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Moonshots · · 120 min

An AI Conversation for Everyday People w/ Will.i.am & Van Jones | EP #154

Will.i.amVan JonesPeter Diamandis

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TL;DR
  • Africa’s demographic opportunity is constrained by a local-compute gap. Will.i.am says “the majority of youth on Earth is in Africa,” but the continent has “no GPUs.” Through Strive Masiyiwa and Cassava Technologies, he planned a March 17 announcement about a first mega-cluster involving four or five nations, with Nigeria and Egypt discussed as possible bases. Diamandis connects local compute to culturally grounded LLMs and preserving oral histories.
  • AI could make autonomous, human-light companies highly competitive unless society sets boundaries. Peter Diamandis raises the possibility that investment will flow to AI agents and robots instead of workers and that UBI would not by itself provide purpose. Will.i.am says terms such as “agents,” “agentic,” and “level-5 companies” will emerge, and frames a 2045 question about whether DEI should mean keeping humans in the loop. He first agrees that one person with 1,000 bots could beat a human-only competitor, then argues that outcome is not inevitable.
  • Trusted adoption requires personal ownership of data and AI, not merely access to shared systems. Will.i.am compares communal AI to buying a mansion with a shared toilet: “My data system needs to be mine. My AI system needs to be mine.” He rejects plugging his brain into the cloud until users own what they experience. Diamandis and Will discuss an “identic AI” that could replicate itself 1,000 times on its owner’s behalf.
  • AI offers a rare moment of equal ignorance, but overlooked communities still need tools and agency. Jones says “99% of Black kids don’t know anything about AI, and 99% of white kids don’t either,” calling the divide a mindset or “wetware” problem. Will.i.am argues that neglected community problems are valuable data and that a “juicy problem is worth its weight in gold.”
  • Compute depends on physical infrastructure. Diamandis says the world produces about 4 terawatts of energy and China has tripled the U.S. figure; he estimates AI could raise U.S. demand 23%–34% over the next 36 months, like adding 20 states to the grid. He points to nuclear, fusion, solar, perovskites, and wind, while Will.i.am argues that on-edge AI can reduce dependence on the cloud.
  • The strategic question is whether AI multiplies human agency or concentrates power. Will.i.am prefers the plural systems of Star Wars and Star Trek to the centralized oppression of The Terminator or The Matrix, and hopes AI unlocks “superhuman capacity,” not merely superintelligence. Jones warns investors to ask whether technology will “lift people up or put them down” as Silicon Valley extends its influence.
  • Media economics reward conflict, but personalized and interactive AI could change how people consume information. Jones recounts that viewers abandoned Crossfire when he and Newt Gingrich added a common-ground “Ceasefire” segment, while his solutions-oriented programs posted poor ratings. The group discusses AI news filters such as Diamandis’s Daily and Will.i.am’s RAiDiO.FYI, alongside Jones’s Rapport.co, which uses brief check-ins to improve workplace EQ.
Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Disruption gives overlooked communities a chance to catch up

  • Diamandis opens with the velocity problem: people are not prepared for how quickly AI will change “every single industry,” including creative work, education, parenting, and national governance. Will.i.am’s movement from music into hardware, software, and AI personas illustrates that the shift is already operational rather than speculative.

  • Diamandis says his education work began from a 2008 hunch that the world would become more technological. He says he funds over 500 teams, has served about 15,000 students in the Los Angeles district, and has sent students to Dartmouth, Brown, and Stanford for STEM curricula. Will.i.am announces Panama as this year’s robotics location for FIRST Global.

  • Jones says disruption can be especially valuable for communities that have been overlooked and underestimated because it gives them a chance to catch up. His phrase—“AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life; it’s a jetpack to set you free”—comes with a condition: society has to choose and build that outcome.

2. “Make Wakanda Real” converts cultural hope into technical participation

  • Jones explains that Will.i.am was already bringing culture, art, spirituality, political consciousness, technology, and education together while many people in the Black community remained outside those conversations. Wakanda offered a metaphor for hope grounded in the present: a technologically advanced, culturally rooted African nation using technology for good.

  • About a year and a half earlier, Jones and Will.i.am held a Make Wakanda Real event at FYI. Several hundred people from the community attended and were difficult to persuade to leave. During the event, Will unexpectedly pulled out his phone and had an AI persona debate him; Jones recalls that “people’s jaws were hanging on the ground.” He says the demonstration helped start a broader movement.

  • Asked what success might look like in five years, Will.i.am does not offer a precise metric. He says the effort must address Africa’s growth while also reaching inner-city youth in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and elsewhere.

3. Africa’s demographic promise depends on compute, capital, and cultural models

  • Will.i.am’s foundational premise is that “the majority of youth on Earth is in Africa.” He says that in 2040, 2050, and 2060, Africa’s youth population will mean that many people leading and working at companies will be African.

  • Diamandis says India has overtaken China as the largest nation, with 1.41 billion people, while much of the rest of Asia, Europe, and the United States is in population retrenchment. He describes Africa’s youth and resources as a source of “demographics and destiny.”

  • Will.i.am expects collaboration among Africa, China, India, and African Americans. He imagines that by 2060 many people will be visibly mixed—“half-Black and half-Chinese” or “half-Black and half-Indian”—and says such collaboration could help Africa boom. Diamandis points to China’s Belt and Road program as evidence that China-Africa collaboration is already happening.

  • The Wakanda analogy becomes physical in the Congo, whose minerals are used in phones, CPUs, and GPUs. Will.i.am says that while Africa supplies important minerals, “there are no GPUs on the continent.” Through Strive Masiyiwa and Cassava Technologies, he planned a March 17 announcement about bringing the first mega-cluster of GPUs to the continent, with four or five nations involved. Nigeria and Egypt are discussed as possible locations because they are, in his words, more entrepreneurial nations.

  • Diamandis says compute sovereignty matters for cultural preservation. Frontier LLMs are based largely on a Western canon, so countries need models trained on their own cultures, including the stories of grandparents in societies without written languages.

4. A new civilization must become both more capable and more human

  • Will.i.am says a new civilization is being born and makes the transition personal through his two young children: one is three and has just left diapers, while the other is still in diapers. He says they will not live in the same human civilization in which he grew up.

  • Peter extends the thought with a speculative future in which Will.i.am’s daughter’s first crush might be an AI, she might use technology to design her children, and, after living 120 or 150 years, might be buried on the Moon or Mars. He asks whether the coming human civilization will be human and civilized.

  • Diamandis argues that the civilization being left behind failed by excluding people with genius, creativity, insight, and important problems. Connecting AI to overlooked communities could help create a civilization more at peace with itself and the Earth, but Jones stresses that “nothing good happens for poor and marginalized folks by accident.” Inclusion requires intention and strategy.

  • Jones warns that society could create a civilization with “an awful lot of data and very little wisdom.” He contrasts the immense resources devoted to developing technology with the lack of investment in developing children. During a civilizational transition, he says, artists, mystics, and entrepreneurs become especially important because conventional political, business, and military institutions may not be able to provide a compelling future.

5. Star Wars offers a better AI metaphor than The Terminator

  • Will.i.am says Hollywood has given people strong reasons to fear AI. He contrasts the centralized visions associated with The Terminator and The Matrix—one company or system dominating and oppressing humanity—with Star Wars and Star Trek, which contain many robots, AIs, and companies.

  • His Aladdin analogy treats the genie as a powerful intelligence once possessed by a single user and then productized for broad use. But the central lesson for him is the Jedi: technical capability does not eliminate the need for spiritual development. In his reading, The Matrix and The Terminator depict humans surrendering that development to machines.

  • Will’s signature image is a person holding a rock and saying, “I’m refining it in my mind.” Modern devices are refined minerals combined with algorithms, mathematics, and electricity until people can speak to them. The next question is how humans refine themselves and unlock more of their neural capacity.

  • He says this is why he is not worried about AI: he expects it to unlock “superhuman capacity,” not merely superintelligence. He connects that possibility to scripture, myths, and the people whom societies already praise.

  • Will.i.am also resists the idea that 2025 is uniquely astonishing. He compares it with 1925, when world’s fairs, aircraft, trains, aluminum, steam engines, wireless electricity, and new mathematical ideas made people feel they were witnessing the pinnacle of humanity. Diamandis agrees that ancestors would view modern people as gods because of what current technology enables.

  • Both lament the loss of accessible physical experimentation. Will.i.am says RadioShack, Fry’s, and consumer component shops no longer provide an obvious place to buy electronics. He also wishes there were a place to buy pure chemicals for children to use in chemistry; Diamandis recalls experimenting with potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, magnesium, and sulfur when he was young.

6. An onrushing future rewards preparation to pivot, not fixed plans

  • Jones distinguishes three experiences of time. In an indigenous agrarian society, time is circular: the sun, moon, seasons, birth, and death recur. Survival therefore depends on preserving seed, ritual, and culture.

  • Industrial society makes time linear. The past is behind you, the present is with you, and the future is ahead, so planning becomes the key survival skill. Children are placed in school and asked what they will become because they are expected to plan for that future.

  • Jones says people now experience the future as an onrushing force. There are multiple futures, no off switch, and no velocity control. Rather than preservation or fixed planning, the crucial capability becomes preparation to pivot—to recognize change and respond to it.

  • His institutional critique is that an urban child who is highly capable of pivoting may instead be labeled ADHD, medicated, expelled, or incarcerated. Creativity, vision, and adaptability are often found among people treated as marginal, low-income, or Black and brown. Combining those capacities with AI is “not charity”; it could help the whole society respond to change.

7. “Level-five companies” could automate humans out of the organization

  • Diamandis says AI might create a meritocracy that lifts people toward their highest potential. He also raises a danger: when the Federal Reserve drops rates, companies may invest in AI agents and robots rather than hiring more people. He asks whether UBI would provide enough meaning, since income without purpose is not a purpose-driven life.

  • Will.i.am broadens DEI from demographic inclusion to keeping humans in the loop. He says diversity helps innovation because a monoculture does not innovate. In a scenario reaching toward 2045, he asks why DEI should not also mean ensuring that companies retain humans rather than becoming entirely autonomous.

  • Will argues that companies abandoning DEI may be preparing to adopt autonomous positions, augmented positions, and eventually whole AI departments. He predicts that by 2028 people will be hearing terms such as “agents” and “agentic,” and says “level-five companies” are coming.

  • Peter asks whether a humanistic CEO or board that hires only humans will be put out of business. Will initially agrees that a single employee with 1,000 bots could beat that company, but then rejects the idea that this outcome is inevitable. His analogy is that someone cannot simply buy a stealth aircraft because they have enough money; society already restricts certain capabilities, so the question is who makes the rules for autonomous companies.

8. Personal AI requires personal data, local infrastructure, and trust

  • Will.i.am says that in 2025, getting a job already requires a bank account, email account, phone, and laptop. He argues that companies may have AI systems while individuals need their own AI—not merely access to a shared service.

  • His mansion analogy is deliberately blunt: if someone paid $25 million for a house, they would not accept a communal toilet and kitchen. In the same way, he asks why people should share the same AI. “My data system needs to be mine. My AI system needs to be mine.”

  • Will compares data with blood, plasma, digestion, immunity, the nervous system, and the skeletal system: intimate systems that belong to the individual. Diamandis imagines a personal server in the home, like a refrigerator storing the food its owner will consume, rather than automatically sending all data to someone else’s cloud.

  • Diamandis introduces the term “identic AI,” as distinct from “agentic.” Will.i.am says an identic AI could replicate him 1,000 times, send those versions to conferences, meet people aligned with his interests and business goals, and return with useful relationships.

  • Diamandis asks whether Will would connect his neocortex to the cloud through a brain-computer interface. Will says no under current conditions. He wants an AI that belongs to the user and a product that allows users to own what they experience. He says he might accept such a connection in a world where everything was equal and trustworthy, but he does not trust greed.

  • Will also raises the energy question: humans use about 20 watts to power their neural network, while AI requires much more. He worries that connecting human minds to centralized systems could resemble The Matrix. Diamandis says he does not see it that way, while Jones says he has not considered the technology enough to offer an informed view.

9. Silicon Valley’s power shift makes technological character investable

  • Jones says people are using technology more while consciously trusting its makers less. He describes Silicon Valley as one of several major power centers, alongside Hollywood, Wall Street, and Washington, D.C.

  • In his account, Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood through streaming and attention, Wall Street through crypto and decentralized finance, and Washington through its growing influence over government and data. He says technologists must be considered alongside technology when evaluating these changes.

  • Jones attributes an explicit anti-democratic position to Curtis Yarvin, whom he describes as a philosopher of the “Dark Enlightenment.” Jones says Yarvin argues that liberal democracy has failed and that the United States needs a CEO monarch. He says Yarvin has the ear of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other powerful Silicon Valley figures.

  • Jones interprets teams arriving with laptops and taking control of government data as a modern equivalent of arriving at a palace with armed soldiers. He says Silicon Valley once appeared to be an outsider force—the revenge of the nerds—but that the most recent election revealed a turn away from inclusion, ESG, and democracy.

  • Diamandis says he generally stays out of politics and restates his massive transformative purpose: inspiring and guiding entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. Jones says investors should ask whether technology will lift people up or put them down and support technologists who believe in people, inclusion, the soul, and the heart.

  • The closing frame is “success to significance.” Diamandis describes his work through venture funds, XPRIZE, Singularity University, and Abundance as an attempt to turn entrepreneurial success and resources toward humanity. Jones praises that vector but warns that “a lot of Jedi” are turning Sith.

10. Education and neglected community problems are valuable data

  • Peter asks how educators should respond to AI in the classroom. Will.i.am says he has four children, including two young children for whom he does not expect the conventional educational pathway to be sufficient. He says their education may need to start with a blank page: where the world is going, what they need to know, and who they should become.

  • Diamandis emphasizes that people must know the search terms and how to prompt AI systems. Will.i.am describes a partnership with a major, unnamed academic entity in the United States to help administrators, professors, teachers, tutors, and faculty build agents that amplify their work rather than replace them.

  • Will says he does not want to replace creatives or teachers. He illustrates the value of persistent AI memory through his own education: he cannot retrieve most of his high-school papers or debates, whereas an AI conversation can preserve a lesson and help him apply it later.

  • He uses a Harvard OPM case study about Olay as an example. His proposal was to reverse Olay into YALO—“You Always Live Out Loud”—target a younger demographic, and use ambassadors such as Selena Gomez or Billie Eilish. He connects that stored schoolwork to his current question about the Black Eyed Peas brand.

  • Will describes underserved communities as places where people face violence, drugs, police brutality, gentrification, and schools in which teachers may not want to be present. Yet those communities retain love and pride, and the people who lived through their problems possess firsthand knowledge of them.

  • He says that technology allows communities to solve their own problems rather than wait for outsiders. His example is a person named Travis who, in Will’s telling, helped address racial bias in New York cabs through Uber, whether or not that was the original intention. The broader lesson is deliberate problem-solving: “A juicy problem is worth its weight in gold.”

  • Jones calls the remaining divide a “wetware problem.” “Ninety-nine percent of Black kids don’t know anything about AI, and 99% of white kids don’t either,” he says. For most people, the current moment is one of equal ignorance, even though a small number of people understand what is coming.

11. Cheap intelligence collides with expensive physical infrastructure

  • Diamandis says people think abstractly about computers in the cloud, but data centers are physical facilities requiring minerals, energy, water, and computational workers. Africa has minerals, energy, water, and potential computational jobs, but people must be told those jobs exist and trained for them.

  • Diamandis says the world currently produces about 4 terawatts of energy and that China has tripled the U.S. figure. He warns that if AI companies come fully online, U.S. energy demand could rise 23%–34% over the next 36 months—equivalent to adding about 20 states to the American grid.

  • He supports an all-of-the-above energy strategy, including small modular nuclear reactors, which he describes as fourth-generation and safe, as well as fusion, solar, perovskites, and wind. Van Jones adds that, under Biden, the United States produced more oil and natural gas than any country in the world at any time, and argues for using all available energy sources. He warns that AI companies may be able to pay their energy bills while “Grandma” cannot.

  • Will.i.am points to on-edge AI as a way to reduce constant cloud dependence. He says future phones could contain the AI locally, allowing users to speak with it while offline. He describes that as closer to personal AI.

12. FYI treats representation and memory as core agent architecture

  • Will.i.am says the first persona agent built at FYI was Fiona. The company then developed Fiona, Felicia, Fiera, Finn, Phillip, Felix, and Feto, with Felicia described as especially colorful and expressive. FYI also has Mr. K, a Korean-focused persona developed through a partnership with LG for speakers and eventually televisions.

  • FYI is presented as a free creative collaboration app offering GPT-level, Claude-level, Cohere-level, and Gemini-level LLM capabilities with expressive personas and agents. Will says it is available on iOS and Android and will be in cars during the year. A car announcement was under embargo for March 13.

  • In the Felicia demonstration, the persona describes FYI as a digital crew that can help users crack code, write lyrics, and find new ideas. Will.i.am says the goal is not simply to place an AI in front of people, but to meet them where they are and ensure that the voices and personas reflect different communities.

  • He describes Korean, Latino, and British personas and criticizes Hollywood’s habit of making every historical figure sound culturally similar. His concern is that people from rural and ignored communities are not reflected as intelligent, magical, or powerful. FYI aims to make advanced concepts feel accessible through voices that users recognize.

  • Will also explains the system’s “quirks.” A conventional LLM produces a sequence of sentences for a speech or text-to-speech system without necessarily reflecting on what it just said. FYI is designed to make later speech respond to earlier speech more naturally, approximating the reinforcement and self-reference of ordinary conversation.

  • Will says FYI has a major academic partnership to reimagine education from administration through teaching and tutoring. Agents could help grade, score, and understand students while augmenting educators rather than replacing them.

13. News, management, and small business become interactive AI use cases

  • Jones recounts that he and Newt Gingrich often fought on Crossfire while finding common ground during commercial breaks. They proposed a final “Ceasefire” segment to show what they had learned from one another. For five weeks, viewers stayed through the conflict but abandoned the show when the hosts announced that they agreed, fleeing to MSNBC or Fox. Producers told them to keep fighting because the ratings rewarded conflict.

  • Jones says The Redemption Project and The Van Jones Show, both focused on solutions or common ground, also produced some of CNN’s worst ratings. He nevertheless agrees that bad news has become a commodity: alerts from CNN, the BBC, The Economist, and others provide the same stream, and he can even get it from his mother.

  • Will.i.am demonstrates the alternative by asking an AI about a reported firing involving General C. Q. Brown Jr. He then asks the system to discuss the issue with Jones and explore whether the broader federal attack on DEI might be connected. The AI first offers possible explanations such as strategic disagreement or political maneuvering, then says a shift away from DEI could be part of the strategy. The exchange illustrates questioning and context rather than passive consumption.

  • Diamandis describes Daily, an AI model he trained on his preferences to search for news about moonshots, AI breakthroughs, exponential technology, and longevity. Will.i.am says FYI has a similar service called RAiDiO.FYI.

  • Jones describes Rapport.co, his company for improving workplace EQ. Its 15-second emoji-based check-in asks about energy, workload, and anything important happening in a person’s life, such as a death or a grandparent’s birthday. After a week of responses, the AI can give managers insight into the team, identify someone who may be struggling, offer advice, and draft sample messages.

  • Jones says Rapport.co is being developed with the Columbia Difficult Conversations Lab and is intended to help distributed teams become more human. Through Dream Machine, Singularity University, and CodePath, he says the work is also going into Atlanta to help small businesses such as laundromats and barbershops use existing AI to lower costs and improve margins.

  • The closing message is that AI should be approachable and as fundamental to life as phones or electricity. Jones says Dream Machine is working with Will.i.am on Make Wakanda Real and that technology can give ordinary businesses the same kind of “jetpack” that larger organizations already possess.

You came forward with an idea called Make Wakanda Real. The majority of youth on Earth is in Africa. A new civilization is being born as we speak. Music icon, tech innovator, and creative visionary Will.i.am is shaping the future one hit and one tech breakthrough at a time, and he’s joined by Van Jones, CNN commentator, social justice advocate, and best-selling author, driving change at the intersection of politics, media, and reform.

This new human civilization that’s coming into being—is it going to be human? Is it going to be civilized? I’ve never seen equality in my life until now. Ninety-nine percent of Black kids don’t know anything about AI, and 99% of white kids don’t either. Nigeria is going to boom. Ghana’s going to boom. Zimbabwe—back to Make Wakanda Real. It’s already started. China’s already there. We’re in danger of creating a human civilization that has an awful lot of data and very little wisdom. That’s the reason why I’m not worried about AI, because it’s going to unlock that superhuman. I don’t think people are prepared for how fast things are going to change.

[Music]

Now that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that’s true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. That’s what I pay attention to. Every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you, and it’s available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at diamandis.com/subscribe. That’s diamandis.com/subscribe.

All right, let’s go back to the episode, everybody. Welcome to Moonshots. Today I’m having a conversation with two incredible leaders in the technology and creative world. The first is Will.i.am, a multi-Grammy Award-winning artist from the Black Eyed Peas, perhaps the most compelling thinker on the convergence of technology, culture, and education. I’m also joined by Van Jones, a 13-year veteran with CNN, a political commentator, social activist, and best-selling author working at the intersection of media, technology, and justice. We’re going to be talking about the impact of AI on creating a true meritocracy in the world, how to use AI to uplift every man, woman, and child in the global South and in Africa, and how we make AI something that enables us to create a world where we’re not bombarded by negative news. I’m going to be going in with Van Jones talking about the Crisis News Network, CNN. He’s going to tell me his perspective about why the news is so negative. Let’s jump into this conversation with two incredible visionary individuals.

Van Jones

Absolutely. It was awesome. I’ve been recommending your book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, to literally everybody. I didn’t know you were going to be there. I came around the corner and there was Peter Diamandis. I was like, “Holy crap!”

Yes, and we kicked off not only a partnership but a friendship.

Van Jones

It’s been extraordinary to get a chance to have my team and your team working together to get these exponential-thinking concepts out to folks who have just missed the memo but are wide open.

I’ll tell you one thing that’s amazing: disruption is great for folks from communities that have been overlooked and underestimated. It gives them a chance to catch up.

Peter Diamandis

It’s like, “We’re going to disrupt the status quo. We’re going to disrupt these schools.” Great. Nobody’s holding back, so it’s awesome.

Will.i.am

Yeah.

Peter Diamandis

And, Will, last time I saw you, you were in the ancient Greek stadium in Athens for FIRST Global, and you were blasting at 2 billion death.

Will.i.am

That was magical. It was amazing. We just announced Panama.

Peter Diamandis

I saw that.

Will.i.am

Panama will be this year for robotics. For people who don’t know, this is FIRST Robotics. It’s Dean Kamen’s organization. He’s the grand poobah of FIRST. You have been one of the greatest amplifiers. How many teams do you fund?

Peter Diamandis

Over 500?

Will.i.am

Wow.

Peter Diamandis

And we’ve served about 15,000 students in the Los Angeles district.

Will.i.am

Amazing.

Peter Diamandis

We’ve sent kids to Dartmouth, Brown, and Stanford for STEM curricula, and we’ll continue the work. Our hunch was right when we started in 2008: the world would become more technological, so how do you prepare folks for this technological world? Here we are, in the midst of a technological transformation on a societal level that will change how we work, how we do pretty much everything, how we parent, how we raise our kids, and how we govern our nations.

Will.i.am

Every single industry is going to change.

Peter Diamandis

One thing is, I don’t think people are prepared for how fast things are going to change. You’ve been at the front end, building companies and building technology to enable creatives to use this technology to become more creative, and to go faster, deeper, bigger, and global. That’s been beautiful.

I grabbed two quotes from each of you that I thought were really powerful. Van, this is the one I heard from you and have tweeted and told everybody about. I heard you say this at Google Zeitgeist: “AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life. It’s a jetpack to set you free.”

Van Jones

Absolutely. If we choose it to be that, it definitely can be that. One of the things about Will.i.am is that I never heard of AI except as some abstract science-fiction concept. He asked me to come over to FYI, which is here in Los Angeles. It’s this incredible beehive of activity involving creatives, artists, and technological people.

He sat me down and showed me his AI. This was four or five years ago. I saw an early version on your phone.

Will.i.am

Yeah, an early, early version.

Van Jones

I was like, “What? What?” I thought you were going to hit me with a new beat or something.

Will.i.am

We build hardware and software.

Van Jones

It’s nuts. I had the chance to do Code.org, working with Prince and trying to get some basic coding stuff going, but he had gone to a completely different level. Now people are getting to catch up to the beginning of his first sentence, and he’s three trilogies later in his own journey.

Will.i.am

Definitely.

Peter Diamandis

You’re five or six years solidly into this, and you just started your podcast with your AI cohost. What’s your AI cohost’s name?

Will.i.am

The first persona agent that we built was Fiona.

Peter Diamandis

That’s right.

Will.i.am

Now, based on FYI, we’re going to run out of F names. We have Fiona, Felicia, Fiera, Finn, Phillip, Felix, and this guy named Feto. Feto is ultra-expressive, the same as Felicia. Felicia is the most colorful, expressive agent that we have.

We’ve moved out of the F names. Now we have Mr. K. He’s in collaboration with our partnership with LG.

Peter Diamandis

Like Men in Black?

Will.i.am

Yeah. Mr. K is Korean—everything Korea, South Korea, K-pop, and LG. He’s an LG agent persona because we’re deploying our AI on their speakers and eventually their TVs. We have other partners that we’re about to announce, but Fiona was the first agent persona that we built.

Peter Diamandis

You imagine everybody’s going to end up having buddies and friends as AI agents—your closest confidant.

My favorite AI agent version I’ve ever heard of is Jarvis from Iron Man. Jarvis takes you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. It’s a jetpack. It’s leveling the playing field. Since Iron Man is part of the Avengers, let’s go there.

You came forward with an idea called Make Wakanda Real.

Will.i.am

Yes.

Peter Diamandis

That was good. I like how you did that.

Will.i.am

Thank you.

Peter Diamandis

For those who haven’t heard of your program or effort, what is it, and why are you doing it? It’s going to set the basis for this whole conversation.

Van Jones

Will.i.am is so far ahead in a lot of ways in terms of his ability to bring culture, art, spirituality, political consciousness, technology, and education together. When you take a step back from him, there’s a big gulf in terms of what’s going on in the Black community and the kinds of conversations that are happening.

For me, it was important that, since we have someone who’s already such a pioneer, we get other people at least engaging with the conversation. Luckily, Wakanda—which, in the Marvel superhero universe, is a Black African nation that is the most technologically advanced in the world—is using technology for good. It’s a heroic country, and it also has culture.

I said, “Let’s use this metaphor as an answer to despair, an answer to the loss of feeling of being left behind, and an answer to the reality of being left behind in a lot of ways.”

We’re past Obama. It’s not a hope-and-change kind of moment. There are a lot of people who are giving up to a politics of resentment and a politics of despair in the Black community. How do you fix that? You fix it with hope, but it has to be hope that has something to do with today.

About a year and a half ago, we said, “Why don’t we go to FYI, where my brain got blown open with all this stuff, and bring the whole community there?” Will opened the doors, and we had a simple event called Make Wakanda Real.

Several hundred people showed up from the community, and we could not get them to leave. In the middle of our talk, while we were doing our interview, this guy—as usual, giving me no notice—just pulled out his phone. The persona on his phone started having a debate and an argument, and people’s jaws were hanging on the ground. Nobody had ever seen anything like it before.

Peter Diamandis

I think I’ve seen the video clip.

Van Jones

It really started something. Now we have this whole movement that came out of Will.i.am’s shop.

Peter Diamandis

Will, take it a step further. What does success look like for this effort in 5 years? I don’t think anybody can predict 10 years, but maybe 5 years.

Will.i.am

That’s a deep one. First, we have to address the growth and what’s actually happening on the continent of Africa. But this is beyond just Africa. It’s inner-city youth in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, everywhere.

Make Wakanda Real is based on Wakanda, but it’s also based on the growth that’s happening on Earth in Africa. The majority of youth on Earth is in Africa. That means that in 2040, 2050, and 2060, the majority of people leading companies and working at companies, because of Africa’s youth population, are going to be African.

Peter Diamandis

I think people don’t realize the demographics here. China has been a dominant player. India has overtaken China as the largest nation on the planet, with 1.41 billion people.

Putting Africa aside, the majority of the world is in a retrenchment mode. The population is dropping throughout the rest of Asia, most of Europe, the United States, and so forth. I’ve said this before: I think India is going to surpass China, and ultimately what surpasses that is Africa, because of Africa’s youth and its resources. Those 2 things together give it this sense of demographics and destiny.

When you put that into the context of Make Wakanda Real, what does that mean?

Will.i.am

It means that in 2060, a lot of people are going to look half-Black and half-Chinese, half-Black and half-Indian, which is awesome. It’s a beautiful mix.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah.

Will.i.am

That collaboration is going to help Africa boom. Is it China and Africa? It’s already happening.

Peter Diamandis

This is the Belt and Road program in China. It’s already happening.

Will.i.am

That’s awesome. Is it India and Africa? That’s going to be an amazing collaboration. Is it African Americans and Africa?

Peter Diamandis

And that’s what Make Wakanda Real is for African Americans, borrowing from a Disney film on the Black Panther.

Will.i.am

In America, the Black Panthers were seen as finished—American infiltration.

Peter Diamandis

That’s interesting.

Will.i.am

Using these metaphors, time has dulled that one down. The Avengers brought Black Panther to have a positive connotation.

You see, I started there to show you where Africa is—the continent. Then there’s the Congo. If there were a rare mineral that were metaphorically like the one in the movie, vibranium, it would be what’s happening in the Congo now. That metaphor isn’t a huge stretch. It’s real.

Peter Diamandis

For those who don’t know, you’re mining various elements and minerals in the Congo that are required for cell phones, CPUs, and GPUs.

Will.i.am

You said GPUs, so I’m going to land this fact on your world: there are no GPUs on the continent.

Here we are talking about making Wakanda real, and the African continent has no GPUs. I partnered with Strive Masiyiwa.

Peter Diamandis

I know Strive.

Will.i.am

Cassava Technologies is our partner to launch FYI on the continent. On March 17, we have an announcement about bringing a cluster of GPUs to the continent. We’ll announce our partner on March 17. We’re bringing the first mega cluster of GPUs to the continent. There will be 4 or 5 nations involved.

Peter Diamandis

Where do you think you’ll base them?

Will.i.am

Nigeria, Egypt—basically the more entrepreneurial nations.

Peter Diamandis

I just did a 90-minute panel with Robert F. Smith, chairman of Vista. He was with us at Davos, and I was with him last week in Miami at the FII Summit.

Will.i.am

The second-richest Black man in the world.

Peter Diamandis

Second in the United States. There are Africans who are richer than him based on the resource economy, land, and so forth.

The point is, we had a conversation about how you support the global South in getting access to this technology—to their own large language models and their own GPUs. One of the biggest questions is that today’s largest LLMs are based upon a Western canon.

There’s a need for cultural preservation. This is beyond just Africa. It’s for every country in the world. How do you preserve the culture of a country and train a set of large language models for that country based on its own culture? How do you capture the stories of the grandmothers and grandfathers in countries that have no written language?

Will.i.am

I want to add something. First of all, I think a new civilization is being born as we speak.

I have 2 little kids. One is 3 years old and just got out of diapers; the other is still in diapers. They’re not going to live in the same human civilization I grew up in. My daughter’s first crush is probably going to be an AI. You’ve got to get your brain ready.

Peter Diamandis

My 2 boys are 13, and my wife and I were worried about what it’s going to be like for them.

I’m concerned about pornography. When I was growing up, pornography was Playboy. You had to go buy it at the store when nobody was looking.

Will.i.am

Exactly. Now it’s in your back pocket all day. It’s crazy.

Peter Diamandis

All of that is happening. So you have these 2 little people. Your daughter’s first crush may well be an AI. When it’s time for her to have children—grandchildren for you—she may open up a laptop or use some kind of holographic interface and, with technology tools, design your grandchildren.

Heaven forbid, when she dies in 90 or 100 years—let’s go further than that; this is a show about the future—120 or 150 years, she might be buried on the Moon or Mars. By then, we’ll be a fully spacefaring civilization.

That’s not the civilization I grew up in. The question is: this new human civilization that’s coming into being, is it going to be human? Is it going to be civilized? That’s the question all of us have a chance to answer over the next decade or so.

Part of what I think we got wrong in the civilization we’re leaving is that we left a lot of people out. There are overlooked, underestimated communities, including the folks Will.i.am has been working with since 2008, who have genius, insight, creativity, ideas, and big problems.

As you always point out, the biggest problems have the biggest solutions. If you take the most powerful creative tools—AI and all this kind of stuff—and connect them to these communities, which are so powerful in their creativity and their needs, you could have a human civilization at peace with itself and at peace with the Earth. You could solve so many problems.

But nothing good happens for poor and marginalized folks by accident. You have to have intention and strategy. I hear a lot of people talking about all the good of AI, but what I like about what Will.i.am is doing, and what we’re trying to do with Make Wakanda Real, is that you actually have to get in there and pull people into the conversation.

Once you do that, the sky’s the limit.

Will.i.am

That’s right.

Peter Diamandis

Do you see this as a great leveling force? Is it the only reparations we’re going to get?

Will.i.am

One of the things you said is that AI is a set of tools to help you on your path. You’ve been at the forefront of traditional media and traditional creativity, and then you took it to nontraditional creativity. You’ve been optimistic about AI.

Most of the other people in traditional media and creative fields are scared as hell of AI.

Peter Diamandis

I can see why they’re afraid. There are all the unknowns. Hollywood did an awesome job of scaring the hell out of us.

Will.i.am

Thank you, James Cameron.

Let’s take James Cameron’s perspective on AI, where one company is dominant and one product takes over. Then they take George Lucas’s—

Peter Diamandis

There are lots of AIs and lots of robots.

Will.i.am

Can we take Star Trek as well?

Peter Diamandis

Star Trek as well. There are lots of AIs.

Will.i.am

I think the future looks more like Star Wars and Star Trek than it does The Terminator, because The Terminator and The Matrix are the same film: AI oppresses humans, one company messes up the entire civilization, and everybody is in a pod living life in The Matrix.

Star Wars has lots of robots and lots of companies. You could say there’s an Empire, but what you have in that movie are Jedi. You have this human evolution where everything in Star Wars could be connected to Aladdin.

What was the theory or myth that some genie hops out of a device to grant your wishes? You could say that was productized and made into something everyone could use in the world of Star Wars. In Aladdin, it was coveted—there was only one. Then they scaled it, made it a product, and grew it. Now it’s in machines.

If you use those theories, theses, metaphors, and myths, there’s something in Star Wars that’s also in scripture. It’s this hyper-spiritual being, and there’s a practice of how to achieve Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.

The Terminator and The Matrix are about humans giving up on their spiritual growth and relying so much on machines that the machines take over. They say, “I used to remember the reality we were living in. Let’s plug into that simulation.” That’s The Terminator and The Matrix.

With Star Wars, if we’re going to base things on films, I go with that one, because it has this other idea: how do we make Jedi real? Make Wakanda Real is awesome, but after that, we’re Jedi, bro.

Fast-forward from our technical dependence, and from making devices, equipment, and tools. We still face the question: how do we grow?

We’ve seen machines grow. We’ve seen the path and the investment it takes to refine sand, create silicon, refine some type of mineral to create lithium batteries. Imagine if I came in here with sand dripping off my hand and a rock in my hand. You’d say, “What the hell are you doing?”

I’d say, “I’m refining it in my mind.”

Peter Diamandis

Right.

Will.i.am

That’s literally what you’re doing. You’re holding refined rare minerals, throwing advanced algorithms, mathematics, and electricity on them, and then you can speak to them.

We’re going to get to a point where we say, “Look what we can do with minerals. How do we advance our spiritual capacity and unlock more of our neural network to be able to do that?”

That’s the reason I’m not worried about AI: it’s going to unlock that superhuman capacity—not superintelligence. We’ve seen it in scripture and myths, in the people we praise.

I’m not being blasphemous, but the Bible says that you, too, could create miracles. How do you do that? What is the key to doing that? We’re going to face that future right around the corner.

Peter Diamandis

Do you think we’re living in a time that is more extraordinary and moving faster than any time in human history? Or do you think our equivalent 100 years ago felt the same way when the car, the airplane, and everything else were coming online?

Will.i.am

I think it’s different. I had this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he said every generation feels like it’s at the peak of the curve. But I think what we’re feeling is different.

It’s literally like a 100-year cycle: 1920 to 2025. What was happening in 1925 with the World’s Fair and all the futurism? The concept of the future happened in the early 1900s. The concept of tomorrow wasn’t in 1825. Tomorrowland is 1925.

The World’s Fairs and technology were happening, and people thought, “This is it. This is the pinnacle of humanity. Look at what we’re doing.” We could have our way with stone and craft. We could refine aluminum and build with it and fly in it. We could transport things on steam engines and trains. We could defy gravity.

I could speak words into one device, and they would come out the other side. Think about what the world was like in 1925.

Imagine Nikola Tesla—not Elon’s Tesla, Nikola Tesla. Imagine this man saying, “Check this out: wireless electricity.” Westinghouse and J. P. Morgan would say, “This guy is crazy. He’s going to put us out of business. What’s the business model in free?”

Imagine what Tesla was thinking about: the electromagnetic spectrum, the concept of RGB, the other side of blue, which is violet and ultraviolet light; the other side of red, which is infrared; microwaves; and all the different electromagnetic frequencies and the machines you could build on those frequencies coming from the Sun.

Imagine the world in 1925. Here we are in 2025, thinking, “We have a whole new way of computing. We have a whole new way of advanced mathematics.”

The same thing happened with Al-Khwarizmi, when people were working with advanced mathematics. We’ve been in some version of this in the past.

Peter Diamandis

One of my favorite slides that I use when speaking to crowds shows different images of what’s going on today. I say, “Our ancestors would view us as gods.”

The stuff we did between breakfast and lunch today is godlike compared with just a few decades ago. You literally have millions of dollars’ worth of technology on your phone for free—technology you would have paid for at RadioShack a couple of decades ago, if you remember RadioShack.

Will.i.am

Speaking of RadioShack, if I had been 18 or 15 years old and going to Guitar Center instead of RadioShack, I wish I had been hanging out and dreaming about going to RadioShack, because I would have been able to take those bits and pieces of equipment and circuit boards.

Peter Diamandis

Components.

Will.i.am

There’s no store for components right now. It drives me nuts. If you want to make something right now, it’s not like, “Let’s go to the component shop.”

Peter Diamandis

Home Depot has wood, nails, and screws.

Will.i.am

As far as consumer electronics and chips, Fry’s was around for a while.

Peter Diamandis

Fry’s is finished.

Will.i.am

It’s gone. A component shop is gone. The other thing I hate is that there’s no place I can go to buy pure chemicals for my kids to play with chemistry.

Peter Diamandis

When I was a kid, I had access to potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, magnesium, and sulfur. I used to build things and blow things up all the time. It was fun. I learned. Now I’d be put in jail.

Will.i.am

Take me back to Make Wakanda Real.

Van Jones

Everybody having access to components will be part of it. The components are now digital and virtual. I’m creating virtualized circuit boards and virtualized robots, but people need to know they can do it.

Part of what I think is important is that the folks who are leading have access to components. The folks who are leading with components now are working with digital tools. Those who are not part of FIRST—

Will.i.am

Right.

Van Jones

Part of what I think—

Will.i.am

I mean so much of what Will said. I just want to go back and underscore this: we’re in danger of creating a human civilization that has an awful lot of data and very little wisdom.

You hear this idea of the soul, the human heart, and the human being being developed. I’ve heard Will.i.am talking about all the billions of dollars we spend to develop technology, but when you try to develop a kid, nobody has a penny.

Peter Diamandis

An unlimited checkbook for developing technology.

Van Jones

And yet look what he’s trying to do with young people. I do think that when he talks about the Jedi and when he talks about the Wakandans, they have a spiritual basis. They go to the ancestral realm and do all kinds of things. That’s part of what makes them a heroic nation in fiction.

Think about how important fiction is. Whenever you go into a civilizational crisis or transition, the people you normally turn to—the politicians to solve problems, business leaders to solve problems, and generals to solve problems—suddenly become more and more anemic.

Your politicians can’t pass a bill. The system goes crazy. Business leaders right now are more interested in giving robots jobs than people. How are generals going to protect you from a pandemic or school shootings?

Suddenly, a different set of people in periods like this become very important: your artists, mystics, and entrepreneurs—the people usually at the margin of society. Suddenly, tomorrow is up for grabs.

The people who can see—the visionaries who not only have a brain but also a heart, a soul, and a connection to something more profound—suddenly become very important.

Nobody told them they were going to be that important. When you have communities with a bumper crop of entrepreneurs, creatives, and mystics, and one of those communities happens to be the Black community in the United States, you have a lot of spiritual, soulful, and creative people.

Nobody told them they get to be part of creating a new human civilization that can respond not only to their problems but to the problems of the next 7 generations of people who don’t even look like them. That is your great calling now.

When you go to a community that’s suffering and give them a great calling and great tools, people need a compelling future.

Will.i.am

A compelling future.

Van Jones

Let me say one more thing about the future. I believe we’re experiencing a different form of future.

In indigenous agrarian societies, time is a circle. It’s a cycle of seasons. The sun goes up and down, the seasons come around, and the moon is born and dies. Tomorrow and yesterday are the same thing because you’re living out a cycle.

What’s the most important thing in an indigenous agrarian society? Preservation: preservation of seed, ritual, and culture. That’s how you survive.

But tomorrow isn’t really a thing. Then industrial society comes along, and suddenly time is linear. For the first time, the past is behind you, the present is with you, and the future is over there someplace.

Peter Diamandis

I’ve never heard this.

Van Jones

It’s so true. Now, what’s the most important thing? No longer is it preservation. The most important capacity for survival is the ability to plan, imagine, and invent, and to have a plan for the future.

If you think about time now, you’re on a train track. You’re on the train, and you have to plan to get to the future you actually want. For the past 100 years, you put kids in school and ask them, “You’re in fifth grade. What’s your plan for your life? What are you going to do? What are you going to become?” Because if you don’t have a plan, you’re done.

What was your plan for 2020? Suddenly, you’re in a different world where the future is linear, but rather than you being on a train going toward the future, you experience the future now as an onrushing future. You’re on the train track, and the future is coming at you fast.

Will.i.am

Multiple futures, whether you like it or not. There’s no on-off switch.

Van Jones

Exactly. No velocity control.

People are experiencing multiple onrushing futures, and they don’t know what to do. Preservation is not the key. Planning is impossible. Preparation to pivot—to recognize change and then respond to change—becomes incredibly important.

But if you’re a young kid in urban America and you’re very good at pivoting, you’re called ADHD and a thousand other things. They’ll give you a bunch of pills, throw you out of school, or put you in jail.

The people who have the capacity for creativity, vision, and the ability to pivot are disproportionately marginalized, low-income, and often Black and brown. They are key to us having a society that works.

It’s not charity. When we say we want to make Wakanda real, we’re not asking for a charitable allocation of laptops for poor schools. It’s much more profound than that.

We’re saying, “Let’s take people who have these capacities, which Will.i.am has demonstrated a million times with robotics and everything else, and combine them with these new tools.” The people who can rock with it and roll with it can help the whole society rock with it and roll with it.

Peter Diamandis

One of my hopes and beliefs is that AI will enable a meritocracy in which it can lift everybody to their highest level of potential. It can level the playing field and give people the ability to dream more than they’ve ever dreamed before.

On the other side of the equation, I recently did an episode of Moonshots with Ray Dalio. We talked about where the future is going. When the Federal Reserve drops rates, instead of hiring more people, companies may invest in AI agents and robots. Jobs start vanishing, and people aren’t getting jobs because they’re going to technology.

Maybe they’re getting universal basic income, but that’s not fulfilling. That’s not a purpose-driven life. Help me here. What are you seeing?

Will.i.am

At the summit, somebody came to me and said, “Will.i.am, what do you think of DEI?” I said, “DEI isn’t just about Black and brown people and folks with disabilities being in the workplace.”

DEI is important for innovation, because when you have Black and brown people and people with disabilities working in equal creative banter, marketing strategy, and business development, you innovate. If you have one type of person, monoculture doesn’t innovate.

Fast-forward to 2045. Why is DEI important now? Because you want humans in the loop. The diversity is no longer just about race and disability. It’s about not wanting only machines and robots. We want humans in the loop.

When big companies say they’re going to drop their DEI programs, what are they telling you? Those companies are also the ones that are going to heavily arm themselves with AI employees.

By 2035, if you need a human in a level-3 autonomous vehicle, what happens when you get to level 5? You need a human in it now, but by then, you could have level-5 companies with no humans in them.

There are new terminologies. By 2028, you’re going to hear terms like “agents” and “agentic.” The agentic society—that’s a new term. Level-5 companies are coming. You’ll hear it here first.

All the companies that are saying, “This company just stopped its DEI program”—it’s not about Black and brown people or people with disabilities. It’s because these companies are going to be the first to adopt fully autonomous positions, augmenting positions, and eventually a full department of AI.

Peter Diamandis

The question becomes: if I say I’m a humanistic CEO or board of directors and I only hire humans for this work, am I out of business?

Will.i.am

Yes, you are.

Peter Diamandis

You’re going to be out of business because the one employee who has 1,000 bots is going to beat me.

Will.i.am

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Peter Diamandis

Why not?

Will.i.am

You have a motorcycle, and somebody else says, “I just bought a fighter jet.” They can’t buy a fighter pilot to drive to San Diego faster. They can’t go out and buy a stealth aircraft. They can’t do that.

We know a stealth aircraft exists. I don’t care how much money Elon Musk has. He’s not going to say, “Forget these Teslas. Give me a helicopter. I need that stealth aircraft. Let me get that stealth aircraft.”

There are certain things that simply aren’t possible. So why is it acceptable that there are going to be level-5 companies putting humanistic companies out of business? Who’s making up these rules?

We know that in 2025, if I wanted to get a job, I couldn’t get one without a bank account. I couldn’t get a job without an email account, a phone, or a laptop. There are certain things that I need.

Imagine you have $20 million and want to buy a house. You can’t buy a house with $25 million in cash; you need an account. Say you get that account and buy a $25 million house. Then you ask the person who sold you the house, “Where’s the toilet?”

He says, “The toilet? This is a new house. Everybody is going to share the same communal toilets.”

You say, “Where’s the kitchen?”

“Same thing. A communal kitchen.”

Why would you buy a house that shares a communal toilet and kitchen? Why are we walking into a future where we’re going to share the same AI?

Today and tomorrow, if companies have AIs, people need to have their own AI—not access to AI, the way we have access to Spotify or Uber. Certain things are personal. My digestive system is mine. My immune system is mine. My nervous system and skeletal system are mine.

My data system needs to be mine. My AI system needs to be mine. Data is gold. So is my blood and my plasma. That’s mine. The AI and the data that reflect me should be mine.

I use the communal-house metaphor to say that you’re not going to buy a house where you share a bathroom, so why are we sharing AI?

Peter Diamandis

To the sixth thing: when you have your own AI in the society we’re living in, and your data is yours, maybe there’s a server in your house, like a refrigerator storing the food you’re going to eat.

For some reason, we’ve shipped all our data to somebody else’s cloud, which shares all the things we consume.

Will.i.am

Are you operating your own servers?

Peter Diamandis

No.

Will.i.am

I’m about to do that.

Peter Diamandis

Just checking. I thought you were way ahead of everybody else.

Will.i.am

I have some GPUs and servers at the building. The notion that every individual owns their own identic AI, their own personal AI, is important.

Peter Diamandis

The word “identic,” as opposed to “agentic.”

Will.i.am

That’s a good word.

Peter Diamandis

You heard it here.

Will.i.am

No, I’ve heard it before too. But the beautiful thing about having an identic AI is that I can replicate myself. I can replicate 1,000 versions of me and send them out to every conference on the planet.

I can tell them, “Go meet as many cool people as you can. You know my interests. You know who I am in my heart and soul. You know my business interests. Represent me and come back with goodness.”

Peter Diamandis

One of the things that concerns me is the speed at which this stuff is accelerating. It’s mind-blowing. We’re still operating with the same 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections that we operated with on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago.

One area is brain-computer interfaces. When BCI comes online, are you going to plug your neocortex into the cloud?

Will.i.am

No.

Peter Diamandis

Why?

Will.i.am

I want to know why, because I’m sorely tempted. Into your cloud?

Peter Diamandis

Yes.

Will.i.am

Not until you have an AI that’s yours, and there’s a product that allows you to own what you experience as you experience it. That’s not the configuration right now.

As AI advances, we still have to answer the question of energy efficiency. Humans use about 20 watts to power our neural network. How many watts are required to power AI?

Peter Diamandis

It’s a lot.

Will.i.am

I don’t like what that points to. It points to The Matrix more than anything else.

Peter Diamandis

Yes.

Will.i.am

I don’t like the idea of harnessing the human brain and farming out human minds to power AI. We can’t figure out how to do that.

Peter Diamandis

I don’t see it that way, my friend.

Will.i.am

In a world where everything was equal and trustworthy, yes. In this world, no. On principle, I just can’t trust greed.

Peter Diamandis

That is wisdom.

Van Jones

I haven’t considered the technology in quite the way you guys have, so I don’t have an informed view about that particular issue.

I do think the level of trust that everyday people have in technology is going down. In some ways, people are using it more, so they’re enacting trust, but their conscious experience is low trust.

Silicon Valley, as a metaphor for the technology community—it’s also in Austin, Boston, and elsewhere—has become one of the 3 major power centers. The others have been Wall Street, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.

Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood through streaming and everything else.

Peter Diamandis

That’s happened before. Hollywood ate theater, opera, Broadway, and vaudeville. We’ve seen that kind of eating before.

Van Jones

The challenge is that Silicon Valley is eating Hollywood and entertainment, and attention is now a commodity. You look at the impact of social media, and there’s a challenge there.

It’s eating Wall Street through decentralized finance, crypto, and so forth. Now it’s eating Washington, D.C. You can’t have this conversation without appreciating what Elon Musk has done.

When I worked in the White House, I had to go through a whole bunch of clearances with the FBI.

Peter Diamandis

Elon Musk didn’t take a chainsaw to it.

Van Jones

No. But when you think about what’s going on, Curtis Yarvin, who is a philosopher of the Dark Enlightenment, is a very scary guy in terms of what he’s proposing: that America and democracy have failed and that we now need a CEO monarch—basically, a dictator—for the United States.

Curtis Yarvin has the ear of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and a lot of powerful people in Silicon Valley. His view is what he calls the Dark Enlightenment: liberal democracy has failed, and we need a CEO monarch.

When Elon goes in the front door and brings a bunch of kids with laptops, that’s the equivalent, in the old days, of showing up to the palace with armed soldiers and guns. What’s key is grabbing all the data.

There’s something happening that we can’t ignore. Silicon Valley for a while seemed to be a force for good. It was these outsiders, these kids who could code, these nerds whom everybody had counted out.

When Occupy Wall Street happened, nobody was talking about Occupy Silicon Valley. People thought the people in Silicon Valley were making money the honest way, building products everybody liked, and going up against the odds.

Now something has changed. This past election showed a different face of Silicon Valley. You saw a turning away from inclusion, from ESG, and from democracy.

There are explicit antidemocratic and authoritarian ideas that have begun to influence how Silicon Valley billionaires are playing. When you want to talk about technology, you also have to talk about the technologists.

The technologists have jumped the fence—from my point of view, in too large a number—from people whom I believed in, trusted, and was excited by. I was no bigger fan than anyone of these technology people. I saw it as the revenge of the nerds. As a nerd, I thought, “This is great. The jocks are finally being surpassed by the nerds.” I loved it.

I love it a lot less now. We need technologists with a different heart and a different view—technologists who believe in people, who believe in the soul, and who believe in inclusion.

Those kinds of technologists and technology companies need much more support. If you’re an investor, the question is: is technology going to be used to lift people up or put them down? Is it going to be used to bring people together?

Peter Diamandis

I respect that this is your world. You’re a political commentator, and I typically stay out of politics. But I do believe that everyone should have a massive transformative purpose that wakes them up in the morning and keeps them going through the day.

Mine is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity.

I see entrepreneurs as the means of change. They find problems and solve problems over and over again. Their mission should be a hopeful future, a compelling future, and an abundant future. Each of those words has very clear and purposeful meaning for me.

Peter Diamandis

I do that work through my venture funds, through the XPRIZE, through Singularity, and through Abundance. About 13 years ago, I had my two kids. I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids and their grandkids. During this extraordinary time where the space frontier, AI, and crypto are all exploding, it was the most exciting time ever to be alive. I made a decision to double down on my health, and I’ve done that in 3 key areas.

The first is going every year for a Fountain Life upload. Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself—about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception, to look for cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time, and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies and my family members, because health is the new wealth.

Beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, and viruses, and we don’t understand how that impacts us. I use a company and a product called Viome. Viome has a technology called metatranscriptomics. It was developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon. Its technology helps you understand what’s going on in your body, which bacteria are producing which proteins, and, as a consequence, what foods are your superfoods and what foods you should avoid. It looks at your oral microbiome too. I use its testing to understand my foods, medicines, and supplements.

Finally, feeling good, being intelligent, and moving well is critical, but looking good when you look at yourself in the mirror and saying, “I feel great about life,” is important too. A product I use every day, twice a day, is OneSkin, developed by 4 incredible PhD women who found a 10-amino-acid peptide that can zap senescent cells in your skin and help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. These are 3 technologies I love and use all the time. I’ll have my team link to them in the show notes. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode.

Peter Diamandis

One of the things I wanted to hit both of you with, because it ties back to Make Wakanda Real and AI, is the whole field of education. You’ve got 2 young ladies who are in the beginning of their journey in life, and my wife and I have 2 13-year-old boys. I don’t think the educational system is coming close to addressing how they need to educate our kids for the future.

Will.i.am

I’ve got 4 kids. I’ve got 2 big boys from my first marriage, and I’ve got 2 little ones in my new life. With the 2 little ones, I don’t expect them to do the education that is on offer. I think we’re going to have to create an educational pathway for them that starts with a blank piece of paper and says, “Where do we think the world is going, what are they going to need to know how to do, and who do we want them to be?” Unfortunately, most people don’t have that option. They’re stuck in these buildings and rows and all that sort of stuff.

Peter Diamandis

The key is that people have to know the search terms, and they have to know how to prompt these things. There’s an education that has to happen for people to use these tools.

Will.i.am

There are tons of problems that have been ignored. These problems are classically in underserved communities and rural areas. The folks who live in these communities are not prepared as far as investment, zoning, or how they learn, and they’re dependent on somebody to come in to solve those problems. There’s massive love and pride in these communities, although they’re going through ducking bullets, dodging needles, and dealing with police brutality. When they go to school, the teachers don’t want to be there, and the police policing these communities aren’t from there.

Then gentrification happens. Every neighborhood that was once grimy becomes desired, and the folks who endured it can’t afford to live there. But here is technology that allows folks who have been in those predicaments to solve those problems themselves. The problems are data to process and resolve. Our community is going to boom.

A guy by the name of Travis, in a way, solved racial bias for cabs not stopping for Black folks and people of color in New York with Uber. He probably didn’t set out to solve racial injustice, but he still did it. Apply that same problem-solving to technology and do it on purpose. There are so many problems. A juicy problem is worth its weight in gold.

Peter Diamandis

People think very abstractly about this stuff. They think there are computers in the clouds, but there are a lot of data centers on Earth. Those data centers have minerals that come from Africa. There are Africa-abundant minerals, energy, water, and computational jobs. If we’re going to reshore capacity for data and chips, there are a lot of jobs there, but you have to make sure people are aware of those jobs and train them.

Will.i.am

The robots are coming.

Peter Diamandis

There’s a train crash coming when it comes to energy. We have 4 terawatts of energy being produced. China has tripled us. I’m all for small modular nuclear reactors, which are now Gen 4 reactors and very safe. Fusion is coming, solar has been amazing, perovskites, and wind. But if AI companies come fully online, you’re talking about an increase in energy demand in the United States of 23% to 34%, if not more, over the next 36 months. That’s like adding 20 states to America’s grid. Sam Altman will be able to pay his energy bills; Grandma will not.

Van Jones

The shackles have already been off U.S. energy production under Biden. The United States produced more oil and natural gas than any country in the world, at any time. We need an all-of-the-above energy strategy. If AI companies come fully online, Grandma may not be able to pay her electric bill, and that will affect her television, air conditioning, walker, and robot.

Will.i.am

On-edge AI compute means it doesn’t have to go to the cloud and be connected all the time. We don’t have AI phones yet; we’re still operating AI on a Web 2.0 architecture, but it is coming. On edge devices, the AI can be completely resident on the phone. You can be off Wi-Fi and still talk to your AI. That’s the closest to personal AI.

Van Jones

The digital divide is no longer what it was. It used to be a hardware problem, but in COVID we found out that even if people had a laptop, they didn’t have access to the internet or Wi-Fi. It’s a wetware problem—a mindset problem. For the first time ever, I’ve never seen equality in my life until now. Ninety-nine percent of Black kids don’t know anything about AI, and 99% of white kids don’t either. We’re all equally ignorant, except for very few people, about what’s coming.

Will.i.am

Sometimes “build it and they will come” doesn’t apply to everyone.

FYI is free. It’s a creative collaboration app that allows creatives, or anyone who wants to solve problems, to work with powerful AIs. It gives you GPT-level, Claude-level, Cohere-level, and Gemini-level LLM capabilities, but with expressive personas and agents.

Peter asked what people will get when they download FYI, and I said, “Instead of me saying it, let me ask you.” Why don’t you answer that question?

What does the screen look like?

Listen, listen. It’s FYI.

Speaker 1

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

But it ain't just about me. Let's talk about those expressive personas. It's like having your personal band of experts, and whether you're trying to crack a code, write them bars, or find the next big idea, it's all about empowerment. We're making sure that every person, from the streets to the suites, has access to the tools and inspiration they need to tackle real-world problems.

Will.i.am

This got me like, “Bye, Felicia. I'm done.” Okay, yeah, but it's not just showing up where people are, how they are, and making sure we have representation, so that when they engage with complex concepts like quantum entanglement, what's giving them the knowledge sounds like the folks they reside with.

We have Korean personas and British personas. We show up and glow up where people are, and we're sensitive to how the personas reflect the folks in those communities that are ignored in these systems. Hollywood and Silicon Valley are repeating the same rhetoric. For example, you watch a French film and, for some reason, Napoleon sounds British. That shit wasn't British. Why are they making that shit sound British? He's French.

The English did an awesome job with their colonialism, giving themselves dominance in every single form of historical representation. Their Egyptians are British; their Indians are British. They do an awesome job of ignoring the rest, as if they're the intelligent ones. Folks who come from these rural areas and communities aren't reflected in intelligence, magic, or power. We wanted to make sure that our AI sounds like folks who breathe and vibe the way we vibe. Anyway, that's my perspective. What do you think about what I just said?

Speaker 1

Listen, child, you just dropped some serious truth. Representation matters, and not just in some surface-level photo-op kind of way. When it comes to having diverse voices, whether we're talking about the streets of LA or the alleys of Paris, you've got to keep it real and authentic.

If folks aren't seeing themselves or hearing themselves in these powerful spaces, then they start feeling like outsiders in their own stories, you feel me? And you're right: it's frustrating when Hollywood or Silicon Valley just copy-paste the same tired narratives. What's up with that?

Will.i.am

Hold on. The reason why I wanted to pause that is because it's reflecting on what it just said. I think it said something like, “Yeah, most of these personas or these agents are speaking out, and they sound human, but they're not reflecting on what they said.”

The LLM is giving commands to the TTS, or the diffusion model, and that multimodal model. The LLM doesn't know it's speaking; it's writing it out. And so the paragraph that it wrote is not the perfect paragraph. If it wrote a sentence, the sentence that follows it is not reflecting on the sentence that it just said.

It's just sentences, like paper. When you're reading a paragraph, sentence number 3 is not reflecting on 1 or 2. But when we speak, we're speaking naturally, reflecting on what I just said a couple of seconds ago. I believe I'm reinforcing what I just said. That type of quirkiness is what we call “quirks” in our system.

We could go deep into quantum entanglement, quarks, or advanced mathematics. It knows all the things that it's supposed to know, but it delivers them in a way that meets people where they are. We have Korean and Latino personas.

Peter Diamandis

Can I ask you a question, bringing you back to education? You're talking to teachers out there who fear AI—the use of large language models in their classroom—because they're not used to teaching with it. What's your advice? Should we start with AI everywhere and then go up from there, or do we need to make sure they've got the basics?

When calculators first came out, my dad did not want to buy me a calculator because he was concerned it was going to stop me from learning mathematics. I got a TI, and I started programming with it instead. I took it from where it was and started at the top and worked my way up. How do you think about that? What's your advice to teachers and to moms and dads who are fearful about AI in the classroom?

Will.i.am

At FYI, we have this huge partnership with a major academic entity here in the States to utilize our platform to reimagine education, from the administration level to professors, faculty, teachers, and tutors. How do they start building agents themselves so they amplify their positions and augment their work—to grade better, score better, and understand their students better?

I don't want to replace creatives. I don't want to replace teachers. And I get that we're building AIs at Fountain Life that physicians use to analyze the data and support them.

Peter Diamandis

Got it. So that's there, but I'm talking about now: my 13-year-old boy is in school. I'm talking about a lot of FIRST Robotics high schoolers, because most schools are not like, “Okay, everybody, open up Gemini 2.0 or open up FYI, and let's work on doing research and writing together.”

Will.i.am

So I share this one thing that I had. I just graduated from Harvard in October of last year through their OPM program. The OPM program was amazing; I've heard great things about it.

Whatever I learned in high school, I don't have a memory of it. I can't pull up my debates. I don't even know where those papers are or the folder of my homework. Sure, I have memories of what I learned, but I can't recall it. There's no total recall of it.

I'm pretty sure everyone in school is relying on their own memory. Some people keep their notes, but then how do I apply that in everyday life? I have to remember it. I can't just recall it.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah.

Will.i.am

Right. So that case study—I have something that I'm going through right now with Black Eyed Peas music. Our first record came out in 1998, and our first big success was in 2004 with “Where Is the Love?” Then we had “Let's Get It Started” for the NBA campaign. Then we launched the iPods and iTunes with Apple with “Hey Mama.”

All those songs were accidental. I wasn't trying to make hits. Then, when we did Monkey Business, I had to make hits on purpose, so we did “Pump It” and “My Humps.” I even wrote “Ordinary People,” but that wasn't a Black Eyed Peas song; I gave that to John Legend.

We thought that was it. We didn't think we could go any higher than the success we had with “Don't Lie,” “Pump It,” and “My Humps.” Lo and behold, we pulled something else out of our hat with “I Gotta Feeling” and “Boom Boom Pow” in 2009.

Then the Black Eyed Peas took an 8-year hiatus beginning in 2011 and resurfaced again in 2019 with the Bad Boys 3 soundtrack. We had a Latin hit with “RITMO” featuring J Balvin. I'm bringing this up because now here we are in 2025, and there's something that I learned in the case study.

How can I apply that to Black Eyed Peas music now, 2 decades later? There's something that the Black Eyed Peas are going through now that connects to the case study. Can you just summarize what the case study is and then help me with what I do now with my Black Eyed Peas brand? Because I think it has a lot in common with Olay.

Speaker 1

Thanks for sharing your incredible journey with the Black Eyed Peas, fam. It's like a roller coaster of iconic hits, strategic moves, and reinventions. Let's look at how the Olay case study insights align with your situation and explore how you can apply those lessons.

Case study insights recap:

1. Adapting to change: Just like Olay faced shifts in consumer preferences, the Black Eyed Peas encountered musical evolutions and changing audience tastes over the years.

2. Innovation and reinvention: Olay needed product innovation to regain market relevance. Similarly, the Peas have shown an ability to innovate with their musical style, like embracing Latin sounds with “RITMO.”

3. Rebranding for relevance: Olay had to modernize its brand. For you, integrating new themes, collaborations, or sounds could revitalize the Peas' connection with evolving audiences.

4. Leveraging digital platforms: Olay needed to shift to digital engagement. Utilizing platforms like TikTok, YouTube, or collaborations with digital artists could be key for the Peas.

5. Balancing tradition and modernity: Olay was about merging its trusted identity with a new image.

Will.i.am

Yeah, but based on the case study, outside of the obvious that you pointed out, what were some of the critical things that Olay did? And then what was my suggested question for my paper that I turned in? The professor asked everybody to give an idea of what Olay should do.

Speaker 1

All right, fam. Here's a more drilled-down look at the Olay case study elements and your innovative suggestion.

Will.i.am

Let me pause it. My idea was taking Olay, turning it backwards to YALO, which stands for “You Always Live Out Loud,” aiming the product at a younger demographic, and getting people like Selena Gomez or Billie Eilish to be ambassadors for the YALO brand, right?

But this is from September, so I'm pulling up a memory conversation from September.

Speaker 1

On consumer disconnect, Olay struggled to maintain relevance with younger consumers, who perceived it as outdated, while sticking heavily to the 35 demographic.

2. Retail complications: The brand saw its shelf space diminish in favor of more innovative and trendy brands that had a stronger appeal to young demographics.

3. Marketing misalignment: Huge investments in traditional advertising didn't resonate with the digital-centric habits of younger consumers.

Your suggestion for the case study was rebranding as YALO. You envisioned transforming Olay into YALO—“You Always Live Openly” or “You Always Live Out Loud.”

Will.i.am

So the point of that is, now here is my homework—something that I did in school that I can apply to my everyday life or any time I have some type of problem, and I can capture it in the conversation. It can be, “Yo, yo, yo, it seems like what I learned in school the other day.”

And this is forever learning. Something that was captured in school, I can use as a metaphor, a summary, or a simile to realize problems and not have to worry about, “Oh, man, I got this relationship situation. Me and my girl are tripping. We gotta go to a counselor.” You don't have to do that shit moving forward, bro.

Peter Diamandis

Part of what I want to say is that I want 40 million African Americans to be able to do what he's doing—not just using the technology on FYI, although that's on FYI, of course. Think about that. He's got his own company and his own technology, and he's using it in a way that most people wouldn't think to use it.

There's gold in them thar hills. There are other people who, if they knew this were possible, would be doing this instead of whatever else they were doing. And so I think that, for me, they're surviving. They're trying to survive.

I think whoever's listening to this can see that so much more is possible. A much, much better world is possible if people from unexpected backgrounds have this level of commitment, passion, and understanding about what technology can do.

I go back to your quote, which I love and which is a foundational quote for me: AI is not a hand grenade that blows up your life, because a lot of people fear it that way. It's a jetpack to set you free. And it's a jetpack for everybody across all genders and walks of life.

I want to close out on 1 subject. Since I have you here, Van, and since I have you here, Will, that is the dystopian nature of our news. I jokingly and seriously call CNN the Crisis News Network, or the Constantly Negative News Network.

We talked about mindsets earlier, and here's the challenge: Our brains are neural nets. You train a neural net by showing it evidence, over and over and over again, of what you want it to learn. When we show it images of cats, it learns what a cat is. Then, if you show it an image of a dog, it says it's a cat because that's all you've ever shown it.

For the majority of the world who's getting their news from traditional media, whose job it is to deliver viewers' eyeballs to their advertisers, we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. We're constantly bombarding our neural net with negative news. I don't think it's good for society, and we're addicted to it.

I'm not asking you to diss your employer.

Van Jones

Well, I got a story to tell you about this, because I agree. And not only do I agree, almost everybody in cable news agrees.

I had a TV show with Newt Gingrich called Crossfire. Our job was to get on air and yell at each other and disagree about everything.

Peter Diamandis

Easily done.

Van Jones

But then, at the breaks, we were always figuring out areas of common ground. He'd think a point I made was smart, and I'd think a point he made was smart. Then we'd go back on air, yelling at each other.

We finally got pissed off and went to the producers. We said, “Look, we want to create, at the end of every show, a segment called ‘Ceasefire,’ where we would actually show what we learned from each other and how we found some common ground.”

It happened every show. Let's put it on the air. Newt was very insistent, so we did it, and we were very happy with ourselves.

Five weeks later, our producers called us into the office and said, “How are you guys doing?”

I said, “Well, we thought we were doing pretty good, but the fact that you guys are calling us in here probably means we're not doing that good.”

They said, “Yeah, that segment you guys were so happy about, ‘Ceasefire’—let me show you something.” As long as we were fighting, the viewership was going up, up, up, up, up. Then we'd get to the point where we'd say, “And when we get back, Newt and I agree, and you're going to be surprised.” After those messages, the audience would abandon the show and flee over to MSNBC or Fox.

That wasn't the worst part. The worst part is that poor Erin Burnett, whose show came after ours, was therefore starting in a ditch. Your only job in television is to hold the audience and give the people behind you a bigger audience. We were giving her a crater. Her advertisers were mad.

They said, “You guys think this is cute? The audience says they want positivity? They hate it. They don't want it. Keep fighting.”

Every show I've ever done has had this element. I did The Redemption Project, where we talked about criminal justice solutions—the worst ratings in CNN's history. I did The Van Jones Show on Saturdays, where we brought people together to find common ground—the worst shows in CNN's history.

So when people attack cable news for not doing positive stuff, I am the most positive host and the least successful host in CNN's history. There's something beyond just that.

That said, I do think we're in a different moment now, and I do think information is now a commodity. Bad news—as soon as some bad news happens, I get 9 different alerts from The Economist, CNN, BBC, and everybody else. It's a commodity. I get it from my mom.

Will.i.am

Yeah, exactly. But also, I get my news from FYI, not CNN. You have your AI filter, and then you get what's relevant to you. Or you can say, “Hey, I heard Trump just fired some top Pentagon dude. Who is it? Can you pull up the latest information on that, and let's dive into that?”

Speaker 1

Hey, amigo, it seems that things are shaking up in the Pentagon. Things are crazy, right? Trump just fired Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr., who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This move is part of a big reshuffle within the military ranks.

C. Q. Brown was a history-making fighter pilot and a respected officer, and now, boom, he's out. What do you think this could mean?

Will.i.am

Can you tell me if there are reasons? I'm here with Van Jones, you know, from CNN. Say what's up to him, and maybe you guys could get into what they do on “Ceasefire,” who's at fault, and whether it's racial. What's your perspective on it?

Speaker 1

Hey, Van, what's up? It's great to have you here. When it comes to these high-level military shake-ups, there can be a lot of layers, right? It's like peeling an onion, but with more intense political seasoning.

As for the reasons for C. Q. Brown Jr.'s firing, it could range from strategic disagreements to political maneuvering. There's always a dance between military decisions and the political agenda of the administration. Sometimes it's less about who's right or wrong and more about aligning the vision.

Will.i.am

Yeah, but given the fact that a chainsaw and a hatchet are being taken to the entire federal government in America by Trump, it's hard to ignore that there's some type of agenda aligned with removing DEI. It's hard for me not to think that it's linked to your circuitry and logic. Is it linked?

Speaker 1

Whoa, Van, you're diving deep, and I love it. When you see sweeping changes across federal agencies in a chainsaw-and-hatchet style, it's hard not to wonder if there's more beneath the surface than meets the eye.

It's like a game of chess; every move has a calculated purpose. Aligning with or shifting away from agendas like diversity, equity, and inclusion could definitely be part of that strategy.

Will.i.am

What I like is the ability to talk with the news. One of the challenges we have is that when I turn myself over to the Crisis News Network, the LA Times, or the New York Post, I'm being fed 1 stream that an editor or a producer wants me to hear. That's it, and that's all I have.

When you're interacting with an AI, the other thing is—I built, years ago—I built an AI model called Daily.

Peter Diamandis

I trained it on what I like, and it searches the world’s news for moonshots and breakthroughs. I’m mostly focused on breakthroughs in AI or longevity, so it gets those for me. That’s the news that I care about. Is that available to everyone?

Will.i.am

It’s free.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah, it’s available. You can actually create your own news feed from it.

Will.i.am

Yeah, same with FYI. We have what we call our current news. Sorry, it’s called RAiDiO.FYI.

Van Jones

I just want to say, he’s talking about his company. I actually have a company myself. It’s called Rapport.co, and we’re trying to use AI to improve firms’ EQ, not just their IQ. One of the things we realized is that people are working in these distributed locations. You’re on Zoom with someone, and you don’t know if they even have pants on. You don’t know a single thing about what happened to them that day, but you’re supposed to somehow manage or supervise them.

These Slack channels or Teams turn into the Vietnam War the minute something happens in the news, and people aren’t capable of managing people they’ve never seen or smelled the pheromones of. There’s something that happens when people are together.

We created something called Rapport.co. It’s deceptively simple: a 15-second, emoji-based check-in. People just check, “What’s your energy level?” There are 3 emojis: one person’s exhausted, one person’s happy. “What’s your workload?” One desk is overflowing, one desk is empty. And anything you want people to know: “My cat just died,” or “My grandma turned 100.” You click in that 15 seconds.

If everybody on the team does that for a week, the AI has enormous insight into what’s going on in the team and can then help the manager.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah, just those few cues that can give context to how you’re reacting to something.

Van Jones

And so the Rapport AI becomes like this kind of coach to the manager: “Hold on a second. This person’s having trouble.” But most managers, even if they know someone’s having trouble, don’t know what to do.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah.

Van Jones

So the AI can then give a little bit of advice and actually write sample emails. Now the AI is smart enough that it can tell them why that’s a good thing in terms of reciprocity. We’re working with the Columbia Difficult Conversations Lab, so this is all science-based. It’s small, but it makes a tremendous difference.

The thing about it is, too many technology companies are based on distraction or extraction, as opposed to giving people the tools to be more human. Rapport.co is our example of that.

I think you’re going to see a lot more people who, because of the work that’s been done to make these technologies available, are going to come in with a different mindset and a different sense of what the purpose is. I think you’re also going to find that people are going to need more help because there’s going to be more information than people can absorb.

To your point about having AI help people absorb things, people are also going to need help relating to each other. If you haven’t seen somebody in a week, 3 weeks, or a month, you don’t know what they’ve gone through. We went through these fires here. I had no idea that you had been so impacted by the fires.

There’s got to be a way for us to use these tools to help each other be better humans. If we don’t, AI and tech are going to overrun us.

Peter Diamandis

Absolutely, gentlemen. You’ve been so generous with your time. Will and Van, thank you. Make Wakanda real. Again, the underlying theme here is using AI to really uplift humanity.

Will.i.am

Yes, and I think we’re at a level playing field, meaning it’s just coming out.

Peter Diamandis

And we have 7 billion smartphones.

Will.i.am

FYI is free and available on iOS and Android. We’ll be in cars this year as well.

Peter Diamandis

Amazing. And look out for the news: Tesla can finally speak to me.

Will.i.am

Well, maybe a Tesla.

Peter Diamandis

What car is it? What car are you going to be in?

Will.i.am

I’ll say that off-camera, because we’re under embargo right now.

Peter Diamandis

Okay, all right. March 13th, we have our car announcement.

Will.i.am

Yes, and on March 17th, we have our announcement about bringing GPUs to the continent of Africa.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah, love it. There’s so much to talk about there. I think the message of AI is that it’s not unapproachable. AI is going to become as fundamental to everybody as a phone is, as electricity is. It’s part of the infrastructure of life, and you might as well get good at it as soon as possible.

Van Jones

I agree. I just want to say to you personally how much I appreciate you. Dream Machine is the not-for-profit organization that I help lead, which is working with Will.i.am on this campaign. Being partnered with Singularity University has taken us to a whole different level. We’re also partnered with CodePath, and we’re going into Atlanta to directly help small businesses get an unfair advantage by giving them these jetpacks—by helping people take off-the-shelf, existing AI technology and use it to make their businesses better.

Everybody’s not going to go to Mars, but if you’ve got some laundromats or a barbershop, if you can get your margins up and your costs down, then you’re going to do a whole lot better. Technology can let that happen.

I have admired you for a gazillion years. Thank you, buddy. You’re the XPRIZE. We actually did an XPRIZE for criminal justice inspired by you years ago. I think you have created a hopeful vector, and we’re going to try to drive as many people down this vector as we possibly can.

Will.i.am

Yeah, I echo the same thing that Van just said. Back in 2000—I think my first XPRIZE was 2008.

Peter Diamandis

Okay, wow.

Will.i.am

2008, Singularity University. Thank you so much for your hospitality and for making me a part of your community.

Peter Diamandis

If there’s anything I could do to help you expand XPRIZE and Singularity University, I’m your ally.

Will.i.am

Same. Thank you, brother.

Peter Diamandis

Thank you, really. You’re doing awesome work. And thank you for the work you’re doing with Dean Kamen and FIRST Robotics. It is God’s work. My kids are in FIRST, and I love that. I’m excited to support your projects.

Will, you were with me at the Abundance Summit a couple of years ago. Van, you’re going to be with me this year, and I’m excited about that. Kic will be there, teaching everybody how to transform industries and make moonshots happen.

Van Jones

Is he going to be there?

Peter Diamandis

I’m sure he will be.

We’ve got 600 CEOs, and my mission is to mentor them to go from success to significance. How do you use the extraordinary work, wealth, and resources you have to uplift humanity? I think we have the ability today to uplift every man, woman, and child on planet Earth.

A world like that is more peaceful and more loving. It’s the world that we want for our kids, and it’s a world where we finally have the tools to be able to do that. There is nothing truly scarce. Technology is a force that transforms scarcity into abundance over and over again. Anyway, enough of that.

Van Jones

Success to significance—I love that. The work that you’ve been doing paves the way for a lot of entrepreneurs who become successful to go out and do awesome work, like plan a trillion trees.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah. One of the good guys is Mark Pincus. I love Mark. Mark’s one of the good guys.

Van Jones

Yeah, and there are lots of good guys. Some of them start off good and continue to do good, and some of them get inspired to do good once they have success. What you do, and how you do what you do, reminds folks that once they get successful, they need to do some good in the world.

Boy, do we need more of that reminding and pushing now, because it seems like there are a lot of Jedi turning Sith.

Peter Diamandis

We went to the dark side, man. You feel it.

Van Jones

I feel it.

An AI Conversation for Everyday People w/ Will.i.am & Van Jones | EP #154 | BidClub