Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Returning to the Office Won’t Work in the Age of AI - Jack Hidary & Nadia Harhen | EP #135
Episode Date: December 10, 2024In this episode, Jack and Peter discuss the future of work and whether returning to the office or working from home will be more successful in the age of AI. Recorded on Dec 7th, 2024 Views are m...y own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Jack Hidary is a leading entrepreneur and visionary at the forefront of AI and quantum technology as the CEO of SandboxAQ, raising over $500m in funding. He is the author of forthcoming book AI or Die and the influential textbook; Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach. A serial entrepreneur, Hidary co-founded and led EarthWeb/Dice from inception to IPO, and co-founded Vista Research and sold it to S&P/McGraw-Hill. Jack studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Stanley Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience at the NIH where he applied neural networks to brain imaging. Nadia Harhen is the General Manager of AI Simulation at SandboxAQ, where she harnesses the power of AI and quantum simulation to revolutionize drug, material, and chemical discovery. With over 15 years of experience spanning R&D, product management, and regulatory operations in the life sciences and technology sectors, she has driven innovations from combination device R&D at Johnson & Johnson to AI-based medical devices at Google. Nadia’s leadership has secured regulatory clearance in 70+ countries, advanced groundbreaking therapies, and opened new markets for cutting-edge technologies. Learn more about SandboxAQ: https://www.sandboxaq.com/ Sandbox AQ’s 3C Success: https://www.sandboxaq.com/press/sandboxaq-publishes-scientific-and-technical-milestones-for-quantitative-methods Pre-Order my Longevity Guidebook here: https://longevityguidebook.com/ ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots
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Unfortunately, the world of work now has painted itself into the following corner.
Is it work from home or is it return to office?
And we're seeing examples of both of those out there.
Amazon announcing, of course, hey, you're not in the office.
Jan one, you're out.
Other companies saying, no, we're completely or remote.
We think actually there's a new way, a third way.
What's going to happen with jobs here?
I believe that AI will produce literally
millions of new jobs to people who want to quote unquote play the AI space. What how do I invest in
the AI space? What company do I invest in? The bigger way to play AI is to look at the biggest
sectors of our economy who are going to be the winners and losers. Everybody Peter Diamandis here and welcome to Moonshots. On this episode
we're going to be diving into an important conversation
that every entrepreneur, every exponential entrepreneur needs to be
having right now, which is if you are running an organization or if you're
joining an organization or if you're starting an organization,
do you build it around a physical office?
Do you return to the office?
Do you allow your employees to work from home or is there a different way?
I'm going to be joined by Jack Hittery, CEO of Sandbox AQ, an extraordinary entrepreneur
out of Google.
His chairman is Eric Schmidt.
They broke out of Google with $500 million of startup capital, and they're changing the
world.
Sandbox AQ, A stands for AI, Q stands for quantum, and they're transforming a whole
slew of different areas with incredible success.
Part of the success, Jack Hittery states, is because of their work model, their agility.
So we're going to be doing an interview to understand how does Sandbox AQ do their work.
It's the how versus the what.
Again, if you're an entrepreneur, this is an episode that you're going to want to think through
to decide how you're building your company or how you manage your company going forward.
We just saw Amazon with a return to the office requirement. Is that the
right way to go? Other companies may be following. Is this right for you? All
right, let's jump into this episode and if you enjoy conversations like this,
please subscribe. It helps me know that I can serve you, which is my goal. All
right, on to the podcast. Before we get started, I want to share with you the
fact that there are incredible breakthroughs coming on the health span and longevity front.
These technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live, how long we're healthy.
The truth is, a lot of the approaches are in fact cheap or even free.
And I want to share this with you.
I just wrote a book called Longevity Guidebook that outlines what I've been doing to reverse
my biological age, what I've been doing to increase my health, my strength, my energy.
And I want to make this available to my community at cost.
So, LongevityGuidebook.com.
You can get information or check out the link below.
All right, let's jump into this episode.
Hi everybody, welcome to Moonshots.
Today we have a really fun conversation,
something that can impact all Moonshot entrepreneurs,
all exponential entrepreneurs, which is what should you be doing?
Should you be going back to the workplace?
Should be working virtually?
What is the new way of work?
I'm joined with one of the most extraordinary exponential entrepreneurs, Jack Hittery, a
dear friend.
He's been on this podcast a number of times.
He's the founder of Sandbox AQ, happens to have an incredible chairman of
Eric Schmidt, who's been on this podcast as well. They've gone from zero to infinity faster
than most any company I know. He is also joined by Nadia Heron, who's the general manager
of AI simulation at Sandbox. As I've said before, we're going to see the emergence of three-person
billion dollar startups faster than ever. These are exponential organizations that are
being driven by the convergence of computation, AI, robotics, 3D printing, all of these technologies.
And the question is, how should these companies be materializing? You get an office these days.
Do you find office space?
Do you go into an incubator?
Are you starting a virtualized company?
We're going to be diving into all of these things.
We've talked about in the past what Sandbox AQ does.
Now we're going to talk about how they do this magic.
Jack, Nadia, welcome.
Peter, great to see you, my friend.
Nadia, great to have you with us.
Peter, I think this is a really exciting moment, as you just pointed out.
A lot of breakthroughs coming out of our company and other companies,
and people often just focus on what is that next breakthrough,
what's the next frontier that we're going to explore with AI,
both on the language model side and on the quantitative model side.
We'll get into that a little bit today.
But what's not focused on enough, Peter, as you pointed out, is how we do what we do.
And at Sandbox EQ, we've really put a big focus on paving a new pathway in that as well.
How we actually organ ourselves.
How do we get this collaboration done?
How do you get a lot of creative minds from so many different disciplines, Peter, physics and AI and chemistry and biology
and pharmacology and mathematics and cyber? I mean, all these things, how do you actually
get creatives to work together in a way that produces on a systematic basis breakthrough
after breakthrough after breakthrough? And you've just published an extraordinary
list of breakthroughs. I hope we'll get to that as well.
But I do agree that how is so important because we have a lot of moonshot
entrepreneurs watching this who are diving deep into A.I.
and utilizing it. They've got huge world changing dreams.
But the question is, do you go back to the old model of how it was done,
you know, pre-COVID 10, 20, 30 years ago?
It's gotta be different now.
Absolutely, Peter.
And I think very often as humans, we know this,
this is one of the Kahneman and Torsky 25,
the biases that Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for,
cognitive biases in our head that we fall into,
the bias of anchoring and other kinds of biases.
One of those biases is the false binary choice.
People often paint themselves into a corner Peter,
as you well know that, oh, it's either this one or that one.
And unfortunately, the world of work now
has painted itself into the following corner.
Is it work from home or is it return to office?
And we're seeing examples of both of those out there.
Amazon announcing of course, hey, you're not in the office, Jan one, you're out.
Other companies saying, no, we're completely all remote. We think actually
there's a new way, a third way. And I'd love to hear about that, but I'll tell
you, one of the things I've heard from two different CEOs is, thank you, Amazon,
for forcing people to come back to work because I get to steal all those amazing employees who don't want to go back to the office.
We're actually seeing that already, Peter. We're seeing that. We're seeing actually,
we literally just hired somebody from Amazon who did not want to go back to work.
And so we did not, you know, seek out to get that person, but that person became available
once that return to work,
a return to office policy kicked in,
and they themselves put themselves on the job market.
So we're seeing the impact of that.
And I think this false choice of either return to office
and everyone's in the old way of doing things
or remote first,
I wanna say that even before COVID,
we were already on this track of doing things a different way.
This was not just because of COVID.
Technology enables it all.
Technology enables it, but also we
have to think about the person themselves.
We call it three Cs.
We think about collaboration, Peter,
and collaboration is about all the different disciplines.
I'll ask Nagya in a minute to elaborate on that.
The different disciplines we bring together.
We talk about customer.
You know what it means when you don't have to be in an office?
It means you can actually embed yourself with the customers.
Recently, a five-person team from our company
embedded itself for two weeks
at one of our customers inside their offices.
You know what it means to a customer
for a team to go and take the time and live essentially with them? With another one of our
partners, we're actually going to permanently embed about 10 of our employees in their various
offices around the world. Permanently, that's going to be their place of work, is going to be the
partner's offices, not one of our hubs or locations.
And then of course you have community. Our mantra, Peter, here is work where you
thrive. That is, don't uproot somebody and have to bring them over to Mountain View
to eat burritos every day when they were in a great city in their country or
their city, where they have their support structure, they have their in-laws to take care of the kids,
they have the university that they know
that where they cultivate new talent
to bring into our company,
where they have their community
and they can engage with that community
and bring in new ideas and customers from that community.
That's about work where you thrive.
So maybe if it appears okay, I can turn it over to Nadia.
I would love that.
To talk about collaboration first.
Nadia, hello, good morning.
Nadia, maybe you wanna introduce yourself a bit more.
Talk about your background as a bench scientist.
Sure thing, sure thing.
Thank you so much, Peter.
It's a pleasure to be here with you and Jack this morning.
I'm Nadia Herron.
I'm the general manager of the AI Simulation Group
here at Sandbox.
And funny enough, when Jack spun this company out of Google, I'm Nadia Herron, I'm the general manager
And one of the things he told me was that, don't worry that this company is completely remote.
We are going to work together to do amazing things in a collaborative fashion.
And you are not going to have to move like you did when you went to go work at Google.
And that was music to my ears.
I remember really thinking.
Where are you living now? Where are you living now? I live in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey right outside of New York City.
Yeah. So it was like give up this amazing opportunity or have to relocate the
entire family 3,000 miles to the West. That's right and I had done that before
like many folks do to take these amazing tech jobs and you have to find new
doctors, you have to find new schools, you uproot your whole family, your partner doesn't have a sense of community.
And so your support structure, which I think we all realized during COVID was very, very
necessary, is completely missing. So that is a big part of thriving. I mean here we have access to our network our people
You know friends family, etc. The whole family is happy and so I think my community yeah, please
Yeah, I would say do you mind if I ask you?
What does a general manager of AI simulation do at sandbox aq because that's a that's a pretty wicked title
It's a job that did not exist five years ago in the world. Yeah, yeah. So I work on leading
an extraordinary team that is globally based to create new drugs, new types of molecules,
impact the biopharma industry, and also the material science chemistry industry primarily.
So as you might imagine, we have folks
from all different disciplines that need to collaborate
to do this amazing work.
And we work across many, many different time zones
in order to do that.
And it is truly being able to hire the talent
where they are in the corners of the planet
is really key to what has helped us be successful
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Amazing. Jack, you said something a few minutes ago. There's a false dichotomy here between return to work or work from home.
Each has its problems. And I just want to, you know, for the entrepreneur
who's who is thinking about which route they go, can we just dive into that one second for each
of those and then talk a little bit more about your third option here? Yeah, so let me just be
very provocative and explicit. Return to office as a total policy policy fail. Work from home as a singular policy fail.
Why? Just to make it super clear. I hope I'm not being too subtle Peter. You never have been buddy.
You never have been. And I'll kick off and I'll ask Nadja also talk about some of the ways that
we collaborate. For example, you know bringing people together in collaborative gatherings and things like that.
What we realize is, yeah, there's problems with going with either of those as your singular focus and policy.
What you want to do is you want to be outcome-based rather than be time-based.
People get obsessed about, are we going to have this number of hours in the workday?
How about this? How many vacation days do I have?
Do I need to be in the office this day, that day, at Tuesdays and Thursdays at
three o'clock on a leap year? I mean this is ridiculous. Let's be outcome-based. One
of the reasons why I think we've had breakthrough after breakthrough after
breakthrough. Recently the team, Nadja can talk more about it, had a breakthrough
with PFAS, the forever chemicals. People may know that they call forever chemicals
for a bad reason because they don't leave our bodies,
they don't leave the environment.
And I'll ask Nadia in a minute
to talk about that breakthrough.
But how do we get these breakthroughs
from multiple disciplines coming together?
What it means is you have to think about
the collaboration part,
then you gotta think about the customer part.
Who's your partner?
Who's your customer?
Don't just once in a while have a Zoom call with them.
Go visit them.
We have a sizable travel budget, Peter,
because we have to go visit these folks in person.
Now that we can post-COVID visit people,
now's the time to go and do that.
Yes, we use some Zoom, of course,
but we like to go physically see the customers,
see the partners, see the
partners work with them, understand what their issues are, how they're working together.
You're effectively trading real estate expenses for air miles.
That's correct.
So net net, we're actually saving millions of dollars.
Peter, our CFO did the numbers.
He's the numbers guy.
30 plus years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. This guy the numbers. He's the numbers guy. 30 plus years at Price, where has Cooper's this guy knows numbers
and he was an auditor of a public
public companies before that.
This guy is really, really solid.
And what David said is that we're saving money.
Look at the numbers by not having all these permanent offices all over the place.
We're actually saving millions of dollars and we're taking a portion of that and we're
spending it on the collaboration gatherings, the off-sites, visiting customers. But Net-Net,
even with all that, we're saving millions of dollars a year. So this is a great way to boost
your company's productivity and output. And it's also a way to save money. But Peter, the most important thing, the theme is outcome-based and treat people like adults.
And so, for example, we have in the US
unlimited vacation policy.
We're not here to say, oh, teacher,
can I please take a vacation day?
Can I take Thursday 3 p.m. off?
I have a doctor's appointment.
Treat people like adults. Keep people know what to do. And if you're outcome-based, if you use the OKR system
that we learned so well from Google, let's remember John Doerr's book, right,
on OKRs. Let's remember the early days of Larry and Sergey and Eric thinking
about the OKR system. That is a powerful system to communicate what? To
communicate we're outcome based,
we're looking for that breakthrough.
How you get there, that's for you to shape.
You as a team, for you to shape.
We give budgets to teams like Nadja.
Nadja is empowered to decide what to do with that.
Nadja, maybe you wanna jump in and talk about
why do we meet in person here and there in different cities,
often with universities
in mind who are in that city?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, we're outcome based and what that means is that we have very ambitious goals.
We're trying to revolutionize drug discovery.
We're creating chemicals and matter that hasn't ever existed before.
And how do you get a group of people that are located all across the planet on that
singular mind share?
And that is really the purpose of an offsite, is to have this purposeful mind share around
strategy, around goals, around sprint cycles.
And I will tell you that there is research that shows that you have to bring people out
of their comfort zone, take them out of their environment, their kind of regular office space
to boost that creativity, to enhance that problem solving.
And we come out of these off sites,
and we tend to do them in locations that are inspiring.
We go to the mountains.
We go to the sea.
We go to universities, where there
is a lot of mind share and inspiration and things to
draw upon.
When we leave these off sites, people are so impassioned, so excited, you can see that
there's all this momentum.
Everyone is rowing in the same direction.
It really carries us through to the next off site.
You end up having a few of these over the course of a year.
You don't need an office.
An office is very casual, you know,
people come home from the office, they're tired.
You know, people leave off sites, they're excited.
So it's very different.
Yeah, I'm just gonna ask you a quick question.
Why do you think Amazon is literally forcing people
to come back to work?
What's their thesis there?
What do they believe?
Yeah, not to comment on Amazon specifically, but in general, I think why we're seeing a lot of
large companies go with RTO is that number one, they have a sunk investment, right? In other words,
they have some sunk costs in huge infrastructure. Sure. Often they own these buildings or have very
long-term leases to these massive buildings all around the world and certainly in their headquarter locations.
And that is an asset that needs to be used or something's going to happen to it.
It's not a great time right now to try to sell these things because of course many other
companies are not using these kinds of platforms.
And so, you know, one one reason I think we're seeing it is people want to leverage the investment
they've made
prior to COVID and then during COVID, you know, things continued.
Number two, I would say is there's a lot of traditional thinking, really, just to be honest
with you around, you know, people need to be in one space.
And I understand people say, hey, there's a spontaneity when you're physically in the
same place.
We agree with that.
That's why work from home alone
is a fail. We agree, Peter, with the contention that just working from home, just working remotely,
does not work. I mean, when you're working from home, you're lonely, you're cut off, you know,
it doesn't give you a through line in the keel. But at the same time returning to the office doesn't, I
loved your point about actually assuming everybody's an adult and that they can,
you know, if they've got key objectives they have to hit, allow them to manage
themselves. If you don't have that belief of them, they
shouldn't be working for you. Exactly Peter, and also let's talk about
cross-pollination. So it's one thing, and
if you look at most return to office, what are they returning to? They're returning to
offices where their team is there. But how about cross team? How about the fact that
a place like SandboxAQ, we've got a team working on biopharma, we've got other teams working
on chemistry, we've got other teams thinking about AI in new and very exciting ways,
we want to get those teams also cross-pollinating with each other. So some of these gatherings
might be with some parts of one team and some parts of another team coming together.
And by the way, who also shows up at one of those off-sites? We have our HR folks,
we have our recruiters. Let the recruiters listen in. Let's see what's happening. Have the recruiters
imbibe so that they know the kind of talent. And let me come back to talent, Peter, because
part of what fueled our thinking about breaking through, not just on what we do, but how we
do it, was the talent issue. When we started getting resumes, both when we were inside
of Alphabet and then post-Spin out, we realized the talent is everywhere,
Peter.
The talent is in Europe.
The talent is all the way in North America.
There's a geographic opportunity here of massive scale.
Exactly.
Now you say to somebody, hey, I know you have a great support system around you living in
Austria, living in France, living in Spain Spain Living in other countries around the world
But by the way, we're gonna uproot you now and you've got to live, you know
10,000 miles away where you don't know anybody and to Nagya's point before don't have that support structure
Is that a good recipe for a great work environment?
Well, it's like you just like with Nadia you would not have gotten her if you'd been made that exactly
Not a helping is your how big is your team and how distributed are they and how often do you meet? I don't think so. Just like with Nadia, you would not have gotten her if you'd been made that demand. Exactly.
Nadia, how big is your team and how distributed are they?
And how often do you meet?
Yeah, so our team is about 60 or so people at the moment.
And we work across six, seven different time zones.
And it is, we are intentional about where we hire
depending on where our customers are as well.
So we can also organize ourselves to service our needs a little bit better.
So we have folks out in Europe to service our European customers.
It has allowed us to scale much quicker because we have these pods everywhere.
You know, we didn't have the hub and hire people into the hubs.
We created the hubs around the people, which I think is another key distinction here as well.
And Jack, I just want to, you said it in passing,
but I want to just take a second to spell it out.
Your triple C strategy, your third way,
not work from home, not return to office, but the triple C,
what do those Cs stand for again?
And just take a second to hit those beats.
So Peter, there's a third way.
We do not have to fall into the false dichotomy of either return to office or work from home.
The third way that we are pioneering that others I think are taking a cue from from
us, we literally have people calling us, asking us to visit and understand this third way
is the three C's.
The first C is collaboration.
We have so many different disciplines.
And the work of today and the future, Peter,
in all companies is going to be collaboration
across disciplines, both in the workplace and also in academia.
Look at some of the most dynamic universities.
Look at Arizona State with Mike Crowe.
Look at Michael Crowe, what he's done there,
breaking down barriers of departments,
breaking down silos. The same thing in the most successful companies, breaking down barriers and
having people collaborate. In our particular company, it's even more pronounced because we've
got 80 plus PhDs in our company. We have another 70 engineers in our company. They have come from
many different disciplines, pharmacology, chemistry, physics,
engineering, AI, all these different areas. And of course, software coding and taking
that domain expertise of the PhDs, putting it into reusable, scalable software code.
This is a whole workflow that involves many different disciplines. So collaboration is
the first C. The second C is about the customer.
Jeff Bezos talks so eloquently about customer first thinking. We agree with him. I think he
was one of the pioneers to really focus on how do you really put yourselves in the shoes of the
customer. And that's something we take from him. A lot of what we talk about, Peter, in our company
is take the best from all the different cultures you've been in and let's bring it together. And that's kind of the
birth of the three C's. We kind of got around people from many different companies. Many of
us came from Google. We took the best of Google, but also we thought about other cultures. So the
second C is about the customer, not just treating the customer like a transaction,
but really thinking about what's their point of pain.
And you know how to find that out?
You got to go and be with them.
You got to go spend time with them, not just in their workplace, but also, for example,
let's say you're both going to a conference, set up a time, a special dedicated time on
the side of that conference to have your team and their team go out out have a dinner together, spend a lot of time understanding what they're
up to. And the final C is community. Community and connection. So maybe it's
two extra C's but we'll put them in one. But community and connection, what is
that about? That's about work where you thrive. It's about what is what is your
support structure Peter? You know very a company says, we're here to support you.
And they might have great benefits and so and so forth.
But the fact is, supporting someone
means that you want to recognize and respect where they are
going to work best, where they're going to live best,
where they're going to thrive as people, where they're
going to realize their potential. An example, they may have a local university that they love,
that they want to take more courses at. They may have a set of family and friends around them that
can support them. Let's say they want to have kids. If you're having kids and you don't have
a support structure around you, God bless. Okay, that's going to be difficult. That's going to be
difficult. It's a happier employee.
It's a more fulfilled employee because you can't support all the stresses at the same time.
And if you've got, you know, if you're able to have your home life and your emotional and social life thriving,
it gives you more capacity to give to your company.
And let me say, you say, a number of things
that people have said before is that we think
of company as a community.
Sometimes people say it's a family.
I think that's not the right term.
Families are different.
You have your crazy uncle who comes for Thanksgiving
all the time.
You can't uninvite them, unfortunately.
But workplace is more like a community.
We respect each other.
We treat people like adults. We are outcome each other. We treat people like adults.
We are outcome based.
We set forth clear goals.
And by the way, where do those goals come from?
They don't come from on high from Mount Olympus.
They come from the conversations and the off sites themselves.
It bubbles up.
Nadja has been running a great process with her team.
What is going to be our outcome goals for 2025?
Once a year, Peter, once a year we gather the whole company. We're still small enough we can
do that and we choose a university city. Last year we did it in Palo Alto at Stanford. This past year,
right now, this past few months we just did it in Cambridge Mass at Harvard MIT we're choosing some new cities now so if you're sitting out there how frequently
do you want us to come let us know how frequently do you have these these meetups these go ahead
Nadja you want to talk about that in your team yeah yeah yeah so we we have our
company wide offset as Jack mentioned once a year just because we're getting
so large.
and product and UX team will meet together. In fact, they just had an offsite out in Vancouver.
Our drug discovery team will meet together. That's about a group of 20. And so we have these little pods. And so there's always touch points going on. And depending on what work is being
accomplished, we have different cross-functional teams that also are invited to those meetings.
And so there's not a lot of time that actually passes when you're not interacting in person with your colleagues. It may seem as though, well, you know, you're always at home,
but you're really not. You're with a customer meeting and understanding their pain, or you're
with your colleagues solving for that, or you're with your family. And so people are just able to
be a lot more well-rounded and taken care of and accommodated in this sort of setting.
Everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's
very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you
love.
The company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins
and a group of very talented physicians.
Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body.
We're all optimists.
Until that day when you have a pain in your side,
you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen,
I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on.
And you know, it didn't start that morning.
It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time,
but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built
at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US
today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain,
a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexa scan, a grail blood cancer test,
a full executive blood workup.
It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive.
150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease
at the very beginning when it's solvable.
You're going to find out eventually.
You might as well find out when you can take action.
Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.
We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics
that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life.
And we provide them to you at our centers.
So if this is of interest to you,
please go and check it out.
Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter.
When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller,
Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us
for Fountain Life memberships.
If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter,
we'll put you to the top of the list.
Really, it's something that is, for me,
one of the most important things I offer my entire
family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.
It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans.
Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter.
It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.
All right, let's go back to our episode.
Peter, if I can talk about another innovation,
which is that, what is the role of the senior executive
in this new 3C structure in the third way?
What is, is the senior executive supposed to sit
in some ivory tower in Mount Olympus and send out commands?
No, that is a prescription for failure.
The senior executives, we believe in service leadership
and that's something that's embedded inside the third way which is flipping the whole
pyramid. It says that as a senior leader, my job is to ask Nadia, Nadia what do you
need to succeed? We've agreed on outcomes, we've agreed on outcomes for 2025 let's
say. Nadia, what are the resources you need and along the way how do we adjust
and make sure you have those resources? Resource doesn't have to be just money and budget. It could also be Nadia telling me, hey Jack,
I really need your help opening the door to that partner. I need your help opening the door to that particular customer.
I need advice on how do we work in this university. Your job is to help her succeed. That's right. That's my job.
And so that means that the senior leadership, we've got to be on the move. Yes. And then not his job is help her team succeed.
Yes. Yeah, in the same way.
I agree. And I love that it is a service mindset from from leadership.
And I've seen so many companies absolutely fail
when the CEOs got this massive plush real estate office.
And it's like, you you know come and pray at the
temple of... Yeah I don't have an office Peter on purpose because my office is
typically traveling and recently I just flew to New York in order to be with one
of the team off sites it was a really exciting time they're dealing with a
number of different ideas about what's their next roadmap they're not sure
whether to put this feature first
or that feature.
They're having a lot of very good discussions.
Not my job to decide, by the way.
I did not opine on that particular point.
I was there just again to support and understand
how could I be helpful to that team.
And then a few weeks ago, I flew to a different offsite
to pop in there and see how it could be helpful there.
And so as senior leaders, what I tell my senior leaders
when I bring them aboard, you gotta sign up for this.
This is something that is not typical.
You're not gonna be showing up at an office
and clocking in and once in a while,
as a senior leader, we have a bigger burden.
Yeah.
Do you make an investment in the employee's home office?
Absolutely.
So we make a lot of investments when people are onboarded.
The first thing we do is make sure they're set up well
in a home office.
I can ask Nigel to talk more about that.
I want to talk about something else, though.
There's also skill sets that we invest in.
I'll give you an example.
Every single person that gets onboarded into our company
gets media and presentation training
to give speeches, to give talks why is that here's another part of the third way
Peter in the old way in the big companies of the world today you are not
allowed to just go and give a talk on behalf of the company if you're not the
CEO or one of the senior leaders you've got to go get permission fill out three
forums I've been involved in several large companies in my career and it would take months sometimes for me to get permission to go
give a talk. And Peter, I've had some experience giving talks as you know from your conferences.
And you do a beautiful job of it.
Thank you. And so it was a frustrating experience because I wanted to represent the company. I
wanted to let people know about the incredible things that company was
doing. We flipped that script again. What we do is we say to everyone the default position is,
yes, go give that talk. Don't ask permission. Don't fill out forms. Go give that talk. By the way,
we're treating you like an adult. Here is a folder on our drive that has all the materials that you
can use in your talks your talks and sure enough
We've had hundreds of talks given by our folks over the past two three years That is some stark contrast to a number of let's call it the trillion dollar companies out there today
I won't name names where you know, I'm speaking to a
Division president or senior VP or whatever and it's like come
and speak at this event I'm sorry I'm not allowed to it's kind of insane. I'm
sure Peter you get that you get this when you ask people to come to your
podcast be like oh I have to go get permission right to come on your part
and why why are people doing that we consider everyone in our company our
advisors our full-time employees ambassadors in fact not just the people we also have this residency program, and I'll ask Nadia
to talk about that.
And we consider them ambassadors.
Maybe Nadia, you want to talk about that a little bit in terms of how we empower people
to go out and speak on behalf of the company and also the residency program.
And let me just frame this one second before you jump into that for everybody listening.
If you're an entrepreneur, if you are a senior executive, an employee at a company, the whole
conversation here is to show you a third option, a new way.
And especially if you're a founder or CEO here, the value of becoming
an exponential organization, and Salim and I wrote
about this in exponential organizations 2.0,
and talking about the speed of change is not,
there's an impedance mismatch with the old ways
of doing things, the old ways of working from the office.
And if you really wanna create a truly exponential
organization,
it is this geographic arbitrage, getting access to employees around the world.
It's setting up the infrastructure to enable that agility,
which is probably the single most important asset you can have.
Highly over-structured organizations will fail as there is rapid iteration and change and how we do things.
And just that's the frame I really want to bring this for folks to listen to.
Nadia, please over to you.
Yeah, one of the really incredible things about Sandbox and it's part of our core values is that we have this incredible learning culture,
which is I think fits into that community and connection
C. And as part of that we really like we believe in continuous education. We love to hire the folks
that are tinkering and are you know experimenting with AI or at the edge of things. And so we often
find ourselves you know like having our off sites at these universities,
recruiting from these universities.
We have programs, because we're at the edge of technology,
we actually have to train the next set of folks
that might wanna come work for us
because these skillsets don't naturally exist.
They're not learning this stuff.
And so we have an entire education team
that works on creating coursework
and various degree programming at NYU is
an example of this. And so this you know this learning culture and creating a
community around it is really deeply rooted in who we are. I appreciate that.
You know Jack, first of all I hope you'll write this up as a third you know
the third way and get this out.
Let me dive into a slightly different direction here,
which is, you know, Jamie Dimon recently said,
the next generation of employees will work
for three and a half days a week and live to 100 years old.
I agree with the 100 years old part and more.
At least 100, please Peter.
At least 100, yes, exactly.
Come on.
Hey, hey, don't get me started 100, yes. Come on. Exactly.
Hey, hey, don't get me started there.
I'll take you on, buddy.
But the three and a half days of work, if you love what you're doing, I don't know.
I play seven days a week in what I do.
And it's always a balance between a home and work and everything.
But as I was on stage with Tony at one of the Abundance Summits, Tony Robinson at the
Abundance Summits recently, we talked about it's not life work balance, about life work
integration.
And I think that is really what you're talking about.
How do you integrate this in a way that's meaningful?
What do you think about these predictions of Microsoft Japan tested a four-day workweek
and productivity jumped 40 percent?
Jamie Dimon's comment about three and a half day work weeks.
What's your thought about that?
Here's my prediction, Peter.
I think that the best organizations, the exponential organizations, the organizations that have
breakthrough have to breakthrough, be it in our tech sector or be it in other sectors,
will be organizations that treat people like adults
that are outcome-based.
When you're outcome-based, you know what falls away?
Nursery school games, like how many hours
should I be working today?
How many days and which days and so on and so forth?
We really consider this very, very old language.
That's a signal.
When someone kind of is talking about that at a company,
I'm like, okay, I get where you're coming from.
You're getting from, you're coming from the old idea
of periods in schools and ringing bells
and bells in factories.
And you know, why do we have periods
and bells ringing in schools, right?
We know that.
We know because it came from the industrial age,
from the factory and so on and so forth.
Is this really where we want to go as humans?
Is this unleashing the human potential?
I don't think so.
So sure, there may be some roles and jobs,
but I think those are gonna change also.
Maybe we can jump and leapfrog also, Peter,
now into talking about humanoid robots,
because when people say, okay, Jack,
that's all well and fine for the kind of skilled work that you all are doing with physics and chemistry and
breakthroughs and new medicines for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's but how about
these distribution centers and warehouses how about light assembly what
are we gonna do there in terms of hours and so and so forth what I would say is
hold on to your seat Peter because big change is coming.
People are underestimating, underestimating the impact of humanoid robots.
It's moving very, very quickly.
Amazon has got a pilot right now with three or four of the robot companies.
We'll see announcements, I'm sure.
I have no information from Amazon, but I'm sure we're going to see announcements in the next 18 months from Amazon.
I actually know a lot about that.
I just wrote a report called the Metatrend report and folks can get it at metatrendreport.com,
which is I looked at probably about 40 of the humanoid robot companies and reported
in more detail on 16 of them and the predictions, right?
There are billions of dollars flowing in.
Obviously, Optimus 2 and Optimus 3 from Tesla.
We've got figure AI with figure 2 and figure 3 coming online right now.
We've got Apollo.
We've got Digit from Agility.
These are robots that are working in industry today.
The numbers, folks should realize, are the following.
These are two arms, two legs, 10-digit robots
able to do most all things.
They're enabled by multimodal AI,
meaning they can see and understand what they're seeing.
They can have a conversation with you,
understand what you're asking for, communicate back.
And the price points, these level of complexity, you can get to a price of typically dollars
per kilogram of weight for a system of that complexity.
And both Elon and the CEO, Brett Adcock of Figure AI, predicts at 30K for a robot that
you could buy it at. Translation that's
that's leasing it for 300 bucks a month which is 30 you know 10 bucks a day 40
cents an hour. What's it like if you're have a minimum wage job at 20 bucks an
hour and you're competing against a robot working 24-7 no drug testing no
problems with their boyfriends or girlfriends.
I think we're going to start to see a lot of those jobs transformed into some other job.
Yeah, look, I do think that we have to get ahead of this. Amazon has put together a billion dollar
fund to get ahead of this proactively and say this is a retraining fund.
They're going to start training the hundreds of thousands of people. I'll let them speak
for themselves. But just as an observer, I'm impressed by the fact that they're taking a
proactive stance. I'm sure Walmart will be doing that pretty soon. Walmart's got 2.5 million people
in that company, of which 2 million are folks working in the warehouses and distribution
centers and we know where that's going.
When we look at Zara and other companies who do fast fashion and have factories in just
five spots on earth, what's going to happen is you're going to start seeing basically
new factories pop up in all kinds of places that didn't pencil out before but now pencil
out with humanoid robots and guess what?
Those plants, those factories would be very near the main street where they're going to
sell those goods, taking fast fashion from 10 weeks now down to maybe five days.
Right?
That's going to be much faster fashion.
I know people are very excited about that.
I believe that.
So both of you guys, I mean, sandbox AQ, A stands for AI, Q stands for quantum,
just for folks to realize that,
deeply embedded in the AI world.
So let's talk about AI employees.
So, you know, there's predictions of,
I'm gonna be having conversations
and working with individuals who are fully AI agents,
and I'm gonna communicate with them, I'll be on communicate with them. I'll be on Slack
with them. I'll be on Zooms with them and they interact with me as if they are
employees but they're actually AI's. How far are we from that and how do you
think about integration into you into your workforce? It's happening already.
First of all, let's look at coding. Coding essentially is the parrot on your
shoulder, the co-pilot.
We and others are already seeing, say, a 10% increase in productivity.
Microsoft is reporting greater percentage productivities across some of the customers
who've really adopted it.
I think that's going to happen.
I think I would expect a benchmark of 25% increase in productivity in coding using an AI as your co-pilot.
So essentially that's an AI agent that you're interacting with and is helping you create
the code but also most importantly debug the code.
That's often what takes the longest in the coding process.
And also think about interactions.
As you know, recently there was a massive outage of more than 8 million computers because of the CrowdStrike update. That's something
where an AI agent, a little more sparts in the system, could have looked at that
interaction of that update and those systems and realized, hey, I think we
better not press this button on this update on a Friday and destroy the
entire planet. And so AI agents, I think, will help us in that way.
And so on the coding side, absolutely.
I think there'll be a lot of AI agents also
that will be really good at brainstorming with us.
I think it's really good as a Socratic dialogue
to have an interaction with an AI agent
as you're brainstorming a new feature,
as you're brainstorming a strategy., as you're brainstorming a strategy.
You know, again, it's not that the AI necessarily comes up with a strategy.
That's not really the expectation.
But I do think it's really cool to have that dialogue, have somebody really push you who's
not a human.
You know, the studies show now, Peter, that people are more willing to open up to a robotic
therapist, to an AI therapist than a human therapist.
They feel less judged.
Yes, and also they're not rushed.
You know, it's interesting,
there was a, one of the American Journal of Medicine
published a paper on empathy,
and the AI agents were judged to be like,
you know, I don't know, maybe it was 4X, maybe it was an order of magnitude, more empathic. Because of that reason, you don't feel judged by an AI,
and the AI doesn't say, I'm sorry, I've got another patient waiting for me. It just gives you as much
time as you want. That's extraordinary. I used to think that empathy was the last bastion of
human uniqueness, but perhaps not.
Yeah.
And then I think another way of looking at this is,
as you know, Peter, the kind of AI that's
being talked about right now that's
the obsession and the shiny object right now
is large language models.
And certainly, it's going to have a big role,
just like we said.
It's going to have a role in talking to us in a dialogue,
in helping us code.
That's all the large language models.
But we are pioneering and others now joining us
in pioneering quantitative models.
And maybe Nadia can talk about the interaction.
How do you see these two coming together?
The quantitative side that's so important
and the language side.
The language side of course trained on social media
comments, Reddit, cat pictures, great for some things,
but not necessarily right
to create a new drug or those kinds of innovations.
So AI agents who are quantitative AI agents,
Nadia maybe you can help us there.
Yeah, please tell us about what is an LQM?
An LQM.
So the way I think about LQMs is-
Which is large quantitative models, right?
Well, large quantitative models, that's right.
It's physics-based, it's first principles-based.
And so you are calculating from the ground up,
from first principles, the way atoms and electrons
and molecular properties behave in the presence of other atoms
next to them.
It's simulating matter effectively from the ground up
and using that data then to train ML models on. atoms next to them.
on existing data. And it's wonderful.
We have a ton of data,
and that is going to be a highly impactful space,
and we've seen it already,
but it will have its limitations,
and that's where we really see the possibility of LQMs
impacting new types of materials and batteries and chemistry
and creating new types of drugs and various things
that just can't possibly exist today.
Help us extrapolate way beyond what we know in the material universe.
Jack, you published recently a paper on sort of the breakthroughs you guys have had in
the recent past, which was impressive.
Do you mind just taking some of those off with Nadia's support?
Yeah, I'm going to talk about one or two of them and Nadia, please do so as well. I just want to first pick up on Nadia's support? Yeah, I'll talk about one or two of them and Nadia please do so as well.
I just want to first pick up on Nadia's point on first principles. Elon is very famous for coming
back to the idea of go back to first principles thinking and others I think are now also focused
on that and that's a big mantra for us. Don't just start with data that's out there, start to think
about what are the principles, what are the equations that can generate data,
pristine data, data that then talks
about that dynamic relationship of that electron
to that electron?
That is truly the first principle,
the principle of down to that subatomic level.
So really proud of the work of the team.
I'll just cite a few things that are happening right now
with quantitative models.
Let's take, for example, navigation. More and more in our world, Peter, and you know this,
you are so focused on space and aviation and so experienced there, you know that GPS is brittle.
GPS cannot be relied upon anymore. It's being jammed in large portions of the world. It's
out here and there. And so pilots around the world are having difficulty,
both in the civilian space and in the defense space.
And the team, a very small team at Sandbox AQ,
literally just about 11 people, again, using the three Cs,
using this approach that we talked about,
embedded themselves with various customers
who had this massive point of pain.
They'd been on site with the United States Air Force
again and again and again, flying up in their planes,
particularly the C-17.
The Air Force has spoken publicly about this,
so that's why we can talk about this today.
And just recently completed a two-year testing cycle
that resulted in the final C-17 run,
where they flew up with our AI
and the sensors. The sensors are feeding a huge amount of quantitative data about the magnetic
field of the earth coming from a quantum sensor and that data has to go into a GPU, an NVIDIA GPU
in this case, and have that AI that we developed reading that in real time Peter so that it can look at the map of the world the magnetic map and
Look at where the magnetic field is underneath that plane and then figuring out where it is in space
In you know in the airspace and sure enough we pass that taste what they do is they take you up in a c-17 Peter and
Without letting you know when it's going to happen, they shut off the GPS four times in that lengthy flight.
And you, your AI has got to navigate that plane.
But most people don't realize is that GPS is being spoofed in some places.
It's giving you the wrong signal, which can sort of drive you or fly you into territories
that you don't want to be in.
And no one's going to spoof in any way, shape or form
the earth's magnetic field, so.
Yeah, you'd have to have another earth
and bring it over here,
which I don't think will happen anytime soon.
But the point is that, that that's a breakthrough
that happened with a very small team.
Margaret Mead said, never underestimate the power
of a small team, a committed small team for change.
And sure enough, and that's the only thing that will.
And sure enough, that's what we have across Sandbox.
We were split into smaller teams that have their own ability to innovate and and
collaborate. So that's an example where I don't see how either return to office
would have resulted in that breakthrough or work from home.
There's no way that either of those would have resulted in this breakthrough
where we had to spend weeks on end at the customers,
we had to bring in experts from all around the world
to make this happen.
There's not many people who know how to bring together.
I think agility is the key word you're looking for here.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, it's the agility of your team,
the ability to form and reform
both in space and time as needed.
Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin.
Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin.
It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synolytic
that kills senile cells in your skin.
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And I think it's one of the most incredible products.
I use it all the time.
If you're interested, check out the show notes.
I've asked my team to link to it below.
All right, let's get back to the episode.
Nadja, maybe you want to talk about PFAS or some of the other breakthroughs we recently
announced.
Yeah, I'm worried about these forever chemicals and people don't realize we're
poisoning our world and as a mom and you know I bet you that's something you
think about. Please tell us. Absolutely. It very much hits close to home because
we know today that PFAS it's a set of chemicals that are unable to be broken
down. They're man-made, they're in the environment,
they're in our drinking water.
And we know today that babies are born with them.
I'm nine months pregnant and my baby
might be born with PFAS in his born stream.
You are nine months pregnant right now?
I am nine months pregnant right now.
Oh my God, thank you for joining us, wow.
Congratulations.
But, you know, I mean, there, thank you so much.
But it is such a problem for our industry.
One of the things that we are extremely proud of at Sandbox is that we were able to break
computationally for the first time in human history that bond energy of a PFAS molecule.
And that is the first step in figuring out how to degrade this from our environment,
but then also to create new alternative PFAS, right?
That have the same properties that we know and love so much.
We love our Teflon, you know, we love our waterproof coats
and things like that when it rains.
We love these materials.
They're very useful, but they're extremely toxic.
And so, you know, we're very hopeful that with simulation technology like the ones we've
built today and bringing together the teams to make these world records, to break them,
to continue to collaborate in this way on these breakthroughs are really, it's a proof
of our model here at Sandbox.
I want to talk about your
predictions Jack. You know I spoke about this a little bit before. What are your
what are your predictions for the future of work here? And you know people are
fearful of AI and humanoid robots taking their jobs. How do we deal with that? You
know interestingly enough all the predictions
thus far to date have proven false. You know, all of the ATMs that we thought were going to take away
all the banking jobs or more banking jobs than ever before, all the computers are going to take away
accountants jobs or more accounts than ever before. How do you think about this?
A few things first. So Peter, we're going to see huge divergence within every sector.
We're going to see winners and losers.
And we're going to see that happen
on the basis of both the use of AI or lack of use of AI
and also how they do the work they do.
So in terms of AI, if we see a company out there,
let's say, for example, take the automotive sector.
And we see a number of companies out there, and some companies will adopt AI. And of course,
most of the old companies will use large language models for customer service, and they're going to
have some productivity, some cutting of costs, probably measured in the single digit millions
to tens of millions. Great. That's table stakes, Peter. Everyone should be doing
AI-based customer service
and those kinds of areas.
Predictive maintenance, for example.
Again, everyone should be doing that as well.
But there'll be some automotive companies who say,
we're gonna actually use AI in this deeper way
to create the next product.
We're gonna create a new material.
We're gonna make the car out of a material,
for example, using more carbon composite as one
idea, that's going to lightweight my car so that whether I'm using gas or electric, whatever I'm
using, it's going to be more efficient. The same thing could be said in the battery and energy
industry. We're going to see that divergence as well. The same thing in pharma. There'll be
some pharma companies that take hold of this AI and use it to cut it from eight, 10 years down
to one to two years of preclinical
work and really have a high success rate in clinical trial.
And there's others that will be slow adopters.
And so that's the first divergence.
But the second vector of divergence is going to be how they do the work.
I'm going to put a bold, you wrote a book called Bold Peter, I'm going to put a bold
prediction out here.
Those companies in the big sectors of our economy
that choose to either go down the rabbit hole
of return to office only or work from home only,
I think they become the Kodaks and Westinghouses
and Polaroids of the future.
That's my prediction.
We can add Blockbuster, Blockbuster the list here.
Blockbuster and so on and so forth.
And so what I think is going to happen is
companies that really want to thrive,
companies that want a great workforce, companies that want to have a global footprint because
that's what their customer base is global, then they're going to choose a third way.
We're putting out one idea for a third way. People listening here, Peter, should maybe
think about their own third way and how to take the three C's and maybe combine them
in different ways. I don't think there's one size fits all. This works for us and I think others can take some of the elements. But
one big message we're trying to share, Peter, is don't get locked in. So here's my big message to
people who want to quote unquote play the AI space. How do I invest in the AI space? What company do
I invest in? It's actually a red herring
just to look at the AI companies themselves, Peter.
What I would suggest to people is
the bigger way to play AI
is to look at the biggest sectors of our economy,
finance, pharma, energy, so on and so forth,
and say, who are gonna be the winners and losers?
You're gonna see a vast divergence
over the next five to six years.
If you're talking about something in the warehousing distribution space, such as an e-commerce
or retail, are they going to adopt humanoid robots faster than their competitor?
Are they going to be more efficient in how they do that?
Agility.
Look how Amazon have been back to agility.
So this is what's not spoken about, Peter.
People get obsessed with the AI companies themselves and great to get
the attention. Thank you. Fantastic. But the bigger point not discussed is how are we going
to see this divergence in the biggest sectors of the traditional economy?
I agree. I do want to take your prediction here. What's going to happen with jobs here? Jacob? On jobs, let me start and then I'll turn to Nadja as well.
Look, I believe that AI will produce literally millions
of new jobs.
Yes, there'll be some displacement
within certain job categories where, for example,
if right now you're somebody who's
pick, pack, and ship in a warehouse,
I do think that an AI driven humanoid robot
will take that job.
And by the way, that's gonna save a huge amount
of ergonomic stress and injury onto humans.
And we've got to get proactive.
Again, Amazon being proactive,
I hope others start to do that as well to say,
hey, that person's job is going away.
So there are specific jobs that will go away,
but let's find a new
role for that person. Net-net over five to 10 years. I think the net is millions of millions
of new jobs, whole new job categories as well. So very optimistic about that. Nadja, get
your opinion too.
Sure. I mean, you know, the way I see this going is that we're just going to have more
human AI collaborations. It's just going to up level everyone's thinking.
It's going to up level people's roles.
It's going to create new roles, as Jack mentioned, and it will have new products, right?
We will have personalized technology solutions, personalized robots, personalized AI assistance,
personalized agents.
I think it's going to hit the consumer market in a pretty unique way in the future.
But what that will do to the workforce,
the employees to really focus us on critical thinking
and decision-making and outcomes-based metrics,
which are set up here with the three Cs
really empowers us to take advantage of.
Peter, let me add to that prediction,
make it even more pointed.
Today's global GDP is roughly 110 trillion per year.
GDP of the world, 110 trillion per year.
US is about 25% of that.
My prediction to you is that as AI flows through,
both on the language side and on the quantitative side,
creating new value, new products, new pharma,
we're gonna see a doubling of the GDP of the world.
Now, that's a bold prediction because what economists are used to is talking about a
2% increase in global GDP, a 3% per year increase.
That would take many years to get to a doubling.
That doubling is going to happen pretty soon.
This is something, Peter, you've talked about so many times, it's singularity in other exponential
and abundance in other places. We are not mentally prepared as a society right now. I agree with you. This is the roaring
20s from a multitude of different reasons. As soon as you get labor and cognitive costs diminishing
and dividing by zero leads you to infinity. It's an extraordinary world ahead.
Absolutely.
So I do think that the best organizations, if I can make a prediction, Peter, are going
to be outcome based.
They're going to treat people like adults.
They're going to take the best of multiple parts of these models and move ahead in their
own way.
They're going to make use of AI in all its forms, physically embedded AI, physical
form AI, which is robotics of all kinds. It could be a humanoid robot. It could be an
arm that's used. And we'll also see revolutions in terms of the interaction of humanoid, lighter
robots along with the big industrial robots that we're used to seeing. We're going to
see the use of AI in all kinds of community,
and also, again, in mental health as well.
There's a mental health and loneliness epidemic
in our country.
When we think about older people,
the idea of retiring has got to go away.
I'm not saying people should work forever
in the sense of the kind of work we think today,
but the kind of work you do, Peter, when you say you don't even feel like working, right?
Because you're doing what you love.
Anybody who wants to, a good argument for not retiring,
Google the correlation between retirement and death.
That's right.
As soon as you've given up on a purpose in life,
having a purpose is one of the single most important things
and having something to look forward to.
A friend of mine says,
having a future that's bigger than your past, right?
That is a vibrant life.
And hopefully as we see the health span revolution
materializing that is able to give people the vital energy
and you're not in pain,
we'll see people wanting to desire to work.
Cause our birth rate's been dropping,
we need that as well. I mean mean it's an extraordinary world ahead and
Peter let me just say if we could marry that longevity that we're getting with
the golden age of education and I'll ask Nadja to continue about continuous
education exactly so I have a friend 54 years old just became a doctor started
medical school at the age of 51, just graduated.
She's going to become a practicing doctor now, not because this is the best way necessarily
for her to earn money per se.
She wants to, she's dedicated to this idea of spending the next 30 years of her life
practicing medicine.
And that's a beautiful thing.
Let's encourage more of that, right? Where we want people to have second and third whole pursuits.
I'm not even using the word career
because I think that's an old term.
Nadja, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
I kind of think about it from the drug discovery side.
You know, one of the key areas for us is in neurodegenerative
and, you know, it's sort of our near term beachhead.
And as we solve for that, the next thing to go after is longevity, right? is in neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases and neurodegenerative diseases that affect us at the end of our lives. And if you live long enough, you will be subject to them.
And I think we will live through a world
with the help of Sandbox where we see these diseases
be treated very successfully.
And so then you look at life expansion,
and it's coming back to all the things
that you all were saying.
I mean, that is the ultimate final frontier of medicine.
It is extraordinary.
We're very fortunate at Sandbox AQ
to have one of our new partners and customers
is the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
And they've asked us to use our AI
to help the labs that they fund,
accelerate the breakthroughs,
accelerate the treatments, accelerate biomarkers. And we have the opportunity and the privilege just a few weeks ago to attend
the Michael J. Fox Foundation gathering where Michael J. Fox was there. I'm
getting emotional talking about this because it is an emotional subject. It is
very inspiring to see him, to see the 22, 23 years that he's dedicated to this.
He's raised over $2 billion in this period of time to galvanize, to invest in research.
And now AI is coming to help.
It's coming to accelerate the work that he has funded, that others have funded.
This is an incredible moment, Peter.
Peter, if I could turn the tables for a minute and ask you, you're somebody who speaks to folks like us,
you're somebody in touch with so many people at the edge.
What are you seeing from your vantage point
in the growth of the exponential organization,
be it a for-profit, be it a university, be it a nonprofit,
what excites you about this moment in time
to jump to the exponential organization?
Yeah, I appreciate that.
You know, one of my funds is a group called Exponential Ventures out of MIT with Dave
Blunden.
And what we're seeing, because we basically identify and find young teams out of MIT and Harvard because they're, they pull in from around the world and
they're there and they're what exactly you're saying they're in a foxhole situation where
they're finding out oh I like this gal, I like this guy, they work hard, they're smart and they
form sort of a nucleus and today the incoming MIT freshmen 70% want to start a company
All right, which is extraordinary never was that way and a lot of those are AI companies. And so I think there is a
Two different drivers today one that people want to do something that's meaningful
They just don't want a job. They want to contribute to society
They want to have the ability to be part of a massive transformative purpose.
And the second thing is they want to have the agility to live their life where they
want, how they want.
And I think old style companies trying to recruit into very structured formats are going
to have a hard time competing, just very fundamentally.
I think the tools of collaboration that were, listen, COVID gave us a gift, and that gift was
driving a new expectation of how we work, breaking the old model and giving us a set of
collaborative tools that everybody adopted. I think we're also
going to see this transformation hitting education too, because today we still have a very old school
educational model in elementary, middle, high school, college, all of that. So a lot of
transformation coming, how we work with each other. Agility for me is the number one
sort of measure of success. You know, if you multiply intelligence times agility, you get magic.
That's great, Peter. No, great to get that point of view as well. Also a shout out to our friend
Dov Seidman for writing the book called How. It was written before this period of time, so,
for writing the book called How. It was written before this period of time.
But he really focused also on integrity,
on the focus on making sure that when you're working
with people, there's openness, there's transparency.
I also got inspired by that book as well.
And I think you're right, Peter,
it's probably time for us to write this up,
to write up the three Cs, to write up the third way,
and to show people there are alternatives.
You don't have to jump into one bucket or the other and suffer the consequences.
I think you need to give the heads of HR, the employee base, the executive base,
a tool to use a data. A playbook, a guide.
Playbook, yeah, so that they have,
because today we just default
to the old ways of doing things.
It's our cognitive biases you spoke about earlier.
Let me just say to both of you, thank you.
Jack, I am grateful to call you a friend,
a board member, a trustee of the XPRIZE,
one of our most, you're a nuclear power source,
I call you that every time, the loud amount of energy, enthusiasm and-
The plutonium is right here.
Yeah, buddy, I know it is.
And Nadia, what a true pleasure to meet you.
You're brilliant.
And I look forward to deepening a friendship with you as well.
So everybody, here we are.
There's a new way of work.
It's the three C's approach
You know, I agree with what Jack and not have said, you know return to office
very limited
And working from home very limited
The question is how do you provide the agility to become an exponential organization to really employ?
Exponential entrepreneurs who are adults that you believe in,
you give them outcome focused objectives, and let them do their work unencumbered.
And I love what you said, Jack.
As a leader, whether you're running a division of AI simulation,
what a cool name that Nadia has, or whether the CEO of the company,
helping your team succeed
Breaking down their service leadership service leadership
Guys, thank you for all excited to have you back on on the moonshots podcast to hear the continued breakthroughs
And I love that forever chemicals are going to be
Broken down forever. No more exactly. That's right
That's right. Well great to be with both of you p Peter, thanks for hosting us. Nadia, thanks for joining today. Thank you guys. Thank you both so much for having us. Be well.