[Music] Doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don’t love it, you will give up before you succeed. If mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? If you don’t believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there’s no way that you can sell it at the level that’s required. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and they’re believing you. Now, that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for coming tonight. This is uh I I get to do a lot of really fun things in my my role here, but uh this takes the cake. Doesn’t get any better than this. Uh so where you are right now, you’re in Link Ventures office
[00:01:00] space. We’re about a billion dollar venture fund. Uh we invest almost entirely in MIT and Harvard teams. Everything is AI now. It’s been at least 90% AI for the last couple years. Uh most of the teams are upstairs above us. They’re all sprinkled around. It’s like a high energy factory up there. And then downstairs here, we have events, events like this. I really appreciate you coming to hear us tonight. So, I’m Dave Blondon. Uh Peter and I founded the venture fund together. You see it there, link XPV. Uh so, we have a rare opportunity to hear from one of the true luminary visionaries uh in all things technical. When I was at MIT many, many years ago, uh I was a undergrad getting a computer science degree. Peter had already gotten his bio degree from MIT. Then went off to Harvard, got an HST degree, so MD, PhD, uh, and then came back to MIT to take an aerastro to get an Aerastro degree. Uh, and so he was taking unified
[00:02:00] engineering, which was the hardest class that MIT has, having already gotten multiple degrees, a true glutton for punishment, uh, while I was getting a computer science degree. So we lived together on campus and uh I’ve been inspired by a few people in my life but at that age uh Peter was by far the most inspiring person that I had met and so it’s been uh like a lifelong dream having uh having Peter as a best friend all these years. Um so uh Peter uh you know he’s he’s in town every now and then. Today happens to be one of those days. uh while he was on campus as an undergrad, he started Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, Seds, which is still I think the biggest club at MIT, pretty sure it is. Uh and his good friend Jeff Bezos heard about it at Princeton and copied it and created SS Princeton. Uh then he graduated, he started International Space University, which is thriving today. This is going to be a long introduction. It is. It is because you’ve done so much. Uh I’ll only add one more thing then. So then after that, he was the founder of X-P Prize. Uh X-Prise is uh I’m on the board of
[00:03:01] X-prise. I get a a firsthand view into what he’s created there. Uh but is changing the world in actually I’ll just use that as a way to hand off the mic to to Peter to tell us about why you’re in town this week in the first place. Yeah, usually I’m the one doing the interviewing on my podcast. So it’s nice to get someone else to do your work now. Uh I was in town yesterday uh at the Time 100 Awards. We were announcing our largest cash prize ever. Uh we gave away $100 million of Elon’s money yesterday. Mhm. Uh it was the carbon removal X-P prize. So we challenged uh back in 2001. Uh we had had So the X-Prize Foundation has been around for 30 years. I started it in 1994 after reading before many of you were born. Um after reading a book called The Spirit of St. Louis and I found out that Lindberg in
[00:04:01] 1927 coming up on the 100th anniversary of that shortly flew from New York to Paris not on a whim but to actually win a $25,000 prize. And I’m reading this biography of Charles Lindberg and I’m like counting the amount of money spent to win this $25,000 prize. And it’s it’s crazy. It’s $400,000 is spent by all the teams cumulatively to try and win this guy’s $25,000 prize. And the most likely aviators to cross the Atlantic, New York to Paris, don’t pull it off. In fact, Admiral Bird, who was one of the great aviators of the time, first person to go to North Pole, crashes on takeoff out of Roosevelt Field on the way to Leer because he had overweighted his airplane with champagne and china so he could celebrate when he lands in as if France would not have champagne in China. Um, but Lindberg and no one would sell
[00:05:02] him an airplane or an engine because they were so worried that he would not succeed and they’d give their airplane or engine manufacturer a bad rep. So, he goes to Ryan Aircraft in San Diego, which was building only uh only building air mail aircraft, and he bought one of those to convert it. So, that was the origin of the X-P prize. I read this book and said, “Okay, I want to go to space. You know, I was born in the 60s. It was the Apollo program and that scientific documentary called Star Trek that was inspired me. And I wanted to go spent a decade here at MIT and then realized I didn’t want to go as a government astronaut. I said, ‘You know, my dream of spaceflight is not I get to go once during my career after five years of praying. Uh, I want
[00:06:00] to go every weekend. And so, the only way to do that is commercial. And when I read Lindberg’s book, I said, I’m going to create a prize for private space flight. And so, long story short, organized and launched a $10 million prize for the first person who could build a spaceship carrying three adults up 100 kilometers, come back with the same ship, do it again within two weeks. And uh that launched the commercial space industry. Before that, the capital, the regulatory industry, none of that was there. uh Elon, Jeff Bezos were there early on supporting X-P prize and we’ve launched 30 prizes since then about $500 million of incentive purses that have driven about $10 billion in R&D and uh yesterday so every year we go through this process of designing prizes voting up prizes and many years ago we said we need a carbon prize to pull carbon out
[00:07:00] of the atmosphere and ocean at scale. And year on year on year, it was it was designed but wasn’t getting funded. And u I remember on January 7th of 2021, uh putting aside all the political going on, Elon became the wealthiest human on the planet and was getting a lot of flack for not being philanthropic. So I texted him and said, “Hey, how about doing another X-P prize?” He had funded an ex-priseze for teaching kids in Tanzania reading, writing, and arithmetic at scale. Long story, successful one. And he he said, “What do you have in mind?” I said, “How about a carbon removal prize?” He goes, “How much?” I said, “$und00 million.” He goes, “Sure.” That was it. We la we got the contract uh uh you know, 30 days later. And so four years later, we had 1,300 teams enter that competition, approaching every it’s Darwinian evolution in in carbon removal, and we awarded uh six finalists and a grand
[00:08:03] prize winner who I gave a check for $50 million yesterday, which was amazing. You left out a really Yeah, Peter you left out a really interesting nugget in that story which is Elon is the first prize funer who said here I’ll just give you the money up front. Yeah. He he gave us not only just $100 million but the operating budget about 30 million and gave us the capital which is sitting in a bank account until yesterday acrewing interest. And funny at the next prize board meeting Peter said I want to put all that into Bitcoin. I did and I wish I had. Yeah. The board said, “No, no, I don’t think we’re allowed to do that.” And yeah, if they’d said yes, it would be a different story. A lot more bigger prizes. Yeah. But we do have we do have three hundred million level prizes. So, originally the first prize was 10 million and people laughed at that amount of money. You’ll never raise it. An amazing woman, Anushia Ansari,
[00:09:01] um, who’s now the CEO of the X-P Prize. very quickly. She’s worth speaking about for a second. Um, I came up with the idea of the X-P prize in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, I took a risk, as entrepreneurs do, and I announced the $10 million prize without having $10 million. I had two of my board members resign on the spot. Uh, we announced it under the arch in St. Louis. Uh, and we had TV cameras. It was an incredible event. I had raised $500,000, 25K at a time and we decided to spend the entire half a million on this massive PR launch event to announce this to the world and it was incredible. We had I had here’s another idea I want to share as entrepreneurs here that how you announce an idea to the world really matters. You see, in our minds, each and every one of
[00:10:00] us have a line of credibility. If you hear an idea below the line of credibility, you dismiss it out of hand. Like, your neighbor’s kid wants to go to Mars tomorrow. No, not going to happen. Great. If you announce it above the line of credibility and this person has a possibility of pulling something off, you’re going to follow and see what happens. But then there’s this line of super credibility. if you can announce something above the line of super credibility, people go, “Oh my god, when’s it going to happen? How do I get involved?” So, I wanted to do that. And what I did was we stationed under the arch in St. Louis. I didn’t have one astronaut on stage with me. I had 20 astronauts. I had Buzz Aldrin, a bunch of Apollo astronauts and shuttle astronauts. It was amazing. Uh, I had the head of NASA, the head of the FAA, um, the Lindberg family, and when we announced this prize, it was like, “Oh my god, no one asked, do you have the money?” I did not. Do you need teams?
[00:11:00] No. But we we announced it and then reality started hitting as I went out to try and raise the $10 million because my pitch was, listen, you don’t pay the $10 million until after someone has won it. you get to name, you get all the publicity, you only pay on success. How great would that be? And it was like, “No, no, no. Why isn’t NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off?” And the clincher was, “Isn’t someone going to die trying?” That’s what I would have said. I No, you would. You would have said you would fund the whole thing. The the Blondon XP prize. It was It would be great. I didn’t have the money, so you didn’t have to take the question. Um, so I five years in and I literally was getting calls from the team saying, “Do you have the money? We’re building our ships. Do you have the money? We’re building our ships.” And I was like, “Okay, trust me.” Long, there’s an incredible book called um, How to Make a
[00:12:00] Spaceship, which is my biography and the story of the X-P Prize and the X-Prize winning teams. Uh, Julian Guthrie, who is uh, incredible. She wrote um uh Larry Ellison’s biography as well. Anyway, long story short, uh I am one day reading Fortune magazine. It was issue of the wealthiest 40 women under 40. I wasn’t married at the time. It was another financing strategy. And I read about Anushia Ansari who had just sold her company called Telecom Technologies to Sonus Networks for $1.3 billion. In her biography, it says she wants to fly in a suborbital flight into space. And I was like, “Oh my god.” After 150 nos, this is the person. And it had been an asset sale of her company. So I’m trying to track her down where there’s no one left. I finally find somebody and find her old
[00:13:00] assistant. and they’re in vac they were vacationing the whole family’s vacationing in Hawaii for 3 months and I got her assistant to promise me if I sent her a package that she would FedEx it to Anushia in Hawaii. Long story I was Anushia’s first meeting when she got back to Plano, Texas and they said yes after 150 nos. It became the Ansari X-P prize. Uh two years after the X-P prize got won in 2004. or I had I had uh I had James T. Kirk there at the launches which was fun to have my childhood hero there. Um but Anushia flew to the space station privately. One of my companies, Space Adventures, was brokering flights on the Soyos from the Russians and now she’s come back as the CEO of the X-P prize. She’s an amazing woman and we’ve launched uh we have $300 million prizes going on. one we wore yesterday, one in longevity to add 20 healthy years on your life, and one on largecale car um
[00:14:03] desalination at scale. Yep. Yep. Every week I study the 10 major tech meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robots, AGI, quantum computing, transport, energy, longevity, and more. No fluff, only the important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives and our careers. If you want me to share these with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, these reports are for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world’s most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world’s most disruptive companies. It’s not for you if you don’t want to be informed of what’s coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandis.com/metatrends. That’s dmmandis.com/tatrends to gain access to
[00:15:01] trends 10 plus years before anyone else. All right, so our first uh line of questions here is actually mindsets. I’m really going to enjoy this one with you. Um before we get into it, how many people have read Peter’s books? He’s a four-time bestseller. Uh my favorite is actually the future is faster than you think. Uh because it’s all about the convergence. You know, through most of technical history, there’s one thing going on now because of exponential curves. There are so many things going on concurrently and they all interact and the future is faster than you think is all about the interactions and and predicting interactions. Yeah. Convergence. Um but before I before I get into mindsets, uh being a futurist, you know, one of the reasons you’ve been so inspiring to me over the years is because you’re willing to actually try to predict the future. And you know, you and Ray Curtzwhile started Singularity University together. And Ray Curtzwhile is famous for predicting many things, including AGI in 2029. And he predicted that in 1999. Yeah. And he’s going to be right within a year, as it turns out. But for most of
[00:16:01] his life, people have been telling him how stupid he is for being miles off. And now, as he gets close to the finish line, turns out he was right in the end. But one of the problems that futurists have and a a lot of reasons people don’t put themselves out there is because in Ray’s case, if you predict 250 things and 240 of them become exactly right, they just seem obvious to everyone in hindsight, but they weren’t. And the 10 that are wrong seem really silly. And so it’s a very fragile thing to actually be a futurist. And therefore, very few people actually put themselves out there and make predictions. And Peter is one of the handful of people I’ve ever met in my life that actually repeatedly and habitually do predict the future and almost always right and it’s incredibly valuable to me because so few other people are willing to do it. So uh so the topic is mindsets and what it takes to have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Yeah. So here’s a question for you guys. If I were to ask you to think about the
[00:17:01] most successful leader or entrepreneur in the world from your consideration, whomever it might be, you know, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Elon, Steve Jobs, I don’t care who you think, if you think about that person, and then I ask you what made them a successful leader. Was it the money they had? Was it the tech they had? Was it the friends they had? or was it the mindset that they had? Right? I I hope you would agree it’s their mindset. If you took away everything from them, but they retained their mindset that they would likely regain the success that they’ve had. If that’s true, if mindset is the single most important thing in being a successful leader or entrepreneur, my question for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade
[00:18:02] ahead? You see, we tend to sort of adapt a mindset uh absorb a mindset given a mindset, right? Our brains are neural nets, right? Work that you did early on and neural nets, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And our our neural nets are shaped by what we listen to, who we speak to, what we read. It’s constantly shaping. And so I tend to be as careful about what I let into my mind as what I let into my body. And and the question is for you to actively shape your mindset. And so, uh, one of my next books is called Mindset Mastery. I’ve been working on this forever. It’s a it’s a personal passion project. But I think about the important mindsets, and
[00:19:01] they have different names, but the first one for me is having a purpose- driven mindset. You know, it’s a great quote from Mark Twain who said, “There are two important days in your life. The day that you were born and the day that you found out why.” It’s a beautiful idea, right? So, I won’t ask I’ll ask the question but not force anybody to answer. Do you know your purpose in life? Do you know why you’re here? You know, when I started Singularity University back uh in 200 n with Ray Kerszswall, I had the first class and these were incredible students from around the world, the very best at the best institutions who had gone through this huge, you know, series of gauntlets to end up at our founding class. And I asked them, how many of you know your purpose in life here? And a third of them raised their hands. I was like, I was a gasast. I was like, oh my god. The rest of you, I don’t care why
[00:20:02] you came here. You have one mission this summer. It’s to find out why you’re here. What’s your purpose? What is that thing that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night, um drives you? What’s taking it a step further is what’s your massive transformative purpose? Right? What’s the thing that really So, we are emotional beings. We as humans are emotional beings. We don’t do things just for cognitive purposes. We do things for emotional purposes. There is something that inspires you massively like Star Trek or Apollo did for me or something that just pisses you off so damn much that refuse to let that continue and you’re focused on solving that. Right? And either one of those awe or pain can be the energy of your massive transformative purpose. But you deserve to find that um if you’re I
[00:21:00] created a uh a platform and uh on a large language model um setup that I did called uh it’s called uh my purposefinder.ai and it will walk you through a series of questions if you’re interested and it will help you uh actually shape and verbalize your massive transformative purpose. So mypurposefinder.ai if you want to play with that. Yeah, it works really well. We do it at X-Prise offsites actually. It works really really well. And uh you know actually I want to ask you about this too because uh the for those of you that are AI startup CEOs which or or founding teams um the process of being a successful entrepreneur has changed tremendously with social media. And you know when I was doing it at a very young age you were pretty much invisible and you could stay invisible. Now you’re out there no matter what. It’s important for capital raising. is important for recruiting and I think Elon Musk has kind of reinvented the degree to which you can take this but if you don’t have
[00:22:01] a massive transformative purpose that’s right on the tip of your tongue then you can’t articulate it when the moment arises and you’re on camera or whatever and then you don’t get the talent and then you don’t get the capital and so you know Peter’s been saying this for many many years but it’s more true today than it ever was before uh so I think it’s you know go ahead try the online exercise ask the LLM Now, how many of you right now could say, “Yeah, I can articulate my my fundamental purpose.” That’s pretty good. Yeah. Um, so, uh, founder dynamics, we have I’m just going to say I dive into that. There’s an exponential mindset, right, that I think you need to you need to really contemplate. Are you able our brains are very linear thinkers. We’re designed in a linear fashion. Can the lion get to me before I get to the tree? Right? So understanding an exponential mindset um a moonshot mindset one in which you’re going 10 times bigger
[00:23:01] versus 10%. Most of the world is happy with 10%. 10% more revenue, 10% more clients, 10% less cost. That’s success for most people. 10 times is a,000%. Right? And so can you create a moonshot mindset where you are able to conceive of um something that’s a thousand% bigger which typically means you’re not starting where you are you’re starting with a clean sheet of paper right so Astroteller at Google X now X says if you are running a car company I’m going to go old school here that’s getting 50 m per gallon and you want to get 10% more you can get there you You can work hard, you can, you know, better aerodynamics, better tires, better fuel, you can get 10%. But if I say, “No, no, no. I want your car to go from 50 m per gallon to 500 m per gallon.” You ain’t getting there incrementally, right? It’s like clean sheet of paper, start again. Um, the other mindsets for me are
[00:24:02] an abundance mindset, not weaponized. um an abundance mindset in which you realize there is just more opportunity next year. If you missed an opportunity, it’s fine. There’s going to be more next year. And that there is nothing truly scarce. Whatever you conceive of as scarce, I don’t care what it is. There is a mechanism driven by technologies to create a level of abundance. And the final mindset I I speak about, write about and I spend a lot of my time right now is a longevity mindset. Uh it’s a belief that we’re going to significantly extend the human lifespan um from AI principally very shortly. I’m talking you know next 5 10 year time frame. And your job is not to die from something stupid before these breakthroughs occur. Yeah. If you don’t read all of Peter’s books, definitely the first chapter of abundance is about the story of
[00:25:00] aluminum. Yes. And uh it’s just absolutely brilliant story. But it goes from being the rarest thing more valuable than gold. Yeah. To being 7% of the earth’s crust and Yes. all boxite. Yeah. Do you know the tip of the Washington Monument is aluminum, right? Because it was the most valuable metal at the time until until we learned how to uh smelt it properly. Yeah. It’s a great story. Um, so, uh, let’s see. I don’t know if you want to riff on this or not, but we went met with the MIT administration this morning and, uh, clearly there, well, Peter thinks in exponentials. Very few people can visualize exponentials. Education is in the crosshairs now. Um, my kids would much rather talk to an LLM and learn from it than go to class, but they learn what they need to know. curriculum isn’t even coming close to keeping up with the rate of change of technology. It’s not even trying. Um, I throw it out there as a
[00:26:00] topic. I don’t know if you want to talk about it on camera or not. Well, I’ll talk. Sure. I’m not shy about any of my opinions. Um, so Ray Kerszswwell, we mentioned earlier, brilliant individual. Uh, I had him on stage at I run a large community called the Abundance 360 community, and I run a a summit every year called Abundance Summit. and he was on stage with me and Jeffrey Hinton at my event 18 months ago and he basically were talking about sort of the speed of ramping things up and he said listen we’re going to see as much change in the next 10 years 2025 to 2035 as we saw between 1925 and 2025. Right? the next 10 years we see a century worth of progress and by reference just to remind you because it’s a distant memory what was life was like in 1925 penetration of electricity and
[00:27:00] telephones in the US was only 30% 30% of homes had TV and a party line I mean TV electricity and a party line and the most advanced tech back then was the Ford Model T so imagine how far we’ve come since then to today And what is life going to look like in 10 years if that level of progress occurs in a I mean it’s truly unfathomable. And so my biggest concern is that no educational institution is preparing any of us for that speed of change. Not close. Definitely not our middle schools and high schools. Um and I would have hoped an institution like MIT would be doing that. Um but maybe not well here quick survey especially for the young entrepreneurs in the crowd. All right so teal fellowship Z fellows Y cominator acceptance MIT degree Harvard degree
[00:28:02] which it would be more important to you to get so think about it for a second and I’ll run down the list and so you get one vote. So Z fellows any takers Y cominator acceptance? Oh I got some some Y cominators. Um uh teal fellowship. There you go. So one of the investments we made Merkore. They uh were freshman or sophomores I think at Georgetown and Harvard. They got the email saying we’ll give you $100,000 deal fellowship. You win. Give you $100,000 right now but you have to drop out and start a company. Two years later the company’s worth $2 billion. They have 100 million of revenue doing 20 million on the bottom line. So the uh the teal fellowship. Yeah, I don’t know exactly how you get it, but it arrives in your inbox and you get 100 grand with it. Uh okay. So got some teals in there. Uh Harvard degree. Nobody. MIT degree. All right. A little bias here. Yeah. So I mean if I’d asked that question three years ago, it
[00:29:00] would have been like of course the degree. Now you can see the trend line, you know, drifting in that direction. there are other credentials that are starting to matter to people even more than that degree. The the the problem is that the time between metriculation and graduation is infinite in terms of progress. Yeah. Um and so ultimately your your grad your MIT degree is learning how to learn and how to socialize and making contacts. It’s not what you actually learned. Yeah. So uh 27 time founder and co-founder. So 27 samples, that’s a lot of samples. Uh, one of the things I was telling the teams earlier today is if you think about Ford Motor Company, when Ford started, they made cars. What does Ford do today? They make cars. Okay, look at the the magnificent seven tech companies. Every one of them does something today that’s very different from when they started. So look at Apple. What did Apple make originally? Actually, the Apple 1 was a box of chips
[00:30:01] you assembled together. The Apple 2, which I had as a kid, is it’s a desktop PC. Then the laptops came along. Then now today, 90% of the revenue comes from the iPhone. Wasn’t even a concept when Apple started. And so tech companies are constantly reinventing them now themselves now. And what matters over the long run in a tech company is not what your business plan is today, but the founder dynamics, the team dynamics, the culture that continually innovates, but now you know when I talk about Apple, I’m looking really in the rear view mirror. Look in the future and the rate of change. So love to get your ideas on. I mean, I think the most interesting companies are the founderled AI or tech first companies that and it it’s it’s so hard for an existing company to retrofit itself. It’s it’s nearly impossible, right? But what you do get is a a founder-ledd tech
[00:31:00] company where the founder says, “Nope, stop doing that. We’re now only doing this.” Right? So you get that with Zuckerberg, you get that with Musk, you get that with a few other companies. Um but that level of like you know full body right turns are what is required otherwise I mean I was amazed when when Bezos said uh at a shareholder meeting in 30 years we’ll be gone. Mhm. Yep. Well, the Tesla reinvention as a as a robotics company and you know Elon very well. That to me is, you know, right at the point where any actually I met with a woman yesterday who’s from Bridgewwater who who talked about inshitification. She said at Bridgewwater we talk about public companies, the founders take it, they get it to a certain level and then the initification sets in. Inshitification all that means is that the professional bureaucrats start coming in the founders gradually leave leave. Nobody really notices, but then the company is in shitified. And so here you’ve got Tesla
[00:32:02] uh right at the point where you knew the stock had peaked and it’s going to come down because it’s a car company. No, we’re not. We’re a robotics company. And that to me is the definition of the the founder is still there. Well, it’s it’s even more extreme in SpaceX where when you know when Falcon 1 flew um the first three times it flew it failed and uh the Elon and the team borrowed enough money to make a fourth flight and Falcon 1 succeeded on the fourth flight and he flew it a number of other times. They got a contract for Falcon 9 and then he shut down the Falcon 1 line, right? Burned those ships. And what he went on to say, as soon as we get Starship flying, we will shut down the Falcon 9 line, the most successful launch vehicle ever in human
[00:33:00] history. Right? And it takes that level of leadership to be able to to make these right-hand turns and say we’re going to put we’re putting everything into that, right? And the same thing with Star with Starlink. Well, I’m always telling people in class on Thursday mornings that they’re spending way too much time on their plan and way too little time on their networking and team building because you’re in this incredibly talent dense environment here. Uh, and it’s rare. If you take advantage of it while you’ve got it, you’ll make lifelong friendships, li lifelong connections. You’ll be able to build many things together, you let it fritter away while you grind away on your business plan. You’ll not you won’t get that opportunity again later. And a single individual can make all the difference in the world in your company. A single individual, I’ll give you an example. So, George Church at Harvard Med School, uh, one of the genetic professors, a brilliant, uh, area in in synthetic biology. He had been focused on bringing back the woolly mammoth for many years.
[00:34:02] Talking about it, talking about it. There was a nonprofit and so forth. He meets a guy named Ben Lamb who has no background in the in biology. He’s a software engineer. He becomes enamored with George. He becomes enamored with George’s mission of uh deextinction, starts Colossal four years ago, and today it’s a10 billion dollar company that’s brought back the direwolf. It’s bringing back next the Dodo and uh Tasmanian Devil and and you know and of course the woolly mammoth but and has spun out three other companies. It’s the difference a single entrepreneur CEO can make. So your job is always to find the smartest people on the planet to partner with you. I will happily hire anybody smarter than me. There’s a coming wave of technological convergence as AI,
[00:35:00] robots, and other exponential tech transform every company and industry. And in its wake, no job or career will be left untouched. The people who going to win in the coming era won’t be the strongest. It won’t even be the smartest. It’ll be the people who are fastest to spot trends and to adapt. A few weeks ago, I took everything I teach to executive teams about navigating disruption, spotting exponential trends a decade out, and put them into a course designed for one purpose, to futureproof your life, your career, and your company against this coming surge of AI, humanoids, and exponential tech. I’m giving the first lesson out for free. You can access this first lesson and more at dmandis.com/futureproof. That’s dmandis.com/futureproof. The link is below. Speaking of smartest people on the planet, um I’m going to do this speed style first and then we’ll come back. Okay. So, I got So, in your travels through life, you’ve met pretty much all of the big shots in entrepreneurship and I’ve got their
[00:36:00] their names listed out here. So, I’ll give you a name. You give me one sentence and then we’ll go back to the top. Okay. Ready? Yeah, I’ll go in reverse order here. Uh, Richard Branson, frustrating. Frustrating. All right. Yeah. So, when I was trying to pitch, when I was trying to raise $10 million for my spaceflight X-P prize in the beginning, of course, Richard Branson’s the first person I go to and I fly out there and um and and pitch him for Virgin Galactic, no, Virgin Atlantic to become the Virgin Atlantic spaceflight prize. He says no. Two years later, I go back and and pitch him for Virgin Mobile. No. The day that the X-P prize got won, October 4th of 2004, after I had spent six years pitching him, he’s at the airport and Mojave airport where the winning flight takes place, signing a contract to buy the rights for the winning technology
[00:37:01] after turning me down twice for funding the 10 million. Years later, he goes, “Oh my god, I should have funded the $10 million. I spent $500 million trying to build Virgin Galactic instead. It would have been much cheaper to do it.” God, I have no idea. First time I’ve heard this. He’s brilliant and charming. Um, and he just frustrated me. All right, we’re gonna give up on the speed style then. I’ll just go. All right, this one, this one drives me crazy actually because I’m How many people know Tony Robbins? Okay, good. Very glad to see that in class every semester. It’s like three people. I’m like, and you know what drives me nuts is that the younger, you know, a lot of the teams now are like high school, freshman, and college. They’re really young. And they think the body language you want as an entrepreneur is cool, like too cool for school, which is a good way to survive high school and a terrible way to start a company. The body language you want is exactly Tony Robbins relentless enthusiasm, never ending. Extraordinary confidence. Your capital raising story for X-Prize is a good example. You have to over you have to give the same pitch
[00:38:00] 150 times enthusiastically. Yes. So Tony is the master of that. So Tonyy’s your co-founder and uh yeah I I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Tony. We were on the same stage. God uh I don’t know 15 years and became best friends. We’ve started a couple companies together and he is one of the most beautiful human beings that I know. He gives of himself 24/7 over and over again. The most relentless schedule on the planet. uh and he people don’t realize the level of philanthropy that he puts forward in terms of feeding people, growing trees, energy systems. I mean, I I’m just blown away by his level of of brilliance and authenticity. What you see is what you get. Uh and um yeah, he’s just extraordinary. Yeah. Drew H gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2017, I think it was. Uh, you know, everyone knows Drew Hston, founder of Dropbox. Yeah, that’s also one that’s kind of dropping off the curve for some reason, but he’s he gave a the best
[00:39:01] commencement address, I think, ever. But he said, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And that’s true whether you want it to be true or not. So, choose those five people really, really wisely. And if you think about, well, what attitude would I want those five people to have? Relentless enthusiasm. Yeah, it it really is. Think about this. Do you want to spend time with someone who’s kind of depressive and low energy or someone who’s just like, you know, just vibrant and you love spending time and they’re excited about life and they’re I mean it is contagious. Yeah. And and so make yourself that person that people want to spend time with. All right. Larry Paige and Sergey Brin, they’re one person in this. Um, so I had the pleasure, so years ago when the X-P prize got won on October 4th, 2004, you guys remember the Google Doodle? So Google Doodle was changed on
[00:40:00] that day with a with Spaceship One flying over the Google logo and this alien spaceship up there looking at us. I I loved it. and I got invited to go up to the Google Plex to go give a presentation and I did to the entire it was like 2,000 Googlers back then. And afterwards, I’m standing in line answering questions, answering questions, answering questions. And this uh this kid in a black t-shirt and a backpack comes up and goes, “Hey, I’m Larry Page. Let’s have lunch.” So, I uh befriended him. Uh we flew a number of zerog flights together. Uh I pitched him and he joined my ex-priseze board and became a benefactor. He brought in Sergey and Eric Schmidt as well and just very brilliant. You know, he’s unfortunately gone MIA uh to a large degree. Sergey or Larry?
[00:41:00] Larry mostly. Sergey has been a little bit, but he’s back now with with Gemini’s training. But what I get frustrated about, and I’m public about this, is individuals like Larry and Sergey who’ve got $140 billion to their name. It’s like, excuse my French, why the aren’t you solving the world’s problems with that money? It really pisses me off when you have such levels of retained capital and the money is not being put to work. I mean, okay, fine. Set aside a billion dollars for your for your kids. ruin their lives and then you know I don’t know launch a hundred billion dollar X-prises you know in invest in in people changing the world I mean it’s money is is a form of energy that should be put to active use to make the world a better place and I just I don’t you know there’s so many billionaires out
[00:42:00] there I I had this conversation with Mark Beni off who is one of the billionaires who does incredible good and invests in uh mostly in environment and in biology. He backed uh Dr. Yamanaka who did the Yamanaka factors and uh he’s backed a number of Nobel laureates. Again, uh Mark and Lynn are amazing. And this conversation with him and Tony and I said, you know, you got the giving pledge, which I don’t get the giving pledge. Giving pledge says, “I’m going to give half of my money to a nonprofit before I die.” Okay, that doesn’t mean it’s going to do anything with the money. Um, what I really want is people to to participate in an impact pledge like I pledge to solve, you know, eliminate hunger in Tanzania, whatever your whatever you want. Um, and giving money is the easy part. It’s using your
[00:43:03] intelligence that made the money to go and solve the problem which is really the high the highest value. So if we had, you know, I don’t know how big the Forbes list is right now, you know, a thousand plus multi-billionaires, I mean, incredible opportunity for for the world to be uplifted. Uh this next one’s really important to me. Uh so Jeff Bezos uh and he’s been an important connection point for the two of us because when I when I was at MIT I was the only person on campus doing neural networks. It was kind of not cool around MIT. So um but I got support. MIT is infinitely flexible and friendly and uh I got support to use the biggest computer in the world to build the first commercial neural networks. So launched the company, was selling, ended up with Walmart as a customer, and then I got a call from Rick Dzel, who ran data warehousing at Walmart. He called me one day. He said, ‘Hey, I just joined a little startup on the West Coast. You may not have heard of it. It’s called
[00:44:00] Amazon. I said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of it. It’s small, you know, it’s about to go public.” Uh, he said, “I want you to fly out here and meet our founder, Jeff Bezos. I think you guys are going to love each other.” So Amazon became our biggest customer. But the very first time I met Jeff Bezos, we were walking around their headquarters and he said, “Did you do you know Peter Diamandis?” And I said, “Yeah, we were roommates at MIT.” And he goes, “Oh, wow.” Cuz I started SS at at Princeton. So that little bonding moment helped a lot in making them our customer. Then they grew like crazy. So we grew like crazy and it all worked out really really well. But I think I think Jeff is the greatest organizational genius of all time. But I’ve spent personally about $200 $300,000 now interviewing former Amazon executives trying to reassemble everything he did along the way into our training program here. Um but you you’ve known him for well since teenage days I guess. Well yeah since since college um yeah I had started SDS here uh at the student center. Uh, I was very very
[00:45:01] frustrated that NASA was mortgaging my future and was was moving glacially and so I ended up creating I was at the Takai at TDC here and when I got to campus I found out there was no student space organization MIT. I said that’s ridiculous and I was like okay I’m going to start one and I realized I needed to get five signatures to start a club on campus. Didn’t know that. Yeah. And so I went to five of our fraternity brothers uh and and so it was like okay I’m going to call it student space society or space cadets at MIT scam was one of the names we came up with um and then SDS stuck students for the exploration development of space and this is I wrote a letter to Omni magazine which no longer exists analog magazine and astronomy saying uh you know we students need to band together to guarantee our future in space because I don’t trust
[00:46:00] NASA to do that for us. And at our house, I had no idea the articles got published. And you know, the the mailbox uh my mailbox was stuffed with letters one morning and it was letters from students around the world saying, “I want to start a chapter. I want to start a chapter.” And so we had like 104 chapters uh coming out of those and one was from Princeton uh and uh Scott Sharfman and uh and Jeff Bezos had gotten the chapter going there. Years later when Amazon started, I went and had a coffee with with Jeff in Seattle and I was like, “Jeff, what’s this Amazon thing? I thought you wanted to do space.” And he goes, “Yeah, I’m going to do Amazon first, make some money, and then spend it in space. an easy onetwo plan and he’s it worked. He’s like just like he’s executing on that perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. And he incredibly brilliant entrepreneur, incredibly focused
[00:47:02] entrepreneur. Yeah. Uh and last on my list, uh we’ve already talked about him a little bit, but Elon Musk has kind of redefined what it means to be an entrepreneur and how much you can do concurrently in life. A new pattern. So he’s on my board at X-P prize uh for four years and uh from 2004. So how I got him on the board. So I’d known Elon for some time. I had pitched him originally on funding the X-P prize instead of a newari. I was think Musk prize and I actually tried to talk him out of starting SpaceX. I said look at all these rockets blowing up. Just fund my $10 million prize instead. Guaranteed you pay the winner. He still tries me for having tried to convince him to not start SpaceX. And um uh and so finally uh where was I going with this story? So uh h we’ll come back to you something
[00:48:02] about Elon. No. So something we now we’re going to be curious for the rest of our lives about some Elon nugget. Uh anyway, so he starts uh he starts SpaceX. He continues, “Oh yeah, uh I am going to meet with Larry Paige for the second time and I’m like going to ask Larry to join my board at X-Prise and it’s like how can I get Larry to join my board at X-Prise?” And so one of the things I realized about boards, if any of you are on any boards, is I’m I’m on boards because I enjoy spending time with the people there, right? It’s it’s a chance to meet with them on a quarterly basis. I get a chance to meet with Dave. And so I’m in the parking lot at Google about to go and meet with Larry and I call Elon. I said, “Hey Elon, I’m about to meet with Larry Page, invite him on the board. Would you get on the board of X-Prise because if you’re on the board, I think we’ll increase probability that he’ll on the board.” And said, he said, “Sure.” So that’s how I got Elon on my
[00:49:00] board. No And and then four years later, he calls me and he says, “I have to drop off the board.” This is 2008. He says, “I’ve got to focus on SpaceX and Tesla. Um, I can’t do I’m dropping off of all boards.” And of course, that lasted for like a microcond. Exactly. And then 10 other companies started. Uh, any any other takeaways on like how he’s redefined what it means to be a CEO just in terms of, you know, doing Saturday Night Live or, you know, being in social media constantly? I think one important element there is some of the most successful CEOs take on a brand of their own. They become the mechanism by which they can promote their company from an orthogonal point of view. Right? End of the day your company is searching for attention in this attention deficit economy. And so how you can either get it by having an amazing product, having an amazing
[00:50:01] brand, having great stunts, but one of the other elements is can you have a a CEO who is super highly visible and is able to penetrate the noise that’s out there. So Elon’s very much done that. you know, I’ve worked on this through my, you know, Moonshots podcast, my MetaTrens blogs, my books, my other things because if I do that, I can support, you know, link exponential ventures. I can support the X-priseze. I can support my company’s Fountain Life and such. You know, I’m going to add one to the list. It’s not on the list here, but I think it’s directly relevant to what you just said, Sam Alman. So, you know, in the history of tech, it’s more I’m going to raise some money. I’m going to build something. I’m going to prove that it works. I’m going to start selling it, then I’m going to raise more money to expand and grow. But now in tech, you have these areas where something clearly will work. And you know, LLMAI being a great example or nuclear power to fund a data center that
[00:51:01] will have a gigawatt or two gawatts of power, but you can’t build it or demo it or start selling it. You need to sell the vision. Yeah. Way ahead of the construction. And Sam has reinvented the level you can Yeah, storytelling. I think that’s going to be a far more important part of entrepreneurship in the future just because the nature of innovation lends itself much more toward that design than toward, you know, the design of building Ford Motor Company from from scratch. We are still human beings and we convey information through story. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and they’re believing you. And in order to get there, you have to believe in yourself at that level. If you don’t believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there’s no way that you can sell it at the level that’s required.
[00:52:00] Right? And so I would on at my abundance summit this past year, R was there, Dave was there, I had uh had Palmer Lucky, which was a fun conversation. I’m going to do a podcast with him next week again. Uh and I had Travis Klanic and we’re talking about when do you give up on your startup? I don’t know about you, but of my 27 companies, startups, there’s a number of them, uh that I read I rode that horse into exhaustion. it. I died with me on the saddle and I should have given up. Uh and the question is when do you give up on on something that you’re passionate about. One of the one of the times you give up is if you don’t believe in yourself anymore or you don’t believe. You cannot fake that. You have to believe it. You have to believe in yourself and believe what you’re doing. A quick aside, you probably heard me speaking about fountain life before and you’re probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about fountain life? And the answer is no, I won’t because genuinely we’re living through a health care crisis. You may not know this, but 70%
[00:53:02] of heart attacks have no precedent, no pain, no shortness of breath. And half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don’t feel cancer until stage three or stage 4 until it’s too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That’s why a group of us including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap, and Bob Heruri founded Fountain Life, a one-stop center to help people understand what’s going on inside their bodies before it’s too late and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span. Learn more about what’s going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/per and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. So, I have a whole bunch more questions here, but I actually want to make sure that we get any burning questions from the crowd. We happened to have Alex Wner Gross with us tonight. He’s the only guy who can say he got he got three degrees from MIT in four years, math, physics, and computer science. And then MIT said, “No, never again. We’re banning this.”
[00:54:01] So, carry that credential for the rest of his life. Brilliant and sweet man. And always has a good question on top of his mind. I’m sure tonight’s no exception. Yeah. Kick us off. Hi, Alex. Good to see you, Bill. Peter, good to see you, too. Um, I’ll give you two questions if I may. Sure, of course. So, so one topic heavy on my mind today, uh, that you alluded to already, uh, abundance and the weaponization thereof. Yes. Um, do you think that we are finding ourselves in a world where as the singularity uh or whatever approximation you may or may not believe in uh approaches where it becomes possible for the great powers of the world to selectively weaponize abundance for hegemony? And if not, why not? And if so, which form of abundance do you think will be weaponized most? Oh my god. So, uh, I have zero doubt that we’re
[00:55:01] heading towards this world. So, back in 2012, I wrote a book with Steven Ker called Abundance, the future is better than you think. Uh, we just sold and just finished writing the followon uh, which we’re calling the survival guide for the age of abundance. Um, because one of the things is we have created an abundance of everything, both good and bad. Uh so I do believe we’re heading towards a world in which you can have anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. One of my greatest concerns is the dissolution of purpose. So if you can have anything you want, any time you want, um, can we still retain the idea of a deep emotional purpose for our lives?
[00:56:01] There’s an incredible experiment done in the 1960s. Did we talked about the universe 25 experiments? Do you know what the universe 25 experiments are? Uh this was done in one of the large medical centers in New York in the 1960s. Uh an experimentter had done sequentially over the years. This was the 25th time he did this experiment where he took a population of rats and he created utopia for the rats. Uh this was you put in a number of breeding pairs and the universe that they were in had all of the food, all the water, all the nesting, everything they needed. And he saw normal exponential growth. But before they saturated the population, what occurred was this very rapid die off and the entire population died every time because there was no challenges for
[00:57:03] them. And so it’s like the idea of the unchallenged life is not worth living. It’s anybody of you who play video games or have kids who play video games, right? that video game is so finely tuned to not be too easy where you give up or not be so hard that you can’t win. It’s just right. So on the thesis that we’re living in a computer model, which of course we are, um it’s just beautifully finely tuned. But what happens if everything becomes available all the time and we have true maximal abundance of anything you want because nanotechnology and AI and robotics and 3D printing and all the accuchant of exponentials makes it possible for us. Um how do we uplevel our challenges? Not quite the weaponization of abundance that you were speaking of but this is on my mind. You you have a second question. I’ll maybe defer. Yeah. All right.
[00:58:04] Wonderful conversation Nina Haidider. Um I follow up related and as a geneticist evolution is very slow for our species. Okay. So if we think about and I too believe technology advances at an exponential pace where we haven’t quite reached our capacity nowhere near perhaps however there will be a point perhaps where we do reach that and if you can comment further on abundance and not just weaponizing because you know in your rat example you gave how they die off there’s good and bad right we our our emotional IQ are different um we’re a product of DNA and environment and our different experiences which we can see in today’s world of both the most decrepit human behavior as well as the most amazing human behavior. How do you see the
[00:59:02] future evolving in this world so that we can reach even closer to a utopia rather than uh and and do we need to go through this complete mass loss in order to have that? So there there is a a wide variety of future scenarios that humanity is going to uh have before it. Uh, one of them that I find fascinating that I wrote about in my last book is a world in which um we are all connecting ourselves to the cloud um where our neoortex is connected to the cloud and I am if you would you know through some version of BCI and I’ve seen some incredible recent versions of high bandwidth BCI. We talked about Ray Kerszwell’s predictions earlier. One of the predictions he made, which it was like, Rey, you got to be wrong on this
[01:00:00] one. No way it’s going to happen. Was was high high-speed BCI by the early 2030s. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. It’s coming. But now imagine I connect myself to the cloud and you connect yourself to the cloud and you all connect yourself to the cloud and now we are connected to each other. Um, so you are a collection of 40 human trillion cells and each of those cells is an individual life form and you operate as a single consciousness of you or me. Imagine that we have 8 billion people now connected through this mechanism becoming conscious on what I call a a meta intelligence. I find that as a fascinating uh potential future scenario. Um I I’ll I’ll leave it at that for the moment. All right, we’re going to uh do a John Wernner style here in a second to
[01:01:01] collect as many questions as possible. Before we do that, we’ve got a really cool couple of MIT uh agentic AI startup guys here. Do you guys want to ask a question? Yeah. Here, catch. I I think I’m curious about you keep bringing up this idea that we might be going too far in in technology in some ways. No, I don’t think I said that. Um not not too far but in the sense that if we solve all the problems, humans have no challenges to face. Ah things like this. Okay. And I I guess I wonder at what point do you develop technology and the the point you brought up about uploading your brain to the cloud? Yeah. Um is there a point that’s too far? Uh is yeah is there some is there some metric we can use to figure out if we’ve if we’ve gone too far in some direction and and it’s potentially dangerous. So I don’t think there is any onoff switch
[01:02:00] and I don’t think there’s any velocity knob. I think we are accelerating at uh a pace which is unconstrained. Um we’re spending a billion dollars a day or is a billion dollars a day being invested in AI today and uh it’s driving you know super exponential breakthroughs and digital super intelligence if it isn’t right on the edge is here very soon thereafter which will just accelerate everything even further. So there’s there is nothing that’s going to slow this down. I hope because the things that can slow this down are not things I want to live through. Um but I do I do think it’s on us on our uh our responsibility to look at how we uplevel the challenges we take on. So I I close my next book uh on abundance
[01:03:00] with a look at how do we how do we go a thousandx bigger in our dreams. Um you know Alex you and I talked about the human race coupling with AI that there is a moment in time here as AI is taking off you know think of the movie Her and we humans are sublinear at best. uh you know do we couple and accelerate with AI we’re giving birth I mean AI is a new life form it is a new species uh will we hybridize with them I mean these are the conversations I think that are very real I don’t think anybody on the planet today in truly understands how fast things are going to get in the next four years uh and the implications thereof clearly not uh in 99.999%. And so there’s going to be some uh you know uh disruptions as a result
[01:04:00] of that. So we have we have time for maybe two more questions, but I want to do this again John Warner style. We’ll pick three. Just yell them out, Peter. Answer any subset you want of the three and then we’ll do another batch of three and then we’ll have to wrap it up. So fire away. Go ahead. Oh, just yell it out. Okay. So, what good microphone so we can record it properly. Okay. Yeah. I I flew uh this morning to see you. Thank you. Uh and because you changed my life and I read that the future is faster than you think that that’s why, you know, wanted to come to MIT and then became MIT alum. So amazing. I appreciate that. Thank you. So then I’m uh passionate about the solving climate change but the industry you know then I I was focusing on green hydrogen but industry is struggling right now. Yes. So what do you think of the future of you know climate change? All right. So you’ve got I love you and green energy. Hold that.
[01:05:00] What are you the most excited about? Um longevity. Yes. Well okay longevity. And so you said that we’re going to see a century worth of change in 10 years, but there’s a grounding of like the physics of human change. I’d like to get a better sense for the mediums in which that change is going to happen through. Is it like just through, you know, mobile phones again where like, you know, Instagram took off. Is there going to be, you know, the the the brain, you know, uh in reverse order? Okay. Um I was having this conversation with Alex earlier and I agree with him. I think we’re going to see uh AI make the most profound discoveries in fundamental math and physics ever. Uh that will unlock a you know a century worth of progress in some small number of years. Uh you know we just saw the Nobel Prize given to Demisabus and John Jumper for Alphafold.
[01:06:00] Uh I think that’s the beginning of a long line of AIdriven Nobel prizes and the ability for AI to hypothesize questions and then run the experiments and solve them and come up with you know sequential and adjacent breakthroughs uh is going to be staggering. It’s literally like a civil a advanced alien civilization landed on Earth and just disclosed all of its discoveries to us cuz it is exactly that. So that’s going to be fascinating. Longevity. I spent half my time in longevity and I think that it is we’re in the midst of a health span revolution. Uh we just saw Dario, the founder of Anthropic on stage uh at uh at Davos saying he expects that we will be able to double the human lifespan in the next 5 to 10 years. Crazy. I was just with David Sinclair
[01:07:02] this morning at Harvard Med School uh looking at the research they have on epigenetic reprogramming and I I can’t disclose it but it’s shocking. Uh we just saw uh Sir Deis Hassabis talk about uh being able to uh cure all disease within a decade. So there’s something definitively happening here, right? Uh the human being never evolved to live past age 30. For you know as long as homo sapiens have been around 230,000 years that was our average lifespan. And then we hit a number of benefits from you know pasteurization, better sanitation and antibiotics and move the needle. Now we’re moving the needle as a result of AI. Uh another point we made, right? We’re going to begin to model the human cell and I will know this is my cell.
[01:08:01] This is my tissue. This is my organ system. This is me and based on my genetics, this is my model and I’m going to make these tweaks. Right? The reason that Falcon 9 flew the Dragon capsule to the space station perfectly the first time wasn’t dumb luck. It wasn’t just intelligence. It was they modeled the out of it and they knew exactly how it was going to work and they ran it in silic,000 times. And so we’re going to begin to to run your biology in silico. Crazy. No one thought possible. Just around the corner. Thank you for your kind words. Um, I I think I think the climate crisis and all of that is going to fall as a gift out of digital
[01:09:02] super intelligence. like it or not, want it or not, it will be just like literally, you know, longevity falls out, climate crisis, you know, we’re going to see new uh new materials uh that are being are being enabled. Um uh we just awarded, you know, obviously this this $100 million on six different approaches for carbon sequestration at gigaton scale. Uh that was the important part. Uh and but energy, yeah, we’re going to drive energy because we need it, need it, need it, need it. But then that energy is going to is going to drive the you know, we are living in a universe of an infinite amount of energy. There’s lots of energy out there, right? It’s just not in a usable form yet. and we’re going to, you know, whether it’s just solar or fusion or zero point energy or
[01:10:00] whatever it is, uh, it’s coming. It’s there. And the breakthroughs in physics are going to open all of these doors. And it’ll be I think it’ll be shocking. It’s like you wake up, holy holy holy It will be one of those. Every day I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, “Peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I’d hear that from anyone.” And honestly, I can’t take the full credit. All I do is use something called OneSkin OS1 twice a day, every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who’ve identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it and again, I use this twice a day, every day. You can go to onskin.co co and write peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That’s oneskin.co and use the code peter at checkout. All right, back to the episode. All right. Well, we’ll be exactly 12 hours since we got together at MIT this morning. So, I promise I’ll
[01:11:02] let you off the hook after just we’ll do one more batch of three. Okay, that’s great. And then Are you okay? Yeah, I’m totally good. All right. And then uh Alex, you have to It’s 5:30 on the West Coast. All right. Uh I promised you Okay. It’s I I like this optimism and abundance. And right now if if you look at the human race, we have abundance of food. But yet there’s inequality between there’s too much food and where there is where there’s starvation. We have more people dying from obesity than starv than than starvation. It’s crazy. So, so the question is uh in this next generation of abundance will we humans overcome our own human limitations to share? That’s a great question. Behind you. Yes. Behind hasn’t come up yet. Quantum computing
[01:12:00] the positives and negatives that are possible around the quantum. Yeah. Very nice. Do you do you want to do another batch of three after this? Sure. All right. One more. All right. Oh, Alison and Hannah knew the next one to take it. Um, if you had small people, uh, I have two 13-year-olds. Okay. So, how what do you do every day to instill in them that deep purpose and what stories? You say we need other storytellers and we risk losing that deep sense of purpose. So, what stories are you telling the youngest people to help them cultivate this new kind of purpose that you allude to? Yeah, it’s a great great question. Kids, quantum and and uh abundance, more on abundance. So on the kids front, um first of all I think the single most important thing I want for my kids isn’t for them
[01:13:01] to learn how to program, isn’t for them to become space cadets. It’s for them to find their purpose in life, right? So it’s like when I was growing up, my parents desperately wanted me to become a physician, which I did. I went to medical school around the corner here to make them happy. And my fourth year of medical school, I was running two companies. I got a copy of my diploma. I shipped it to my dad and said, “Okay, obligation complete.” Um, I don’t want I don’t want my kids doing anything for me. And I tell them all the time, your job is to find what you love, what it’s passionate, what you’re passionate about. Uh, the second thing I want for them is to learn how to ask great questions, to be questioning everything. And so when they go to school every day, when I drop them off, whatever, I say, “Listen, ask great questions today.” We joke about that. It’s become, so I do try and incentivize them to be, you know, to
[01:14:01] question both authority, but question what they hear. Um, you know, you can call it prompt engineering if you want, but we’re heading into a world where you’re going to be able to know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. I mean, just think about that. I can know the average color of a woman’s blouse on Madison Avenue today because the cameras are there. The AI can analyze it. I can know that. So, if you can know anything from a business perspective or from a from a purpose- driven perspective, it’s it’s how do you use that information? What’s the question you want to ask? Right? someplace there is a billion dollar question that if you if you could answer that question it’s worth a billion dollars to you or it will solve one of the world’s biggest problems. So it’s getting into that mindset, right? I think is so mindsets are what I try and focus my kids on, not anything else
[01:15:02] because the tech is always changing. The final thing is become an expert in the problem, not the solution. The problem unfortunately remains sort of there and we try different solutions, different solutions, the solutions constantly are changing. But if you understand the problem, then you can apply the new solutions as they come on. So those are my my thoughts. And quantum, I really want to hear your answer on this. So, I’m actually doing a salon this Saturday night um back in LA with uh with the head of Google Quantum uh and the head of the brain Allen Brain Institute uh and then uh one of the top physicians in the psychedelic space and u we’re we’re talking about Hartmoot Nevin runs Google Quantum. We’re talking about um
[01:16:00] consciousness as a quantum phenomenon. Um which I find absolutely fascinating. Um so we are quantum beings. Uh you know I I’m tracking what’s going on at at Google, at Microsoft and other locations in this space. Uh um uh I think you know I’m the area that is most so the question is when is it going to become applicable when are we going to get basically uh you know a sufficient number of logical cubits that it’s useful what’s interesting is the work that sandbox AQ is doing right now right so sandbox has taken quantum equations, Heisenberg, Schroyinger and and so forth
[01:17:00] and they’re using AI to solve those equations and we’re getting the first glimpses there. Um Alex, do you have an opinion further? Very strong ones. I want to hear them. I do too. Okay. So, um this is all off the record, right? We only have No, it’s being uh Sorry. So um the conventional wisdom in in certain communities I I’ll project it on to everyone else rather than taking credit for this opinion um is quantum computing has been a major disappointment thus far uh that uh some would say that uh the the best application that we could hope for right now from from quantum on computing side is to generate huge amounts of synthetic training data that we can then feed to very much classical machine learning algorithms to do things like drug discovery. We’ll we’ll do efficient synthetic generation of quantum chemistry calculations, build up a huge synthetic uh data set, feed that to classical ML. I I think that’s that
[01:18:03] right now if if nothing else changes in the quantum space, that’s the trajectory that we’re on where it’s basically wildly underdelivering on the promise at the there was a lot of hype in the early days. Yes, the the quantum computing lunch got eaten by classical AIM ML and otherwise useless. Um, if I had to make the Steelman case for for how quantum confounds expectations and ends up being wildly more useful than right now it appears to be, I’m I’m with you on your earlier uh gesture at something to do with quantum biology. If it turns out that biology is a lot more quantum than uh than most biologists think it is right now, if it turns out there’s some essential bit of quantum mechanics in biology, I think that’s likeliest to be the safe embrace of quantum computing or uh quantum sensing I I think is incredibly promising. there it’s well established that we can get major quantum advantages uh for uh for gravitational sensing especially um and
[01:19:02] and this is where sandbox AQ is developed products right now right uh so sandbox is using quantum sensing uh to be able to navigate without GPS by using slight variations in the magnetic fields of the of the earth due to ferro deposits in in the crust there there are enormous potential discoveries right under our noses is not widely appreciated that even gravity hasn’t been uh Newtonian gravity hasn’t been established to length scales as short as a micron no one knows quantum sensors could mean the difference between discovering new physics at meoscopic length scales and no new physics so I’m personally I’m very bullish that quantum sensing could unlock enormous revolutions nice and then abundance you’re saying it’s better than EKG2 yeah So they do for EK EKGs. Exactly. Yeah. No worries about encryption either of you. What’s that?
[01:20:02] Yeah. What’s your what’s your Go ahead. Give me my microphone. Anytime anytime I get to hear from Alex, please I want to hear as much as I can. The question was no worries about encryption. No, I mean the the the cognizant agencies have already moved to postquantum. So it’s uh yeah, the the world has moved on. Okay. It’s your old hard drive that’s ruined. Yes. Okay. On so phrase the question on abundance for me once again. The human nature. Yeah. So the question is uh as we enter this new age of abundance and as we have seen in the past experiences where we have this abundance of food but where there’s still this inequality of food and food distribution. to this new age of abundance the game are going to have the same thing play over where some people have everything that they want anytime at their fingertip and the vast majority are still left because humans don’t
[01:21:01] intuitively want to share other than with their tribe it’s primarily tribal people great okay thank you for the question first of all if you look at the data uh and in the back of my you my next book, whatever we call it, age of abundance or survival guide for abundance. We’ve got 80 charts and you look over the last um we look at 200 year life, 200 year spans, 100 year spans, 50ear spans, and 30ear spans. And uh the access to food globally has massively increased. Malnutrition has fallen by 300%. So while there is still uh this this uh lack of equitable distribution, it has consistently gotten better consistently over this time. So I
[01:22:01] I the analogy I use is you know if you think about this device right any kid with a smartphone and the number of smartphones call it 7 billion or thereabouts any kid with a smartphone has access to Google at the same level that Larry and Sergey’s kids have access to Google it’s not a little bit better a little bit worse it is fully democ democr democratized and fully demonetized. And where we’re heading next is that this device will be your diagnostician. And anyone with a smartphone will have a not a decent diagnostician, the very best. You can’t afford a better diagnostician than the kid with a smartphone. and the very best educator will be there. So we are
[01:23:01] bypassing human nature. We’re bypassing tribalism in that regard. Uh I find that very refreshing in that in that fashion. And we’re coming up with new business models for the things that are still physical and not digital. those those models, if you would, for vertical farming or stem cell grown meats where we’re able to um you know, move the production of food to where the where the humans are and need them. Um yeah, we’re we’re we’re dealing with a very, you know, a paleolithic mindset, unfortunately. And if you can bypass that mindset by making things, again, this isn’t the abundance mindset, that things are just so available and so cheap that anyone can have it. Uh, that’s part of the solution. Um,
[01:24:01] you know, Elon talks about, you know, so here’s a here’s some numbers, right? Tesla bot, Optimus, uh, Figure AI. There’s I’m tracking about a hundred decently funded 50 wellunded humanoid robot companies. The prediction on the price point of these robot companies is uh $20,000 in production, right? The number, the estimate now is by 2040 there will be 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet, more than there are humans. I’ll ask you a question about that in a minute. So the price point has been said 20,000 to 30,000 and in volume production things get down to a price per kilogram. And so that’s a that’s where it will end up at 20 to $30,000. And if I’ve got a a humanoid robot that’s operating on GPT5, it’s just operating on the on the latest models, and it costs $30,000 to buy, and it cost me $300 a month to
[01:25:02] lease, which is $10 a day, which is 40 cents an hour. And I have a digital super intelligence robot at my beck and call for 40 cents an hour. I don’t know, that creates a lot of abundance for a lot of people out there. M. So the question is, if they c if it cost you 300 bucks a month, 10 bucks a day, how many will you own? Right. I don’t know, probably a couple at least, maybe more. Maybe one will massage my left foot, one will massage my right foot. Um, so I I think the bo the bottom line ultimately is we’re moving to a postc capitalist society. I mean just to just to jump ahead to the to the punch line, money will mean very little at the and it will mean very little, right? If you can have if you have nanotechnology on top of AI and
[01:26:01] robotics, I don’t know, Alex, you agree? I I’ve had long conversations with AI about AIdriven post capitalism. Yeah. And it agrees. Yeah. Know it has very strong opinions about what post capitalism looks like. I should I should talk to mine about that. Willist existing systems allow that. What’s that? Will existing systems existing systems allow that? Uh no. They will fight like hell and and they will become irrelevant just like libraries. Don’t tell the librarian about that. Still want to take three more before. All right. We’ll take three more and then Alex is going to ask something totally out of control. Brilliant. Ron, do humans have a moat? Ah, that’s a great question. I love that. Uh, Sophie, write that down for me. It’s a great blog. Liberal arts and religion. What is the appropriate amount? Should we be worried that no one answered that Harvard was the right choice? Not a single vote. Is anyone here from Harvard? I didn’t want to. And you guys didn’t vote for
[01:27:01] yourself? That was interesting. All right, last one. Hi, thank you so much for doing this. Of course. You’re really inspiring. Thank you. Uh, quick question. Apart from that particular startup that you, you know, was on for like a long ass time you didn’t give up. What is something else that you feel like after doing 27 different or 27 different startups that you could have done differently in high? Yeah. What did you What did you up? Yes. What would you say, Dave? So, all right. Last one is what did you up? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Wait, Ron had what was yours again? Yeah, I I got I got hers. So, so listen. Um there’s no question that in hindsight you can do everything better. Uh I I’ll tell you some of the very big lessons learned. Whenever I did something for money and not for purpose or passion, I failed miserably because doing anything big and bold is hard. And if you don’t love it, you will
[01:28:00] give up before you succeed. I learned that lesson. It’s like, no way. It’s like, you know, it’s getrich quick schemes. Nuh-uh. Um, so, you know, I I I think the other thing is who you start your companies with is one of the most fundamental things, right? you’re going to spend more time with your co-founders and your founding team than your husband, your wife, your kids, your best friends. Uh so you got to make sure that you love these people, you respect these people, and that you want to do something awesome with these people, right? That’s one of the fundamental learnings that Dave when he’s looking at teams to invest in for link exponential ventures is like you know were they best friends in high school or through college or grad school and such those are much more likely to succeed. Um, and I I think the the the final thing and it’s related to the first one
[01:29:01] is, you know, being being driven by a massive transformative purpose, being driven by something bigger than yourself. Because when you’ve got that in your heart and you’re communicating what you want to do, people see that, they feel it, they hear it, it attracts the best people to you. Um, and people want to be with you and people want to support you along the way. I mean, so a purpose-driven effort versus something that you’re doing for somebody else or you kind of want to do No, no. Find that. So, the question was, what did you mess up? I know you never messed up the transformative purpose part of that, but sounded like the co-founder side of it. No, no. I I went after I went after companies because I thought it was quick way to make money. Oh, did you? I did. I did. I did a couple of those and I said, “I’ll never do those again.” Interesting. Um and and yeah, there were a couple of times where I started a company with somebody who I didn’t fully
[01:30:02] have that level of of bond with and it just it it broke. Yeah. Yeah. We call that the Fred Wilson rule because we borrowed it from another MIT alum, Fred Wilson, the founder of Union Square Ventures, would only invest in teams of three or more people, best friends. They all write the code themselves, meaning they’re all technical and you trust them. If they pass those filters, you’d always invest no matter what the plan was. Um, so say again, liberal arts and religion, what is the appropriate amount? You touch on a lot of those topics and sort of around them, but don’t directly touch on a lot of uh it depend. I mean, I honestly it for me it’s low. But that’s not my who I am. Um, but there are some of the most extraordinary leaders on the planet who that’s that is their that is their
[01:31:03] heart’s place. I think it it it there isn’t I mean one of the biggest questions is what will happen to religion in the next decade. Um we’re we’re giving birth to advanced digital super intelligence. Um we’re giving birth to new species. We’re uncovering what we thought were long lived secrets. We’re doubling the human lifespan. We’re humanity is transitioning so rapidly. Um I think you know the question is will religion play a stabilizing role or break? Will history play a guiding role for us? Um I don’t know. You have an opinion about that? Uh, no. I’m not I’m not
[01:32:01] taking that one. It’s too complicated. But, uh, Ra, you had the Is there a mode for humans? We’re going to find out. Yeah. So, I mean, that’s a fascinating question. Are we simply a transient life form? That we are giving birth to our our, you know, our children that will conquer the universe. Um, you know, one of the questions I asked a couple years ago at the Abundance Summit is, would you want to live on this planet with digital super intelligence or without it? Mhm. My conclusion is I don’t trust this planet with the powers we’re developing without digital super intelligence. I don’t think human nature
[01:33:03] is able to deal with the level of power without having a stabilizing force. Alex, I want to hear I want to hear your thoughts on these last two questions and your final question. Yeah. And I have a favorite to ask on the final question. It’ll be something mind-blowing because it’s Alex. Um, and then we’re going to capture whatever the answer is on film and then whatever it is, that’ll be the end of the night. So, applaud wildly so we capture that on the on the video for KJ over there. Okay. All right. Your thoughts on the last two? Doctor, doctor, doctor. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, so the last two were the humanities. Uh, and maybe just a a comment. Uh I I think we’re already seeing the emergence of AIdriven cults. Uh it’s a like pretty obvious trend. There are a number of uh crypto uh AI cults emerging in social media. So uh it seems like we’re already witnessing an explosion of new religions uh inspired by AI. Seems reasonable by
[01:34:02] the law of straight lines to assume that we’ll see many more. Um and to the second question of uh is there a mode? Yes. Is there a mode? Um I I don’t think the question makes sense. I I think that the premise that humanity needs a competitive differentiation presumably against super intelligence or whatever whatever barbarians lie outside the mode. I don’t think the I don’t think it’s even wrong. I think the premise is flawed. I uh I I think we merge with the super intelligence and the question the question that’s interesting for me is what happens after that. Uh I I spent a lot of my time thinking about what does the post singularity look like? uh given that at least from my foxhole uh the singularity or I I just use that term as as a placeholder because I don’t actually think we’re going to to hit uh sort of an IG good type uh vertical wall where there’s instantaneous progress but technologies that we call singularity uh prosaically um like that’s a foregone
[01:35:02] conclusion at this point we’re we’re well past the event horizon I agree with the merging but I wonder if there are human qualities like curiosity or agency or love or something That was more No, those are all I I would argue that those are all uh instrumentally convergent requirements. So AI has those as well. Your question, doctor. Wait, wait, wait. Before before your final question, uh cuz yes, at the end of this, we’re going to erupt an applause and that’ll be the end of the night. So I want to I want to first of all thank everybody for coming tonight. Uh I hope it was worth the price of the ticket. Um and uh and really uh you know, Peter is just such an incredible joy and so motivating for everyone when you come to town. So you the more we can get you here the better. So and the applause at the end but not not we have our so I have no idea what Alex is going to ask. It’s always ingenious. Um and whatever we end on uh let’s make sure we end it on the final sentence being
[01:36:00] something upbeat and inspiring which is very a positive note of course. All right. Here we go. Ready? Here we are. You’re the founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. You’re the champion and chief for abundance. Uh I I want to put you on the spot and ask you to project forward say 100 or 200 years uh and ask the question, what does humanity from from the reference uh from the perspective of SS or abundance look like? And I’ll offer you a few options uh you know door ABC D and uh other as well. Um, does humanity look something like O’Neal cylinders where we’re just projecting atoms outward into interstellar space? Does humanity look like transcension hypothesis where we break out of said singular set simulation uh or you know other dimensions you know fill in the blank? Does it look like humanity turning purely inward uh building uh vast computers and and
[01:37:03] living an inner life? Does it look like something else entirely? What is what is it? If not the terminal state, uh if if you think that we’re we’re on an exponential and presumably the although every point on an exponential looks like the knee of the curve, if we’re on a hyper exponential, then presumably we hit the vertical sometime before 100 years from now. What does the state of humans in space look like? Yeah. Uh it’s a fantastic question, Alex. Expect nothing less from you. Um, so first of all, the realization I had combining space and abundance is that the earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources, right? And that this is a very magical moment in time over the next decade or two where we are moving humanity off the planet irreversibly. The best analogy I have is the lungfish
[01:38:01] moving out of the oceans onto land. And so there will be some elements of humanity that are moving out into space. Uh the tools that we’ll have with robotics and nanotechnology that’s able to reshape material resources into anything and everything we need. But I think the overwhelming vision of the future is us uploading into some version of a pre-mputronium out there and living our lives. Uh I I’ve searched this in my mind a thousand times and I do believe without any question we’re living in an nth generation simulation and we’ll create n plus1 um and it’s a mechanism by which we can
[01:39:00] tune the dial on the degree of difficulty uh on on purpose. So the high note is recursion, recursion and repeat uh and infinite possibilities. Um I do believe we can create a world of extraordinary abundance. The work I do across everything with X-P prize and singularity and my venture funds with Dave and all is how do we uplift humanity? We have the ability over this next not 50 years, 20 years, this next decade to uplift every man, woman and child. Right? I define a billionaire as someone who helps a billion people, right? And it’s an incredible, incredible time. We’re about to give every human on the planet access to the most powerful resource intelligence. Um, and what they do with that, what we do with that, uh, I think is is what we need to keep our eyes
[01:40:00] focused on. But 200 years from now, I mean, first of all, I’d like to start a city on the moon. That’s one of my goals. I’d like to fulfill uh DD that’s 10 years from now. I’m asking the hundreds. I I think I think that we’re living in a a virtualized universe. Um how about you? You want that? I already I already turned it off. I want to hear Alex’s idea. All right. You can cut in the Ask me the question. So 200 years from now in a world of infinite abundance and space fairing humanity, what does it look like? All right, so I have a really scary answer. Um I I’ve had a conversation, extended conversation with a few frontier AIs about this. The answer is sort of terrifying from from an exponential growth perspective. So, so Carl Sean’s cosmic calendar, right? Suggests the universe uh when it began
[01:41:00] um uh time scales were very short, slowed down, U-shaped uh and then as we came up to the present, things seem to be accelerating again and back up on an exponential. The scary answer um one of the frontier models in an extended conversation gave me is uh that we’re we’re going to hit a plateau. Uh and even though it looks like we’re on an exponential or hyperexponential development right now, uh and we’re going to hit a number of major, you know, universal milestones, uh we’re going to find that the the next rungs of the development ladder uh take exponentially more time than than the speed up that we’ve experienced to the point where AI thinks uh the next few rungs of the developmental ladder, you know, not quite cartev levels, but it’s its own somewhat similar version of that are going to take progressively uh hundreds thousands tens of thousands eventually hundreds of millions of years. So, so to the answer, my answer
[01:42:02] to your question back to you, we’re we’re in our solar system. Uh, if we uh if if we can survive technologies that enable us to destroy ourselves, then uh then we leave our solar system. Uh and if if we can survive after that, we colonize the galaxy, meet all of the other intelligences that are cohabiting our and this of course presumes that they don’t come to meet us before then. It it it does not presume that we haven’t already made contact with which will be the subject of our next evening conversation. All right. Thank you. everybody. Thank you. If you could have had a 10-year head start on the dot boom back in the 2000s, would you have taken it? Every week I track the major tech meta trends. These are massive game-changing shifts
[01:43:00] that will play out over the decade ahead. From humanoid robotics to AGI, quantum computing, energy breakthroughs, and longevity. I cut through the noise and deliver only what matters to our lives and our careers. I send out a Metatron newsletter twice a week as a quick two-minute readover email. It’s entirely free. These insights are read by founders, CEOs, and investors behind some of the world’s most disruptive companies. Why? Because acting early is everything. This is for you if you want to see the future before it arrives and profit from it. Sign up at dmmus.com/tatrens and be ahead of the next tech bubble. That’s dmmagnus.com/metatrends. [Music]