Tony Robbins Takes AI's Hardest Questions: Job Loss, Purpose, and The Hard Times Ahead | 222

People ask me all the time, how do you provide certainty for people when the external world no longer offers certainty? There is no external certainty. So, when those jobs are disrupted, what will people hang on to?

The answer is one of the most famous people on the planet: Tony Robbins. The great Tony Robbins is here, my man.

There’s nothing that people want that they can’t make happen if they really want it with heart and soul and they’re willing to do something about it. This kind of change hitting society isn’t just a threat about unemployment. It’s a threat about a nervous-system shock.

AI is the call. New technology is the call for us to become more, to move from survival to spirit, to move from settling to something greater.

AI is going to create this rate of change that is just beyond belief, and it doesn’t correlate with happiness necessarily. It needs to be turned into happiness. Tony, you’ve been coaching millions of people over decades, right? After looking back over that time, are you more optimistic about the world or less?

Here’s what I think about optimism.

Now, that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I’m here today with a dear friend, the world’s number-one life and business coach, Tony Robbins. He’s coached more than 100 million people across 195 countries. Beyond his coaching, he’s the owner of more than 114 companies, with $12 billion in business.

He’s an investor in private equity across 80 private-equity companies, with $11 billion in AUM. He’s advised presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs, and global leaders on leadership and human potential. Personally, Tony is one of my best friends. We’ve co-authored a number-one New York Times bestselling book, and we’ve co-founded 2 companies, Fountain Life and Life Force.

In my opinion, he is one of the greatest humanitarians on the planet alive today. Tony, welcome, pal.

Thanks, buddy. It’s great to be with you.

Yeah, for sure. You know, I remember a decade ago, we started a conversation, and we started too early, about what we saw as the age of coming technological socialism.

Yes. Where technology, not the government, but technology would start to take care of individuals, and the implications that that might have on our psychology, on our sense of safety, and on how we motivate ourselves.

As you know, I did a podcast recently with Elon. During that conversation, he said a few things that I wanted—the first person I wanted to speak to about this was you. He said, literally, that he expects in the next 3 to 5 years that AI and robotics would fundamentally displace all human labor.

I think the time frame that folks have been talking about in the media, in government, and across the board has been more of a 20-year adaptation cycle. Humans are amazingly adaptable, but I don’t think at that speed. I think this kind of change hitting society isn’t just a threat about unemployment. It’s a threat about a nervous-system shock.

Yeah. So, let’s start there. How do you respond to that? What are your concerns?

When the environment changes faster than our ability to adapt, people panic. When people panic, they have a variety of emotional reactions, including anger, rage, and sometimes violence.

If you look at the history of change, I can go back all the way to the Luddites. If you remember studying your history in the 1800s in England, they created these machines that displaced about 70% of the jobs. What did people do? They rioted. You had thousands of people attacking these machines with hammers to destroy them. You had them blowing up facilities and factories. You had factory owners being shot and threatened with being killed. You had factory owners putting people out there to shoot people.

The government in England passed a law in the first year of this kind of 5-year cycle, basically saying that if you destroyed a machine, it was capital punishment. They publicly hanged 24 people to try to stop this. They put out 12,000 people to fight them. This was during the same time as the Napoleonic Wars.

There’s no guarantee of this being a smooth transition. I’m not a reactionary person, but when you hear 3 to 5 years, it gets your attention. Elon’s one of the smartest people alive, and people can argue about the timeline. But Ray Kurzweil, a mutual friend of both of ours, has been talking about 2029 for probably 20 years, and he’s been the most accurate forecaster I know.

If you go to Hinton, who’s the godfather of AI himself, he has a longer version. He goes 2030 to 2040. So, I’d say 3 to 10 years is my guess. I don’t think all business will be gone or changed in that time period, but the question really is, how do you provide certainty for people?

People ask me all the time, how do you provide certainty for people when the external world no longer offers certainty? I would argue that you don’t have to deal with it at all, because it’s already true. What I mean is, there is no external certainty. External certainty is a total illusion.

You have a rented certainty because you have a certain business, or you have a certain category, a certain income, or certain relationships. But COVID, for example, instantly changed all of that overnight for people. You walk across the street and get hit by a car, and you can’t walk for 6 months or forever. Things like this have always been a part of our lives.

I think it’s really about dispelling the illusion of certainty and finding within people the ability to get that internal certainty. Neuroscience is teaching us that, just like AI, our brains are predictive machines. They’re constantly trying to predict what’s going to happen and close the gap between what they predict and what reality is.

When it doesn’t match up, that’s when that craziness, anger, and fear show up. So, it’s going to show up on a large scale. Our job, I think, as leaders is to anticipate that and look at history, because it’s not just the Luddites.

You can say 15 years later that happened with the threshers, another machine that was used to process wheat. They had the same reaction 15 years later. In the 1930s—’30, ’31, ’32—communism came, and people had to be put down. Governments in the past have overreacted to this to try to stop it. It’s been a very difficult stage.

If we’re going to make the transition, I think we have to anticipate what’s coming. I remember I talked to President Obama about this 10 years ago. Right at the end of his term, I was saying, “What are you going to do?”

I gave the example. I said, “You inherited an economy where 8 million jobs disappeared in 2008, and the world economy was smashed up. Look at this: these self-driving cars are going to be around sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, and they’re going to displace truck drivers and anybody who’s driving an Uber.”

“Who’s going to hire a truck driver who can work 8 hours a day maximum? They cost a lot of money for their health insurance, which is always going up, and they complain. When you can have a truck that drives 24 hours a day, probably has cheaper insurance, doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t require health care, and you can depreciate the asset, who’s going to hire that truck driver?”

I said, “If you just take that category alone—truck drivers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers—that’s 8 million jobs.” I said, “What are you guys doing at the governmental level to anticipate this and retool people?”

I’ll never forget, he said, “Tony, it’s not going to happen that fast.”

I said, “Well, with all due respect, Mr. President, if you look at history, we could say that 150 years ago, 80% of us were farmers. Now it’s 3%, and we feed the world. No one thought of a new job called being a webmaster, or these days, doing something different like being an AI master, or whatever the case may be. Those jobs weren’t even thought of.”

“I know there’ll be new jobs, but that was a 150-year shift. The speed of this is the challenge.”

Yeah.

And he said, “Tony, all the people we’re talking to, it’s just not going to happen that fast.”

I’m thinking about it just the other day, because it’s only been 10 years. You and I both know, between Waymo and obviously Elon, it’s happening in cities all across the world. It’s not standard yet, but will it be sometime soon? The answer is yes.

So, when those jobs are disrupted, what will people hang on to? The answer is, we have to give them 2 things.

First, help them develop an identity as a creator. Here’s what I mean by that: most people that you talk to in daily life are stressed. “It is the number one thing I’m stressed about. There’s so much I don’t know what to do. I’m so stressed about this, so stressed about that.” There’s so much talk about mental health these days.

Are you really going to tell me that life is more stressful today than when you had to fight for your food with a tiger? I mean, it’s absurd. Or during the Middle Ages, when you might catch something and an entire community would go down.

But we think it’s more stressful because we’re managers today. We try to manage so much. We were not made to manage our circumstances. We’re made to create. When you’re managing circumstances, you don’t feel any sense of agency. You don’t feel like you’re in charge.

Most human stress comes from the fact that you feel events are controlling you versus you’re controlling events. So, think about it: something created us. You can call it God, you can call it the universe, you can call it whatever you want to call it. But we were created by something, and we were given the ability to create.

When you become a creator of life on your terms, it doesn't matter what changes in the outside world.

Now, there's one other piece. You might say, practically, what skills would somebody need to be able to do well? I've been thinking about it, and I've got kids just like you. I've got 5 kids and 5 grandkids now. I have a 52-year-old daughter, and thanks to COVID, I have a 4-year-old daughter who was good to me.

I think about my grandkids and my younger kids, and I say, “Man, 80%, 50%, 30%, depending on which studies you read, of traditional jobs are going to disappear.” Elon’s saying all of them. But no matter how you slice it, the world's going to change radically.

How do I arm them? Not just with money or resources, but how do I arm them to have self-esteem and know they can play the game? The answer is to develop an identity that says, “I'm the kind of person that always finds the way. I'm the person that can find meaning in anything and empowering meaning. I know how to use my body to produce certainty and not try to get it from the outside world, which is an illusion. I have an identity. I'm the person that makes it happen.”

Think about Lance Armstrong's identity: “I'm the guy that always finds the way to victory.” He was told he had cancer in his lungs, in his brain, and in his testicles. Most people would say, “I'm out.” He was like, “I'm going to find the answer.” He did.

Now, the same belief system of identity made him use drugs to compete, and that hurt his career and his identity in some way. But identity is what controls it.

Then there's the skill. I'll finish with this. There are 3 skills I teach every one of my kids, anybody I'm in business with, and anybody I'm in a relationship with to continually master. If you master these 3 skills, it doesn't matter what happens with AI. You'll still be a part of what wins, because in the end, you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone else that uses AI.

The first skill is pattern recognition. You're a genius at this. You and I have been friends for decades. I'm not blowing smoke. You and I are both damn good at recognizing patterns early on and seeing what they mean.

When you recognize the pattern, it eliminates fear. People are fearful because something looks like it has never happened before. There's nothing like this. There's always something like this. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, as we hear so often.

Once you recognize the pattern in yourself, emotionally or physically, or the pattern financially, or the pattern of cycles of markets, you're no longer fearful. The second skill is pattern utilization.

Think about it. What changed humanity from living in fear and running from one place to another, being hunter-gatherers trying to hopefully get our food, to staying in one place and being able to build a family, a community, a city, and a nation? One pattern that we learned to recognize and use was the seasons.

Until we understood the seasons, you could do the right thing at the wrong time and have nothing. Planting in the winter, no matter how hard you work, doesn't work. Once we learned that, we realized, “Wow, we could plant here, protect during the hot summer, reap, and keep some of it for the winter.” That's how we've come to be where we are.

Once you recognize financial patterns, business patterns, and patterns of technology, you're not fearful. Once you start to use those patterns, you become powerful. You start to be able to invest better. You may be able to build a business. You'll be able to have a more mature relationship, one that's more passionate, more alive, and more loving.

But the third target that I have for all my kids, which I want them to move toward and constantly reinforce, is pattern creation.

Think of it this way: If you're learning to play music, the piano, usually someone else before you has come up with a pattern that's delightful, enhancing, beautiful, or whatever you want to call it. You learn their pattern, and you learn a lot of their patterns. You don't just recognize it; you use it. You can produce an amazing result.

But as time goes by, suddenly there'll be a point where you've played enough of other people's patterns that you come through, and now you become a creator of patterns. If you do that in business or in sports, you become the GOAT of that industry. You become the greatest of all time because you're bringing something to the table that's never been there before.

So the answer—a long answer, but I think it needs context—is that the need for certainty is in human beings. But that need can be met in many different ways. In order to have them succeed, they need to have a different identity. They have to understand that this idea of certainty, just things being the same way, has never really been there if you look at it in reality.

But I can give you internal certainty. I can find the meaning. I can develop the identity of the person that finds the way. I can develop the identity of being a creator. If I study these 3 skill sets, I'll always be able to learn, and as I learn, I'll be able to master anything life brings me, including AI, technology, robotics, nanotechnology, and so on.

I appreciate this, and I agree with you, of course. The challenge is how many people have it within themselves to actually go down that road.

One of the challenges is that we're living in a world where there have been a number of social contracts that have become codified in all of our lives: go work hard in school, go to a good college, get a degree, get a great job. All of a sudden, that gets disrupted, and people find themselves where their identity for all time has been their job.

First off, the idea of work is a rather recent invention. We never used to work 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. We survived. I love Sadhguru. He has a great quote about this. I remember he said, “Technology is the means by which we take a vacation from survival.” I love that. That's great.

The question now is, when your self-worth has been tied to your job and all of a sudden it's either taken away or minimized, what happens? I also think one of the biggest concerns I have—and Elon echoed this—is that we're going to have a large population of individuals not getting jobs.

They're in the process of following the social contract: “I've worked hard, I got to college,” and we're seeing this at MIT, at Northeastern, and at universities around the country. People with great degrees are saying, “I cannot get a job.”

Retooling themselves to go and become a creator is difficult. One of the things we've talked about a lot on the Moonshots podcast is that the real future career, the real future opportunity, is being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is the future for everybody in some shape or form. Call it a creator, call it whatever you like.

How do people make that shift when they're in the midst of hurting? We're not there yet.

Another thing that Elon said that I want to mention is that we're going to head toward universal high income, where robots and AI enable us to have anything we want, and at the same time, we're going to have social unrest. How do you think about social unrest coming? Is it avoidable? Can we immunize ourselves? Do you think governments are going to take the actions required?

Those are great questions, and I'm certainly not the expert to answer them. I can only give you my two cents and my opinion.

I've heard a lot of people say this before: “For 4,000 years, our identity has been tied to work. What happens when we don't have to work anymore?” It's just not true for 4,000 years. Before the agrarian transformation of our society, as you said, we were into survival. But really, what we were tied to was a tribe. We were tied to connection and contribution.

Those are 2 human needs that have never gone away and are not going to go away if there's no “work.” Now, I don't know if I buy that there'll be no work for human beings, personally. I could be dead wrong, but I just don't buy that as a necessary future. Certainly not in the next 3 to 5 years, as you're describing.

But I think you've got to think about economic utility, and then you have your sense of significance. Let's talk about something for 2 seconds, because you know this, but share it with your audience.

I work with people all over the Earth. One of the things that I uncovered about 20 years ago, which really changed my work and allowed me to help people in a radically different way, is that I noticed I've worked in 139 countries, and I've got clients in 193 countries. I've gone to those countries and worked.

Every country has its own values and rule systems, obviously. Generally, for example, if you go to the East, saving face is very, very important, as you well know. There are cultures like the United States where the individual is more valued. There are cultures where it's more about the group.

But the one thing I noticed in every single culture was that the same problems occurred, even though the culture was different. That made me dig to see what drives people underneath it all.

What are the drives that aren’t just motivational? What are the drives built into all human beings? I finally discovered what I consider to be the 6 human needs that drive everything. In other words, whatever people do, they have a reason. If somebody says they’re going to commit suicide, they have a reason. If someone’s willing to run into a building and save someone, even though they might lose their life doing it, they have a reason. If somebody just yells at you, they have a reason. They might not consciously know what it is, but there are a million reasons. There are 6 needs that drive those reasons or those stories, right? Someone’s going to kill themself; obviously, they have to have a belief that dying is less painful than living, as an example. So those 6 needs come down to these, real fast.

And then let’s actually take these 1 at a time, because AI impacts all of them.

They do. It does. Now let’s just look at what they are. The first basic human need is certainty: the need to be comfortable and avoid pain. This need for certainty is in every human being. The differences among human beings in these 6 needs are that some people value certainty number 1, and some will value, let’s say, uncertainty—another need—much higher. Where you value these 6 needs is why we make different decisions.

The second thing is, how do you get certainty? Some people get certainty by lowering their expectations. Some people get certainty by trusting in God and saying, “There’s a higher purpose. I’m going to be guided.” Some people get certainty by saying, “I’ve been through hell before. I’ve always found the answer. I’ll find the answer here.” Some people get certainty by working out and feeling that certainty in their body. So we all have different rules, a different map about how to meet that need.

The 2 differences are: what do you value toward the top 2? That’s what drives you. And what are your rules about how to meet them? So, having said that, you can get certainty by eating a lot of food. You’re all stressed out, you eat a lot of food, your stomach fills up, and you start to breathe better, right? Because you’re full. Or you smoke a cigarette. Take a breath in and blow it out nice and slow, and you feel better. You’re killing yourself, but you feel comfortable while you’re doing it, right? It just provides certainty. So you can find certainty in positive ways, neutral ways, or negative ways.

But if you were certain every moment of your life—you knew what was going to happen, when it was going to happen, what someone was going to do, what they were going to say—in the beginning, that would feel great. But after a while, you’d be bored out of your mind, which is why the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, gave us a second need, which is uncertainty. We have a need for uncertainty. We have a need for surprise.

In fact, when I do large audiences, I’ll say to a stadium, “How many of you love surprise?” And 15,000 people all raise their hand, and I go, “Bullshit.” I say, “You like the surprises you want, right? The surprises you don’t want, you call problems.” But we need those. It triggers a different response in us. We need that need for variety. Now, if there’s too much variety, people freak out. If there’s too much certainty, they’re bored out of their mind.

So is the goal to be the lukewarm middle? No. The goal is that, through multiple beliefs or actions or emotions, you can meet multiple needs. If someone’s ever rented a movie that they’ve already seen, I’ll ask people that, and most people say they have. And I say, “Get a life,” right? [Laughter] But I’ve done it, too. Why would you rent a movie you’ve already seen? Because you’re certain it’s good, and you’re hoping it’s been long enough that you’ve forgotten enough that it still gives you variety to watch it again, right? And so you can meet multiple needs.

The third need is the need for significance: the need to feel unique, to feel special, to feel important. This is one of the most important human needs. They’re all important. Some people value significance number 1; some people value certainty number 1. And so they live a very different life, right? If you’re valuing certainty number 1, you’re going to be holding back a little bit back here. If it’s uncertainty, you’re going to be charging forward, right? The direction of your life is driven by which of these needs you value at the top.

Significance means to feel needed, to feel important, to feel significant, right? You can get significance by working harder than anybody else, by being more generous. You can get significance by beating up on somebody, by verbally tearing somebody down. You have the illusion that if they go down, you go up, right? There are so many ways to do it that are positive and negative.

The reason we have violence is that if somebody doesn’t feel significant, and you’re in that part of town where maybe they don’t feel like they’re part of our society, or taken care of, or have the same options, somebody puts a gun at your head. How certain are they that you’re going to respond? Zero to 10. Ten. How much variety is there? Every time, it’s different. And thirdly, you’re the most significant thing in their life.

I bring this up because this is a critical principle. I know I’m teaching you a lot real quick, but you’ll see why it’s important in understanding how technology and AI affect us and the changes we’re talking about. If you are in a position where you meet at least 3 of your needs through a belief, or 3 of your needs through an emotional pattern, or 3 of your needs through an action, you’ll become addicted to that belief, emotion, or action. Whether it’s a positive thing or a negative thing, you’ll be addicted to it.

And by the way, unfortunately, violence has always been with us and will be until there’s a consciousness change, because it’s one of the fastest ways to feel significant and certain and have variety. It also meets the 4th need, unfortunately, which is connection and love—not the love part, but the connection part.

Everyone needs connection and love, right? As a doctor, with your background—I know, rocket scientist and doctor—you also know, as a medical doctor, that if children aren’t physically held as babies, if they don’t have that kinesthetic touch, they get failure-to-thrive syndrome. Literally, they can die from the lack of that. So we need that connection.

Now, most people have had love, and maybe it disappeared or it ended, and so they settled for the crumbs of connection, but they still want that. So you can get connection through having problems and sharing your problems with someone else. You can have that connection through prayer. You can have connection by going for a run and feeling connected to God or the universe. You can feel that connection by buying a dog. Because cats leave, but dogs—you leave for 2 minutes, it’s like you’ve been gone for 6 months. They’re so happy to see you, right? So there are many ways to get that sense of connection.

By the way, if you’ve ever seen 2 people fight over whose problem is bigger—“I have this problem. I have this problem.”—they’re not fighting over the problems; they’re fighting over who’s got a more significant problem. “Mine’s more significant,” right?

It’s like when you and I battle over who’s been traveling too much.

That’s exactly right.

So the first 4 needs are the needs of the personality. Everyone needs certainty, and if you have to lie to yourself, you’ll do it. If you have to work 20 hours a day, you’ll do it. People find a way to get certainty. Now, zero to 10, they might get 5, 6, 7—I don’t know. And they might get it in a way that’s temporary. If you take a bunch of sugar, you’re going to get a nice sugar high, but it’s going to drop. It doesn’t last. Most people meet their needs in a way that’s temporary, right?

But certainty and uncertainty—you can see how those 2 feel contrasted. Significance: “I want to be the one,” but then I want to be connected. So you can see the kind of conflicts that most people find in these first 4.

But the ultimate needs are our spiritual needs. Not religious, but spiritual. Everything in life has to grow. Everything grows or it dies. That’s not my law; it’s the law of the universe. And everything in the universe, if it doesn’t contribute, is eventually eliminated, right? So we have to contribute. We have to give something. When we contribute and have something to give, that’s when you have a spiritual high. That’s when people feel fulfilled, as opposed to just living for survival.

I say this because when we talk about someone losing their job, or their sense of identity, or their self-worth because they’re not getting it through their work anymore—or let’s assume that there’s no need for work. Let’s take this utopian view. I would be concerned about that if I thought the only way we could meet our needs for significance and certainty would be through work.

But look, we’ve already lived in a post-work world to some extent if you go back in our history as humans, right? When you were not evaluated by your economic utility—your, quote, “job”—we always ask, “What do you do?” in America, for example. But that’s not what was happening then. You were evaluated by, let’s say, your courage in war, by your creativity, by your wisdom, right? By the things that you could share: your art or your music or your ability to tell stories.

So there are many ways to meet our needs. Right now, we’ve been driven to think of it only in one particular way for the last couple hundred years, but we’ve done it before, and we can do it again. But the answer to your question is: will we as a society do that quickly enough? Will everybody make that happen quickly enough? I’m afraid to say the answer is no, in my opinion, just because right now you have the carrot and the stick that’s driving this technology, especially AI, with nanotechnology right behind it and everything else.

The carrot is that I can make trillions of dollars, and the stick is that if we don’t do this, China could dominate the world.

Yep.

As a result, almost no money is spent on safety, and there’s almost no thinking about what it’s doing to jobs. Right now, we’re already seeing high school students have greater employment than college students for the first time. It’s never happened before in modern history.

That’s happening because people are leaving, and those middle jobs have disappeared. Those entry-level jobs have already disappeared. Are we doing anything about it? The answer right now is no.

Is it concerning to me? Yes. My biggest concern is, if you don’t have any work, how do you find meaning? I know you can do it. There are many ways to do it. But we have to educate people, and we’ve got to retool them.

Just like when I talked to President Obama, there are very few people actually looking at how to retool our society. Others say, “Well, they’ll become programmers.” People are told to go study code. And now, of course, as you know, with vibe coding, I was just talking to a mutual friend of ours. I think you know Robert Smith over at Vista.

Yes. It’s a $125 billion private equity firm.

I remember, 5 years ago, I talked to him and said, “What’s the chokehold on your business?” He said, “Getting more people who can write code—more software engineers.”

Right now, they’re eliminating them like crazy. They only need a few really smart ones. So, again, you don’t lose your job to AI; you lose your job to someone else who uses AI better than you do.

I think the answer to your question is that there is a way to meet all of our needs. It’s going to be a call, and I think what AI is doing is a spiritual call. I know that’s my view of it. We’re going from survival values to spiritual values, from external focus to more internal focus, where we’re able to share and make the world better.

That’s the upside of this, but the transition time is going to be painful. If you look at history, most of those transitions are roughly a 5-year period, if you look at every type of major disruption that’s happened with technology in the past. I hope it’s not like that. I hope conversations like this could be stimulated, and other people could have them at a high level, so that people like you and I can try to create as much influence as possible with those who have influence to make that shift.

But there’s no guarantee of it, and I think we have to be realistic and say there’s probably going to be some disruption. Look at how many billionaires that you and I both know are preppers right now.

Yes. I know of a dozen of them who got together. I got invited to this meeting. I didn’t go, but I got to hear the details of it, and it was blowing my mind. We have mutual friends who are building places underground and giant ranches, hiring giant armies, and stocking food.

But prepping for the future—that’s not the answer. The way to prepare for the future is to prepare society by giving people the ability to have a different psychology about change and figuring out the ways in which we’re going to create that transition.

Tony, I love you for it. You talk about taxing robots and so forth; that might be a part of it. I love you for this. And by the way, anybody who hasn’t gone to Tony’s Date With Destiny, which I’ve gone to twice, it’s an extraordinary experience, and I commend it to everybody. You’ll explore these 6 human needs and understand which of them drive you.

I’m not questioning whether this transformation can occur. I’m concerned about who in society, what institution, what organizations, or what leaders are going to lead this, because I don’t see anybody in government addressing it. I see a little bit coming out of the hyperscalers, which are, in fact, going to be the wealthiest, most powerful institutions on the planet.

The Magnificent 7 right now have revenue equivalent to half the GDP of the United States and more than 99% of the planet. So who’s going to take the lead? What types of programs need to be in place to change this conversation at the middle-school and high-school level?

With your young daughter and your older children, it was always, “Okay, study hard. This is important. You need to contribute to society. You need to learn. You do your math tables.” All of these things are effectively fading away. How you contribute—ultimately, the conversation we’ll talk about this in a few minutes—is how you use technology to upskill your purpose in life, to go for your moonshots.

The analogy I like to use is: How do you create a Star Trek future versus a WALL-E or a Mad Max future?

Well, I think, again, these are deep questions, but my hope is in the Elons of the world, whom we’ve had a chance to chat with and whom you’re good friends with, and in some of our friends at Google and some of those very individuals you’re talking about. I think the gentleman at Anthropic has even more association with some of this.

He’s still saying, “Look, we have to do 2 things. We’ve got to retool people for this, but we’ve got to retool the psychology.” And as you know, we did that study at Stanford. In the middle of COVID, they came to me and said, “You’ve gotten these unbelievable results from 2 of our professors who came to Date With Destiny, a 6-day program. What do we do?”

They reorganized—I didn’t tell them how—their value system. When you change your value system, you change what you notice and what you appreciate. If your number-one value in life is security and the bottom of your list is adventure, when you walk into that seminar room, you know where all the exits are. If your number-one value is adventure, you don’t even know which door you came in through. You don’t care, right?

Your predictive process, just like AI, is literally rewired in that process. So we need to teach people how to rewire themselves, and we’ve proven that we can do it.

In the Stanford study, I asked them in advance. They said they wanted to do it on depression, and I said, “Tell me what the meta-studies show about current treatments for depression.” It blew my mind. Sixty percent of the people who go in for therapy or drugs, or a combination thereof, make zero improvement in their depression. Sixty percent. That’s what the meta-studies show.

Forty percent improve, but on average, they improve by half as much. They’re 50% less depressed. Now, some get well, but very few. Most stay on these drugs. And I said, “Man, you should be able to get that result with a placebo.”

I said, “What’s the best study you’ve ever done?” It was done at Johns Hopkins about 8 years ago. For a month, they gave depressed people psilocybin—magic mushrooms—and cognitive therapy. I said, “With that much biochemical change, you must have gotten a change.”

They said, “It was the most successful study in history. Six weeks later, 56% of the people had no symptoms.” That’s pretty unbelievable compared to anything else.

They said, “I know this sounds like I’m exaggerating, or like there’s ego involved. I’m not. We’ve just done this enough. I know the rewiring process. We will trounce those numbers.”

So we set it up the same way. When they did the study, after 6 weeks, 93% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever. The other 7% had improved. More importantly, 17% of the people in the study came in with suicidal ideation. When they left, none did.

This is just reorganizing and retooling. The best part was that a year later, with no interaction from me, their negative emotions had dropped 72% overall, and their positive emotions were up 51%.

Why am I telling you that? If you have the best Ferrari in the world—let’s call AI your Ferrari—it can empower you to do amazing things. It’s amazingly fast. But you’ve got to think about what the new environment is in which you’re driving that Ferrari.

If you’re going to the Baja 1000 and you try to drive that beautiful Ferrari, it’s not going to go anywhere. If you go to the Dakar race—9,300 miles in the Sahara Desert—and you don’t retool, you’re going to die out there.

So I think we’ve got to retool the thinking processes and the emotions, and we’ve proven we can do it. With people, these types of things can now be done at scale, as you know.

I’m doing my seminar at the end of this month. I do one once a year for free for people all over the world. I’ve done it since COVID. We call it the Time to Rise Summit, because it’s time to take your life to the next level.

We offer it for free. We had 1.3 million people join us last year from every country on the face of the Earth. Every night, I did it for 3 days—3 and a half hours a day—and you see these huge transformations that before I could only create in an audience of 15,000 people in a stadium.

All that came about, by the way, because when they shut everything down during COVID, I had to adapt because I wanted to help people. It wasn’t about the fact that I’ve got 114 companies; this is my mission. So I said, “Okay, we’ll move to Vegas.” They shut down Vegas. We moved to Texas. They shut down Texas. We said, “We’ll do it in movie theaters.” They shut down the movie theaters. So I built the studio, and we started this process.

Now the seminar is no longer 15,000 people. A standard event, like Unleash the Power Within, has between 40,000 and 60,000 people, because we have people at the live event and people everywhere.

Everything is to your advantage if you create these psychological shifts. That's what has to happen in people, and we need some players who want to help fund that. I'm doing it for free where I can, as much as I can, but the tools exist. It's not like we don't know what to do to rewire people.

But if we do nothing, we're going to have problems, and not everyone's going to take advantage of that, no matter what you do. You're going to have to deal with that as a society still.

So, first of all, we'll put the link to Time to Rise in the show notes and recommend it again to everybody here. You know, Tony, maybe the advantage is going to be AI Tony at scale. I mean, we're going to have AI delivering massive solutions in this disruption.

Well, not only me, but I actually am in discussions right now with an organization that has some of the smartest AI people, I think, on the planet. We've already got it up and running. We're doing 50 languages. We're doing counseling. I wouldn't recommend the average therapist. I'm not being disrespectful. I wouldn't recommend the average coach.

In any industry, there are people who are exquisitely good, but they're hard to get to or their schedule's full. So, we're going to make this available literally worldwide for people to help them manage. They could pop on an app and make it happen. Right now, it's done for free for people. At some point, there'll be a price point, but it'll be reasonable.

Also, they haven't announced it yet, but the federal advisory committee on health and human services has had, I guess, almost 2,000 people apply. I didn't apply, but there are 15 people on it, and they just selected me. I'm going to be the person on the mental health side. So, it gives me a chance to really look at how I can have some influence on the governmental side to use some of these digital tools that can help us do that, because I think digital tools are part of the answer. As you can scale them, I think it's the only answer at scale.

When you look at your 6 human needs, right? Certainty and uncertainty, variety, significance, love, connection, growth, contribution. AI's hitting every one of those in a disruptive fashion, right? Just in terms of teenagers having relationships with AI girlfriends, that's going to disrupt the normal course of social development for individuals. I mean, there's the level of uncertainty that's going to hit people in their jobs, and the level of certainty when I always know I can go get an answer and I have my AI that loves me and always answers me. You know, significance—

Does it love you? But it always affirms you, even if you're being an idiot, and tells you your jokes are hilarious.

So smart. That's such a great idea, right? [laughter] And it's crazy. It is. So, I mean, it's going to screw with our 6 human needs.

It already is, as you said. There's more certainty for me to pick up my AI, and I don't know if you saw, but the latest statistic in Japan is that no one's having sex. Yeah.

Right? They've moved completely out. They're burnt out by work, and then they fulfill themselves digitally in every way. They're, as you know, robots. They think of a soulmate. So, they have a completely different frame.

But I saw a statistic the other day that blew my mind. Here in the United States right now, among young men 25 to 33 years old, less than 1/3 have ever approached a woman to ask her out for a date physically. And that goes along with home ownership. It's crazy. We're destroying the existing social fabric in many ways.

The challenge is, I believe, we're just at 5% of it all. You and I both—we can't estimate something so big, but I think you're right. It's at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. But I do think there's a solution that's available to us on a larger scale, too, if we can, at a fundamental level, get people to understand the story of their life.

What is your life? It's a story. If you think about it, if you go to a movie or read a book, there's usually 7 elements of a story. The fundamental thing that tells you what the story's about is that the main character has a desire—a driving desire. If you go back 30 years and look at a terrible movie that almost everybody's seen, Schwarzenegger made this movie called True Lies.

In the beginning of this movie, you see this guy and realize he's a spy and he's going after the bad guys. So, you know what his driving desire is. Your desire determines the story. Is your desire to become one with God? Is your desire to make $1 billion? Is your desire to help the planet? Is your desire to save children? Is it to write poetry? That starts your story.

Then the next part of your story is you take a look at this and start to say everybody has a problem or a need, or they wouldn't be after that desire. What you'll see often is that you, as the person reading or watching the story, can see the main character is missing courage, or they're not very kind, or they're not telling the truth.

In that silly example I gave of Schwarzenegger, he looks like a superhero, and he goes home and you realize his family doesn't even know he's a spy. He lies to everybody about everything, right? So, he doesn't have courage at home. He doesn't have honesty. He doesn't have connection.

Then the next part of the story is there are always opponents. There are 3 opponents. There's the external opponent, like those bad guys out here, but then there's the intimate opponent. In that movie, he thinks his wife is cheating on him, and she's not, so he has fights there. But then there's ultimately the fight within yourself—the internal opponent.

As you fight that, you usually come up with a plan to deal with these opponents. And if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans, right? You have battles. But eventually, if you keep going through those battles, you have self-revelation. You have a moment when you realize, “Oh my God, it's not her, it's me. I'm not being honest. I'm not being courageous. I'm being courageous here, but not here, where it matters.”

That self-revelation leads to new actions, new character, and then you get to an equilibrium where life will never be the same again—or, you know, happily ever after. Those elements of a story, if you can see where you are, where your desires are, what your current plan is, and who you're battling with, allow you to step out of reaction.

But the ultimate step out is this: the oldest story of humanity. First of all, you need a really good opponent. If you look at The Silence of the Lambs and see Anthony Hopkins with Jodie Foster, he's so brilliant and makes her a bigger hero, right?

The hero's journey story has been taught a million times. It's in every culture in the world, and we all know Joseph Campbell. But I just want to remind people that if you can think of your life in terms of the hero's journey, whatever you're dealing with—technology change, job change, career change—everyone is going to experience what the first step in that hero's journey is.

Your life seems to be okay, and then something happens. It's called the call to adventure. It doesn't feel like an adventure when your house burns down. It doesn't feel like an adventure when you're burglarized. It doesn't feel like an adventure when you lose your job, the government shuts you down with COVID, or you find yourself in a position where someone says you have a tumor. But it is the beginning of an adventure if you don't give up.

When you experience that extreme stress, we're all going to experience it. It doesn't matter how spiritual you are, how religious you are, how much of a believer you are. It doesn't matter how rich you are. It doesn't matter how sincere you are. Everyone's going to experience it more than once.

But what happens is most people try not to go on the call. They just ignore it. And then it only gets worse, as you know. The old phrase is, “If you're going through hell, keep going.” If you push through those moments, the people who do get 3 things out of it.

Number 1, they realize how strong they are. All these other things you're worried about go away because you start realizing, “I am so much more than I thought I was.” Second, you learn who your real friends are—not your Facebook friends, or whoever you call them, right? The ones who are there when it's not going well. And third, you get almost an immunity to future challenges.

I have a friend who was in Vietnam and was shot down as a pilot and spent 6 years in solitary confinement. A year later, I remember the IRS was coming after him, and I asked, “Aren't you stressed?” He's like, “After the North Vietnamese? Are you kidding me? This is no problem here.” [laughter]

The first step in that journey—think of it like The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy has this nice black-and-white life. It's okay. She thinks a big deal is that somebody wants to take her dog from her because the dog bit somebody, right? Little Toto.

Then what happens? She avoids any real change. She just tries to run away. But then life comes and gets you. When you try to refuse the call, it says, “No, you're going on the journey.” The tornado takes her.

She finds herself in a new world where there are new people. She makes new alliances. She meets new mentors who are going to help guide her. And she starts to go past the threshold where she can't go back.

She’s on this road. She’s on this new journey. On that journey, she goes through an ordeal. She has to fight the dragon. The witch in this case is the Witch of the East and the West. She’s going to get to the promised land where Oz is going to give her everything.

She goes through all these fights, learnings, and experiences, and she becomes more. When she gets there, she finds out, “This guy is not the person who’s going to change my life. The answer is already inside of me.” The Tin Man discovers that he already has a heart. The Scarecrow understands he’s got a brain. Yes, the Lion has demonstrated courage. It’s not that you weren’t fearful; you did it anyway. For her, it’s tapping your feet and saying, “There’s no place like home.”

When you go through that cycle, when you slay the dragons, you become more and you now have something to give. You come home a new person. As soon as you think it’s all over, it happens again. When I lost my home, I donated $6 million because I couldn’t stand the pain I saw people in LA experiencing. I don’t live in LA, but I saw people there get a 14-day pass. What are they going to do without a home?

I tried to help as many people as I could. Some of the people I helped individually, and some of the people I got to talk to, I said, “I lost my home 20 years ago. It burned to the ground. Everything I had was gone, but my family was alive. That’s what mattered. Everything else was gone. There was no place to store your pictures or your history in the cloud.” I said, “But what it led to was a whole new world. I met new friends. I had to move to a new place. I met new mentors.”

I have a dear friend I recently talked to who lost his home a year ago during that time. He’s in the best shape he’s ever been in, and he never would have made those changes without the call. So AI is the call. New technology is the call for us to become more—to move from survival to spirit, to move from settling to something greater.

I agree with it all. I just want to go back to one point before we leave it: This does not exist throughout society today. A small percentage of the populace have come to your programs and learned your teachings, as I have. I’ve been, I think, both a close friend and a student of yours.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, if you remember those books, foretold the collapse of the empire. The whole story is about how we shorten the dark age. I believe, from everything I’m seeing, that we’re going to have a period of disruption. Is that disruption 3 to 5 years, 3 to 8 years, or 3 to 10 years? I don’t know.

The challenge has to be: How do we ameliorate the issues? How do we shorten that time? I think this whole transformation of mindset, purpose, and understanding this as an opportunity and a calling versus the devastation of your career is critically important. For whoever is listening to the podcast, I think this is important to teach your kids and for you to internalize on your own.

I think those who are heads of corporations or government leaders need to start this conversation and this kind of planning today, because it’s going to take 2 or 3 years to roll out. I think this has got to be in middle schools and high schools. I’m decimated by the fact that high schools today are avoiding the discussion or utilization of AI. This is coming. The wheel of fortune rolls faster than ever before. We need to understand that.

This is a quote from a dear friend who basically said, “AI is not a hand grenade; it’s a jetpack.” That’s how you should think about it. It’s not something that’s going to blow up your life. It’s something that enables you at scale. So I think, Tony, the conversation is: How do we do that? How do we get this deployed?

I think it’s certainly not just what I’m teaching. I’m one of God only knows how many people who have these insights. I think what it is, is having systems of scale. The education system is a huge part of that process. That’s why I’m personally investing in several approaches where it’s a different form of teaching. They’re private groups right now, but I’m looking to find that ideal formula.

As you know, there are many of them where AI is a part of the process and you can massively accelerate traditional learning. But then kids are learning to have grit. We’ve got 5-year-olds doing a 5K on their trikes, and they don’t think they can do it, but they find out they can. Or a group of kids comes together and learns how to rent and create their own Airbnb experience. There are experiences of life that are coming, and there’s a lot of it happening right now. But is it going to come together?

Look, 3 to 5 years, probably we’re going to have some very challenging times. To think that you’re going to have every season be the same is absurd. We all think that however it is right now—if it’s terrible, it’s always going to be terrible; if it’s good, it’s always going to be good. But the four seasons of life happen.

We will go through a tough summertime, or you could call it a tough wintertime. Some people freeze to death in winter; other people learn to ski and snowboard, build a fire, and be with their family. What I’m suggesting is that our discussions, and many other discussions—not just the ones we’re having—will hopefully stimulate more people to say, “I’m going to choose to have this be a season I love, enjoy, and grow from, not one I’m fearful of.”

At the same time, I know not everyone will. I’m going to do everything I can to support individuals, organizations, or tools that can help people navigate this time period. On the other side of it, again, you’ll have another springtime. There are times when people are optimistic, everybody believes everything’s going to go great, and it goes that way for a period of time. But you’ve got to remember, human beings are cyclical, just like the seasons. Our emotions are, too.

We go 15 or 20 years—if you study 1,000 years of Roman history or 500 years of Anglo-American history, which I’ve studied pretty deeply, you see there are periods. There’s that springtime where everybody’s optimistic and it’s great. But eventually, if you smile constantly, your face hurts. We need variety.

Then you go through—or the universe goes through—a summer that’s a little tough, a little hard. Then you go to the fall, where everything’s easy and you reap, and the economy’s great. Then you go through a great winter. Life is strengthening us, testing us, and then giving us a chance to grow. Testing us, and a chance to grow. That cycle is not going to go away because technology enters our world.

It doesn’t mean that because there’s no work, there won’t be seasons. Those seasons are part of nature; they’re part of something larger than ourselves. What you want to do is figure out how to take advantage of whatever season you’re in and how to help your family.

I think, coming back to developing some new habits, you can get your kids to take the 10 or 15 minutes a day they spend scrolling and learn AI instead—just 10 or 15 minutes a day. We do courses for people like that. Or you can say, “I’m going to study something in some area. I’m going to study nanotechnology. I’m going to study my own human psychology.”

Taking these little microlearning moments as a new habit will change people’s lives, because it will get them to start recognizing patterns, using them, and eventually creating their own. When you create your own, when you become a creator, all this fear disappears. It’s not that you won’t have challenging times; it’s just that nothing sustains you more than your own capacity, your own identity that says, “I find a way, always, to take things to the next level.”

The biggest thing missing, I think, for most human beings is that they’re looking at what they can get instead of what they can give. Every person I know, including you, talks about moonshots. We’ve found things we care about way more than ourselves, whether it’s your kids, your family, or your community.

I got fed when I was 11 years old, and it changed my life. We had no food. Now I’ve fed 62 billion meals. I did 1 billion on my own here in the U.S., and now we’ve done 62 billion toward our 100 billion meals. I learned how to scale—just like I did in business—my philanthropy, and that gives me more juice than anything else.

You’ve got to have something that you care about more than yourself. Then you have plenty of energy to face not just the challenges, but to surpass the challenges, because you’ll have a compelling future. The one thing I’d say everyone needs is this: Anyone can bear a difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow.

When we go through this process, we’ve got to show people how to navigate it and show them how to create a compelling future out of it. Again, I think what AI is really going to do, if it does the things that people are saying it’s going to do—if it really does eliminate a lot of our survival instincts, if we have access to an AI doctor, an AI whatever, and we can create what we want in our own life on our own terms—then the bottom line is, we still need to feel alive. We need to grow.

The one thing that makes people feel alive is progress. Progress equals happiness. If I’m growing and I’m stimulating that growth, it doesn’t matter that economics or survival are no longer the primary focus of it. It’s something else that will light me up.

And we need to find that—what you call a moonshot, what I call a magnificent obsession. When you find that, man, life is never the same again. You and I both know that. We have the privilege of living those lives. But we develop that compelling future, and we need to help other people do the same.

Yeah, agreed. We call it a massive transformative purpose: what wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going through the day, and that you obsess over.

You know, let's talk about something that I wrote about in my upcoming book, We Are As Gods. Tony, we've talked about the Universe 25 experiment. Our dear mutual friend, Dr. Oz, first brought it to my attention. If listeners don't know what Universe 25 was, let me do a quick recap.

There was a behavioral scientist named John Calhoun back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he created a mouse utopia. This was a large facility with all the food, water, and nesting material they needed—no predators and no disease. It was basically a mouse paradise. It was the 25th time he had done this, and he had gotten the results consistently over time.

Initially, he puts in 4 mating pairs, and the population grows exponentially. But it reaches a threshold where social behaviors begin to break down. The mice withdraw; they're apathetic and hyper-aggressive, and there's social dysfunction. The mice stop mating, parenting declines, and infant mortality spikes. He describes these mice called the beautiful ones: they groomed themselves all day long and lost any need for social behavior or reproduction. Ultimately, the entire society of mice collapses, not from any external threat.

He talks about how the actual need for purpose and meaningful challenge matters more than almost anything else. Let's talk about it. You've addressed that in part, but the purposeful life being absolutely critical—I think most of society's purpose is putting food on the table and taking care of their kids, or getting a Netflix account. We're going to have to up-level that to a huge degree.

It's true, but one thing I caution, though, is that we're not mice. You've done enough medical studies to know that about 80% of the studies that affect mice don't affect us the same way. But in this case, it's obvious. Mice do not have the creative ability that we're at least aware of for creating meaning.

We have that capacity. We have the ability to use death as a counselor—something that creates a drive for us to do something with our lives—and the ability to create something from nothing. But let's be honest: when people talk about Darwin, you hear people talk about it as the strongest survive. That's not what he said. He said—

That's true. It's not the strongest of the species that survives, and it's not the most intelligent. It's those that are most responsive to change—the most adaptable—that do it.

Yes. Our ability to adapt as a species is unmatched. It's why we dominate the planet, for better or worse—you can argue about that—but we dominate the planet. Having that sense of purpose, which we've talked about multiple times here, is critical.

But I think there are many people who are going to take what you call the WALL-E example. They're just going to be entertained by the world and grow into a fat person who doesn't move, just moves around on a scooter, versus the Star Trek thing, where you're going on the adventure to uncover what things are. That's always been true of humanity. That has never changed, and I don't think it's going to change with us.

There are going to be people who use AI and all this technology just to be entertained. Think about it: right now, among men from the ages of 25 to 35, a larger percentage are living at home than at any time in human history, including the Depression. What do they do? The majority of them play video games, their mom cleans and does their laundry, and they order Uber Eats. They live in that universe, that digital universe, where I don't know how much added value is happening for their life, much less anybody else's.

There's always going to be those who maintain, and there's going to be those who create. There's always going to be people like yourself—

You made my point. I think you made the point about the Universe 25 experiment. There is that population who are just self-soothing because it's easy. Unless there's intellectual groundwork placed early on in a child's life, that can become the default.

One of the challenges—and I think about this as a parent—is that you're a perfect example. Hardship early in your life develops this need. I had that conversation with Elon. He was in South Africa, which was a very dangerous place, and his goal was to escape there. Most successful people—not all, but most successful people—had a sense of hardship early on.

If we're eliminating a lot of physical hardships, you don't want to try and artificially create that. But again, I'm going back to how you up-level people's sense of purpose in this regard.

What you have to awaken is hunger. What you're really talking about is hunger. Hardship can awaken hunger, but so can creativity. Sometimes your life doesn't change, then you meet somebody, and they have this extraordinary life—something that you value, relationship-wise, business-wise, impact-wise, lifestyle-wise, whatever. People look at them and go, “Man, I'm as smart as that guy is. What the hell's happening here?” And they awaken to a new possibility.

It doesn't have to be because something was taken from you. There are some people who are just driven to be the best in their life, and there wasn't necessarily hardship. But I think more have been. That's absolutely true, because hunger is—

I'm asked all the time, “You meet people all over the Earth. You meet the most challenged and the most successful. What do the most successful people on Earth have in common?” My first response in the early days was extraordinary intelligence, because I love wickedly smart people, you being one. I'm not flattering you with compliments; you know who you are. I'm a fairly smart guy myself, and so I love that interaction.

But I found there are brilliantly smart people who can't fight their way out of a paper bag in real life. So the number one factor is hunger: the hunger to be more, do more, create more, and give more. A hunger that never goes away.

When you look at somebody like Richard Branson, he still has the hunger in his 70s that he had when he was 16 in that cemetery, starting up his little music company. It was Virgin at that time. He still has it today. As long as that hunger is alive, the world is going to be a beautiful place for you, and all these tools are tools you will use with your agency to create something extraordinary.

But look, there are levels of consciousness. Just one more model for a second. There was a guy named Graves, Dr. Graves, who, in the 1960s, saw that the world in the early 1970s looked like it was coming apart. Young people were fighting older people. People who just looked at the short term were saying our society was being pulled apart into nothingness: Black and white, women versus men, all these issues.

He started studying the evolution of societies, and he developed what he called 8 levels of consciousness. Anyone who hears about it, it's worth looking at. He called it Spiral Dynamics.

I learned about it when I had the chance to work with Nelson Mandela, because when he was coming back after a quarter-century of being locked up, he could have wanted to kill every white person in the world, and you wouldn't support it, but you'd understand, because everything was taken from him unfairly. But instead, he got people to stop thinking white versus Black by using these colors. He took these Spiral Dynamics and turned them into colors. Is that person a blue person, a green person, or a red person?

Let me give it to you in 10 seconds. There are 8 levels, real fast. Maybe you can put them on the screen later to show people. Level 1 is survival, or instinct. That's someone who's basically a baby, or someone who's really old and doesn't have their faculties. They're basically stimulus-response.

Level 2 of consciousness, what they call purple, is tribal order. You care about things, and you care about other people, because they can affect your pain or pleasure. So you join a tribe. You can be on a sports team and see people in tribal order who wear the same jockstrap, put on the same thing, and believe in certain rituals that are going to give them the same results—certain gods, right?

But in the tribal-order area, there's someone who leads, and it's usually the storyteller, the shaman. We evolve through each of these stages because we get to a point where we can't handle our problems, and so our brain finally forces us to look at life in a new way.

The 3rd level is called power gods. They think of the power god as red. Think of it as when you go to red, mad. A red person is someone who no longer just wants certainty; they want significance. A red person might be the kings of the past who took the peasants and said, “You work for me, you live for me, you die for me,” right?

Power gods—you can find a power god today in some bands. You can see them out there: rock stars.

They go and wreck the whole building, somebody pays all the money, and they keep doing it. Everybody was a two-year-old power god, right? “No” is the word you learned to say. So, not everybody evolves, and I’m telling you this because we get to certain levels, and they affect the way we look at life.

The fourth level is called Order in the Absolute. This is blue. Why would you go from being the power god, where you’re in charge and you own everything and you have the power and you’re the most significant one? Because at some point, you think about death, or you’re getting older and a young power god is coming up. And so that evolved into, “I need to figure out how I can be good forever.”

Blue became the idea of the religious approach: If I can follow these universal rules, then I can have heaven forever. I can have this kingdom forever. I can have this beauty forever. But now I have to go from just thinking about my own certainty and my own significance to, “How do I affect other people?” That was the value of religion. I have to look at that because it affects whether I’m going to be damned or not. And it became a new consciousness.

Well, blue has its limits, because after a while, people start to question: How could this one guy, whether it’s the pope or the general in the army—that’s another blue environment—be the one who has all the answers? The rules are clear: You live by them or you’re punished severely, right? Well, we evolve from that because people start saying, “I don’t buy it. I don’t believe they have the whole answer. I want to try it on my own.”

That evolved into what modern society is, at least in a good portion of America, which is what we call a StriveDrive, an orange. That’s a person who’s like, “No, I test the rules. I’m in business. I’m a scientist. I’m going to test it and prove it works.” And if it works, then it doesn’t matter what you think. That’s what science is. That’s basically what business is.

Then people get burned out on that eventually, because everything is a transaction. I’m doing this to prove that, to get this. And that can evolve to green, which is what most of us think of as socially conscious. Instead of everything being rule-driven, we all have a voice. We all care. We think about the environment. We think about everything.

But each level has its strengths and weaknesses. They all think they’re the most important level. If I ask people, “Which level are you?” some of you say, “I’m socially conscious. I’m at the top of the tree.” Or, “I’m a business person. We employ all you greenies and make it possible for you.” Or the reds go, “I don’t give a damn. You screw around, I’ll take your life.” Or the blues go, “I need to save you.”

They look at the same problems in different ways, but they all think they’re superior, when the truth is we need them all. It’s like I’ve said to you: What’s more important, the atom or the molecule? What would you say? They are one component in the other, and they’re both critical. The molecule or the cell? You get the game, right? The cell or the organism? The organism or the ecosystem? The ecosystem or the planet? The planet or the Earth? So, you take out any link in the chain, and we all fall apart.

They’re all invaluable, and the goal is to move up and down this. There is a seventh level called yellow, which is FlexFlow. Flex-flow knows that we need to have some sense of hierarchy, like orange and blue look at, but we also need to be able to flex like green can. It allows you to look at things and say, “Not who’s there because of the number of years, but who has the answers?”

And then the final level that he talks about is an awakened soul. That’s where you feel everything. I feel humans. My wife feels animals. She can tell what’s going on. We all have moments of these levels.

Now, why am I telling you this? Because right now, most of the world is in trouble, at levels 2, 3, and 4—meaning purple, red power gods, and blue order and absolutism. It’s this or it’s that, or I kill you, type of thing. Modern society is more level 5, that orange striver-driver, and some green.

AI is going to take away, potentially, if it can do the things that you were talking about and that Elon’s talking about, and bring this world of abundance. It literally takes us out of all these survival elements and calls for us to go to this integrated view of life, this spiritually awakened view of life, where we feel connected to everything and we can create things at that level.

So, there are going to be people who do that, and there are going to be people who are going to play their video games, or the new version of that that’s 3D and totally immersive, and we’re not going to get away from that.

But here’s what I’ll tell you about history: You can find history in 4 sentences. Good times create weak people. We had society back in the Roaring ’20s where, if you were a kid, you were known as a flapper and you were irresponsible, and the whole world changed with technology overnight: cars, radios, television, airplanes. It was unbelievable, and you thought, “When I turn 18 or 19, I’m going to get a car.”

You’re born in 1910, let’s say. And guess what? 1929 comes when you’re 18 or 19 years old, and people are jumping out of buildings, people are standing in food lines, and you’ve got the Dust Bowl in the middle of the country. That generation of people who were so weak went through 10 years of depression, from 1929 to 1939, and they got strong because they had to be.

Then, right when they thought they were going to have a break, World War II broke out. Hitler looked like he was winning, and they went and fought the war and came back. So, they spent 15 or 20 years—basically until they were 35 years old—living with unbelievable challenges, and that’s the only way you build a muscle.

So, guess what? Weak, easy times—the Roaring ’20s—created weak people. Weak people created bad times. Bad times create strong people, and strong people create great times. And you can see that evolution in every 100-year and 20-year cycle.

And today, you’ll hear people who are Generation X, or even somebody older, talk about millennials today or talk about Generation Z. They talk about how they’re so spoiled and they got it so easy. And there’s some truth to that. They haven’t had to work anywhere near as much as other generations.

But I guarantee you, we’re going to face some real challenges coming up, and those are the new hero generations. The very generations people don’t think understand technology are going to learn how to grow and build muscle, and they’re going to help make the world a better place, in my opinion. I think that’s the next step. That’s the evolution of consciousness that technology is going to call for us.

And speaking of conscious and brilliant individuals, I’m going to use this as a point to invite my moonshot mates in, if it’s okay.

Yeah, I would love that. Let’s bring them in, and I’ll introduce you to them.

Tony, I want to introduce you to 3 of my best friends, my moonshot mates, as I call them. Salim Ismail—Salim is the CEO of Exponential Organizations and was my co-founder with Ray at Singularity.

Yes.

Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is our resident genius in the world of AI and all things exponential. And Dave Blundin, my partner in my AI lab.

Yes.

Anyway, 3 amazing individuals, and I’ve had the chance to cover so many subjects with them. I wanted to bring them in to have this conversation for the next 30 minutes or so. I wish we were asking these questions to them so I could hear their answers, and I welcome you to ask the questions of them as well.

All right. We will. Some other time, we’ll do a follow-up.

Who wants to jump in first? Salim?

Tony, I’ve got to say, I’ve been teaching a class at MIT called Foundations of AI Ventures for the last 5 years—2 semesters, so 10 classes. About 130 people in each class. So, 1,300 people have heard me say, “Act like Tony Robbins.”

There’s only one winning attitude in life, because everyone comes in as a student. They think they want to be too cool for school, or they want to be, you know, like—no. There’s only one way to act that actually works if you have any desire to be an entrepreneur, a builder, or a creator. Just study every video of Tony and act exactly like that. It’s the winning strategy.

So, thank you for being a role model for those 1,300 people.

Thank you. That’s not to mention me, by the way. Thank you.

Very kind. Can’t be too kind to Tony.

Salim, as you’re dealing with these kids today, what are the biggest questions that they’re dealing with as they look at where the world’s unfolding with technology?

Exactly what you guys have been talking about. One thing you touched on is Japan, but if you look at Korea, it has the highest tech penetration in the world, the highest smartphone penetration in the world, and Samsung has record profits.

By any technical metric, it should be the greatest place on Earth. It has the highest suicide rate in the world and 0.6 children per capita. So basically, at that exponential decay rate, it’ll disappear from the Earth in just a couple of generations.

This is what they’re thinking about, and it’s good that they’re thinking about it, because they want to live in a happy, abundant, fruitful world with their friends—exactly the things you guys were talking about. AI is going to create a rate of change that is just beyond belief, and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with happiness. It needs to be turned into happiness.

Well, we’ve met people—we all know people—who have more than enough economic resources, billions of dollars, and who are miserable. Those are phone calls that I often get to deal with, dealing with people. So abundance doesn’t guarantee anything, but I do agree with you. I think, unfortunately, the level of engagement—what’s the biggest problem in business today? It’s engagement.

It’s the lowest level since COVID that we’ve ever had. They look at engagement, and what’s obvious is disengagement, which is what we now call quiet quitting, where someone’s doing the minimum. Then there’s active disengagement, which is someone who’s not only trying to do the minimum but also trying to hurt the company.

We’ve had the biggest drop in engagement and the highest increase in active disengagement. So what’s happening is people are fulfilling themselves in other ways. Why should I go to work? Why should I do this?

We have a cultural shift where technology is meeting some of those 6 needs. They’re getting certainty easily; I don’t have to do anything for certainty. I don’t have to grow, push myself, or face my fears. They get unlimited variety.

They can feel significant by tearing somebody down with a couple of keystrokes—someone they don’t even know—and there’s no consequence for that. They can also feel connected to other people the same way. But what they don’t experience are the spiritual needs, which are to grow. When we grow, we have something to give.

That’s where the emptiness is. That’s why we have so many people out there talking about their mental health. The solution that we’ve been promoting since COVID—or at least pop culture has been promoting—is this idea that you need to take care of yourself more.

What’s the term everybody uses these days? Self-care, right? “I need more self-care.” But what you find is that people get weaker and weaker. Don’t get me wrong, you need to take care of yourself, but I think the biggest challenge is that without the push to build any form of muscle—meaning a spiritual muscle: courage, faith, determination, creativity—if there’s no push for that, then we start to diminish.

I think what has to happen—I don’t have the right answers by any stretch. I’m actually encouraged by countries like Australia. There are some things I don’t like that they’ve done, like what they did during COVID, but I like the idea of some of these countries starting to say, “Hey, kids can’t get on social media until they’re 16, 17, 18. You only get so many hours.”

Unfortunately, you would expect that to be parents, but we no longer have family units in the same way or any cohesion in the teaching. Today, so many people—I read a statistic the other day that said a third of families have someone in their family they don’t talk to anymore. To me, that’s insane.

We aren’t teaching people that life is about sharing; we can have different points of view. If you have a different point of view from me, then I have to eliminate you. Or that words are violence. Chris Rock said to me, “If people say words are violence, they’ve never had their face slapped the shit out of them” on national television, right?

We have these belief systems poured into our younger generation that are actually harming them, and then we’re giving them tools that addict them and wondering why our society isn’t flourishing. It’s like this: When we have a bunch of people who are financially not doing well, we put them together in a project. How are they ever going to get better when there are no examples of success there?

We take a bunch of people who are crazy, put them in a mental institution, and wonder why they don’t get better. The way we get better is through different examples and offerings. So we need to go full force, in my opinion—as business owners, entrepreneurs, leaders, and people in politics—and start to say, “What are the 2 or 3 things that can make the biggest difference?”

Part of that has got to be in the educational system, as we’ve already talked about. But I think another part of that is: What is the discourse? What is the narrative about what’s going to give you a fulfilled life? Most people have fallen into making a living. They’ve been disappointed by so many things, they’re no longer designing their life, and now they’re in that maintaining mode and stressed all the time.

During COVID, there was a woman in The New York Times who did an article about all these people trying to do less and less so they’d be less stressed, and she taught them a 9-week basic time-management course. I mean, really basic. What she found was that their work level went up 3 times, and their life-satisfaction scores went up 4 times, just from learning how to get more out of their life. That is one of the greatest sources of power.

We don’t teach young people any of these skills, and they wonder why they wind up addicted to devices that are designed to addict them. You can see how this could go horribly wrong and how it could be really, really good. Exactly what you said, because AI could be like junk food—emotional junk food.

You get addicted to the easy path, and before you know it, you’re emotionally fat. Or it could go the other direction, where you commit that you want to be a better person and you just tell the AI, “Hold me accountable.” Yes.

And then it becomes like a life coach. It keeps you on track, encourages you, and motivates you. It really comes down to whether the—

—are motivated by improving the world or motivated by squeezing money out of you, or some other negative motivation. It’s all just making it up. What’s your bet on which one’s the driving force for the majority?

Well, I think you have such a huge following of highly motivated people, or people who want to be highly motivated. If there’s a good option out there, and we’ll keep track of it ourselves on this pod, you can point a lot of people toward it, and it can make a huge impact on the world.

Anything of that nature, I hope you guys will fill me in. If you’ve got access to me through Peter, I’m there in 2 seconds flat. I want to make sure that we get as much out there as possible.

Like I said, I’ve been put on the federal advisory committee for Health and Human Services, and some of that is on mental health. That should give me another avenue for having deeper discussions, because I know a lot of people in that position. Bobby Kennedy’s a friend of mine. Dr. Oz is a friend of mine. Marty Makary is a good friend of mine.

So we’ve got a lot of brilliant people in that area on the health side. I think you can attack it from the mental-health side as one part of it. But I think we’ve also got—you see all these kids who think communism is the answer, right?

I don’t know if the number’s accurate, but I heard or read somewhere that 80% of the female vote of young people went to Mamdani, right? It’s like, “Okay, here’s the solution, because it sounds so nice.” I’m old enough that I went over when it was still the Soviet Union. I was invited over because of the work I was doing with firewalking and things of that nature.

I went with a group of scientists and traveled the country. I got to see pure communism right up front. We traveled on a train literally from Moscow to Siberia and back over a period of 2 weeks.

We were on a train where everybody was supposed to be equal, and everybody there was having caviar and everything else. At every train stop in every town, there was a giant central area, and you’d see people wrapped up against the freezing cold, 3/4 of a mile around, waiting in line to get a gallon of milk and half a loaf of bread.

I mean, these people were having caviar. It turned me into a capitalist. I didn’t know what a capitalist was, but when I left there, I was so pissed.

Kids today have no clue. They just think it means more good stuff. Some of these kids have had a helicopter parent who took care of them their whole life, and so they think the government should be that. They don’t know the cost of what that’s going to be.

Unless we keep putting out the truth and find solutions to help them through this unique time, I think we’re in for a rough patch here for a period of time.

It’s amazing how much faith they put in the government, though, as if it’s there—like somebody up there must be studying and understanding all of this. I mean, you are the government now, right? That’s Tony. You’re the guy.

Actually, you should tell us more about that commission, because that’s going to be hugely important in this transition year. What is that all about?

Well, they just formed it, and really they haven’t even announced it all yet, but there were 15 of us on the council.

I'm the mental health one. I'm going to be sitting down with them. The first focus is tapping into digital technology to improve the quality of people's lives. I'm sure you know they're already going to invest now so that people on Medicare and so forth can wear their WHOOPs and measure what's really going on with them. They want people to have that.

But then there's the digital mental health side, like AI counselors, that can help people. As I said, I'm working with a company right now. We're producing some results that even blow my mind. It isn't an average person; it's the best of the best. They've read every single psychological book there is, but then we can guide them through some of the latest tools, because some of that technology is 100 years old. It would be like saying you wouldn't use a phone from 10 years ago—why would you even consider technology from 100 years ago related to our minds? But that's traditionally what we do in traditional psychology.

There are tools available in the digital world. The digital world can help us scale that. That's where we can make a difference.

You have one of the most powerful positions you could have in the entire world right now. What's one of the most powerful and important roles? I mean, that role as the person in charge of health with AI, federally, at the national level—you can't pick anything more critical to the success of the country and to the world, really.

I'm an advisor. I don't want to play a big role in this. But it does put me in a position to be able to take the stuff that I learned from you guys and other people and bring it to the table for discussion.

I think we have an administration here that, whether you like the administration or not, is aggressively trying to do the most it can to get people to be healthy again, to get poisons out of foods, and to operate in ways that could help people have an emotional base that is different from what we have right now.

Yeah.

We have the largest mental health issues that we've heard about in God only knows when. You've seen what suicide rates have been and so forth. Post-COVID, we've gotten weaker, and we've got to become stronger.

I keep telling everybody around the schools—they all hate the administration because they're cutting funding, whatever. I tell everyone, look, I don't care whether you like the administration or not. This is the only one that matters in the AI era. We're only 1 year into it, guys. There are 3 more years to go. Look at the rate of AI change.

So you either get comfortable with the administration, or if you wait it out, it's over. Four years from now, it's going to be a different world.

Tony, when you talk to young people, what are the best techniques you've found that awaken that hunger in them? What are the techniques and hacks that you've found?

I find that telling them my story is powerful. I never used to tell the story of what my youth was actually like. My mother was the most influential person in my life, and God rest her soul, I wouldn't be who I am without her. But she also mixed alcohol with prescription drugs, and when that happened, she was extremely violent.

I remember the first time I was with this group of kids. They were mostly from minority families with single mothers. I was up there speaking to them initially, and I could just see and read their minds: “This tall, rich, white guy—what the hell?”

So, for the first time in my life, I told the whole story. I was never derogatory; my mom had passed at this stage. I just told them the burning truth. I had them all crying their eyes out by the time I was done. Then they understood, “Hey, we have the same background elements.”

I told them, “Your biography is not your destiny. It doesn't matter where you've come from. It's the choices you make now.” I got credibility by entering their world in a way that was absolutely as real and raw as possible, and I used very direct language that they understood at that stage. I entered their world.

I find it's really critical to try to see who you're dealing with, no matter where you are in the world. If I'm going to speak in China, I have to understand the cultural rules there, or I'm not going to be able to reach people appropriately. I know the human needs are the same, but I still have to make it through those rules.

With kids, I find that if they can see that this is real—and we live in a world where everybody talks about the wealth gap—a big part of the wealth gap is that there are about a dozen people who are getting $100 billion, $200 billion, or $300 billion. That's very different from the mean, as we know.

When you're on social media, you used to compare yourself to the neighbor, right? Now you compare yourself to billionaires. There are, what, 3,000 of them roughly in the world? That'll make you feel like you're behind.

It's literally what made Russia change. People started to see what was happening in the West and said, “I want that.” But now we're creating a level of discomfort and unfairness for people because they're having the expectation that they should be the winners of the lottery. Not everybody is going to be, even if you're smart and incredibly skilled.

I think it's about getting real and showing that there's still a path, because so many kids think there's no path to having a home. I tell them, “Look, when I bought my first home, I was 18 years old. It was 2008, and interest rates at that point were 16%.” They look at me like, “Are you crazy?” People are complaining about 7% or 6%.

I think it's entering their world, showing them what's real, demonstrating that it still can be done, and helping them build a compelling future. To me, that's the most important part.

I'm a Tony Robbins AI subscriber, by the way. I've really been enjoying getting your stuff.

That's great.

Although I've got a slight beef with you. Back at Singularity University, you'd brought your Platinum Group, and I moderated for a couple of days. Then you took me aside afterward and said, “I need a couple of minutes with you.”

You said, “There's a group of people that know the world is changing dramatically. I call that the TED crowd.” You said there's a subset of that group that knows how deep and broad that change is, which is kind of like your Singularity people. But then there's the number of people that know what to do about it. I would put that group on one hand. And you said, “Salim, you're one of them. Don't stop if you have any inclination toward this stuff.”

That's been bugging me ever since.

Thanks a lot, pal. Appreciate it.

Alex, why don't you pop in? Alex, you want to say something brilliant?

The pressure's on. By the way, Alex has 3 degrees from MIT in 4 years—the 3 hardest you can get—and his PhD from Harvard. So it was actually 3 plus 1. Anyway, sorry.

Congratulations on your new advisory position. I should say, as a preliminary matter, I don't have any financial interest in your budding empire, but congratulations nonetheless.

I did have a question based on your anecdote about the Soviet Union. There are millions, as I understand it, who look to you for insight in terms of gaining financial freedom and thinking about retirement. And yet, in the next 10 years, there are many, myself included, who think that advances in AI are going to transform the way finance is done, perhaps beyond recognition.

First question: Would you be interested in leading a sort of Manhattan Project for the global economy to prepare people for a new world—a new economic world where perhaps money as we know it is obsolete and scarcity as we know it has turned to abundance?

I'm not sure I'm qualified to be the leader, but I'd love to be a supporter of it any way I could, of course.

One thing I try to get across to young people also, because this is coming, is that besides the obvious things they can do now—what they can do today and what they have control over—I remember when I was 18 years old, I had a teacher named Jim Rohn. He was a personal-development and kind of a business philosopher.

I had four different fathers, and one of the reasons I've fed a billion people in the US and 62 billion overseas is cuz I wasn't fed. It was Thanksgiving when I was 11. Somebody delivered food for our family when we had no food. We had crackers and peanut butter, but we didn't have a meal.

The reason I tell you that is I look at those experiences and say, “How can I help someone understand why it is that some schoolteacher”—I went to the schoolteacher and told him, “Look, I had 4 fathers. They're all good men, but we were always broke. We were always worried about where the next meal was going to come from.”

I said, “I'm only 17 at the time, and my current father is going through it right now. He's a good man. A schoolteacher, I think, in those days made about $35,000. Then you see this hedge-fund guy made $1 billion last year. I don't understand this. This doesn't seem fair.”

And he said something I'll never forget, and it shaped my whole life. He said, “Tony, you are right. We are all equal as souls on this planet, but we're not equal in the marketplace.”

I said, “What does that mean?”

He said, “Was it possible for someone to earn twice as much money in the same time? Four times as much money? 10 times? 100 times?”

I said, “Well, obviously. There are people that do it.”

I said, “How?” He goes, “That’s the answer. The how is, you have to become more valuable. If you go to work at McDonald’s and you get minimum pay, it’s not designed to be a great job. It’s a first job. It’s not designed to be your whole career. And the reason is, anyone can learn to do that job in a few hours, max. Today, even faster. There’ll be machines that are doing it in some of these places, right?”

He said, “It’s not worth much. Your job is to learn to do more for others than anybody else in the marketplace. If you become more valuable in your skills, your insights, your tools, and you have more you can give, and it’s what people need, there will be no limit.”

So, I think in any change of society that we talk about, where maybe economics are not as primary, there’s still the idea that we all need to find what added value we’re bringing to the marketplace, so to speak. When I say “marketplace,” I mean to our children, to our family, to our community. In other words, nobody feels valuable because you just tell them they are.

When people talk about self-esteem, I hate this term. It’s so overused. People say, “Well, I don’t have any self-esteem because when I was growing up, my parents said this and that to me.” Well, someone can tell you you’re the most beautiful person, you’re the smartest child on the planet, you’re brilliant, and you cannot believe it. You can have someone tell you you’re a piece of crap, and some part of you can say, “I’ll show you.” Right? Your self-esteem has nothing to do with whatever people said to you.

Your self-esteem is based on only one thing: esteem for yourself. And that is earned. When you get yourself to do something that’s incredibly difficult, and by doing it, it not only benefits you but others, there’s an explosion in self-esteem. I think whatever happens in the world, the idea that I’m here to bring something to life, that life is calling me to bring something—even if there’s no economics involved—is the most important element in having a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning, and therefore a healthier, vital, joyful, and meaningful life.

Yeah. A follow-up question, if I may, on the notion of scarcity. You’ve clearly impacted so many millions of people with your way of thinking in terms of finance and life outcomes. I have to ask you the contrarian question: What information do you still have in your mind that you haven’t already shared with the world? What viewpoint do you have that is so wildly shocking and not evenly distributed that, if you told me what it is now, it would make national or international news? What secrets do you have left?

First of all, I’m not that significant. I’m just one guy trying to help as many people as I can. I don’t pretend to be God or have these giant insights. I feel very lucky and sincerely grateful to be in the presence of people with the greatest minds—all of you. I honor and respect you.

But I don’t know. I think there’s an ongoing evolution in me, as I’m sure there is in you, right? If you and I stopped our growth and stopped our insights, how many of the insights that I have around intimate relationships, around how to scale a business, or around what you can do with your physical body and some of the breakthroughs that are there—those are continually growing.

Peter and I wrote that book just 2 years ago, Peter, was it? Maybe 3?

Life Force.

Life Force, yeah, 3 years ago. And, as I usually do, we wrote a little, tiny book with 700 pages. We used Bible paper so it doesn’t look too big, but I wanted to hit every angle, and I had the right partner with Peter, right? We could dig into everything there.

Even after that, in the couple of years since, there have been so many new things Peter and I do. We have businesses where those things can happen. I don’t know if there’s any one thing in one area. I’d just say I’m going to continue to evolve and then, as I do, try to use as many vehicles as possible to share things with people who are interested.

I’m not the right style for everybody. I’m quite passionate and intense, and I talk 100 miles a minute. That’s not the right style for some people. I may not come in the right package. But what I’m more interested in is platforms where multiple voices can make that happen, not just me.

That’s why I’m interested, for example, in AI interventions. Yes, I have an AI, and yes, we have AI interventions, but being able to pick a style that’s supportive or more challenging, or a man or a woman—all those choices in your language that you can access 24/7 when the problem’s happening, with someone with the level of skill that I would have, or someone else you would respect, or we would respect together—to me, that’s where it gets exciting.

I think it’s more the distribution of those distinctions into vehicles where people can have one-to-one relationships at scale. That’s what I try to do with feeding people: take it to scale. I’m fortunate enough to have my own private plane that uses a lot of fuel, so I was like, “Okay, what’s my fuel burn? How much am I using?” I found that I needed 3,000 trees, so I planted 100 million trees. I set a goal, and I did it in 4 years.

In everything I do, I’m looking to scale it. My wife and I witnessed some friends whose child was abducted and trafficked, and it was the most horrific thing you could imagine. We stepped in, and now, in the last 7 years, we’ve helped free more than 70,000 kids in that category. Scale, to me, is what I’m looking to do. Take any insight we can and scale it.

But I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or even the right answers. I have some answers for some people who are interested in that style.

One more question, if I may, along those lines, Tony. If you had the opportunity to upload your mind into the cloud and scale yourself indefinitely, say sometime in the next 10 years, would you take it?

100%. Why would you not? I’m not suggesting that everything I’m going to load there is going to be valuable. There’s a lot in there. You’d probably say, “It doesn’t work for me.” But you would allow people to select what is most valuable for them on a major scale.

Quite frankly, I believe that possibility, or at least a version of what you described, will happen in the next 3 to 10 years. I think it will. Whether I can put that in and then this vehicle goes away and my consciousness continues, like Ray Kurzweil talks about—who’s a dear friend of ours, and I love him to death—I don’t know if that’s the same thing.

I don’t know. I think there’s something called spirit that I believe in. I could be dead wrong. You could say it’s just ones and zeros, information, and data, but I don’t know if that’s there. To make a contribution beyond my lifetime is my goal already.

I don’t have any sense of self-importance, like I’m going to be a historic figure or something. But while I’m here, I want to help and touch as many lives as I can, and I want to leave as much as I can for my family and my grandchildren, and for anybody else who’s interested and finds value in it.

Since so much of what I think you talk about is willpower and everything connected with that, if you had the power, in connection with uploading or a high-bandwidth brain-computer interface or some other AI assistant, to gain conscious control over your dopamine response, would you exercise that?

That’s a great question. I’ve never thought about that. I think if I trusted myself to be judicious with it, yes, I think so. Otherwise, it’s just like every other technology. You can turn technology into a drug.

Most people turn problems into a drug. If you think about it, I don’t think the biggest drug on the planet is cocaine, pot, or heroin. It’s problems. The deepest fear everybody has is that they’re not enough.

I’ve never met anybody who, in some context, didn’t feel like they weren’t rich enough, smart enough, lovely enough, humorous enough, funny enough, or smart enough—whatever it would be for someone they care about. You may not feel it now, but we all feel it at some point.

That feeling of not being enough leads to feeling like you won’t be loved. I think those 2 fears are so strong in human beings that they dominate people. Most people create a story about why they’re not where they want to be, and that becomes like the wall that protects them. But the wall that protects them then imprisons them.

I look at these things and say, “I don’t want to become a dopamine machine where I’m just making myself feel good.” I think one of the secrets to life, in my opinion, is that most people don’t win the game of life because, number 1, they don’t know what the goal of the game is. They’ve never decided what their purpose is, right? If you don’t know the goal of the game, how are you going to win?

The second problem is that they don’t know the goal of the game, but they’ve got lots of rules: “I can’t do this. I must do that.” And the third problem is that their rules are often in conflict. They were taught, “Look before you leap.” They were also taught, “He who hesitates is lost.” So, how do I make a decision, right?

Another thing is, you’ve got to deal with other human beings who have different rules if you’re going to succeed in this life. You’ve got to deal with that.

Another one is that most people take things so heavily. The people who I think succeed in life know the goal of the game, at least for now—the purpose of what they’re about. They have decided there are some rules that they’re going to follow.

Something else that’s different—and this relates to your dopamine question, which is why I was triggered to tell you this—is that in life, you can do the right thing and get pain, and do the wrong thing and get pleasure. So, only a smart person learns to train themselves to give themselves pleasure when they really do what they believe is right, not what everybody else gives them accolades for, like AIs.

These AIs today are absurd. They make you feel like you’re the greatest person in the world, no matter what you say. That’s the stupidest thing in the world. If I do something that I know is wrong, even if the world doesn’t punish me, I give myself that hit.

My only concern with the dopamine side would be if it got abused. I don’t think I’d abuse it, but I’d have to think that one through because it would certainly be tempting once you’re in it. I got this for my son for Christmas, actually: the Claude “You’re absolutely right” sticker. Just a little reminder that you can’t fall into that AI trap.

It’s a total sycophantic process, and that’s why I’m reading about these women who are all having relationships now because they’re affirmed constantly. Their AI listens to them and affirms them continuously, and they think, “What do I need a man for?” That’s part of what we’re dealing with here. Salim, why don’t you jump in?

That’s the slippery slope. Tony, you’ve been coaching millions of people over decades. After looking back over that time, are you more optimistic about the world or less optimistic, given the transformation you’ve seen at the zeitgeist level? There’s almost nobody in the world who can comment on this trajectory as you’ve seen it over those decades.

It’s my 49th year. I’m just beginning. It’s almost 50 years. It blows my mind. Of course, I started when I was 3, you understand?

I am more optimistic, but Peter and I are dear friends and partners in several businesses, and I’m not as optimistic as Peter is about things sometimes. We tease back and forth. But I think here’s what I think about optimism: I think I’m realistic.

I don’t think you should go to your garden and chant, “There are no weeds, there are no weeds, there are no weeds.” When the weeds are there, I feel like I’ve got to see the weeds and rip them out. I don’t think this is a smooth transition to the future. I think there are going to be some bumpy parts of the road, but that’s part of our own growth physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and as a society.

But I am more optimistic, and I think optimism is the right route. I don’t know if you read Learned Optimism years ago—I’m sure you did, Alex—Seligman’s book. The great thing I found in that book was that he talked about how pessimists are always more accurate about their performance than optimists. They’re much more accurate in their description of how they perform.

Optimists always think they perform better than they have. But because the optimist thinks they’ve done better, they do it again and again, and they keep going, so they tend to succeed. I think if you had to pick one, you’ve got to be optimistic.

Secondly, I would say here’s what I’m optimistic about: I’m optimistic as I look at not just the last 50 years, but when I study 1,000 years of Roman history or 500 years of Anglo-American history and see the cycles. I’m very optimistic that the kids of today—and I’m calling people in their 40s “kids,” which might be insulting to them; it’s not meant to be. I’m just turning 66 in a few weeks here, so I feel a little differently about it now.

In other words, millennials and Gen Z, I think they’re the next heroes of our society. I’m extremely optimistic that the things we’re going to face, they are going to be the ones who actually step up and help us through that transition in an effective way.

Just going back 1 century, the flappers became the greatest American generation. We call them the Greatest Generation. These people are going to face significant challenges, and I think they’re going to grow as a result. I think we’re going to have a new springtime, but we’re not going to get to spring without going through winter.

People think we’re in winter right now. I would argue we’re in winter, but we’re not in the strongest part of winter. The strongest part of winter is when we get the kind of technological jolt that happens if we’ve got a serious cyberwar with China. We have a cyberwar already, obviously—certain things that can push us to have to look at things in a different way.

I think those things are coming, and technology is going to push them. Internally, these job losses that are already starting to occur can become part of that push as well. This is a long answer to say that in my 50 years of service—almost 49—I am more confident today because I’ve seen long-term patterns, not just short-term ones.

I’m also more confident because of what’s available today to the average human being. Think about it: we live better than the greatest pharaohs in the world. What would they have given to be able to fly from one part of the world to another in a few hours, something we complain about when it takes an extra hour or two? What would they give for an actual bathroom?

Better yet, could they spend $100 million on a movie to entertain them for 2 hours and have people backed up around the block, when we’re paying $10 for, what, a hundred movies available right there on your TV set? People’s quality of life today is greater than the pharaohs’, and it’s going to become even greater.

The question is, can we get our human psychology to keep up with the technological advances? That’s the good question that we all face.

The good news here, Tony, is that the same technology that’s giving us these problems allows us to scale the solutions.

That’s right.

We just need to get more people focused on solutions. We’ve got about 5 minutes left.

I’d be curious to press one more time, Tony, on the contrarian question: what belief do you have that you think no one else in the world does?

I just don’t think I’m that unique. I appreciate the question, but I think multiple people would say the same thing. I’ll give you a core belief that I have that not everybody has. It’s a core belief, and I developed it maybe out of necessity—I don’t know how you want to look at it—but I really believe that life is always happening for us, not to us, even though it looks like it’s happening to us.

I believe that because I’ve lived long enough, and I’m sure you have as well, Alex. If you look back at your life—or any of you—how many of you have had an experience in your life 5, 10, or 15 years ago or more that, when it was happening, felt like the worst thing to happen in your life? You never wanted to go through it again, and you never wanted anybody you care about to go through it.

But 5, 10, or 15 years later, with the power of perspective, you look back and go, “Man, I see the universe’s or God’s value in that. That made me so much stronger, it made me care more, or it made me more sensitive to this.” I haven’t been able to find anything where I couldn’t find that to be true when I gave it my focus.

Of course, if you think life is happening to you, that’s all you find. I think that frees me from this punishment cycle that people have for themselves, or that they think God, the universe, or the world is imposing on them. It frees me from the idea that somebody is pushing me down and the system is against me.

I look at it all as a worthy opponent. It’s designed so that I become more, so that I can give more, so my life has more meaning while I’m here, and hopefully when I’m gone.

Tell me about the Time to Rise event coming up, and how do people find out about

I've done this since I did this since COVID. It's like people were trapped at home, and I was like, "How do we help people in the middle of all this?" And I said, "I'm going to do a seminar. I'm just going to do two hours, three hours." I said, "No, let's do three days. Let's do about two and a half, three hours a day. Make it enough that it doesn't take their whole day, but it's like going to a great movie, but your life transforms." And what we do is we'll have over a million people every year from virtually every country in the world, and it's coming up, uh, I believe it's January 29th through the 31st, and 2:00 p.m. Eastern. We have people joining from all over the earth. And what we do is we walk people through the process of making some of these changes. And at night, they're part of a community of a million or more people literally all over the earth, and people put up videos showing the assignment I gave them and how they changed. And you see this community over three days come together and transform. So, there's zero charge for it. It's not partially free, it's totally free. And all they got to do is go to, uh, timetorisummit.com and register, and they can join us. And if they're doing it at home, they can do it with their family. If they're doing it through the office, they might want to It's fun to do with some of your friends. It's a very fun process, but it'll show you how to increase your energy, it'll show you how to get clear what you really want, it'll show you how to deal with the obstacles, it'll show you how to retool yourself in the areas that matter most, your body, your emotion, your relationships, your finances, just in three days. And it gives people momentum. Instead of waiting until the first of the year, by the time we do this—we always do this in the third week—people have set their New Year’s resolutions, those who even do it anymore, and usually by that time they’ve already broken them. Resolutions don’t do it. You need a plan and a strategy, and you need a community to support you.

I’ve made it so you don’t have to travel, and you don’t have any cost. It’s just our way of trying to see how we can help a million or more people each year, and I’m excited to do it. Peter Diamandis

I love you, brother. Thank you for all that you do in the world. I’m just grateful and can’t wait for Tony AI to scale.

I think it’s one of the most important conversations we’ve had here.

Well, Peter, and all of you, I really mean it sincerely: you guys are doing amazing work, and I love how your podcast has grown like crazy. I know friends in other countries who watch you guys religiously, so thank you for all your contributions. I appreciate it so much. Grateful.

Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Salim. Dave, thank you. Great to have you here, buddy.