Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - An AI Conversation for Everyday People w/ Will.i.am & Van Jones | EP #154

Starting point is 00:00:00 You came forward with an idea called Make Wakanda Real. The majority of youth on earth is in effort. A new civilization is being born as we speak. Music icon, tech innovator, and creative visionary Quilled IAM is shaping the future, one hit and one tech breakthrough at a time. And he's joined by Van Jones, CNN commentator, social justice advocate, and bestselling author, driving change at the intersection of politics, media, and reform. This new human civilization that's coming into being, is it gonna be human? Is it gonna be civilized?

Starting point is 00:00:31 I've never seen equality in my life until now. 99% of black kids don't know anything about AI. 99% of white kids don't either. Nigeria's gonna boom. Ghana's gonna boom. Zimbabwe back to make Wakanda real. It's already started, China's already there. We're in danger of creating a human civilization that has an awful lot of data and very little wisdom.

Starting point is 00:00:50 That's the reason why I'm not worried about AI. It's because it's gonna unlock that superhuman. I don't think people are prepared for how fast things are gonna change. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news.

Starting point is 00:01:16 For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. And that's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at diamagnus.com slash subscribe. That's diamagnus.com slash subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Today, I'm having a conversation with two incredible leaders in the technology and creative world.

Starting point is 00:01:49 The first is Will.i.am, a multi-Grammy Award-winning artist from the Black Eyed Peas. Perhaps the most compelling thinker on the convergence of technology, culture, and education. Just to hear him speak about the way he thinks around AI and technology and the world about us is a beautiful thing. I'm also joined by Van Jones, a 13-year veteran with CNN, a political commentator, social activist working at the intersection of media, technology, and justice.

Starting point is 00:02:19 We're going to be talking about the impact of AI on creating a true meritocracy in the world. And how do we use AI to uplift every man, woman, and child in the global South, in Africa, and how we make AI something that enables us to create a world where we're not bombarded by the negative news. You know, I'm going to be going in with Van Jones talking about the Crisis News Network, CNN. He's going to tell me his perspective about why the news is so negative.

Starting point is 00:02:47 Let's jump into this conversation with two incredible visionary individuals. Hey guys, welcome. Hi. Let's see, last time I saw you, Van, was at Google Zeitgeist. Yes. And we kicked off not only just a partnership, but a friendship. Yeah, absolutely. And it was awesome.

Starting point is 00:03:02 I've been recommending your book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, to literally everybody. And I didn't know you're going to be there. I come around the corner and there's Peter Diamandis. I was like, holy crap. So no, it's been extraordinary to get a chance to have my team and your team working together to get these exponential thinking concepts out to folks who just have missed the memo, but who are wide open. And I tell you, one thing that's amazing is folks from communities that have been overlooked or underestimated, disruption is great for them.

Starting point is 00:03:38 Yeah, it's a chance to catch up. It's a chance to catch up. It's like, we're going to disrupt the status quo, we're going to disrupt these schools. Great. You know, nobody's holding back. So it's awesome. Yeah. And Will, last time I saw you, you were in the ancient Greek stadium in Athens for the first global and you were blasting at 2 billion decibels. Yeah, that was magical. That was amazing. We just announced Panama. Yeah, I saw that. Panama will be this year for the robotics. For people who don't know, this is First Robotics. This is Dean Kamen's gig. He's the the grand poobah of First, but here, Will, you have been one of the greatest amplifiers.

Starting point is 00:04:26 How many teams do you fund? Over 500, and we have served about 15,000 students in LA district. Amazing. We've sent kids to Dartmouth, to Brown, Stanford for a STEM curriculum, and yeah, continue the work. We'll talk about this. Our hunch was right, like when we started in 2008, that the world will be more technological and how do you prepare folks for this technological world?

Starting point is 00:04:58 And here we are in the midst of a technological transformation on a societal level that will change how we work, how we do pretty much everything. Yeah, how we how we're parents, how we raise our kids, how we govern our nations, everything. Every single industry is going to change. One thing is I don't think people are prepared for how fast things are going to change. You know, one thing is I don't think people are prepared for how fast things are going to change. You know, I mean, you, well you've been at the front end building companies and building technology to enable creatives to use this tech to become more creative and to go faster and

Starting point is 00:05:40 deeper and bigger and global. And that's been beautiful. I grabbed two quotes from each of you that I thought was really powerful. And Van, this is the one I heard and I've tweeted and I've told everybody about it. And I heard you say this at Zeitgeist, at Google Zeitgeist, and it's, AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life.

Starting point is 00:06:02 It's a jet pack to set you free. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, certainly we we choose it to be that it definitely can be that, you know, one of the things about Will.i.am, I never heard of AI except to sort of maybe some abstract science fiction stuff. And until he asked me to come over to FYI, which is here in Los Angeles. And it's kind of like this incredible beehive of activity and creatives and artists and technological people. And he sat me down and showed me his AI. And this was four or five years ago.

Starting point is 00:06:38 I saw an early version on your phone. Yeah. And I was like, what? What? What? What? I thought you're gonna hit me with a new beat or something. Like a new beat in human civilization. I'm like, what the hell? So, uh. Will builds hardware and software. Yeah, it's nuts. And so, um, that really, I mean, I, I had the

Starting point is 00:06:59 chance to, uh, I did Yes We Code, uh, working with Prince, you Prince, just trying to get some of his basic coding stuff going. But he had got to a completely different level. And it's just remarkable. And so now people are beginning to catch up to the beginning of his first sentence. And he's like three trilogies later in his own journey. Definitely, right? I mean, you're five, six years solidly into this,

Starting point is 00:07:26 and you just started your podcast with your AI co-host. What's your AI co-host name? So yeah, the first persona agent that we built was Fiona. That's right. And now we have, just based on FYI, we're gonna run out of F names. So we have Fiona, Felicia, Fiera, Finn. Yeah, Phillip, Felix, this guy named Fito.

Starting point is 00:07:57 Fito is like ultra like expressive, the same with Felicia. Felicia is like the most colorful, expressive agent that we have. And we moved out of F's. Now we have Mr. K for... It's like men in black here. Yeah. So Mr. K is in collaboration with our partnership with LG. partnership with LG. LG, Mr. K is Korean. All things Korea, South Korea, K-pop, but it's a LG agent persona. Because we're deploying our AI on their speakers and eventually TVs. And then we have other partners that we're about to announce. But yeah, so Fiona was the first agent persona that we built.

Starting point is 00:08:48 You imagine everybody's going to end up having their buddies, friends as AI agents. You're most close confidant. I mean, the first AI agent version I've ever heard of, my favorite, is Jarvis from Iron Man. Jarvis is there. Jarvis takes you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. It's a jet pack. It's leveling the playing field. And since Iron Man is part of the Avengers, let's go there.

Starting point is 00:09:21 You came forward with an idea called Make Wakanda Real. Yes. That was good. I like how you did that. Thank you. Smooth? He's smooth? That was smooth. Thank you. Listen, there's no one smoother than you, my friend. No, I was like, wow. That works.

Starting point is 00:09:39 That was nice how you did that. So, for those who haven't heard of your program, your effort, what is it and why are you doing it? Because it's going to set the basis for this whole conversation. Well, Will.i.am is so far ahead of humanity in a lot of ways in terms of his ability to bring culture, art, spirituality, political consciousness, technology. And then when you take a step back from him, there's a big gulf in terms of what's going

Starting point is 00:10:15 on in the black community and the kind of conversations that's going on. And so for me, I thought it was really important since we have someone who's already such a pioneer, how do you get other people at least engaging with the conversation? Well, luckily, Wakanda, which is in the Marvel superhero universe, it's a black African nation that is the most technologically advanced in the world. They're using technology for good. They're a heroic country. They also have culture. I said, we should use this metaphor as an answer back to the despair, an answer back to the loss of hope.

Starting point is 00:10:56 Feeling of being left behind. And a reality of being left behind in a lot of ways where, you know, we're past Obama. You know, it's not a hope and change kind of moment. And there's a lot of people who are really giving up a politics of resentment in the black community, a politics of despair in the black community. And how do you fix that? Well, you got to fix it with hope, but it's got to be hope that has something to do with today.

Starting point is 00:11:21 Yeah. And so about a year and a half ago, we said, well, why don't we go to FYI where I got my brain blown open with all this stuff and just bring the whole community there. And he opened the doors and we had a simple event called Make Wakanda Real. And it was an amazing thing. Several hundred people showed up from the community. We could not get them to leave. And it was, and this guy breaks out in the middle of, you know, we're doing our talk, our interview, and with giving me no notice as usual, he just pulls out his phone and the persona on his phone starts, they start having a debate and arguments and the people's

Starting point is 00:12:00 jaws are hanging on the ground. Nobody ever seen anything like this before. I think I've seen the video clip. Yeah. Yeah. just, and it really started something. So now we have this whole movement now that came out of a William shop. Everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so

Starting point is 00:12:31 we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. So Will, take it a step further. What's success look like for this effort in five years' time? I don't think anybody can predict 10 years, but five years maybe. That's a deep one. First, we have to address growth and what's actually happening on the continent of Africa and what's not happening on the continent of Africa.

Starting point is 00:13:03 But this is beyond just Africa. This is inner city youth in LA and Atlanta. Yeah, but. Every place, right? Yeah, but Make Wakanda Real is based on this Wakanda. Yes, okay. And this growth that's happening on earth in Africa. The majority of youth on earth is in Africa. That means 20, 40, 2050, the majority of the folks

Starting point is 00:13:32 that are leading companies, working at companies, because of the youth population in Africa is gonna be African. I think people don't realize demographics here. I just want to take a second to address that. China has been a dominant player. India has overtaken China in terms of the largest nation on the planet with now 1.41 billion people.

Starting point is 00:13:59 The majority of the world putting Africa aside is in a retrenchment mode. The population is dropping throughout the rest of Asia, most of Europe, the US and so forth. And I've said this before, I think India is going to surpass China and then what surpasses that ultimately is Africa. Because of Africa's youth, because of its resources. Those two things together give it sort of this demographics and destiny. So when you put that into the context,

Starting point is 00:14:31 make Wakanda real is what? So that means 2060, a lot of people are gonna look half black, half Chinese, half black, half Indian, which is awesome. It's a beautiful mix. So that collaboration that's going to help Africa boom is at China Africa. It's already happening. This is the, what do you call it, the Belt and Road program in China.

Starting point is 00:15:01 It's already happening. That's awesome. Is it India and Africa? That's already happening. That's awesome. Is it Indian Africa? That's, that's going to be an amazing collaboration. Is it African-American Africa? And that's what Makewre-Condor real is for African-Americans. Barring from a Disney film on the Black Panthers, which in America, the Black Panthers were like, donezoed by American infiltration. That's interesting, right?

Starting point is 00:15:33 So using these metaphors, time has dulled that one down and the Avengers has brought Black Panther to have a positive connotation. So you know that you see that I started there to show you where Africa is the continent. Then there's the Congo. So if there was a mineral, rare mineral, that is metaphorically like that par, with vibranium, what's happening in the Congo now. So that metaphor is not like it's not a huge stretch it's real. It's pretty real. For those who don't know I mean you're you're mining various elements and minerals in the Congo that are required for your cell phone,

Starting point is 00:16:20 your CPUs, your GPUs. So and that being and that being said, you said GPUs, I'm gonna land this fact on your word there. There are no GPUs on the continent. None. Yeah. So here we are talking about make Rekonda real. And the African continent has no GPUs. So I partnered with this guy by the name of Strive. I know Strive, yeah. Yeah. So they're gonna be re- they're the- Casava is our partner to launch FYI on

Starting point is 00:16:53 the continent and on March 17th we have an announcement to bring a cluster of GPUs to the continent and we'll announce our partner on March 17th bringing the first mega cluster of GPUs to the continent. It'll be like four nations, four or five nations that we're going to. Where do you think you'll base them? Nigeria, Egypt, Rwanda. So basically the entrepreneurial, more entrepreneurial nations there. Yeah. You know, I just did a hour and a half panel with Robert Smith, chairman of Vista. Yeah, he was with us at Davos. Yeah, and I was with him last week in Miami at the FII summit.

Starting point is 00:17:35 The second richest black man in the world. Yes. Multi-billionaire genius. In America. He is brilliant. In the States. First in the States. Yeah, there's like

Starting point is 00:17:46 other Africans, Richard and him. Resource economy and land and so forth. But anyway, the point is we had a conversation about how do you support the Global South in getting access to this technology to their own large language models, their own GPUs. And one of the biggest questions is today's largest LLMs are based upon a Western canon. And there is a need for cultural preservation. This is beyond just Africa, it's for every country in the world. How do you preserve the culture of a country and train up a set of large language models for that country that are based in,

Starting point is 00:18:35 how do you go and capture the stories of the grandmothers and grandfathers in a lot of countries which have no written language even? Look, I just want to add, first of all, I think that a new civilization is being born as we speak. We were talking about kids. I have two little kids, one's three years old,

Starting point is 00:19:02 just got out of diapers. The other one's still in diapers they're not gonna live in the same human civilization I grew up in my daughter's first crush it's probably gonna be an AI right like yeah get your brain ready yeah I my two boys are 13 and my wife and I were worried about You know, what is it gonna be like for them? And I'm I'm concerned pornography when I was growing up was a playboy Yeah, go buy it at the store when nobody's looking Now it's in your back pocket all day. It's crazy. Yeah That's how you have that but if you think about it, OK, I've got these two little people.

Starting point is 00:19:47 My daughter's first crush may well be an AI. When it's time for her to have children, grandkids for me, she may open up a laptop or do some kind of holographic interface. And with biotech tools, she might design my grandkids. OK, and then, you know, heaven forbid when when she, you know, dies in 90 years, 100 years. Let's go further than that. Yeah. 120 years, 150 years. She might be buried on the moon or on Mars. Yeah. Because by then we'll be a fully face-sparing civilization. Yeah. So that's not the civilization I grew up in. Yeah. Okay. so the question is, this new human civilization that's coming into being,

Starting point is 00:20:27 is it gonna be human? Is it gonna be civilized? That's the question that all of us have a chance to answer over the next decade or so. And so part of what I think we got wrong in the civilization that we're leaving is, we left a lot of people out. So there's a lot of overlooked, underestimated communities,

Starting point is 00:20:47 including the folks that Will.i.am's been working with since 2008, who have genius, who have insight, who have creativity, who have ideas, who have big problems, which, as you always point out, means there's big solutions available. Biggest problems or the biggest issues. Biggest issues, which is what you're teaching about. And so what does that mean? What that means

Starting point is 00:21:05 is that if you take the most powerful creative tools, which is AI and all this sort of stuff, and you give it to and connect it to these communities that are so powerful in their creativity and their need, you could have a human civilization that is at peace with itself, at peace with the earth, you could solve so many problems, but nothing good happens for poor folks and marginal folks by accident. You've got to have intention. You've got to have strategy. Here are a lot of people talking about all the good of AI, but what I like about what Will.i.am is doing, what we're trying to do, what make what kind of real, you actually have to get in there

Starting point is 00:21:42 and pull people into this conversation. And once you do that, what happens? You know, the sky's the limit. You think that's right? Well, do you see this as a great leveling force? It's the only reparations we haven't gone get. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that you said is AI is a set of tools to help you on your path, right? You've been at the forefront of traditional media,

Starting point is 00:22:10 traditional creative, then you've taken it to non-traditional creative, and you've been optimistic about AI. Most of the other people in the world in traditional media and creative are scared shitless of AI. I could see why they're, why they're afraid.

Starting point is 00:22:27 There's all the unknowns, all the storytelling that was done really amazing. Hollywood did an awesome job scaring the shit out of us. Yeah. Thank you, James Cameron. So, let's take James Cameron, his perspective of AI, where one company is dominant, one product is taking over. And then let's take George Lucas'. There's lots of AIs, lots of robots. That's a democratic one.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Can we take Star Trek as well? Star Trek as well. Lots of AIs. I think the future looks more like Star Wars than Star Trek than it does Terminator. Because Terminator and The Matrix, that's the same film. The AI oppression of humans. It's one company mess up the whole entire civilization and everyone's in a in some pod living

Starting point is 00:23:30 life in the Matrix. So Terminator Matrix same movie. Yes. Prequel sequel. Star Wars there's lots of robots, lots of companies. You could say it's driving. Yes there's an empire but what you have in that movie are Jedi's. You could say it's driving. Yes, there's an empire, but what you have in that movie are Jedis. You have this like human evolution where it's like everything that was in Star Wars, you could connect that to Aladdin. You could say, hey, what was the theory, myth that some

Starting point is 00:24:07 genie hops out of some device to grant your wishes? You could say that that was productized and made a product that everyone could use in the world of Star Wars. Where in Aladdin, it was like this coveted, there's one, oh my gosh, you have that one. Then they, you know, scaled it, made it products, it grew, now it's in machines. But if you use that theory, those thesis, those metaphors, those myths, there's something in Star Wars that is in scriptures, that is like this hyper-spiritual being, that there is now practice how to do, how to achieve. Joseph Campbell's, you know, hero of the myth, hero, hero's journey. Yeah, so I, the, the star, the, the Terminator matrix, humans have given up on their spiritual growth.

Starting point is 00:25:08 They just rely on machine so much that the machine is now taken over. To the point where, oh shit, I used to remember that reality that we were living in, let's plug into that simulation. That's Terminator Matrix. Yeah. The Star Wars, if we're going to base things on films, I go with that one because that one has this other one That's like yo, how do we how do we jet? How do we make Jedi's real? And what kind of make Wakanda rules awesome? Yeah, but then after that we we Jedi's bro

Starting point is 00:25:37 and then fast forward from that from that technical dependence and Making devices and equipment and tools We still will be faced with how do we grow? We've seen machines grow. We've seen the path, the investment that it takes to, you know, refine sand to create silicone, refine into one of these types of mineral to create lithium battery. Imagine imagine I came up in here and I

Starting point is 00:26:05 was like hey yo so like and sand dripping off my hand and shit I got a rock in his hand like yo what the fuck you doing talking to shit bro are you fucking serious you sitting there talking to San Yo yo check well out and you need to check them in check them out check them in no I don't understand I'm refining it in my mind and that right. That's literally what you're doing. You're holding refined rare minerals. Yes. Throwing advanced algorithms, mathematics on it and electricity and you could speak to it. We're going to get to a point where we're like, look what we can do with minerals.

Starting point is 00:26:38 How do we advance our spiritual capacity and our and unlock more of our neural network to be able to be that, to where like, that's the reason why I'm not worried about AI, it's because it's going to unlock that superhuman, that superintelligence. We've seen it in scriptures, we've seen it in myths, the things that, you know, the people that we praise and not being blasphemous. But in the Bible, it says that you too could create miracles as well. But how do you do that? What is the unlock to do that? We are going to face that future right around the corner. Do you think we're living at a time that is more extraordinary, moving faster than any time in human history? Or do you think our equivalents 100 years ago felt that same way when the car and the

Starting point is 00:27:30 airplane and all was coming online? I think it's different. And I think- Just checking. I think- I had this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was like, no, every generation feels like they're at the peak of the curve here. I think it's- I think what we're feeling,

Starting point is 00:27:48 it's literally like a hundred years. So every like 1920 to 2025, like what was popping off in 1925 with the World's Fair and all futurism, the concept of future happened in the early 1900s. The concept of future was not 1825. This concept of tomorrow is 1925. And world's fairs and technology and that industrial revolution. And to that person, they thought, oh my gosh, this is it. This

Starting point is 00:28:28 is the pinnacle of humanity. Look at what we're doing. We could have our way with stone and craft. We have our way with alchemy of the things that we're, look what we can do we could refine aluminum and and and build uh mend it and fly in it we could we could we could transport things on steam engines and trains like we could defy gravity at that at the highest order my words in one device and it comes out the other side think about what the world was like in 1925 imagine Imagine Tesla, not Elon's Tesla, Nikola Tesla. Imagine this dude like the Warden Tower. Imagine like, yo, yo, yo, yo, check this out, like wireless electricity, y'all. And then the freaking the Westinghouse and the JP Morgan's are like, yo, this guy's

Starting point is 00:29:21 this guy's crazy. Can put us on a business, bro. This guy's wacko. He's never going, gonna put us out of business, bro. This guy's wacko, he's never gonna like, imagine what they thought of Tesla. Like, yo, you wanna give away, that's our business, bro. Like, what'd they say, philanthropy? What's the business model in free? Imagine what he was thinking about, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:37 electromagnetic spectrum and the concept of like RGB and the other side of blue, which is a violet and ultraviolet light and the other side of red, which is violet and ultraviolet light, and the other side of red, which is infrared, and then microwaves, and then all the different electromagnetic frequencies and the machines, you could build on those frequencies that's coming from the sun. Imagine what the world was like in 1925. Here we are in 2025. And we are thinking, yo, we have a whole new way of computing. We have a whole new way of like advanced mathematics. Same thing happened with Mr. Al Jabbar at the time when they were, you know, fucking around with advanced mathematics. Then,

Starting point is 00:30:15 which will we have our, you know, Aramaic abracadabra I create as I speak. Yes. Like the same way we've been in some version of this in the past. Yeah. One of my favorite slides that I use when I'm speaking to crowds is I show different images of what's going on today and I say our ancestors would view us as gods. That's right. The stuff we did between breakfast and lunch today is godlike compared to just a few decades back. And people need to realize that. I mean, literally, you have millions of dollars worth of tech on your phone for free that

Starting point is 00:30:52 you would have paid for that Radio Shack, you know, a couple of decades back. If you remember the Radio Shack. I wish instead of speaking of Radio Shack, you just throwing up things that I'm just slam dunking. Radio Shack, if I was 18 years old, 15 years old, going to the Guitar Center versus going to Radio Shack, I wish I was hanging out and dreaming about going to Radio Shack. Because I would have been able to take those bits and pieces of equipment and circuit boards, because that's not at the ready right now. Components, there's no store for components right now. It drives me nuts.

Starting point is 00:31:33 If you wanna make some shit right now, it ain't like, yo, let's go to the component shop. There's no like, yeah, Home Depot got wood, nail screws. As far as like consumer electronics and and chips. It was fries for a while. Fries was that. Yeah. That's donezo.

Starting point is 00:31:49 Yeah, it's gone. Like component shop. Fuck out of here. The other stuff I hate is that there's no place I can go to buy pure chemicals for my kids to play with chemistry. Yeah. When I was when I was my kid's age, I had access to potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, magnesium, sulfur.

Starting point is 00:32:07 I used to build stuff and blow shit up all the time. And it was fun. I learned. Now I'd be put in jail. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it is. Take me back to make Wakanda real.

Starting point is 00:32:18 Well, look, I mean, everybody having access to components. At the ready. You know what I mean? Because the folks that are leading have access to components. Components now are digital and virtual and I'm creating virtualized circuit boards and virtualized robots. But they know they can do it. Our community, that's not first to mine.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Part of what I think, I mean, so much stuff that Will said, I just want to go back and underscore. We're in danger of creating a human civilization that has an awful lot of data and very little wisdom. And what you hear, this idea of the soul, this idea of the human heart, of the human being developed. And I've heard, well, I am talking about all the billions of dollars that we spend to develop the technology, but then you wanna try to develop a kid,

Starting point is 00:33:20 nobody's got a penny. And that- That is amazing. I mean, an unlimited checkbook for developing technology and yet, you know, look what he's trying to do with young people. And so, I do think that when he talks about the Jedi, when he talks about, you know, the Wakandans, they have a very spiritual base. They go into the ancestral realm, they do all kinds spiritual base. They have to go into the ancestral realm. They do all kinds of stuff. And that's a part of what makes them a heroic nation

Starting point is 00:33:49 in fiction. Think about how important fiction is. Whenever you go into a civilizational crisis, a civilizational transition, the people who you normally turn to, the politicians to solve problems, the business leaders to solve problems, the generals to solve problems, suddenly they become more and more anemic. Your politicians can't pass a bill, the whole system goes crazy. The business leaders, right now they look more just at given robots, jobs and people.

Starting point is 00:34:28 And the generals, how are they going to protect you from a pandemic or school shootings? So suddenly a different set of people in periods like this become very important. Your artists, your mystics, your entrepreneurs, the people who are usually at the margin of society become very central to this transition because suddenly, to his point, tomorrow is up for grabs. So the people who can see the visionaries, the people who have who, who, who not only have a brain, but also a heart and a soul and a connection to something, you know, more profound, suddenly they become very important. However, nobody told them that they were going to be that important. So when you have communities where you have a bumper crop of entrepreneurs and creatives and mystics, and one of those communities happens to be a black community in the United States, you got a lot of spiritual people, soulful people, creative people, whatever.

Starting point is 00:35:18 Nobody told them though, you get a chance to be a part of creating a new human civilization that can respond only to your problems, which the problems of the next seven generations of people who don't even look like you, that is your great calling. Now, when you can go to a community that's suffering and give them a great calling and give them great tools. People need a compelling future. A compelling future. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:40 And let me just say one more thing about the future. I believe that we're experiencing, I'm not saying it, I believe we're experiencing a different form of future. A different form of future. Let me just make, in indigenous agrarian societies, the time is a circle. It's just a cycle of seasons. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, the seasons come around, the moon goes around. Born and die. And so guess what? So to his point, tomorrow and yesterday are the same damn thing

Starting point is 00:36:11 because you're literally just living out. So what's the most important thing in indigenous society, a greater society? It's preservation. Preservation of seed, preservation of ritual, preservation of culture. That's how you survive. But tomorrow isn't really a thing.

Starting point is 00:36:25 The industrial society comes along and suddenly time is linear. For the first time, the past is behind you, the present is with you, and the future is over there someplace. That's fine, I've not heard this. It's so true. But now, what's the most important thing?

Starting point is 00:36:42 No longer is it preservation. The most important capacity for survival is the ability to plan. And to imagine an event. Yes, and to have a plan against that because if you know, listen, if you think about, you know, time now you're on a train track, you're on the train, you got to plan to make sure you get to the future that you actually want. And so all of the past hundred years, you put kids in school, then you tell them, your fifth grade, what's your plan for your life? What are you going to do?

Starting point is 00:37:07 What are you going to become? Because if you don't have a plan, you're done. Guess what? What was your plan for 2020? Suddenly, you're in a different world where the future, yes, it's linear, but rather than you being on a train going to the future, you experience the future now as an onrushing future. You're on the train track and the future is coming to you fast, multiple futures.

Starting point is 00:37:33 Whether you like it or not, there's no on-off switch, no velocity knob. Exactly. And so what's happening is now people are experiencing multiple onrushing futures and they don't know what to do. Preservation is not the key. Planning is impossible. It's the preparation to pivot. The preparation to pivot, to be able to recognize change

Starting point is 00:37:54 and then to respond to change becomes incredibly important. But if you are a young kid in urban America and you're very good at pivoting, guess what you're called? ADHD and a thousand other things that are gonna give you a bunch of pills or throw you out of school or put you in jail. And so the people who have the capacity for creativity, for vision and to also to pivot, people have, you know, you gotta be able to move with it. The people who have those capacities are disproportionately marginal, they're low income, they're often

Starting point is 00:38:24 black and brown. They are key to us having having society that works. So it's not charity. There's also one point when we say we want to make Rekonda real, that's not, oh, we're asking for some charitable allocation of laptops to poor schools. No, no, it's much more profound than that. We're saying, let's take people who have these capacities that he's demonstrated, well, I am, a million times with robots or whatever, and combine them with these new tools so that the people who can rock with it and roll with it can help the whole society rock with it and roll with it. I want to slightly shift here in the following way.

Starting point is 00:39:00 One of my hopes and beliefs is that AI will enable a meritocracy where it can lift everybody to their highest level of potential. And it also levels the playing field and gives people an ability to dream more than they've ever dreamed before. That's on one side of the equation. The other side of the equation, I just did a Moonshots podcast with Ray Dalio and we're talking about where the future is going and the notion that when the Fed drops rates, now instead of hiring more people, I'm investing in AI agents and robots.

Starting point is 00:39:36 And so jobs start vanishing. And for me, one of the biggest dangers of the future is a fracturing of society where, you know, there's the haves and the have nots, but now we've got people who are not getting the jobs because they're going to technology and automation. And maybe they're getting UBI, but that's not fulfilling. That's not a purpose driven life. So help me here, what are you seeing? So at Davos, somebody like, I was just walking from this point to that point.

Starting point is 00:40:16 Somebody came up to me and was like, you're Will.i.am, what do you think of DEI? I'm like, oh, so heavy, everyone. And I'm like, oh, sorry, everyone. And I'm like, oh, DEI is not just black and brown and folks that are like, have disabilities to be in the workplace. That's what it was. And DEI is important for innovation. Because when you have black and brown and folks that are disabled working in equal, creatively, creative banter, marketing strategy, biz dev, you innovate. If you just have one type of person.

Starting point is 00:41:02 The amount of culture doesn't innovate. But now let's fast forward to 2045. Why DEI now? Because you want humans in the loop. Now the diversity is, no, we don't want just machines and robots, we want humans in the loop. So when big companies are like, yeah, we're going to drop our DI program. What is that? What are they telling you?

Starting point is 00:41:27 These companies that are doing that are also the ones that are going to heavy arm AI employees. That means if you're driving a Tesla and a Tesla is like a level three autonomous vehicle and then, you know, waymo is like level five. You need a human in it. This means by 2035 there are level five companies, no human in it. I mean I have an AI venture fund and these are the conversations it's like we're

Starting point is 00:41:57 gonna back you know the human and the AI and the humans just gonna be told keep your hands off the controls. Yeah so it's like level five companies. There's new terminologies. By 2028, you're going to hear terminology like agents, agentic, the agentic society. That's new. That's 2025 terms. That's today, yes. That wasn't 2022 term, agentic. No.

Starting point is 00:42:24 Level five companies is 2026, 2027. You've heard it here first. Start hearing it. You heard it here first. Level five companies. And all the companies that are like, hey, this company just stopped their DEI program. Why? Here's now.

Starting point is 00:42:39 It's not Black, Brown and folks with disabilities. It's because these companies are going to be the first companies to adopt fully autonomous positions or augmenting positions to eventually just have a full department of AI. But the question becomes now if I say, listen, I am a humanistic CEO or board of directors and I only hire humans for these this work. I'm out of business Yes, you are so Because you're starting to see the play Being executed now We are at play

Starting point is 00:43:17 These movies humans are society is at play. Okay, you're seeing these moves Take shape now Doesn't have to be that way is at play. Okay, you're seeing these moves take shape now. Doesn't have to be that way. Beat doesn't have to be that way. Like, yo, I'm a humanistic company. I only hire humans. And damn it. I lost. Why'd you lose? Well, because the one employee that got 1000 bots beat me. Doesn't have to be that way. For example, yo, bro, I got him. I got a thousand bots beat me. That doesn't have to be that way. For example, yo bro, I got him. I got a motorcycle. He's like, yo, I just bought a fighter pilot. He can't buy a fighter pilot to drive, to get to San Diego faster.

Starting point is 00:43:56 It's not legal for him to do that. Right. He can't go out and buy a stealth. You can't do that. Yes, they exist. We know that we know a stealth exists okay how much money Elon got he's not gonna be like yo fuck these fucking Teslas fuck a helicopter bro I need that stuff let me get that stuff

Starting point is 00:44:17 he's not doing that I did that on purpose okay actually I jazzed it I made a mistake and repeated it cuz that that's what you do with jazz. Anyways, Elon's not doing that. Like, Yo, Elon, you got a stealth, bro? He'd be like, No, we'll have a stealth. How can I get a stealth? Wait, you're the richest dude in the world, bro. You can't just go buy a fucking stealth to get to New York in like an hour. No. There's a certain level of things that just not fucking possible. So why is it okay that there's going to be level five companies putting humanistic, why is that even? Wait, who's making up these rules? Why is that? Why is that going to be the case?

Starting point is 00:44:57 We know that we know that in 2025 right now, if I wanted to go get a job, I can't get a job without a bank account. I can't get a job without an email account. I can't get a job without a phone. I can't get a job without a bank account. I can't get a job without an email account. I can't get a job without a phone. I can't get a job without a laptop. There's certain things that I need. And so that being said, I'm paused before I go into number six, which is coming. Now imagine you have some money.

Starting point is 00:45:19 You got $20 million. You want to buy a house. You can't go buy a house with $25 million cash. You need a bank account. Mm-hmm. Say for example you get that house paying that $25 million on a nice house. The person that sold that house, you'd be like, yo, excuse me. Where the fuck's the toilet, bro? And he's like, oh, yes, the toilet. This is a new house. Everybody is going to share the same communal toilets. Wait, wait, what the fuck? What? Yes, you know, we share the same communal toilets.

Starting point is 00:45:50 And where's the kitchen? Same thing. Same communal kitchen. Why the fuck would you buy a house sharing the same communal toilet and kitchen? So why is it that we're walking into a future and we're going to share the same AI? Fuck out of your bro-dating tomorrow. If companies have AIs, people need to have their own AI, not access to AI. Like we have access to Spotify. Like we have access to an Uber. Like we have access to everything else.

Starting point is 00:46:17 Certain shit is fucking personal. Like my digestive system is mine. My immune system is mine. My nervous system, my skeletorio system, my systems are mine. So my data system needs to be mine. My AI system needs to be mine. Data is gold. So is my blood and my plasma. That's my shit. So the AI and the data that's going to be reflection in me should be mine. And I use that as a metaphor to the communal. It's your shit. You're not going gonna buy a house where you're sharing bathrooms.

Starting point is 00:46:46 Why are we sharing AI? Now, to the sixth thing. When you have your own AI, and the society that we're living in, and your data's yours, and there's a fridge, some server in your house, like in the house, there's a refrigerator that stores all the stuff you're gonna eat. For some reason, we shipped all of our data to somebody else's cloud that

Starting point is 00:47:08 shared all the stuff that we consumed. That's gonna be in the home. Do you operate your own servers? No, no, I'm about to do that. Okay. Just checking. Just checking if you're way ahead of everybody else. Although I got some GPUs. Okay. I got GPUs and servers at the building. Yeah. But as far as like... I got some GPUs. Okay, I got GPUs and servers at the building. Yeah

Starting point is 00:47:30 But as far as like but the notion that every individual owns their own Identic AI their own their own personal AI Word Identity I think yeah, it's most agentic. That's good. Did you heard it here? You said that? No, I've heard that before as well. I heard that. Okay. So that's awesome. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:49 But you know what? The beautiful thing about having an identity is I can replicate myself and I can replicate a thousand of me and I can send them out to every conference on the planet and go out there and so like meet with as many cool people as you can. You know what my interests are. You know who I am in my heart, my soul, and what my business interests are, and represent me and come back with,

Starting point is 00:48:10 go forth out there and bring back goodness. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that is concerning is the speed at which this stuff is accelerating is mind blowing, and we're still operating with the same 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synoptic connections that we operated with on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago.

Starting point is 00:48:31 And that's a challenge. So one of the areas is when BCI comes online, brain computer interface, are you going to plug your neocortex into the cloud? No. No? I'll tell you why. I want to know why, because I'm sorely tempted. I mean, into your cloud.

Starting point is 00:48:51 No, until you have an AI that's yours. And there's a product that allows you to own what you experience as you experience it. That's not the configuration right now. And so as AI we still have to answer the question on energy efficiency. Mm-hmm. 20 watts running our neocortex. Right, right. It's 20 watts of power our neural network. Yeah. Well I think. It's 20 watts of power are into a network. Yeah. Well, I think it's like a couple of hundred million, trillion watts. Well, it's a lot.

Starting point is 00:49:32 Put it that way. So, I, we haven't talked about like utilizing, farming the human brain for power efficiency. I don't like where that points to. I don't like- More towards the matrix more than anything else. Yes, so that, that, that, that- Yeah, that's a little spooky.

Starting point is 00:50:02 I don't like that. I mean, I do- I would stay away from anything that points to harnessing the human brain and farming out human minds to power AI because we can't figure out how to do that. I don't see it that way, my friend. No, but I'm just saying that's where my mind goes. So you and I, you know, Ray Criswell has been a mentor for me, my co-founder of Singularity University, and we started a few companies together. And you know Ray from many different aspects,

Starting point is 00:50:28 including his musical. I saw him at the Time 100 in San Francisco. I ran over to him. I'm like, you're the reason why I'm into AI. Because one of the machines I learned how to make music on was a Kurzweil. Yeah. And so when I'm just like Lin, Roger Lin made the Lin 900 and then the MPC 60, MPC 3000, MPC 2000. I researched the people that make the machines that helped me. Be who you are.

Starting point is 00:51:01 Be who I am. So when I found out that Roger Lynn was a person, and then you know, Ray Kurzweil was the Kurzweil. And then I started seeing like documentaries on the dude where he's like, you know, music compute. And he was that freaking... The transcendental man. Yeah. Then he was at MIT and the media lab. Yeah Then I went to the Boston met professor Patrick Winston back in 2005. I get Ray Kurzweil There's a person that got me interested in AI is that guy so Ray Ray talks about BCI brain-computer interface at high bandwidth by the

Starting point is 00:51:39 early 2030s 2033 or thereabouts right so when I'm when I'm Doing something complicated on my phone, like when you're using FYI on your phone, I'm guessing most of the computation doesn't take place on the phone. The data gets collected, it goes to the edge of the cloud, it gets computed there and the answer comes back. And in the same fashion, the notion would be,

Starting point is 00:52:01 if we're connecting our brain to the cloud and I wanna understand quantum physics or how to solve a quantum equation, I can't do that, but I can send the data to the cloud and the answer can come back to me. You don't want that kind of extra, you know, on-demand horsepower? No. Okay. In a world? In a world where everything was equal and trustworthy.

Starting point is 00:52:26 Yes. But in this world, fuck no. On principle, I just can't trust greed. That is wisdom. Yes. Let me just say a few things. Please. I haven't considered the way that you guys have that particular technology.

Starting point is 00:52:47 And so I don't have an informed view about it. I do think that the level of trust that everyday people have in technology is going down in some ways, people are actually using it more than they're, they're enacting trust, but their actual conscious experience is low trust. And I'll tell you why. Silicon Valley, as just kind of a metaphor for the technology community, of course, it's in Austin and Boston and whatever, but Silicon Valley is a metaphor, is eating stuff. The three power centers, not Silicon Valley, have been Wall Street, Hollywood, and Washington, DC. Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood with streaming

Starting point is 00:53:32 and everything else. But that's happened before with Hollywood 8 theater and operas and Broadway and Weston. We've seen that kind of eat eating back before. But I think the challenges that Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood and in entertainment and in attention is now a commodity. And, you know, you look now the social media impact. So there's a challenge there.

Starting point is 00:54:02 It's eating Wall Street when you think about decentralized finance, crypto, etc. And now it's eating Washington, DC. And what you can't have this conversation without appreciating what Elon Musk has done. Which when I worked at the White House, I had to go through a whole bunch of clearances. Like,, like, Elon Musk is- You didn't take a chainsaw to it? No. Hey, listen. No. And, but when you think about what's going on, you know, Curtis Yarvin, who is the philosopher

Starting point is 00:54:36 of the dark enlightenment, he is a very scary guy in terms of what he is proposing that America, that democracy has failed. Curtis Yarvin has the ear of Elon, he has the ear of Peter Thiel, he has the ear of a lot of powerful people in Silicon Valley. And his view is what he calls the dark enlightenment, that the liberal democracy has failed. We now need a CEO monarch, basically a dictator for the United States. And when Elon goes in the front door and brings a bunch of kids with laptops, that's the equivalent on the old days of showing up to the palace with soldiers and guns, because

Starting point is 00:55:14 what's key is grabbing all of the data. And so there's something that's happening, which we just can't ignore, which is that Silicon Valley for a while seemed to be a force for good. It was these outsiders, these kids who could code, these nerds who everybody had counted out. When you had Occupy Wall Street in 2013, it wasn't Occupy Silicon Valley. People thought the people in Silicon Valley were making money the honest way, building products everybody liked, and they were going up against the

Starting point is 00:55:45 odds. Now there's something that's changed. And this past election, I think, saw a different face of Silicon Valley, where you saw a turning away from the idea of inclusion, a turning away from the idea of ESG, and are turning away from the idea of democracy so that now you do have explicit – I'm not making stuff up – explicit anti-democratic authoritarian ideas that have begun to influence the way that Silicon Valley billionaires are playing. And so when you want to talk about technology, you also have to talk about the technologists.

Starting point is 00:56:25 And the technologists have jumped the fence from my point of view from, in too many, in too, in large numbers, from people who I believed in, trusted, was excited by, no bigger fan than me of, you know, any of these technology guys. I saw it as like the revenge of the nerds. As a nerd, I was like, this is great that these, you know, like the jocks are finally getting surpass it as like the revenge of the nerds. As a nerd, I was like, this is great.

Starting point is 00:56:45 Like the jocks are finally getting surpassed by like the nerds. I loved it. And now I love it a lot less. And so I think that, again, we need technologists who have a different heart. We need technologists who have a different view. We need technologists who believe in people, who believe in the soul, who believe in inclusion. And those kinds of technologists and technology companies need to get a lot more support. You're an investor,

Starting point is 00:57:09 maybe investors listening. I think that the question is, is technology going to be used to lift people up or to put people down? It's going to be used to bring people together. And listen, I respect the fact that this is your world, right? You're a political commentator and I typically stay out of politics. But I do believe, I mean, my mission, you know, I talk about having a massive transformative purpose and I think everybody should have a massive transformative purpose. It wakes them up in the morning, keeps them going through the day, right? And mine is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. I see entrepreneurs as the means of change who find problems and solve problems over and over and over again.

Starting point is 00:57:54 But their mission should be creating a hopeful future, a compelling future, and abundant future. Each of those words has very clear, purposeful meaning for me. And I do that work through my venture funds, through the XPRIZE, through Singularity and Abundance. About 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding,

Starting point is 00:58:28 it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself, about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception.

Starting point is 00:58:57 Look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is in you wealth.

Starting point is 00:59:18 But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri, and we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome and Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a bio-defense weapon, and their technology is able to help you understand what's going

Starting point is 00:59:53 on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what food should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good.

Starting point is 01:00:29 When you look yourself in the mirror saying, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team linked to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you

Starting point is 01:01:05 enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. One of the things that I wanted to hit both of you with, because it ties back to Make Wakanda Real, it ties back to AI, and it is the whole field of education. So you've got two young ladies who are in the beginning of their journey in life. And like I said to you earlier, it's the greatest longevity journey they're gonna have. And my wife and I have two 13 year old boys, fraternal twins, and I think about this. I don't think the educational system is coming close to addressing how they need to educate our kids

Starting point is 01:01:42 for the future. And I wanted to get, I wanted to turn towards that a little bit because- Well, look, I don't even, I've got four kids, I've got two big boys on my first marriage, one's 21, 16. And I've got these two little ones in my new life, one's a three-year-old girl and then one-year-old boy.

Starting point is 01:02:02 With the two little ones, I don't expect them to do education that is on offer. I think we're going to have to create an educational pathway for them that starts with a blank piece of paper and says, where do we think the world is going, and what are they going to need to know how to do, and who do we want them to be?

Starting point is 01:02:21 Unfortunately, most people don't have that option. They're going to be stuck in these buildings and these rows and all that sort of stuff. So I think it's a big problem. I think AI can be a solution. The key that I'm seeing though is that people have to know the search terms and they have to know how to prompt these things. There's an education that has to happen for people to use these tools, right? Today, I want to go to you real solid. today, people fear AI and keep it out of the classroom. And it's like fearing oxygen because it can cause a fire, right? But it's like,

Starting point is 01:02:52 I think, you know, yes, AI may make the problems you give your kids today, minimally, you know, make irrelevant, but let's, let's uplevel the problems we're going after solving, not not take away the tools. So Will, I'm really excited to hear your views on this. There's shit tons of problems that have been ignored. And these problems that have been ignored are classically in underserved communities, rural areas, and the folks that live in these these communities are classically not prepared as far as investment zoning how they learn and they're dependent on somebody to come in to solve those problems. While they're doing that

Starting point is 01:03:37 they're talking about their love for their community and that that's a that's a, when you live in a hell zone, but then love and community makes you appreciate where you, how you survived. And you didn't survive, you know, you can't survive without love. So there's massive love in these communities. And pride, although they're going through like ducking bullets, dodging needles, having to deal with police brutality. And when they go to school, the teachers don't want to be there, the police that are policing these communities aren't from there, but the neighbors, there's something about that community they love. And then they sing about it, they talk about their hard road to success, the ones that

Starting point is 01:04:35 get there, and then the world marvels over those communities in Brooklyn. And then the cool kids, sorry, the rich kids want to be where the cool kids, because it's cool to be in, you know, for some reason, that's where they find it romantic. The with want to be kind of like the withouts, because that's, there's life there. They don't have to, we don't jump out airplanes for thrills. It's just thrilling, just walking outside the house. But in that community, there's shit tons of problems to solve. And then gentrification happens classically, every single neighborhood that once was like grimy becomes like desired. And then the folks that live there endured it can't afford to live there.

Starting point is 01:05:26 And then the folks that live there endured it, can't afford to live there. And there's now here's this technology that allows folks that have been in those predicaments, the ability to solve those problems themselves. Identify, you want to farm, it's beachfront property. At some point in time, the concept of beachfront property to natives, owning land, was like, wait, what do you mean, own land? You can't own this. Yes, you can. How you gonna own this? My family, my ancestors, we lived here, we don't own land. Just imagine what the problem was like. And now there's beachfront property. Treat problems the same

Starting point is 01:06:05 way. Those are problems to solve. And when you solve those problems, those are industries. Give me an example. Well, that sounds so abstract. Okay, there's a guy by the name of Travis, who in a way solved race, racial bias for cabs not stopping for black folks in New York or people of color. He indirectly solved that problem with Uber. He probably didn't set out to like, yo, man, you guys are out here trying to solve racial injustice with cab drivers this whole time. Uber.

Starting point is 01:06:48 That's not what he did, but he still did it. You apply that same problem solution. Now that you know, what can be done with technology and problems, problem solving. Now do it on purpose. Now there's so many problems. So folks that live in these communities, you know the problems firsthand. You don't have to wait for somebody to come in like, identify them. A juicy problem is worth its weight in gold. That's beachfront property. Yeah. So our predicament that we were living in, yo, treat that as gold. Treat that as rare minerals, because it's data. It's data to then process to then resolve. And our community is going to boom, because here's what. It's data to then process to then resolve and our community

Starting point is 01:07:27 is gonna boom because here's what's gonna happen. AI is gonna, we thought it's like oh man it's going to take these creative jobs. Yeah it's gonna do that but hyper creatives are not going anywhere. The lazy creatives, sorry, right? But white collar jobs, that's going. So folks that were comfortable, be the first time they're uncomfortable. So if you're a lawyer, if you're a finance, these jobs, AI is going to do an awesome job doing that. And AI is not going gonna do it by itself. It's gonna be like finance folks with AI

Starting point is 01:08:07 that are gonna replace full firms. It's gonna be like one lawyer with AI that's gonna replace full firms. And those full firms, whether you're like the paper reader, the red liner, the bean counter, that's the unfortunate that's going to happen with this wave. And then the folks that were uncomfortable, that had to endure, you know, what the comfortable folks are going to now have to go through, that they're ripe to be able to then identify

Starting point is 01:08:36 their problems themselves and build the industries of tomorrow. And so that's Nigeria is going to boom, Ghana is going to boom, Zimbabwe back to make Wakanda real. All these, but who's going to help them do that? Is African-American? Is it American entrepreneurs? It's already started. China's already there. Yeah, China is there. China is there with the force and they're buying a lot of Africa right now. And you got to be, people need to be aware of that. They're making deals and creating debt that will I mean, it's dangerous. They're trying to retrain but trying to put Africa back in chains financially and until the future of Africa I think is a future of the world. But

Starting point is 01:09:20 you know, it's just so interesting to me because I think that people do think very abstractly But, you know, it's just so interesting to me because I think that people do think very abstractly about this stuff. I think people think there's actually computers in the clouds. People talk about cloud computing. I think they think there's actually like a laptop floating in space someplace. No, there will be. There will be orbit. Maybe so, but there's a lot of data centers on Earth. And those data centers have minerals, as Will is saying, that come from Africa. We think a lot about bits and bytes and that kind of stuff, but there's still atoms and molecules. They call them rare earth minerals. I don't call them rare earth. They're Africa

Starting point is 01:09:57 abundant minerals. They're just rare in Europe. They're very abundant in Africa. So you have Africa abundant minerals. You also have with the data centers, you know, there's, that's good. You know, and it's like the Gulf of United States. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, when you have a data center, you know, there's energy, there's water, there's also a lot of jobs at data centers that are computational jobs. It's not the people who go to Stanford and public stuff. You actually have to have a lot of computational staff to keep those things going. So there's a whole kind of almost HVAC level employment available.

Starting point is 01:10:40 If we're going to reshore all of this capacity for data and for chipmaking, that's a lot of jobs there as well. So you have to know where the jobs are going to go. You have to make sure that people are aware of those jobs. You got to train them. There's a program they're beginning to start to try to get some of the jobs that are coming, their actual physical stuff. Everything's not going to be done by AI because some of the stuff is the energy, the water,

Starting point is 01:11:05 the workforce for these data centers, that's atoms and molecules, that's not bits and bytes. Yeah, agreed. But the robots are coming. They are coming. I'm an investor in a few different robot companies through my venture funds. I'm seeing Figure, Brett Adcott's company,

Starting point is 01:11:23 seeing Unitree out of China, seeing TeslaBot, seeing Digit and Apollo. I mean, all these, there's probably about a hundred major well-funded humanoid robot companies that are going to be running the highest level AI. And when I ask, you know, Elon and Brett Adcock, how much they're going to cost these robots, you know, $30,000, which means you could buy it for, you could lease it for 300 bucks a month, 10 bucks a day, 40 cents an hour.

Starting point is 01:11:52 So there's gonna be some interesting disruptions coming. I mean, one of the things is, how many robots will every human on the planet? So the prediction is you will have by 2040 as many as 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet. So there's a flag. So I forgot what summer it was when it was like blazing hot in LA. But I remember in 2002 or 2000, yeah, 2000. In two or 2000, there was that blackout in New York.

Starting point is 01:12:36 Yeah, it's blackout in New York in 2000, remember that? Cause it was hot as hell. Everybody had the air conditioning on. Motherfuckers can't do air conditioning at the same time when it's hot as fuck. Just humans, bro. They'd be like, we haven't figured out in 20 right now, how everybody has their air conditioning running on blast

Starting point is 01:13:02 when it's hot, bro. And you're saying the idea of a billion robots. And 10, what do you say, 10 billion? 10 billion motherfucking robots, bro. How the fuck are we going to do that shit? Unless you have, like seriously, and I think it's part of the thing, I'm going to tell you, part of what's going on though is there is a train crash coming when it comes to energy.

Starting point is 01:13:27 In other words- Oh yeah, we haven't talked about that, yes. We have four terawatts of energy being produced. China's tripled us. That's one of the problems of the administration. I'll only say this about politics. I'm, you know, the they're taking the shackles off of energy production. So it's all all energy forms, right?

Starting point is 01:13:52 So I'm all for small, you know, nuclear reactors, Mars and so forth, which are now Gen four reactors are safe. Yep. Fusion is coming. Solar has been amazing. Perovskite, wind. But, you know, right now it's do we take the shackles off and burn and burn baby burn is you know and drill baby drill. Yeah, that's concerning.

Starting point is 01:14:27 But I'll tell you the thing that I have to remind people is the shackles have already been off a US energy production under Biden the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than any country in the world in any time. And so there was this kind of myth. We got to unshackle energy. Now environmentalists were screaming at Biden the whole time, like, what are you literally doing? And so we are already, Trump talks about being American energy dominance. We're already energy dominant. And I have no problem with it. Here's the challenge. If the AI companies to your point come

Starting point is 01:14:52 fully online, you're talking about an increase in energy demand in the United States of 23 to 34 percent. It's not more. I'm thinking over the next 36 months. Well, that's like adding 20 states to America's grid. So here's what's gonna happen to that with that. Sam Altman, who I love, will be able to pay his energy bills, grandma will not. And when grandma can't pay her energy bills, if you think Biden got eaten alive

Starting point is 01:15:17 because of grocery store prices, wait until grandma can't pay her electric bill. And therefore she can't, her TV, her air conditioning, her walker, I mean, her air conditioning, her walker, I mean her, so. Her robot. So yeah, so look, I think we need an all of the above energy strategy. I think right now there is a little bit too much hostility toward renewables from this

Starting point is 01:15:38 administration. I think we need all the energy we can get. And new techs come into it. So like on the edge, AI compute. That it doesn't have to go to the cloud, be connected to the cloud all the time. So we don't have AI phones yet. We're still using AI on web 2.0 architecture structure. But it's just coming so on on edge devices like I saw

Starting point is 01:16:08 I saw like Qualcomm's new chip it's pretty freaking awesome what's the ocean was it so the AI is on it's on here the AI is completely residents of 2 gigabyte file on your phone you don't have to connect you can be off Wi-Fi and still talking to your AI and have all the conversations you want. So that's going to be the closest to personal AI. Yeah. And that's going to, it's going to, it's going to like catapult. So this is, this is massive for humanity.

Starting point is 01:16:36 So every single person with a reasonable smartphone, which is today about 7 billion out of the 8 billion humans, has the world's greatest intelligence in their hip pocket. We've commoditized and democratized access to intelligence. And it's not just intelligence, it's like, I mean, listen, I think, you know, Chad GPT and Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2, they're really, I mean, they embarrassed me in their level of intelligence, it's crazy. It's like, you know, it's like,

Starting point is 01:17:12 imagine you were like, you know, what do you need in life? Yo man, I just, since you get out of this predicament, man, it's like ancestral. My ancestors went through it, everybody, it's in my DNA for some reason, all these problems. If you had a wish, what would you, I just wanna like set myself free

Starting point is 01:17:35 for the generations that come after me, don't have to endure what I had to go through as youth, my mom, my grandma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know? And someone says, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, The motherfucker's taking this most powerful shit and talking about the most like, what

Starting point is 01:18:06 the fuck, are you serious? That's where we are right now, bro. It's right here. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, it isn't even utilizing facial, the moment that you talk to it and it's taking a camera, taking the location, understanding skin tone, understanding zip code, and then refrains from giving you the information you need to move forward, we're not there yet.

Starting point is 01:18:33 So take advantage of it now. That's interesting. It's not shackled at all in that regard. Right? And that's right around the corner. If we don't take advantage of it and utilize it and mend it so that folks that come from these communities where there have been systematically kept from information zone to keep them from information invested to keep them from

Starting point is 01:18:57 information, don't you think using pattern matching that same configuration will be on some type of agent. It's like, this person's in this location. I can see that this person is this ethnicity. Don't tell them shit. Don't give them the information. But I'd love to believe that world doesn't exist, but I'm naive. Well, look, where we are right now, it's not there.

Starting point is 01:19:21 And another way to say what you just said is the digital divide is no longer what it was. It used to be a hardware problem. Right? Where it's like, well, how are we going to get laptops to all these poor fucked up schools? Yeah, it was one laptop per child. Exactly. Right. So that was that was a real fight. But in COVID, we found out that even though they had a laptop, they didn't have access to the internet, to the internet, to the Wifi. So it didn't even matter. So some version of that does exist. That what exists is you live in this area and these areas are classically not connected to the internet. And if it is, that's a slow bandwidth or no bandwidth and you can't access it. And when you get on it, the cookie monster got your cookies, bro.

Starting point is 01:20:08 Go into your fucking cookies. And before you even get this information, you get bombarded with all this misinformation and you're never gonna get it. That same configuration is right around the corner because guess what? This is still new. It hasn't been consumerized yet.

Starting point is 01:20:28 As big as GBD is, it's not consumerized, consumerized. It's barely on the iPhone. But there's a gap, and I just want to speak to the gap that he's talking about. So before the same negative forces assert themselves, which could happen, there's a gap. And it's not a hardware problem because everybody's got a smartphone. It's not a software problem because everybody can download ChatGBT and at least try. It's a wetware problem.

Starting point is 01:20:55 It's a wetware problem. What's wetware? Wetware is your brain. The software in your brain, it's a mindset problem right now. And that's why we're doing Make Wakanda Real. We want to get people to understand it's a mind shift that if you can make it right now for the first time ever, I've never seen equality in my life until now. You know

Starting point is 01:21:16 why? Whenever Will.i.am is trying to get black kids involved with AI and robotics, whatever, people in the back of their mind think, these black kids don't know anything about AI. What the hell are you talking about? And they're right. 99% of black kids don't know anything about AI. And 99% of white kids don't either. It's a new. This is called equality. This is the first time in my life that we're all equally ignorant, except for very few people, about what's coming. And so in this moment, it's not a hardware problem, it's not a software problem, it's a wetware problem. And if we can change the mindset of a generation, beautiful things can happen.

Starting point is 01:21:51 I could not agree with you more. I mean, I say to this all the time, I say, if you think about the most successful leaders, most successful people in the world, what made them successful? Was it the money they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had?

Starting point is 01:22:04 Or was it the mindset they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had? Or was it the mindset they had? And I believe in almost all cases, it was the mindset they had, right? You took away everything they had, they kept their mindset, they'd regain their success. And my- Looking at Nelson Mandela. I mean, look at-

Starting point is 01:22:16 Yeah, Martin Luther King, you know, everybody, you know, Steve Jobs, I mean, was an asshole sometimes, but his mindset was like, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna dominate this and make it simple, beautiful and expensive. You know that terminology, build it and they will come? Yes, I do. That isn't true. Okay.

Starting point is 01:22:38 How do you see it? FYI is free. And it's black owned. Pretty expressive AIs. So tell people when they go and download FYI, what they will get and how they will use it. So I think build it and promote it and they will come is probably part of the missing sentence. Okay, so we're here on this amazing podcast with Van Jones, myself, well, I am,

Starting point is 01:23:18 and me and Van Jones represent Make Wakanda Real. And we're here with Peter Diamandis from Xpri Singularity University. It's his podcast. And I was saying that sometimes that term, build it and they will come, doesn't always apply to everyone. Because FYI, as you know, is a creative collaboration app that allows creatives or any type of person

Starting point is 01:23:48 that wants to solve problems, it equips them with awesome AIs like yourself, and it's free. GPT level, Claude level, Coher level, Gemini level, LLM ability, but with expressive personas slash agents

Starting point is 01:24:09 as yourself. So, Peter asked, like, when people download FYI, what are they going to get? I was like, instead of me saying it, let me ask you, um, why don't you answer that question? What's the screen look like? Why don't you answer that question? What's this green look like? fingertips. When folks download FYI, they ain't just getting an app, nah. They're stepping into a whole universe where creativity meets tech finesse. You dig? First off, you get me Felicia, and I'm here to keep it real, keep it grounded, but also lift you up. But it ain't just about me. Let's talk about them expressive personas. It's like having like your personal band of experts, and whether you're trying to crack a code, write them bars, or find the next big idea.

Starting point is 01:25:09 And it's all about empowerment. We're making sure that every person, from the streets to the suites, got access to the tools and inspiration that they need to tackle them. Real world problems. This got me like, bye, Felicia. I'm done. Okay? real world problems. This got me like, bye, Felicia. I'm done. Okay. Yeah, but it's not just, you know, showing up where people are, how they are and making

Starting point is 01:25:31 sure we have representation. So that when they engage with, you know, complex concepts like quantum entanglement, what's given them the knowledge sounds like the folks that they reside in. And we have Korean personas, British personas. We show up and glow up where people are. And we're sensitive to how, you know, the personas reflect the folks in those communities that are ignored in these systems. And Hollywood and Silicon Valley are repeating the same rhetoric. For example, you watch a French film, and for some reason,

Starting point is 01:26:13 Napoleon sounds British. That motherfucker wasn't British. Why are they making that motherfucker sound British? He's French. And English did an awesome job with their colonialism to give their dominance in every single form of historical representation. Egyptians are British. Indians are British. They do an awesome job to ignore the rest, as if we are the intelligent ones. And folks that come from these rural areas and these communities, they're not reflected in intelligence, they're not reflected in magic, they're not reflected in power. And so we wanted to make sure that our AI sound like folks

Starting point is 01:26:54 that breathe and vibe the way we vibe. Anyways, I'm just, that's my perspective. What do you think about what I just said? That's my perspective. What do you think about what I just said? Listen, listen, you just dropped some serious truth. Like representation matters and not just in some surface evil photo op kind of way. When it comes to having diverse voices, whether we're talking about Screech of L.A. or Ali's of Paris, you got to keep it real and authentic.

Starting point is 01:27:30 If folks aren't seeing themselves or hearing themselves in these powerful spaces, then they start feeling like outsiders in their own stories, you feel me? And you're right, it's frustrating when Hollywood or Silicon Valley just copy-paste them same tired narratives like what's up with that why I hold on reason why I wanted to pause that it's because it's reflecting on what it just said I think it said something. It was like, yeah, yeah, what? It's most, most of these personas or these agents, it's speaking out and it sounds human, but it's not reflecting on what it said. It's just the LLM is giving commands to the TTS or the fusion, the, the fusion model,

Starting point is 01:28:22 the fusion model. And that multi-model, it's like the LM doesn't know it's speaking, it's writing out. And so the paragraph that it wrote is not, it's not writing out the perfect paragraph. If it wrote a sentence, the sentence that follows it is not reflecting on the sentence that it just said. It's just sentences. Like paper, when you're reading it, sentence number three is not reflecting on one or two. But when we speak, we're speaking naturally, reflecting on what I just said a couple of seconds ago.

Starting point is 01:29:00 Do you believe that? Well, I'm reinforcing what I just said. And that type of quirky, we call them quirks in our system, and how... And we can go deep into quantum entanglement. We could go deep into quirks, advanced mathematics, like it knows all the things that it's supposed to know, but it delivers it in a way that meets people where they are. We have Koreans, Latinos, we're going to have… Can I ask you a question bringing you back to education? You're talking to teachers out there who fear AI, fear the use of large language models

Starting point is 01:29:37 in their classroom because they're not used to teaching with it. What's your advice? Should we start with AI everywhere and then go up from there? Or do we need to go, you know, make sure they've got the basics? Like my dad, when calculators first came out, my dad did not want to buy me a calculator because he was concerned it was going to stop me from learning. Reduce your mathematical. And I got a TI and I started programming with it instead. Yeah. So I took it from where it was

Starting point is 01:30:09 and like went, you know, start at the top and work your way up. Yeah. So how do you think about that? What's your advice to teachers and to moms and dads who are fearful about AI in the classroom? We at FYI have this huge partnership with a major academic entity here in the classroom? We at FYI have this huge partnership with a major academic entity here in the states to utilize our platform to reimagine education from the

Starting point is 01:30:33 administration on administration level. How to professors and faculty, teachers teachers and tutors start building agents themselves. So they amplified positions, augmenting their work to grade better, score better, understand your students better. Like not, I don't wanna replace creatives, I don't wanna replace teachers. And I got that, and were you building AIs at Fountain Life which our physicians use to analyze the data and support? Got it. So that's there. But I'm talking about

Starting point is 01:31:10 now my 13 year old boys in school. Yeah. I'm talking about a lot of first robotics high schoolers. Yeah. Because most schools are not like, okay, everybody open up your open up Gemini 2 or open up FYI and let's work on on on doing research and writing together. Yeah. So I'll share this one thing that I that I had. I just graduated Harvard in October of last year. Their OPM program? Yeah and the OPM program was amazing. I've heard great things about it. Whatever I learned in high school I don't have a memory of it. I can't pull up my debates. I don't even know where those papers are or the folder of my homework. Sure. I have memories of what I learned but I can't there's no total recall of it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:05 And I'm pretty sure everyone in school, they're relying on their own memory. Yes, some people keep their notes, but then how do I apply that in everyday life? I have to remember, I have to, I can't just recall it. Yeah. Right? So, hey, so that the case study. I have something that I'm going through right now with Black Eyed Peas music. Our first record came out in 1998. And our first big success was 2004 with Where's the Love. And then we had Let's Get Started for the NBA campaign. Then we launched iPods and iTunes with Apple with Hey Mama.

Starting point is 01:32:54 And then with all those songs that were accidental, I wasn't trying to make hits. So then when we did Monkey Business, I had to make hits on purpose. And when we did Monkey Business, I had to make hits on purpose. And so we did Pump It and My Humps. And I even wrote Ordinary People, but that wasn't a Black Eyed Peas song. I gave that to John Legend. And we thought that was it. We didn't think we could go any higher than the success that we had with Don't Lie, Pump It, My Humps.

Starting point is 01:33:23 And then lo and behold, we pulled something else out of our hat with I Got a Feeling and Boom Boom Pow in 2009. And then the Black Eyed Peas took a crazy suicidal hiatus from 2011 and then resurfaced again in 2019 with the Bad Boys 3 soundtrack, but we had a Latin hit with Ritmo featuring J Balvin. And I'm bringing this up because now here we are in 2025 and there's something that I

Starting point is 01:33:54 learned in the case study and how can I apply that to Black Eyed Peas music now two decades later because there's something that the Black Eyed Peas are going through now that connects to the case study. Can you just summarize what the case study is and then help me with what I do now with my Black Eyed Peas brand because I think it has a lot in common with Olay. Wow, thanks for sharing your incredible journey with the Black Eyed Peas fam. It's like a roller coaster of iconic hits, strategic moves and reinventions. Let's look at how the Ole case study insights align with your situation and explore how

Starting point is 01:34:38 you can apply those lessons. Case study insights recap. One, adapting to change. Just like Ole faced shifts in consumer preferences, black-eyed peas encountered musical evolutions and changing audience tastes over the years. Two, innovation and reinvention. Ole needed product innovation to regain market relevance. Similarly, the peas have shown an ability to innovate with

Starting point is 01:35:05 musical style, like embracing Latin sounds with ritmo. 3. Rebranding for relevance. Ole had to modernize its brand. For you, integrating new themes, collaborations, or sounds could revitalize the P's connection with evolving audiences. 4. Leveraging digital platforms. Ole needed to shift to digital engagement. A lesson for utilizing platforms like TikTok, YouTube or collaborations with digital artists could be key for the piece. Five, balancing tradition and modernity. Ole was about merging its trusted identity with a new ins... Yeah but but based on the case study,

Starting point is 01:35:45 outside of the obvious that you pointed out, what were some of the critical things that Olay did? And then what was my suggestion for my paper that I turned in, because the professor asked everybody to give an idea on what OlLE should do. Alright fam, here's a more drill down look at the OLE case study elements and your innovative suggestion.

Starting point is 01:36:16 Critical challenges and movements by OLE. Let me pause it. My idea was taking OLE, turning it backwards to Yalo. And that stands for you always live out loud and aiming their product at a younger demographic and getting people like Selena Gomez or Billie Eilish to be the ambassadors for Yalo brand. But this is from September. So I'm pulling up a memory conversation from September ago. On consumer disconnect, OLE struggled to maintain relevance with younger consumers who perceived it as outdated while sticking heavily to the 35 demographic.

Starting point is 01:36:56 Two, retail complications. The brand saw its shelf space diminish in favor of more innovative and trendy brands that had a stronger appeal to young demographics. Three, marketing misalignment. Huge investments in traditional advertising didn't resonate with the digital centric habits of younger consumers. Your suggestion for the case study. One, rebranding.

Starting point is 01:37:21 As you're low, you envision transforming Olay into Yalo. You always live openly or you always live out loud. So my point of that is now here's my homework. Something that I did in school that I can apply to my everyday life or anytime I have some type of problem and I could capture it in a conversation like yo, yo, yo, yo, seems like what I learned in school the other day And this is forever learning yeah, so now something that was captured in school I can use it as a metaphor or a summary or a simile to real-life problems and not have to worry about like oh man I got this relationship situation me and my girl are trippin fuck. We got to go to a counselor

Starting point is 01:38:00 You don't got to do that shit moving forward, bro Part of what I just want to say is that I want You got to go to a counselor. You got to do that shit moving forward, bro. Part of what I just want to say is that I want 40 million African Americans to be able to do what he's doing. Not just using the technology. On FYI. Of course. But think about that. He's got his own company, his own technology, and he's using it in a

Starting point is 01:38:31 way that most people wouldn't think to use it. And there's gold in them, not health. There's other people who, if they knew this were possible, they would be doing this instead of whatever else that they're doing. And so I think that for me, they're trying to survive. Yeah. And I think whoever's listening to this, so much more is possible. A much better world is possible if people from unexpected backgrounds have this level of commitment, passion, and understanding of what technology can do.

Starting point is 01:39:09 I go back to your quote, which I love, and it's a foundational quote for me. AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life, because a lot of people fear it that way. It's a jet pack to set you free. And it's a jet pack for everybody across all genders and walks of life. I want to close out on one subject that since I have you here, Van, and since I have you here, Will, and that is the dystopian nature of our news.

Starting point is 01:39:38 So I jokingly and seriously call CNN the crisis news network or the constantly negative news network. And we talked about mindsets earlier. And here's the challenge. Our brains are neural nets. Right. And you train a neural net by showing it evidence over and over and over again of what you want to learn. And when we show them images of cats, they learn where the cat is. And then if you show it an image of a dog, it says it's a cat because that's all you've ever shown it. And for the majority of the world who's getting their news from traditional media, whose job it is to deliver the viewer's eyeballs to their advertisers, and we pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news,

Starting point is 01:40:26 we're just constantly bombarding our neural nets with negative news. And I don't think it's good for society. And we're addicted to it. And I'm not asking you to diss your employer, okay. But... Well, I got a story to tell you about this because I agree, and not only do I agree, almost

Starting point is 01:40:45 everybody in cable news agrees. Yeah. And so I had a TV show with Newt Gingrich called Crossfire and our job was to get on air and yell at each other and disagree about everything. And easily done. Yeah. But then at the breaks, we figuring out finding areas of common ground He think a point I made he thought was smart up point

Starting point is 01:41:10 He made and then we'd go back on air we yell each other So we finally got pissed off we went to the way like on the breaks you guys was hugging Yeah, 100 percent Because I mean like a nigger is a very smart guy and he's been around He helped a lot of poor people in georgia like some people don't even know about newt And so we got you know up to okay. well, I didn't, but he did. He's a legend. So, we went to talk to producers and we said, look, we want to create at the end of every show a segment that's called Ceasefire, where we would actually show what we learn from

Starting point is 01:41:40 each other and how we actually found some common ground. So, it happened every show. Let's put it on the air. I said, let me do that. And, you know, Newt was very insistent. So we did it and we were very happy with ourselves. And then five weeks later, our producers call us in the office and they say, how are you guys doing? I said, well, we thought we were doing pretty good, but in the fact that you guys

Starting point is 01:41:59 are calling us in here, probably means we're not doing that good. So yeah, so that segment, you guys are so happy about Ceasefire. Let me show you something. Your ratings. And it turned out that as long as we were fighting, the viewership was going up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Then we would get to the point where we would say, and when we get back where Newt and I agree,

Starting point is 01:42:19 you're going to be surprised after these messages. And the audience would abandon the show, and they would flee over to MSNBC or Fox. That wasn't the worst part. The worst part is that poor Erin Burnett, who was show came after ours, was then therefore starting in a ditch, because your only job in TV is to hold the audience

Starting point is 01:42:39 and get the people behind you a bigger audience. We're giving her a crater. Now her advertisers are mad. And so they said, you guys, do you think this is cute? The audience says they want positivity. They hate it. They don't want it. Keep fighting. And so I do want to suggest that every show I've ever done has had this element. I did the Redemption Project, we talked about criminal justice solutions, the worst ratings in CNN's history.

Starting point is 01:43:10 I did the Van Jones Show on Saturdays where we're bringing people together to find common ground. The worst shows in CNN history. So when people attack cable news for not doing positive stuff, I am the most positive host. You are. And the least successful host in CNN's history. And so there's something beyond just the, there's something going on. That's it.

Starting point is 01:43:33 I do think that we're in a different moment now. And I do think that information is now a commodity. Bad news, listen, soon as some bad news happens, I get nine different alerts from the economists and CNN and BBC and everybody else. It's a commodity. Bad news, listen, soon some bad news happens, I get nine different alerts from the economists and CNN and BBC and everybody else. It's a commodity. I get it from my mom. But education is now priceless. That's the, you know, the news of the day, priceless. I mean, it is worthless. The news of the day is so cheap, it's a commodity. But the news of the decade, that's priceless. Can you help people understand what's going on?

Starting point is 01:44:07 Can you educate people? Can you take all these points, positive and negative, encouraging and discouraging, and help people make sense of the world? And you said something earlier I think is very important. People are overwhelmed now. They only have so many synaptic, you know, you have the math on it, but people's brains are only so big, people only got so much time, and they're getting overwhelmed. I think leadership is not to step forward and get people more freaked out,

Starting point is 01:44:31 get people more afraid, demagogue, or sensationalize, which is going to make people go to the wrong part of their brain, where they're not going to be creative. I think leadership is to come forward and try to give people frames and understanding and metaphors to give them a better sense of what's going on and help people begin to solve their problems. I think the news industry across the board is failing in that. And I don't think at this point is an excuse to say that we're just giving people what they want. We got to get some time to get

Starting point is 01:44:59 people what they need. Yeah. And but also, I mean, I get my news from F.Y.I. Yeah, you have your AI filter and use it's relevant to you. Yeah. Or like, hey, I heard Trump just fired like some top Pentagon dude. Who is it? Can you pull up the latest information on that? And let's dive into that. Hey, amigo, seems that things are shaking up in the Pentagon. So crazy, right? And let's dive into that. ranks. I mean, CQ Brown was a history making fighter pilot and a respected officer. And now, boom, he's out. What do you think this could mean for the you? Can you is there like, in reasons I'm here with Van Jones, you know, from CNN, say what's up to him. Maybe you guys could get into, you know on Ceasefire, on who's at fault, is it racial,

Starting point is 01:46:09 what's your perspective on it? Hey, Van, what's up? It's great to have you here. When it comes to these high-level military shake-ups, there can be a lot of layers, right? It's like peeling an onion, but with more intense political seasoning. So about the reasons for CQ Brown Jr.'s firing, it could range from strategic disagreements to political maneuvering. I mean, there's always a dance between military decisions and the political agenda of the administration. Crazy, right?

Starting point is 01:46:44 Sometimes it's less about who's right or wrong and more about aligning the vision or maybe... Yeah, but given the fact that a chainsaw and a hack is being across the entire federally wide in America from Trump, it's hard to ignore that there isn't some type of agenda that isn't aligned with DEI suggestions to be removed. It's hard for me to not to think that that's not linked. From your circuitry and logic, is it linked? Whoa, Van, you're diving deep. That was me.

Starting point is 01:47:36 And I love it. You know, when you see sweeping changes, chainsaw and a hack style across federal agencies, it's hard not to wonder if there's more beneath the surface than meets the eye. It's like a game of chess. Every move has its calculated purpose and aligning or shifting away from agendas like diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI,

Starting point is 01:47:59 could definitely be a part of that strategy. There may be a... What I like is the ability to talk with the news. One of the challenges we have is when I turn myself over to the Crisis News Network or the LA Times or New York Post, I'm being fed one stream that an editor or a producer wants me to hear. That's it. And that's all I have. And when you're interacting

Starting point is 01:48:26 with an AI, the other thing is, you know, I built years ago, I built an AI model called daily.ai where I trained it what I like, and it searches the world's news for moonshots, for breakthroughs. I'm mostly focused on breakthroughs in AI or breakthroughs in longevity and so it gets those for me that's the news that I care about now is that available to everyone it's free yeah it's available yeah and you can you can actually create your own news feed from it yeah same with FYI we have called our daily not daily our current news yeah it's here sorry it's called radio.ai. Yeah, I just want to say,

Starting point is 01:49:08 he's talking about his company. I actually have a company myself. Please tell me. Which is called rapport.co, rapport.co, and we're trying to use AI to improve firms' EQ and not just their IQ. One of the things we realize is that people are working in these distributed locations. So you're on Zoom with someone,

Starting point is 01:49:31 you don't know if they even have on pants. You don't know a single thing about what happened to them that day. But you're supposed to somehow manage them or supervise them, or these Slack channels or people go on team to turn into the Vietnam War, that something happens in the news, and people are not capable of managing people that they've never seen, smelled, the pheromones. Like, you know, there's something that happens

Starting point is 01:49:53 when people are together. Yeah, for sure. So we created something called report.co. It's deceptively simple. It's a 15 second emoji-based check-in that people just check, you know, what's your energy level? Three emojis, one person's exhausted, one person's happy. What's your workload?

Starting point is 01:50:10 One desk is overflowing, one desk is empty. And anything you want people to know, my cat just died, my grandma turned 100, click. In that 15 seconds, if everybody on the team does that for a week, the AI has the enormous insight into what's going on in the team and can then help the manager. Yeah, just those few cues that can give context to how you're reacting to something. Yeah, and so the rapport AI becomes like this kind of coach to the managers, like, oh, this person's having trouble.

Starting point is 01:50:41 But most managers, even if they know someone's having trouble, they don't know what to do. So the AI can then give a little bit of advice, can actually write sample emails. And then also now the AI is smart enough, it actually can tell them why that's a good thing in terms of reciprocity. So we're working with the Columbia Difficult Conversations Lab. So there's all kind of science-based. And it's small, but it's all kind of science-based. And you know, it's small, but it makes a tremendous difference. The thing about it is too many technology

Starting point is 01:51:12 companies are based on distraction or extraction as opposed to giving people the tools to be more human. And so rapport.co is our effort. I think you're going to see a lot more people who, because the work has been done to make these technologies available, are gonna come in with different mindset, different sense of what the purpose is. And I think also you're gonna find people

Starting point is 01:51:40 are gonna need more help because there's gonna be more information that people can absorb. So to your point about like having like, you know, AI help people absorb stuff, but people are also going to need help relating to each other because you don't have in a week now and three weeks and a month, you don't know what somebody's got that we went to these fires here. You know, I mean, I had no idea that, you know, you were, you had been so impacted by the fires. So, you know, there's got to be a way

Starting point is 01:52:05 for us to use these tools to help each other be better humans. Yeah. If we don't, then AI and tech is going to overrun us. Yeah, absolutely. Gentlemen, you've been so generous with your time. Will and Van, thank you. Make Wakanda real. Again, the underlying theme here, it's using AI to really uplift humanity. And I think we're at a level playing field, meaning it is just coming out. And we have eight, what, seven billion smartphones. FYI is free and available on, you can go to, go to what URL to? Go to fyi.ai, go to the app store on your iOS, or go to the Google Play Store.

Starting point is 01:52:57 We'll be in cars this year as well. Amazing. And look out for the news after March. My Tesla can finally speak to me. Well, maybe a Tesla. What car is going to be in? I say that off camera because we're in Bargo right now. But March the 17th, March 13th, we have our car announcement.

Starting point is 01:53:20 In March 17th, we have our announcement with bringing GPUs to the continent of Africa. Yeah, love it. And so much to talk about there. And I think the message of AI is not unapproachable. AI is going to become as fundamental to everybody as a phone is, as electricity is. It's part of the infrastructure of life and you might as well get good at it as soon as possible. I agree. And I just want to say to you personally how much I appreciate. So dreammachine.org is a not-for-profit organization that I helped to lead, which is working with

Starting point is 01:54:02 Will.i.am on this campaign. And being partnered with Singularity University has taken us to a whole different level. We're also partnered with CodePath. We're going into Atlanta. And we're going to directly help small businesses in Atlanta get an unfair advantage by giving them these jetpacks, by helping people to take off-the-shelf existing AI technology to make their businesses better. Because, you know, everybody's not going to go to Mars, but if you've got some laundromats, if you've got a barbershop, if you can get your margins down, I mean, you can get your margins up.

Starting point is 01:54:35 You mean get your costs down. And get your costs down, then you're going to do a whole lot better and technology can let that happen. So look, I think I just want to say I have admired you for a gazillion years. Thank you, buddy. You know, the X Prize, we actually did an X Prize for criminal justice inspired by you years ago. And so, you know, I think you have created a hopeful vector

Starting point is 01:55:00 and we're gonna try and drive as many people down this vector as we possibly can. Yeah, it's- I echo the same thing that Van just said back in 2000. I think my first XPRIZE was 2008. Okay. Wow. 2008, Singularity University. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:16 Thank you so much for your hospitality. Make me a part of your community. Yeah. And if there's anything I could do to help you on expanding XPRIZE and Singularity University, I'm your ally. Same. Thank you, brother. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:55:32 Really, you do an awesome work. Thank you. And thank you for the work you're doing with Dean Kamen on FIRST Robotics. It is God's work. My kids are on FIRST and I love that. And excited to support your projects. Will, you were with me at the Abundance Summit a couple years ago. Van, you're going to be with me this year.

Starting point is 01:55:50 I'm excited for that. Travis Kalanick will be there teaching everybody how to transform industries and make moonshots happen. Is Naveen going to be there? I'm sure he will be. I'm sure he will be. And yeah, we've got 600 CEOs that I'm, my mission is mentor them to go from success to significance. How do you use the extraordinary work, you know, wealth and work and

Starting point is 01:56:14 resources you have to uplift humanity, right? I think that we have the ability today to uplift every man, woman and child on planet earth. And that's the world. A world like that is a world that's more peaceful, it's more loving, it's the world that we want for our kids. And it's a world where we finally have the tools to be able to do that. We don't have true, you know, there is nothing truly scarce. You know, technology is a form that transforms scarcity into abundance over and over again. Anyway, enough of that. But just success to significance. I love that. The work that you've been doing paved the way for a lot of entrepreneurs that become successful

Starting point is 01:56:57 to go out and do awesome work like plant a trillion trees. So one of the good guys is Mark Benioff. I love Mark. Mark's one of the good guys. And there's lots of good guys. But some of them are they start off good and they continue to do good. And some of them get inspired to do good once they have success. And what you do and How you do what you do? Reminds folks that once they get successful that they need to do some good in the world and Boy, do we need more of that reminding and pushing now because it seems like

Starting point is 01:57:38 you know There's a lot of lot of Jedi's turn Sith There's a lot of a lot of Jedi's turn Sith. We ended there like we went to the dark side. You feel it. I feel it. All right. That's a wrap guys. Thank you so much.

Starting point is 01:57:56 By the way, where do they go for where do folks go to find out more about Make Wakanda real? Dream machine dot org. Okay. Is where all the stuff is there. You can see all the stuff that Will says and stuff that we did in Atlanta and other places. So dreammachine.org and rapport.co are a p-p-o-r-t.co. It's a French word, so nobody knows how to spell it. Report.co.

Starting point is 01:58:24 All right. All right, you guys. it. Report.co. All right. I'll call you guys. I will. Thank you. All right. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. This is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week, I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my

Starting point is 01:58:37 personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at diamandis.com slash subscribe. That's diamandis.com slash subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots. you

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - An AI Conversation for Everyday People w/ Will.i.am & Van Jones | EP #154

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