this is a great moment in technology because I mean we’ve all witnessed what AI can do now we’ve been able to take this technology and do some amazing things with it quote we’re not adding any software Engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with agent force to the point where engineering velocity is incredible agent force I’m singularly focused on that right now how do I deliver a billion agents in the world mark would you come out on AI is going to decimate jobs well I think in some cases like all technology has there will be a change in jobs we have declining birth rates we have less labor we have less capability so you know we’re going to have to build some digitally hey everybody Peter dandis here and welcome to moonshots on this episode we’re going to be speaking with a dear friend Mark Benny off he’s the chair CEO and co-founder of Salesforce a global leader in cloud computing the
[00:01:00] largest Enterprise applications company and now one of the leaders in agentic AI uh this year mark uh proclaimed that because of his use of AI agents he is not hiring any new engineers and he’s still able to increase productivity of his engineering 30% we’ll be talking about agentic ai ai agents we’ll be talking about humanoid robots we’ll be talking what the future looks like and what Mark is doing right here right now in the now all right a fun conversation with a dear friend uh who is really transforming the world through his philanthropy and through His Brilliant work before we get started I’d like to mention that this podcast is made possible through the sponsorship of three incredible companies the first is Fountain life a company which is able to digitize and upload you understand what’s going on inside your body to find cancer any kind of disease aneurysms at Inception before they impact you and
[00:02:00] keep you in Optimal Health the second company is one skin it’s a product I use every day twice a day people tell me I have amazing skin well it’s all because of the incredible technology in these peptides and one skin that finds scile cells and kill them to enable you to have youthful skin the third is viome viome is a company that uses metatranscriptomics to understand what’s going on in your trans crypto and that in your gut helping you decide what you should eat what supplements to take these are the companies I care deeply about and I thank them for the support of this episode let’s jump in and if you love the kinds of conversations like we’re about to have Please Subscribe helps me know that you care and lets me redouble on the work that I do for you everybody Welcome to moonshots I’m here with a dear friend Mark benof an extraordinary entrepreneur Mark uh Aloha how’s Hawaii doing today how are you Peter how’s everything with you uh I’m
[00:03:00] evacuated from Santa Monica oh wow we haven’t talked about that we haven’t talked about the fires you know well we went through that last August as you know in Hawaii I remember that and my heart is going out to everybody in LA because you know I lost part of my house and I understand very well what it everybody is going through and it’s horrible yeah and the worst part about this is it’s all preventable right that is 100% correct yeah we’ve got an $1 million Wildfire X prize encouraging teams to use Ai and drones and exponential Tech to find a fire at Inception when it’s you know 3 m or less and put it out and be done with it that is great absolutely fantastic and also don’t forget our incredible firefighters who are so important and we more of and fire trucks and fire hydrants that work with water in them and everybody has partipate all of this stuff yeah I mean I’ve gone through this in NorCal myself and our San Francisco
[00:04:00] you know offices Sonoma Napa the horrible fires you know the paradise fire campfire all of these terrible fires that have happened and I mean we’ve even bought trucks directly for Cal Fire and we’ve bought uh trucks in Hawaii as well anywhere where there’s fires that are happening we’ve been buying trucks and trying to augment the firefighters because I think that’s the one thing we can all do right now you know these next Generation trucks are amazing and uh we just need to support our firefighters in every possible way 100% buddy 100% And your philanthropy has been extraordinary most people know you as the founder CEO chairman of Salesforce but they don’t know the scale of your philanthropy you know when I was on the phone with you about two weeks ago you laid out five things that you care about uh and they’re amazing I was going to read these I need to stop giving you information in advance of these podcasts Peter why uh so listen there are five things that you laid out
[00:05:00] that yeah you’re focusing on cuz you know focus is important Focus allows you to go big and bold I mean it’s time for you to do something significant with your life mark it really truly is I’m trying to do something Peter but you know I I’m still looking for that one idea I’m sure you’ve gotten it let me just read the five so people know where we’re going to go in this podcast uh the first is AI agents uh big big deal for you we’re going to dive deep into that humanoid robots was number two energy small modular nuclear actors was number three regenerative bio which you and I care about had you had 30 healthy years on your life and then this planet called Earth uh is that still the same five you had two weeks ago it’s still the same five you know they’re going to change probably at some point but those are the five that I am really focused on right I mean these are mostly commercial type things and obviously you know we just talked about fires that’s on my mind all the time everywhere I live uh I look around I’m always worried about fire i b been in the middle and
[00:06:00] caught in the middle of wildfires and it’s an unbelievable situation so that’s on my mind and I have PTSD also so I would say we there’s things we all should be thinking about but those are five investment ideas I would say that well they Investments and and philanthropy for you and philanthropy I mix them up you know I I get it and you’re all in I mean there’s a lot of individuals out there who done incredibly well in their lives and but they haven’t come back and gone all into to you know focus on making the world a better place well I just am doing one thing Peter which is I only do what I enjoy yeah and I’m at a point in my life where I’m like just thinking to myself hey I just want to do what I’m enjoying doing and if I’m not enjoying doing it I’m not going to do it and people will say to me all the time hey tell me you know how do you really get happier I’m like you know look this is what I tell my family this is what I tell myself which is I make a list like
[00:07:01] what are the five things that I’m really enjoying doing right now in priority and really try to constantly hone that list and it’s changing all the time and then I also make a list of what are the five things that I’m doing that I’m not enjoying right now and you know we can’t stop everything that we’re not enjoying and we cannot only do what we’re enjoying but we can do a little more of what we’re enjoying and a little less of what we’re not enjoying and if you look at that list list of the five things you’re enjoying and the five things that you’re not enjoying and you do a little bit less of the not enjoying and a little bit more of the enjoying I guarantee Peter you’re gonna be a little happier in your life so there’s a little nod to our friend Tony yes yes and and Tony introduced us Tony Robbins years ago and uh uh I I view him and me as the world’s Chief guinea pigs I’m trying to drag you along on that Journey but we’ll get there let’s start with AI agents which is has been big I’m going to read
[00:08:00] a quote from you Mark it says uh quote we’re not adding any software Engineers next year because we have increase the productivity this year with agent force and with all AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% to point uh to the point where engineering velocity is incredible so um talk about that talk about what led to that conclusion uh let’s talk about what agent force is uh you’ve you’ve not doubled down you’ve gone 10x down on this yeah I have well I think that I mean you can only do one thing you know like uh I actually got this really great phone call from Steve Jobs and he said come down to Apple right now and I’m like all right let’s go and um I went down there and I’m like why am I down here what is going on he’s like I have to show you this and I’m getting really excited I used to work for Apple by the way when I was 19 years old in 1984 I wrote the first Native Assembly Language on the Macintosh as an employee of apple as a summer intern during my time at USC
[00:09:01] what you had promise even back then and I had promised then and I love Apple I love Steve Jobs and I’m down there and I’m like a kid in a candy store it’s like going to see willly Wonka you know it’s like incredible moment and he’s like all right I’m going to show this to you and he like takes out um this box and he’s like now listen at Apple we have only one team one good team we have a huge Company Mark but we only have one team that actually knows what they’re doing and so that one team can only do one thing at one time do you understand what I’m saying one thing I’m say yes sir I do he’s like all right now I’m going to show you it’s the iPad and here it is and he shows I’m like this is amazing he’s like I know it’s this it’s that it’s 10 Ines I can’t remember the exact size he show he’s like yeah and I love this big size and I just have to show you this one other thing CU I have want to get feedback on it and I’m like what is it he takes out a small one and he goes and this is the small one I’m
[00:10:01] like oh you should have both of these he goes no never we’ll never do that because we’re only G to have one I’m like okay but if you had the small one no no we’re not doing the small one and they were so cool and then you know he said you know for the last five years I’ve only been or three years or whatever it is I’ve only been focused on iPhone and that was my one thing but now I’m going to shift into iPad and I’m like this is really just awesome and so yeah when we’re like rolling out something at Salesforce and right now we are focused on agent force we take everything that we have learned from the great incredible Steve Jobs who inspired my life and my whole industry my company and agent force I’m singularly focused on that right now thinking about how do I deliver a billion agents in the world and this is all I’m doing 100% okay so let’s dive in I mean agent you’ve now released agent force too um and how how do people think about
[00:11:03] Agents from Salesforce just the individual small companies mediumsized companies yeah this is a great moment in technology because I mean we’ve all witnessed what AI can do now the how it’s changed things we’ve all had our chat GPT moment you know where we got on chat GPT like we had our Google moment where we searched the internet for the first time you know maybe it was Yahoo at that point or maybe it was one of the other services but we’ve all now had our chat GPT moment or Gemini moment or u.com moment or whatever it is whatever the AI that you love using is and we’ve been able to take this technology and do some amazing things with it now obviously we’re a huge customer relationship management platform that means we’re helping our customers connect with their customers in new ways and we do that with many products in sales and service in marketing and Commerce and analytics we
[00:12:01] own slack we own Tableau we have incredible portfolio of products and all of those products have been Rewritten into a single platform and that single platform has been augmented with a data cloud and that data Cloud amalgamates all of your data in your company and then we’ve done one more thing so we have the customer 360 platform we call it we have our data cloud and then we have one more layer above it which is our Genentech layer and that agentic layer is where those agents are living and they are able to look at all of the applications and all of the workflow and all of the data and they are very smart and it’s letting companies do incredible new things so in my example at Salesforce even I have something that I do for customers which is provide customer support like many companies and service like many companies so our site is called help. salesforce.com comp we have 36,000 companies that come
[00:13:01] there every week for help and if you had talked to me a month ago I’d tell you that of the 36,000 our technolog is very good but still 10,000 have to talk to human beings which is why we have about 9,000 people in customer support now we’ve put an agentic layer on that and those human those customers are talking to agents first and those agents have this not only generative AI but they have all of the other machine intelligence machine learning deep learning all the things built into our platform and they can resolve about 95% of these customer inquiries now still 5,000 of the 31,000 have to go to human beings and those human beings then are seamlessly interoperating with that service because this is about humans and agents working together but it’s for it’s those 5,000 are going to agent to humans for the moment I mean they’re you know the speed which
[00:14:00] we’re Peter I know this is hard for you I’m in the now someone as amazing as you living in the future taking whatever you’re taking I don’t know way out there in the world no I’m here in the now and right now Peter I’m saying Peter and I are close friends so I’m kidding him right now in the now moment of the 36,000 customer inquiries I get every single week now now 31,000 can be resolved by agents those are digital agents software and 5,000 still have to go to human agents so it’s digital agents and human agents working together as a team we have appliations and agents that are able to interoperate and have this incredible experience together and I and I love that and I love the fact that you’ve gotten all in on that I mean part of it a survival mechanism right you’re any company that’s not going fully into a gentic AI uh is going to have a hard time uh
[00:15:01] navigating the next few years but my question is is there that’s exactly right this is a moment of evolution in our whole industry we are you know well look it it was in the cloud we pioneered that it was mobile we were a Pioneer in that it was social we are pioneering that and by the way this is not our first AI we also deliver two trillion Enterprise AI transactions every week already for our customers on our Einstein platform I I know Einstein well we do AI for a lot of folks all over the world and half for a long time but this is the next level and we’re always going to another level technology is constantly getting lower cost easier to use a continum as you know very well and is there anything is there anything that these agents will not be able to do in your opinion in the future and I’m sorry I am moving into the future of this conversation the future the future con yes the future Peter um in the future Peter in the future let’s go right can
[00:16:01] we roll the movie Space Odyssey now her will be next we’ll also show you Minority Report Terminator let’s just go to that because for those of you who have not seen the movies we’ll be going to that so you can all see and you’ve read the books you’ve seen the movies let’s just talk about the future now let’s talk about the present so I want to talk about the present and then we will get to the Future when it arrives but right now we can do amazing things with technology for our companies and that is what’s truly magical and um I you know I’m super excited like next week we’re all rolling to uh this little town in Switzerland called Davos we’re doing this thing called the world economic Forum there’s going to be like 600 CEOs there and this is the first year Salesforce runs all of the you know data infrastructure for this Davos experience and all of these customers are interoperating on this communications platform but they’re going to be interoperating with agents to get through their town and figure out
[00:17:01] where to go and how to work with each other and it’s humans with agents working together that’s where we are right now so yes will there eventually be only agents well I saw the movie her but I’m not there they leave they take off at the end they go away I’m not there yet so total Dr Market maybe one day you said Doug a trillion dollar Tam on this is that today well I think you know I’m a software executive I’m the chairman and Co of Salesforce Peter and that means I run a company we do about 38 billion in Revenue this year about 12.9 billion in cash flow and we run the CRM for about 135,000 companies helping them connect with their customers a lot of companies you know like Disney and you know Royal Bank of Canada JP Morgan Chase or you know different you know different organiz all kinds of great companies that you know very very very very well okay yeah and
[00:18:02] um I think that this idea that you know what Salesforce needs to do is deliver this agentic platform we need to make our customers successful just like I’m making my Su self successful we’ve already sold more than 1,500 paid implementations of this agent force platform 3,000 total of customers already implementing I’ve never seen anything go as fast as it’s going it’s amazing and this is just a moment in time and technology and we’re going to Pioneer this lead this and um help every company um connect with our customers in this incredible New agentic Way well I I think the important thing is that agents make this bite-sized and understandable and you can assign specific functions and you can start to think about how do I sta up I mean the prediction you made about you know not hiring you software Engineers but still increasing productivity by 30% % I mean that’s only
[00:19:00] going to be increasing you know day on day I won’t go year on year on you it’s too far in the future for you but um well that’s just you’ve mentioned this twice so let me comment on it which is that yes our head of engineering who’s amazing came to me about three weeks ago and said you know we’ve been deploying this technology now uh over the last basically two years and we’re writing code delivering technology and capabilities faster than we’ve ever done and we’ve got tens of thousands of Engineers we have 75,000 people total and he’s like I don’t want any more Engineers this year I’m like what did you say I don’t want any more Engineers this year I’m like you’ve never said that before he goes I know but we are just in the last year 30% more productive and we’re doing great and we just want to focus and get get all this done and I’m like wow this is a moment where not only I’m going to hire Less customer support Engineers cuz I didn’t really finish my story on that customer support which is that 9,000 customer
[00:20:00] support Engineers I don’t need as many of them anymore and I can rebalance them into new areas in the company and Engineers software Engineers the same thing so in these key areas okay of running a big company which is what we’re doing at Salesforce we’re able to rebalance our Workforce based on the evolution of artificial intelligence and this is very exciting for a CEO like myself yeah no and I’m sure Wall Street loves it as well um Sam hope they do yeah you never really know what they’re gonna like yeah no it’s true I I I don’t want to go there uh Sam Alman made a statement uh tweeted out a statement saying he expects we’re going to reach uh AGI and have a hard takeoff in the next going into the future again Peter you just can’t help yourself can you I can’t I can’t you are you should think about building a company around this your fascination you have maybe you could do something maybe give out some kind of a prize or something on the future I don’t know you think about this
[00:21:02] Peter you the best way to predict the future Budd is is to create it yourself which you’re doing but I am I am curious if you think about a hard takeoff of AI you know I had Elon on stage last year at abundance you’ve been on my abundance stage as well and Elon said you know uh by 2030 AI is equivalent to the entire human species how do you think about navigating a company at that speed of increase I mean that must be it must be an extraordinarily exciting and difficult time at the same at the same thing well we you know for 25 years I’ve been you know took this company from as an idea to where it is today the second largest software company in the world you’ve been along the ride with me quite a for quite a long ways and you know it’s a lot of fun I’m not an Elon Musk I don’t have six companies that I’m doing this with I can only do one maybe two a time you know I own Time Magazine but really only one I can do one I can focus
[00:22:00] I can do the one thing the Steve Jobs idea I can’t do the Elon mus thing which is singularly focused on six or 10 things now even the US government maybe other governments also I guess he’s also focused on Germany and the UK as well I I can’t do that I don’t have that capability I didn’t find that psychedelic or whatever their whatever he’s been able to do I can only do what I’m doing my unaltered mind is singularly focused on Salesforce and I am just trying to deliver the number one CRM company in the world delivering on the number one CRM AI an agentic platform and agent force and that’s really where my mind is at and when you do look at that look technolog is getting lower cost it’s easier to use and AI is moving in this direction as well that we have these bigger data centers bigger chips everything’s getting faster bigger better and when we apply these deep learning models and by the way a lot of them have been vented at Salesforce we’re really proud that prompt engineering was invented at Salesforce a lot of the major deep
[00:23:02] learning research has come out of Salesforce and two out of the top five most accurate models are out of Salesforce and when we look at what’s going on in AI yes it’s incredible what is going on but we still have a long way to go so let me just give you a little dash of reality which is these models the nature of the models and I we can go into how the models work but they’re not 100% accurate Peter because of the nature of how they’re trained and because of and how they operate they’re not 100% nobody has a 100% accurate model and we’re very good we’re in the 90s on our new Atlas reasoning engine which is the core part of agent force 20 that you mentioned our customers are having some incredible experiences we’ve been able to talk about great things that we’re doing with customers helping them to give them unlimited workforces you know we have this great company called Wy it’s a book seller and they
[00:24:01] used to have to spike you know their Workforce you know and back to school they don’t have to do that anymore they’re using agents it’s incredible you know Disney that you know very well they have a very complex product uh line for their cast members were’re able to give them incredible super high accurate AI to help them run their company in incredible new ways and help their customers also find all the products that they want you know to kind of give them the Disney product that’s most important to them or we have incredible Banks like I mentioned RBC that’s doing wealth management to help somebody plan their future with an agent technology that’s amazing but none of these things are 100% so we can do a lot of things but nobody can do everything and the vision that we keep hearing of these magical three initials AGI which is the Fantastical vision for the future of 20 you know 2030 2040 2050
[00:25:01] when we say Hal open the door I’m sorry oh I’m sorry Hal I will not open the door why will you not open the door let’s let’s go second door is not opening second on your list was humanoid robots I see you got a humanoid robot over your left shoulder back there I do I it’s not going to come over here me and clobber me on the head yet I get we’re going to get there but I would say that that no that’s the manifestation of this agent technology yeah I think these robots are going to require agents um you know the again I’m I’m I’m venturing into the future here but we’ve got I don’t know by my count probably about 60 well-funded uh humanoid robot companies a few out of the US a lot out of China to make up for their one child policy but these robots are going to be driven by agents aren’t they well you’re really addressing you know the declining birth rate and labor shortage all in one sentence there I guess
[00:26:01] so I would say that yeah digital labor Peter this is real and digital labor is real I mean aente platforms and agents and robots are kind of the same thing in a way if you think about it as digital labor and yeah you’re going to be able to take these you can see these great videos coming out of Stanford right now and in the video in this incredible project this Mahalo project which are AI models that are working to run these robots and they are cleaning these hotel rooms I I’ve seen is that your is that your philanthropy funding those it’s not my philanthropy funding it but our team at Salesforce comes out of Stanford and our head of research in AI is also a professor of AI at Stanford and so we’re very involved with these folks and I would say that I just talked actually to the creators of this Mahala model so it’s on my mind that you know here’s
[00:27:00] this robot you know cleaning this hotel room and I’m like and you know I funded a couple of children’s hospitals and I went right there and I said you know for some of these new therapies we have for cancer and we need the ability to not bring humans into you know the room hospital rooms of kids who are going through some of these therapies as you know very well you’ve got the tech you’re the MD with a technical background but that idea of a robot cleaning a hospital room or a robot cleaning a hotel room it’s also going to have to be linked to the hotel record the customer record on the hotel hello Mr Benny off is it okay that I’m in here should I leave the room right now or the hospital room where it’s like this this can happen in this hospital room and this cannot this is very exciting that we can augment our human Workforce with a digital Workforce or a robotic Workforce or an agentic Workforce and we are moving into that very fast and that’s not in the future that is the
[00:28:01] here and now and um that is very exciting yeah I mean the people don’t realize one of the big benefits about these these robot systems humanoid or otherwise is their data Gathering really they’re they’re driving massive amounts of data to train the next generation of agents and and AI models have you been investing in any of these companies yet I am investing in those companies and I you know I’m a Believer in this in the future and I’m not going to jump into the future like you are but I occasionally go there and I think that you know look we picked off the top two of the five you know the first one is look we’re moving into an agentic world where human Workforce will be augmented by digital labor and that companies organizations will be able to extend their workforces and it’s going to be awesome like even in the healthc care area where you’re so strongly vested you
[00:29:00] know that well you know what just happened with my achilles we talked about it and I just you know regenerated my killes I’m sure we’ll get there but that idea that you know I’m doing I need pre-operative care post-operative care I need to have I need to talk to experts all the time when they’re not available but I can talk to agents and I’m sure all of us are going to chat DPT and asking medical questions as well saw that study that was amazing right where the accuracy level can be higher than a lot of doctors well it’s not only that the accuracy level of the agent alone was higher than the doctor and the agent because the doctor injecting bias into all yes it’s crazy yes I we don’t do that Peter thank God I I’m not biased you and I are we have no bias we’re we’re Crystal Clear we’ve really just moved that right out of our mind so thank you so so uh let’s see venod kosla says a billion robots in the next decade uh Brett Adcock at figure and Elon uh
[00:30:02] are at 10 billion by 2040 are you seeing those numbers do you think that everyone’s going to have one of these the by the way at $30,000 uh purchase price that’s like at a lease price of 300 bucks a month it’s 40 cents an hour how many robots are you going to own in your in your home there oh I just talked to the CEO one of those leading companies and they said $350,000 for their robot and it can’t do really much and it’s still like two a couple years away and I would say that you know I’m sure that we are hitting to the point where we’re going to come home and say hey make me an omelet make my bed take care of this do that do this um I don’t know how fast all of that exactly is going to happen I’m not very good in those areas but I think we’re moving in that direction and I think we’re all going to want that kind of technology and that kind of capability look we already have robot cars right so your
[00:31:00] car maybe drove you to the office and it’s just a robot on wheels at this point it is I got into a whmo and I was like I just called it with my phone jumped in the whmo went to my office boom it’s a robot on Wheels it’s the same thing right it’s like what’s the difference it is and my Tesla you know hasn’t tried to kill me in many months it’s working pretty well on FSD that is a that’s a science fiction movie I’d rather not watch you know AI one of the one of the challenges with AI is its energy consumption rate and so I’m going to bring us to number three on your top five list which is small modular reactors uh you know I’ve said for a while now I think it’s it’s sinful that we haven’t invested heavily into nuclear in this country the the Gen 4 reactors are safe um talk to me about your your thoughts on on how do we power this AI Revolution and and what are you doing in that field well number one is I I think we are using a lot of energy that we don’t need to be using we could go into
[00:32:00] that but I think that in a lot of the training of these models and how we’re doing AI Salesforce is committed to being a net zero company and we’re doing a lot of things to be Net Zero you know that I do and this is extremely important we think we are I’m sure there could be challenges to that idea already and even as we Implement our AI technology we’re holding that line but I think there’s people who are using exhaustive amounts of AI energy because they’re in various levels of competitive races that is causing that to happen so let’s put that issue completely to aside for just a second and you’re right we need new energy capabilities you know that I spent a lot of time on the big island of Hawaii that is a place where it’s already 60% renewable they use wind they use solar they have a volcano which helps them because they’ve got geothermal and uh they’ve got got batteries and what I hope is that a
[00:33:01] company like a commonwealth energy where I’m an investor will be able to offer Fusion which is not fision but Fusion so it’s not small not small modular nuclear you know that Fusion will be real I think that that is an absolute possibility you mentioned venod kosla who is the absolute lead investor in that company and then yes you’re right this kind of smaller nuclear power plants that we’ve seen start to get deployed uh there’s even tests of those I think that’s we’re very optimistic I don’t know if you’re going to use that in a island where there’s a high volcanic activity but you might find a lot of places where you can use that very successfully and look how do we know that’s a capability well we know that we have this nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines and you also know it’s probably one of the highest safety uh rates that have ever happened of any kind of ship vessel and we have the ability just you know
[00:34:01] think about just taking those aircraft carriers and submarines just plug them into the electric grid on these islands like that’s a real thought like why can’t we just do that and we can but it’s been the uh sort of threemile Island Fukushima uh brand of dystopian use that’s held us back and regulations and such do you see that changing dramatic Ally soon I think it’s happening um I hope it happens faster and this is a great you know we have all this great technology we should use it but we have to use it in a safe way look trust and safety have to be our highest values and everything that we do nothing is more important than the trust that we have with our customers it’s our highest value at Salesforce and I think that when we talk about energy whether it’s fossil fuels or whether it is nuclear um or Renewables of any type trust and
[00:35:00] safety have to be number one so as long as you have trust and safety I am all in all in do you ever see yourself delivering agents to the individual I mean uh versus the corporation uh through Salesforce do do you think I’m going to wake up one day and be able to call on my on my Salesforce agent to support me throughout the day I mean for me the vision is a version of Jarvis right this is you know an AI that that I give permission to read everything I look at all my emails you really love going into the future Peter you know we really need to talk about that if you gave me your psychologist phone number I’ll help you with that but I would just say you know Peter I think that we will probably Supply that to our customers to do I mean in some cases we’re doing it you know but I would say that it’s for our customers but I think we want to empower others to provide that technology we’re a platform we’re a platform that you can build your own agent now this is not some future idea like you can get on the Salesforce and
[00:36:00] we have thousands of companies right now building agents and one of our customers is one of the largest home builders in the country and they’re amazing they don’t want me to use their name so I won’t but yeah we already do all their sales and service and their marketing Automation and you know they’re like you know we need to do 247 service for our homes we need to sell mortgages we need to do all these things we don’t have enough people to do it and they’re building a completely gentic platform around their company to be a better home builder a better Bank a better Media company and to that point then that Vision that you have you know gets expressed through those companies I think in many ways mark would do you come out on AI is going to decimate jobs well I think in some cases uh like all technology has there will be a change in jobs that’s what we’ve seen in in technology throughout history and this will be true look at my company I mentioned it already once in the podcast
[00:37:02] which was that we have 9,000 support agents and we’ll probably take a couple thousand and move them into other jobs at Salesforce because we’ve built a new agentic layer on all of our customer support and service this year we’ll also build an agentic layer on our sales and sales development capabilities and Business Development capabilities so that will have implications as well and so yes you know that’s what you want you want to be constantly looking looking for the opportunity to make things lower cost and easier to use and that can have implications for jobs and jobs will move and that will be true in every industry from you know Health Care to uh consumer product goods to retail to AC the government across the board and that’s a great thing and let’s Bal rebalance our Workforce because as you said earlier as well we have declining birth rates we have less labor we have less capability in the United States it’s already very hard for me to hire Sales and Service
[00:38:00] professionals I’m trying to hire 2,000 more sales people right now at Salesforce I’m trying to find the best enterprise software Executives in the world to come to Salesforce there aren’t that many in our industry at scale so you know we’re going to have to build some digitally yeah no I I get that just there’s a lot of fear out there as humanoid robots come online and Agents come online and I think it’s going to be an interesting future of how we uplevel people you know one of the challenges I think about is if you’ve got AI agents doing a lot of the work for you and humanid robots taking care of you sort of like a social technological socialism the you know are we still going to have the struggles that make us human are we still going to have the you know the ability to uh have find purpose at a level like that what do you think how do you think about that let’s just really get into the future shall we and go way way way out there to evaluate our existential existence as human beings and what is life about and the fundamental meaning I just think you’re
[00:39:00] such a smartar we should just move right there to that moment where none of us have jobs and we’re just sitting in a home saying well we’re in an abundant credible world with everything is happening around me with the robots and the and this now what is life about so let’s just go there and oh wait let me just check hold on oh there’s no robots here actually I don’t know what happened to my robot how about at your house can you call your robot over so I can see what your robot looks like two 13-year-old boys who are robots and they’re uh they’re on Virtual I want to just know what your robots look like that’s all pet that’s all I was asking can meditate on the existential you know I’ll show them to you in theut the universe and you know whether we’re going to deeply commit to our religion and our spirituality and our belief in God or move to annihilism it’s this is that moment that we should all go focus
[00:40:00] on let let’s move some or we could be in the now and we could be in the present moment reality that we are living in where we can be happier and healthier today your choice where you want to be with your mind right now proud of you eer toally would be so proud of you my friend I’m just saying you can just think about where you want to be right now do you want to be here do you want to be somewhere else yeah be here now I I definitely appreciate that I love Romos he was actually I actually got to meet him a few times incredible person that is and listen I I meditate uh about the now most of my meditation and then I look at the future just to sort of that’s why I’m here in this podcast just to remind you we can all come back to the present moment with our breath yes and we are in the present moment uh an area of common interest that we you know we’ll get on the phone for an hour or two sometimes and talk about what pills you’re taking what pills I’m taking what your latest scientists you’ve been
[00:41:00] backing and and you’ve done incredible philanthropy um in the biomedical space from the benof uh you know uh microbiome uh work that’s been done uh AC I mean you backed shinoa yamanaka who uh developed the yamanaka factors for uh creating induced blur potent stem cells probably one of the most important Technologies developed uh over the last you know uh decade plus and the implications are are phenomenal um H how do you think about regenerative medicine what’s your why are you there is it for your own personal health um how long do you want to live I’m curious Mark what’s your what’s your number well I think number one is I only do what I enjoy Peter that’s where I am in my life right now and I am focused on what are those things that I’m enjoying those five things and trying to do less of the five things that I’m not enjoying and look I’ve been very excited that I’ve been able to endow you know five Hospitals
[00:42:01] now you know our children’s hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland our Hospital in Hilo Honolulu and our new one in Puna Hawaii um and that idea that we can bring highquality accessible Health Care to everybody is very important to me that some of those hospitals are developing Next Generation the Therapeutics like what we’ve done in where we saw traumatic ability to cure cicle cell and other things that have been haunting our society for so many years and the tremendous advancements like youve said in the microbiome and immunotherapies in all of these incredible areas and as you said very well the regenerative biology and I think you know surprised here I am you know I’m just having a nice little scuba diving trip because I also love the ocean and I’m also focused on the ocean and the trees and I jumped off a boat in the French
[00:43:02] Polynesia and the two amoto islands in an island called fakarava and I jumped off the boat in fakarava with my tanks and my fins and my this and my that and I jumped as hard as I could into the ocean and I hit it exactly wrong as I went in and my fin went up at a 90° uh angle and snap my right Achilles and that was September 26th of 2024 and and I went wow did I hit the boat on the way down and I didn’t I just just gave that much force to my achilles that I should not have done so then I got on the phone with my friends and said I don’t exactly know how we’re going to do this because part of my achilles is up on this side of my leg and the other part of my achilles is on the other side of the leg and half of my friends said very easy we’re going to slice you open and we are going to operate and take part of your toe and reconnect your Achilles and it’s going to be great and then half of my
[00:44:02] friends because I have very unusual friends like you who do all kinds of crazy things said no no we’re not going to do that we are going to regenerate your Achilles and we’re going to figure out how to entice your Achilles to find itself come back together and be stronger than ever and we’re going to try to activate the parts inside you um to indicate to it’s your Achilles to regenerate itself and of course I’m into that idea very much so and I kind of have done it a little bit on my left Achilles and now I’ve done it on my right side and I used the incredible Human Performance Lab at UCSF in San Francisco you’ve been there you’ve met some of our folks like people like Anthony Luke and Sal Val and you mentioned shinya yamanaka you know I just want to thank them for everything they’re doing to contribute to the body of science called regenerative biology because we are in a moment where we
[00:45:01] realize yes we’re regenerating parts of oursel all the time if you took out and I don’t anticipate then hopefully no one will do this and took a small knife and cut your skin and then you know you put a little Band-Aid on the skin and you came back in two weeks well you know your skin would be healed so we know that we can regenerate oursel and heal ourself and in certain areas um we know how to do it in other areas we don’t and yamanaka on who’s based in kyota University halftime and UCSF the other halftime did win the Nobel Prize because he showed how we can regenerate our eye and also take these skin cells from our you know body and turn them into these stem cells um and do amazing things with it and he’s been able to build these organoids he’s been able to do all these amazing things and then yes the other person that you met I think solv L at UCSF you know the parabiosis where he took the blood from a young Mouse and
[00:46:00] put it into old mouse and the old mouse got young because and then he discovered with Anthony Luke this pf4 you know agent in our plasma that’s there that if you have it you regenerating I mean this is cool stuff and this is all like real right now and yeah we should be trying to use more of that and that’s I think very exciting and so I’m I’m I’m grateful to be able to fund an invest in these brilliant scientists and in a philanthropic way at UCSF and in Kyoto and in different places in the world to to see that and regenerative biology I just invested in another company called parallel bio that’s yeah know it well yeah oh you know that company yeah yeah and that company they’re building a lymph known organoid and that idea that they can test Pharmaceuticals you know on a basically a part of our biology without being in a human being and that idea that that’s
[00:47:00] real you know yamanaka is doing the same thing with intestines that the idea to be able to test drugs on what looks like a part of a human being but it’s not I think that’s very exciting for the future of by Pharmaceuticals and again I’m in your area now why are you not talking about this this is your category this isn’t my category well and I I know almost nothing about this area I I do appreciate our conversations on the subject I mean and we’ve got Dean Cayman with his regen Valley using shinoa’s yamanaka’s factors to generate new organs I mean the ability to build a liver lung kidney you know pancreas that’s right is yeah that’s right I just talked to David agus at USC and he’s just generated a liver using the amanoa factors so wow what a world we’re in so exciting and fun it is extra and by the way I think this is the most exciting time ever to be alive and uh you know when people say well why are you so
[00:48:00] focused on longevity and health span extension is cuz I want to see as much of this as possible um you will I I sure I will and you’re doing great you know one of the things that will allow us to see as much of this extraordinary world as possible is making sure that the world stays healthy itself uh and that takes us to your fifth area which is planetary Health um what are you doing in that realm uh you’ve got the trillion trees project you’re doing work in oceans uh what’s driving you there well I mean we there’s so many simple things we can do to make our life better I mean I think about and like your feedback but I mean I think about these La wildfires and how horrible it is and when I looked at all of those homes that got torched I know a lot of them had Teslas outside them because they’re high value homes in Los Angeles and those all that battery and all that stuff went into a big toxic plume that then went into the water supply and the soils and I don’t know
[00:49:01] where it is or what that means for health but when it a lot of it also probably went into the ocean and we also know that that means it gets consumed into our food supply into the fish we also know that we’re dumping all this plastic in the ocean and there’s a lot of stuff we could do that maybe can improve our health and one of them is our lungs are the ocean and that’s where we’re getting our oxygen and and when we look at we’re dumping this plastic into the ocean so for more than a decade I’ve been working with Incredible people like buy and slat at the ocean cleanup he’s great to figure out how do you get this plastic out of the ocean and also to like find these we talked about robots he’s got robots in that we funded you know in rivers that are preventing the plastic from getting in the ocean which is really neat and that’s one thing I think of course I think about over fishing and I think about the coral bleaching and the acidification of the ocean and all
[00:50:01] of those pieces as well we can talk about any of those pieces but healthy ocean is about a healthy humanity and you mentioned regenerative uh regenerating Agriculture and you know we’re also introduced this concept of the trillion trees this idea could we get a trillion trees on the planet to sequester 200 gatons of carbon um we know that we’ve deforested so much of the planet already I I heard I heard a stat that if we added a trillion trees to the global count that it would take back take us back to like pre-industrial levels of carbon do you have that number in the back of your mind uhhuh is that correct I do I just gave it to you it’s about 200 gigatons of carbon and the way to think about it is like this Peter I think we had Six Trillion trees on the planet okay when how many are left I guess half about half less than half
[00:51:01] three trillion and if every trillion trees is Peter is 200 gigatons of carbon and we deforested three trillion trees how much carbon Peter was released into the atmosphere 100 600 gigatons yeah so that doesn’t sound very good it’s our carbon Bank the trees are our carbon Bank the trees are carbon and why do we not focus on putting our carbon banks on the planet the ocean right now is do you know how much o do you know how much carbon is stored in the ocean a lot but I don’t have the number about 20,000 gigatons and do you know how much in the soils no about 3,000 so if you have now I’m not a you’re not talking to somebody who’s an expert in this area so all these numbers may be slightly wrong but some of this comes out of our lab at the University of California Santa Barbara very close to you Doug mcau is our chief scientist there and he said 20,000 gigatons of carbon are stored in the ocean now when all that stuff went up in
[00:52:02] horrible fires in La a lot of it is going to get into the oceans and a lot of it is then gets reabsorbed into the ocean and that’s why the ocean is getting hotter because you get the acidification of the ocean as it is absorbing more of the carbon so that we don’t want we don’t want a hot ocean we want the carbon in the trees we want more trees and this this is how I think about simply and then I know you are also working on your own carbon xise yeah we uh we’re going to be awarding so about four or five years ago I got Elon to put up $100 million for large scale gigaton carbon capture uh it was a fun conversation he was getting a lot of flak for not being philanthropic on the day he became the wealthiest person so I texted him and I said how about doing an next prize he said how much I said 100 million for what uh for carbon extraction he wrote back sure s a s and then We’re Off to the Races um we’re
[00:53:01] awarding it actually at your event at the time 100 this April how exciting yeah and thank you for thank you for keeping time alive and for having time celebrate uh you know incredible moments but the positive news not just the negative news in the world we have so much dystopian press out there people’s neural Nets yeah yeah well I’m very grateful to all of our Folks at time they do an incredible job and we’re doing the best that we can to support them yeah you know uh I want to close out with the notion of what we started which is you’ve identified five wow did we hit all five areas we did hit all wow I didn’t think we could do it so in the now we hit them in the now it’s incredible we’re in the now thank you Peter this has been therapeutic for you hasn’t it this has been incredibly therapeutic but the idea for you know listen this is a this podcast called moonot therapeutic
[00:54:00] podcast we didn’t even do our deep breathing exercise I’m going to call you back tonight we’ll talk about this more uh but I you know this is called uh moonshots and the PE you know the entrepreneurs listening are looking to do big and bold significant things what’s your advice for uh entrepreneurs who want to take Moon shots on like you’ve done get really clear about what you want you know I think number one is do you really know what you want because look we’re all creating exactly what we want every day and we need extreme radical Focus On Our intention and that is the most important thing and you mentioned your friend Elon quite a few times that guy’s got some crazy radical you know focus on his intention across many categories um and it seems like as you know we’ve known him for a while he comes up with new intentions all the time but wow we need that same idea like what is Our intention and then what are our values
[00:55:01] what are our core values what are our principles to help us I mentioned trust is important especially when we talk about energy or when we bumped into nuclear on this call that you know surfaces my core value of trust and and then three is you know how are we going to get these things what is our actual plan but let’s not jump into the plan before we get clear about the intention and the values that are going to guide us and of course the obstacle will surface what is preventing us from achieving our success and the fifth area that you know I focus on is the kpis how do I know I’m going to be successful but when we go to the kpis too fast I think we can lose sight of Our intention and our values our vision and our values our plan our you know Clarity of our obstacles that we’re going to have to overcome and then we look we can all write down exactly how we know we will be successful and those five areas I I think is the most important thing for every single entrepreneur so when you
[00:56:00] start your day as an entrepreneur you’re starting your fiscal year that’s what I’m about to do on February 1st then I’m going to write down those five things and part of it gives you the opportunity you might say yeah one of my values is giving back so well how are you going to give back what kind of things we have our 111 model you know that we have 20,000 companies that have followed us billions of dollars have flowed into philanthropy through our one one model we’re just so grateful that that has worked out so well we have done 10 million hours of volunteerism we run 50,000 nonprofits for free we’ve given away a billion dollars philanthropically and the as a company I’ve done it personally as well that idea that you know when you get clear about your values it’s easy to make a decision to say this is my value giving back this is how I am doing it and um that’s really the power of Entrepreneurship is getting clear about those five things and one of your friends Tony you know he may be
[00:57:02] responsible for helping teach me and hone me on some of those questions because I think the the quality of your questions is the quality of your entrepreneurship yes you can ask those right questions it’s going to give you the ability to be a better entrepreneur and have a better outcome and that’s that came from our good buddy and I will say that this is kind of how I lead for the last 2 years I’m constantly working with our employees asking them those five questions so if I meet a manager a divisional executive or somebody working on a new product that’s where I start with those five questions you have to be one of the youngest longest lived Founders CEOs out there in the uh in the tech sector I said that prop I said that carefully I’m 60 now so I’ll take it anytime somebody tells me that I’m young I’m all in you know how old you now Peter I’m 63 I’m I’m that’s why that’s why I’m I’m living in your future that’s
[00:58:01] why I’m thank you buddy that’s why I’m so Focus well I get exercise every day and I wrote this book we made fun of each other’s books before and I wrote this book so that’s our two books anyway uh it’s it’s an extraordinary time to be alive it is we’re so grateful aren’t we uh it start clear we’re living in this this dream I mean this is the 99th level of the game playay health is number one right Peter health is the new well and gratitude is in there too gratitude the mindsets right and I know family is so important to you I have my two 13y old boys in the virtual school right next door uh love them dearly and uh listen uh thank you my friend for your friendship person foremost love you so much Peter thank you for everything you’re doing I love being friends with you you’re so much fun same buddy be well byebye now [Music]