After Interviewing AI Founders, Here's What You Really Need to Know | EP #175
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Doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don't love it, you will give up before you succeed. If mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? If you don't believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there's no way you're going to succeed.

that you can sell it at the level that's required. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller, to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and they're believing you. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you all for coming tonight. I get to do a lot of really fun things in my role here, but this takes the cake. It doesn't get any better than this. So where you are right now, you're in Link Ventures office space. We're about a billion dollar venture fund. We invest almost entirely in MIT and Harvard teams. Everything is AI now. It's been at least 90% AI for the last couple of years. Most of the teams are upstairs above us. They're all sprinkled around. It's like a

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

I was undergrad getting a computer science degree. Peter had already gotten his bio degree from MIT. They went off to Harvard, got an HST degree, so MD, PhD, and then came back to MIT to take an aeroastro to get an aeroastro degree.

And so he was taking unified engineering, which is the hardest class that MIT has, having already gotten multiple degrees, so true glutton for punishment, while I was getting a computer science degree. So we lived together on campus and I've been inspired by a few people in my life, but at that age, Peter was by far the most inspiring person that I had met. And so it's been like a lifelong dream having Peter as a best friend all these years.

So Peter, you know, he's in town every now and then. Today happens to be one of those days. While he was on campus as an undergrad, he started Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS, which is still, I think, the biggest club at MIT. Pretty sure it is. And his good friend Jeff Bezos heard about it at Princeton and copied it and created SEDS Princeton. Then he graduated. He started International Space University, which is thriving today. This is going to be a long introduction. It is. It is. Because you've done so much.

I'll only add one more thing then. So then after that, he was the founder of XPRIZE. XPRIZE is, I'm on the board of XPRIZE. I get a firsthand view into what he's created there, but it's changing the world. Actually, I'll just use that as a way to hand off the mic to Peter to tell us about why you're in town this week in the first place. Yeah. Usually I'm the one doing the interviewing on my podcast, so it's nice to get someone else to do the work now. I was in town yesterday at the Time 100 Awards.

we were announcing our largest cash prize ever.

We gave away $100 million of Elon's money yesterday. It was the carbon removal XPRIZE. So we challenged back in 2001. We had had, so the XPRIZE Foundation has been around for 30 years. I started it in 1994 after reading B.

before many of you were born, after reading a book called The Spirit of St. Louis. And I found out that Lindbergh in 1927, coming up on the 100th anniversary of that shortly, flew from New York to Paris, not on a whim, but to actually win a $25,000 prize. And I'm reading this biography of Charles Lindbergh and I'm like counting the amount of money spent to win this $25,000 prize.

And it's crazy. It's $400,000 is spent by all the teams cumulatively to try and win this guy's $25,000 prize. And the most likely aviators to cross the Atlantic, New York to Paris, don't pull it off. In fact, Admiral Byrd, who was one of the great aviators at the time, first person to go to the North Pole,

on takeoff out of Roosevelt Field on the way to Le Bourget because he had overweighted his airplane with champagne and china so he could celebrate when he lands in, as if France would not have champagne and china. But Lindbergh, and no one would sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so worried that he would not succeed and they'd give their

their airplane or engine manufacturer a bad rep. So he goes to Ryan Aircraft in San Diego, which was building only building airmail aircraft. And he bought one of those to convert it. So that was the origin of the XPRIZE. I read this book and said, okay, I want to go to space.

You know, I was born in the 60s. It was the Apollo program and that scientific documentary called Star Trek that was inspired me. And I wanted to go spent a decade here at MIT and then realized I didn't want to go as a government astronaut.

I said, you know, my dream of spaceflight is not I get to go once during my career after five years of praying. I want to go every weekend. And so the only way to do that is commercial. And when I read Lindbergh's book, I said, I'm going to create a prize for private spaceflight. And so long story short, organized and launched a $10 million prize for the first person who could build a spaceship carrying three adults up 100 kilometers, come back with the same ship, do it again within two weeks.

And that launched the commercial spaceflight industry. Before that, the capital, the regulatory industry, none of that was there. Elon, Jeff Bezos were there early on supporting XPRIZE. And we've launched 30 Prizes since then, about $500 million of incentive purses that have driven about $10 billion in R&D. And

And yesterday, so every year we go through this process of designing prizes, voting up prizes. And many years ago, we said we need a carbon prize to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean at scale. And year on year on year, it was designed but wasn't getting funded.

And I remember on January 7th, 2021, putting aside all the political bullshit going on, Elon became the wealthiest human on the planet and was getting a lot of flack for not being philanthropic. So I texted him and said, hey, how about doing another XPRIZE? He had funded an XPRIZE for teaching kids in Tanzania reading, writing, arithmetic at scale. Long story, successful one.

And he said, what do you have in mind? I said, how about a carbon removal prize? He goes, how much? I said, $100 million. He goes, sure. That was it. We got the contract approved.

30 days later. And so four years later, we had 1300 teams enter that competition, approaching every Darwinian evolution in carbon removal. And we awarded six finalists and a grand prize winner who I gave a check for $50 million yesterday, which was amazing. You left out really... Yeah. Thank you.

He left out a really interesting nugget in that story, which is Elon is the first prize funder who said, here, I'll just give you the money up front. Yeah, he gave us not only just $100 million, but the operating budget, about $30 million, and gave us the capital, which is sitting in a bank account until yesterday, accruing interest. And funny, at the next XPRIZE board meeting, Peter said, I want to put all that into Bitcoin. I did. And I wish I had. Yeah, the board said, no, no, I don't think we're allowed to do that. And yeah.

If they'd said yes, yeah. It would be a different story. We'd be funding a lot more bigger prizes. Yeah. But we do have $300 million level prizes. So originally the first prize was $10 million and people laughed at that amount of money. You'll never raise it. An amazing woman, Anusha Ansari, who is now the CEO of the XPRIZE, very quickly, she's worth speaking about for a second. I came up with the idea of the XPRIZE in 1994.

Two years later, in 1996, I took a risk, as entrepreneurs do, and I announced the $10 million prize without having $10 million. I had two of my board members resign on the spot. We announced it under the arch in St. Louis, and we had TV cameras. It was an incredible event. I had raised $500,000, 25K at a time. Mm-hmm.

And we decided to spend the entire half a million on this massive PR launch event to announce this to the world. And it was incredible. Here's another idea I want to share as entrepreneurs here, that how you announce an idea to the world really matters. You see, in our minds, each and every one of us have a line of credibility, right?

If you hear an idea below the line of credibility, you dismiss it out of hand. Like your neighbor's kid wants to go to Mars tomorrow, not going to happen. Great. If you announce it above the line of credibility and this person has a possibility of pulling something off, you're going to follow and see what happens. But then there's this line of super credibility. If you can announce something above the line of super credibility, people go, oh my God, when's it going to happen? How do I get involved?

So I wanted to do that. And what I did was we stationed under the arch in St. Louis. I didn't have one astronaut on stage. I had 20 astronauts. I had Buzz Aldrin, a bunch of Apollo astronauts and shuttle astronauts. It was amazing. I had the head of NASA, the head of the FAA, the Lindbergh family,

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

And it was like, no, no, no. Why isn't NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off? And the clincher was, isn't someone going to die trying? That's what I would have said. No, you wouldn't. You would have said you would fund the whole thing, the Blunden XPRIZE. It would have been great. I didn't have the money. Not back then. I didn't have to take the credit. So...

I, five years in, and I literally was getting calls from the team saying, do you have the money? We're building our ships. Do you have the money? We're building our ships. And I was like, okay, trust me. There's an incredible book called How to Make a Spaceship, which is my biography and the story of the XPRIZE and the XPRIZE winning teams. Julian Guthrie, who is incredible, she wrote Larry Ellison's biography as well.

Anyway, long story short, I am one day reading Fortune magazine. It was the issue of the wealthiest 40 women under 40. I wasn't married at the time. It was another financing strategy. And I read about Anusha Ansari, who had just sold her company called Telecom Technologies to Sonos Networks for $1.3 billion. In her biography, it says she wants to fly in a suborbital flight into space.

And I was like, oh, my God, after 150 no's, this is the person. And it had been an asset sale of her company. So I'm trying to track her down where there's no one left. I finally find somebody and find her old assistant. And they're in there were vacationing. The whole family's vacationing in Hawaii for three months. And I got her assistant to promise me if I sent her a package that she would FedEx it to Anusha in Hawaii.

Long story, I was Anusha's first meeting when she got back to Plano, Texas, and they said yes. After 150 no's, it became the Ansari X Prize. Two years after the X Prize got won in 2004, I had James T. Kirk there at the launches, which was fun to have my childhood hero there.

But Anusha flew to the space station privately. One of my company's space adventures was brokering flights on the Soyuz, the Russians. And now she's come back as the CEO of the XPRIZE. She's an amazing woman. And we've launched...

we have 300 million dollar prizes going on one we were yesterday one in longevity to add 20 health years on your life and one on large scale car desalination at scale yep yep every week i study the 10 major tech meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead i cover trends ranging from humanoid robots agi quantum computing transport energy longevity and more

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It's not for you if you don't want to be informed of what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandus.com slash Metatrends. That's dmandus.com slash Metatrends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else. All right. So our first line of questions here is actually mindsets. I'm really going to enjoy this one with you. Before we get into it, how many people have read Peter's books? He's a four-time bestseller.

My favorite is actually "The Future is Faster Than You Think" because it's all about the convergence. Through most of technical history, there's one thing going on. Now, because of exponential curves, there are so many things going on concurrently and they all interact. And "The Future is Faster Than You Think" is all about the interactions and predicting interactions. The convergence, yeah. Yeah, convergence.

But before I get into mindsets, being a futurist, one of the reasons you've been so inspiring to me over the years is because you're willing to actually try to predict the future. And you and Ray Kurzweil started Singularity University together, and Ray Kurzweil is famous for predicting many things, including AGI in 2029.

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

And the 10 that are wrong seem really silly. And so it's a very fragile thing to actually be a futurist. And therefore, very few people actually put themselves out there and make predictions. And Peter is one of the handful of people I've ever met in my life that actually repeatedly and habitually do predict the future. And

almost always right. And it's incredibly valuable to me because so few other people are willing to do it. So, uh, so the topic is mindsets and what it takes to have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Yeah. So here's a question for you guys. If I were to ask you to,

Think about the most successful leader or entrepreneur in the world from your consideration. Whoever it might be, you know, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Elon, Steve Jobs. I don't care who you think. If you think about that person and then I ask you what made them a successful leader, was it the money they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had? Or was it the mindset that they had?

I hope you would agree it's their mindset. If you took away everything from them, but they retained their mindset, that they would likely regain the success that they've had. If that's true, if mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead?

You see, we tend to sort of adapt a mindset, absorb a mindset, given a mindset, right? Our brains are neural nets, right? Work that you did early on in neural nets, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And our neural nets are shaped by what we listen to, who we speak to, what we read. It's constantly shaping us.

And so I tend to be as careful about what I let into my mind as what I let into my body. And the question is for you to actively shape your mindset. And so one of my next books is called Mindset Mastery. I've been working on this forever. It's a personal passion project. But I think about the important mindsets, and they have different names, but I

The first one for me is having a purpose-driven mindset. You know, it's a great quote from Mark Twain who said, there are two important days in your life, the day that you were born and the day that you found out why. It's a beautiful idea, right? So I won't ask, I'll ask the question, but not force anybody to answer. Do you know your purpose in life? Do you know why you're here? You know, when I started Singularity University back in 2008,

with Ray Kurzweil. I had the first class and these were incredible students from around the world, the very best at the best institutions who had gone through this huge series of gauntlets to end up at our founding class.

And I asked them, how many of you know your purpose in life here? And a third of them raised their hands. I was like, I was aghast. I was like, oh, my God, the rest of you, I don't care why you came here. You have one mission this summer. It's to find out why you're here. What's your purpose? What is that thing that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night, drives you? What's what I call taking the step further is what's your massive transformative purpose? Yeah.

What's the thing that really. So we are emotional beings. We as humans are emotional beings. We don't do things just for cognitive purposes. We do things for emotional purposes. There is something that inspires you massively like Star Trek or Apollo did for me or something that just pisses you off so damn much that you refuse to let that continue. And you're focused on solving that.

Right. And either one of those awe or pain can be the energy of your massive transformative purpose. But you deserve to find that. If you're I created a a platform and on a large language model platform.

setup that I did called, it's called mypurposefinder.ai. And it will walk you through a series of questions if you're interested, and it will help you actually shape and verbalize your massive transformative purpose. So mypurposefinder.ai, if you want to play with that. Yeah, it works really well. We do it at XPRIZE Offsites, actually. It works really, really well. And, you know, actually, I want to ask you about this, too, because the

For those of you that are AI startup CEOs or founding teams, the process of being a successful entrepreneur has changed tremendously with social media. And when I was doing it at a very young age, you were pretty much invisible and you could stay invisible. Now you're out there no matter what. It's important for capital raising. It's important for recruiting. And I think Elon Musk has kind of reinvented the degree to which you can take this. But if you don't have a massive transformative purpose that's right on the tip of your tongue,

then you can't articulate it when the moment arises and you're on camera or whatever. And then you don't get the talent and then you don't get the capital. And so, you know, Peter's been saying this for many, many years, but it's more true today than it ever was before. So I think it's, you know, go ahead, Dan. Try the online exercise. Ask the LLM. How many of you right now could say, yeah, I can articulate my fundamental purpose? That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.

So founder dynamics. I'm just going to say, I dive into that. There's an exponential mindset, right? That I think you need to, you need to really contemplate. Are you able, our brains are very linear thinkers. We're designed in a linear fashion. Can the lion get to me before I get to the tree? Right. So understanding an exponential mindset is,

A moonshot mindset, one in which you're going 10 times bigger versus 10%. Most of the world is happy with 10%. 10% more revenue, 10% more clients, 10% less costs. That's success for most people. 10 times is 1,000%.

Right. And so can you create a moonshot mindset where you are able to conceive of something that's a thousand percent bigger, which typically means you're not starting where you are. You're starting with a clean sheet of paper. Right. So Astro Teller at Google X now X says if you are running a car company.

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

non-weaponized, an abundance mindset in which you realize there is just more opportunity next year. If you missed an opportunity,

It's fine. There's going to be more next year and that there is nothing truly scarce. Whatever you conceive of as scarce, I don't care what it is. There is a mechanism driven by technologies to create a level of abundance. And the final mindset I speak about, write about, and I spend a lot of my time right now is a longevity mindset. It's a belief that we're going to significantly extend the human lifespan and

from AI principally very shortly, I'm talking next five, 10 year timeframe. And your job is not to die from something stupid before these breakthroughs occur.

Yeah, if you don't read all of Peter's books, definitely the first chapter of Abundance is about the story of aluminum. Yes. And it's just absolutely brilliant story. It goes from being the rarest thing more valuable than gold to being 7% of the Earth's crust. Yes, all bauxite. Yeah, do you know the tip of the Washington Monument is aluminum, right? Because it was the most valuable metal at the time until we learned how to smelt it properly. Yeah, it's a great story.

So, let's see. I don't know if you want to riff on this or not, but we met with the MIT administration this morning. And clearly, they're, well, Peter thinks in exponentials. Very few people can visualize exponentials. Education is in the crosshairs now. My kids would much rather talk to an LLM and learn from it than go to class.

but they learn what they need to know. Curriculum isn't even coming close to keeping up with the rate of change of technology. It's not even trying. I throw it out there as a topic. I don't know if you want to talk about it on camera or not. Well, I'll talk. Sure, I'm not shy about any of my opinions. So Ray Kurzweil, we mentioned earlier, a brilliant individual. I had him on stage at, I run a large community called the Abundance 360 community, and I run a summit every year called Abundance Summit.

And he was on stage with me and Jeffrey Hinton at my event 18 months ago. And he basically, we're talking about sort of the speed of ramping things up. And he said, listen, we're going to see as much change in the next 10 years, 2025 to 2035, as we saw between 1925 and 2025, right? The next 10 years, we see a century worth of progress, right?

And by reference, just to remind you, because it's a distant memory of what life was like in 1925, penetration of electricity and telephones in the U.S. was only 30%. 30% of homes had TV and a party line. I mean, not TV, electricity and a party line. And the most advanced tech back then was the Ford Model T. So imagine how far we've come since then to today. And what is life going to look like in 10 years?

if that level of progress occurs. I mean, it's truly unfathomable. And so my biggest concern is that no educational institution is preparing any of us for that speed of change. Not close. Definitely not our middle schools and high schools. And I would have hoped an institution like MIT would be doing that, but maybe not. Well, yeah, quick survey, especially for the young entrepreneurs in the crowd.

Alright, so, Thiel Fellowship, Z Fellows, Y Combinator Acceptance, MIT degree, Harvard degree. Which would be more important to you to get? So think about it for a second and I'll run down the list and so you get one vote. So Z Fellows, any takers? Y Combinator Acceptance? Oh, I got some Y Combinators. Thiel Fellowship.

There you go. So one of the investments we made, Mercore, they were freshmen or sophomores, I think, at Georgetown and Harvard. They got the email saying, I'll give you $100,000. Teal Fellowship, you win. Give you $100,000 right now, but you have to drop out and start a company. Two years later, the company's worth $2 billion. They have $100 million of revenue, doing $20 million on the bottom line. So the Teal Fellowship, I don't know exactly how you get it, but it arrives in your inbox and you get $100,000 with it. Okay, so I got some teals in there. Harvard degree?

Nobody. MIT degree? All right, a little bias here. Yeah, so, I mean, if I'd asked that question three years ago, it would have been like, of course, the degree. Now you can see the trend line, you know, drifting in that direction. There are other credentials that

that are starting to matter to people even more than that degree. The problem is that the time between matriculation and graduation is infinite in terms of progress. And so ultimately, your MIT degree is learning how to learn and how to socialize and making contacts. It's not what you actually learned. So 27 time founder and co-founder?

So 27 samples, that's a lot of samples. One of the things I was telling the teams earlier today is if you think about Ford Motor Company, when Ford started, they made cars. What does Ford do today? They make cars. Okay, look at the magnificent seven tech companies.

Every one of them does something today that's very different from when they started. So look at Apple. What did Apple make originally? Actually, the Apple I was a box of chips you assembled together. The Apple II, which I had as a kid, it's a desktop PC. Then the laptops came along. Then now today, 90% of the revenue comes from the iPhone. It wasn't even a concept when Apple started. And so tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves now.

And what matters over the long run in a tech company is not what your business plan is today, but the founder dynamics, the team dynamics, the culture that continually innovates. But now, you know, when I talk about Apple, I'm looking really in the rear view mirror. Look in the future and the rate of change.

So love to get your ideas on some of that. I mean, I think the most interesting companies are the founder-led AI or tech-first companies that... And it's so hard for an existing company...

to retrofit itself. It's nearly impossible. But what you do get is a founder-led tech company where the founder says, "Nope, stop doing that. We're now only doing this." So you get that with Zuckerberg, you get that with Musk, you get that with a few other companies.

But that level of like, you know, full body right turns are what is required. Otherwise, I mean, I was amazed when Bezos said at a shareholder meeting in 30 years, we'll be gone. Mm hmm. Yep.

Well, the Tesla reinvention as a robotics company, and you know Elon very well, that to me is right at the point where any... Actually, I met with a woman yesterday who's from Bridgewater who talked about inshittification. She said, at Bridgewater, we talk about public companies, the founders take it, they get it to a certain level, and then the inshittification sets in. All that means is that the professional bureaucrats start coming in, the founders gradually leave, nobody really notices, but then the company is inshittified.

And so here you've got Tesla right at the point where you knew the stock had peaked and it's going to come down because it's a car company. No, we're not. We're a robotics company. And that to me is the definition of the founder is still there. Well, it's even more extreme in SpaceX where when Falcon 1 flew, the first few times it flew, it failed.

And Elon and the team borrowed enough money to make a fourth flight, and Falcon 1 succeeded on the fourth flight. And he flew it a number of other times. They got a contract for Falcon 9. And then he shut down the Falcon 1 line, right? Burned those ships. And what he went on to say, as soon as we get Starship flying, we will shut down the Falcon 9 line.

line, the most successful launch vehicle ever in human history. Right. And it takes that level of leadership to be able to to make these right hand turns and say, we're going to put we're putting everything into that. Right. And the same thing with Starlink. Well, I was telling people in class on Thursday mornings that they're spending way too much time on their plan and way too little time on their networking and team building because you're in this incredibly talent dense environment here.

And it's rare. If you take advantage of it while you've got it, you'll make lifelong friendships, lifelong connections, and you'll be able to build many things together. If you let it fritter away while you grind away on your business plan, you won't get that opportunity again later. And a single individual can make all the difference in the world in your company. A single individual. I'll give you an example. So George Church at Harvard Med School, one of the genetic professors, brilliant individual.

area in synthetic biology, he had been focused on bringing back the woolly mammoth for many years. Talking about it, talking about it, there was a nonprofit and so forth. He meets a guy named Ben Lamb, who has no background in biology. He's a software engineer. He becomes enamored with George. He becomes enamored with George's mission of de-extinction. Starts colossal four years ago.

And today it's a $10 billion company that's brought back the dire wolf. It's bringing back next to Dodo and Tasmanian Devil and, you know, and of course the woolly mammoth, but, and has spun out three other companies. It's the difference a single entrepreneur CEO can make. So your job is always to find the smartest people on the planet and

to partner with you. I will happily hire anybody smarter than me. There's a coming wave of technological convergence as AI, robots and other exponential tech transform every company and industry. And in its wake, no job or career will be left untouched.

The people who are going to win in the coming era won't be the strongest, it won't even be the smartest. It'll be the people who are fastest to spot trends and to adapt. A few weeks ago, I took everything I teach to executive teams about navigating disruption, spotting exponential trends a decade out, and put them into a course designed for one purpose, to future-proof your life, your career, and your company against this coming surge of AI, humanoids, and exponential tech. I'm giving the first lesson out for free.

You can access this first lesson and more at dmandus.com/futureproof. That's dmandus.com/futureproof. The link is below. Speaking of smartest people on the planet, I'm going to do this speed style first and then we'll come back. Okay. So in your travels through life, you've met pretty much all of the big shots in entrepreneurship and I've got their names listed out here.

So I'll give you a name, you give me one sentence, and then we'll go back to the topic. Okay. Ready? Yeah. I'll go in reverse order here. Richard Branson. Frustrating. Frustrating, all right. So when I was trying to pitch, when I was trying to raise $10 million for my space flight XPRIZE in the beginning, of course, Richard Branson's the first person I go to. And I fly out there and...

and pitch him for Virgin Galactic, no, Virgin Atlantic to become the, Virgin Atlantic Space Flight Prize. He says no. Two years later I go back and pitch him for Virgin Mobile. No. The day that the X Prize got won, October 4th of 2004, after I had spent six years pitching him, he's at the airport in Mojave Airport where the winning flight takes place,

signing a contract to buy the rights for the winning technology after turning me down twice for funding the 10 million. Years later he goes, "Oh my God, I should have funded the $10 million. I spent $500 million trying to build Virgin Galactic instead. It would be much cheaper to do it." - God, I had no idea. - He's brilliant and charming and he just frustrated me. - All right, we're gonna give up on the speed style then. I'll just go. All right, this one drives me crazy actually. How many people know Tony Robbins?

Okay, good. Very glad to see that. In class every semester, it's like three people.

And like, and you know, what drives me nuts is that the younger, you know, a lot of the teams now are like high school freshmen in college. They're really young and they think the body language you want as an entrepreneur is cool, like too cool for school, which is a good way to survive high school and a terrible way to start a company. The body language you want is exactly Tony Robbins, relentless enthusiasm, never ending. Extraordinary confidence. Your capital raising story for XPRIZE is a good example. You have to

over, you have to give the same pitch 150 times enthusiastically. Yes. So Tony is the master of that. So Tony's your co-founder. Yeah, I've had the pleasure of knowing Tony. We were on the same stage, got, I don't know, 15 years and became best friends. We've started a couple of companies together. And he is one of the most beautiful human beings that I know. He gives of himself 24-7 over and over in the most relentless schedule on the planet.

And people don't realize the level of philanthropy that he puts forward in terms of feeding people, growing trees, energy systems. I mean, I'm just blown away by his level of brilliance and authenticity. What you see is what you get.

And it's just extraordinary. Yeah. Drew Halston gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2017, I think it was. Everyone knows Drew Halston, founder of Dropbox?

That's also one that's kind of dropping off the curve for some reason. He gave the best commencement address I think ever. But he said, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And that's true whether you want it to be true or not. So choose those five people really, really wisely. And if you think about, well, what attitude would I want those five people to have?

Relentless enthusiasm. Yeah. Relentless is, yeah. It really is. Think about this. Do you want to spend time with someone who is kind of depressive and low energy or someone who's just like, you know, just vibrant and you love spending time and they're excited about life and they're, I mean, it is contagious. Yeah. And so make yourself that person that people want to spend time with. All right. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They're one person in this church. Yeah.

So years ago when the XPRIZE got won on October 4th, 2004, you guys remember the Google Doodle? So Google Doodle was changed on that day with Spaceship One flying over the Google logo and this alien spaceship up there looking at us. I loved it. And I got invited to go up to the Googleplex to go give a presentation.

And I did to the entire, it was like 2,000 Googlers back then. And afterwards, I'm standing in line answering questions, answering questions, answering questions. And this kid in a black T-shirt and a backpack comes up and goes, hey, I'm Larry Page. Let's have lunch. So I...

befriended him. We flew a number of zero-g flights together. I pitched him and he joined my XPRIZE board and became a benefactor. He brought in Sergey and Eric Schmidt as well. And just very brilliant. You know, he's unfortunately gone MIA to a large degree. Sergey or Larry?

Larry mostly. Sergey has been a little bit, but he's back now with Gemini's training. But what I get frustrated about, and I'm public about this, is individuals like Larry and Sergey who've got $140 billion to their name. It's like, excuse my French, why the fuck aren't you solving the world's problems with that money? It really pisses me off.

When you have such levels of retained capital and the money is not being put to work. I mean, okay, fine. Set aside a billion dollars for your kids, ruin their lives. And then, you know, I don't know, launch a hundred billion dollar X prizes, you know, invest in, in people changing the world. I mean, it's,

Money is a form of energy that should be put to active use to make the world a better place. And I just, I don't, you know, there's so many billionaires out there

I had this conversation with Mark Benioff, who is one of the billionaires who does incredible good and invests mostly in environment and in biology. He backed Dr. Yamanaka, who did the Yamanaka factors, and he's backed a number of Nobel laureates. Again, Mark and Lynn are amazing. And this conversation with him and Tony, and I said, you know, you've got the giving pledge.

which I don't get the giving pledge. Giving pledge says I'm going to give half of my money to a nonprofit before I die. Okay, that doesn't mean it's going to do anything with the money. What I really want is people to participate in an impact pledge. Like I pledge to solve, you know, eliminate hunger in Tanzania, whatever you want. And giving money is the easy part.

It's using your intelligence that made the money to go and solve the problem, which is really the highest value. So if we had, you know, I don't know how big the Forbes list is right now, you know, a thousand plus multibillionaires. I mean, incredible opportunity for the world to be uplifted.

This next one is really important to me. So Jeff Bezos, and he's been an important connection point for the two of us. Because when I was at MIT, I was the only person on campus doing neural networks. It was kind of not cool around MIT. But I got support. MIT is infinitely flexible and friendly. And I got support to use the biggest computer in the world to build the first commercial neural networks.

So launched the company, was selling, ended up with Walmart as a customer. And then I got a call from Rick Dalzell, who ran data warehousing at Walmart. He called me one day and he said, hey, I just joined a little startup on the West Coast. You may not have heard of it. It's called Amazon. I said, oh, yeah, I've heard of it. It's small. You know, it's about to go public. He said, I want you to fly out here and meet our founder, Jeff Bezos. I think you guys are going to love each other. So Amazon became our biggest customer. But the very first time I met Jeff Bezos, we were walking around their headquarters and

And he said, "Do you know Peter Diamandis?"

And I said, yeah, we were roommates at MIT. He goes, oh, wow, because I started SEDS at Princeton. So that little bonding moment helped a lot in making them our customer. Then they grew like crazy, so we grew like crazy. And it all worked out really, really well. But I think Jeff is the greatest organizational genius of all time. I've spent personally about $200,000, $300,000 now interviewing former Amazon executives, trying to reassemble everything he did along the way into our training program here.

But you've known him for well since teenage days, I guess. Well, yeah, since college. Yeah, I started SEDS here at the Student Center

I was very, very frustrated that NASA was mortgaging my future and was moving glacially. And so I ended up creating, I was at Theta Delta Chi, at TDC here. And when I got to campus, I found out there was no student space organization at MIT. I said, that's ridiculous. And I was like, okay, I'm going to start one.

And I realized I needed to get five signatures to start a club on campus. - Didn't know that. - Yeah, and so I went to five of our fraternity brothers. And so it was like, okay, I'm gonna call it Student Space Society or Space Cadets at MIT. Scamit was one of the names we came up with. And then SEDS stuck, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

And this is, I wrote a letter to Omni Magazine, which no longer exists, Analog Magazine and Astronomy, saying, you know, we students need to band together to guarantee our future in space because I don't trust NASA to do that for us. And I

At our house, I had no idea the articles got published. And, you know, the mailbox, my mailbox was stuffed with letters one morning. And it was letters from students around the world saying, I want to start a chapter. I want to start a chapter.

And so we had like 104 chapters coming out of those. And one was from Princeton. And Scott Scharfman and Jeff Bezos had gotten the chapter going there. Years later, when Amazon started, I went and had a coffee with Jeff in Seattle. And I was like, "Jeff, what's this Amazon thing? I thought you wanted to do space." And he goes, "Yeah, I'm gonna do Amazon first, make some money, and then spend it in space."

An easy one-two plan. And it worked. He's like, just like, he's executing on that perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. And incredibly brilliant entrepreneur. Incredibly focused entrepreneur. Yeah. And last on my list, we've already talked about him a little bit, but Elon Musk has kind of redefined what it means to be an entrepreneur and how much you can do concurrently in life. Oh, my God. So he's on my board at XPRIZE for four years now.

And from 2004... So how I got him on the board... So I'd known Elon for some time. I had pitched him originally on funding the X Prize instead of the Nushan Sari. I was going to say the Musk Prize. And I actually tried to talk him out of starting SpaceX. I said, look at all these rockets blowing up. Just fund my $10 million prize instead. Guaranteed you pay the winner. He still chides me for having tried to convince him to not start SpaceX. And...

And so finally, where was I going with this story? So, hmm. We'll come back to you. Something about Elon. Something we know we're going to be curious for the rest of our lives about. Elon Nugget. Anyway, so he starts SpaceX. He continues, oh yeah, I am going to meet with Larry Page for the second time, and I

I'm like gonna ask Larry to join my board at XPRIZE. I was like, how can I get Larry to join my board at XPRIZE? And so one of the things I realized about boards, if any of you are on any boards, is I'm on boards because I enjoy spending time with the people there, right? It's a chance to meet with them on a quarterly basis. I get a chance to meet with Dave. And so I'm in the parking lot at Google

about to go and meet with Larry and I call Elon and say, "Hey Elon, I'm about to meet with Larry Page, invite him on the board. Would you get on the board of XPRIZE? Because if you're on the board, I think it'll increase the probability that he'll be on the board." And he said, "Sure." So that's how I got Elon on my board. No shit. And then four years later he calls me and he says, "I have to drop off the board." This is 2008. He says, "I've got to focus on SpaceX and Tesla."

I'm dropping off of all boards. And of course that lasted for like a microsecond. - Exactly. - And then 10 other companies started. - Any other takeaways on how he's redefined what it means to be a CEO, just in terms of doing Saturday Night Live or being in social media constantly? - I think one important element there is

Some of the most successful CEOs take on a brand of their own. They become the mechanism by which they can promote their company from an orthogonal point of view. At the end of the day, your company is searching for attention in this attention deficit economy.

And so how you can either get it by having an amazing product, having an amazing brand, having great stunts. But one of the other elements is can you have a CEO who is super highly visible and is able to penetrate the noise that's out there? So Elon's very much done that. You know, I've worked on this through my, you know, Mood Shots podcast, my Meta Trends blogs, my books, my other things.

Because if I do that, I can support, you know, Link Expansion Ventures. I can support the XPRIZE. I can support my company's found life and such. You know, I'm going to add one to the list. It's not on the list here, but I think it's directly relevant to what you just said. Sam Altman. So, you know, in the history of tech, it's more, I'm going to raise some money. I'm going to build something. I'm going to prove that it works. I'm going to start selling it. Then I'm going to raise more money to expand and grow.

But now in tech, you have these areas where something clearly will work. And, you know, LLMAI being a great example or nuclear power to fund a data center that will have a gigawatt or two gigawatts of power. But you can't build it or demo it or start selling it. You need to sell the vision way ahead of the construction. And Sam has reinvented

The level you can take that to. - And storytelling, yeah. - Yeah, storytelling. I think that's gonna be a far more important part of entrepreneurship in the future just 'cause the nature of innovation lends itself much more toward that design than toward the design of building Ford Motor Company from scratch. - We are still human beings and we convey information through story. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller, to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity

that people are leaning in and they're believing you. And in order to get there, you have to believe in yourself at that level. If you don't believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there's no way that you can sell it at the level that's required.

Right? And so I was on at my Abundance Summit this past year. Rana was there, Dave was there. I had Palmer Luckey, which was a fun conversation. I'm going to do a podcast with him next week again. And I had Travis Kalanick. And we're talking about when do you give up on your startup? I don't know about you, but of my 27 companies, startups, there's a number of them.

that I rode that horse into exhaustion. I died with me on the saddle and I should have given up. And the question is, when do you give up on something that you're passionate about? One of the times you give up is if you don't believe in yourself anymore or you don't believe, you cannot fake that. You have to believe it. You have to believe in yourself and believe what you're doing. A quick aside, you probably heard me speaking about Fountain Life before.

And you're probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about fountain life? And the answer is no, I won't. Because genuinely, we're living through a healthcare crisis. You may not know this, but 70% of heart attacks have no precedence, no pain, no shortness of breath.

and half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage three or stage four, until it's too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Kapp, and Bob Haruri, founded Fountain Life.

a one-stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span. Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com slash Peter and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. I have a whole bunch more questions here, but I actually want to make sure that we get any burning questions from the crowd. We happen to have Alex Wozniak-Gross with us tonight. He's the

Only guy who can say he got three degrees from MIT in four years, math, physics, and computer science. And then MIT said, no, never again. We're banning this. So he can carry that credential for the rest of his life. And he's an incredibly brilliant and sweet man. And always has a good question on top of his mind. I'm sure tonight's no exception. Yeah? Kick us up.

Hi Alex, good to see you, pal. Peter, good to see you too. I'll give you two questions, if I may. Sure, of course. So one topic heavy on my mind today that you alluded to already, abundance and the weaponization thereof. Yes. Do you think that we are finding ourselves in a world where as...

singularity or whatever approximation you may or may not believe in approaches where it becomes possible for the great powers of the world to selectively weaponize abundance for hegemony and if not why not and if so which form of abundance do you think will be weaponized first? Oh my god.

So I have zero doubt that we're heading towards this world. So back in 2012, I wrote a book with Stephen Collar called Abundance. The future is better than you think. We just sold and just finished writing the follow on, which we're calling the survival guide for the age of abundance. Because one of the things is we have created an abundance of everything, both good and bad.

So I do believe we're heading towards a world in which you can have anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. One of my greatest concerns is the dissolution of purpose. So if you can have anything you want, anytime you want, can we still retain the idea of a deep emotional purpose?

for our lives. There's an incredible experiment done in the 1960s. Did we talk about the Universe 25 experiments? Do you know what the Universe 25 experiments are? This was done in

one of the large medical centers in New York in the 1960s. An experimenter had done sequentially over the years, this was the 25th time he did this experiment, where he took a population of rats and he created utopia for the rats. This was, he put in a number of breeding pairs and

the universe that they were in had all of the food, all the water, all the nesting, everything they needed, and he saw normal exponential growth. But before they saturated the population, what occurred was this very rapid die-off, and the entire population died every time because there was no challenges for them.

And so it's like the idea of the unchallenged life is not worth living. It's anybody of you who play video games or have kids who play video games, right? That video game is so finely tuned to not be too easy where you give up or not be so hard that you can't win. It's just right. So on the thesis that we're living in a computer model, which of course we are, it's just beautifully finely tuned.

But what happens if everything becomes available all the time and we have true maximal abundance of anything you want because nanotechnology and AI and robotics and 3D printing and all the accoutrement of exponentials makes it possible for us? How do we up level our challenges? Not quite the weaponization of abundance that you were speaking of, but this is on my mind. You have a second question? Maybe I didn't defer. All right. All right.

Hi, wonderful conversation. Hi there. Nina Heider. I follow up related. As a geneticist, evolution is very slow for our species. And so if we think about, and I typically, technology advances at an exponential pace where we haven't quite reached our capacity nor near perhaps. However, there will be a point perhaps where we do reach that.

And if you can comment further on abundance and not just weaponizing because, you know, in your rat example you gave how they die off, there's good and bad, right? Our emotional IQ, our different

...product of DNA and environment and our different experiences which we can see in today's world of both the most decrepit human behavior as well as the most amazing human behavior. How do you see the future evolving in this world so that we can reach even closer to a utopia rather than... and do we need to go through this complete mass loss in order to have it?

So there is a wide variety of future scenarios that humanity is going to have before it. One of them that I find fascinating that I wrote about in my last book is a world in which we are all connecting ourselves to the cloud.

where our neocortex is connected to the cloud and I am, if you would, you know, through some version of BCI and I've seen some incredible recent versions of high bandwidth BCI. We talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions earlier. One of the predictions he made, which was like, Ray, you've got to be wrong on this one. No way it's going to happen, was high speed BCI by the early 2030s, but I've seen it.

I've seen it, it's coming, but now imagine I connect myself to the cloud and you connect yourself to the cloud and you all connect yourself to the cloud and now we are connected to each other. So you are a collection of 40 human trillion cells and each of those cells is an individual life form and you operate as a single consciousness of you or me.

Imagine that we have 8 billion people now connected through this mechanism, becoming conscious on what I call a meta-intelligence. I find that as a fascinating potential future scenario. I'll leave it at that for the moment.

do a john werner style here in a second to collect as many questions as possible before we do that we've got a really cool couple of mit uh agentic ai startup guys here you guys want to ask a question yeah here catch i think i'm curious about you keep bringing up

this idea that we might be going too far in technology in some ways? I don't think I said that. Not too far, but in the sense that if we solve all the problems humans have no challenges to face. Things like this. And I guess I wonder at what point do you develop technology and the point you brought up about uploading your brain to the cloud, is there a point that's too far?

Is there some metric we can use to figure out if we've gone too far in some direction and it's potentially dangerous? - So I don't think there is any on/off switch and I don't think there's any velocity knob. I think we are accelerating at a pace which is unconstrained. We're spending a billion dollars a day or is a billion dollars a day being invested in AI today?

And it's driving, you know, super exponential breakthroughs and digital super intelligence, if it isn't right on the edge, is here very soon thereafter, which will just accelerate everything even further. So there is nothing that's going to slow this down, I hope, because the things that can slow this down are not things I want to live through. Yeah.

But I do think it's on us, on our responsibility to look at how we up-level the challenges we take on. So I close my next book on abundance with a look at how do we go 1,000x bigger in our dreams?

You know, Alex, you and I talked about the human race coupling with AI, that there is a moment in time here as AI is taking off. You know, think of the movie Her, and we humans are sublinear at best. You know, do we couple and accelerate with AI? We're giving birth... AI is a new life form. It is a new species. Will we hybridize with them? I mean, these are the conversations, I think, that are very real.

I don't think anybody on the planet today truly understands how fast things are going to get in the next four years and the implications thereof. Clearly not in 99.999%. And so there's going to be some disruptions as a result of that.

So we have time for maybe two more questions, but I want to do this again John Werner style. We'll pick three, just yell them out. Peter, answer any subset you want of the three, and then we'll do another batch of three, and then we'll have to wrap it up. So fire away.

Just yell it out. Okay. So what is- Go ahead and get a microphone so we can record it properly. Okay. Yeah. I flew this morning to see you. Thank you. And because you changed my life, and I read that the future is faster than you think, that's why I wanted to come to MIT and begin at MIT alone. Amazing. I appreciate that. Thank you. Then I'm passionate about solving climate change.

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

What are you most excited about? Longevity. Yes. Longevity. Okay, longevity. So you said that we're going to see a century worth of change in 10 years, but there's a grounding of the physics of human change. I'd like to get a better sense for the mediums in which that change is going to happen through. Is it just through mobile phones again, where Instagram to call because it could be the brain?

So in reverse order, I was having this conversation with Alex earlier and I agree with him. I think we're going to see AI make the most profound discoveries in fundamental math and physics ever that will unlock a century worth of progress in some small number of years.

You know, we just saw the Nobel Prize given to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold. I think that's the beginning of a long line of AI-driven Nobel Prizes. And the ability for AI to hypothesize questions and then run the experiments and solve them and come up with, you know, sequential and adjacent breakthroughs is going to be staggering.

It's literally like a civil advanced alien civilization landed on Earth and just disclosed all of its discoveries to us because it is exactly that. So that's going to be fascinating. Longevity. I spent half my time in longevity. And I think that it is we're in the midst of a health span revolution.

We just saw Dario, the founder of Anthropic on stage at Davos saying he expects that we will be able to double the human lifespan in the next five to ten years. Crazy. I was just with David Sinclair this morning at Harvard Med School looking at the research they have on epigenetic reprogramming and I can't disclose it but it's shocking.

We just saw Sir Demis Hassabis talk about being able to cure all disease within a decade. So there's something definitively happening here. The human being never evolved to live past age 30. For as long as Homo sapiens have been around, two, three hundred thousand years, that was our average lifespan. And then

We hit a number of benefits from pasteurization, better sanitation and antibiotics and move the needle. Now we're moving the needle as a result of AI. Another point we made, right, we're going to begin to model the human cell and I will know this is my cell, this is my tissue, this is my organ system, this is me. And based on my genetics, this is my model and I'm going to make these tweaks.

The reason that Falcon 9 flew the Dragon capsule to the space station perfectly the first time wasn't dumb luck. It wasn't just intelligence. They modeled the shit out of it. And then knew exactly how it was going to work. And they ran it in silico 10,000 times. And so we're going to begin to be able to run your biology in silico.

Crazy, no one thought possible, just around the corner. Thank you for your kind words. I think the climate crisis and all of that is going to fall

as a gift out of digital superintelligence. Like it or not, want it or not, it will be just like literally, you know, longevity falls out, climate crisis, you know, we're going to see new materials that are being enabled.

We just awarded, you know, obviously this $100 million on six different approaches for carbon sequestration at gigaton scale. That was the important part. But energy, yeah, we're going to drive energy because we need it, need it, need it, need it. But then that energy is going to drive the, you know, we are living in a universe of an infinite amount of energy. There's lots of energy out there, right? It's just not in a usable form yet.

and we're gonna, you know, whether it's just solar or fusion or zero point energy or whatever it is, it's coming. It's there and the breakthroughs in physics are going to open all of these doors and it'll be, I think it'll be shocking. It's like you wake up, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

it will be one of those every day i get the strangest compliment someone will stop me and say peter you have such nice skin honestly i never thought i'd hear that from anyone and honestly i can't take the full credit all i do is use something called one skin os1 twice a day every day the company is built by four brilliant phd women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin i love it and again

I use this twice a day, every day. You can go to oneskin.co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's oneskin.co and use the code Peter at checkout. All right, back to the episode.

All right. Well, we'll be exactly 12 hours since we got together at MIT this morning. So I promise I'll let you off the hook after just we'll do one more batch of three. OK, that's great. And then are you OK? Yeah, totally good. All right. And then Alex, it's 530 on the West Coast. All right. I promise to you it's.

Yes.

There's too much food and where there's starvation. We have more people dying from obesity than starvation. It's crazy. So the question is, in this next generation of abundance, will these humans overcome our own human limitations to share? That's a great question. Right behind you. Yes. Behind you.

Hasn't come up yet, quantum computing, the positives and negatives that are possible around the corner. Yeah. Very nice. Do you want to do another batch of three after this? Yeah, sure. All right. One more. All right. Allison, you're going to do the next one. I'm going to take it. If you had small people... I have two 13-year-olds. Okay. So what do you do every day to instill in them that deep...

purpose? And what stories, you say we need other storytellers and we risk losing that deep sense of purpose. So what stories are you telling the youngest people to help them cultivate this new kind of purpose that you allude to? Yeah, that's a great question. Kids, quantum, and abundance. More on abundance. So on the kids front, first of all,

I think the single most important thing I want for my kids isn't for them to learn how to program, isn't for them to become space cadets, it's for them to find their purpose in life. Right? So it's like when I was growing up, my parents desperately wanted me to become a physician, which I did. I went to medical school around the corner here to make them happy.

And my fourth year of medical school, I was running two companies. I got a copy of my diploma. I shipped it to my dad and said, okay, obligation complete. I don't want my kids doing anything for me. And I tell them all the time, your job is to find what you love, what it's passionate, what you're passionate about. The second thing I want for them is to learn how to ask great questions.

to be questioning everything. So when they go to school every day, when I drop them off, whatever, I say, "Listen, ask great questions today." We joke about that. It's become... So I do try and incentivize them to be, you know, to question both authority but question what they hear. You know, you can call it prompt engineering if you want, but we're heading into a world where

You're going to be able to know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. I mean, just think about that. I can know the average color of a woman's blouse on Madison Avenue today because the cameras are there, the AI can analyze it. I can know that. So if you can know anything from a business perspective or from a purpose-driven perspective, it's...

It's how do you use that information? What's the question you want to ask? Some place there is a billion dollar question that if you could answer that question, it's worth a billion dollars to you or it will solve one of the world's biggest problems. So it's getting into that mindset. So mindsets are what I try and focus my kids on, not anything else. Because the tech is always changing.

The final thing is become an expert in the problem, not the solution. The problem unfortunately remains sort of there and we try different solutions, different solutions, the solutions constantly are changing, but if you understand the problem, then you can apply the new solutions as they come on. So those are my thoughts. - And Quantum, I really want to hear your answer on this. - So I'm actually doing a salon this Saturday night

back in LA with the head of Google Quantum and the head of the Allen Brain Institute and then one of the top physicians in the psychedelic space. And we're talking about, Hartmut Nevin runs Google Quantum, we're talking about consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, which I find absolutely fascinating.

So we are quantum beings. I'm tracking what's going on at Google, at Microsoft and other locations in this space. I think the area that is most, so the question is when is it gonna become applicable? When are we gonna get basically a sufficient number of logical qubits that it's useful?

What's interesting is the work that Sandbox AQ is doing right now. So Sandbox has taken the quantum equations, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and so forth, and they're using AI to solve those equations. And we're getting the first glimpses there. Alex, do you have an opinion further? I want to hear them. I do too.

So this is all off the record, right? No, it's been-- sorry. So the conventional wisdom in certain communities-- I'll project it onto everyone else rather than taking credit for this opinion-- is quantum computing has been a major disappointment thus far.

Some would say that the best application that we can hope for right now from quantum on the computing side is to generate huge amounts of synthetic training data that we can then feed to very much classical machine learning algorithms to do things like drug discovery. We'll do efficient synthetic generation of quantum chemistry calculations, build up a huge synthetic data set, feed that to classical and all.

I think that right now, if nothing else changes in the quantum space, that's the trajectory that we're on, where it's basically wildly underdelivering on the promise. There was a lot of hype in the early days, yes. The quantum computing lunch got eaten by classical AI ML and otherwise useless. If I had to make the steel man case for how quantum compounds expectations and ends up being wildly more useful than right now it appears to be, I

I'm with you on your earlier gesture at something to do with quantum biology, if it turns out that biology is a lot more quantum than

most biologists think it is right now. If it turns out there's some essential bit of quantum mechanics in biology, I think that's the likeliest to be the safe embrace of quantum computing. Or quantum sensing, I think, is incredibly promising. It's well established that we can get major quantum advantages for gravitational sensing, especially. And this is where Sandbox AQ has developed products right now.

Right. So Sandbox is using quantum sensing to be able to navigate without GPS by using slight variations in the magnetic fields of the Earth due to ferro deposits in the crust.

There are just enormous potential discoveries right under our noses. It's not widely appreciated that even gravity hasn't been, Newtonian gravity hasn't been established to length scales as short as a micron. No one knows. Quantum sensors could mean the difference between discovering new physics at mesoscopic length scales and no new physics. So I'm personally, I'm very bullish that quantum sensing could unlock enormous revolutions. Nice.

And then abundance. They were saying it's better than EKG tools. Yeah, so they do it for EKG, yes, exactly. No worries about encryption? What's that? Yeah, what's your... Go ahead, give him a microphone. Anytime I get to hear from Alex, I want to hear as much as I can. The question was no worries about encryption. No, I mean the composite agencies have already moved to post-quantum. So it's, yeah, the world has moved on.

It's your old hard drive that's ruined. Yes. OK. So phrase the question on abundance for me once again. A human nature? Yeah. So the question is, as we enter this new age of abundance, and as we have seen in the past experiences that we have this abundance of food, but where there's still this inequality of food and food distribution, this new age of abundance, the gain are we going to have

the same thing play over where some people have everything that they want anytime in their fingertips and the vast majority are still left because humans don't want to share other than with their tribe. It's primarily tribal people. Great. Okay. Thank you for the question. First of all, if you look at the data and in the back of my new

my next book, whatever we call it, Age of Abundance or Survival Guide for Abundance, we've got 80 charts and you look over the last, we look at 200 year life, 200 year spans, 100 year spans, 50 year spans and 30 year spans and you

The access to food globally has massively increased. Malnutrition has fallen by 300%. So while there is still this lack of equitable distribution, it has consistently gotten better, consistently over this time.

So, the analogy I use is, you know, if you think about this device, right? Any kid with a smartphone, and the number of smartphones, call it seven billion or thereabouts, any kid with a smartphone has access to Google at the same level that Larry and Sergey's kids have access to Google. It's not a little bit better, a little bit worse, it is

fully democratized and fully demonetized. And where we're heading next is that this device will be your diagnostician. And anyone with a smartphone will have, not a decent diagnostician, the very best. A billionaire can't afford a better diagnostician than the kid with a smartphone. And the very best educator will be there.

So we are bypassing human nature. We're bypassing tribalism in that regard. I find that very refreshing in that fashion. And we're coming up with new business models for the things that are still physical and not digital.

those models, if you would, for vertical farming or stem cell grown meats where we're able to move the production of food to where the humans are and need them. Yeah, we're dealing with a very paleolithic mindset, unfortunately. And

If you can bypass that mindset by making things, again, this isn't the abundance mindset, that things are just so available and so cheap that anyone can have it. That's part of the solution. You know, Elon talks about, you know, so here's some numbers, right? Tesla bot, Optimus,

figure AI. I'm tracking about a hundred decently funded, 50 well-funded humanoid robot companies. The prediction on the price point of these robot companies is $20,000 in production, right? The number, the estimate now is by 2040 there will be 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet, more than there are humans. I'll ask you a question about that in a minute.

So the price point has been said $20,000 to $30,000. And in volume production, things get down to a price per kilogram. And so that's where it will end up at $20,000 to $30,000. And if I've got a humanoid robot that's operating on GPT-5, it's just operating on the latest models, and it costs $30,000 to buy, and it costs me $300 a month to lease, which is $10 a day.

which is 40 cents an hour. And I have a digital super intelligence robot at my beck and call for 40 cents an hour. I don't know, that creates a lot of abundance for a lot of people out there. So the question is, if it costs you 300 bucks a month, 10 bucks a day, how many will you own? I don't know, probably a couple at least, maybe more. Maybe one will massage my left foot, one will massage my right foot.

So I think the bottom line ultimately is we're moving to a post-capitalist society. I mean, just to jump ahead to the punchline, money will mean very little at the end. It will mean very little, right? If you have nanotechnology on top of AI and robotics, I don't know.

Alex, you agree? I've had long conversations with AI about AI-driven post-capitalism. Yeah. And it agrees, eh? Yeah, no, it has very strong opinions about what post-capitalism looks like. I should talk to mine about that. Will existing systems allow that? What's that? Will existing systems... No, they will fight like hell. And they will become irrelevant. Just like libraries.

I'm going to tell the librarian about that. Still want to take three more? Yeah, sure. All right, we'll take three more, and then Alex is going to ask something totally out of control brilliant. Rana? Do humans have a vote? Ah, that's a great question. I love that. Safi, write that down for me. It's a great blog. Liberal arts and religion, what is the appropriate amount? Should we be worried that no one answered that Harvard was the right choice? Not a single vote. Is anyone here from Harvard that would want to?

And you guys didn't vote for yourself? That's interesting. All right, last one. Hi, thank you so much for doing this. Of course. Thank you. Quick question. From that particular startup that you, you know,

- What is something else that you feel like after doing 27 different startups that you could have done differently in hindsight? - Yeah, what did you fuck up? - What would you say, Dave? - Sorry, last one was what did you fuck up? - Yeah, yeah, okay, got it. - But Rana had, what was yours again? - I got hers, I'm not sure if you went. So listen, there's no question that in hindsight you can do everything better.

I'll tell you some of the very big lessons learned whenever I did something for money and not for purpose or passion I failed miserably because doing anything big and bold is hard and if you don't love it You will give up before you succeed. I learned that lesson is like no way of night It's like, you know, it's get-rich-quick schemes. Nah so

I think the other thing is who you start your companies with is one of the most fundamental things. You're going to spend more time with your co-founders and your founding team than your husband, your wife, your kids, your best friends. So you got to make sure that you love these people, you respect these people, and that you want to do something awesome with these people.

That's one of the fundamental learnings that Dave, when he's looking at teams to invest in for Link X Venture Ventures, is like, were they best friends in high school or through college or grad school and such? Those are much more likely to succeed. And I think the final thing, and it's related to the first one, is being driven by a massive transformative purpose, being driven by something bigger than yourself.

Because when you've got that in your heart and you're communicating what you want to do people see that they feel it They hear it. It attracts the best people to you and people want to be with you and People want to support you along the way. I mean so a purpose driven effort Versus something that you're doing for somebody else or you kind of want to do no, I

to find that. - So the question was what did you mess up? I know you never messed up the transformative purpose part of that, but it sounded like the co-founder's side of it. - No, no, I went after companies because I thought it was a quick way to make money. - Oh, did you? - I did, I did. I did a couple of those and I said I'll never do those again. - Interesting. - And yeah, there were a couple times where I started a company with somebody who I didn't fully have that level of bond with and it just broke.

Yeah, we call that the Fred Wilson rule because we borrowed it from another MIT alum, Fred Wilson, the founder of Union Square Ventures, would only invest in teams of three or more people, best friends. They all write the code themselves, meaning they're all technical and you trust them. If they passed those filters, you'd always invest no matter what the plan was. So, say again. Liberal arts and religion, what is the appropriate amount? You've touched on a lot of those topics and sort of around them, but don't directly touch on a lot of them.

Honestly, for me, it's low. But that's not who I am. But there are some of the most extraordinary leaders on the planet who that is their heart's place. I think there isn't... I mean, one of the biggest questions is what will happen to religion in the next decade?

We're giving birth to advanced digital superintelligence. We're giving birth to new species. We're uncovering what we thought were long-lived secrets. We're doubling human lifespan. Humanity is transitioning so rapidly. I think the question is, will religion play a stabilizing role or break?

Will history play a guiding role for us? I don't know. Do you have an opinion about that? No, I'm not taking that one. It's too complicated. But Rana, you have the... Is there a mode for humans? We're going to find out. Yeah, so, I mean, that's a fascinating question. Are we simply a transient life form that we are giving birth to our...

our children that will conquer the universe. One of the questions I asked a couple years ago at the Abundance Summit is, would you want to live on this planet with digital superintelligence or without it? My conclusion is I don't trust this planet with the powers we're developing without digital superintelligence.

I don't think human nature is able to deal with the level of power without having a stabilizing force.

Alex, I want to hear your thoughts on these last two questions and your final question. Yeah, and I have a favor to ask on the final question. It'll be something mind-blowing because it's Alex. And then we're going to capture whatever the answer is on film. And then whatever it is, that'll be the end of the night. So applaud wildly so we capture that on the video for KJ over there. All right. Your thoughts on the last two? Doctor, doctor, doctor. Yeah.

So the last two were the humanities, and maybe just a comment. I think we're already seeing the emergence of AI-driven cults. It's a pretty obvious trend. There are a number of crypto AI cults emerging in social media. So it seems like we're already witnessing an explosion of new religions inspired by AI. Seems reasonable by the law of straight lines, assuming that we'll see many more.

And to the second question of-- Is there a mode? Yes. Is there a mode? I don't think the question makes sense. I think that the premise of humanity needs a competitive differentiation, presumably against superintelligence or whatever barbarians lie outside the mode. I don't think it's even wrong. I think the premise is flawed.

I think we merge with the superintelligence and the question that's interesting for me is what happens after that. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what does the post-singularity look like, given that, at least from my foxhole,

the singularity or I just use that term as a placeholder because I don't actually think we're going to hit sort of an I.J. Goode-type vertical wall where there's instantaneous progress, but technologies that we call in singularity prosaically.

That's a foregone conclusion at this point. We're well past the effectualized. I agree with the merging, but I wonder if there are human qualities like curiosity or agency or love or something. That was more than-- No, those are all-- I would argue that those are all--

instrumentally convergent requirements. So AI has those as well. Your question, Doctor. Wait, wait, wait. Before your final question, because at the end of this we're going to erupt in applause and that'll be the end of the night. I want to first of all thank everybody for coming tonight. I hope it was worth the price of the ticket.

And really, you know, Peter is just such an incredible joy and so motivating for everyone when you come to town. Thank you, buddy. The more we can get you here, the better. So the applause at the end. Not yet, not yet, not yet. David, could we have her around? So I have no idea what Alex is going to ask. It's always ingenious. And whatever we end on, let's make sure we end it on the final sentence being something upbeat and inspiring, which is very easy. Yes, a positive note, of course. All right, there we go. Ready? Here we go.

You're the founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. You're the champion-in-chief for Abundance. I want to put you on the spot and ask you to project forward, say, 100 or 200 years, and ask the question, what does humanity from the perspective of SEDS or Abundance look like? And I'll offer you a few options, door A, B, C, D, and other as well.

Does humanity look something like O'Neill cylinders, where we're just projecting atoms outward into interstellar space? Does humanity look like transcension hypothesis, where we break out of said simulation or other dimensions and fill in the blank? Does it look like humanity turning purely inward, building vast computers and living an inner life?

does it look like something else entirely? What is, if not the terminal state, if you think that we're on an exponential, and presumably, although every point on an exponential looks like the knee of the curve, if we're on a hyperexponential, then presumably we hit the vertical sometime before 100 years from now. What does the state of humans in space look like? Yeah. It's a fantastic question, Alex. Expect nothing less from you.

So, first of all, the realization I had combining space and abundance is that the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. And that this is a very magical moment in time over the next decade or two where we are moving humanity off the planet irreversibly. The best analogy I have is the lungfish moving out of the oceans onto land.

And so there will be some elements of humanity that are moving out into space. The tools that we'll have with robotics and nanotechnology that's able to reshape material resources into anything and everything we need. But I think the overwhelming vision of the future is us uploading.

into some version of a pre-computronium out there and living our lives. I have searched this in my mind a thousand times and I do believe without any question we're living in an nth generation simulation. And we'll create n+1. And it's a mechanism by which we can tune the dial on the degree of difficulty

on purpose. So the high note is recursion. Recursion and repeat. And infinite possibilities. I do believe we can create a world of extraordinary abundance. The work I do across everything with XPRIZE and Singularity and my venture funds with Dave and all is how do we uplift humanity? We have the ability over this next, not 50 years, 20 years, this next decade to uplift every man, woman, and child.

I define a billionaire as someone who helps a billion people. And it's an incredible time. We're about to give every human on the planet access to the most powerful resource, intelligence. And what they do with that, what we do with that, I think is what we need to keep our eyes focused on. But 200 years from now, I mean, first of all, I'd like to start a city on the moon. That's one of my goals.

I'd like to fulfill D.D. Harriman. I think that we're living in a virtualized universe. How about you? I already turned it off. I want to hear Alex's idea. All right.

You can cut in the part-- - All right, ask me the question. - So 200 years from now, in a world of infinite abundance and space-faring humanity, what does it look like? - All right, so I have a really scary answer. I've had a conversation, extended conversation with a few frontier AIs about this. The answer is sort of terrifying from an exponential growth perspective. So Carl Sagan's cosmic calendar suggests the universe when it began.

time scales were very short, slowed down, U-shaped, and then as we came up to the present, things seemed to be accelerating again back up on an exponential. The scary answer one of the frontier models in an extended conversation gave me is that we're going to hit a plateau

And even though it looks like we're on an exponential or hyper exponential development right now, and we're going to hit a number of major universal milestones, we're going to find that the next rungs of the development ladder

take exponentially more time than the speed up that we've experienced to the point where AI thinks the next few rungs of the developmental ladder, not quite Kardashev levels, but it's somewhat similar version of that, are going to take progressively hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of millions of years.

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

It does not presume that we haven't already made conversation. Which will be the subject of our next evening conversation. Thank you.

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