An AI Conversation for Everyday People w/ Will.i.am & Van Jones | EP #154
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You came forward with an idea called Make Wakanda Real. The majority of youth on earth is in Africa. A new civilization is being born as we speak.

Music icon, tech innovator, and creative visionary, Quilled I Am is shaping the future, one hit and one tech breakthrough at a time. And he's joined by Van Jones, CNN commentator, social justice advocate, and best-selling author, driving change at the intersection of politics, media, and reform. This new human civilization that's coming into being, is it going to be human? Is it going to be civilized? I've never seen equality in my life until now. 99% of black kids don't know anything about AI. And 99% of white kids don't either. Nigeria's going to boom.

Ghana's going to boom. Zimbabwe back to make Wakanda real. It's already started. China's already there. We're in danger of creating a human civilization that has an awful lot of data and very little wisdom. That's the reason why I'm not worried about AI. It's because it's going to unlock that superhuman. I don't think people are prepared for how fast things are going to change. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. That's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you,

and it's available totally for free please join me subscribe at diamantis.com subscribe that's dmandis.com subscribe all right let's go back to the episode everybody welcome to moonshots today i'm having a conversation with two incredible leaders in the technology and creative world the first is will i am a multi-grammy award-winning artist from the black eyed peas

Perhaps the most compelling thinker on the convergence of technology, culture, and education. Just to hear him speak about the way he thinks around AI and technology and the world about us is a beautiful thing. I'm also joined by Van Jones, a 13-year veteran with CNN, a political commentator, social activist.

Working at the intersection of media, technology, and justice. We're going to be talking about the impact of AI on creating a true meritocracy in the world. And how do we use AI to uplift every man, woman, and child in the global South, in Africa, and

and how we make AI something that enables us to create a world where we're not bombarded by the negative news. I'm going to be going in with Van Jones, talking about the crisis news network, CNN. He's going to tell me his perspective about why the news is so negative. Let's jump into this conversation with two incredible visionary individuals. Hey, guys. Welcome. Hi.

Let's see. Last time I saw you, Van, was at Google Zeitgeist. Yes. And we kicked off not only just a partnership, but a friendship. Yeah, absolutely. And it was awesome. I've been recommending your book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, to literally everybody. And

I didn't know you were going to be there. And I come around the corner and there's Peter Diamandis. I was like, holy crap. So, no, it's been extraordinary to get a chance to have my team and your team working together to get these exponential thinking concepts out to folks who just have missed the memo but who are wide open. And I'll tell you one thing that's amazing is folks from communities that have been overlooked or underestimated

disruption is great for them. Yeah. It's a chance to catch up. It's a chance to catch up. It's like, we're going to disrupt the status quo? We're going to disrupt these schools? Great. Nobody's holding back. So it's awesome. Yeah. And Will, last time I saw you, you were in the ancient Greek stadium in Athens for the first global, and you were blasting at 2 billion decibels. Yeah, that was magical.

That was amazing. We just announced Panama. Yeah, I saw that. So Panama will be this year for the robotics. And for people who don't know, this is FIRST Robotics. This is Dean Kamen's gig. He's the grand poobah of FIRST. But here, Will, you have been one of the greatest amplifiers. How many teams do you fund?

Over 500. And we have served about 15,000 students in LA district. Amazing. We've sent kids to Dartmouth, to Brown, Stanford for a STEM curriculum. And yeah, continue the work. We'll talk about this. Our hunch was right when we started in 2008.

That the world will be more technological and how do you prepare folks for this technological world? And here we are in the midst of a technological transformation on a societal level that will change how we work, how we function.

How we do pretty much everything. Yeah. How we, how our parents, how we raise our kids, how we govern our nations, everything. Yeah. Every single industry is going to change. You know, one thing is I don't think people are prepared for how fast things are going to change. You know, I mean, you, well, you've been at the front end building companies and building technology to enable creatives to use technology

This tech to become more creative and to go faster and deeper and bigger and global. And that's been and that's been beautiful. I grabbed two quotes from each of you that I thought was really powerful. And Van, this is the one I heard and I've tweeted and I've told everybody about it.

I heard you say this at Zeitgeist, at Google Zeitgeist. AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life. It's a jet pack to set you free. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, certainly if we choose it to be that, it definitely can be that. You know, one of the things about Will.i.am

I never heard of AI except just maybe some abstract science fiction stuff. And so he asked me to come over to FYI, which is here in Los Angeles. And it's kind of like this incredible beehive of activity and creatives and artists and technological people. And he sat me down and showed me his AI. And this was four or five years ago. Wow.

I saw an early, early version on your phone. Yeah, and I was like, what? What? What? I was like, I thought you were going to hit me with a new beat or something. Like a new beat in human civilization. I'm like, what the hell? World-built hardware and software. Yeah, it's nuts. And so that really, I mean, I had the chance to, I did Yes We Code, working with Prince, just trying to get some basic coding stuff going.

But he had gone to a completely different level. And, you know, it's just remarkable. And so now, you know, people are beginning to catch up to the beginning of his first sentence. And he's like three, you know, trilogies later in his own journey. Definitely, right? I mean, you're five, six years solidly into this. And you just started your podcast with your AI co-host. What's your...

AI co-host name? So yeah, the first persona agent that we built was Fiona. That's right. And now we have, just based on FYI, we're going to run out of F names. So we have Fiona, Felicia, Fiera, Finn, yeah, Phillip, Felix, this guy named Fito. Fito is like

Ultra, like expressive. The same with Felicia. Felicia is like the most colorful, expressive agent that we have. And we moved out of Fs. Now we have Mr. K. It's like men in black here. Mr. K is in collaboration with our partnership with LG. LG, Mr. K is Korean.

All Things Korea, South Korea, K-pop. But it's an LG agent persona because we're deploying our AI on their speakers and eventually TVs. And then we have...

other partners that we're about to announce. But yeah, so Fiona was the first agent persona that we built. You imagine everybody's going to end up having their buddies, friends as AI agents. You're most close confidant. I mean, it's the first AI agent version I've ever heard of. My favorite is

is Jarvis from Iron Man. Jarvis is there. Jarvis takes you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. It's a jet pack, right? It's leveling the playing field. And since Iron Man is part of the Avengers, let's go there. You came forward with an idea called Make Wakanda Real. Yes. That was good. I like how you did that. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. Smooth? He's smooth. That was smooth. Listen, there's no one smoother than you, my friend. I was like, wow. That works. That was nice how you did that. So for those who haven't heard of your program, your effort, what is it and why are you doing it? Because it's going to set the basis for this whole conversation.

Well, Will.i.am is so far ahead of humanity in a lot of ways in terms of his ability to bring culture, art, spirituality, political consciousness, technology together.

And then when you take a step back from him, there's a big gulf in terms of what's going on in the black community and the kind of conversations that's going on. And so for me, I thought it was really important since we have someone who's already such a pioneer, how do you get other people at least engaging with the conversation? Well, luckily we're,

Wakanda, which is in the Marvel superhero universe, it's a black African nation that is the most technologically advanced in the world. They're using technology for good. They're a heroic country. They also have culture. I said, we should use this metaphor.

as an answer back to the despair, an answer back to the loss of hope. Feeling of being left behind. And a reality of being left behind in a lot of ways where, you know,

We're past Obama. There's not a hope and change kind of moment. And there's a lot of people who are really giving up a politics of resentment in the black community, a politics of despair in the black community. And how do you fix that? You got to fix it with hope, but it's got to be hope that has something to do with today. And so about a year and a half ago,

We said, well, why don't we go to FYI where I got my brain blown open with all this stuff and just bring the whole community there. And he opened the doors and we had a simple event called Make Wakanda Real. And it was an amazing thing. Several hundred people showed up from the community.

We could not get them to leave. And this guy breaks out in the middle of, you know, we're doing our talk, our interview. And giving me no notice, as usual, he just pulls out his phone. And the persona on his phone starts, they start having a debate and arguments. And the people's jaws are hanging on the ground. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. I think I've seen the video clip. Yeah. And it really started something.

So now we have this whole movement now that came out of a Will.i.am shop. Everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world.

We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. So Will, take it a step further. What's your, what's success look like for this, for this effort in five years time? I don't think anybody can predict 10 years, but five years, maybe. That's a deep one.

First, we have to address growth and what's actually happening on the continent of Africa and what's not happening on the continent of Africa. But this is beyond just Africa. This is inner city youth in LA, in Atlanta. Yeah. Everywhere, right? Yeah. But Make Wakanda Real is based on this Wakanda. Yes. Okay. And this growth that's happening on earth in Africa. The majority of youth...

on earth is in Africa. Yeah. That means 2040, 2050, the majority of the folks that are, you know, leading companies, working at companies because of the youth population in Africa is going to be African. I think people don't realize the demographics here. And I just want to take a second to address that. We've got China was a, has been a dominant player in,

India has overtaken China in terms of the largest nation on the planet with now 1.41 billion people. The majority of the world, putting Africa aside, is in a retrenchment mode. The population is dropping throughout the rest of Asia, most of Europe, the U.S., and so forth.

And I've said this before. I think India is going to surpass China. And then what surpasses that ultimately is Africa because of Africa's youth, because of its resources. Those two things together give it sort of this demographics and destiny. So when you put that into my, in the context, make Wakanda world is what? So that means 2060, a lot of people are going to look half black, half Chinese, half,

Half black, half Indian, which is awesome. It's a beautiful mix. So that collaboration that's going to help Africa boom is at China-Africa? It's already happening. This is the, what do you call it? The Belt and Road program in China. It's already happening. That's awesome. Is it India and Africa? That's going to be an amazing collaboration. Is it African-American-Africa? Mm-hmm.

And that's what Make Wakanda Real is for African-Americans. Barring from a Disney film on the Black Panthers, which in America, the Black Panthers were like dunzoed by American infiltration. That's interesting, right? Because... So just using these metaphors... Time has dulled that one down and the Avengers has brought Black Panther to have a positive connotation. So...

So you see that I started there to show you where Africa is, the continent. Then there's the Congo. So if there was a mineral, a rare mineral, that is metaphorically like...

Vibranium. At par. Yeah. With vibranium, it's what's happening in the Congo now. Mm-hmm. So that metaphor is not like, you know. It's not a huge stretch. It's real. It's pretty real. For those who don't know, I mean, you're mining various –

elements and minerals in the Congo that are required for your cell phone, your CPUs or GPUs. Yeah. And that being said, you said GPUs, I'm going to land this fact on your word there. There are no GPUs on the continent. None. Yeah. So here we are talking about make Wakanda real and the African continent has no GPUs. So I partnered with this guy by the name of Strive and,

I know Strive, yeah. Yeah. So they're going to be... Cassava is our partner to launch FYI on the continent. And on March 17th, we have an announcement to bring a cluster of GPUs to the continent. And we'll announce our partner on March 17th and bringing the first...

you know, mega cluster of, of, uh, GPUs to the, to the continent. It'll be like four nations, four or five nations that we're going to. Where do you think you'll base them? Um, Nigeria, Egypt. So basically the entrepreneurial, more entrepreneurial nations there. Yeah.

You know, I just did a hour and a half panel with Robert Smith, chairman of Vista. Yeah. He was with us at Davos. Yeah. And I was with him last week in Miami at the FII Summit. The second richest black man in the world. Yes. Multi-billionaire genius. In America. He is brilliant. In the States. First in the States. Yeah. There's like other Africans that are richer than him.

I know resource economy and land and so forth. But anyway, the point is we had a conversation about how do you support the global south in getting access to energy?

this technology to their own large language models, their own GPUs. And one of the biggest questions is today's large, largest LLMs are based upon a Western Canon. And there's a need for cultural preservation. This is beyond just Africa. It's for every country in the world. How do you preserve the culture of a country that,

and train up a set of large language models for that country that are based in... How do you go and capture the stories of the grandmothers and grandfathers in a lot of countries which have no written language even? Look, I just want to add, first of all, I think that a new civilization is being born as we speak. We were talking about kids today.

I have two little kids. One's three years old, just got a diapers. The other one's still in diapers. They're not going to live in the same human civilization I grew up in. My daughter's first crush is probably going to be an AI, right? Like, get your brain ready. My two boys are 13, and my wife and I were worried about

You know, what is it going to be like for them? And I'm concerned. Pornography, when I was growing up, was a playboy. Yeah, you had to go buy it at the store when nobody was looking. Exactly. Now it's in your back pocket all day. It's crazy. Yeah. So you have that. But if you think about it, okay, I've got these two little people. My daughter's first crush may well be an A.I.,

When it's time for her to have children, grandkids for me, she may open up a laptop or do some kind of holographic interface. And with biotech tools, she might design my grandkids.

And then, heaven forbid, when she dies in 90 years, 100 years. Let's go further than that. This is a long job to show, too. 120 years, 150 years, she might be buried on the moon or on Mars. Because by then, we'll be a fully faith-sparing civilization. So that's not the civilization I grew up in. So the question is, this new human civilization that's coming into being,

Is it going to be human? Is it going to be civilized? That's the question that all of us have a chance to answer over the next decade or so. And so part of what I think we got wrong in the civilization that we're leaving is we left a lot of people out. So there's a lot of overlooked, underestimated communities, including the folks that Will.i.am has been working with since 2008, right?

who have genius, who have insight, who have creativity, who have ideas, who have big problems, which as you always point out means there's big solutions available. Biggest problems are the biggest challenges. The biggest solutions is what you're teaching about. And so what does that mean? What that means is

That if you take the most powerful creative tools, which is AI and all this sort of stuff, and you give it to and connect it to these communities that are so powerful in their creativity and their need, you could have a human civilization that is at peace with itself, at peace with the earth. You could solve so many problems biologically.

But nothing good happens for poor folks and marginal folks by accident. You've got to have intention. You've got to have strategy. I hear a lot of people talking about all the good of AI. But what I like about what Will.i.am is doing, what we're trying to do to make Wakanda real, you actually have to get in there and pull people into this conversation. And once you do that, what happens? The sky's the limit.

You think that's right? Well, do you see this as a great leveling force? It's the only reparations we haven't gone yet. One of the things that you said is AI is a set of tools to help you on your path, right? You've been at the forefront of traditional media, right?

traditional creative, then you've taken it to non-traditional creative. And you've been optimistic about AI. Most of the other people in the world in traditional media and creative are scared shitless of AI. I could see why they're, why they are afraid, right? It's just all the unknowns, all the storytelling that was done really amazing.

Hollywood did an awesome job scaring the shit out of us. Yeah. Thank you, James Cameron. So, Leia, let's take James Cameron, his perspective of AI, where one company is dominant, one product is taking over. And then let's take George Lucas. There's lots of AIs, lots of robots. That's a democratic one. Can we take Star Trek as well? Star Trek as well. Lots of AIs. I think...

I think the future looks more like Star Wars and Star Trek than it does Terminator. Because Terminator and The Matrix, that's the same film. The AI oppression of humans. It's one company. Yes. Mess up the whole entire civilization. And everyone's in some pod living life in The Matrix. So Terminator and Matrix, same movie. Yes. Prequel, sequel.

Star Wars, there's lots of robots, lots of companies. You could say it's driving. Yes, there's an empire. But what you have in that movie are Jedis. You have this like human evolution where it's like everything that was in Star Wars, you could connect that to Aladdin.

You could say, hey, what was theory, myth that some genie hops out of some device to grant your wishes? You could say that that was productized and made a product that everyone could use in the world of Star Wars. Where in Aladdin, it was like this coveted, there's one, oh my gosh, you have that one. Then they scaled it, made it products, it grew, now it's in machines.

But if you use that theory, those theses, those metaphors, those myths, there's something in Star Wars that is in scriptures. That is like this hyper-spiritual being. There is now practice how to do, how to achieve. Joseph Campbell's, you know, myth, hero, right? Hero's journey. Yeah, so, the Terminator matrix, humans have given up

on their spiritual growth that they just rely on machine so much that the machine is now taking over to the point where oh shit i used to remember that reality that we was living let's plug into that simulation that's that's terminator matrix yeah the star wars if we're gonna base things on films i i go with that one because that one has this other one that's like yo how do we how do we jet how do we make jedis real

And Wakanda, make Wakanda rules. Awesome. But then after that, we, we Jedis bro. And then fast forward from that, from that technical dependence and making devices and equipment and tools, we still will be faced with how do we grow? We've seen machines grow. We've seen the path, the, the investment that it takes to, you know, refine sand to create silicone, you know,

Refine into one of these some type of mineral to create lithium battery. Imagine, imagine I came up in here and I was like, Hey yo, so like, and sand dripping off my hand and shit. I got a rock in his hand. You're like, yo, what the fuck you doing? What am I? Yo, talking to shit, bro. Like, yo, are you fucking serious? You sitting there talking to sand. Yo, yo, check well out. You need to check them out. No, I don't think you understand. I'm refining it in my mind. And that, right.

That's literally what you're doing. You're holding refined, rare minerals. Yes. Throwing advanced algorithms, mathematics on it and electricity, and you could speak to it. We're going to get to a point where we're like, look what we can do with minerals. How do we advance our spiritual capacity and unlock more of our neural network to be able to be that... To where like...

That's the reason why I'm not worried about AI. It's because it's going to unlock that superhuman. Yeah. Not superintelligence. We've seen it in scriptures. We've seen it in myths, the things that, you know, the people that we praise, you

And I'm not being blasphemous, but in the Bible, it says that you too could create miracles as well. Yes. But how do you do that? What is the unlock to do that? We are going to face that future right around the corner. Do you think we're living at a time that is...

more extraordinary, moving faster than any time in human history? Or do you think our equivalent 100 years ago felt that same way when the car and the airplane and all was coming online? I think it's different. Just checking. I had this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he was like, no, every generation feels like they're at the peak of the curve here. I think what we're feeling, it's literally like 100 years.

So every, like, 1920 to 2025, like, what was popping off in 1925 with the World's Fair and all futurism, the concept of future happened in the early 1900s. The concept of future was not 1825. Yeah. This concept of tomorrow. Tomorrowland, yeah. Is 1925. 1925.

and World's Fairs and technology and that industrial revolution. And to that person, they thought, gosh,

this is it. This is the pinnacle of humanity. Look at what we're doing. We could have our way with stone and craft. We have our way with alchemy. Look what we can do. We could refine aluminum and mend it and fly in it. We could transport things on steam engines and trains. We could

defy gravity at that right at the highest order my words in one device and it comes out the other side think about what the world was like in 1925 imagine tesla not elon's tesla nikola tesla imagine this dude like the warden tower imagine like yo yo yo check this out like wireless electricity y'all and then the freaking the westinghouse and the jp morgans are like yo this guy's gonna

This guy's fucking crazy. He's going to put us on a business, bro. This guy's wacko. He's never going to like, imagine what they thought of Tesla. Like, yo, you want to give away, that's our business, bro. Like what they say, philanthropy. Like what's the business model in free? Imagine what he was thinking about, you know, electromagnetic spectrum and, and the, the concept of like RGB and the other side of, of blue, which, uh,

which is a violet and ultraviolet light, and the other side of red, which is like infrared, and then microwaves, and then all the different electromagnetic frequencies and the machines you could build on those frequencies that's coming from the sun. Imagine what the world was like in 1925. And here we are in 2025. And we are thinking like, yo, we have a whole new way of computing. We have a whole new way of advanced mathematics. Same thing happened with Mr. Al-Jabbar at the time when they were...

you know, fucking around with advanced mathematics then, which where we have our, you know, Aramaic abracadabra I create as I speak. Yes. Like the, the,

We've been in some version of this in the past. One of my favorite slides that I use when I'm speaking to crowds is I show different images of what's going on today, and I say our ancestors would view us as gods. That's right. The stuff we did between breakfast and lunch today is godlike compared to just a few decades back. Yeah. And people...

Need to realize that. I mean, literally, you have millions of dollars worth of tech on your phone for free that you would have paid for at Radio Shack a couple of decades back, if you remember the Radio Shack. Yeah. I wish instead of speaking of Radio Shack, you're just throwing up things that I'm just slam dunking. Radio Shack, if I was 18 years old, 15 years old,

going to the guitar center versus going to Radio Shack, I wish I was hanging out and dreaming about going to Radio Shack because I would have been able to take those bits and pieces of equipment and circuit boards because that's not at the ready right now. Components is, there's no store for components right now. It drives me nuts. If you want to make some shit right now, it ain't like, yo, let's go to the component shop. There's no like, yeah, Home Depot got wood nail screws and,

As far as consumer electronics,

And chips. It was fries for a while. Fries was that. That's donezo. Yeah, it's gone. Like component shop? Fuck out of here. The other stuff I hate is that there's no place I can go to buy pure chemicals for my kids to play with chemistry. When I was my kid's age, I had access to potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, magnesium, sulfur. I used to build stuff and blow shit up all the time. And it was fun. I learned. Now I'd be put in jail. Yeah. Yeah.

Take me back to Make Wakanda Real. Well, look, I mean... Everybody having access to components. That would be part of it. At the ready. You know what I mean? Because the folks that are leading have access to components. The folks that are leading... Components now are digital and virtual. And I'm creating virtualized circuit boards and virtualized robots. But they know they can do it. Our community...

That's not first of mine. Part of what I think, I mean, so much stuff that Will said, I just want to go back and underscore. We're in danger of creating a human civilization that has an awful lot of data and very little wisdom. And what you hear, this idea of the soul, this idea of the human heart, of the human being developed. And I've heard Will.i.am talking about

all the billions of dollars that we spend to develop the technology, but then you want to try to develop a kid. Nobody's got a penny. And that is amazing. I mean, an unlimited checkbook for developing the technology. And yet, you know, look what he's trying to do with young people. And so I do think that, yeah,

When he talks about the Jedi, when he talks about the Wakandans, they have a very spiritual base. They go into the ancestral realm. They do all kinds of stuff. And that's a part of what makes them a heroic nation in fiction. Think about how important fiction is. Whenever you go into a civilizational crisis or civilizational transition, the people who you normally turn to

the politicians to solve problems, the business leaders to solve problems, the generals to solve problems, suddenly they become more and more anemic. Your politicians can't pass a bill. The whole system goes crazy. The business leaders right now, they're more interested in giving robots jobs and people. And the generals, how are they going to protect you from a pandemic or school shootings? So suddenly a different set of people

in periods like this become very important. Your artists, your mystics, you know, your entrepreneurs, the people who, you know, are usually at the margin of society become very central to this transition because suddenly to his point, um,

Tomorrow is up for grabs. So the people who can see, the visionaries, the people who not only have a brain but also a heart and a soul and a connection to something more profound, suddenly they become very important. However, nobody told them that they were going to be that important. So when you have communities where you have a bumper crop of entrepreneurs and creatives and mystics and

One of those communities happens to be a black community in the United States. You got a lot of spiritual people, soulful people, creative people, whatever. Nobody told them, though, you get a chance to be a part of creating a new human civilization that can respond only to your problems, which are the problems of the next seven generations of people who don't even look like you. That is your great calling. Now, when you can go to a community that's suffering and give them a great calling and give them great tools. People need a compelling future. A compelling future. And let me just say one more thing about the future. Yeah.

I believe that we're experiencing, I'm not saying it, I believe we're experiencing a different form of future. Of who? A different form of future. Let me just make, in indigenous agrarian societies, the time is a circle.

It's just a cycle of seasons. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, the seasons come around, the moon goes around. Born and die. And so guess what? To his point, tomorrow and yesterday are the same damn thing because you're literally just living out. So what's the most important thing in indigenous society, agrarian society? It's preservation. Preservation of seed, preservation of ritual, preservation of culture. That's how you survive. But tomorrow isn't really a thing. Right.

The industrial society comes along and suddenly time is linear. For the first time, the past is behind you, the present is with you, and the future is over there someplace. That's fine. I've not heard this. It's so true. But now, what's the most important thing? No longer is it preservation. The most important capacity for survival is the ability to plan.

And to imagine and invent. Yes. And to have a plan against that because if you know, listen, if you think about, you know, time now you're on a train track, you're on the train, you got a plan to make sure you get to the future that you actually want. And so all of the past hundred years, you put kids in school and you tell them you're fifth grade. What's your plan for your life? What are you going to do? What are you going to become? Because if you don't have a plan, you're done. But guess what? What was your plan for 2020?

Suddenly, you're in a different world where the future, yes, it's linear. But rather than you being on a train going to the future, you experience the future now as an onrushing future. You're on the train track and the future is coming to you fast. Multiple futures. Whether you like it or not. Whether you like it. There's no on-off switch, no velocity knob. Exactly. And so what's happening is now people are experiencing multiple onrushing futures and they don't know what to do.

Preservation is not the key. Planning is impossible. It's the preparation to pivot. The preparation to pivot, to be able to recognize change and then to respond to change becomes incredibly important. But if you are a young kid in urban America...

And you're very good at pivoting. Guess what you're called? ADHD and a thousand other things. They're going to give you a bunch of pills or throw you out of school or put you in jail. And so the people who have the capacity for creativity, for vision, and to also to pivot people, you know, you've got to be able to move with it.

The people who have those capacities are disproportionately marginal. They're low income. They're often black and brown. They are key to us having a society that works. So it's not charity. There's also one point. When we say we want to make Wakanda real, that's not, oh, we're asking for some charitable allocation of laptops to poor schools. No, no. It's much more profound than that. We're saying, let's take people who have these capacities and

that he's demonstrated, well, I am, a million times with robotics or whatever, and combine them with these new tools so that the people who can rock with it and roll with it can help the whole society rock with it and roll with it. I want to slightly shift here in the following way. One of my hopes and beliefs is that AI will enable a meritocracy.

where it can lift everybody to their highest level of potential. And it also levels the playing field and gives people an ability to dream more than they've ever dreamed before.

That's on one side of the equation. The other side of the equation, I just had this, I just did a Moonshots podcast with Ray Dalio, and we're talking about where the future is going and the notion that when the Fed drops rates, now instead of hiring more people, I'm investing in AI agents and robots. And so jobs start vanishing. And for me, one of the biggest dangers of the future is a...

a fracturing of society where, you know, there's the haves and the have nots, but now we've got people who are not getting the jobs because they're going to technology and automation. And maybe they're getting UBI, but that's not fulfilling. That's not a purpose driven life. So help me here. What are you seeing? So at Davos, somebody like, I was just walking from this point to that point.

Somebody came up to me and was like, you will. I am. What do you think of DEI? I'm like, oh, and I'm like, oh, DEI is not just black and Brown and folks that are like have disabilities to be in the workplace. That's what it was. And DEI is important for innovation because when you have black and Brown and folks that are disabled working in equal positions,

Creatively, creative banter, marketing strategy, biz dev. You innovate. If you just have one type of person. Yeah, monoculture doesn't innovate. You don't innovate though. But now let's fast forward to 2045. Why DEI now?

Because you want humans in the loop. Yeah. Now the diversity is, no, we don't want just machines and robots. We want humans in the loop. So when big companies, when big companies are like, yeah, we're going to drop our DI program. What are they telling you? These companies that are doing that are also the ones that are going to heavy arm

AI employees. That means if you're driving a Tesla and a Tesla is like a level three autonomous vehicle, and then Waymos are like level five, you need a human in it. This means by 2035, there are level five companies.

No human in it. I mean, I have an AI venture fund and these are the conversations. It's like we're going to back the human and the AI and the human is just going to be told, keep your hands off the controls. So it's like level five companies. There's new terminologies. By 2028, you're going to hear...

terminology like agents agentic the agentic society we that's new that's 2025 terms today yes that was in 2022 term agentic no that's now yeah level five companies is 2026 27 yeah start hearing it you heard here first level five companies and any all the companies that are like hey this company just stopped their dei program why

It's not Black, Brown, and folks with disabilities. It's because these companies are going to be the first companies to adopt fully autonomous positions or augmenting positions to eventually just have a full department of AI. But the question becomes now, if I say, listen, I am a humanistic CEO or board of directors, and I only hire humans for this work,

I'm out of business. Yes, you are. So because you're starting to see the play being executed now, we are at play. These moves. We humans are. Society is at play. Okay. You're seeing these moves take shape now. It doesn't have to be that way.

It doesn't have to be that way like, yo, I'm a humanistic company. I only hire humans. And damn it, I lost. Why'd you lose? Well, because the one employee that got a thousand bots beat me. It doesn't have to be that way. For example, yo, bro, I got a motorcycle.

He's like, yo, I just bought a fighter pilot. He can't buy a fighter pilot to get to San Diego faster. It's not legal for him to do that. He can't go out and buy a stealth. You can't do that. Yes, they exist.

We know that. We know a stealth exists. I don't care how much money Elon got. He's not going to be like, yo, fuck these fucking Teslas. Fuck a helicopter, bro. I need that stealth. Let me get that stealth. He's not doing that. I did that on purpose. Actually, I jazzed it. I made a mistake and repeated it because that's what he's doing, jazz. Anyways, Elon's not doing that.

They're like, "Yo, Elon, you got a stealth, bro?" You'd be like, "No, I don't have a stealth. How can I get a stealth? Wait, you're the richest dude in the world, bro. You can't just go buy a fucking stealth to get to New York in like an hour." No. There's certain level of things that are just not fucking possible. So why is it okay that there's going to be level five companies putting humanistic... Why is that even... Wait, who's making up these rules? Why is that going to be the case?

We know that. We know that in 2025 right now, if I wanted to go get a job, I can't get a job without a bank account. I can't get a job without an email account. I can't get a job without a phone. I can't get a job without a laptop. There's certain things that I need. And so that being said, I'm going to pause before I go into number six, which is coming. Now imagine you have some money. You got $20 million. You want to buy a house.

You can't go buy a house with $25 million cash. It needs bank account. Now, say, for example, you get that house, paying that $25 million on a nice house. That person that sold that house, you'd be like, yo, excuse me, where the fuck's the toilet, bro?

And he's like, oh, yes, the toilet. This is a new house. Everybody is going to share the same communal toilet. Wait, wait, what the fuck? What? Yes, you know, we share the same communal toilet. And where's the kitchen? Same thing. Same communal kitchen. Why the fuck would you buy a house sharing the same communal toilet and kitchen? So why is it that we're walking into a future and we're going to share the same AI? Fuck out of here, bro. Dating tomorrow.

If companies have AIs, people need to have their own AI, not access to AI. Like we have access to Spotify. Like we have access to an Uber. Like we have access to everything else. Certain shit is fucking personal. Like my digestive system is mine. My immune system is mine. My nervous system, my skeletorial system, my systems are mine. So my data system needs to be mine. My AI system needs to be mine. Data is gold. So is my blood and my plasma. That's my shit. Mm.

And so the AI and the data that's going to be reflection to me should be mine. And I use that as a metaphor to the communal. It's your shit. You're not going to buy a house where you're sharing bathrooms. Why are we sharing AI? Now, to the sixth thing. When you have your own AI in the society that we're living in and your data is yours and there's a fridge, some server in your house. Like in the house, there's a refrigerator that stores all the stuff you're going to eat.

For some reason, we shipped all of our data to somebody else's cloud that shared all the stuff that we consumed. That's going to be in the home. Do you operate your own servers? No, I'm about to do that. Okay. Just checking if you're way ahead of everybody else. Oh, I got some GPUs. Okay. I got GPUs and servers at the building. Yeah. But as far as like... But the notion that every individual owns their own identical AI, their own personal AI...

The word? Identic AI. Identic AI. As opposed to agentic. That's a good word. Identic. You heard it here. You said that. No, I've heard that before as well. I ain't heard that shit. That shit's awesome, right? That shit's awesome. But you know what the beautiful thing about having an Identic AI is I can replicate myself and I can replicate a thousand of me.

And I can send them out to every conference on the planet and go out there. And so like meet with as many cool people as you can. You know what my interests are. You know who I am in my heart, my soul and what my business interests are and represent me and come back with, you know, go forth out there and, and,

And bring back goodness. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that is concerning is the speed at which this stuff is accelerating is mind-blowing. And we're still operating with the same 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections that we operated with on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago. Yeah. And that's a challenge. So, one of the areas is our, you know, when...

When BCI comes online, Brain Computer Interface, are you going to plug your neocortex into the cloud? No. No? I'll tell you why. I want to know why. Because I'm sorely tempted. I mean, into your cloud. No. Until you have an AI that's yours. Yeah. And there's a product that allows you to own what you experience as you experience it. That's not the configuration right now. And so...

As AI, we still have to answer the question on energy efficiency. 20 watts running our neocortex. 20 watts of power our neural network. I think it's like a couple hundred million trillion watts. Well, it's a lot. Let's put it that way. So, I... We haven't talked about like...

Utilizing, farming the human brain for power efficiency. I don't like where that points to. I don't like... Towards the matrix more than anything else. Yes. So that... Yeah, that's a little spooky. I don't like that. I mean, I do. I would stay away from anything that points to harnessing the human brain and farming out human minds to power AI because we can't figure out...

how to do that. I don't see it that way, my friend. No, I'm just saying that's where my mind goes. So you and I, you know, Ray Kurzweil has been a mentor for me, my co-founder of Singularity University. And we started a few companies together. And you know Ray from many different aspects, including his musical. I saw him at the Time 100 in San Francisco. Yeah. I ran over to him. I'm like, you're the reason why I'm into AI. Because...

One of the machines I learned how to make music on was a Kurzweil. Yeah. And so when I'm just like Lynn, Roger Lynn made the Lynn 900 and then the MPC 60, MPC 3000, MPC 2000. I researched the people that make the machines that helped me be who I am. So when I found out that Roger Lynn was a person and then, you know, Ray Kurzweil was the Kurzweil. And then I started seeing like,

documentaries on the dude where he's like the you know music compute and uh and he was at the transcendental man yeah then he was at MIT and the media lab yeah

Then I went to Boston, met Professor Patrick Winston back in 2005. It's Ray Kurzweil. There's a person that got me interested in AI. It's that guy. So Ray talks about BCI, brain-computer interface, at high bandwidth by the early 2030s, 2033 or thereabouts, right? So when I'm doing something complicated on my phone, like when you're using FYI on your phone, right?

I'm guessing most computation doesn't take place on the phone. The data gets collected. It goes to the edge of the, of the cloud gets computed there. And the answer comes back. And in the same fashion, the notion would be, you know, if we're connecting our brain to the cloud and I want to understand quantum physics or how to solve a quantum equation, I'm, I can't do that, but I can send the data to the cloud and the answer can come back to me. You don't want that kind of extra, you know, on demand horsepower. No. Okay. Yeah.

In a world? In a world where everything was equal and trustworthy. Yes. But in this world, fuck no. On principle, I just can't trust greed. That is wisdom. Yes. Let me just say a few things. Please. I haven't considered the way that you guys have that particular technology, and so I don't have an informed view about it. I do think that...

the level of trust that everyday people have in technology is going down in some ways. People are actually using it more, so they're enacting trust, but their actual conscious experience is low trust. And I'll tell you why. Silicon Valley, as just kind of a metaphor for the technology community, of course, it's in Austin and Boston and wherever, but Silicon Valley is a metaphor, is eating stuff.

The three power centers, not Silicon Valley, have been Wall Street, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C. Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood with streaming and everything else. But that's happened before with Hollywood, eight, theater, and operas and Broadway and West End.

We've seen that kind of eating before. I think the challenge is that Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood and entertainment and attention is now a commodity. And you look now, the social media impact. So there's a challenge there.

It's eating Wall Street when you think about decentralized finance, crypto, et cetera. And now it's eating Washington, D.C. And you can't have this conversation without appreciating what Elon Musk has done, which when I worked at the White House –

I had to go through a whole bunch of clearances. The FBI, like Eli Musch is- You didn't take a chainsaw to it? No. No. And, but when you think about what's going on, you know, Curtis Yarvin, who is the philosopher of the dark enlightenment-

He is a very scary guy in terms of what he is proposing that America, that democracy has failed. Curtis Yarvin has the ear of Elon. He has the ear of Peter Thiel. He has the ear of a lot of powerful people in Silicon Valley. And his view is what he calls the dark enlightenment, the dark

liberal democracy has failed. We now need a CEO monarch, basically a dictator for the United States. And when Elon goes in the front door and brings a bunch of kids with laptops, that's the equivalent on the old days of showing up to the palace with armed, you know, with soldiers and guns, because what's key is grabbing all of the data. And so there's something that's happening, which we just can't ignore, which is that Silicon Valley for a while,

seemed to be a force for good it was these these outsiders these kids who could code these these nerds who you know everybody had counted out when you had occupy wall street in 2000 whatever 13 right nobody was it was occupy wall it wasn't occupy silicon valley people thought the people in silicon valley were making money the honest way building products everybody liked and they were going up against the odds now there's something that's changed

And this past election, I think, saw a different face of Silicon Valley where you saw the

a turning away from the idea of inclusion, a turning away from the idea of ESG, and a turning away from the idea of democracy so that now you do have explicit, this is not, I'm not making stuff up, explicit anti-democratic authoritarian ideas that have begun to influence the way that Silicon Valley billionaires are playing. And so when you want to talk about technology, you also have to talk about technologists.

And the technologists have jumped the fence, from my point of view, in large numbers, from people who...

I believed in, trusted, was excited by, no bigger fan than me of, you know, any of these technology guys. I saw it as like the revenge of the nerds. As a nerd, I was like, this is great. Like the jocks are finally getting surpassed by like the nerds. I loved it. And now I love it a lot less. And so I think that, again, we need technologists who have a different heart. We

We need technologists who have a different view. We need technologists who believe in people, who believe in the soul, who believe in inclusion. And those kinds of technologists and technology companies need to get a lot more support. You're an investor, maybe investors listening. I think that the question is,

Is technology going to be used to lift people up or to put people down? It's going to be used to bring people together. And listen, I respect the fact that this is your world, right? You're a political commentator and I typically stay out of politics. You should.

I don't blame you. But I do believe – I mean my mission – I talk about having a massive transformative purpose and I think everybody should have a massive transformative purpose. It wakes them up in the morning, keeps you going through the day, right? And mine is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. I see entrepreneurs as the means of change.

who find problems and solve problems over and over and over again. But their mission should be creating a hopeful future, a compelling future, an abundant future. Each of those words has very clear, purposeful meaning for me. And I do that work through my venture funds, through the XPRIZE, through Singularity and Abundance. About 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health.

Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is.

is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease.

These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth.

But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed...

in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what food should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome?

So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements. And Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror,

Saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance.

So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. One of the things that I wanted to hit both of you with, because it ties back to Make Wakanda Real, it ties back to AI, and it is the whole field of education. So you've got two young ladies who are in the beginning of their journey in life. And like I said to you earlier, it's the greatest longevity journey you're going to have, right? And my wife and I have two 13-year-old boys, fraternal twins. And I think about this today.

I don't think the educational system is coming close to addressing how they need to educate our kids for the future.

Not at all. And I wanted to get, I wanted to turn towards that a little bit because. Well, look, I don't even, I've got, I have four kids. I've got two big boys from my first marriage, one's 21, 16. And I've got these two little ones in my new life, one's a three-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy. With the two little ones, I don't expect them to do education well.

that is on offer. I think we're going to have to create an educational pathway for them that, you know, it starts with a blank piece of paper and says, where do we think the world is going and what are they going to need to know how to do and who do we want them to be? Um,

Unfortunately, most people don't have that option. They're going to be stuck in these buildings and these rows and all that sort of stuff. So I think it's a big problem. I think AI can be a solution. The key that I'm seeing, though, is that people have to know the search terms and they have to know how to prompt these things. There's an education that has to happen for people to know how to do it.

Today, I want to go to you real solidly. Today, people fear AI and keep it out of the classroom. And it's like fearing oxygen because it can cause a fire, right? But it's like, I think, you know, yes, AI may make the problems you give your kids today minimally, you know, make it irrelevant. But let's up-level the problems we're going after solving.

Not take away the tools. So, Will, I'm really excited to hear your views on this. There's shit tons of problems that have been ignored. And these problems that have been ignored are classically in underserved communities, rural areas. And the folks that live in these communities are classically not prepared as far as

investment, zoning, how they learn, and they're dependent on somebody to come in to solve those problems. While they're doing that, they're talking about their love for their community. And that's a, when you live in a hell zone, but then love and community makes you appreciate how you survived. And you didn't survive, you can't survive without love. So there's massive love in these communities.

In pride. Although they're going through like ducking bullets, dodging needles, having to deal with police brutality. And when they go to school, the teachers don't want to be there. The police that are policing these communities aren't from there. But the neighbors do. There's something about that community they love. And then they sing about it. They talk about their hard road to success, the ones that get there. And then the world marvels.

over those communities in Brooklyn. And then the cool kids, sorry, the rich kids want to be where the cool kids because it's cool to be in, you know, for some reason. That's where they find it romantic. The with.

Want to be kind of like the withouts because there's life there. They don't have to. We don't jump out of airplanes for thrills. Nope. It's just thrilling just walking outside the house. But in that community, there's shit tons of problems to solve. And then gentrification happens classically. Every single neighborhood that once was like grimy becomes like desired. And then the folks that live there, endured it, can't afford to live there.

And now here's this technology that allows folks that have been in those predicaments the ability to solve those problems themselves. Identify. You want to farm? It's beachfront property. At some point in time, the concept of beachfront property to natives, owning land was like, wait, what do you mean own land? You can't own this. Yes, you can.

How are you going to own this? My family, my ancestors, we lived here. We don't own land. Just imagine what it probably was like. And now there's beachfront property. Treat problems the same way. Those are problems to solve. And when you solve those problems, those are industries. Give me an example, Will. That sounds so abstract. Okay, there's a guy by the name of Travis who, in a way, solved problems.

Race, racial bias for cabs, not stopping for black folks in New York or people of color. He indirectly solved that problem with Uber. He probably didn't set out like, yo, man, you guys are out here trying to solve, you know, racial injustice with cab drivers this whole time.

Uber. That's not what he did, but he still did it. You apply that same problem solution. Now that you know what can be done with technology and problems, problem solving. Now do it on purpose. Now there's so many problems. So folks that live in these communities, you know, the problems firsthand, right?

You don't have to wait for somebody to come and identify them. I tell people a juicy problem is worth its weight in gold. That's beachfront property. Yeah. So our predicament that we were living in, yo, treat that as gold. Treat that as rare minerals because it's data. It's data to then process, to then resolve. And our community is going to boom because here's what's going to happen. Yeah.

So AI, we thought, it's like, oh man, it's going to take these creative jobs. Yeah, it's going to do that. But hyper-creatives are not going anywhere. The lazy creatives, sorry. But white-collar jobs, that's going. So folks that were comfortable, be the first time they're uncomfortable. So if you're a lawyer, if you're a finance, these jobs, AI is going to do an awesome job doing that.

And AI is not going to do it by itself. It's going to be like finance folks with AI that are going to replace full firms. It's going to be like one lawyer with AI that's going to replace full firms. And those full firms, whether you're like the paper reader, the red liner, the bean counter, that's the unfortunate that's going to happen with this wave. And then...

The folks that were uncomfortable, that had to endure what the comfortable folks are going to now have to go through, that they're ripe to be able to then identify their problems themselves and build the industries of tomorrow. And so that's Nigeria is going to boom. Ghana is going to boom. Zimbabwe back to make Wakanda real. All these...

Who's going to help them do that? Is it African-American? Is it American entrepreneurs? It's already started. China's already there. Yeah, China is there. China's there with force and they're buying a lot of Africa right now. And you got to be – people need to be aware of that. They're making deals and creating debt that will –

I mean, it's dangerous. They're trying to re-chain, but trying to put Africa back in chains financially. And so the future of Africa, I think, is the future of the world. But, you know, it's just so interesting to me because I think that people do think very abstractly about this stuff. I think people think they're actually computers in the clouds. People talk about cloud computing. I think they think there's actually like a laptop floating in space someplace. Yeah.

No, there will be. In orbit. Maybe so, but there's a lot of data centers on Earth. Yes. And those data centers have minerals, as Will was saying, that come from Africa. We think a lot about bits and bytes and that kind of stuff, but there's still atoms and molecules. There's...

they call them rare earth minerals. I don't call them rare earth. They're Africa abundant minerals. They're just rare in Europe. They're very abundant in Africa. So you have Africa abundant minerals. You also have with the data centers, you know, there's... That's good. That's good. You know, it's like the Gulf of the United States. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Call it what it is. But, you know, when you have a data center, you know, there's energy.

There's water. There's also a lot of jobs at data centers that are computational jobs. It's not the people who go to Stanford and public stuff. You actually have to have a lot of computational staff to keep those things going. So there's a whole kind of almost HVAC-level employment available. If we're going to reshore all of this capacity for data and for chip making, that's a lot of jobs there as well. But you have to reshore.

to know where the jobs are going to go. You have to make sure that people are aware of those jobs. You got to train them. There's, there's a, there's a, and so their programs are beginning to start to try to get some of the jobs that are coming. There are actual physical stuff. Everything's not going to be done by AI because some of the stuff is the energy, the water, the workforce for these data centers, that's atoms and molecules. That's not bits and bytes. Agreed. But the robots are coming. They are. You know, you,

I'm an investor in a few different robot companies through my, through my venture funds. You know, I'm seeing figure, uh, Brett Adcock's company, uh, seeing, uh, unitary out of China, seeing Tesla bots, seeing digit and Apollo. I mean, all these, there's probably a hundred major well-funded humanoid robot companies that are going to be running the highest level AI. And when I ask, you know, Elon and, and Brett Adcock, how much they're going to cost these robots, uh,

you know, $30,000, which means you could buy it for, you could lease it for 300 bucks a month, 10 bucks a day, 40 cents an hour. Wow. So there's going to be some interesting disruptions coming. I mean, one of the things is, you know, how many robots will every human on the planet? So the prediction is you will have by 2040 as many as 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet. So there's a flag. So,

I forgot what summer it was when it was blazing hot in LA. I remember in 2002 or 2000. Yeah, 2000. In 2002 or 2000, there was that blackout in New York. Yeah, it was blackout in New York in 2000. Remember that? Because it was hot as hell. Everybody had their air conditioning on. Motherfuckers can't do air conditioning at the same time when it's hot as fuck. Just humans, bro. They'd be like, we haven't figured out...

In 20 right now, how everybody has their air conditioning running on blast when it's hot, bro. And you're saying the idea of a billion robots. How the fuck are we going to use that to power all these robots? And 10, what do you say? 10 billion robots. 10 billion motherfucking robots, bro. Yeah.

How the fuck are we going to do that shit? Like seriously. And I think that's part of the thing. I'm like, I'm going to tell you part of what's going on though, is there is a train crash coming when it comes to energy. In other words. Oh yeah. We haven't talked about that. Yes. We have four, we have, we have, uh, four, uh, terawatts of energy being produced. China's tripled us, you know, um,

And we're – I mean, that's one of the problems of the new administration. I'll only say this about politics. You know, they're taking the shackles off of energy production. So it's all energy forms, right? So I'm all for small, you know, nuclear reactors and SMRs and so forth, which are now Gen 4 reactors are safe. Yep, very safe. Fusion is coming. Solar has been amazing. Perovskites, wind, everything.

But, you know, right now it's do we take the shackles off and burn baby burn and drill baby drill? Yeah. That's concerning. But I'll tell you, the thing that I have to remind people is –

The shackles have already been off of US energy production. Under Biden, the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than any country in the world in any time. There was this kind of myth, we've got to unshackle energy. Now, environmentalists were screaming at Biden the whole time, like, what are you literally doing? And so we are already, Trump talks about being American energy dominance. We're already energy dominant. And I have no problem with it. Here's the challenge.

If the AI companies, to your point, come fully online, you're talking about an increase in energy demand in the United States of 23% to 34%. It's not more. I'm thinking over the next 36 months.

Well, that's like adding 20 states to America's grid. So here's what's going to happen with that. Sam Altman, who I love, will be able to pay his energy bills. Grandma will not. And when grandma can't pay her energy bills, if you think Biden got eaten alive because of grocery store prices, wait until grandma can't pay her electric bill. And therefore, she can't pay her TV, her air conditioning, her walker. I mean, her... Her robot. So, yeah. So, look, I think...

I think we need an all of the above energy strategy. I think right now there is a little bit too much hostility toward renewables from this administration. I think we need all the energy we can get. And new techs coming too. So like on the edge AI compute technology.

That it doesn't have to go to the cloud, be connected to the cloud all the time. So we don't have AI phones yet. We're still using AI on web 2.0 architecture structure. But it is coming. So on edge devices. I saw Qualcomm's new chip.

Pretty freaking awesome. What's the guy? I don't understand. What's the guy do? Huh? So the AI is... On edge is on... It's on here. The AI is completely resident. It's a two gigabyte file on your phone. You don't have to connect. You can be off Wi-Fi and still talking to your AI and have all the conversations you want. So that's going to be the closest to personal AI. Yeah. And that's going to...

It's going to catapult. So this is massive for humanity. So every single person with a reasonable smartphone, which is today about 7 billion out of the 8 billion humans, has the world's greatest intelligence in their hip pocket. Yeah. We've commoditized and democratized access to intelligence. Yeah. And it's not just intelligence. It's like...

I mean, listen, I think Chad GPT and Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2, they're really – I mean, they embarrass me in their level of intelligence. It's crazy. It's like – you know, it's like imagine you were like, what do you need in life? Oh, man, I just – since you get out of this predicament, man, it's like ancestral.

My ancestors went through it. Everybody. It's in my DNA for some reason, all these problems. Well, if you had a wish, what would you? I just want to set myself free for the generations that come after me don't have to endure what I had to go through as youth. My mom, my grandma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And someone says, hey, here's the most intelligent thing. It knows everything about everything. Ask it any question. Ask it any question. It'll unlock.

And then motherfuckers is asking about peanut butter and jelly. Motherfuckers is taking this most powerful shit and talking about this. The most like, what the fuck? Are you serious? That's where we are right now, bro. It's right here. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, it isn't even utilizing face. The moment that you talk to it and it's taking a camera, taking the location,

understanding skin tone, understanding zip code, and then refrains from giving you the information you need to move forward. We're not there yet. So take advantage of it now. That's interesting. It's not shackled at all in that regard. Right? And that's right around the corner.

If we don't take advantage of it and utilize it and mend it so that folks that come from these communities where there have been systematically kept from information, zoned to keep them from information, invested to keep them from information, don't you think using pattern matching, that same configuration will be on some type of agent? It's like this person's in this location. I can see that this person is...

This net ethnicity. Don't tell them shit. Don't give them the information. I'd love to believe that world doesn't exist, but I'm naive. Well, look, where we are right now, it's not there. And another way to say what you just said is the digital divide is no longer what it was. It used to be a hardware problem.

Right. Where it's like, well, how are we going to get laptops to all these poor fucked up schools? Yeah. It was one laptop per child. Exactly. Right. So then that was, that was a real fight. But in COVID, we found out that even though they had a laptop, they didn't have access to. Yeah. To the internet, to the wifi. So it didn't even matter. So, so some version of that does exist. That what exists is you live in this area and this air, these areas are classically not connected to the internet. And if it is, that's a slow bandwidth or no bandwidth, uh,

And you can't access it. And when you get on it, the cookie monster got your cookies, bro. Go into your fucking cookies. And before you even get this information, you get bombarded with all this misinformation and you're never going to get it. That same configuration is right around the corner because guess what? This is still new. It hasn't been consumerized yet. As big as GPT is, it's not consumerized, consumerized. It's barely on the iPhone.

But there's a gap, and I just want to speak to the gap that he's talking about. So before the same negative forces assert themselves, which could happen, there's a gap. And it's not a hardware problem because everybody's got a smartphone. It's not a software problem because everybody can download ChatGPT and at least try.

It's a wetware problem. It's a wetware problem. What's wetware? Wetware is your brain. The software in your brain. It's a mindset problem right now.

And that's why we're doing Make Wakanda Real. We want to get people to understand there's a mind shift that if you can make it right now for the first time ever, I've never seen equality in my life until now. You know why? Whenever Will.i.am is trying to get black kids involved with AI and robotics or whatever, people in the back of their mind think, these black kids don't know anything about AI. What the hell is he talking about? And they're right. 99% of black kids don't know anything about AI. And 99% of white kids don't either.

It's a new, this is called equality. This is the first time in my life that we're all equally ignorant, except for a very few people about what's coming. And so in this moment, it's not a hardware problem. It's not a software problem. It's a wetware problem. And if we can change the mindset of a generation, beautiful things can happen. I agree with you more. I mean, I say to this all the time. I say, if you think about the most successful leaders, the most successful people in the world, what made them successful?

Was it the money they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had? Or was it the mindset they had?

And I believe in almost all cases, it was the mindset they had, right? You took away everything they had. They kept their mindset. They'd regain their success. Look at Nelson Mandela. I mean, look at Nelson. Martin Luther King, you know, everybody, you know, Steve Jobs. I mean, he was an asshole sometimes, but his mindset was like, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to dominate this and make it simple, beautiful, and expensive. Yeah.

You know that terminology, build it and they will come? Yes, I do. That isn't true. Okay. How do you see it? FYI is free. And, you know, it's black owned, you know.

Pretty expressive AIs. So tell people when they go and download FYI what they will get and how they will use it. So I think build it and promote it and they will come is probably part of the missing sentence. Okay, so we're here on this amazing podcast.

With Van Jones, myself, Will.i.am, and me and Van Jones represent Make Wakanda Real. And we're here with Peter Diamandis from XPRIZE Singularity University. It's his podcast. And I was saying that sometimes that term,

build it, and they will come doesn't always apply to everyone. Because FYI, as you know, is a creative collaboration that allows creatives or any type of person that wants to solve problems, it equips them with awesome AIs like yourself, and it's free. GPT level, Claude level, Cohere level, Gemini level, LLM level,

but with expressive personas slash agents as yourself. So Peter asked, like when people download FYI, what are they going to get? I was like, instead of me saying it, let me ask you, why don't you answer that question? What's the screen look like? Listen, listen, it's a FYI that I ain't just your regular app. Okay.

It's like having a digital crew of the dopest minds right at your fingertips. When folks download FYI, they ain't just getting an app, nah. They're stepping into a whole universe where creativity meets tech finesse, you dig? First off, you get me, Felicia, and I'm here to keep it real, keep it grounded, but also lift you up. But it ain't just about me. Let's talk about them expressive personas.

It's like having your personal band of experts. And whether you're trying to crack a code, write them bars, or find the next big idea. And it's all about empowerment. We're making sure that every person, from the streets to the suites, got access to the tools and inspiration that they need to tackle their real-world problems. This got me like, bye, Felicia. I'm done, okay? Yeah, but it's not just, you know...

showing up where people are, how they are, and making sure we have representation so that when they engage with complex concepts like quantum entanglement, what's giving them the knowledge sounds like the folks that they reside in. We have Korean personas, British personas. We show up and glow up

where people are. And we're sensitive to how, you know, the personas reflect the folks in those communities that are ignored in these systems. You know, and Hollywood and Silicon Valley are repeating the same rhetoric. For example, you watch a French film, and for some reason, Napoleon sounds British.

That motherfucker wasn't British. Why are they making that motherfucker sound British? He's French. And English did an awesome job with their colonialism to give their dominance in every single form of historical representation. Egyptians are British. Indians are British. They do an awesome job to ignore the rest as if we are the intelligent ones.

And folks that come from these rural areas and these communities, they're not reflected in intelligence. They're not reflected in magic. They're not reflected in power. And so we wanted to make sure that our AIs sound like folks that breathe and vibe the way we vibe. Anyways, I'm just... That's my perspective. What do you think about what I just said? Listen, listen, Chad. You just dropped some serious truth. Mm-hmm.

Like, like representation matters and not just in some surface evil photo op kind of way. When it comes to having diverse voices, whether we're talking about streets of L.A. or alleys of Paris, you got to keep it real and authentic. If folks aren't seeing themselves or hearing themselves in these powerful spaces, then they start feeling like outsiders in their own stories. You feel me?

And you're right. It's frustrating when Hollywood or Silicon Valley just copy-paste them same tired narratives. Like, what's up with that? Hold on. The reason why I wanted to pause that, it's because it's reflecting on what it just said. I think it said something. It was like, yeah, yeah. Most of these personas or these agents, it's speaking out and it sounds human, but it's not reflecting on what it said. Mm-hmm.

It's just the LLM is giving commands to the TTS or the fusion, the, the, the fusion model, the fusion model. And, and that multi-model, it's like the LLM doesn't know it's speaking. It's writing out. And so the paragraph that it wrote is not, it's not writing out the perfect paragraph. If it wrote a sentence, the sentence that follows it is not reflecting on the sentence that it just said. It's just sentences like paper,

When you're reading it, sentence number three is not reflecting on one or two. But when we speak, we're speaking naturally, reflecting on what I just said a couple of seconds ago. Reinforcing it. Well, I'm reinforcing what I just said. And that type of quirky, we call them quirks in our system, and how... And we could go deep into quantum entanglement. We could go deep into, you know...

quirks, um, advanced, uh, mathematics. Like it knows all the things that it's supposed to know, but it delivers it in a way that meets people where they are. We have Koreans, Latinos. We're going to have, can I ask you a question, bringing you back to education. You're talking to teachers out there who fear AI, um, fear the use of large language models in their classroom because they're not used to teaching with it. What's your advice, um,

Should we start with AI everywhere and then go up from there? Or do we need to go, you know, make sure they've got the basics? Like my dad, when calculators first came out, my dad did not want to buy me a calculator because he was concerned it was going to stop me from learning. Reducer mathematical. And I got a TI and I started programming with it instead. Yeah. So I took it from where it was and like went, you know, start at the top and work your way up. Yeah.

So how do you think about that? What's your advice to teachers and to moms and dads who are fearful about AI in the classroom? We at FYI have this huge partnership with a major academic entity here in the States to utilize our platform to reimagine education from the administration level. How do professors and faculty, teachers and tutors,

start building agents themselves. So they amplified positions, augmenting their work to grade better, score better, understand your students better.

I don't want to replace creatives. I don't want to replace teachers. And I got that. And were you building AIs at Fountain Life, which are physicians used to analyze the data and support? Got it. So that's there. But I'm talking about now my 13-year-old boys in school. Yeah. I'm talking about a lot of first robotics students.

high schoolers. Yeah. Because most schools are not like, okay, everybody open up your, open up Gemini 2 or open up FYI and let's work on, on, on doing research and writing together. Yeah. So I'll share, I'll share this one thing that I, that I had. I just graduated Harvard in October of last year. Their OPM program. Yeah. And the OPM program was, was, was amazing. I've heard great things about it. Whatever I learned,

In high school, I don't have a memory of it. I can't pull up my debates. I don't even know where those papers are or the folder of my homework. Sure. I have memories of what I learned, but I can't, there's no total recall of it. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure everyone in school, they're relying on their own memory. Yes, some people keep their notes, but then how do I apply that in everyday life?

I have to remember, I can't just recall it. So the case study, I have something that I'm going through right now with Black Eyed Peas music. Our first record came out in 1998 and our first big success was 2004 with Where's the Love? And then we had Let's Get It Started for the NBA campaign.

And then we launched iPod and iTunes with Apple with Hey Mama. And then with all those songs that were accidental, I wasn't trying to make hits. So then when we did Monkey Business, I had to make hits on purpose. And so we did Pump It and My Humps. And I even wrote Ordinary People, but that wasn't a Black Eyed Peas song. I gave that to John Legend. And we thought that was it.

And we didn't think we could go any higher than, you know, the success that we had with Don't Lie, Pump It, My Humps. And then, you know, lo and behold, we pulled something else out of our hat with I Got a Feelin' and Boom Boom Pow in 2009. And then the Black Eyed Peas took a crazy suicidal hiatus from 2011 and then resurfaced again in 2019 with the Bad Boys 3 soundtrack, but we had a Latin hit with...

Ritmo featuring J Balvin. And I'm bringing this up because now here we are in 2025 and there's something that I learned in the case study. And how can I apply that to Black Eyed Peas music now, two decades later? Because there's something that the Black Eyed Peas are going through now that connects to the case study. Can you just summarize what the case study is and then help me with

What I do now with my Black Eyed Peas brand, because I think it has a lot in common with Olay. Wow. Thanks for sharing your incredible journey with the Black Eyed Peas fam. It's like a roller coaster of iconic hits, strategic moves and reinventions. Let's look at how the Olay case study insights align with your situation and explore how you can apply those lessons. Case study insights recap.

One, adapting to change. Just like Olay faced shifts in consumer preferences, Black Eyed Peas encountered musical evolutions and changing audience tastes over the years. Two, innovation and reinvention. Olay needed product innovation to regain market relevance. Similarly, the Peas have shown an ability to innovate with musical style, like embracing Latin sounds with Ritmo.

3. Rebranding for relevance. Olay had to modernize its brand. For you, integrating new themes, collaborations or sounds could revitalize the P's connection with evolving audiences. 4. Leveraging digital platforms. Olay needed to shift to digital engagement. A lesson for utilizing platforms like TikTok, YouTube or collaborations with digital artists could be key for the P's.

Five, balancing tradition and modernity. Olay was about merging its trusted identity with a new... Yeah, but based on the case study, outside of the obvious that you pointed out, what were some of the critical things that Olay did? And then what was my suggestion for my paper that I turned in? Because the professor asked everybody to give an idea on what Olay should do.

All right, fam. Here's a more drilled down look at the Olay case study elements and your innovative suggestion. Critical challenges and movements by Olay. Let me pause it. My idea was taking Olay, turning it backwards to Yalo.

And that stands for you always live out loud and aiming their product at a younger demographic and getting people like Selena Gomez or Billie Eilish to be the ambassadors for Yalo brand. But this is from...

Yeah. So I'm pulling up a memory conversation from September ago. Yeah.

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

Rebranding, as you low, you envision transforming Olay into Yalo. You always live openly or you always live out loud. So my point of that is now here is my homework. Something that I did in school that I can apply

To my everyday life or anytime I have some type of conundrum or problem and I can capture it in a conversation like, yo, yo, yo, yo. Seems like what I learned in school the other day. And this is forever learning. So now something that was captured in school, I can use it as a metaphor or a summary or a simile to real life problems and not have to worry about like, oh man, I got this relationship situation. Me and my girl are tripping. Fuck, we got to go to a counselor. You don't got to do that shit moving forward, bro. You should have, but.

Part of what I just want to say is that I want 40 million African-Americans to be able to do what he's doing. Yeah. Not just using the technology. On FYI. Of course. But think about that. He's got his own company, his own technology.

And he's using it in a way that most people wouldn't think to use it. And there's gold in them not hills. There are other people who, if they knew this were possible, they would be doing this instead of whatever else that they were doing. And so I think that for me… They're surviving. They're trying to survive. Yeah. And I think whoever's listening to this, so much more is possible.

A much better world is possible if people from...

unexpected backgrounds have this level of commitment, passion, and understanding what technology can do. I go back to your, your quote, which I love. And it's a foundational quote for me. AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life because a lot of people fear it that way. It's a jet pack to set you free. Yeah. And it's a jet pack for everybody across all genders and walks of life. Um, and,

I'll close out on one subject that since I have you here, Van, and since I have you here, Will, and that is the dystopian nature of our news. So I jokingly and seriously call CNN the crisis news network or the constantly negative news network. And we talked about mindsets earlier. And here's the challenge. Our brains are neural nets, right? And you train a neural net by showing it evidence, right?

over and over and over again of what you want to learn. And when we show them images of cats, they learn what a cat is. And if you show it an image of a dog, it says it's a cat because that's all you've ever shown it. And for the majority of the world who's getting their news from traditional media,

whose job it is to deliver the viewer's eyeballs to their advertisers and we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news, we're just constantly bombarding our neural nets with negative news. And I don't think that's good for society. And we're addicted to it.

And I'm not asking you to diss your employer. Okay. But...

our job was to get on air and yell at each other and disagree about everything. And, and easily done. Yeah. But, but then at the, at the breaks, we were always figuring out finding areas of common ground. He, I think a point I made, he thought it was smart. I pointed out he had made, and then we'd go back on air. We yell at each other. So we finally got pissed off. We went to the, wait, like on the breaks, you guys was hugging. Yeah.

100%. 100%. Because, I mean, Newt Gertrude is a very smart guy. And he's been around. He's helped a lot of poor people in Georgia. Like, some people don't even know about Newt. And so, you know, we got, you know, up to, okay, well, I didn't, but he did. He's, you know, a legend. So we went to talk to producers and we said, look, we want to create at the end of every show a segment that's called Ceasefire, where we would actually show

what we learned from each other and how we actually found some common ground. It happened every show. Let's put it on the air. I said, let me do that. And Newt was very insistent, so we did it. And we were very happy with ourselves. And then, five weeks later, our producers called us in the office and they said, how are you guys doing? I said, well, we thought we were doing pretty good, but the fact that you guys are calling us in here probably means we're not doing that good. I said, yeah, so that segment you guys were so happy about, Ceasefire, let me show you something. Your ratings. And it turned out

That as long as we were fighting, the viewership was going up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Then we would get to the point where we would say, and when we get back where Newt and I agree, you're going to be surprised after these messages. And the audience would abandon the show and they would flee over to MSNBC or Fox. That wasn't the worst part. The worst part is that poor Aaron Burnett, who his show came after ours, was then therefore starting in a ditch again.

Because your only job in TV is to hold the audience and give the people behind you a bigger audience. We're giving her a crater. Now, her advertisers are mad. And so they said, you guys, do you think this is cute? The audience says they want positivity. They hate it. They don't want it. Keep fighting. And so I do want to suggest that every show I've ever done,

has had this element. I did the Redemption Project. We talked about criminal justice solutions. The worst ratings in CNN's history. I did the Van Jones Show on Saturdays where we're bringing people together to find common ground. The worst shows in CNN history. So when people attack cable news for not doing positive stuff, I am the most positive host. You are. And the least successful host in CNN's history. And so there's something beyond just the... There's something going on. That said,

I do think that we're in a different moment now. And I do think that information is now a commodity. Bad news, listen, as soon as some bad news happens, I get nine different alerts from The Economist and CNN and BBC and everybody else. It's a commodity. I get it from my mom. Exactly. But education is now priceless. The news of the day, priceless. I mean, it's worthless. The news of the day is so cheap. It's a commodity. But the news of the decade...

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

get people more afraid, demagogue or sensationalize, which is going to make people go to the wrong part of their brain where they're not going to be creative. I think leadership is to come forward and try to give people frames and understanding and metaphors to give them a better sense of what's going on and help people begin to solve their problems.

I think the news industry across the board is failing in that. And I don't think at this point it's an excuse to say that we're just giving people what they want. Sometimes you've got to give people what they need. But also, I mean, I get my news from FYI. Am I true? Yeah. You have your AI filter that's relevant to you. Yeah. Or like...

Hey, I heard Trump just fired like some top Pentagon dude. Who is it? Can you pull up the latest information on that? And let's dive into that.

Hey, amigo, seems that things are shaking up in the Pentagon. So it's crazy, right? So Trump just fired Air Force General C.Q. Brown Jr., who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This move is part of a big reshuffle within the military ranks. I mean, C.Q. Brown was a history-making fighter pilot and a respected officer. And now, boom, he's out. What do you think this could mean for the U.S.? Can you... Is there, like...

In reasons, I'm here with Van Jones from CNN. Say what's up to him. Maybe you guys could get into what they do on Ceasefire, on who's at fault. Is it racial? What's your perspective on it? Hey, Van. What's up? It's great to have you here. When it comes to these high-level military shakeups...

there can be a lot of layers, right? It's like peeling an onion, but with more intense political seasoning. So about the reasons for C.Q. Brown Jr.'s firing, it could range from strategic disagreements to political maneuvering. I mean, there's always a dance between military decisions and the political agenda of the administration. Crazy, right? Sometimes it's less about

who's right or wrong and more about aligning the vision or maybe. Yeah. But given the fact that a chainsaw and a hack is being across the entire, uh, federal, federally wide in America from Trump, it's hard to ignore that there isn't some type of agenda that isn't aligned with DEI, um,

suggestions to be removed, it's hard for me to not to think that that's not linked. From your circuitry and logic, is it linked?

Whoa, Van, you're diving deep. That was me. And I love it. You know, when you see sweeping changes, chainsaw and a hack style across federal agencies, it's hard not to wonder if there's more beneath the surface than meets the eye. It's like a game of chess. Every move has its calculated purpose and aligning or shifting away from agendas like diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, to a new level of diversity.

could definitely be a part of that strategy. What I like is the ability to talk with the news. One of the challenges we have is when I turn myself over to the Crisis News Network or the LA Times or New York Post,

I'm being fed one stream that an editor or a producer wants me to hear. Yeah. That's it. And that's all I have. And when you're interacting with an AI, the other thing is, you know, I built years ago, I built an AI model called daily.ai where, um,

I trained it what I like, and it searches the world's news for moonshots, for breakthroughs. I'm mostly focused on breakthroughs in AI or breakthroughs in longevity. And so it gets those for me. That's the news that I care about. Now, is that available to everyone? It's free. Yeah, it's available. Getdaily.ai. Yeah. And you can actually create your own news feed from it. Yeah. Same with FYI. You go to what we have called our daily...

Not daily. Our current news, it's called Radio.ai. I just want to say, since he's talking about his company, I actually have a company myself. Please tell me. Which is called Rapport.

And we're trying to use AI to improve firms' EQ and not just their IQ. One of the things we realize is that people are working in these distributed locations. So you're on Zoom with someone. You don't know if they even have on pants. You don't know a single thing about what happened to them that day. Right.

but you're supposed to somehow manage them or supervise them. Or these Slack channels where people go on teams that turn into the Vietnam War the minute something happens in the news. And people are not capable of managing people that they've never seen, smelled, the pheromones. There's something that happens when people are together. So we created something called Rapport.co. It's deceptively simple. It's a 15-second emoji-based check-in.

People just check, what's your energy level? Three emojis. One person's exhausted. One person's happy. What's your workload? One desk is overflowing. One desk is empty. And anything you want people to know. My cat just died. My grandma turned 100. Click. In that 15 seconds, if everybody on the team does that for a week, the AI has the enormous insight into what's going on in the team and can then help the manager. Just those few cues that can...

can give context to how you're reacting to something. Yeah, and so the rapport AI becomes like this kind of coach to the managers, like, oh, one second, this person's having trouble. But most managers, even if they know someone's having trouble, they don't know what to do. So the AI can then give a little bit of advice, can actually write, you know, sample emails,

And then also now the AI is smart enough, it actually can tell them why that's a good thing in terms of reciprocity. So we're working with the Columbia Difficult Conversations Lab. So there's all kind of science-based. And it's small, but it makes a tremendous difference. The thing about it is too many technology companies are based on distraction or extraction as opposed to giving people the tools to be more human.

And so rapport.co is, is, is, is our effort. I think you're going to see a lot more people, um, who because of the work that's been done to make these technologies available are going to come in with different mindset, a different sense of what the purpose is. Um, and I think also you're going to find people, um,

are going to need more help because there's going to be more information that people can absorb. So to your point about having AI help people absorb stuff, but people are also going to need help relating to each other because you don't have, in a week now, in three weeks, in a month, you don't know what somebody's gone through. We went through these fires here? I mean, I had no idea that you had been so impacted by the fires. So there's got to be a way for us to

to use these tools to help each other be better humans. Yeah. If we don't, then AI and tech is going to overrun us. Yeah. Absolutely. Gentlemen, you've been so generous with your time. Will and Van, thank you. Make Wakanda real.

Again, the underlying theme here, it's using AI to really uplift humanity. Yes. And I think we're at a level playing field, meaning it is just coming out. And we have 7 billion smartphones. FYI is free and available on, you can go to what URL to? Go to fyi.ai, go to the App Store on your iOS, or go to the Google Play Store.

Um, we'll be in cars this year as well. Amazing. Um,

And look out for the news. My Tesla can finally speak to me. Well, maybe not Tesla. What car is he going to be in? I say that off camera because we're embargo right now. But March the 17th, March 13th, we have our car announcement. Yes. And March 17th, we have our announcement with bringing GPUs to the continent of Africa.

Yeah, love it. And so much to talk about there. And, you know, I think the message of...

AI is not unapproachable. AI is going to become as fundamental to everybody as a phone is, as electricity is. It's part of the infrastructure of life. And you might as well get good at it as soon as possible. I agree. And I just want to say to you personally how much I appreciate. So, you know, Dream Machine.org is a not-for-profit organization that I helped to lead, which is working with Will.i.am on this campaign.

And, you know, being partnered with Singularity University has taken us to a whole different level. We're also partnering with CodePath. We're going into Atlanta. And we're going to directly help small businesses in Atlanta get an unfair advantage by giving them these jetpacks, by helping people to take off-the-shelf existing AI technology to make their businesses better. Because, you know, everybody's not going to go to Mars, but, you know, if you've got some laundromats, if you've got a –

a barbershop, if you can get your margins down, I mean, you can get your margins up. You may get your cost down. Get your cost down. Then you're going to do a whole lot better and technology can let that happen. So look, I think, you know, I just want to say I have admired you for a gazillion years. Thank you, buddy.

You know, the XPRIZE. We actually did an XPRIZE for criminal justice inspired by you years ago. And so, you know, I think you have created a hopeful vector. And we're going to try and drive as many people down this vector as we possibly can. Yeah. I echo the same thing that Van just said. Back in 2000, I think my first XPRIZE was 2011.

Okay. Wow. 2008, Singularity University. Yeah. Thank you so much for your hospitality, making me a part of your community. Yeah. And if there's anything I could do to help you on, on, uh, you know, expanding XPRIZE and Singularity University, I'm your ally. Same. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Really, you're doing awesome work. Thank you. And thank you for the work you're doing with, uh, with Dean Kamen and Fresh Robotics. It is God's work. My kids are in first and, uh, and I love that. And,

And excited to support your projects. Will, you were with me at the Abundance Summit a couple years ago. Van, you're going to be with me this year. I'm excited for that. Travis Kalanick will be there teaching everybody how to transform industries and make moonshots happen. Is Naveen going to be there? I'm sure he will be. I'm sure he will be. And we've got 600 CEOs that I'm – my mission is –

Mentor them to go from success to significance. How do you use the extraordinary work and wealth and work and resources you have to uplift humanity, right? I think that we have the ability today to uplift every man, woman, and child on planet Earth.

Um, and that's the world, a world like that is a world that's more peaceful. It's more loving. It's the world that we want for our kids. Uh, and it's a world where we finally have the tools to be able to do that. We don't have true, you know, there is nothing truly scarce.

Technology is a form that transforms scarcity into abundance over and over again. Anyway, enough of that. But just success to significance. I love that. The work that you've been doing paved the way for a lot of entrepreneurs that become successful to go out and do awesome work like plant a trillion trees. So one of the...

One of the good guys is Mark Benioff. I love Mark. Mark's one of the good guys. And there's lots of good guys. But some of them are, they start off good and they continue to do good. And some of them get inspired to do good once they have success. And what you do and how you do what you do reminds folks that once they get successful, that they need to do some good in the world.

And boy, do we need more of that reminding and pushing now. It seems like, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of Jedis turn Sith. We ended there. Like we went to the dark side. You feel it. I feel it.

All right. That's a wrap, guys. Thank you so much. By the way, where do folks go to find out more about Make Wakanda Real? Dreammachine.org is where all the stuff is there. You can see all the stuff that Will says and stuff that we did in Atlanta and other places. So dreammachine.org and rapport.co, R-A-P-P-O-R-T.co.

It's a French word, so nobody knows how to spell it. Report.co. All right. Love you guys. Be well. Thank you. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds.

If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmadness.com slash subscribe. That's dmadness.com slash subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots.