make a Spaceship, which is my biography and the story of the X Prize and the X Prize winning teams. Julian Guthrie, who is incredible, she wrote Larry Ellison's biography as well. Anyway, long story short, I am one day reading Fortune magazine. It was the issue of the wealthiest 40 women under 40. I wasn't married at the time. It was another financing strategy.

And I read about Anusha Ansari, who had just sold her company called Telecom Technologies to Sonos Networks for $1.3 billion. In her biography, it says she wants to fly in a suborbital flight into space. And I was like, oh my God, after 150 nos, this is the person. And it had been an asset sale of her company, so I'm trying to track her down, where there's no one left.

I finally find somebody and find her old assistant, and they're in, they were vacationing, the whole family's vacationing in Hawaii for three months and I got her assistant to promise me if I sent her a package that she would FedEx it to Anusha in Hawaii long story I was Anusha's first meeting when she got back to Plano Texas and they said yes after 150 nos, it became the Ansari X-Prize. Two years after the X-Prize got won in 2004, I had James T. Kirk there at the launches, which was fun to have my childhood hero there.

But Anusha flew to the space station privately. One of my company's space adventurers was brokering flights on the Soyuz, the Russians. And now she's come back as the CEO of the XPRIZE. She's an amazing woman. And we've launched, we have $300 million prizes going on. One we were yesterday, one in longevity, dad, 20 healthy years on your life, and one on large scale desalination at scale.

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To subscribe for free, go to dmandus.com slash meta trends. That's dmandus.com slash meta trends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else. All right, so our first line of questions here is actually Mindset. I'm really going to enjoy this one with you. Before we get into it, how many people have read Peter's books? He's a four-time bestseller. My favorite is actually The Future is Faster Than You Think because it's all about the convergence. You know, through most of technical history, there's one thing going on. Now, because of exponential curves, there are so many things going on concurrently and they

all interact. And the future is faster than you think is all about the interactions and predicting the interactions. Convergence, yeah. Yeah, convergence. But before I get into mindsets, being a futurist, one of the reasons you've been so inspiring to me over the years is because you're willing to actually try to predict the future. And you and Ray Kurzweil started Singularity University together and Ray Kurzweil is famous

for predicting many things, including AGI in 2029. And he predicted that in 1999. And he's going to be right within a year, as it turns out. But for most of his life, people have been telling him how stupid he is for being miles off. And now as he gets close to the finish line, turns out he was right in the end. But one of the problems that futurists have, and a lot of reasons people don't put themselves out there, is because in Ray's case, if you predict 250 things and 240 of them become exactly right, they just seem obvious to everyone in hindsight. But they weren't. And the 10 that are wrong seem really

silly. And so it's a very fragile thing to actually be a futurist and therefore very few people actually put themselves out there and make predictions. And Peter is one of the handful of people I've ever met in my life that actually repeatedly and habitually do predict the future and almost always right. And it's incredibly valuable to me because so few other people are willing to do it. So the topic is mindsets and what it takes to have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Yeah. So here's a question for you guys. If I were to ask you to think about the most successful leader or entrepreneur in the world from your consideration,

whoever it might be, you know, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Elon, Steve Jobs, I don't care who you think. If you think about that person, and then I ask you what made them a successful leader? Was it the money they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had? Or was it the mindset that they had? Right? I hope you would agree it's their mindset. If you took away everything from them but they retained their mindset that they would likely regain the success that they've had. If that's true, if mindset is a single most

important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? You see, we tend to sort of adapt a mindset, absorb a mindset, given a mindset. Our brains are neural nets, work that you did early on in neural nets, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And our neural nets are shaped by what we listen to, who we speak to, what we read. It's constantly shaping.

And so I tend to be as careful about what I let into my mind as what I let into my body. And the question is for you to actively shape your mindset. And so one of my next books is called Mindset Mastery. I've been working on this forever. It's a personal passion project. But I think about the important mindsets, and they have different names. But the first one for me is having a purpose-driven mindset. It was a great quote from Mark Twain who said there are two important days in your life, the day that you were born and the day that you found out why. It's a beautiful idea.

Right, so I won't ask, I'll ask the question but not force anybody to answer. Do you know your purpose in life? Do you know why you're here? When I started Singularity University back in 2009 with Ray Kurzweil, I had the first class and these were incredible students from around the world, the very best at the best institutions who had gone through this huge series of gauntlets to end up at our founding class. And I asked them, how many of you know your purpose in life here?

And a third of them raised their hands. I was like, I was aghast. I was like, oh my God, the rest of you, I don't care why you came here, you have one mission this summer. It's to find out why you're here. What's your purpose? What is that thing that wakes you up in the morning,

keeps you going at night, drives you? What's what I call, taking the step further, is what's your massive transformative purpose? Right, what's the thing that really, so we are emotional beings. We as humans are emotional beings. We don't do things just for cognitive purposes. We do things for emotional purposes.

There is something that inspires you massively like Star Trek or Apollo did for me or something that just pisses you off so damn much that you refuse to let that continue and you're focused on solving that. And either one of those, awe or pain, can be the energy of your massive transformative purpose. But you deserve to find that. I created a platform on a large language model setup that I did called, it's called mypurposefinder.ai, and it will walk you through a series of questions if you're interested, and it will help you

actually shape and verbalize your massive transformative purpose. So mypurposefinder.ai if you want to play with that. Yeah, it works really well. We do have XPrize offsides actually. It works really, really well. And you know, actually I want to ask you about this too because for those of you that are AI startup CEOs or founding teams, the process of being

a successful entrepreneur has changed tremendously with social media. And you know, when I was doing it at a very young age, you were pretty much invisible The process of being a successful entrepreneur has changed tremendously with social media. And when I was doing it at a very young age, you were pretty much invisible and you could stay invisible. Now you're out there no matter what. It's important for capital raising. It's important for recruiting.

And I think Elon Musk has kind of reinvented the degree to which you can take this. But if you don't have a massive transformative purpose that's right on the tip of your tongue, then you can't articulate it when the moment arises and you're on camera or whatever and Then you don't get the talent and then you don't get the capital and so, you know Peter's been saying this for many many years, but it's more true today than it ever was before So I think it's you know, go ahead and try the online exercise ask the LLM Now many of you right now could say, yeah, I can articulate my fundamental purpose? That's pretty good.

Yeah. So founder dynamics. We have a rule. Okay. I'm just gonna say, I dive into that. There's an exponential mindset, right, that I think you need to really contemplate. Are you able, our brains are very linear thinkers,

we're designed in a linear fashion, can the lion get to me before I get to the tree? Right, so understanding an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, one in which you're going 10 times bigger versus 10%. Most of the world is happy with 10%, 10% more revenue, 10% more clients, 10% less cost. That's success for most people. 10 times is a thousand percent.

And so can you create a moonshot mindset where you are able to conceive of something that's a thousand percent bigger, which typically means you're not starting where you are, you're starting with a clean sheet of paper. Right, so Astro Teller at Google X, now X, says if you are running a car company, I'm gonna go old school here, that's getting 50 miles per gallon, and you wanna get 10% more, you can get there.

You can work hard, you can, you know, better aerodynamics, better tires, better more, you can get there. You can work hard, you can, you know, better aerodynamics, better tires, better fuel, you can get 10%. But if I say, no, no, no, I want your car to go from 50 miles per gallon to 500 miles per gallon, you ain't getting there incrementally, right? It's like, clean sheet of paper, start again. The other mindsets for me are an abundance mindset, non-weaponized, an abundance mindset in which you realize

there is just more opportunity next year. If you missed an opportunity, it's fine. There's gonna be more next year. And that there is nothing truly scarce. Whatever you conceive of as scarce, I don't care what it is, there is a mechanism driven by technologies to create a level of abundance.

And the final mindset I speak about, write about, and I spend a lot of my time right now, is a longevity mindset. It's a belief that we're gonna significantly extend the human lifespan from AI principally very shortly. I'm talking next five, 10 year time frame. And your job is not to die from something stupid

before these breakthroughs occur. Yeah, if you don't read all of Peter's books, definitely the first chapter of abundance is about the story of aluminum. Yes. And it's just absolutely a brilliant story. It goes from being the rarest thing, more valuable than gold, to being 7% of the Earth's crust.

And it's all bauxite. Yeah, do you know the tip of the Washington monument is aluminum, right? Because it was the most valuable metal at the time until we learned how to smelt it properly. Yeah, it's a great story. So let's see, I don't know if you wanna riff on this or not, but we met with the MIT administration this morning

and clearly, well, Peter thinks in exponentials, very few people can visualize exponentials. Education is in the crosshairs now. My kids would much rather talk to an LLM and learn from it than go to class, but they learn what they need to know. Curriculum isn't even coming close to keeping up with the rate of change of technology. It's not even trying. I throw it out there as a topic. I don't know if you want to talk about it on camera or not. I'm not shy about any of my opinions.

So Ray Kurzweil, we mentioned earlier, a brilliant individual. I had him on stage at, I run a large community called the Abundance 360 Community, and I run a summit every year called Abundance Summit. And he was on stage with me and Jeffrey Hinton at my event 18 months ago. And he basically, we're talking about sort of the speed of ramping things up. And he said, listen, we're going to see as much change in the next 10 years, 2025 to 2035, as we saw between 1925 and 2025.

The next 10 years, we see a century worth of progress. And by reference, just to remind you, because it's a distant memory of what life was like in 1925, penetration of electricity and telephones in the US was only 30%. 30% of homes had TV and a party line. I mean, not TV, electricity and aphones in the US was only 30%. 30% of homes had TV and a party line. I mean, not TV, electricity and a party line. And the most advanced tech back then was the Ford Model T.

So imagine how far we've come since then to today and what is life gonna look like in 10 years if that level of progress occurs? I mean, it's truly unfathomable. in years if that level of progress occurs. I mean, it's truly unfathomable. And so my biggest concern is that no educational institution is preparing any of us for that speed of change. Not close. Definitely not our middle schools and high schools.

And I would have hoped an institution like MIT would be doing that but maybe not. Well, a quick survey especially for the young entrepreneurs in the crowd. All right, so Teal Fellowship, Z Fellows, Y Combinator Acceptance, MIT degree, Harvard degree. Which would be more important to you to get. So think about it for a second and I'll run down the list. And so you get one vote.

So Z Fellows, any takers? Y Combinator acceptance? Oh, I got some Y Combinators. Teal Fellowship. There you go. So one of the investments we made, Mercor, they were freshmen or sophomores, I think, at Georgetown and Harvard.

They got the email saying, I'll give you $100,000, Teal Fellowship, you win. Give you $100,000 right now, but you have to drop out and start a company. Two years later, the company's worth $2 billion. They have 100 million of revenue, doing 20 million on the bottom line. So the Teal Fellowship,

I don't know exactly how you get it, but it arrives in your inbox and you get 100 grand with it. OK, so I got some TEALs in there. Harvard degree? Nobody. MIT degree? All right, a little bias here.

Yeah, so if I'd asked that question three years ago, it would have been like, of course, the degree. Now you can see the trend line, drifting in that direction. There are other credentials that are starting to matter to people even more than that degree. The problem is that the time between matriculation and graduation is infinite in terms of progress.

And so ultimately, your MIT degree is learning how to learn and how to socialize and making contacts. It's not what you actually learned. So 27-time founder and co-founder. So 27 samples. That's a lot of samples. One of the things I was telling the teams earlier today is if you think about Ford Motor Company, when Ford started, they made cars.

What does Ford do today? They make cars. OK, look at the magnificent seven tech companies. Every one of them does something today that's very different from when they started. So look at Apple. What did Apple make originally? Actually, the Apple I was a box of chips

you assemble together. The Apple II, which I had as a kid, it's a desktop PC. Then the laptops came along. Then now today, 90% of the revenue comes from the iPhone. Wasn't even a concept when Apple started. And so tech companies are constantly reinventing 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. Look in the future and the rate of change. So, love to get your ideas on some of the founder dynamics. I mean, I think the most interesting companies

are the founder-led AI or tech-first companies that... 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, nope, stop doing that. We're now only doing this, right? So you get that with Zuckerberg, you get that with Musk, you get that with a few other

companies. But that level of like, you know, full body right turns are what is required. Otherwise, I mean, I was amazed when Bezos said at a a shareholder meeting, in 30 years, we'll be gone. Yep. Well, the Tesla reinvention as a robotics company, and 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 in shitification.

She said, at Bridgewater, we talk about public companies, the founders take it, they get it to a certain level, and then the inshitification sets in. 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 going to come down because it's a car company. No or not, we're a robotics company. And 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 it 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 other times. They got a contract for Falcon 9, and then he shut down the Falcon 1 line, right, burned those ships and what he went on to say is soon as we get Starship flying we will shut down the Falcon 9 line, the most successful launch vehicle ever in human history, right, and it takes that level of leadership to be able to make these right hand turns

and say we're going to put, we're putting everything into that. And the same thing with Starlink. I'm always 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 and you'll be able to build many things together. You let it fritter away while you grind away on your business plan. You won't get that opportunity again later.

A single individual can make all the difference in the world in your company. A single individual, I'll give you an example. So George Church at Harvard Med School, one of the genetic professors, brilliant area in synthetic biology, he had been focused on bringing back the woolly mammoth for many years. Talking about it, talking about it, there was a non-profit and so forth, he meets a guy named Ben Lam, who has no background in biology.

He's a software engineer. He becomes enamored with George. He becomes enamored with George's mission of de-extinction. Starts Colossal four years ago, and today it's a $10 billion company that's brought back the dire wolf, it's bringing back next the dodo, and Tasmanian devil, and of course the wooly mammoth,

but, and has 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. It'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 diamandis.com slash future-proof. That's diamandis.com slash future proof. That's diamandus.com slash future proof. The link is below. Speaking of smartest people on the planet, I'm going to do this speed style first and then we'll come back. Okay.

So I got, so in your travels through life, you've met pretty much all of the big shots in 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'll go in reverse out here. So I'll give you a name, you give me one sentence, and then we'll go back to the talk. Okay. Ready? Yeah. I'll go in reverse order here. Richard Branson.

Frustrating. Frustrating, all right. So when I was trying to pitch, when I was trying to raise $10 million 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 pitch him for 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, at 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 the 10 million, years later he goes, oh my God, I should for funding the $10 million. Years later, he goes, oh my god, I should have funded the $10 million.

I spent $500 million trying to build the Virgin Galactic instead. It would have been much cheaper to do it. God, I have no idea. That's the first time I've heard that story. He's brilliant and charming. And he just frustrated me. All right, we're going to give up on the speed style then.

I'll just go. All right, this one drives me crazy, actually, because I'm tired. How many people know Tony Robbins? Okay, good. Very glad to see that. In class every semester, it's like three people. And like, and 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. They're 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. The body language you want is exactly Tony Robbins, relentless enthusiasm, never an extraordinary

confidence. Your capital raising story for XPRIZE 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. And 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 and authenticity. What you see is what you get. And it's just extraordinary. Yeah.

Drew Halston gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2017, I think it was. Everyone knows Drew Halston, founder of Dropbox? That's also one that's kind of dropping off the curve for some reason. He gave the best commencement address, I think, ever. But he said, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

And 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, relentless is, yeah. It really is. Think about this, do you wanna 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, you know and and so Make yourself that person that people want to spend time with All right, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they're one person in this chart. So years ago when the XPRIZE got won on October 4th, 2004, you guys remember the Google Doodle? So Google Doodle was changed on that day with 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 2,000 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. We flew a number of zero-g flights together.

I pitched him and he joined my XPRIPrize board and became a benefactor. He brought in Sergey and Eric Schmidt as well. And just very brilliant. He's unfortunately gone MIA to a large degree. Sergey or Larry? Larry mostly. Sergey has been a little bit, but he's back now with with Gemini's training. But what I get frustrated about, and I'm public about this, is individuals like Larry and

Sergey who've got 140 billion dollars to their name. It's like, excuse my French, why the fuck aren't you solving the world's problems with that money? It really pisses me off when you have such levels of retained capital and the money is not being put to work. I 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 XPRIZES, 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 in mostly in environment and in biology. He backed Dr. Yamanaka, who did the Yamanaka Factors, and he's backed a number of Nobel Laureates. Again, Mark and Lynn are amazing. And 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 gonna give half of my money to a nonprofit before I die. Okay, that doesn't mean it's gonna do anything with the money. What I really want is people to participate in an impact pledge. I pledge to eliminate hunger in Tanzania, whatever you want. 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 value. So if we had, I don't know how big the Forbes list is right now, 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, because 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, and I got support to use the biggest computer in the world to build the first commercial neural networks. So launched the company, was selling, ended up with Walmart as a customer. And then I got a call from Rick Dalzell, who ran data warehousing at Walmart. He called me one day and he said, hey, I just joined a little startup on the West Coast. You may not have heard of it. It's called Amazon.

I said, oh, yeah, I've heard of it. It's small. 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 Diamandis? And I said, yeah, we were roommates at MIT. He goes, oh wow, because I started SEDS at Princeton. So that little bonding moment helped

a lot in making them our customer. Then 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 $200,000, $300,000 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, yeah, since college. Yeah, I started SEDS 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 Theta Iltakai at TDC here, and when I got to campus, I found out there was no student space organization at MIT. I said, 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 MIT. SCAMET was one of the names I came up with. And then SEDS stuck, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. And this is, I wrote a letter to Omni Magazine, which no longer exists, Analog Magazine and Astronomy saying, you know, we students need to band together to guarantee our future in space because they don't trust NASA to do that for us. And at our house, I had no idea the articles got 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 wanna start a chapter, I wanna 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 gonna do Amazon first, make some money, and then spend it in space. An easy one-two plan. And it worked. He's executing on that perfectly. Yeah. And 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. So he's on my board at XPRIZE for four years.

And from 2004, so how I got him on the board, so I'd known Elon for some time. I had pitched him originally on funding the X Prize instead of the 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 you pay the winner. He still chides me for having tried to convince him

to not start SpaceX. And so finally, where's that going with this story? So, well, we'll come back to you. Something about Elon. Something we know we're gonna be curious for the rest of our lives about some Elon nugget. Anyway, so he starts SpaceX, he continues.

Oh yeah, I am going to meet with Larry Page for the second time, and I'm going to ask Larry to join my board at XPRIZE. I was like, how can I get Larry to join my board at XPRIZE. I was like, how can I get Larry to join my board at XPRIZE? One of the things I realized about boards, if any of you are on any boards is, I'm on boards because I enjoy spending time with the people there. It's a chance to meet with them on a quarterly basis, I get a chance to meet with Dave.

So I'm in the parking lot at Google about to go in to 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 XPRIZE? Because if you're on the board, I think it will increase the probability that he'll on the board. And 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 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 microsecond. Exactly. 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 constantly? 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. At the end of the day, your company is searching for attention in this attention deficit economy. And so how you can either get it by having an amazing product, having an amazing brand, having great stunts, But 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.

I've worked on this through my Moonshots podcast, my Metatrends blogs, my books, my other things. Because if I do that, I can support, you know, link exponential ventures. I can support the XPRIZE. I can support my company's found life and such. You know, I'm gonna add one to the list. It's not on the list here, but I think it's directly relevant

to what you just said, Sam Altman. So, you know, in the history of tech, it's more, I'm gonna raise some money, I'm gonna build something, I'm gonna prove that it works, I'm gonna start selling it,, I'm gonna raise some money, I'm gonna build something, I'm gonna prove that it works, I'm gonna start selling it, then I'm gonna raise more money to expand and grow. But now in tech, you have these areas where something clearly will work.

And, LLMAI being a great example, or nuclear power to fund a data center that will have a gigawatt or two 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 you can take that to. Storytelling. 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. We 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 yourself at that level there's no way that you can sell it at the level that's required. Right? And so I was on at my Abundance Summit this past year, Rana was there, Dave was there.

I had Palmer Lucky, which was a fun conversation. I'm going to do a podcast with him next week again. And I had Travis Kalanick. And we're talking about when do you give up on your startup? I don't know about you, but of my 27 companies, startups, there's a number of them that I rode 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 something that you're passionate about? 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 anymore or you don't believe. You cannot fake that. You have to believe that 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? And the answer is no I won't because genuinely we're

living through a health care crisis. You may not know this but 70% of heart attacks have no precedence, no pain, no shortness of 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 Capp and Bob Haruri 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. Learn 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. So I have a whole bunch more questions here,

but I actually wanna make sure that we get any burning questions 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 Wisner-Gross 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 an incredibly brilliant and sweet man. And he's an incredible credential for the rest of his life. Brilliant and sweet man. And always has a good question on top of his mind. I'm sure tonight's no exception. Yeah? Kick us off. Hi, Alex.

Good to see you, Bill. Peter, good to see you too. I'll give you two questions, if I may. Sure, of course. So one topic heavy on my mind today that you alluded to already, abundance and the weaponization thereof. Yes. Do you think that we need to be more open to the public?

I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. One topic heavy on my mind today that you alluded to already, abundance and 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 weaponize abundance for hegemony. And if not, why not? And if so, which form of abundance do you think will be weaponized first? Oh my God. So I have zero doubt that we're heading towards this world. So back in 2012, I wrote a book with Stephen Coller 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, any time you want, can we still retain the idea of a deep emotional purpose for our lives? There's an incredible experiment done in the 1960s. Did we talk about the Universe 25 experiments?

You know what the Universe 25 experiments are? This 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 the entire population died every time, because there was no challenges for them. And so it's like the idea of the unchallenged 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 accoutrement of exponentials makes it possible for us. How do we up-level our challenges? Not quite the weaponization of abundance that you were speaking of, but this is on. Clearly. I have a wonderful conversation. Hi there. Nina Heider. I follow up related as a geneticist, evolution is very similar for our species. So if we think about, and I typically technology advances at an exponential pace where we haven't quite reached our capacity nor near 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 in your rat example, you gave how they die off, there's good and bad, right? Our emotional IQ, our different product of DNA and environment and 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 mass loss in order to have that? 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 in my last book is a world in which we are all connecting ourselves to the cloud, where our neocortex 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 was like, Ray

you've got to 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. Imagine 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 Werner 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, agentic AI startup guys here. You guys want to ask a question? Yeah. Here. Catch. I think I'm curious about, you keep bringing up this idea that we might be going too far in technology in some ways? I don't think I said that. Not too far, but in the sense that if we solve all the problems humans have no challenges to face, things like this.

Okay. 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. Yeah. Is there a point that's too far? Is there some metric we can use to figure out if we've gone too far in some direction and 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. 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 is a billion dollars a day being invested

in AI today and it's driving super exponential breakthroughs and digital super intelligence 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 gonna slow this down, I hope, because the things that can slow this down are not things I wanna live through. But I do think it's on us, on our responsibility to look at how we up-level the challenges we take on. So I close my next book on abundance with a look

at how do we go a thousand X bigger in our dreams? 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, think of the movie Her and we humans are sublinear at best. Do we couple best, do we couple and accelerate with AI? AI is a new life form, it is a new species. Will we hybridize with them? I mean, 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 gonna get

in the next four years. and the implications thereof, clearly not in 99.999%. And so there's gonna be some, you know, 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. We'll 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. So fire away.

Just yell it out. Okay. So what do we do? Go ahead and get the microphone so we can record it properly. Okay. Yeah. I flew this morning to see you. Thank you. And because you changed my life and I read that the future is part of anything that the industry, you know,

then I was focusing on green hydrogen, but industry is struggling right now. So what do you think of the future of climate change? All right, so you've got, I love you and green energy. Hold that thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

What are you most excited about, longevity? Yes. Oh, that would be well, okay? Longevity. Yes. Longevity. So you said that we're going to see a century worth of change in ten years but there's 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 mobile phones again where Instagram took to talk is going to be the brain. So in reverse order, I was having 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 century worth of progress in some small number of years. We just saw the Nobel Prize given to Demis Asabas and John Jumper for Alpha Fold. I think that's the beginning of a long line of AI drivendriven Nobel prizes.

The ability for AI to hypothesize questions and then run the experiments and solve them and come up with 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. We 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 10 years. Crazy. I was just with David Sinclair 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 Demas Hasabis 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. For as long as homo sapiens have been around two, 300,000 years, that was our average lifespan. And then we hit a number of benefits from pasteurization, better sanitation, and antibiotics, and move the needle. Now we're moving the needle as a result of AI. Another point we made, 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 tissue, this is my organ system, this is me. And based on my genetics, this is my model.

And I'm gonna make these tweaks. 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, they modeled the shit out of it and 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 to run your biology in silico. Crazy, no one thought possible, just around the corner. 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 super intelligence. Like it or not, want it or not, it will be just like literally, longevity falls out, climate crisis, we're gonna see new materials that are being enabled. We just awarded, obviously, this $100 million on six different approaches for

carbon sequestration at gigaton scale. That 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 going to, 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, wake up, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. It 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 one skin.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. All 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. And then are you okay? Yeah, totally good. I promised I'll let you off the hook after just, we'll do one more batch of three. Okay, that's great. And then, are you okay? Yeah, totally good. All right, and then Alex, you have to go to our clincher. It's 5.30 on the west coast.

All right, I promise to you. It's, I like this optimism and abundance. And right now, if you look at the human race, we have abundance of food, but yet there's inequality between where there's too much food and where there is starvation. We have more people dying from obesity than starvation. It's crazy.

So the question is, in this next generation of abundance, will the humans overcome our own human limitations to share? That's a great question. Right behind you. Hasn't come up yet quantum computing, the positives and negatives that are possible around the group. Yeah. Very nice. Do you want to do another batch of three after this? Yeah, sure. All right.

One more. All right. Allison, you're next. I'm going to take it. If you had small people... I have two 13-year-olds. Okay. So what do you do every day to instill in them that deep purpose?

And what stories, you 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 open to? Yeah, it's a great question. Kids, quantum, and abundance, more and abundance. So on the kids' front, first of all, I think the single most important thing I want 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. Right, 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 I was running two companies, I got a copy of my diploma, I shipped it to my dad and said, okay, the obligation complete. I 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 can call it prompt engineering if you want, but we're heading into a world where you're gonna be able to know anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. I 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? Someplace 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. So mindsets are what I try and focus my kids on, not anything else, because 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 a salon this Saturday night back in LA with the head of Google Quantum and the head of the Allen Brain Institute, and then one

of the top physicians in the psychedelic space. Hartmut Neven runs Google Quantum. consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, which I find absolutely fascinating. So we are quantum beings. I'm tracking what's going on at Google, at Microsoft, and other locations in this space. I think, you know, the area that is most, so the question is when is it gonna become applicable? When are we gonna get basically, a sufficient number of logical qubits that it's useful? What's interesting is the work that SandboxAQ

is doing right now, right? So Sandbox has taken the quantum equations, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and so forth, and 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 want to hear them.

I do too. So this is all off the record, right? No, it's being, sorry. So conventional wisdom 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

on the computing side is to generate huge amounts of synthetic training data that we can then lead to very much classical machine learning algorithms to do things like drug discovery. We'll do efficient synthetic generation of quantum chemistry calculations, build up a huge synthetic data set, feedback to classical and all. I think that right now if 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. There was a lot of hype in the early days, yes.

The quantum computing lunch got eaten by classical AI ML, and otherwise useless. If I had to make the Steelman case for how quantum compounds expectations and ends up 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, if it turns out there's some essential bit of

quantum mechanics in biology, I think that's the likeliest to be the safe embrace 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 a sandbox aq is developed products right now Right so sandbox is using quantum sensing to be able to navigate without GPS by using slight variations in the magnetic field of the the earth due to ferro deposits and the crust

Enormous potential discoveries right under our noses is not widely appreciated. Gravity hasn't been established to like scales as short as a micron. No one knows. Quantum sensors could mean the difference between discovering new physics at mesoscopic length scales and no new physics. So personally I'm very bullish that quantum sensing could unlock enormous revolutions. Nice. And then abundance.

You were saying it's better than EKG to us. Yeah, so they do for EKG, yes, exactly, yeah. No worries about encryption for an interview? What's that? I'll just ask him that. Yeah, what's your, go ahead, give me the microphone. Anytime I get to hear from Alex, please, or girls, I want to hear as much as I can.

The question was no worries about encryption. No, I mean the composite agencies have already moved to post quantum, so it's, yeah, the world has moved on. It's your old hard drive that's ruined. Yes, okay, so phrase the question on abundance for me once again. Human nature? Yeah, so the question is, as we enter this new age of abundance, and as we have seen in the past experiences,

that we have this abundance of food, but where there's still this inequality of food and food distribution. With this new age of abundance, the game are going to have the same thing play over where some people have everything that they want anytime in their fingertips, and the vast majority are still left because humans don't want to share other than their crime. It's primarily for the private people. Great.

Okay. Thank you for the question. First of all, if you look at the data, and in the back of my new, my next book, whatever we call it, Age of Abundance or Survival Guide for Abundance, we've got 80 charts. And 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 thereabouts, any kid with a smartphone has access to Google at the same level that Larry and Sergey's kids have access to Google. It'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 afford, 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 fashion. And we're coming up with new business models for the things that are still physical and not digital. Those 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 isn't the abundance mindset, that things are just so available and so cheap that anyone can have it, that's part of the solution. Elon talks about, so here's some numbers, right? TeslaBot, Optimus, Figure, AI, I'm tracking about 100 decently funded, 50 well-funded humanoid robot companies.

The prediction on the price point of these robot companies is $20,000 in production, right? The number, the estimate now is by 2040 there 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 volume production things get down to a price per kilogram and so that's where it things get down to a price per kilogram And so that's a that's where it will end up at twenty to thirty thousand dollars And if I've got a humanoid robot that's operating on GPT-5 It's just operating on the latest models and it costs thirty thousand dollars to buy and it cost me

$300 a month to lease Which is ten10 a day, which is 40 cents an hour. And I have a digital super intelligence robot at my beck and call for 40 cents 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 costs you 300 bucks a month,

10 bucks a day, how many will you own? Right? I don't know. Probably a couple at least. Maybe more. Maybe one will massage my left foot, one will massage my right foot. So 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 at the end. It will mean very little, right? If you have nanotechnology on top of AI and robotics, I don't know. Alex, do you agree? I've had long conversations with AI about AI-driven post-capitalism. Yeah, and it agrees, right? Yeah, no, it has very strong opinions about what post-capitalism looks like. I should talk to mine about that. Will existing systems allow that? What's that? Will existing systems allow that?

No, they will fight like hell yeah and and they will become irrelevant just like libraries all right until I brain about that still want to take three more yeah sure all right well take three more and then Alex is gonna ask something totally out of control brilliant run-up do humans have a moment 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? She would be worried that no one answered that Harvard was the right choice. Not a single vote. Is anyone here from Harvard that wants to? And you guys didn't vote for yourself? That's interesting. All right, last one.

And you guys didn't vote for yourself? That was interesting. Alright, last one. Hi, thank you so much for doing this. You're really inspiring. Thank you. Apart from that particular startup that you know, was on for like a long time, you didn't give up.

What is something else that you feel like after doing 27 different, or 27 different startups, that you could have done differently in hindsight. Yeah, what did you, what did you fuck up? What would you say Dave? So all right, last one was what did you fuck up? Yeah, yeah, okay got it. Wait, Rana had, what was yours again?

Yeah, I got hers, I got hers. So listen, there's no question that in hindsight you can do everything better. 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 failed miserably. Because 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 like no way

I'm nice like, you know, it's get rich quick schemes. Nah so You know, I think the other thing is who you start your companies with is One of the most fundamental things right you're gonna 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 exponential 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.

And I think the final thing and it's related to the first one is being driven by a massive transformative purpose, being driven by something bigger than yourself. Because when you've got that in your heart and you're communicating what you want to 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. So a purpose-driven effort versus something that you're doing for somebody else or you kind of want to do, no, no, you'll 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-founder's side of it. No, no. I went after companies because I thought it was a quick way to make money. Oh, did you? I did. I did. I did a couple of those and I said 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, it just, it broke. Yeah. Yeah, we call that the Fred Wilson rule because we borrowed it from another MIT alum,

Fred Wilson, the founder of Union Square Ventures, would 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. If they passed those filters, he'd always invest no matter what the plan was. So, say again.

Liberal arts and religion, what is the appropriate amount? You've touched on a lot of those topics and sort of around them, but don't directly touch on a lot of them. It depends, I mean, honestly, for me, it's low. but that's not who I am. But there are some of the most extraordinary leaders on the planet who that is their heart's 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 super intelligence. We're giving birth to new species. We're uncovering what we thought were long lived secrets. We're doubling the human lifespan. We're humanity is transitioning so rapidly. I think, you know, the question is will religion play a stabilizing role or break? Will history play a guiding role for us?

I don't know, you have an opinion about that? No, I'm not taking that one. It'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,

our children that will conquer the universe. One 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 super intelligence or without it? My conclusion is I don't trust this planet with the powers we're developing without digital super intelligence. 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 to 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 so applaud wildly so we capture that on the video for KJ over there. Okay? 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 a pretty obvious trend. There are 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 to assume that we'll see many bar. And to the second question of the Is there a motive?

Yes. Is there a motive? I don't think the question makes sense. I think that the premise of humanity needs a competitive differentiation, presumably against super intelligence or whatever barbarians lie outside the motive. I don't think it's even wrong.

I think the premise is flawed. I think we merge with the superintelligence and the question that's interesting for me is what happens after that. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what does the post-singularity look like, given that, at least from my boxhole, the singularity, or I just use that term as a placeholder because I don't actually think we're going to hit a sort of an I.J. Goodes type vertical wall where there's instantaneous progress but technologies that we call in singularity prosaically,

that's a foregone conclusion at this point. We're well past the eventualism. I 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- No, those are all, I would argue that those are all instrumentally convergent requirements. So AI has those as well.

Your question, Doctor. Wait, wait, wait, before your final question, because at the end of this, we're gonna erupt in applause and that'll be the end of the night so I want to I want to first of all thank everybody for coming tonight I hope it was worth the price of the ticket and really you know Peter is just such an incredible joy and so motivating for everyone when you come to the body you the more we can get you here, the better. So the applause at the end. Not yet, not yet. David, can we have our applause?

So I have no idea what Alex is going to 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. Yes, a positive note, of course. All right, here we go. Ready? Here we go. You're the founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. You're the champion in chief for abundance. I want to put you on the spot and ask you to project forward, say, 100 or 200 years

and ask the question, what does humanity, from the perspective of SEDs or abundance look like? And I'll offer you a few options, you know, DOR, ABCD, and other as well. Does humanity look something like the wheel cylinders where we're just projecting atoms outward into interstellar space. Does humanity look like transcension hypothesis where we break out of singularity of a simulation or other dimensions, you know, fill in the blank?

Does it look like humanity turning purely inward, building vast computers and living an inner life? Does it look like something else entirely? What is, if not the terminal state, if you think that we're on an exponential and presumably the, although I heard point on an exponential looks like the knee of the curve, if we're on a hyper exponential then presumably we hit the vertical sometime to 400 years from now, what does the state of humans in space look like? Yeah.

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 resources. And that 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 onto land. And so there will be some elements of humanity that are moving out into space. The tools that we'll have with robotics and nanotechnology that's able to reshape material resources into anything and everything we need. But 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. And we'll create N plus one. 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 XPRIZE 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. Right? I define a billionaire as someone who helps a billion people. Right? And it's an incredible, incredible time. We're about to give every human on the planet access to the most powerful resource, intelligence. And 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 a city on the moon, that's one of my goals. I'd like to fulfill D.D. Harriman. That's 10 years from now. I think that we're living in a virtualized universe. How about you? You want that? I already turned it off. I want to hear Alex's idea. You can cut in the end.

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 frontier AIs about this. The answer is sort of terrifying from an exponential growth perspective. So Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar suggests the universe

when it began, time scales were very short, slowed down, U-shaped, and then as we came up to the present, things seemed to be accelerating again, back up on an exponential. The 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 a hyper-exp hyper exponential development right now, and we're going to hit a number of major universal milestones, we're going to find that the next rungs of the development ladder take exponentially more time than the speed up that we've experienced to the point where AI thinks the next few rungs of the developmental ladder, you know, not quite Kardashev levels, but its own somewhat similar version of that, are going to take progressively hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of millions of years.

So to the answer, my answer to your question back to me. So we're in our solar system? If we can survive technologies that enable us to destroy ourselves, then we leave our solar system. And if we can survive after that, we colonize the galaxy, meet all of the other intelligences that are cohabiting our solar system. And this of course presumes that they don't come to meet us before then.

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, everybody. Thank you. If you could have had a 10-year head start on the dot-com boom back in the 2000s, would you have taken it? Every week I track the major tech meta trends.

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