After Interviewing AI Founders, Here's What You Really Need to Know | EP #175

[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. I get to do a lot of really fun things in my role here, but this takes the cake. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Where you are right now, you’re in Link Ventures’ office space. We’re about a $1 billion venture fund, and we invest almost entirely in MIT and Harvard teams. Everything is AI now; it’s been at least 90% AI for the last couple of years. Most of the teams are upstairs above us, sprinkled around. It’s like a high-energy factory up there. Downstairs, we have events like this. I really appreciate you coming to hear us tonight.

I’m Dave Blondon. Peter and I founded the venture fund together. You see it there: link XPV. We have a rare opportunity to hear from one of the true luminary visionaries in all things technical.

When I was at MIT many, many years ago, I was an undergraduate getting a computer science degree. Peter had already gotten his biology degree from MIT, then went off to Harvard and got an HST degree—a combined MD and PhD—and then came back to MIT to get an aeronautics and astronautics degree. He was taking Unified Engineering, which was the hardest class that MIT had, having already gotten multiple degrees—a true glutton for punishment—while I was getting a computer science degree.

We lived together on campus. I’ve been inspired by a few people in my life, but at that age, Peter was by far the most inspiring person I had met. It’s been a lifelong dream having Peter as a best friend all these years.

Peter, he’s in town every now and then. Today happens to be one of those days. While he was on campus as an undergraduate, he started Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, or SEDS, which is still, I think, the biggest club at MIT. I’m pretty sure it is. His good friend Jeff Bezos heard about it at Princeton and copied it and created SEDS Princeton.

Then he graduated and started International Space University, which is thriving today.

This is going to be a long introduction.

It is. It is, because you’ve done so much. I’ll only add one more thing, then. After that, he was the founder of XPRIZE. I’m on the board of XPRIZE, so I get a firsthand view into what he’s created there and how it’s changing the world.

I’ll just use that as a way to hand off the mic to Peter to tell us about why you’re in town this week in the first place.

Usually, I’m the one doing the interviewing on my podcast, so it’s nice to get someone else to do your work for you.

I was in town yesterday at the TIME100 Impact Awards. We were announcing our largest cash prize ever. We gave away $100 million of Elon’s money yesterday.

It was the carbon-removal XPRIZE. We challenged teams back in 2001. The XPRIZE Foundation has been around for 30 years. I started it in 1994, after reading, before many of you were born, a book called The Spirit of St. Louis.

I found out that Lindbergh, in 1927—we’re 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. I was reading this biography of Charles Lindbergh and counting the amount of money spent to win this $25,000 prize. It was crazy: $400,000 was spent by all the teams cumulatively to try to win this guy’s $25,000 prize.

The most likely aviators to cross the Atlantic, from New York to Paris, didn’t pull it off. In fact, Admiral Byrd, who was one of the great aviators of the time and the first person to go to the North Pole, crashed on takeoff out of Roosevelt Field on the way to Le Bourget because he had overloaded his airplane with champagne and china so he could celebrate when he landed, as if France wouldn’t have champagne and china.

Lindbergh couldn’t get anyone to sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so worried that he would not succeed and give their airplane or engine manufacturer a bad reputation. So he went to Ryan Airlines in San Diego, which was building only air-mail aircraft, and bought one of those to convert.

That was the origin of XPRIZE. I read this book and said, “Okay, I want to go to space.” I was born in the ’60s. It was the Apollo program and that science-fiction show called Star Trek that inspired me.

I wanted to go, so I 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 that I get to go once during my career after 5 years of praying. I want to go every weekend.” The only way to do that is commercially.

When I read Lindbergh’s book, I said, “I’m going to create a prize for private spaceflight.” Long story short, I organized and launched a $10 million prize for the first person who could build a spaceship carrying 3 adults up 100 kilometers, come back with the same ship, and do it again within 2 weeks.

That launched the commercial space industry. Before that, the capital and the regulatory infrastructure—none of that was there. Elon and Jeff Bezos were there early on, supporting XPRIZE. We’ve launched 30 prizes since then, with about $500 million in incentive purses that have driven about $10 billion in R&D. Every year, we go through this process of designing prizes and voting up prizes, and many years ago we said we need a carbon prize to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean at scale. Year on year on year, it was designed but wasn’t getting funded. I remember on January 7th of 2021, 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 XPRIZE?” He had funded an XPRIZE for teaching kids in Tanzania reading, writing, and arithmetic at scale. Long story, successful one. He said, “What do you have in mind?” I said, “How about a carbon-removal prize?” He goes, “How much?” I said, “$100 million.” He goes, “Sure.” That was it. We got the contract 30 days later. And so four years later, we had 1,300 teams enter that competition—it’s Darwinian evolution in carbon removal—and we awarded 6 finalists and a grand-prize winner. I gave the winner a check for $50 million yesterday, which was amazing.

You left out a really interesting nugget in that story, which is that Elon is the first prize funder who said, “Here, I’ll just give you the money up front.”

Yeah.

He gave us not only $100 million, but also the operating budget—about $30 million—and gave us the capital, which was sitting in a bank account until yesterday, accruing interest.

At the next XPRIZE board meeting, Peter said, “I want to put all that into Bitcoin.”

I did, and I wish I had.

Yeah, the board said, “No, no, I don’t think we’re allowed to do that.”

If they’d said yes, it would be a different story.

A lot more and bigger prizes.

But we do have $300 million-level prizes.

Originally, the first prize was $10 million, and people laughed at that amount of money. “You’ll never raise it.” An amazing woman, Anousheh Ansari, who’s now the CEO of XPRIZE, is very quickly worth speaking about for a second.

I came up with the idea of XPRIZE in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, I took a risk, as entrepreneurs do, and announced the $10 million prize without having $10 million. I had 2 of my board members resign on the spot.

We announced it under the arch in St. Louis. We had TV cameras. It was an incredible event. I had raised $500,000, $25,000 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. It was incredible.

We had—I have another idea I want to share with the entrepreneurs here—the way you announce an idea to the world really matters. In our minds, each and every one of us has a line of credibility. If you hear an idea below the line of credibility, you dismiss it out of hand. Your neighbor’s kid wants to go to Mars tomorrow? “No, not going to happen.”

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?”

I wanted to do that. We stationed ourselves under the arch in St. Louis. I didn’t have 1 astronaut on stage with me; I had 20 astronauts. I had Buzz Aldrin, a bunch of Apollo astronauts, and shuttle astronauts. It was amazing.

I had the head of NASA, the head of the FAA, the Lindbergh family, and when we announced this prize, it was like, “Oh, my God.” No one asked, “Do you have the money?” I did not. “Do you need teams?” No.

But we announced it, and then reality started hitting as I went out to try to raise the $10 million. My pitch was, “Listen, you don’t pay the $10 million until after someone has won it. You get to name it, you get all the publicity, and you only pay on success. How great would that be?”

And it was like, “No, no, no.”

“Why isn’t NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off?” And the clincher was, “Isn’t someone going to die trying?” That’s what I would have said.

“No, you would. You would have said you would fund the whole thing.”

The X Prize would be great. I didn’t have the money, so you didn’t have to take the question.

Five years in, I was literally getting calls from the teams saying, “Do you have the money? We’re building our ships. Do you have the money? We’re building our ships.” And I was like, “Okay, trust me.”

There’s an incredible book called How to Make a Spaceship, which is my biography and the story of the X Prize and the X Prize-winning teams. Julian Guthrie, who is incredible, wrote it. She also wrote Larry Ellison’s biography.

Long story short, one day I was reading Fortune magazine. It was an issue about the 40 wealthiest women under 40. I wasn’t married at the time, so it was another financing strategy. I read about Anousheh Ansari, who had just sold her company, Telecom Technologies, to Sonus Networks for $1.3 billion.

In her biography, it said she wanted to fly on a suborbital flight into space. I was like, “Oh my God.” After 150 noes, this was the person. It had been an asset sale of her company, so I tried to track her down. There was no one left.

I finally found somebody who found her old assistant. The whole family was vacationing in Hawaii for 3 months, and I got her assistant to promise me that if I sent her a package, she would FedEx it to Anousheh in Hawaii.

Long story short, I was Anousheh’s first meeting when she got back to Plano, Texas, and they said yes. After 150 noes, it became the Ansari X Prize.

Two years after the X Prize was won, in 2004, I had James T. Kirk there at the launches, which was fun because he was my childhood hero. Anousheh flew to the space station privately. One of my companies, Space Adventures, was brokering flights on the Soyuz from the Russians, and now she’s come back as the CEO of XPRIZE.

She’s an amazing woman, and we have $300 million in prizes going on: one we awarded yesterday, one in longevity to add 20 healthy years to your life, and one on large-scale desalination.

Yep. Yep.

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All right, so our first line of questions here is actually mindsets. I’m really going to enjoy this one with you. Before we get into it, how many people have read Peter’s books? He’s a 4-time best-selling author. My favorite is actually The Future Is Faster Than You Think because it’s all about the convergence.

Through most of technical history, there’s been one thing going on. Now, because of exponential curves, there are so many things going on concurrently, and they all interact. The Future Is Faster Than You Think is all about those interactions and predicting them.

Yeah. Convergence.

But before I get into mindsets, being a futurist, one of the reasons you’ve been so inspiring to me over the years is because you’re willing to actually try to predict the future. You and Ray Kurzweil started Singularity University together. Ray Kurzweil is famous for predicting many things, including AGI in 2029, and he predicted that in 1999.

Yeah.

He’s going to be right within a year, as it turns out. But one of the problems that futurists have, and one of the reasons people don’t put themselves out there, is that 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. The 10 that are wrong seem really silly.

It’s a very fragile thing to actually be a futurist. Therefore, very few people put themselves out there and make predictions. Peter is one of the handful of people I’ve ever met in my life who repeatedly and habitually predicts the future and is almost always right. It’s incredibly valuable to me because so few other people are willing to do it.

The topic is mindsets and what it takes to have the mindset of an entrepreneur.

Here’s a question for you guys. If I were to ask you to think about the most successful leader or entrepreneur in the world, from your consideration, whoever it might be—Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs—and then I ask you what made them a successful leader, was it the money they had? Was it the technology they had? Was it the friends they had? Or was it the mindset they had?

I hope you would agree it’s their mindset. If you took away everything from them but they retained their mindset, they would likely regain the success 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? More importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead?

We tend to adapt a mindset, absorb a mindset, or be given a mindset. Our brains are neural nets: 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. Our neural nets are shaped by what we listen to, who we speak to, and what we read. They’re constantly being shaped.

I tend to be as careful about what I let into my mind as what I let into my body. The question is whether you will actively shape your mindset. One of my next books is called Mindset Mastery. I’ve been working on it forever. It’s a personal passion project.

I think about the important mindsets, and they have different names, but the first one for me is having a purpose-driven mindset. There’s a great quote from Mark Twain who said, “There are 2 important days in your life: the day that you were born and the day that you found out why.” It’s a beautiful idea.

I won’t ask—I’ll ask the question, but I won’t force anybody to answer: Do you know your purpose in life? Do you know why you’re here? When I started Singularity University back in 2008 with Ray Kurzweil, I had the first class. These were incredible students from around the world, the very best at the best institutions, who had gone through this huge series of gauntlets to end up in our founding class.

I asked them, “How many of you know your purpose in life?” A third of them raised their hands. I was aghast. I was like, “Oh my God. The rest of you, I don’t care why you came here. You have 1 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, and drives you? Taking it a step further, what’s your massive transformative purpose? What’s the thing that really inspires you?

We’re emotional beings. We don’t do things just for cognitive purposes; we do things for emotional purposes. There’s something that inspires you massively, like Star Trek or Apollo did for me, or something that pisses you off so damn much that you refuse to let that continue and you’re focused on solving it. Either one of those—awe or pain—can be the energy of your massive transformative purpose.

You deserve to find that. I created a platform using a large language model called MyPurposeFinder.ai. It will walk you through a series of questions, if you’re interested, and help you actually shape and verbalize your massive transformative purpose. It’s MyPurposeFinder.ai, if you want to play with it.

Yeah, it works really well. We do it at XPRIZE off-sites, actually. It works really, really well.

I want to ask you about this, too, because for those of you who are AI startup CEOs or founding teams, the process of being a successful entrepreneur has changed tremendously with social media. When I was doing it at a very young age, you were pretty much invisible and you could stay invisible. Now you’re out there no matter what.

It’s important for capital raising. It’s important for recruiting. I think Elon Musk has reinvented the degree to which you can take this. But if you don’t have a massive transformative purpose that’s right on the tip of your tongue, then you can’t articulate it when the moment arises and you’re on camera or whatever. Then you don’t get the talent, and you don’t get the capital.

Peter’s been saying this for many, many years, but it’s more true today than it’s ever been before. I think you should go ahead and try the online exercise and ask the LLM.

How many of you right now could say, “Yeah, I can articulate my fundamental purpose”? That’s pretty good.

Founder dynamics—I’m just going to say, I dive into that. There’s an exponential mindset, right, that I think you need to really contemplate. 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?

Understanding an exponential mindset—a moonshot mindset, one in which you’re going 10 times bigger versus 10%. Most of the world is happy with 10%: 10% more revenue, 10% more clients, 10% less cost. That’s success for most people. 10 times is 1,000%.

Can you create a moonshot mindset where you are able to conceive of something that’s 1,000% bigger? That typically means you’re not starting where you are; you’re starting with a clean sheet of paper. Astro Teller at Google X says, if you’re running a car company that’s getting 50 miles per gallon and you want to get 10% more, you can get there. You can work hard: better aerodynamics, better tires, better fuel. You can get 10%.

But if I say, “No, no, no. I want your car to go from 50 miles per gallon to 500 miles per gallon,” you ain’t getting there incrementally, right? It’s a clean sheet of paper. Start again.

The other mindsets for me are an abundance mindset—not weaponized—an abundance mindset in which you realize there’s just more opportunity next year. If you missed an opportunity, it’s fine. There’s going to be more next year. 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.

The final mindset I speak about, write about, and spend a lot of my time on right now is a longevity mindset. It’s a belief that we’re going to significantly extend the human lifespan from AI, principally, very shortly. I’m talking a 5- to 10-year time frame. Your job is not to die from something stupid before these breakthroughs occur.

If you don’t read all of Peter’s books, definitely read the first chapter of Abundance. It’s about the story of aluminum, and it’s an absolutely brilliant story. It goes from being the rarest thing, more valuable than gold, to being 7% of the Earth’s crust and in all bauxite.

Yeah.

Do you know the tip of the Washington Monument is aluminum, right? It was the most valuable metal at the time, until we learned how to smelt it properly. It’s a great story.

I don’t know if you want to riff on this or not, but we met with the MIT administration this morning, and clearly—well, Peter thinks in exponentials. Very few people can visualize exponentials. Education is in the crosshairs now. My kids would much rather talk to an LLM and learn from it than go to class, but they learn what they need to know. The curriculum isn’t even coming close to keeping up with the rate of change of technology. It’s not even trying. I throw it out there as a topic. I don’t know if you want to talk about it on camera or not.

Well, I’ll talk. I’m not shy about any of my opinions. Ray Kurzweil, whom we mentioned earlier, is a brilliant individual. I had him on stage at my event 18 months ago with Geoffrey Hinton. I run a large community called the Abundance360 community, and I run a summit every year called Abundance Summit. They were on stage with me, and they were basically talking about the speed of ramping things up.

He said, “Listen, we’re going to see as much change in the next 10 years, from 2025 to 2035, as we saw between 1925 and 2025.” The next 10 years will see a century’s worth of progress. By reference, just to remind you, because it’s a distant memory, what life was like in 1925: Penetration of electricity and telephones in the U.S. was only 30%. Thirty percent of homes had telephone service, electricity, and a party line. The most advanced technology back then was the Ford Model T.

Imagine how far we’ve come since then to today, and what life is going to look like in 10 years if that level of progress occurs in AI. It’s truly unfathomable. 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. I would have hoped an institution like MIT would be doing that, but maybe not.

Here’s a quick survey, especially for the young entrepreneurs in the crowd. All right: Thiel Fellowship, Z Fellows, Y Combinator acceptance, MIT degree, Harvard degree—which would be more important to you to get? Think about it for a second, and I’ll run down the list so you get 1 vote.

Z Fellows—any takers? Y Combinator acceptance? Oh, I got some Y Combinators. Thiel Fellowship? There you go. One of the investments we made was Mercor. They were freshmen or sophomores, I think, at Georgetown and Harvard. They got the email saying, “We’ll give you a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. You win. We’ll give you $100,000 right now, but you have to drop out and start a company.”

Two years later, the company was worth $2 billion. They had $100 million in revenue and were doing $20 million on the bottom line. So, the Thiel Fellowship—I don’t know exactly how you get it, but it arrives in your inbox and you get 100 grand with it.

Harvard degree? Nobody. MIT degree? All right. A little bias here. If I’d asked that question 3 years ago, it would have been, “Of course, the degree.” Now you can see the trend line drifting in that direction. There are other credentials that are starting to matter to people even more than that degree.

The problem is that the time between matriculation and graduation is infinite in terms of progress. Ultimately, your MIT degree is learning how to learn and how to socialize and making contacts. It’s not what you actually learned.

You’re a 27-time founder and co-founder. So, 27 samples—that’s a lot of samples.

One of the things I was telling the teams earlier today is, if you think about Ford Motor Company, when Ford started, they made cars. What does Ford do today? They make cars.

Now look at the Magnificent 7 tech companies. Every one of them does something today that’s very different from when they started. Look at Apple. What did Apple make originally? Actually, the Apple I was a box of chips you assembled together. The Apple II, which I had as a kid, was a desktop PC. Then the laptops came along. Today, 90% of the revenue comes from the iPhone. It wasn’t even a concept when Apple started.

Tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves. 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, and the culture that continually innovates. But now, when I talk about Apple, I’m really looking in the rearview mirror. Look at the future and the rate of change.

I’d love to get your ideas on that.

I mean, I think the most interesting companies are the founder-led AI or tech-first companies, and it’s so hard for an existing company to retrofit itself. It’s nearly impossible, right? But what you do get is a founder-led tech company where the founder says, “Nope, stop doing that. We’re now only doing this.”

You get that with Zuckerberg, you get that with Musk, and you get that with a few other companies. But that level of full-body right turns is what’s required. Otherwise—I mean, I was amazed when Bezos said at a shareholder meeting, “In 30 years, we’ll be gone.”

Yep. Well, the Tesla reinvention as a robotics company—and you know Elon very well—that, to me, is right at the point where—actually, I met with a woman yesterday who’s from Bridgewater, who talked about enshittification.

She said, “At Bridgewater, we talk about public companies: The founders take it, get it to a certain level, and then enshittification sets in.” Enshittification—all that means is that the professional bureaucrats start coming in, the founders gradually leave. Nobody really notices, but then the company is enshittified.

So here you’ve got Tesla right at the point where you knew the stock had peaked and it was going to come down because it’s a car company. “No, we’re not. We’re a robotics company.” That, to me, is the definition of the founder still being there.

Well, it’s even more extreme in SpaceX. When Falcon 1 flew, the first 3 times it flew, it failed, and Elon and the team borrowed enough money to make a 4th flight. Falcon 1 succeeded on the 4th 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.

What he went on to say was, “As soon as we get Starship flying, we will shut down the Falcon 9 line”—the most successful launch vehicle ever in human history. Right? It takes that level of leadership to be able to make these right-hand turns and say, “We’re putting everything into that.” The same thing with Starlink.

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 they’re in this incredibly talent-dense environment here. It’s rare. If you take advantage of it while you’ve got it, you’ll make lifelong friendships and lifelong connections. You’ll be able to build many things together. If you let it fritter away while you grind away on your business plan, you won’t get that opportunity again later.

A single individual can make all the difference in the world in your company. A single individual—I’ll give you an example. George Church at Harvard Medical School, one of the genetics professors, is a brilliant person in the area of synthetic biology.

He had been focused on bringing back the woolly mammoth for many years, talking about it, talking about it. There was a nonprofit and so forth. He meets a guy named Ben Lamm, who has no background in biology. He's a software engineer.

He becomes enamored with George and with George's mission of de-extinction, starts Colossal 4 years ago, and today it's a $10 billion company that's brought back the dire wolf. It's bringing back next the dodo and Tasmanian Devil and, of course, the woolly mammoth, and has spun out 3 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.

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Speaking of the smartest people on the planet, I'm going to do this speed-style first, and then we'll come back. In your travels through life, you've met pretty much all of the big shots in entrepreneurship, and I've got their names listed out here. I'll give you a name; you give me 1 sentence, and then we'll go back to the top. Ready?

Yeah. I'll go in reverse order here. Richard Branson: frustrating.

Frustrating. All right.

When I was trying to raise $10 million for my spaceflight XPRIZE in the beginning, of course, Richard Branson's the first person I go to. I fly out there and pitch him for Virgin Galactic—no, Virgin Atlantic—to become the Virgin Atlantic Spaceflight Prize. He says no. 2 years later, I go back and pitch him for Virgin Mobile. No.

On the day the XPRIZE got won, October 4, 2004, after I'd spent 6 years pitching him, he's at the airport—the Mojave Airport, where the winning flight takes place—signing a contract to buy the rights for the winning technology after turning me down twice for funding the $10 million. Years later, he goes, “Oh my God, I should have funded the $10 million. I spent $500 million trying to build Virgin Galactic instead. It would've been much cheaper to do it.”

God, I had no idea. This is the first time I've heard this. He's brilliant and charming, and he just frustrated me. All right, we're going to give up on the speed style, then. I'll just go.

This one drives me crazy, actually. How many people know Tony Robbins? Okay, good. I'm very glad to see that in class every semester. It's like 3 people.

What drives me nuts is that the younger teams—a lot of the teams now are high school freshmen and college students—are really young. They think the body language you want as an entrepreneur is cool, like too cool for school, which is a good way to survive high school and a terrible way to start a company.

The body language you want is exactly Tony Robbins': relentless enthusiasm, never-ending extraordinary confidence. Your capital-raising story for XPRIZE is a good example. You have to give the same pitch 150 times enthusiastically.

So Tony's your co-founder?

Yeah. I've had the pleasure of knowing Tony. We were on the same stage, I don't know, 15 years ago, and became best friends. We've started a couple of companies together, and he is one of the most beautiful human beings that I know.

He gives of himself 24/7, over and over again. He has the most relentless schedule on the planet. People don't realize the level of philanthropy that he puts forward in terms of feeding people, growing trees, and energy systems. I'm blown away by his level of brilliance and authenticity. What you see is what you get. He's just extraordinary.

Drew Houston gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2017, I think it was. Everyone knows Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox. That's also one that's kind of dropping off the curve for some reason, but he gave the best commencement address, I think, ever.

He said, “You become the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.” And that's true whether you want it to be true or not. So choose those 5 people really, really wisely.

And if you think about it, what attitude would I want those 5 people to have? Relentless enthusiasm.

Yeah, it really is. Think about this: do you want to spend time with someone who's depressive and low-energy, or someone who's vibrant, whom you love spending time with, and who's excited about life? It is contagious. Make yourself that person that people want to spend time with.

All right, Larry Page and Sergey Brin—they're one person in this.

I had the pleasure, years ago, when the XPRIZE got won on October 4, 2004. You guys remember the Google Doodle? The Google Doodle was changed on that day, with SpaceShipOne flying over the Google logo and this alien spaceship up there looking at us. I loved it.

I got invited to go up to the Googleplex to give a presentation to the entire company—it was about 2,000 Googlers back then. Afterwards, I'm standing in line answering questions, answering questions, answering questions, and this kid in a black T-shirt and a backpack comes up and says, “Hey, I'm Larry Page. Let's have lunch.”

So I befriended him. We flew a number of Zero-G flights together. I pitched him, and he joined my XPRIZE board and became a benefactor. He brought in Sergey and Eric Schmidt as well, and he's just very brilliant. Unfortunately, he's gone MIA to a large degree.

Sergey or Larry?

Larry, mostly. Sergey has been a little bit, but he's back now with Gemini's training.

What frustrates me—and I'm public about this—is individuals like Larry and Sergey who've got $140 billion to their name. It's like, excuse my French, why the fuck aren't you solving the world's problems with that money? It really pisses me off when you have such levels of retained capital and the money isn't being put to work.

Fine, set aside $1 billion for your kids, ruin their lives, and then launch 100 billion-dollar XPRIZEs and invest in people changing the world. Money is a form of energy that should be put to active use to make the world a better place.

I had this conversation with Marc Benioff, who is one of the billionaires who does incredible good and invests mostly in the environment and biology. He backed Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, who did the Yamanaka factors, and he's backed a number of Nobel laureates. Again, Marc and Lynne are amazing.

In a conversation with him and Tony, I said, “You've got the Giving Pledge, which I don't get. The Giving Pledge says, ‘I'm going to give half of my money to a nonprofit before I die.’” Okay, that doesn't mean it's going to do anything with the money.

What I really want is for people to participate in an impact pledge: “I pledge to eliminate hunger in Tanzania,” whatever you want. Giving money is the easy part. It's using your intelligence that made the money to go and solve the problem, which is really the highest value.

If we had, I don't know how big the Forbes list is right now, 1,000-plus multibillionaires, I mean, that's an incredible opportunity for the world to be uplifted.

This next one is really important to me: Jeff Bezos.

He's been an important connection point for the 2 of us because when I was at MIT, I was the only person on campus doing neural networks. It was kind of not cool around MIT, but I got support. MIT is infinitely flexible and friendly, and I got support to use the biggest computer in the world to build the first commercial neural networks.

I launched the company, was selling, ended up with Walmart as a customer, and then I got a call from Rick Dalzell, who ran data warehousing at Walmart. He called me one day and said, “Hey, I just joined a little startup on the West Coast. You may not have heard of it. It's called Amazon.”

I said, “Oh, yeah, I've heard of it. It's small. It's about to go public.” He said, “I want you to fly out here and meet our founder, Jeff Bezos. I think you guys are going to love each other.”

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 know Peter Diamandis?” And I said, “Yeah, we were roommates at MIT.” He goes, “Oh, wow,” because I started SEDS at Princeton.

That little bonding moment helped a lot in making them our customer. Then they grew like crazy, so we grew like crazy, and it all worked out really, really well. But I think Jeff is the greatest organizational genius of all time.

I've spent personally about $200,000 to $300,000 now interviewing former Amazon executives, trying to reassemble everything he did along the way into our training program here. But you've known him for, well, since teenage days, I guess.

Well, yeah, since college. I had started SEDS here at the student center.

I was very frustrated that NASA was mortgaging my future and moving glacially, so I ended up creating one. When I got to campus, I found out there was no student space organization at MIT. I said, “That’s ridiculous.” I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start one,” and I realized I needed to get 5 signatures to start a club on campus.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah. So I went to 5 of our fraternity brothers, and 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.” Then SEDS stuck: Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

I wrote a letter to Omni magazine, which no longer exists, Analog magazine, and Astronomy, saying, “We students need to band together to guarantee our future in space because I don’t trust NASA to do that for us.” At our house, I had no idea the articles got published.

The mailbox—my mailbox—was stuffed with letters one morning. They were from students around the world saying, “I want to start a chapter. I want to start a chapter.” We ended up with 104 chapters, and one was from Princeton. Scott Scharfman and Jeff Bezos had gotten the chapter going there.

Years later, when Amazon started, I went and had a coffee with Jeff in Seattle. I was like, “Jeff, what’s this Amazon thing? I thought you wanted to do space.” He goes, “Yeah, I’m going to do Amazon first, make some money, and then spend it in space. An easy one-two plan.” And it worked. He’s executing on that perfectly.

Yeah. He’s an incredibly brilliant entrepreneur, an incredibly focused entrepreneur.

Yeah. And last on my list—we’ve already talked about him a little bit—is Elon Musk. He’s kind of redefined what it means to be an entrepreneur and how much you can do concurrently in life. He’s on my board at XPRIZE for 4 years, starting in 2004.

Here’s how I got him on the board. I’d known Elon for some time. I had pitched him originally on funding the XPRIZE instead of starting SpaceX. I was thinking, “Musk Prize.” 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. You’re guaranteed to pay the winner.” He still teases me for having tried to convince him not to start SpaceX.

So, finally—where was I going with this story? We’ll come back to something about Elon. Now we’re going to be curious for the rest of our lives about some Elon nugget. Anyway, he starts SpaceX.

Oh, yeah. I’m going to meet with Larry Page for the second time, and I’m going to ask Larry to join my board at XPRIZE. I was thinking, “How can I get Larry to join my board at XPRIZE?” One of the things I realized about boards—if any of you are on any boards—is that I’m on boards because I enjoy spending time with the people there, right? It’s a chance to meet with them on a quarterly basis. I get a chance to meet with Dave.

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 and invite him onto the board. Would you get on the board of XPRIZE? Because if you’re on the board, I think we’ll increase the probability that he’ll get on the board.” He said, “Sure.” So that’s how I got Elon on my board.

4 years later, he calls me and says, “I have to drop off the board.” This is 2008. He says, “I’ve got to focus on SpaceX and Tesla. I can’t do this. I’m dropping off all boards.”

Of course, that lasted for about a microsecond.

Exactly. And then 10 other companies started.

Any other takeaways on how he’s redefined what it means to be a CEO, just in terms of doing Saturday Night Live or being on social media constantly?

I think one important element is that some of the most successful CEOs take on a brand of their own. They become the mechanism by which they can promote their company from an orthogonal point of view.

At the end of the day, your company is searching for attention in this attention-deficit economy. You can get it by having an amazing product, an amazing brand, or great stunts. But one of the other elements is whether you can have a CEO who is super highly visible and able to penetrate the noise that’s out there. Elon’s very much done that.

I’ve worked on this through my Moonshots podcast, my MetaTrends blogs, my books, and my other things. If I do that, I can support Link Exponential Ventures, the XPRIZEs, and my companies, 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 Altman.

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. LLM AI is a great example, or nuclear power to power a data center that will have 1 gigawatt or 2 gigawatts of power, but you can’t build it, demo it, or start selling it. You need to sell the vision way ahead of the construction.

Sam has reinvented the level you can reach through storytelling.

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 the design of building Ford Motor Company from scratch.

We are still human beings, and we convey information through story. Your job is to become a compelling storyteller, to paint the vision with such clarity and such audacity that people are leaning in and believing you. In order to get there, you have to believe in yourself at that level.

If you don’t believe in your mission and yourself at that level, there’s no way that you can sell it at the level that’s required, right? At my Abundance360 Summit this past year, Ray Kurzweil was there, Dave was there, Palmer Luckey was there, which was a fun conversation, and I had Travis Kalanick. I’m going to do a podcast with him next week again.

We were talking about when you give up on your startup. I don’t know about you, but of my 27 companies and startups, there are a number of them where I rode that horse into exhaustion. It died with me in the saddle, and I should have given up.

The question is, when do you give up on something that you’re passionate about? One of the times you give up is if you don’t believe in yourself anymore, or you don’t believe in what you’re doing. You cannot fake that. You have to believe it. You have to believe in yourself and believe in 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% 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.

I have a whole bunch more questions here, but I actually want to make sure that we get any burning questions from the crowd. We happen to have Alex Wissner-Gross with us tonight. He’s the only guy who can say he got 3 degrees from MIT in 4 years—math, physics, and computer science. Then MIT said, “No, never again. We’re banning this.” So he can carry that credential for the rest of his life.

He’s a 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. I’ll give you 2 questions, if I may.

Sure, of course.

One topic heavy on my mind today, which you alluded to already, is abundance and the weaponization thereof. Do you think that we are finding ourselves in a world where, as the singularity—or whatever approximation you may or may not believe in—approaches, it becomes possible for the great powers of the world to selectively weaponize abundance for hegemony? If not, why not? And if so, which form of abundance do you think will be weaponized most?

Oh, my God. I have zero doubt that we’re heading toward this world. Back in 2012, I wrote a book with Steven Kotler called Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. We just finished writing the follow-on, which we’re calling The Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, because one of the things is that we have created an abundance of everything, both good and bad.

I do believe we’re heading toward 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. If you can have anything you want, anytime you want, can we still retain the idea of a deep emotional purpose for our lives?

There’s an incredible experiment done in the 1960s. Have we talked about the Universe 25 experiments? Do you know what the Universe 25 experiments are? This was done at one of the large medical centers in New York in the 1960s.

An experimenter had done this sequentially over the years. This was the 25th time he did the experiment, where he took a population of rats and created a utopia for them. He put in a number of breeding pairs, and the universe they were in had all the food, water, nesting, and everything they needed. 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 were no challenges for them.

It's like the idea that the unchallenged life is not worth living. Anybody who plays video games or has kids who play video games knows that a video game is so finely tuned—not to be too easy, where you give up, and not to be so hard that you can't win. It's just right. On the thesis that we're living in a computer model—which, of course, we are—it's 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, AI, robotics, 3D printing, and the convergence of exponentials make it possible for us? How do we uplevel our challenges? It's not quite the weaponization of abundance that you were speaking of, but this is on my mind. You have a second question. I'll maybe defer.

All right. Wonderful conversation, Nina Haider.

I have a follow-up related to this, and as a geneticist, evolution is very slow for our species. If we think about that—and I, too, believe technology advances at an exponential pace—we haven't quite reached our capacity, nowhere near, perhaps. However, there will be a point where we do reach that. If you can comment further on abundance, and not just weaponizing it, in your rat example, you gave how they die off.

There's good and bad. Our emotional IQs are different. We're a product of DNA, environment, and our different experiences, which we can see in today's world, with both the most decrepit human behavior and the most amazing human behavior. How do you see the future evolving in this world so that we can reach even closer to a utopia rather than—do we need to go through this complete mass loss in order to have that?

There is a wide variety of future scenarios that humanity is going to have before it. One that I find fascinating, and that I wrote about in my last book, is a world in which we are all connecting ourselves to the cloud, where our neocortex is connected to the cloud, and I am, if you will, connected through some version of BCI. I've seen some incredible recent versions of high-bandwidth BCI.

We talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions earlier. One of the predictions he made—which was like, “Ray, you've got to be wrong on this one. No way it's going to happen”—was high-speed BCI by the early 2030s. But I've seen it. I've seen it. It's coming.

Now imagine I connect myself to the cloud, you connect yourself to the cloud, and you all connect yourselves to the cloud. Now we are connected to each other. You are a collection of 40 trillion human cells, and each of those cells is an individual life form, and you operate as a single consciousness—you or me. Imagine that we have 8 billion people now connected through this mechanism, becoming a consciousness, what I call a meta-intelligence. I find that a fascinating potential future scenario. I'll leave it at that for the moment.

All right, we're going to do a John Werner-style process here in a second to collect as many questions as possible. Before we do that, we've got a really cool couple of MIT agentic-AI startup guys here. Do you guys want to ask a question?

I think I'm curious because you keep bringing up this idea that we might be going too far with technology in some ways.

No, I don't think I said that.

Not too far, but in the sense that if we solve all the problems, humans have no challenges to face—things like this. At what point do you develop technology—and, with the point you brought up about uploading your brain to the cloud, is there a point that's too far?

Is there some metric we can use to figure out if we've gone too far in some direction and it's potentially dangerous?

I don't think there is any on-off switch, and I don't think there's any velocity knob. I think we are accelerating at a pace which is unconstrained. We're spending $1 billion a day—or $1 billion a day is being invested in AI today—and it's driving super-exponential breakthroughs. Digital superintelligence, if it isn't right on the edge, is here very soon thereafter, which will just accelerate everything even further.

There is nothing that's going to slow this down. I hope so, because the things that can slow this down are not things I want to live through. But I do think it's on us—our responsibility—to look at how we uplevel the challenges we take on.

I close my next book on abundance with a look at how we go 1,000 times bigger in our dreams. Alex, you and I talked about the human race coupling with AI. There is a moment in time here, as AI is taking off—think of the movie Her—when we humans are sublinear at best. Do we couple and accelerate with AI?

We're giving birth. AI is a new life-form; it is a new species. Will we hybridize with it? These are the conversations I think are very real. I don't think anybody on the planet today truly understands how fast things are going to get in the next 4 years, or the implications thereof—clearly, not 99.999% of us. So there are going to be some disruptions as a result of that.

We have time for maybe 2 more questions, but I want to do this again, John Werner-style. We'll pick 3. Just yell them out, Peter. Answer any subset you want of the 3, and then we'll do another batch of 3, and we'll have to wrap it up. Fire away. Go ahead. Just yell it out. Make sure you have a good microphone so we can record it properly.

I flew this morning to see you. Thank you. You changed my life, and I read The Future Is Faster Than You Think. That's why I wanted to come to MIT and then became an MIT alum. So, amazing. I appreciate that.

I'm passionate about solving climate change, but the industry—I was focusing on green hydrogen—is struggling right now. What do you think of the future of climate change?

All right. So you've got climate change. I love your green energy. Hold that. What are you most excited about?

Longevity.

Yes. Well, okay, longevity. You said that we're going to see a century's worth of change in 10 years, but there's a grounding in the physics of human change. I'd like to get a better sense for the mediums through which that change is going to happen. Is it just through mobile phones again, where Instagram took off? Is it going to be the brain? In reverse order? Okay.

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

We just saw the Nobel Prize given to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold. I think that's the beginning of a long line of AI-driven Nobel Prizes. The ability for AI to hypothesize questions, then run the experiments, solve them, and come up with sequential and adjacent breakthroughs is going to be staggering. It's literally like an advanced alien civilization landed on Earth and disclosed all of its discoveries to us, because it is exactly that.

That's going to be fascinating. I spend half my time in longevity, and I think we're in the midst of a health-span revolution. We just saw Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, on stage 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 this morning at Harvard Medical School, looking at the research they have on epigenetic reprogramming, and I can't disclose it, but it's shocking. We just saw Sir Demis Hassabis talk about being able to cure all disease within a decade. So, something is definitively happening here.

The human being never evolved to live past age 30. For as long as Homo sapiens have been around—230,000 years—that was our average lifespan. Then we gained a number of benefits from pasteurization, better sanitation, and antibiotics, and moved the needle. Now we're moving the needle as a result of AI.

Another point we made is that we're going to begin to model the human cell. I will know: This is my cell. This is my tissue. This is my organ system. This is me. Based on my genetics, this is my model, and I'm going to make these tweaks.

The reason Falcon 9 flew the Dragon capsule to the space station perfectly the first time wasn't dumb luck. It wasn't just intelligence. They modeled the hell out of it, knew exactly how it was going to work, and ran it in silico 1,000 times. So we're going to begin to run your biology in silico. Crazy. No one thought this was possible. It's just around the corner.

Thank you for your kind words. I think the climate crisis and all of that is going to fall as a gift out of digital superintelligence. Like it or not, want it or not, it will be just like longevity. We're going to see new materials that are being enabled. We just awarded, obviously, this $100 million for 6 different approaches to carbon sequestration at gigaton scale.

That was the important part. Energy—yeah, we're going to drive energy because we need it, need it, need it, need it. But then that energy is going to drive us. We live in a universe with an infinite amount of energy. There's lots of energy out there, right? It's just not in a usable form yet. Whether it's solar, fusion, zero-point energy, or whatever it is, it's coming. It's there.

Breakthroughs in physics are going to open all of these doors, and I think it'll be shocking. It'll be like you wake up and say, “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.

It'll be exactly 12 hours since we got together at MIT this morning. I promise I'll let you off the hook after this; we'll do one more batch of 3.

Okay, that's great.

And then, are you okay?

Yeah, I'm totally good.

All right. And then, Alex, you have to—it's 5:30 on the West Coast. I promised you—

Okay. I like this optimism and abundance. Right now, if you look at the human race, we have an abundance of food, but there's inequality in its distribution. There's too much food, yet there are places where there's starvation. We have more people dying from obesity than from starvation. It's crazy.

In this next generation of abundance, will we humans overcome our own human limitations in order to share? Humans don't intuitively want to share outside of their tribe. They're primarily tribal people.

That's a great question. Behind you. Yes, you—behind you. You haven't come up yet.

Quantum computing: the positives and negatives that are possible around quantum computing.

Yeah, very nice. Do you want to do another batch of 3 after this?

Sure. All right, one more. Alison and Hannah knew who would take the next one.

If you had small people—I have two 13-year-olds—what do you do every day to instill in them that deep purpose? What stories do you tell them? You say we need other storytellers, and we risk losing that deep sense of purpose. 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 question. Kids, quantum, and abundance—more on abundance.

On the kids front, first of all, I think the single most important thing I want for my kids isn't for them to learn how to program or to become space cadets. It's for them to find their purpose in life, right?

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. In my fourth year of medical school, I was running 2 companies. I got a copy of my diploma, shipped it to my dad, and said, “Okay, obligation complete.”

I don't want my kids doing anything for me. I tell them all the time, “Your job is to find what you love and what you're passionate about.”

The second thing I want for them is to learn how to ask great questions—to question everything. When they go to school every day, when I drop them off, I say, “Listen, ask great questions today.” We joke about that. I've tried to incentivize them to question authority and to question what they hear.

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. Think about that. I can know the average color of a woman's blouse on Madison Avenue today because the cameras are there and AI can analyze it. I can know that.

If you can know anything, from a business perspective or from a purpose-driven perspective, how do you use that information? What's the question you want to ask? Somewhere, there is a billion-dollar question that, if you could answer it, would be worth a billion dollars to you, or it would solve one of the world's biggest problems. It's getting into that mindset, right?

Mindsets are what I try to focus my kids on, not anything else, because the technology is always changing. The final thing is: become an expert in the problem, not the solution. The problem remains, unfortunately, and we try different solutions, but the solutions are constantly changing. If you understand the problem, then you can apply the new solutions as they come along.

Those are my thoughts. And quantum—I really want to hear your answer on this. I'm actually doing a salon this Saturday night back in Los Angeles with the head of Google Quantum AI, the head of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and one of the top physicians in the psychedelic space. Hartmut Neven runs Google Quantum AI. We're talking about consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, which I find absolutely fascinating.

We are quantum beings. I'm tracking what's going on at Google, at Microsoft, and at other locations in this space. I think the question is: when is it going to become applicable? When are we going to get a sufficient number of logical qubits for it to be useful?

What's interesting is the work that Sandbox AQ is doing right now. Sandbox has taken quantum equations—Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and so forth—and they're using AI to solve those equations. We're getting the first glimpses there.

Alex, do you have a further opinion?

Very strong ones.

I want to hear them.

I do, too. Okay, so this is all off the record, right? We only have—

No, it's being recorded.

Sorry.

The conventional wisdom in certain communities—I’ll project it onto everyone else rather than taking credit for this opinion—is that quantum computing has been a major disappointment thus far. Some would say that the best application we could hope for right now on the quantum-computing side is to generate huge amounts of synthetic training data that we can then feed to very much classical machine-learning algorithms to do things like drug discovery.

We'll do efficient synthetic generation of quantum-chemistry calculations, build up a huge synthetic data set, and feed that to classical machine learning. I think that's the trajectory we're on right now if nothing else changes in the quantum space. It's basically wildly underdelivering on the promise. There was a lot of hype in the early days. The quantum-computing lunch got eaten by classical machine learning, and otherwise it's useless.

If I had to make the steelman case for how quantum confounds expectations and ends up being wildly more useful than it appears to be right now, I'm with you on your earlier gesture at something to do with quantum biology. If it turns out that biology is a lot more quantum than most biologists think it is right now—if it turns out there's some essential bit of quantum mechanics in biology—I think that's likeliest to be the saving grace of quantum computing or quantum sensing.

Quantum sensing, I think, is incredibly promising. It's well established that we can get major quantum advantages for gravitational sensing, especially. This is where Sandbox AQ has developed products right now. Sandbox is using quantum sensing to navigate without GPS by using slight variations in the magnetic fields of the Earth due to ferromagnetic deposits in the crust.

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

Nice. And then, abundance. You're saying it's better than EKGs, too?

Yeah. They do it for EKGs.

Exactly. Yeah. No worries about encryption, either of you?

What's that? Yeah, what's your—

Go ahead. Give me my microphone. 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 cognizant agencies have already moved to post-quantum. The world has moved on.

Okay. It's your old hard drive that's ruined.

Yes.

Okay. Phrase the question on abundance for me once again.

Human nature. The question is: as we enter this new age of abundance, and as we've seen in past experiences where we have an abundance of food but there's still inequality in food distribution, are we going to have the same thing play out in this new age of abundance? Will some people have everything they want at their fingertips while the vast majority are still left behind? Humans don't intuitively want to share outside of their tribe. They're primarily tribal people.

Thank you for the question. First of all, if you look at the data—and in the back of my mind, my next book, whatever we call it, “Age of Abundance” or “Survival Guide for Abundance,” has 80 charts—you look over 200-year spans, 100-year spans, 50-year spans, and 30-year spans, and access to food globally has massively increased.

Malnutrition has fallen by 300%. So while there is still a lack of equitable distribution, it has consistently gotten better over this time.

The analogy I use is: If you think about this device, any kid with a smartphone—and there are about 7 billion smartphones, give or take—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 or a little bit worse; it is fully democratized and fully demonetized.

Where we’re heading next is that this device will be your diagnostician. Anyone with a smartphone will have not a decent diagnostician, but the very best. You can’t afford a better diagnostician than the kid with a smartphone. The very best educator will be there as well. So we are bypassing human nature. We’re bypassing tribalism in that regard, and I find that very refreshing.

We’re coming up with new business models for the things that are still physical and not digital—those models, if you would, for vertical farming or stem-cell-grown meats, where we’re able to move the production of food to where the humans are and need it. We’re dealing with a very Paleolithic mindset, unfortunately. If you can bypass that mindset by making things so available and so cheap that anyone can have them, that’s part of the solution.

You know, Elon talks about it. Here are some numbers: Tesla Bot, Optimus, Figure AI. I’m tracking about 100 decently funded and 50 well-funded humanoid robot companies. The prediction on the price point of these robots is $20,000 in production. The estimate now is that 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.

The price point has been said to be $20,000 to $30,000, and in volume production, things get down to a price per kilogram. That’s where it will end up: $20,000 to $30,000.

If I have a humanoid robot that’s operating on GPT-5, just operating on the latest models, and it costs $30,000 to buy, while it costs me $300 a month to lease—that’s $10 a day, which is 40 cents an hour—I have a digital superintelligence robot at my beck and call for 40 cents an hour. I don’t know; that creates a lot of abundance for a lot of people out there.

So the question is, if it costs you $300 a month—$10 a day—how many will you own?

I don’t know. Probably a couple at least, maybe more. Maybe one will massage my left foot and one will massage my right foot.

I think the bottom line, ultimately, is that we’re moving to a post-capitalist society. Just to jump ahead to the punch line, money will mean very little in the end. If you have nanotechnology on top of AI and robotics, I don’t know. Alex, do you agree? I’ve had long conversations with AI about AI-driven post-capitalism.

Yeah, and it agrees.

Yeah. It has very strong opinions about what post-capitalism looks like.

I should talk to mine about that.

Will existing systems allow that?

What’s that?

Will existing systems allow that?

No. They will fight like hell, and they will become irrelevant, just like libraries.

Don’t tell the librarian about that. I still want to take 3 more before—

All right. We’ll take 3 more, and then Alex is going to ask something totally out of control.

Brilliant.

Ron, do humans have a moat?

That’s a great question. I love that. Sophie, write that down for me. It’s a great blog.

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 them.

It depends. Honestly, for me, it’s low, but that’s not who I am. There are some of the most extraordinary leaders on the planet for whom that is their heart’s place.

I think one of the biggest questions is what will happen to religion in the next decade. We’re giving birth to advanced digital superintelligence. We’re giving birth to new species. We’re uncovering what we thought were long-lived secrets. We’re doubling the human lifespan. Humanity is transitioning so rapidly.

I think the question is: Will religion play a stabilizing role or break? Will history play a guiding role for us? I don’t know. Do you have an opinion about that?

No, I’m not taking that one. It’s too complicated.

But, Ron, you had the question: Is there a moat for humans?

We’re going to find out.

Yeah.

That’s a fascinating question. Are we simply a transient life form, giving birth to our children that will conquer the universe?

One of the questions I asked a couple of years ago at the Abundance Summit is: Would you want to live on this planet with digital superintelligence or without it?

My conclusion is that I don’t trust this planet with the powers we’re developing without digital superintelligence. I don’t think human nature is able to deal with that level of power without having a stabilizing force.

Alex, I want to hear your thoughts on these last 2 questions and your final question.

Yeah, and I have a favor to ask on the final question. It’ll be something mind-blowing because it’s Alex. Then we’re going to capture whatever the answer is on film, and whatever it is, that’ll be the end of the night. So applaud wildly so we capture that on the video for KJ over there.

Okay. All right. Your thoughts on the last 2?

Doctor, doctor, doctor. Yeah, yeah. So, the last 2 were the humanities. Maybe just a comment: I think we’re already seeing the emergence of AI-driven cults. It’s a pretty obvious trend. There are a number of crypto-AI cults emerging in social media, so it seems like we’re already witnessing an explosion of new religions inspired by AI. It seems reasonable, by the law of straight lines, to assume that we’ll see many more.

And to the second question—is there a moat? Yes. Is there a moat? I don’t think the question makes sense. I think the premise that humanity needs a competitive differentiation, presumably against superintelligence or whatever barbarians lie outside the moat, is not even wrong.

I think the premise is flawed. I think we merge with the superintelligence, and the question that's interesting for me is, what happens after that? I spend a lot of my time thinking about what the post-singularity looks like.

I agree with the merging, but I wonder if there are human qualities like curiosity, agency, love, or something—

No, those are all—I would argue that those are all instrumentally convergent requirements. AI has those as well.

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

Peter is just such an incredible joy and so motivating for everyone when you come to town. The more we can get you here, the better. The applause is at the end, but not yet. I have no idea what Alex is going to ask. It's always ingenious, and whatever we end on, let's make sure the final sentence is something upbeat and inspiring—a very 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-in-chief for abundance. I want to put you on the spot and ask you to project forward, say, 100 or 200 years, and ask the question: What does humanity, from the perspective of space or abundance, look like?

I'll offer you a few options—doors A, B, C, and D, and “other” as well. Does humanity look something like O'Neill cylinders, where we're just projecting atoms outward into interstellar space? Does humanity look like the transcension hypothesis, where we break out of said simulated universe, or into other dimensions? Does it look like humanity turning purely inward, building vast computers and living an inner life? Does it look like something else entirely? What is it, if not the terminal state?

If you think that we're on an exponential—and presumably, although every point on an exponential looks like the knee of the curve, if we're on a hyperexponential, then presumably we hit the vertical sometime before 100 years from now—what does the state of humans in space look like?

Yeah, it's a fantastic question, Alex. Expect nothing less from you.

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? This is a very magical moment in time over the next decade or 2, where we are moving humanity off the planet irreversibly. The best analogy I have is the lungfish moving out of the oceans onto land.

There will be some elements of humanity that are moving out into space. The tools that we'll have with robotics and nanotechnology will be 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 computronium out there and living our lives.

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+1. It's a mechanism by which we can tune the dial on the degree of difficulty on purpose. So the high note is recursion, recursion, and repeat—and infinite possibilities.

I do believe we can create a world of extraordinary abundance. The work I do across everything with XPRIZE and Singularity and my venture funds with Dave and all is: How do we uplift humanity? We have the ability over this next—not 50 years, 20 years, this next decade—to uplift every man, woman, and child. I define a billionaire as someone who helps a billion people, right? It's an incredible, incredible time. We're about to give every human on the planet access to the most powerful resource: intelligence.

What they do with that, what we do with that, I think is what we need to keep our eyes focused on. But 200 years from now, I mean, first of all, I'd like to start a city on the Moon. That's one of my goals. I'd like to fulfill that. That's 10 years from now.

I'm asking the hundreds.

I think that we're living in a virtualized universe. How about you? You want that?

I already turned it off. I want to hear Alex's idea. All right, you can cut in and ask me the question.

So, 200 years from now, in a world of infinite abundance and spacefaring humanity, what does it look like?

All right, so I have a really scary answer. I've had an extended conversation with a few frontier AIs about this. The answer is sort of terrifying from an exponential-growth perspective.

Carl Sagan's cosmic calendar suggests that the universe, when it began, had very short timescales that slowed down, formed a U-shape, and then, as we came up to the present, things seemed to be accelerating again and picking up on an exponential. The scary answer one of the frontier models gave me in an extended conversation is that we're going to hit a plateau.

Even though it looks like we're on an exponential or hyperexponential development right now, and we're going to hit a number of major universal milestones, we're going to find that the next rungs of the development ladder take exponentially more time than the speedup that we've experienced—to the point where AI thinks the next few rungs of the developmental ladder, not quite Kardashev levels but its own somewhat similar version of that, are going to take progressively hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of millions, of years.

So, to answer your question back to you, we're in our solar system. If we can survive technologies that enable us to destroy ourselves, then we leave our solar system. If we can survive after that, we colonize the galaxy and meet all of the other intelligences that are cohabiting our galaxy. And this, of course, presumes that they don't come to meet us before then. It does not presume that we haven't already made contact, which will be the subject of our next evening conversation.

All right. Thank you.

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 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]