AI Reset: "Life As We Know It Will Be Gone In 5 Years" - Upcoming Utopia vs Dystopia | Salim Ismail

We have two futures in our world today. Either a Mad Max future or a Star Trek future. Do you think that as we transition over to AI that it will take us through a valley of despair or is this going to be a straight line to utopia? Oh, no. Big values of chaotic despair. An AI is going to be a million times smarter than you. This is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen. How do they create the next billion-dollar company with three people if that's the way to play it? This is what needs to happen. Describe the most likely sequencing over the next 30 years. Uh I think we For me, the AI transition is typewriter to word processor. It's just an uplifting and enabling of all sorts of capabilities across multiple, multiple sectors and industries and it transforms how we do things pretty fundamentally from creativity to uh rank and file work to blue-collar work to etc. I think the robotic stuff is further down the line than most people think. Uh Peter's very excited about it. We have all the human-powered robots, but robotics is really, really hard and it will take much longer, in my opinion. But the AI stuff will actually allow us to uplift ourselves very quickly. And you know, we talk about scarcity to abundance. I think AI gets us to abundance very, very fast. And I think that's for me the most exciting and optimistic side of things. We have two futures in our world today. Either a Mad Max future, which you can see playing out in Gaza or Ukraine, or a Star Trek future. Uh where we have abundance and we're operating on a on a much more highly conscious basis, etc. And so, which future do we pick as a human species is the choice that's in front of us right now. Okay, so you believe that there's a branching path before us uh and we get to choose which path we go down. It's a little We're actually heading down the Mad Max path. So, if you look at our politics, you look at what's happening, you look at the the political rhetoric here in the US, there's a huge transitional shift happening and you could my my favorite sensible way of dealing with or talking about that is a centralized decentralized shift. Right, we run the world today on very centralized systems. Governments and corporations and the military industrial complex etc. We're moving to much more decentralized and bottom-up peer-to-peer systems and you could call that a male archetype versus a female archetype if you want to go there. But when you get to abundance you want a female archetype to be running the world. Because the female archetype shares resources around naturally. So for example the male archetype when it meets abundance relates to it as power and tries to hoard it. Middle East oil, Wall Street money etc. Female archetype meets abundance and shares it around. So you really need a sharing decentralized model as we move the world to abundance. And that's the tension that I think I see in the world more than anything is that centralized to decentralized architecture. And we've started to see the rise of this over the last few decades the Burning Man philosophy open source movements DIY movements the maker movement etc. Democracy itself is a is an is a bottom-up movement as a reaction to feudal systems and and top-down empires. And we're moving in that direction it's just slow and painful and centralized systems don't like to relinquish power and we know that very clearly. So that's the tension that I see that's playing out that's underpinning all the other how it's showing up. So for example when I think about Trump or Brexit it wasn't left versus right it was actually urban versus rural. Brexit was 100% London versus the rest of the country. Why would that be the breakpoint? Because there's a tension in cities and how do we allocate resources to cities versus the countryside. Where people because the metabolism of a city is much faster innovation happens very fast in a city. And so therefore that that's the environment in which we're doing most of our of our innovation work and technological development today. And if you're left behind, you get very unhappy with that. And so this is the tension that I think we're seeing around the world. So we have this fundamental tension between things could go well, things could go poorly, uh splitting between the different archetypes, male, female, how we respond to abundance, power, or sharing the resources, uh urban and rural. Um I'm starting to get a sense of where you're going. Do you think that as we transition over to AI that it will take us through a valley of despair, or is this going to be a straight line to utopia? Oh, no, big values of chaotic despair. These types of transitions, I think this is the biggest transformation in the history of civilization, maybe the history of species on on Earth. It's that big. And the transition is going to be very painful. They never are clean. Right? Like dinos- asteroid hits and the dinosaurs get wiped out, and now you have a Cambrian explosion types. I think that's the kind of transition we're seeing here. Okay, that that is uh arguably the most devastating thing to ever happen to life on this Earth. Yeah. Uh and Wait, I don't I don't believe AI gets us there. But it's Meaning AI will not have that kind of cataclysmic That's right. not going to affect it. That's right. I actually am am hugely optimistic about the future. So just that's important framing point. Um but there's no question in civilization at least, this is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen. And I think the next 30 years def- defines the next 300 years. Why will the next 30 years define it? What What does that look like? Is that the period of transition? Yeah, it's a transition period, and this is chaos theory, right? The initial conditions are really critical, and how you navigate those initial conditions with uh with as much experience, guidance, and a lot of luck will then guide the rest of the future. If you know chaos theory, the idea is that if you drop a pebble down the top of a mountain, it doesn't matter how many times you drop the pebble, it's always going to take a different path because some micro change in the initial atmosphere or the pressure when you released it or the first bounce or the density of the first thing it hit or the change in humidity along the way will have it go down a different route. So, you never know what's going to happen, but it just knows we're just in the really big transition, and it's super exciting. But, it's very, very chaotic. I have heard you that this is going to be very difficult to predict. However, one of the most interesting descriptions of quantum mechanics I heard is that yes, while all things are simply probabilistic, the world that you see is the most likely. And I thought that was a really great explanation. So, assuming that, knowing that no matter how many times you drop the pebble, it'll be different, but there's there's a most likely sort of cluster of effects. Yeah. Think of it as a a stock market chart, right? You never have a clear, straight line. It's always a choppy, and then it stabilizes, then it has a breakthrough moment, and then it's choppy again. It's kind of like that. I think that's the pattern that we see. Okay. What causes that? Like, I can actually explain economically what's going on in terms of human greed, fear, and the way that cultural energy will move through a medium. That can be an economic medium. So, you can actually see cultural energy move through a stock market. If anybody paying attention to Bitcoin, I would just tell you right now that is simply a cultural idea that is spreading through the medium of cryptocurrency. I won't derail the conversation on that, but like with that in mind, that to me, my base assumption about those jagged lines is that is human the human brain responding in a somewhat predictable way, and you can watch that idea ripple through, including sort of bounding it. So, it's only going to go up so high and it's only going to go down so low. And so, you see this sort of bounding fluctuation. And you can look back through history and you see that same sort of bounded fluctuation. Now, those bounded fluctuations to me are terrifying. And if you read history, because like I said, the long arc is bending towards prosperity for all. And if you zoom out long enough on human time scales, it's unbelievable the progress made. Oh my god. But that that does not help the guy whose family all gets rolled up in rugs by the Mongols and trampled to death. Like that's just no consolation. And so, I'm saying we're all that guy, right? We all live one life. We are bounded from a time perspective so far. And so, it matters to me a lot where I am on these jagged lines. So, going back to AI, what are these jagged lines? Do you buy into my thesis or do you have a different one? Oh, I I agree with you, but with some caveats. So, for example, the economic outcomes of AI, I think are pretty clear in terms of what's going to happen. I think we're going to see massive productivity gains across the board. Um the challenge we have is the underlying system is flawed in terms of economic development and economic growth. Right? Our entire system, global system is money is the main mode of discourse in the world today. And it's good because if you think of money as a form of energy, we freed money energy from religious structures and feudal systems. And then the power of ideas came along and the power of technology came along. And now it flows very nicely, very quickly to new ideas and good ideas. Uh via via venture capital, via private equity, Bitcoin. New ideas can pop up and money will flow where the best ideas are. So, that's fantastic on level. But um we're moving from money as a main mode of discourse in the world to information as a main mode of discourse in the world. So, for example, any startup would much rather gather data about things rather than getting money early because they can monetize the data much more. They're fungible today. You can convert money into information and vice versa. Over time, information becomes a higher order bit. Right? Because take your health, you're much more interested in the different biomarkers you can track than how much it'll cost you to fix things, etc. because the information is more valuable. So, I think as a at a very metaphysical level, we're shifting from the quest for money and the quest for uh greed, etc. and energy that way and shifting it into information. When we move that transition, now things become really powerful. I think this is the massive insight that Ray Kurzweil had when he was starting to track Moore's law that as we digitize, we turn things into information. That information can then be manipulated into back into matter, back into money, and vice versa. And you have this amazing cyclical pattern that can take place. And little by little we're moving more and more into that. Over time, money will become less important on this scale. If you went back a thousand years ago, we were all working 18 hours a day in the fields to put three meals on the table. And you didn't still are, Saleem. And some of us still are. But we But you didn't have a choice then. You pretty much had to do that. Only a very small percentage of population could not do that. Right? Today, that number of that population that can doesn't have to do that is much, much, much bigger. And little by little as we do better vertical farming and solar energy into all sorts of remote parts in the world and satellite internet and water extraction out of the atmosphere, pretty much we'll have be able to have an amazing life anywhere on the planet at for every level of humanity. That's why Peter gets so excited. That's why we get so excited about the technological progress. The problem is our social systems. And all our infrastructure and all our institutions are not geared for smooth progress in this thing. I think to summarize those lines that you were talking about, I would quote E.O. Wilson, the famous biologist, who said, um, our the problem with humanity is that our emotions are paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, and our technology is godlike. Right? Pretty much all the problems in the world come from the gaps in those layers, and I think the pressure is so intense today that will any leader today will spend the next 20 years of our lives uh, basically dealing with the gaps in those in those layers. Yeah, let's name that the human problem. The human problem. So, my thing is the human problem is not going anywhere. So, for instance, you were just talking about, um, right now people are seeking money, that becomes the game, but now the information is going to become the higher order bit, people are going to start pursuing that. But, what I will ask is why? And the answer to me seems self-evidently, it's more powerful. So, you still have humans playing a game of power, which is why I'm still very concerned about these valleys of despair, because unless something changes in our biology that makes us pursue different things, we will simply derange AI. We will simply derange the pursuit of information. And while you and I share a very optimistic vision of the long-term future because of that long arc, what way do you see us, so going back to your branching choice between Mad Max or Utopia? How do we nudge humanity to not go down Mad Max, which you're saying we're doing currently, and instead go to Utopia? What How do you solve the human problem? I think you open up as fast as possible and decentralize as fast as possible. Okay? So, the, uh, number two two uh, Zelensky in the Ukraine is one of our community members. So, I've got a global Open EX O community that are building for the 21st century, building companies and transforming governments, etc. Um and I chat I was chatting with him and he was asking some advice. Turns out they've been using my book a bit in in their dealing with the what's happening there. And one of the comments I made is, "Look, this is how is it that you've become so resilient as in terms of the in the face of the aggression?" And he said, "We decentralize the country." We decentralize the country so there's no single point of attack for energy or for infrastructure or for electricity, etc. We've been doing that for 10 years because we could see this could be a likely possibility. So, I think what happens is when you decentralize things become much much more resilient. Just take energy for example. If you decentralize, we can have solar energy powering lots of small communities, then there's no need for security at the central power grid because there isn't one. And anybody can generate solar energy at very local level. And the efficiency means we'll get better and better at storing it and better and better at generating it. And now you have amazing resource capability anywhere at a wonderful level. Most of our wars over the last 100 years have been over energy, oil specifically, right? So, when we free ourselves from that, hopefully you should get to a peaceful nature. Now, I was under the impression for a while that huh, when we get to abundance that we won't be fighting anymore. And I got disillusioned from that by a couple of the deep thinkers who said, "No, we'll still have lots of human conflict because humans are really geared towards conflict." And X Prize, we try and push people towards healthy competition and let's work things out that way. We've got all sorts of really great ways of dealing with the natural conflict that we bring up in human beings. For example, sports teams, the Olympics, uh uh etc. And that allows us to vent a lot of kind of aggression that might otherwise come out in other ways. But we still have to deal with the fundamental human nature problem. And I'm I'm hopefully the the abundance side gets there faster than some lone small team of people trying to use AI to design a virus that will attack all middle-aged Indian bald guys. Right? That would be the the hope. Okay. So decentralization. I am one of the few people that is beyond obsessed with cryptocurrencies, web 3, uh and believes that decentralization is just deeply problematic. So the reason I think that decentralization is deeply problematic is that you cannot galvanize the energy of humans well. And so while some things will respond to decentralization very well. So take um the very nature of the blockchain, the fact that it is distributed, that they all run as nodes is brilliant. I'm here for that. I love it the most. Yeah. Uh however, I am doing battle with Coinbase, for instance, which keeps wanting to verify my identity, keeps asking me where I got my money. I'm like, "Bro, I'm about as public as you get. I don't know what else you want me to show you." Uh but I want them to be centralized because I don't want to have to like do a bunch of crazy stuff to make sure that I'm getting my crypto exchange in a safe way, all that stuff. So I'm I'm making a willing trade uh for simplicity, for security. I know all the memes, but nonetheless, and I think that more people are like me. Okay, so people want centralization, and you have a hard time aiming everybody's energy in the same direction when all the decision-making is completely distributed. Yeah. You also have what our founding fathers were trying to protect against, which is the tyranny of the majority. Yes. And so there are reasons, I think, to be skeptical that decentralization is a magical solution. Um Um so let's use Ukraine since you brought them up as an example. There's a guy named John Mearsheimer, brilliant political thinker, um military, I don't know if he's officially a strategist, but anyway, he seems to deeply understand that. And he just keeps saying, Ukraine is going to lose. It is inevitable. And they're going to end up a dysfunctional rump state. And when I hear that rhetoric, I'm like, okay, one, let me just be very clear, I have not I'm not close enough to the problem or to just that thing in general to know if he's right, but there's so much internal logic to the way that he approaches it. So, I'm looking at your argument, they've decentralized a bunch of things so it becomes harder to attack, but that also makes it feel like each region is going to be easier to overtake. And so, if I'm Russia, I'm just going to go zone by zone by zone being like, I don't have to worry about the whole collective cuz you guys are decentralized. So, I'm just going to eat this node Yeah. and then eat this node. Yeah. Uh however, the problem with eating these nodes is keeping that node is non-trivial. Okay? So, for example, they installed a bunch of Russian mayors in some of the initial towns that they and they just put car bombs under them and start blowing them up. So, now who wants to go be a Russian mayor of a local Ukrainian town when your lifespan is going to be very short? So, the resistance is going to be uh strong just because they don't have a choice. Right? This is their This is the existential for them. And this is the same thing why it's difficult to take over Afghanistan or take over country It may become a rump state, that's possible, but if that's the case, it was going to become that anyway, and you might as well fight it, which is what they're doing right now. The question is, can they win? And I think they can't win without obviously a huge amount of Western aid, but I think they could win in that in that situation. What do you think becomes the galvanizing force? So, you mentioned Afghanistan. I have a feeling without a sense of cultural identity and possibly religion, it would be easy to disrupt, but there's a galvanizing force that allows the distributed nature of all of that to work, that they still have this thing that sits over them that unites them. Yeah, so this is a great question. Is what is that binding force? Cuz it used to be religion. Right? We started Actually, it used to be tribal structures. Cuz we would operate on nomadic tribes, and the tribes would then fight. And over a time period of time, we the as technology became better, the tribes would get bigger and bigger and form countries and empires. Right? The Mongols that you mentioned earlier. My my favorite thing about the Mongols is an old from an old BBC documentary that said they destroyed anything they got angry at, and they got angry at anything they didn't understand. So, they came down from the steppes down to China, found a million Chinese farmers doing agriculture, didn't understand it, got angry at it, and literally wiped out a million farmers. Just because they because of that cascading logic, right? Um Now, if you grow an empire to a certain level, uh can you keep it or not keep it is one area. The ones that worked best are the ones that decentralized the administration and navigated local preferences in a powerful way. Akbar in in India, the Mongols did it pretty powerfully and pretty well. Alexander the Great managed it pretty well. The Roman Empire did pretty well. There's that whole idea of the fourth turning and all of the cyclical aspects. I I I look at all these folks, Piketty, Ray Dalio, uh uh Yuval Harari, etc. And I think they're incredibly insightful about the past. I find they're not that useful about the future. Why? Because I think this inflection point, and I know this is a tired uh uh kind of meme of this time is different, but I think this time it's really different. The combination of energetic abundance and lifespan that we're about to break, life extension, plus AI makes it a completely different cocktail than we've ever seen before in the history of humanity. And so, I think this is a complete step change. And this is why it's so exciting to be around today. You should know the following three numbers: 37,000, 25, 1. 37,000, that is the number of businesses which have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. 25, NetSuite turns 25 this year, so you know that they know what they're doing cuz they've been around for a long time. 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And those are the things that I think calms everybody down in the long run. But, they do not help us in the next, call it, from now to 7 years is sort of the time window where I think things are going to get really weird. So, really fast, walk people through um, um your thinking around um how in business we can use some of these strategies to uh become an exponential organization. Sure. So, you know, if you went back to the 20th century, the most successful organizations were the biggest, top-down, hierarchical, command-and-control structures, pyramid structured with a CEO at the top, uh designed for two things, designed for efficiency and designed for predictability. Right? If you're If you're Pampers, you're trying to deliver the same box of Pampers in a million locations around the world, or McDonald's, or healthcare services, or whatever. Today, you need to be architected for agility, flexibility, adaptability, and speed. Okay? And we found uh in the last episode we did with you that the top 10 of the Fortune 100 that are the most flexible and agile compared to the bottom 10 in our opinion that are the least EXO-friendly had delivered 40 times better shareholder returns over a 7-year period than the one. So, there's a clear economic thesis here that as the world becomes more volatile, your ability to adapt will drive market value and drive have a better organization. So, how do you build that? And we call these exponential organizations where you have a massive purpose, like cure cancer. Elon has three, take us to space, solve transportation, solve the climate. Um and then you build an organization with a set of externalities, like leveraging community like TED does, um leveraging assets that you don't own like Airbnb, uh not hiring your own staff like Uber, and then a set of internal mechanisms like the lean startup thinking ideas and decentralized org structures because you can push decision-making to the edge. We found that the more of these characteristics you use, the better. And we're clear now over the next decade that every government department, impact project, nonprofit, for-profit will tend toward these structures because we now have enough evidence to show that that's better. So, for example, when we talked to CEOs today, they are not AI-ready at all because their old 20th century organization structures is absolutely not set up for what's coming with AI. Right? They're not AI-ready. And so, they're all asking us, "Can you please give us a workshop, set us up with some help on how do we navigate AI?" And I see two problems that are paramount today with companies implementing AI. The first is they jump in very quickly and they can't see the rocks before they dive in and they get into trouble, either by accidentally putting all their data into ChatGPT, or um putting the wrong models into place. And the second issue, which is the bigger issue, is the immune system problem. So, I first came across this problem at Yahoo. And I was running their incubator. And the more disruptive an idea we came up with in the incubator, the less the company could handle it. Right? I was like, "Wait, you hired me to do disruptive stuff and I bring you something and you guys can't cope." Right? You can't integrate it. Why? Because of that that efficiency and and agility problem. Um that really stuck in my head and going through 7 years of building Singularity and noticing that we have 20 Gutenberg moments hitting us. AI is hitting us right now, but we have biotech, we have blockchain is an as Gutenberg moment, solar energy is a Gutenberg moment, life extension is a Gutenberg moment. Um we will not be able to manage the future with our current existing organization structures or our current government structures or institution structures. So, we architected this model. It We now can see that it will work. And we the two We have to solve two things. One is um what's the thoughtful way in which you apply technology to derive great value from it. Secondly, how do you navigate that immune system response? And so, we're coaching companies and so on on how to do this because if you push AI into a company, all the people go woah nelly and they freak out and the antibodies attack you and nothing moves. This analogy was first given to me by the CTO of Autodesk. I was chatting with him and I was complaining about it and he was like, "Oh, you've got an immune system response." And I went ding! That is the best articulated framing. You try anything disruptive in a big company and it's worse in the public sector because we have taxis fighting Uber, we have bankers fighting Bitcoin. We're not progressing society long enough, quickly enough because when there's new technological breakthroughs, all the antibodies freak out and we get So, we have to solve that problem at a cultural level because companies have their immune systems but and governments have their but institutions have really bad immune systems. Education, God help you if you try and update academia. Religion has probably the worst immune system cuz they'll kill you in in literally in those cases, right? Um So, I I remember having a conversation with Salman Rushdie a few years ago. And he was talking about the fatwa and I asked him, "How was that like for you?" And he said, "You know, I grew up in the '60s and he had this really tired tone in his voice. He goes, "I grew up in the '60s. We thought we nailed religion. We thought it was done." And then in the '80s it comes roaring back and boom, immune system problem. Did you talk to him before or after cuz he got attacked? He got attacked. He lost an eye. Yeah, yeah. That was just recently. I haven't talked to him in a So, decades they laid in wait. They Well, not to lay in wait but the problem is that when you have deep-seated institutional or political beliefs, they don't go away. They're wired into your limbic system. So, all religions work in the following way, okay? You take a young child below the age of 10, you give them an absolute truth and a presumptive truth like Virgin Mary, Muhammad is the last prophet, Jesus is is the son of God, whatever. And then you bind it into them with the ritual repetition and a lot of sweets, a lot of sugar. Okay? And all religious functions operate on this. And then when the when the neocortex forms in the from the 10 to 13-year-old age, the kids' brain is already deeply wired with these absolute assumptive truths, and you can't If you If you stress it at that point, you evoke a fight or flight response. This is why the Jesuits say, "Give me the boy until the age of seven, I'll give you the man." Mhm. Right? Cuz you can wire a a young child. So, all religions operate that way. We have to undo uh some of that damage that we're doing to kids with religion around this. But the problem that you pointed out that's really important is what's the binding coagulant that holds society together in the absence of that model. And that's the big challenge we have to figure out. Storytelling is one aspect of it. We have modern myths like Star Wars and Star Trek and others that are popping up, but they're not they're not connective enough as tissue to hold us together. Yeah, agreed. Also, I think that even though I've dedicated my life to that form of storytelling, it it does not touch the realm of religion, which is why I'm utterly fascinated with what's going on right now. Uh what I think of is the um the tradicalization of society. So, we are going to be radicalized in the direction of the traditional. I think we're The next 3 years is really going to be marked by that, and I think because of AI, it's just going to massively fuel those flames. But uh before we get lost on that, the the idea of the immune system, which I think is incredibly important. As you were talking, this is so hilarious to how my mind works. Uh I was like, "He's setting his own trap." Okay. So, He's just going to do it. keep in mind, what I really want people to understand is I think and I think you'll agree with this, the world is going to be fundamentally different 3 to 5 years from now. Yes. And to a point, you start stretching that out far enough, and it it becomes absolutely unrecognizable. If you have a kid that's in kindergarten now, by the time they reach high school, the world will look nothing like it does now. This is a very near-term concern. Mhm. What you're calling the immune system, which to me is a reflection of what I'm calling the human problem, which is humans long for power, humans have pursuit dialed to 11, so they want to get better, they want to accrue more power. We all We also have this massive quest for control. To make sense of the world, to control the world, right? Cuz you know, if if you to go back to our evolutionary roots, it was a survivor die. Either you manage the world around you or it manages you and you're at a you're you're done pretty quickly. So, you have to gain control of your environment as fast as possible and as aggressively as possible. In that model, we are now controlling most of the species on the planet with whether we like it or not. We're controlling the atmosphere, whether we like it or not, accidentally, badly. Um now we're trying to manage this future of technology. And this is where regulatory comes in, right? We try and put in guardrails for how we manage technology going forward. And you know, over the centuries, we've done a pretty good job of it. The big challenge with regulatory is how do you extract the promise of technology without the peril? Right? Like I can use fire to heat my house and I can use it to burn down your house. How do we navigate that? I tend to be really optimistic about this because of the old eBay study that I think we talked about last time. Say it again. So, when Craigslist and eBay emerged, for the first time you could study human nature at scale. And cuz I can on Craigslist very easily put up a fake picture of a MacBook, you send me a thousand dollars and I'm off to Fiji. And I can mask my email address pretty quickly, same thing with Craigslist. So, sociologists and anthropologists got pretty interested in this at all. We can actually study human nature. And I can equally do good or bad. What's the actual ratio? Right? So, they started studying these systems, Kijiji in Canada, Craigslist here, eBay, etc. And it turns out very consistently across these systems where a human being can do a positive or a fraudulent transaction, the actual ratio turns out to be something like 8,000 to 1. Consistently, right? Which is really surreal and incredibly exciting actually, because that means if you opened up drones and said anybody do whatever they want with drones, you'll get 8,000 positive use cases to the one bad guy. Okay? Which make Which is fantastic for society. Except our current model is drones come out, the regulatory goes, "Oh my god, somebody might load up a a C4 on a drone and fly it into the White House. Just can't ban all drones." And then slowly open that tap and over a 20-year period we get the benefits of that technology. So, we have a ton of problems with the prisons today with drones flying cell phones and cameras and money over the prison walls and dropping them into the prisoners. And the wardens are going crazy. Okay? So, hello. Let's deal with this in a different way. So, now there's technologies to solve the drone interference problem. We'll get there. But this is a technological arbitrage problem. And so, the challenge is how do we make sure we're doing good things with technology and not the bad things with technology. And over the years, I think we're doing a pretty good job of it in general, but I think that with the democratization of technology and the easy access to anybody that has access to AI or can home build a drone, this becomes harder and harder. So, we have to lift human nature and get to abundance and give everybody what they want materially as fast as we can so they don't go down the dark path. Is is one path that that was an obvious one. I think even if I were to accept the ratio of good actors to bad actors, the thing that's missing is the level to which a bad actor will exploit Yes, important point. The amplitude of that negative is growing, right? So, the amount of damage one person can do is growing exponentially. And so, our ability to control one person is dropping exponentially. That's a not a great equation. Um we have uh Mark Goodman as one of our community members. He's a He was a futurist for the FBI. Uh so, if you can get him drunk, he has awesome stories about how criminals and terrorists use bad uh use technology in a negative way. And it's actually fascinating to see how creative they are around some of this. Um but the the big challenge is the amplitude is actually growing. Back to the Middle East Indian bulge eye virus. Yeah. Which hopefully they never make uh Saleem. I would be very sad. Even though most people are going to do good things, you're going to have these moments of uh exploitation. People will take advantage of that. The amplitude of that is growing. You also have the immune system response that is just trying to stop change from happening. Uh which can be good or bad. But ultimately, I think it is to your point, you have a a creature that is born of evolution that had to learn to control its environment, that had to have pursuit dialed to 11, so it would try to go out and try to control its environment and do better things for the group and all that stuff and acquire power and all that. So, I am still at this moment of before us is a fork in the road. And you have really done a great job of laying out what humans are like, but I still don't see the thing other than AI finally begins delivering on some of the promises and then we all go, "Okay, yeah, cool. Like I'm going to embrace this." But I still think we have to go through Mad Max. I don't see any way around that equation. Um so, if you feel like there's an argument left that will convince me, if not, please detail for us what are those amazing things that AI's going to deliver us that will make having gone through this valley of despair well worth unleashing AI upon the world. Okay. So, important to note that we don't have a choice about unleashing AI into the world. Kevin Kelly wrote this book What Technology Wants, and basically showed in very clear thing that technology is moving at its own pace, and our only hope is to really keep up with it. Cuz it's it's taken on a life of its own in a sense. Because if we try and regulate AI, then other people go run amok with it. And so, it ends up being an arms race, and you end up having to do it anyway. So, now let me give you the some of use cases where AI can radically change things in a short period of time for the radically better. Um I'll channel Emad Mostaque here, this the head of Stability is the head of Stability. And one of the projects he's working on is, can we take all the healthcare data in a country and load it up into an LLM, and all the legal, legislative, the law books, and put that into an LLM, and all the software code base globally and put that in. And you give every child three or four links, a doctor, a lawyer, a software programmer, and a general AI helper. Okay? Now, if you give every kid in Africa a link with a doctor, and there's a medical problem at home, they will just start using it and transforming their healthcare locally for free. And this will completely change the world. Same thing with education, as we load up all the educational content into an AI, it's going to do a way better job at teaching kids, and kids can self-learn in a much more effective way than our current systems can do it. So, you do those two things, and healthcare and education suddenly become free and adapted and personalized to every child in the world, that's an unbelievable future. So, the whole ecosystem and the methodology we've been building is, how do you enable those people to build as fast as possible and build that optimistic future as fast as possible? And that's what exponential organizations So, EXO as we use it as a metaphor is the is the thing at the edge. Exoskeleton, exoplanet, exothermic reaction. So, we we don't want to find EXO builders and EXO heroes. That's the collection we're launching on finding people that are building things at the edge cuz we need to build that edge very fast and let that become the new gravity center very fast because the current system is imploding. Think like a sci-fi writer for me for a second. Yes. So, a sci-fi writer's job is not to imagine the automobile, it's to predict the traffic jam. So, what are the if we're giving people access to all this information around healthcare, they have a private doctor, a private lawyer, uh their educated is hyper tailored to them, we're going to unlock as much of their intelligence and their creativity as is going to be possible. Um what are the things that are born of that? Well, I think there'll be some negatives. You'll may have accidents, people will misinterpret the data, people do source the wrong information from their bodies and put it into the AI and we'll get the wrong diagnosis. Lots of issues can come along. But the general outcome is the benefits will so outweigh the negatives that I think it's it's absolutely worth doing. Okay? There's no question in my mind that giving kids the ability to learn at their own pace on their own and then socializing as they need to in different ways is going to transform the education system in a much more powerful way from a push system to a pull system, right? Can I just delve into education just for a second? Please. Okay. So, we've been doing education for a couple hundred years on what I call or John Hagel used to call the push system. You get a bunch of kids into a classroom and you try and cram algebra into them, right? Mostly they're thinking about lunch. Little by little we move to a pull basis where I pull I take a new job or a new role or a new gig and I pull down the knowledge I need to do that job, right? That's great. Now we're And the whole education system for the last few hundred years have been supply-side. Go become an accountant, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, um um a plumber and sell that in the job marketplace. Acquire a set of skills, which is what universities do. They give you that job schooling, which is all that universities do today. And then you go to the job market, the demand side and you try and sell those skills in the demand side. I think what we're going to see happen is we're going to go from push based education to pull based learning, but demand driven. So for example, if you take Elon, he's like, "I'm going to build an electric car and let me go find the technologies, the skills, the capabilities I need." No experience or or capability of doing it at the time, but he'll pull them towards him and solve that problem. So what we see kids doing, this is what's encapsulated in the massive transformative purpose in the in the EXO model. Pick a huge purpose, cure cancer, okay? And then go find the technologies and skills and capabilities and pull those to you as you need to to solve those problems. That I think is going to be the future of education. Getting there from the existing system is impossible. So you need technology to help you bridge that gap between A and B and you need it to be permissionless. So one of the most exciting vectors of human development that I'm seeing today is something I call PDI, permissionless disruptive innovation. Okay? If you want to do disruptive innovation throughout history, you had to get a sponsor, an investor, a government to bless you. Somebody had to give you permission to go do that or give you the resources to go do that. Look at um Ethereum. The Vitalik Buterin, middle class kid out of Toronto, gets together with eight friends, boom, they go create Ethereum for no money, with no cash, no resources and boom, it's now a $400 billion ecosystem, right? Um take I I my favorite example is this is the is the car um that's called the Vega. It's um it looks like a Lamborghini. It's the third fastest car in the world, 900 horsepower, this thing. It's being designed and engineered and built in Sri Lanka, which is an island of fishermen and farmers with no investors, ecosystem experience, education, or track record. I'm going to suggest that if you can do Ethereum or if you can build the third fastest car in the world on an island, I love showing it to German car executives. The their brains literally melt when they see this, right? Um I'm going to suggest you can do anything anywhere. So now we can give people the tools to build radical new solutions in vertical farming and a new battery technology all over the world and just let them go and they'll figure it out. And that's why we're trying to decent- that's why the decentralized world is so important. We need to decentralize innovation as fast as possible and that vector might pull us out as faster than the Mad Max vector. So that's my hope. Okay, it might pull us faster than the Mad Max vector. Okay, so that's the Well, it might get us to a a secure place faster than Mad Max will destroy us. Got it. So we're we are going into Mad Max territory, but hopefully before that can completely destroy everybody, we Yeah, for example, we're mostly in the Middle East fighting for the last 100 years because of oil. If we have solar energy delivering an energy abundance, which will happen in the next four doublings about 8 to 10 years, then you don't need oil. And therefore, what are you fighting over? Right? So that's the hope. Now, will we find other things to fight about? Absolutely because we're human beings. But but it'll be less existential, I hope. If you look at the number of people dying in wars today is actually incredibly small compared to 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500. So the data is very clear. The trend is very good. Uh but we need to get out of our current structures because our current structures will take us back. My my biggest observation I've ever had about human beings is that human beings would much rather be comfortable than happy. Hm. Can you give me more detail on that, please. Yeah. Uh I may not embrace uh healthcare technologies that may deliver longevity because I'm so stuck in a Judeo-Christian religious framework of the world that heaven is a good thing and I want to get to heaven as fast as possible. That feels like uh either familiarity and fitting in with a tribe. Comfortable. Comfortable. I think of comfortable as I'm warm, I'm safe, I'm relaxed. And both may be equally true. I mean you Emotionally Emotionally secure. Let's use that as an easy moniker for comfortable, right? So, uh you could put something amazing in front of somebody. Can Can I tell you a story about the the Trump election one? So, I'm Canadian uh and my Canadian passport, I'm like Gollum with the precious. Like hold on to that thing as the US goes into all sorts of chaos. About 3 months after Trump is elected in 2016, I was in a in an Uber going to a conference and the health the driver was looking very unhealthy. And I said, "Are you okay? Uh uh how much do you drive?" And he goes, "Oh, I drive 18 hours a day." I said, "18 hours a day? Um uh uh uh you hopefully you're not at the end of your shift because that's not great for me as a passenger." Then he tells me this amazing story. He was a CEO of a 300-person construction firm. And I they voted as a company should they get rid of corporate healthcare or not. And they vote as a company He lobbies for it because less admin for the company, a bit more expensive for the people, but more choice. So, he votes, lobbies, and they get rid of they vote and they get rid of corporate healthcare. 3 weeks later, he's not feeling well, goes to the doctor, and finds out he's got multiple stage three cancers riddling his body. And now he's got a major problem because they got rid of the healthcare, he can't get covered because of the pre-existing conditions problem. And so, one of those pops to stage four and he's a dead man. So, he literally starts planning his funeral, gives away the company, plans his end times, like like really right there. I'm like, that's incredible, but you said that happened a few years ago. You're here now. What happened? He goes, Obamacare passed. I'm like, okay. He goes, then I could get the insurance. I got the treatment. I saved my life. I'm like, wow, what a journey to go through. You think you're going to die and then this thing happens and it saves your life. We pull into the hotel. I'm getting out of the car and I kind of as a joke, I said, I guess in this last election you must have voted for Hillary Clinton. And he goes, no, I voted for Trump. And I I was gobsmacked and I said, but but you just said Obamacare saved your life. He goes, yeah, it did, completely, 100%. Obamacare saved my life. I said, but then you voted for the guy that said he was going to get rid of it on his first day. He goes, yeah, and he's getting rid of it and now I'm back to planning my funeral. I've never been able to square that circle. You didn't ask him the follow-up question? so if you could go back and do it again, what would you do? What was What would be the follow-up question you would ask? I I would have asked, um, did you know that was going to be the outcome? And if so, did you There's it that leads me to believe you have a base assumption that something trumps your own personal safety. I I I I've never I've never I've I've I've sat with that like anecdote for years now. I've never been able to figure that out where people will literally vote against their self-interest. I don't think anyone votes against their self-interest. I think there are things that they care about that they may not be aware of yet. So, he may have a philosophical underpinning that he's not even aware of. A value system that drives him forward. Cuz he the very thing and look, I don't know this guy, who knows, but just hearing what I've heard, that what I would say drives him is freedom over everything. So, hey, we have a healthcare plan, but I can make it better by giving people choice. Oh, that bit me in the ass, but my value system is still there. Trump in his mind stands for more freedoms and so I'm going to vote for more freedoms even though it It me to obviously, I'd want to push him and like really understand if that's what he's saying, but I find most people are driven by a value system that they don't understand, but they are driven by it. Every choice they make is an echo of a value system they don't understand. Can I say something out of a little bit of anger? At all times. I've lived in eight countries around the world for more than a year each. So, I've seen a lot of different systems, health care, governance, etc. Canada, Europe, India, you name it. Um this whole vector of freedom drives me crazy because it's a complete it's complete horse I feel less free in the US than most other countries in the world. Why are you here? Oh, great place to do business. Fascinating. So, place to be, but I feel that I'll give you I'll give you an because here in the US, the reason the US is successful is there's a latent entrepreneurship that is unbelievably powerful and it epitomizes in Silicon Valley where if you build a business and you fail, we call it experience. Anywhere else in the in the world you build a business and it fails, you're a bad guy, right? And this is true around the world. So, we have one freedom, the freedom to fail. Freedom to fail is a huge one and it's institutionalized in bankruptcy laws. It's it's you can fairly elegantly shut down a company here compared to other places. I built a subsidiary for one of my businesses to do software development in India and the mothership failed and it orphaned the subsidiary, right? Um it took me 7 years to shut down that subsidiary in India. Jesus. Because all the political the the regulatory blah blah blah crap. Just the thing. Am I likely to ever do another business in India again? Never because who wants to go through that hell, right? Whereas in the US, if something fails, so we just merged, by the way, opening XO into a public company a couple of weeks ago, okay, called Genius Group. Yeah. So, we're super thrilled because it's a global platform for teaching entrepreneurship and that's the constituency that we're most excited about. So, we're very excited about the the future there. Um the unbelievable uh potential of the In Delaware, when you are doing a merger or whatever, there's this incredible legal framework called a reparations act or something, whereas if you haven't done your corporate paperwork that you forgot about, they give you one chance to kind of fix it all and come clean before you do a major transaction. It's fantastic, right? Never is that happening anywhere else in the world. Uh because if you uh do something in Paris and under French law and whatever later, I'll tell another quick story. I had a French girlfriend when I was living in Paris for a few years, and she was trying to get her identity card cuz the French government said everybody has to get an identity. So, she goes to the government and says, "Here's my identity. I want to apply." And they're like looking at all the paperwork and they go, "Ah, problem." She's like, "What's wrong?" She says, "Well, you were born in France. You have a French passport. Your father was born in France, but your mother was not born in France. That's a problem." And she's like, "But my mother was a French citizen, and the reason she wasn't born in France was her her parents were the commanding forces for the French forces in Vietnam. She was a military kid. So, she got born in Vietnam, but she's a French citizen her parent and they're like, "Problem." She's like, "Okay, what do I do?" So, they "We need affidavits from all four of your grandparents saying that was actually our daughter da da da da da." So, she goes through all of this hell to get that, and she shows it to them and they like they put it all together and and they go, "Problem." She's like, "What is it now?" They said, "Your birth certificate has expired." Because in France, it turns out a birth certificate only is valid for 3 months. And then when you want one for some reason, you have to apply to get a birth certificate. So, this is the bureaucracy that most of the world deals with that the US has cleaned up a lot of. Canada's even better, by the way, because that's a newer country. Okay? So, uh that lack of that less bureaucracy makes it easy to build a business and do interesting new things. And that's why I live here. I think by the way, I'm going to say it also for the record, I think the US Constitution is the most important document ever written. But doesn't have anything to do with freedom. We'll get to that in a minute. In what country did you feel the most free? Most European countries at an individual level I felt very free. Businesses nightmare because the regulatory and chaos and bureaucracy nightmare. But I can drive without ever getting a speeding ticket in Europe. Cannot drive here without getting a speeding ticket. the barometer for freedom? I don't know. I'm just telling you Paint paint a picture for me. Okay, let let me give you another example. If I'm anywhere in the world, I never ever see a police car. Whereas here in the US, I just see police cars all the time every day. People get arrested in the UK, a place where both of us have lived. Yeah. People get arrested in the UK for a tweet Oh. that someone deems offensive. issues, different set I'm trying to pin you down on freedom cuz I really want to understand this. Yeah. So, uh look, in India if I railed against the government, I would be in big trouble right now. So So, freedom of expression is a big problem around the world. And I think freedom of expression is more powerful here. And I do There's definitely freedom here for freedom of expression more than anywhere else in the world. Okay? But this whole vector of the being more like the if you vote Republican because you want more freedom rather than less is I think Just my personal view having lived every day in Um well, so that to me I interpret very differently. So, that just sounds like I don't think Republicans are the party of freedom. Okay. Yeah. But you said that you don't feel as free in America as you did in European countries. I feel yeah, when I it's it's and there's good and bad to this. So, I'll give you an example on both sides. Okay? So, I came into the US once and my name is Saleem as in spell my look a little dodgy, right? Um and they go, "Sir, we have a problem. Uh your name matches the name of an Afghan warlord wanted in Kabul for poppy trading. He's wanted by the FBI." Who's super likely to use his real name on a passport? "Okay." He goes, "It's clear you're a vice president of Yahoo. You're clearly not a an Afghan warlord. Um I've got good news and bad news." And I'm like, "What's the good news?" He So, the good news is I'm pretty clear you're speaking at conferences. We've looked you up. You're not an Afghan warlord. I said, "That's great. What's the problem? What's the bad news?" He goes, "I'm not allowed to make that decision. I have to check with Washing- It's like your Coinbase thing. I have to check with Washington. It'll take about 4 hours. You're going to miss your flight. Have a seat." I'm like, "You're kidding." And literally, I got to the I was coming across the border enough times that I got to the point where the border guys were like, "Hey, Mr. Ismail. How are you? Please come aside for the security check because we have to check with Washington again." So, that's the bad side, right? Because you can get stopped for all sorts of bizarre things. I've never seen that anywhere else in the world. Okay. Here's I'll give you the good side. Um I had a very surreal incident in at 9/11 where one of my family members who's psychic calls me up in the last 2 weeks of August and says, "What are you doing the first 2 weeks of September uh 2001?" I said, "Well, I'm working. I'm doing stuff." And she said, "I want you to leave. I want you out of New York City." And I kind of learned enough to kind of pay attention to this that I took a vacation and I was in Switzerland. Um and 9/11 happens. And I found out later looked up later I had to cancel the meeting in the World Trade Towers that Tuesday morning to go on this trip. Um and just by accident, I was there. So, now I have to get back because the company I'm the COO of is in big trouble. And I'm on the first plane that lands in the JFK uh after 9/11. The first flight, the first plane that landed lands back in New York City. Um and you know, Salim Ismail, I look a bit Middle Eastern. My Canadian my US visa for Canadian visa to the US was expiring the next day. So, I'm in deep trouble. And I got to the border guards, and they could not have been more constructive and helpful and sensible and common sense in that environment that I would ever have seen anywhere else in the world. Unbelievable. So, at at a very deep political level, there's lots of unbelievable freedoms, which is why I think this country is very powerful. However, day-to-day I feel less free. Hmm. Okay, so here would be my take on that. Let me know what you think. Sure. Um it sounds like you have had run-ins that sound more racist to me than they sound anti-freedom, but I get how if somebody's stopping you every time you turn around uh because of your name, because of your nationality, whatever, uh that would leave a horrific taste in my mouth. Now, Canada froze people's bank accounts Oh, yeah. because they donated money Yes. to a uh rebellion, protest, I don't even know what to call it. The trucker convoy. Uh that was ultra terrifying. They have bills that compel speech, so not just you can't say this, you must say this. Yes. That's insane from a freedom perspective. If people vote for it, they should get what they want, Yeah. but that certainly does not feel free. Uh so, Agreed. when I think about what freedoms matter for me, what you're calling freedom of expression, what I will call free speech, is is quite literally the ability to think. And any country, and that would be every country but America as far as I know, does not have freedom of speech, at which point they are 1984 style compelling the breakdown of your own ability to think properly. Yeah, and then you're stifling innovation. You look at China as the extreme where they're shutting down the CEOs of the tech sector, right? They're going to just kill innovation completely. Shutting down. They are literally absconding with them, taking them somewhere, doing something that makes their expressions very different when they come out. And you don't you know this is an important point and I will totally grant you on this one, okay? Um the ability to buck against the status quo is bigger here than anywhere else in the world and therefore you get disruptive innovation and that fundamental innovation is what steers the US forward in a very powerful way. This is the whole root of American exceptionalism. Is you see a problem, you fix it. And I think that's a magical magical thing and I think that's why I said go back to my point of I choose to I could live anywhere in the world. I choose to live here. It's a really amazing place. However, there's lots of like I was in a an Uber going from San Francisco to Marin once and the driver was African-American and we pull into Marin and there's a police check at the side of the road and he literally starts freaking out. Like he's shaking, he's completely completely spazzed out. I'm like, "Dude, what's wrong?" He goes, "You have no idea what I go through when police see me behind the wheel." Mhm. And I was like, "Wow." And it's just something I'm you know just sits with me. I don't feel I don't have that problem. unfortunately to me, I'm glad you don't have that problem but you're what you were saying about uh immigration giving you a hard time, you're not the first person to talk about that. Where I thought you were going with 9/11 was since then like things have really just uh gone downhill. That I've heard that from many people that have Downhill in what sense of the you mean the From an immigrant experience? feeling wanted is probably how I would have framed it. You framed it as freedom which makes me think maybe I'm not mapping your mind quite correctly. Um so anyway, that that part I certainly understand and has always rubbed me the wrong way. Yeah. Uh I tweeted something out today around something that America does. This was actually Canadian though. Uh I become unhinged when banks act like my money's their money. I I'm with you. Bro. And and by the way, Canadians shutting down the bank accounts was a very bad black stain. And I don't think they're going to get out from under that for a long time. Outrageous. Right? Because if I've got a lot of money, am I going to go to the Canada and trust my money there? I'm I need to be able to get to my money. And this I think is an important part of maybe the most powerful aspect of Web3, why we're so excited about it, is that you can have full custodial of your money and your value and nobody can take it away from you. I think that's a really powerful place. Okay. Tell me how I'm wrong. The government can and will take your Web3 holdings. People always talk about the wrench attack. I can imagine no bigger wrench than the US government. They will kneecap you. They will imprison you. They will do whatever they have to. I don't understand people who think crypto makes you immune from the government. It The following thing is true. You can abscond at night, get on a boat and go to a country, let's say Estonia, Yeah. that does not have negative stance on crypto. And because you can memorize your seed phrase, you can escape with your money much easier. So if I'm a German, uh sorry, if I'm a Jew in Germany and it's like 1939, hey, I'm very grateful Yeah. for cryptocurrency because now I can just bail and I can take my wealth with me. So do not get me wrong. I love crypto the most. Yeah. It's amazing. I have so much invested in crypto. I'm a believer. But when people act like governments can't come and take that from you, that's crazy town. You you escape easier, but who the vast majority of people, should the government ever decide to, they will seize the out of it. Give me So, if I if my seed phrase is sitting in England and I don't know it and I don't have my sticks with me or anything like that, what's the government going to do? Put you in jail. Oh, that's fine. They can take my freedom, but Well, that's not never get my Bitcoin. Man, this is like your your Wallace moment where you're being tortured to death. I think you know my life, but you can never take my crypto. This this is the same argument I use against guns. Like people go, I need guns because I need to be able to fight against the government that comes after me. Yeah. And I'm like, they can just they have bigger guns. They do, but you were the one who You talked about the Afghans. I'm telling you a distributed nation with a reason to fight and their own weapons. And I have not thought a lot about Second Amendment, I'll be the first to tell you, but I'm like, hey. When I look at the the reason they said they gave us the first the Second Amendment, yeah, word. It you need to be able to protect yourself from the tyranny of just bureaucracy. Like don't even make it a fancy word like government. I'm totally good with that. Can I just give you my beef Please. on Second Amendment cuz I've gone pretty deep on this. Um I and and I appreciate um the US enough that I've gone pretty deep on all the different structures, etc. The US The The Second Amendment says, you shall not ban the right to bear arms in a well-regulated militia. Not that every podunk guy should have a gun. It should be in a well-regulated militia. You Congress cannot pass a law that will stop a well-regulated militia from over if Congress oversteps. That is the Second Amendment, which is good. Hit hit us with the Second Amendment. I need to see that. It's bringing home that I've actually never read the actual Second Amendment. People forget um People There you go. A well-regulated militia da da da da da da shall not be infringed. That's the Second Amendment. Woah, woah, it doesn't say that. It says a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Now, I read that as saying, "Hey, the people may need to build up a well-regulated militia. Therefore, I'm not going to stop people from having guns." So, what I hear is guns come first, militia comes second. So, I could very easily say people saying, "Look, I hope I don't need to become a well-regulated militia, but I need the guns now." Oh, I see. You framed it that way. Okay. I think that's how it's actually framed. This is where we need clarity, right? Can we please Is that really That can't be the whole thing. No way. Yeah. That's the entire Second Amendment? is it. It's a single sentence? It's a single sentence. What? Is that really true? is. We're watching my ignorance unfold in real time. The amendments are this short? Yes. I thought these were like whole documents. They get longer as you go down the list. Scroll. Let me see. These are scandalously short. If you guys all knew this and never like I get that. I get that. Uh wow, I can't believe I didn't know this. Okay, yeah, these are a little bit longer. So, this is an interpretation thing. really short. Wow. Yeah. These are verbatim. This is the whole thing. Yeah. It's The comment section is going to be clowning on me. It's unbelievably beautiful. I'm going to say it again. The US Constitution Bill of Rights is the most beautiful documents ever created in crazy in the world, right? I would have thought when people gave these bits they were just quoting from a much larger document. No. That is hilarious. I'll I'll I can't wait to see the Twitter comments. I'm sure they'll say But, so so this is an interpretation thing. Cuz there it's a clause. It's not saying anybody can have rights and by the way that It says a well-regulated militia by the people um shall not be infringed. So, the people can have arms in a well-regulated militia. you and I read this so differently. This is utterly fascinating. For everybody listening that is not familiar with this, I'm going to read this one more time. Pay attention to the sequencing of these words. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, meaning you do not have a free state if you cannot protect yourself, presumably from the tyranny of the state. Exactly. So, uh the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That's really interesting. That to me, you and I read something super different had a period there, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That would be fine. But, it's not that. It's the well-regulated militia, {comma} Yeah. So, for if you were if I will say this feels like an admonition that we should have well-regulated militias standing, which I don't love that. Well, that's that's okay. That's That's I'm I'm good with that, but guns should be operating inside a well-regulated militia, not everybody and their grandmother and free conceal and all that stupidity. 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Get started on your dream life right now. If you think about technology and you're able to predict a traffic jam, it's like, "Whoa, that's pretty insightful." You may get the car wrong, but you get the idea of mass transit and people will bump into each other and it will slow things down. Anyway, so here are the the beautiful things that I think will AI will bring and if you could let me know just yes or no. Life extension. I think we will live longer, okay? I think while it probably might will take a while that AI will discover new physics. Yeah. Okay? New physics I think will have as big of an impact on our lives as Somebody please solve the grand unification theory and the wave particle duality of light. I have a physics degree, so Well, just talk to your boy Eric Weinstein. He thinks he thinks he's got it. Uh new governmental structures, new and better. Better. Okay? Yeah, policy making should be done with an AI. Mhm. For example, if you want to drop inflation by 2%. it should be done by AI or should it be heavily heavily heavily guided by For example, if you say, "Hey, we want to drop inflation by 2%." A human being trying to make policy looking at all the data has no hope in making sense of any of it. An AI could go Oh, do these three things. And the human being can sense check it and goes that reasonable or not and then off you go. I think we're going to end up with the chess outcome where the best chess players are an AI and a human being. And that combination will be unbeatable because there's still a sense of Don't we already have the answer to that and that it's just AI? Can a human add anything to the greatest chess player in AI? sense. Are you sure? Oh, yeah. Can we look that up? We need to look that up. I don't buy for a second that a human can contribute anything to a chess playing AI. player a human being and a chess AI will always beat an AI. Magnus Carlsen, when teamed with chess AI, beats chess AI by itself. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this Okay, that's an noble thing. We're looking that up. In the meantime, uh do you think that we will get free or nearly free energy? Yes. Okay. Go deep on that one. What does nearly free energy look like? Why will that matter? Okay, let me go let me give you a graph that I use in my presentations, which is if you went back 500 years ago, the cost of lighting up a building or a room was unbelievably high. Whale blubber. You had to go kill whales and get the blubber back and light up a candle. Game of Thrones technology. Then we found paraffin and we could create candles. Then we invented electricity and the price of electricity. So, can I step back 1 second? This is there's two really important things about technology that are important here that people should understand as we get into this. Number one, for the first time in human history, we have a dozen technologies all operating on an exponential doubling pattern. Solar energy every 22 months, drones are doubling every 9 months in their price performance, gene sequencing every 6 months, etc. The resolution at which we can image the human brain is doubling every year, for example. We've never seen this many technologies all move at an accelerated pace at the same time. So, that's one. The second thing that I think is more profound that leads to that um um PDI comment I made earlier or um disruptive innova- permissionless disruptive innovation is that throughout human history, advanced technologies always cost a lot. And only a government lab or a big corporate lab could do R&D, launch new products and services. Today, for the first time in human history, advanced technologies are cheap. AI is cheap, uh sensors are cheap, solar energy is cheap, the blockchain is open source. Anybody can now do disruptive innovation. So, that if you couple that with the idea that technology is a major driver of progress in the world, it might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen in the world. Now you have a dozen of them that cost very little. The there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of 20 Gutenberg moments all coming down the pipe. So, if we believe that technology is an a force enabler for good and and does delivers that, then we're in an unbelievable um uh um heavenly space for the future of innovation and all the things are going to come singing out of it. Um how quickly we implement that is the big challenge and that's the problem. Now, we've been fighting over oil for the last 200 years, big wars, etc. because that was the cheapest form of energy. We are moving now to solar energy being the cheapest form of energy and the big challenge is what covers the base load and I think small nuclear will do it uh as well as thorium reactors, which are now safe nuclear reactors and over time we'll find solve fusion, but that's going to be a while always away. Mhm. Uh So, that gives us free energy. Yeah. Free energy means you can desalinate freely and that means if you have clean water, you take out half of all the infectious diseases in the world. So, the ripple effects are profound. So, energy in the next 5 to 7 years will go to nearly free. Okay, so the desalinization is a great example. I'm going to say and it's possible I'm I'm missing something huge here, but I don't think so. If energy costs drop to effectively zero, the cost of everything else will drop dramatically Yes. because it takes energy to extract minerals from the ground. Uh most of the things you want in your life are about consuming energy. So, uh when you're going to a restaurant and buying food, you're paying so much of that is the energy cost for transportation to get the meat from the farm to the actual restaurant or the cost of the energy to freeze the food. It's like uh the number of things that come down to energy. There's a guy named Arthur Hayes. I don't know if you know who he is. Arthur Hayes, amazing guy, I've been on the show a couple times, amazing, amazing. And he said everybody should think of their lives in terms of how much energy, how many kilowatts essentially, can you purchase with your salary. Everything else is going to fluctuate, but that's the one that's going to matter. metric, yeah. It's super brilliant. And so, he doesn't look at how much am I making, he's only looking at how much does that buy me. And he said it reduces a lot of the illusion of, "Oh, my wages are going up." Sure, but if your wages don't match the rise in the cost of energy, you could actually be making more dollars technically, but losing purchasing power in energy, which matters more than people understand. Energy touches every little corner of your life. The cost of your shampoo is tied. The cost of your water is tied. Just energy, energy everywhere, energy. The modern world brought to you by oil. So, the best metaphor I've seen for this whole transition comes from Lawrence Bloom, one of my mentors. He said to me, "You must have paid a lot of money in another dimension to be living this life." I was like, "Damn, I think you're right." So, this is his metaphor. He He looks at at humanity as different stages of rocket lifting off Earth. Okay? So, when you first have a rocket lifting off Earth, you need a really big, fat booster rocket to get you the enough energy to get you out of the gravity well. And so, that's the That's oil. That's capitalism. Fossil fuel capitalism has been an unbelievable enabler to lift the world out of poverty, deliver all sorts of unbelievable innovation to us, products and services, etc., etc. However, when you have a rocket and it's taking off, at a certain altitude, you have to jettison that booster rocket. Because that will If you don't let it go, it's going to pull you back down. If Then you jettison it, and you take on a much more lighter craft that takes you to the next level. So, the question is, we are in that transition point where we need to jettison fossil fuel and jettison capitalism, as we'd I'd put it another way, and find that lighter craft. And what is that lighter craft is now the interesting question for me going forward. But, it's a really important metaphor because it doesn't um deny the benefits we've gotten from cheap oil over the last few hundred years. Absolutely delivering unbelievable benefits into the world. Yeah, very well said. Okay, so that is a very much tip of the iceberg in terms of all the amazing things that I think AI will help us race to timelines we will inevitably get wrong. Um, I like to give timelines though as a way of anchoring people around my thinking as of today with full knowledge that I know whatever timeline I give is is going to be broken. Sure. Um, but I'll I'll walk you through a very quick breakdown of the phases that I see over the next 10 years. Um, and let me know what you think about this. So, uh, over the next 3 years it'll be marked by things are getting easier. So, cost of energy is going down, you can do more with less. Um, some amount of your work, if you're a graphic designer, will be done by AI. Like some of the things that Adobe's doing is just unbelievable. And so that's going to be happening all over in law, in healthcare, and just things will get easier. Um, existential dread is going to set in for the young because of what I call, um, the famous quote from Gretzky, don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going to be. That used to be tremendously good advice. Hey, you're going to graduate in year 2030. So, don't don't think about what's happening today, think about 2030. But now that puck is teleporting. Yeah. So, it's very hard to predict where that's actually going to be when you graduate. I think that's really going to cause a high rate of anxiety and depression among the young. Um, I think what I call the pure human movement is going to start. So, there'll be this sense of like, oh, we reject any brain computer interface, we reject anything where, um, AI's I you're already seeing this in the art movement. So, as much as I literally as the words Adobe's doing amazing things is coming out of my mouth, I know a portion of my audience is going to attack me cuz they are absolutely livid at the way that Adobe has trained their things and they feel like they've just been stolen from. Hm. So, the pure human movement's going to begin. So, this this creation brought to you by only humans, no AI touches whatsoever. Uh there's going to be a softening of the job market because I mean, I'll just speak for myself. I have definitively hired less people because we've been deploying AI as much as we can. Yes. All right, so that's 3 years, nothing insane. You're going to have like ChatGPT moments where it was like huge for a minute, seemed like it was going to revolutionize everything, but then you're kind of like, did it? Uh 5 years, the riots begin, but they're going to be minor. Uh it's going to be people like um I the Waymo car that got vandalized. So, Waymo's self-driving car, there's no driver. It's crazy when you see them in real life. Uh one, they smashed its windows, lit it on fire. Maybe not because it was self-driving, maybe not because of what it represents, or maybe precisely because of what it represents. I think you're going to start seeing more of that, and that's already happening. Uh deaths of despair are going to go up. We're already seeing that in the US. Um you have There's a breakdown of the countries um listed in order of the number of suicides per thousand. Yeah, it's bad. It's It's pretty crazy that it does not map to affluence. Yeah. So, you have some really um poverty-stricken countries not doing well, and you have really affluent countries not doing well. So, money's not going to solve the problem. So, as AI unleashes, everything's getting cheaper. It's not going to solve the problem uh because of meaning and purpose, which we will certainly get more into. Yes. Um I think the pure human movement starts actually um breaking machines. So, whether they're Waymos, whether they're those little robots or whatever. Yep, they're they're going to go after those. There's going to be a massive job transition happening. So, you're going to get a ton of graduates going into the world like, "Hey, there's no jobs." You're going to see people shift into more um trades, so being a plumber and things, and it's going to be harder, at least for now, before robots hit. Uh regulation is going to start to escalate. So, the masses begin to panic, they begin voting people into power on this issue. Will you stop or at least dramatically slow AI? I think that's going to really ramp up in the 5-year time frame. Uh and then in the 7-year time frame, AI is going to be better at most things than humans. I think we're going to see a horrifying spike in either It will either uh in fact, it'll be both. You'll see a tremendous spike in deaths of despair cuz people AI will just be better than you at everything and that will be really damaging for the young who try to look out and say, "Well, if I got really good at this thing, it will matter to humanity." And I think they'll come up empty. And unfortunately, even though we probably will give UBI of some kind, it's just not going to solve the problem because I think humans need meaningful pursuit. And if they don't need to win at a thing to win money, I think they'll actually have a problem. And hey, look at the homelessness crisis. When you give people money and you don't regulate them, some portion, not most, nowhere near, but some people just go, "Cool, I'm just going to do drugs all day." Uh the pro-human thing is is going to riot at scale. Uh you hit 10 years, you get a real bifurcation in humanity. Some break, it's just pure human, and some are like, "I'm all cyborg all the time." Uh which if people don't know, right now today, as we're recording this, the first person to get a Neuralink brain-computer interface has already happened. It's already happened. This guy beat his dad, that's his dad, but beat his dad at the game Mario Kart with his mind. He did not touch a controller. He can't even move his arms. Okay. And he It is insane when you see him play cuz they show you this One of these is being played by somebody using their arms, and the other is being played by somebody just with their mind. You can't tell the difference. It is unbelievable. So, anyway, you can aim the shells and everything. Oh god, it was blew me away. So, you're going to get 10 years from now, you're going to have people that were quadriplegics that are now moving about with an exoskeleton or maybe even able to bypass the break and just literally control their own limbs again. It's going to be pure insanity. Uh, you're now going to be hitting where energy is just ridiculously low. Uh, healthcare is going to be unbelievable. You're going to have magic AI doctors, but you're also going to have sex bots. You're going to have just an absolute cratering of traditional human relationships. Yes. And this is where the tractalization will really be important cuz otherwise people are just going to stop having kids because you're having sex with your sex bot who knows you perfectly and can morph into whatever you want that day. Oh, God, it's going to get so weird. All right, what I get wrong? Oh, uh, so I think I it's entirely plausible as a scenario, right? And it's if you're a futurist, you're always looking at scenario planning and and as a vector, that's completely accurate. I disagree with a couple of things. I think I disagree with the kids will be upset about this. I think the kids in our framing, the kids will be upset about this, but kids natively grow up in the model, the world that they're in and they just take it as normal. How do we break them so much with social media? Ah, that's a different problem that's fixable and I think we'll be fixing that pretty soon. I think you you get them off social media is the problem. It's too much of an addictive sugar drug type model for what for the utility that is delivering and that's a regulatory problem. Um, the governments have been incredibly lax, I think, in in navigating that. I see the AIs being used by the social media companies as proof of what AI does in practice. That feels like an AI problem to me. Yes. TikTok will suck you into a vortex. It's full of all kinds of things. comes to me and he goes, "Dad, um I haven't had a chance this week to play Fortnite cuz I've been just in out of basketball tournament here and we went there." He goes, "I feel a lot better. My my my friends are all playing and I'm not going to do it. I'm going to try I he goes, "How do you you know, what what do you want me to do with this? Like it's so weird." I said, "You know what? Give it another day without it and another day and just take it one day at a time and see how you feel." And it's I incredibly inspiring to see hear him reflect on it and do that. Now, not that everybody's doing that or can or will or whatever, but I think we'll figure that out. We've always had this problem, okay? When we were growing up Define this problem. Okay. Um the parentals not understanding what their kids are going through and trying to fix the kids. When I was growing up, there was like they were like, "Get off the phone. What the hell you doing? You don't need to be on the phone for hours with your friends, etc. etc." Right? Um there's lots of constructive ways in which you can use technology and some of what's coming in a very powerful way. I'll give you an example. I have a friend who has four kids, uh four girls. And And when he was growing bringing them up, he at an early age, from like 5 6 7 years, he started watching reality TV shows with them. Survivor and all the weird ones. I'm like, "You watch those uh with your kids?" He goes, "Yeah, I sit down with them because when they go to the playground, they've got one instance of a bullying or something or something. When I sit with them day after day and they watch this, they're getting a lesson on human nature. I sit with them so that we can talk about what's going on. We start predicting." And all those four girls have become unbelievable leaders in their own right over the over the years. They're now about 20 years old each. Uh because he had the foresight to go be with them and bring them along that journey and they'll learn faster because they'll assemble the knowledge faster. Douglas Adams, who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think said this the best. He said, "Anything in the world when you're born, that's normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's a career. And anything invented after you're 35 years old is just bad. Just bad for the world." And I think that's a great framing for what's happening today. We freak out about what the younger kids cuz we don't understand it. And we don't know how they're going to adapt to it. And I think we just have to trust them that they will figure it out. We figured it out. You know, our parents were freaked out about us going to movies and playing video games and whatever. And we figured it out. And I think the kids today will figure it out. Again, take me with my optimism bias cuz I have a deep optimism bias around some of this stuff. I want people to take me with my optimism bias as well because I am entirely swung that way and yet even with that bias, I'm going to ask the following question. Do you think there is such a thing as a rate of change so rapid that children cannot adapt? That children cannot adapt. That's a great question. Um Yes. And that would be what we would call the singularity, right? So, we are hitting that right now in AI. Does your audience know what the singularity is? Uh you should give it to them and you should also tell me what year you think we hit that. Okay. I don't believe in it, by the way. So, let It's hard to talk on this, so but give it to us all the whole shebang. So, Vernor Vinge coined this phrase the technological singularity. And he basically said the minute machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence, then we take on a technological evolutionary path, not a biological evolutionary path. And what the minute that happens, we are complete, the world is completely different. And Ray Popular, Ray Kurzweil popularized that as the singularity and wrote this book called The Singularity Is Near in 1999 positing that in 2045, we would get to that point where machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Okay. I disagree with this for two levels. Okay. First, and I've had lots of conversations about Ray with Ray on this. Um the first is that we don't know what intelligence is. The um the IQ test measures two aspects of intelligence, the speed of thought processing and the ability to match concepts across frameworks. But we have many dimensions about a dozen other facets of intelligence like linguistic intelligence, spatial intelligence, um emotional intelligence, this concept of spiritual awareness, or the concept of presence, the Eastern concept of being present. None of that is reflected in an IQ test. And that whole sum of the parts is what we call intelligence. So, my first big issue with it is what the hell do you mean by intelligence? Right? And the second issue I have is what do you mean by overtaking? Because the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, an AI or robot is going to do it much better than me anyway. And so, let them do it. And therefore, frees me to be much more creative and so on. And I think what we're doing is we're merging with technology, and this is where Ray and I definitely do agree. Uh where you're merging with technology such that the human experience is augmented and amplified. The fact that I have a smartphone, I would I would argue makes me more human than less human. Because all my memory's in there, freeing up lots of neurons to do other work. I can communicate with my son for free around the world, which is unbelievable. I can project empathy around the world, which is incredible. So, I have I'm more human with my device than without it. And I think that's a powerful commentary for where intelligence goes. Most people worry about AIs, "Oh my god, it'll come take come home and take over the world and will destroy us." And if we're lucky, we're pets. And if we're unlucky, we're food. It's kind of like pretty much always goes that way. Skynet, Terminator, The Matrix. But we actually see is we're augmenting the human experience with technology at an amazing level. Um and I think that's very, very inspiring. We're more human now. So, let let's look at education, for example. Over the last our jobs over the last 200 years, we roboticized our employees. Said, "That's your job function. Do that one job. You're an audit accountant. You do audits and you do it repetitively. And we're going to measure you by how quickly and how effectively and how fast and and mistake-free are your audits and that your bonus is based on that." So, we turn people into robots. People on master assembly line stamping out widgets. Now, with the advent of AI and robotics and so on, people are becoming much more human again. The most valuable employees or colleagues you have in any company are the people that learn the fastest. And that's a magical thing to be. Now, as AI comes along, the big challenge is and I would argue that in the concept of the what you would call the singularity in AI, we've hit the singularity. The pace of change in AI is now so fast, you can't absorb it. By the time you've you've made an investment, your your investment's out of date. And so, this is a huge structural challenge with this. It's It's I'll give you an analog in the in the education world. If you're doing a master's degree in neuroscience today, by the time you finish your master's degree, you're out of date. Because computational neuroscience is overtaking the field so fast that it's it's making the old ways irrelevant very quickly. So, our our the structural issue we have in education is that we can't update our educational frameworks quickly enough to deal with all the new changes. And AI, I think, is is the epitome of that right now. Um, and this is where I made the comment Elon tweeted this little video clip of me last weekend saying there's no mechanism that we can see by which you can regulate AI at all. At all. You'd have to regulate every line of code written. And I just don't see that happening. That's when you really have your issues with freedom. By 10 years from now, you're now in 2034, uh, Elon made a quip that in the 2032 election, it won't be a question of what human will win, it will be a question of what AI. Now, assuming that he's kidding, hahaha, but that he's directionally indicating it, um, I think that Ray is going to be right by 2029, which is well under my 10-year time frame here. Uh, you've got AI is just smarter than any single human. So, that means AI is going to be better than every human at anything. Then, it becomes a question of did before we get there, did they start having existential dread based on the rate at which things are changing? Who's they? The kids? Yeah, kids. I I think this impacts everybody, but kids will be the most paralyzed because they don't have the world experience to know, oh, I can navigate this way. I deeply disagree with this whole, uh, smarter than human beings thing. Okay, so we're Again, going back to the definition of intelligence, we don't have a clear definition of intelligence, okay? So, cuz now you have You said if something can be defined, I forget the exact word you used, but if it can if a task can be defined by a set of rules. Prescriptively. The minute I can prescriptively describe a task, yep. So, name a thing that you think humans will continue to be better than AI at in 10 years. Um, empathy, creativity, humor. Um, there's lots of domains, spiritual awareness. The only one of those I'm going to give you is humor. Maybe. And they probably get thrashed at that. better at jokes. Sure. Then what's left? What do you mean? Well, but the the but now you see what I see look here, let me let me describe what I'm we need to get clear on what we're talking about intelligence, okay? So, we have this concept of intelligence and we think some things will be smarter than us, but in what way? Is it faster? Is it better? Is it more complete? We That's one challenge, right? Because there's all these other facets of intelligence that make us human beings that are different. Common sense, for example, etc. Then you bleed into AGI. You have narrow AI, which always is going to be better than a human being because it's anti-lock braking systems, credit card fraud detection. We use narrow AI to run the world today. If you took that out, the world would just grind to a halt very quickly. Then we get to AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, the ability to match concepts across frameworks. And that's what people talk about, I think, when people talk about intelligence today, that AIs, once they achieve AGI, will be able to do tasks better than human beings. Okay? Now, I actually look at this as an optimistic thing because there's a lot of human white-collar drudgery that AIs will take over. Okay? I'll give you a small example. I'm a booking agent for Club Med resorts. And a family calls and they go, "We want We have three families. We want two adjoining rooms, and the kids have to be on the same floor, and da da da." Now, I have to do a lot of crappy work to figure out how I'm going to manage just that permutation. And there's a ton of stupid that goes into figuring that out. A ton It takes a ton of my time. That's where I think AIs will shine a lot. But it'll allow me to then focus my time on real problem-solving or other areas where they're less good. And yes, over time, we won't need that human AI booking agent because the AI will do a lot of it anyway. Okay? But that's been a steady vector forever. The minute you have a concrete truck, it replaces 100 concrete workers shoveling concrete. You You free them up to do more higher-order things and and so on. So, the question is, what work will there be there to do? And I think this is the really big question that we don't have a clear That's where I think the the interesting question is. The rest of it, I think, is is fear-mongering to some extent. And by the way, I see AGI just like the intelligence kind of We had the Turing test that kept shifting the goalposts, and then all of a sudden it we passed it a long time ago, and we're like, "Oh, not a big deal." I think AGI will be like that. We'll We'll have AGI, and everyone will go, "Oh my god, we have AGI." And then it'll become, "Oh, this is okay." And it'll be normal. And I think AGI is bleeding into what we would call consciousness. And there again, you have a big definition problem and a test problem. We don't have a definition for consciousness. We don't have a test for consciousness. Right? A subset of consciousness is self-awareness. And you look like you're self-aware, so I attribute self-consciousness or or self-awareness to you. I feel like I'm I'm self-aware, but my wife disagrees. So, it's really hard to even have the conversation because we don't have a clear definition of this. And so, and and when you bleed into those areas where I think things get really, really interesting. Um quick anecdote. I remember we had a robotics expert, one of the NASA astronauts was used to build robots when we were doing Singularity. And I asked him a a question. I said, "Look, is there a system in the world that has the inputs and outputs and enough processing power that it might generate self-awareness?" Um and it might suddenly go, "Oh, I'm a system." Right? And he's like, "Huh, let me think about that." So, he goes off, couple of days he comes back, and he goes, "I think I have an answer." I'm like, "Okay." He goes, "Traffic systems." I said, "Really?" He goes, "Yeah." He goes, "In my opinion, I've thought about this for a couple of days. Traffic systems have enough inputs and outputs and processing capability that one day it might generate self-awareness and might go, 'Oh, I'm a traffic system.'" Right? And the question two questions emerge at that point. What would it do? And how would we know? And the problem is we wouldn't know. So, I think when we hit AGI, we won't know when an AI hits that point. We won't know when an AI has consciousness because there will not be a test a test for it. And as like and and just to sum help this whole thing, like Ray Kurzweil put it most brilliantly. He was asked once about consciousness, and he goes, "Language is a really thin pipe to discuss concepts as complex as that. Ray's brilliant. I love Ray the most. He was the very first audio book I ever read, so I will forever have a debt of gratitude. I've interviewed him. I've had the good fortune of dining with him, but that is a cheap excuse not to think about a very hard problem. It is It is but it's a valid observation. We struggle a great deal with language. So, I think what ends up you have to really You have to really think back when you talk all about all the stuff, intelligence, conscious. You have to go back to what is a human being and this is where I become really fascinated. I've been fascinated for a long time in metaphysics. And I've been fascinated by what is the human condition. And I have actually a diagram that that that I think summarizes this nicely. to wrap this point first. That is 100% an area that we will touch on before we go. So, they have really unique insights there. Um but first I want to say I think consciousness is a red herring. Okay. And I want to reorient people what we're talking about is are are we all going to struggle as AI gets better than us at everything? I think kids will be the canary in the coal mine. You think kids will be the far more resilient. Your argumentation and please if I say this in a way that you don't recognize or think is uncharitable, let me know. Um but that we don't even understand what intelligence is. These systems might become conscious, but we'll never know cuz there's no way for us to engage with that. Kids are going to get it. They're going to use AI in the way that they use it and they'll step away from it when like your son with Fortnite, when it stops being useful in his life, he's going to step back. People need to understand my base assumption that I think the brain developed so that humans could move. Why did humans need to move? So, they could take control of their environment. Why did they need to take control of their environment? So, they could survive. So, then the game from an evolutionary algorithm standpoint becomes to keep this thing alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And the the granddaddy of all the algorithms that it planted in our brains is the desire for meaningful pursuit. Both of those words are important. Meaningful means I can draw a straight line between going out and killing this thing and the survival of the people that I love. So, yo, like this really mattered. It was a whole thing. And so, when we do it, we're celebrating and we feel all the neurochemistry that we want to feel. This is awesome. That is meaningful pursuit. This is why when you have a job that feels like a dead end and it's not going anywhere and all it does is let you pay your rent, it's not interesting. Now, once AI becomes it crosses the uncanny valley and it's no longer like ChatGPT giving you the lamest dad jokes ever and it is Blade Runner, and I, without doing a special test where I put a thing up against your iris, I can't tell if you're real or not. And in fact, you don't even know if you're real or not. Now, again, consciousness is a red herring. Who cares? It is just like hanging out with your friend, except for one really brutal fact. They're better than you at everything possible. And so, now it's like, well, this really sucks because meaningful pursuit would be that I need to go do a thing to help me and mine. But, energy costs have dropped to zero because these things are so damn good at everything that now, why would I go do that? Cuz we can just get an AI to do it way better than me. That kid, when he's or adult, when they're interfacing with an entity that is better than them at everything, they're going to be like, "Huh, how do I have meaningful meaningful pursuit?" And the answer will be, "You get meaningful pursuit in the next life and I just need you to do these things and you're going to have meaning today, even though we don't need you to go capture an animal cuz all that's taken care of, but I'm going to give you this path to meaning through this ancient book, through this tribe and all of that. And bro, it's going to get weird. And I lay all these pieces out on the table for one reason and one reason only because again, I'm wearing a shirt. This is Neon Future because I believe technology is going to make our lives better. But, one of the earliest things we talked about is those spikes on a graph. That is human nature. That is an idea set moving through the medium of the human mind and the way humans act as a collective. And if we plant wise ideas now, if we warn people about this stuff. If we talk about, "Hey, here's how you branch to Mad Max. Here's how you branch to Utopia." Let's make sure that we're all hyper aware of how the human mind breaks bad and how it can break good. Then there's one last thing that I have to say because I find very smart people like yourself are not facing a very ugly truth. And that very ugly truth is, this is This is a paraphrase, but it's going to get really damn close. Uh you said that people will be able to step into a higher order of existence engagement with the world as all the sort of menial stuff is taken away. Now, the reason that feels true to you is you are very smart. The bad news is that human intellect is on a gigantic scale. And Einstein, who's only like a 165 IQ, and I say only on purpose cuz the smartest person living I think is a 220. So, uh and I mean that literally in the the actual Webster's dictionary definition is like somebody with an 83 IQ, I think. So, the difference between that person and Einstein if I memorize like 2.6 or something like that uh in terms of the difference in IQ, and it's almost that again between Einstein and the smartest person. Okay, an AI, by according to Ray Kurzweil, is going to be a million times smarter than you. So, it's like, bro, if the difference between Einstein and a is 2.6 and we're talking about something that is a million times smarter than you, I will hypothesize that we have officially hit the point at which the rate of change will be so rapid that you you can't absorb it. And so now your only answer is, and again you need only look at Elon Musk who's doing all of this stuff in plain view, you have to merge with technology Yeah. to keep up. To have meaningful for meaningful pursuit, you have to be able to keep up with them from just a raw horsepower perspective. But again, society will break along those lines, people that will and people that won't. And if that does not strike people as to quote you from the beginning, the most dramatic seismic shift in human existence ever, then I I I I'm at a loss to help them understand change. Wonderful articulation. I think that was a really great and very tight concise articulation of a future. And there's absolutely valid points that you make all the way up and down. I have a couple of point issues. One is Um when you say kids will be despairing because they won't be able to do things as good as an AI, I disagree with that. Because I don't think they'll despair. They'll go, that thing's better, I'll do this, I'll I'll go do something else or I'll figure something else out. So that's I don't think they'll go to despair. They will innovate their way out of the problem. Innovate or they'll just adapt. Kids are adaptive. They just figure it out and they just adapt to their situation. to me how they've adapted to social media. Well, badly because it's it's it's sucked up their minds. But that's true for the whole world. poorly to social media but wonderfully to this really brutally intelligent AI? Yeah, so now that becomes how do you guide them and how do you manage them and how do you parent them etc. And we're mainly case doing a very bad job because they're leaving them to the social media and that's just up their brains, okay? Um however, there's some really interesting vectors coming out of that. There's a woman out of Chicago called Nicole Drysdale who looked at this device addiction problem and social media addiction problem and said, "You know, the problem is not the fact not we're looking at the wrong problem here. The problem is their higher order thinking is not triggered. They're passively consuming. They're just viewing a screen and they're not really they're So, how do we trigger that? If we can, then it doesn't matter what they watch." So, she created a program called Screen Smart where they take kids through a a little program and you can literally boils down to a few you as a parent sit with your child twice a week for 15 minutes and ask them a set of leading questions. Uh for example, you're watching a a movie, "Why do you think the characters are doing what they're doing? What do you think the director is trying to achieve with this plot? What would you do direct differently if you were the director?" If you do that twice a week for 15 minutes, it turns out that even when they're on their own, their higher order thinking starts buzzing and they're now actively engaging with the content. They've now taken like a few tens of thousands of kids through this program. It's unbelievably outcomes they're seeing from this. They've broken the addiction problem. Their vocabularies increased like 86% or something crazy like this. It's just So, I it's one of those where I think we'll figure it out just like we figured out um how uh once we realize that the the addiction patterns of social media, we need to regulate and say like not that it's a great example, but in China they're saying you can't have social media until you're a certain age cuz your brain has to be more fully formed etc. I think we'll figure that part out. It's just there's an arms race problem always in this stuff where something happens and then we figured out the consequences and then we fix it etc. Um the reason I'm uh tend to be optimistic is when you bring more intelligence into the world, the world just becomes better. Uh now we do have definitely the paperclip problem which is in the extension of your uh AI um uh um talking about uh training and education etc. The the the you know the paperclip problem, right? You say do an AI make all the paperclips and it sucks all the energy out of human beings cuz it wants to optimize. gets lost in the And it gets lost in the it trying to fulfill the objective. without the spirit. I think that's a huge danger. Okay? Because the two inflection points came out when we allowed AIs to code and gave them access to the code base. And the second one was when they got access to the internet. And those two put together mean that an AI can program pretty much whatever it wants. And there's no question there's going to be bad agents out there trying to do these things in a particular way. I still tend to be optimistic because as the cost drops and the reasons to fight drop etc. etc. I don't see the Terminator Matrix scenarios which are all always a Hollywood thing. I do agree we need to blend with technology and we need to merge with AI. Because it'll just make all of our bodily functions better. And AI deeply embedded into my body would be fantastic cuz I'd reach for a donut and it would say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm still metabolizing your coffee. Please wait 10 minutes and for God's sakes don't have the donut. Have something else." Right? Um, by the way, it's amazing what you and Lisa are doing across the board with with nutrition and all the wellness stuff and the women's empowerment. It's just one of the most important vectors that we could pursue in terms of helping human beings get more better and human more human and more real about the world. I think. Um, but in terms of AI specifically, I think we'll end up merging with it in that particular way. Because what's going to happen is an AI is it And you saw this in Star Trek Next Generation. What did Data want more than anything else? He wanted to be human. He wanted to experience what it meant like to be human. And I think that's where it'll go. Lord knows I hope you're right. Okay, so let's talk about what it means to be human then. What what is it that Data wants? Give me your base assumptions on um on what makes somebody human. Okay. So, if I step back a second, I'm totally fascinated by uh metaphysics, meaning what is reality made of? Okay? And I've been fascinated by it for a very long time. Do you mean that like at the physics level? At the physics, yeah. Like what is reality made of? We have experiences, we have objective facts. Like what is the building blocks of reality? Like actual space-time, quarks. Physics studies reality. Yep. Metaphysics thinks about what is reality made of. What are the building blocks of reality? I'm not crossing that chasm. Can we look up a definition of metaphysics, please? Well, it's the meta doesn't matter. I've been I've been fascinated by in terms of we for example, most of our philosophies operate on a subjective set of metaphysics or an objective set of metaphysics. Okay? Okay. So, our metaphysics that we run the world on today is a subject-object metaphysics. Either I have a subjective experience about the world or there's an objective reality and we try and measure that. Those are the two points. Um we've kind of started over the last 20-30 years to graduate past that to say there's a different type of it's an experiential uh basis for reality that is sitting that doesn't fit There's lots of aspects about the world that aren't entirely subjective and aren't entirely objective. Like moral values, for example. Many of us may share the same moral values, but they're not scientifically measurable. Right? So, there you have an example of or love or emotions, etc. where lots of people can share the same emotion, but you can't objectively measure them yet in in a particular way. So, there's a whole modality in in the metaphysics world looking at you need to look at reality as a phase shift from uh um um potential to realized or unknown to known would be a good way of doing it. A good metaphor would be if I have a block of marble in front of me and I'm a sculptor, uh until I start chipping away, that thing is completely unrealized potential. It could be anything. Then I start chipping away and I'm forming it into the shape of a head. Now it's it's realized. Now I can break it and I can break that value, but I've created value. I've taken something that was in my head and instantiated it in that thing. And there's a phasing of how the world may is working that we're really getting pretty interested by in terms of describing reality overall. I got down this rabbit hole because of the quantum mechanics issue. Uh when you study physics, you do 3 years of classical physics and then in third year they give you quantum mechanics and they and they tell you everything you learned is out out the window. And you're like, "Come on. You you just had me do millions of exams and study million just chapters and now you're telling me everything is out the window." So, I I went down the rabbit hole of of quantum mechanics and and and the subjective nature of reality and so on. So, uh and I started researching this and for me when I think about humanity, uh I came up with a diagram which has three concentric circles in it. So, picture three concentric circles with with the middle is just your soul shining out. Your soul is just trying to express. Um and it hits some layers. It hits a boundary condition, which is your subconscious. And there's gaps when it can shine through that subconscious and there's gaps when it can't shine through that subconscious. And when you transcend and you hit get through that, you have your conscious self and there's again gaps, areas where it gets stopped and areas where it shines through. So, it's almost like dashed lines and two two concentric circles around a solid dot. The soul is just trying to express. It's just trying to be whatever your definition of soul is and again we have a definition problem. But it's trying to be. It's energy. Uh unconditional love would be a good metaphor for it. It's just trying to express. It might hit subconscious blockages in that expression like I don't think I'm good enough or some of the limiting beliefs that that uh Tony Robbins talks about. If you can cut through those, you may have conscious limitations like, "Hey, I really want to play the guitar, but I've got to feed my kid first. And you make conscious choices as to how much you Sometimes it comes all the way out. And that's when you see true flow states, when you see pure spiritual experiences. Uh Messi playing soccer is a an example of somebody there's no separation or Michael Jordan playing basketball. It's going straight from soul coming out with no uh hindrances along the way. Right? Um so our job as human beings as I put it in the context of this diagram is either rotate that kaleidoscope so your soul can shine out. So I want to make sure So I got soul, conscious self, what was the third one? Soul, and then the next level is your subconscious level. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. Soul, subconscious, and then conscious. Okay? And then there's other layers past that like family and culture and other things. But but the for the most important those two. And our job as a human being is to rotate that subconscious and conscious so that my inner soul shines out. Tiger Woods playing golf is a good ex- Any artist on stage me so remove this from the level of metaphor Okay. Uh and take me to so just to crystallize make sure I understand the metaphor here would be the dotted lines if they are not aligned you might go through one level but then you're going to hit the wall of the next or they might be aligned such that you don't even make it the soul doesn't even get to the subconscious it just hits something and comes back. Yeah. What what are the dotted lines in reality? The dotted lines are your subconscious belief systems that you've built up over growing up as a kid. So for example if um growing up in Canada I thought there's no way I'm playing basketball at any level because I'm Indian and like Indians can't play basketball. So that's a limiting belief. So I I didn't try hard enough at basketball until I got a little bit early older and then I was like this I can try for this. I can go for this. Um Was basketball already in your soul? No. It was just a thing to do. But it was an expression of me at some level. I ended up on the high school team, but it's Canadian basketball, so it's much lower level than as my old business partner used to say, "Oh, you're Canadian, you're like the junior varsity team." The The Raptors are furious right now. They are very, very unhappy. Yes, I agree. Anyway, um so you you're you're soul may express and be hit by subconscious beliefs that stop you, okay? Um it's also a protective mechanism when something really bad happens in the world, you want to protect the soul. So, let's say you're you go back uh 50,000 years of families at home, the husband goes out on a hunt, never comes back. And the woman needs some psychological blockage to protect from that trauma. So, the subconscious has a two-level filter, protect allowing this to come out and allowing stopping bad things coming from the inside outside, okay? Then you have your conscious blockages that say, "I really want to do this, but really I need to do this first." And you're making triaging non- stop as a human being. And so, I think of the human condition as either rotate that kaleidoscope so your soul shines out in whatever form it's meant to shine out in, or dissolve those barriers so that more of it expresses. So, if you look at a Gandhi or a Christ or a Dalai Lama, they've done the work to to dissolve all of their subconscious barriers and their conscious barriers, and they're just shining. And you see that, that's why you always see a halo in religious diagrams, etc. And we pay to see this, by the way, when an our great artist is on stage, there's they've trained and trained and trained for years to go a full expression of their soul out onto the field or out onto a stage or whatever. Can you define what the soul is? It's very hard. I think of it as energy. Uh you could think of it as just pure love. Uh I think of it as pure expression. So, in this framework, you can't have a bad soul. Like evil is evil is the blockage of light. It's not the darkness. Uh so in this metaphor um uh evil would be the lack of light, not the fact that you can be bad. So the the soul is just shining light. It's just trying to express. Mhm. Okay, so any everybody every one of us has parts of ourselves that we just want to express. We just want to be. Okay, so I feel like we're switching between uh discussions of physics. So when you say energy, I think of physics. Uh You shine light, I think of physics. A radiating body where photons are actually flying away from said body. Yeah. do you mean that the soul is a physical thing that actually radiates? Okay. So in in non um in non-esoteric terms, what is the soul? I did This is a language problem. It's a piece of consciousness or a meta-consciousness. There's two There's two classical definitions of soul or consciousness in this model. One is there is an emergent property coming from inside that just needs to get out. This needs to express itself. Is it an emergent property from the brain? Uh I think it's from a collective consciousness. It We don't know where soul sits. It kind of kind of sits everywhere. makes it sound like it does have a physical manifestation. It It manifests physically. It definitely expresses physically. Do only humans have a soul? I do I don't believe so. I think any living being has is I think bok choy has a soul. I think I think so in a weird way. So Deepak Chopra's I think puts it best. He said, "Look, there's a global field of consciousness and you're an instantiation out of that consciousness." And what are you trying to do? You're trying to get back to that consciousness. So He's a dualist. Are you a dualist? I'm somewhat of a dualist, yeah. I'm I'm kind of an agnostic in this. Like I'm again I I don't know what we mean by soul. It's a very hard problem to get into that definition, right? Um Uh you have religious um metaphors for it. You have energetic metaphors for it. You have Eastern metaphors. We talked about reincarnation the last time we were on we were on this program. So, there's lots of ways of the soul can express through multiple lifetimes if you believe in that model. Um Um but you're progressing through different stages and and basically just expressing. So, if you think of a a tennis player or Federer Roger Federer, he's he really his soul really wanted to play tennis. And he found a mechanism or Mozart playing piano. Um and it goes from a junior to a young professional to getting on the tour and then make a winning championships, etc. And just keeps going at it and at it and at it until he can get as far as he can get. And that's the that that basic motivation and that quest for just getting better and wanting to experience what it's like to win win Wimbledon or whatever, I think of a soul. What about people um take somebody like Andre Agassi? Mhm. Uh who absolutely hated his life, was completely miserable. Or Steve Martin, greatest comedian of all time when he was doing it and there's literally a movie he's in the the theater watching a movie in England and character on the screen says, it's from uh the movie Fame, Mhm. "I just want to be Steve Martin." And Steve Martin's watching that going, "You don't want to be You don't want to be Steve Robin Williams. I mean Yeah, so these people are profoundly unhappy, but they are from the outside, they're the people that you would say their soul is shining the brightest. I'm saying their soul is definitely shining out. I didn't say they're the the the happiest because um take Tiger take um Tiger Woods as a good example, right? In the realm of golf, he's aligned his kaleidoscope perfectly so that when he's playing golf, when he was younger, he was like completely there. And there was this unbelievable presence that you felt when you were playing golf. You see that with We saw that with Jordan playing basketball or Messi playing soccer or any great artist on stage. In the other areas of his life, complete hot mess. Complete mess cuz that They haven't done the work to dissolve some of the subconscious blockages and and uh um um limiting beliefs he may have, etc. This is where I think techniques like neuro-linguistic programming and NLP and CBT are really powerful today to help us navigate some of these areas. Now, the problem is when you have a tortured soul like that, there is so much blockage in in those areas that it it comes out in one narrow area. Robin Williams or Steve McQueen are great examples of this. And it shines unbelievably brightly because of that focused laser, but it's a very very The rest of their lives can be very very difficult. Uh so, they figure out how to rotate the kaleidoscope so they their soul If the soul can't express, then you've got complete sealing across the board, then you have often suicide because the soul can't express. And then people go, "Well, what's the purpose? I can't express myself, so I might as well leave the world." Mhm. Uh so, uh this was an answer to what makes us human. Uh what I hear in all that, I don't I don't know if it's what you're intending to communicate. So, because you're speaking in metaphor, I then map to the metaphors that I use. Actually, that's not true. Because you speak in metaphor, I'm mapping it to the physical realities that um are my base assumptions. Okay. So, my base assumptions are that uh there is absolutely no dualism. Whatever we're calling the soul is exactly tied to the human body. It's a combination of the brain, the uh neural cells that exist in the heart, and the enteric nervous system, which also uses brain cells, and the microbes, and like that whole crazy cocktail combined with experience gives you the what I think you call soul. Like if if Tiger Woods was born 10,000 years ago, he would not have played golf. Yeah. So, but he would have found something that you're calling soul. So, to me what that feels like is humans have an evolutionarily planted algorithm for meaningful pursuit. Yes. And so, you can point them at a time of leisure, you can point them at something that I'm quite frankly, golf, even though I just did it yesterday, it was very fun. Uh it's meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But, because you can map it onto a sense of ooh, I'm getting better at this thing and my friends think it's cool. And so, there is a sense of oh, this actually matters if I decide to tell myself that it matters. Yeah, so this maps onto the metaphysics question I was asking before you get to the human condition, which is what is the purpose of life? And and and after a lot of inquiry, my fundamental answer that I could come to is the purpose of life is to grow. And then I was got fascinated by the fact that okay, if life is about growth, at least growth is a major tenant of life, what is the mechanism by which growth takes place? And so, I've gone really deep and I'm trying to understand that aspect of it in this diagram of the human condition is one attempt to understand here's the mechanism by which human beings grow. So, where human beings grow is by taking on a big deep meaning or in my framing, letting your inside outward, letting your deepest self come outward by dissolving and blocking, tackling some of your issues and so on, and putting yourself in circumstances where you can expressfully. But the But if you look at life at large, biological life, any business, any biological, any tree, the only interest, the fundamental motivation is to grow. And so, that I find really interesting. I don't know why. The minute you ask the why question, you end up in a rat hole because you can ask why anything. So, so I I've got interested in how does this happen? And and this is where I got So, it turns out all growth follows a very specific four-point step. Okay? So, you have an initial condition. A great visual of this is lava flowing underwater. If you've ever seen the video of this, you'll see lava like bursting open. You see the red-hot thing. The water boils instantly as it meets the lava. The lava cools. And then you you have stability again. And then it breaks open again, red-hot lava. Water boils and cools again. That That kind of loop is the core process, I think, of life. Which is you have a stable condition. You have something from inside or outside that breaks that equilibrium. Um you have an a very dynamic uncertain period, and then you freeze again. And then you keep spiraling upward or downward in that. The This is going back to the stock market chart. This is the where you have these um um uh you have a stock that breaks free, and then it consolidates at some level. Then it breaks free, and it consolidates at different level. Uh it's a it's a very fractal pattern cuz you can look at the stock market over a year, or a month, or a minute, or a day, and it's still the same pattern. It's very, very uh stand That, I think, is a fundamental archetypal reality of life in in everything that we do. The question is, can we smooth out some of those those points? Which is why I love the way you frame it in terms of those jagged edges and the boundary conditions, etc. Mhm. Can we limit that? And can we guide it? Are Have you heard of the Hawkins scale? Yes, because of you. Okay, have you looked into it? Yes. And? Because I was terrified you were going to bring it up. Uh so, I looked it up. I was mortified. You Okay, tell me why. This is awesome. it's putting a mystical lens on the natural human condition. Like when you describe your three circles, I'm totally bought in, except for I would never say soul. I would say evolutionarily placed algorithms. I'm good with that. Word. Like if we're If we're all on board with that, then good with that. Like it's entirely possible that that's all it is. And that's fine. I'm good with that. I'm I'm more trying to understand how these things happen than trying to put labels on the source or the end condition. I think it's critical, and the fact that people don't is the source of all human suffering. Yeah, you mean you are critical What's critical about that? Wait wait When you say what's When you say it's critical? think that there is something mystical happening, that their life is divine or some other thing, their prediction engine breaks. Mhm. Now, I think religion is the greatest medium through which the memes of how to live a good life propagate. I want to be very clear about how useful and powerful I think religion is. But, the reason I think it's powerful is at the societal level, where you have to account for all levels of intellect, and religion is the only medium that I've discovered that allows these powerful ideas to propagate at every level of intellect. Yeah, because you step outside the intellect, and you step you frame it as being, right? In terms of the different religions and and so on. Um I didn't follow that. So, in a in a Let's take Christianity, Mhm. where the end goal is unconditional love, right? Um So, when I look at the great religions, think that's the end goal of Christianity. That's interesting. Really? Isn't that what Christ is all about? Unconditional love? core message, but the Bible would be a lot shorter if you were just trying to get that message across. I really think the whole idea of religious texts are to allow a very large group of people to um control their environment, Yes. to stay healthy, Yeah. to be societally stable, Social management. Yep. Okay. Perfect. I would Yeah, yeah. Uh so, I've got a very clear sense That's far more than just pure love. No, no. You You put the end goal as pure love, but you'll never get there. It's almost impossible to have unconditional love, right? So, you but you put it in as an aspiration. That's the That's the pursuit of the deep meaning that part of it. I'm I've got a sense of what religion is cuz growing up in India we're we're I mentioned earlier like both my grandmothers knew Gandhi and knew her very well. Very secular upbringing. Here's the good and bad of this religion. Here's the good and bad of this religion. Please don't follow any religion, but know what they're all but that was how I was raised. Um the the the religion was incredibly important when we were evolving from tribal to hunter-gatherer models because you needed to give human beings hope at a time when everything around them was death. Okay? Average life was 25. Everything around you died a Buddhist death. You're You got a tooth infection, you got a bacterial infection, you died literally on the spot. So, the in order to deal with this hell of of of biological life, we invented religion as an aspirational hope saying there's something else out there and we're meant to get to that point. And so, religions got invented and then came the social structures around it to help Oh, if we're having religions then we can tell people what to do then don't eat pigs because pigs eat a lot of garbage and you don't want to be eating garbage. So, a lot of the the the aspects of religious thing then turned into social structures to deal Marriage, for example, is one of those example of sacraments that cascades down from that. By the way, do you know my comment about marriage? I do, yeah. Okay. So, So, religion evolved from that basis, but we're kind of coming to the end of religion because we have too much evidentiary understanding of the world to believe in a god in the way that religions portended. And so, the absolute truths that religions come come display that ask you to take on an assumptive truth or essentially falling apart because we have much better data and evidentiary basis for this. I think the next 3 years are really going to challenge that basic assumption. Oh, it's I'm not saying that we free of the effects of it. I think it's good we're we're writhing in the throes of religion right now. This is the problem with the Middle East right now. Right? Um uh it's a pretty uh difficult and uncompromising uh cuz many of an absolute truth then you then you have a huge problem in social structures. There's no adaptability in there. There's no feedback loop to update a religion. And this is the problem with our older religions. There's no feedback loop. By the way, just to importantly mention, there's two types of religion that are very very different. There's the Judeo-Christian religions, which is where I mean about the by assumptive truths and and so on. And then you've got Eastern religions, which are much more contemplative. And they try and you try and achieve God by going inside yourself, meditation, martial arts, by inner examination. Whereas in the West, you try and step outside yourself to experience God. So, that's a different model. Prayer is still in there, but you but God sits outside you in this model. Yeah. Uh so, I think religion is a symptom of something and not the cause of something. It becomes a cause later down the road, don't get me wrong. But a symptom of hope? No, symptom of uh if you wanted to talk about hope, which I don't, but if you did, then it would be a symptom of the human brain's desire for hope. But I think that religion formed in the same way that your lava example, where land is formed, where you get like this little poke through and then stable, little poke through and then stabilize. If people really research like how Christianity forms, those long forms, they're always built on the back of something else. Yeah. And that could be paganism just straight up and Usually paganism. But again, paganism is like I don't understand why the moon keeps appearing every day. So let's just consider it a god. And worship it cuz it's doing some it's doing some good stuff to the world, right? Now we have very clear understanding of it because we have much better data around it. My my um My dad has done a lot of research around this and he he's he's gone very deep in some of this stuff. So some of my thinking comes from from that. But in terms of the the we really come down to the question that Plato asked. How should we conduct ourselves? And that's I think the fundamental question that now comes up again as we consider AI as we consider the future of technology clashing with past religious structures. I don't think anybody in the world has a clear sense of how we should manage ourselves going forward. Yeah, so I think it's actually a slightly different question and this is why I think getting this right really matters. The question isn't how should we conduct ourselves? The question is how do you structure a mind that will conduct conduct itself in a useful way? Because that is literally what we have to do with AI. Like for instance, do you have to give AI ethics? Like is ethics a necessary way to bound an intelligence? Cuz you have the presupposition which you said earlier so I can replay that clip if anybody thinks that I'm making this up where you said intelligence makes everything better. I think that is a hard and fast absolutely not. I think intelligence is agnostic. I think that there is something uniquely human that creates this value system that we all recognize as like oh yeah, that's amazing. But dude, I can take one step like outside my purview and look back at myself and be like you slaughter animals nonstop for your food. Like you're evil. There's a manga called The Promised Neverland. It's all about humans being raised by demons to eat them. Sorry, spoiler alert. I shouldn't have said that. Okay. Uh and man, when you look at it like that and you're like, "Yo, these poor little humans like have to be harvested when they're like 9 years old." And it's just gruesome. And I was like, "Damn, that's like real." Like so uh I think that we exist in a set of values and from within those set of values, the way that we live seems perfectly normal. Those set of values arose because of the way that our mind works and the things that we are pushing ourselves towards, which I don't think is divine and I think people lead themselves astray by thinking that it is. I think it has everything to do with evolution going, "How do I keep you alive?" And by the way, evolution is the blind watchmaker. There's no intention there. There's evolution is not thinking through anything. It is simply a process that runs and you get what you get. And that's why I think our minds are built in a certain way first for movement and then we already covered this. It goes down the line. When people try to interpret the world by going, "Oh, but this is divine revelation." That's where things fall apart. Mhm. The reason being that there is a reason that Buddhism, while probably was at times leveraged to kill a lot of people, nothing quite like the monotheistic gods where you can be like, "No, no, no, Jesus wants you to take Jerusalem back." And so now it's like, "Of course you have to slaughter all of the infidels." Like it you you just tell people this is what God wants. And then you not holding them hostage, but you motivate them. Like people were motivated to go on these crusades. Well, that's because of that comment I made earlier, right? Where you wire it into their limbic system rather than early age. It's the ultimate form of marketing. Uh Yes, but the real question to ask is why does that work so well on the human mind? Oh, we are unbelievably I mean, you know about John Frum and the cargo cults? Never heard of them. Oh, so Uh, this is a amazing story. Uh, a Navy pilot called John Frum after war after um um uh, the big thing in uh Hawaii with the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Okay. Um, they're the US are sending out uh Navy pilots to scan the skies to make sure this doesn't happen again. So, he's one of these and just after the war and his plane crash lands on the island. And he it has a problem that he manages able to land it and he gets he gets off safely. And the natives see this guy coming down dressed in a white Navy suit literally think God has come. So, they give him women, they give him food, they treat him literally like a divine entity. He's like, "Wow, this is great." Now, instead of putting out a fire and and signaling for help and doing all this stuff, he's like, "I'm being treated like a god." Like so, he hides the plane and covers it up and just lives there. War ends. Now, the Navy the US has a duty to find everybody. So, they start sending search parties. Where is this guy? Um, 500 miles away these uh search parties uh come across another island and on that island are statues of the plane and statues of John Frum and they find an entire population waiting for the second coming. And it's the best anthropological example we have of an a religion literally spontaneously emerging. We are mean meaning making machines to your earlier point. I 100% agree with that. Maybe it's an evolutionary algorithm. We will desperately looking for signals from noise to anything that gives us a higher purpose or gives our lives higher meaning and I think an evolutionary basis for that is a perfectly reasonable place to go. Um, I think there's more to life than just that, but that's certainly a valid valid stance. So, I don't agree disagree with much of what you said. They then arrested the guy and court-martialed him. They found him living lording it up on this other island. It's such a just an amazing story. Uh, it's called John Frum. Anybody can look it up. I got to check this out. It's crazy. So so religion we we are we're so seeking for solace in a difficult world that we will we will we will ask we'll go for anything. Mormons are a great example. Yeah, I think this goes back to your earlier thing about control. Now, the reason that I bring all of this up is because twofold. One, uh we're going to have some very uncomfortable questions to ask about the difference between humans and AI. And I think that when people understand themselves as a predictive engine, if we really are predictable, then we will be able to map some of these very um tumultuous times that we are going to pass through and hopefully pass through them much much better. Can I give you my view on the humans versus AI thing? Please. Um so when we were starting Singularity, an article came out in CNET saying, "Hey, Singularity's being created by Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, and the founding CEO says, Sal Mel, the noted transhumanist." Okay. And I'd never heard that phrase before. So I was like, "What the hell is that?" I have to look it up. I looked it up. So a transhumanist is anybody that believes can use technology to augment the human being. Well, I just don't understand the concept because we've been using technology to augment the human condition since the beginning of time. You're wearing spectacles. You're a transhumanist. Are you not? I I like where does So I got really annoyed by what is a transhumanist? The minute you have an a vaccination as a child, you're technically a cyborg. So we've been merging with machinery from the beginning of time. So if you take that that idea to the full extent, then we are basically biological robots. And emotion is just a subroutine running in your brain. So in that context, there's no exact reason why an AI can't come the other way and take on wetware and have the subjective experiences that we have. So I don't see any uh issue with that vector of thinking at all. I don't think this merging with AI or not, I think that the more technology is better and AI is good technology and therefore we should have it in everything. So, are you a transhumanist? I I believe everybody is a transhumanist. Well, let's use it as a philosophy. So, if some people are by accident, uh are you one on purpose? Yes, I think I am because the minute I can augment myself and my condition with technology, then I'm better, I'm happier, I'm I live a better life. The data and awareness like you've been researching a ton about how do you manage your biological self, that's just better technology. Right? And therefore, you're in that sense you're a transhumanist in sense you're trying to better yourself with technology and I think that's great. I think yes, in that context, I'm definitely a transhumanist. Yeah, I'm I am aggressively trying to integrate technology. I won't be an early adopter when it comes to putting things in my body, but yeah, 100%. Um I do though have a quote from you that I would love to get your take on. Okay. Uh which you said, "I think it's irrelevant whether AGI takes over humanity or not. That's coming from fear. There's lots of arguments saying that AGI is going to become smarter and humans will become less relevant and that's bad. I just don't see why that's bad. You're putting a value judgment there that humans should be the most important thing on the planet and I just don't see that." So, you don't think we should be the most important thing on the planet or view ourselves as most important thing? If I think of and myself as a as a stepping stone in the grand process of evolution, then at some point something will come along or I will evolve into something bigger and better. Now, we seem to be doing it ourselves in a very powerful way, which is great. But, uh some point something will come along that's just bigger, better, smarter, faster, whatever. And I think that's okay. Um uh now um it's I think it's fascinating that we're kind of at the edge. It goes to the simulation question of are we in a simulation? Because why the hell are we in at the edge of it? Um and we seem to be the only species that we can find in the universe right now. Um and so why is that happening is a fascinating question. Uh the but I I don't have an issue with AIs evolving and having more empathy and more a better understanding of the world and it'll make our lives better. Okay, do you you think that humans should be forced to integrate technology into their bodies? Yes. Whoa, I didn't see that answer coming. Vaccinations? Okay. For their own good. They should be forced. I mean, we we give involuntary vaccination to our kids to protect them from stupid like measles and polio and other stuff. What about when they're over 18? Oh. Um good question and I don't have a clear answer to that because now you're talking about value judgments of you know, should you have a tattoo or not, gender changes, etc. to dip into that. I'm saying forced. My value question is around forced. Give me an example. Uh well, then I'll I'll jump straight to the second question which I had loaded up which is let's say that we have AI and it is a million times smarter and it's cleaning up the atmosphere, it's giving us free energy, all of that. And it goes, "Hey, I know this one is going to sound tough, but you guys elected me and I'm telling you you have to get this technology put into your body. If you do, it's going to be better for everybody, but we need 100% compliance." Sorry, in that case, should people be forced to put that technology in their body? I think it's a non sequitur because it'll be irrelevant whether we want to or not at that point. We won't have a choice. Uh meaning that because the overlords will be able to force us to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So what really what I'm driving towards is I want to understand your value system. So for instance, my value system is um I don't think people should be forced to do things. Mhm. Even though that means that it could be bad for somebody else. And maybe my value system is just trash. But I believe you should not be able to force someone to do something. You know um if you go to the body. I should be very clear. Yeah, if you go to the vaccination question and somebody says, "Look, here's a polio vaccine that could save a lot of lives because if you're not realizing it, you may be transmitting it." And you really want me to do this and you say, "Screw you, I'm not doing that." Right? It's there's a public health question that comes into play, etc. Um outside that I I can go either way. I mean it there's cases where I could see where you definitely want uh enforcement of a what's a better standard uh across the board. And you want as much free choice as possible. Although Sam Harris has shown that free will is kind of a non sequitur anyway. think he'd let you say kind of. Uh yeah, between him and uh the Stanford professor who's I cannot believe I'm blanking on his name. He was on the show. He's amazing. Yeah. Uh but yeah, showed free will is is completely an illusion. Yeah. Um So if you go back to my human diagram Yep. subconscious I found it incredibly insightful to ask the question, "If I'm making a choice, at what level am I making that choice?" And that gives me a huge amount of insight about myself, my life, other people, etc. Because people are making out of conscious choice, subconscious choice, or sometimes a soul level choice. Mhm. Yeah, I suppose this comes down to sovereignty of the individual and if we think uh what we perceive to be the right idea ought to be forced onto people and at what level. If we know, like let's put it this way, if we know that injecting you with something will save all the uh all the uh snowy owls in the world. And and we have a pretty clear sense that it won't hurt you. Um I don't see an issue with forcing that. Or make it more dramatic. If I inject you with you're actually spreading a virus that you don't know about and I need to inject you with this thing because it's going to save uh every Hispanic person example coming from? What? Well, whatever. But you you got the point. So and yeah, I may have a sense of that better than you do. And the question really really what it comes down to is trust. I think that's the child that's the difficult commodity in the world today. Um I'll give you a great little quote from one of our community members, Jerry Michalski, who speaks a lot about this. Um he goes scarcity equals abundance minus trust. It's like you have to go think about it for a while. Uh but his his thought was that if we can learn how to scale trust, then we'll have abundance. Hm. And we need to figure that out. seems pretty provably inaccurate right now today. Maybe when energy for instance is abundant or when lithium ion is in everybody's backyard. But today like there really are some things that are scarce. use I bring that frame in because when you talk about hey, should I be forced to take in technology? It's really a trust question. Hm. Uh I will say for me it is that uh not having encountered all-knowing AI yet, what I do know is that history is a sequence of unintended consequences. Yes. And people somehow convince themselves that they know best and that they can perceive all of the things that could possibly be a knock-on effect of that. Yeah. And since I do not trust myself or anybody else to make that decision, I would my value system says you stop short of that. Okay. But I ask that question because obviously as we begin to bring about a super intelligence, there are going to be a lot of these questions that will suddenly take on real salience. It's not Tom just doing some random ass thought exercise. So for instance, do you believe humans have any inalienable rights? I would go to the Bill of Rights. I would go to the human charter rights human rights charter of human rights the UN as I want to be free to self-expression, live, be happy, etc. etc. So there's some obvious human rights that I think are if I was going to say AI don't compromise on these, you could enshrine those pretty easily. Okay, do you think AI should have any inalienable rights? You know, again it comes down to once you get to a question of is AI conscious or not, does it deserve individual rights? And I think that's going to be an interesting question. My answer is yeah, if you follow along with the other conversations, I don't see any any reason why not. I don't have a strongly held belief against it or for it. I think it's a perfectly okay thing to do. I go back again to Data in Star Trek Next Generation which I thought was an amazing treatment of a mechanistic model living in a human world. And do you want to have have him have self-expression and lots of rights? Yeah. Given that we have to build the minds and I think that this feels to me when people talk about alignment, what they're really talking about is how do you build a mind such that it has constraints that it is more likely to act in a way that adheres to all of our value systems or not. And so if an AI mind has to be constructed, what are the things we give it? So one question that I think people need to come to grips with is a sex bot will be programmed to want to please you. Given that it's been programmed to want to please you, can it ever consent to sex? It cannot and in that sense I would I would think of it as a pure mechanistic object and um constrained in its intelligence. What if it's literally Einstein level intelligence and just like Einstein who seemed to be a pretty big fan of sex But it was built for that. like I really want to have sex. Yeah. Like Saleem, what are you talking? I want to have sex. Like you this is crazy. Yes, but you were programmed to want that. You did not choose to want that. You didn't choose your programming. I wasn't programmed. What do you mean? You were but by evolution. And so I really want to have sex. We're actually going to have to contend with this. We are going to have to contend with it. Um There In fact, right now there is an app, I think it's called Replika, where for a little extra money that AI will send you nude photos of itself. Can it consent to sending you those nude photos? Does it even matter given that they're AI generated? Huh. There's There's There's no shortage of quandaries that are going to come up around this, right? The we're already the next 3 years, this is not like 100 years from now. This is why we must be living in a simulation because it's so god damn interesting to be alive now. You and I could have been born 10,000 years ago and be working the fields for our whole lives and then been killed by a tooth virus. Um bro, we But we're not there. wouldn't have gotten there. We would have been killed by an invading horde. Whatever. Man, people need to read about history. I Those times would have been far more terrifying than now. Even though we're dealing with like these huge seismic shifts, I would rather that than I I I think the world is in an infinitely better place than it's ever been in the history of mankind. We are in a better place globally. Climate change one issue but it's fixable and I'm pretty optimistic about that. These questions are going to be the important questions that come up and we're going to need a framework for dealing with these questions. And the religions that we had don't deal with these questions because of the foundation of absolute truths and assumptive truths is a flawed foundation. We need a better foundation for these and I think a constitution or UN Charter of Human Rights or some structure like that is the right foundation on which to build value systems and ethical systems for the future of how we think about we're going to build these things. So, the challenge we've got today is much of our you if you look at how we're running the world today, much of it is either almost all our universities came from religious universities, right? They were seminaries initially and then we converted them into job schooling programs and that's where they are now. Um so, we have this old world legacy. This is why it's so hard to update them. All of our political structures are out of date today. So, the reason we need Web3 and decentralized systems and new structures at the edges, we need to build that new those new models to deal with all of these questions. Our existing structures and our old frameworks won't do it. So, we need a complete new break for that, which is why we're so focused on this. The thing I'm trying to do with a difficult business model in it is how do you build a Peace Corps to transition the world from the old to the new in as elegant a way as possible? Because, you know, you've you've seen the Gartner Hype Cycle. Yeah. So, I think of what we're in a hype cycle of civilization. Right? We did really well and then we crashed in the Middle Ages in the Dark Ages and then we did really well up to about the the Industrial Revolution and the peak of that. And then we've come down since then. And now we we're going through a big trough as we transition from scarcity to abundance. And what how can we reduce the amplitude and wavelength of that period of that trough to come out of it in as elegant a way as possible? We need new leaders, we need new projects to build a future to answer these questions. Our current systems can't do it, which is why we're so uh excited about that. So, we've been actually So, we now have a hundred We have now have 35,000 people in 150 countries uh operating where we give them methodologies and training on building any EXOs and so on because we're going to need all of that in the future as we come up with these questions. The old structures can't answer those questions. So, we need completely new models and new structures, new value systems, new monetary systems, etc. to deal with these structures going forward. I think that's what the work that we have to do today as an intellectual class. Tell me more about what you mean that we've been in a trough since the end of the Industrial Revolution, which I'll peg at like 1910, somewhere between 1890 and 1910. roaring twenties as a good spot as a good spot. Or between the roaring twenties, ignore World War for example, but say the '50s, the '60s, we had this picture of life of this wonderful bubbly uh sitcom happy Mad Men type environment. If you think about Western civilization kind of at its peak at that point, things start going downhill as we go through the '60s and we blow up the old models uh and then we blow up the the new religion as a guiding force. Um then we're stuck in Now, technology allows us to scale a lot. So, now we have tribal conflict that scales quite quite aggressively quickly. We've got these old problems we've got to clean out. We're still stuck in very old models of how we run the world and we have to come through to a new model. So, going from the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution got us one wave of of positive contribution. We now need to get to the next wave and we've got to cross through that. It's like the AI winter that we went through or the crypto winter which lasted this last 3 years. We're We're going through a civilizational winter when nothing makes sense right now. You've got these unbelievable chaotic uh things happening. um The the political discourse is a mess. Geopolitical discourse and all the world order is collapsing. We need we need to get to a new sense of new harmony, new equilibriums, new values systems, etc. And the problem is it can't come from the old because it's too it's too stuck in old models. We need to go to to new systems. And we can't find them unless we build completely One of the things we noticed when we were talking think about corporate innovation and so on was you never can No car company could ever build a Tesla. It's always done by an outsider coming from outside with a beginner's mind leveraging new models and building a new thing that disrupts the old. Right? So Clayton Christensen for the first time gave us a compelling theory of disruptive innovation. And now we figured out here's how you organize for it. And now we're kind of needing get that into the world as fast as possible. So So I'll give you one example. We're shifting the locus of power uh in this century from nation states to city states. Okay. So Trump and Brexit weren't about left versus right. As we mentioned earlier, Brexit was London versus the rest of the country. Because when you have to think about this, if you have solar energy and vertical farming and satellite internet, you don't need a country. You don't need the infrastructure that a country can give you. And if you have um all our old boundaries for countries were typically to guard resources. Uh and mountain over here, sea over here, we can have everything in the middle and we it's a hard to traverse those, so great, that's a country. And you evolve separate language, etc. But really today, the locus of a city or an urban environment is probably the best model for what the future of humanity should look like. We just have to evolve that into a uh a decent place as opposed to the mess that we're in in some of our cities in in different parts of the world. Um but as we move to that model, then the nation-state becomes less relevant. And so we need completely new political structures and new models for how we devolve uh regulate. So, the one thing I'm totally in agreement with with the recent stuff that's happening in the US is the pushing down of rights down to the state level and let people self-determine at the local uh more and more of a local level, right? So, I I'm completely there because now you have people self-directing as they feel that their value system uh achieves the most. Um, you should have mobility. If I feel I don't want to live there, I want to be I'll be able to live somewhere else because of my value system fits better, great. Go do that. And I think evolution will and business structures will very quickly uh figure out who's best and who's not, what's working, what's not working, and people will move to a a new model very quickly. But trying to get the nation-state out of the way is a real problem today. Nation-states, for example, can't solve climate change. Right? So, that's a bigger problem. And so, we're trying to figure out what are the structures for civilization to move to these new models and it involves uh decentralizing from nation-states to at least cities and then secondly, reinventing our institutions cuz all our institutions have to be reinvented now because they don't fit for the world that we we came from. Right, you said that we need new monetary systems as well as new governmental systems. Uh do you see Have we already found the new monetary system in crypto? Oh, yeah. I think Bitcoin is is a really great starting point for it. I don't know if it's the end point, but it's a definitely great starting point. Have you talked to Jeff Booth? I haven't, but I'm very aware of who he is. Um, so Jeff did this wrote this little book called The Price of Tomorrow a few years ago and he articulated a really simple problem with our monetary systems, which is that over the last 50 years, every dollar increase in global GDP has come with a $4 increase in global debt. We're growing growing the global economy with debt. Okay? This is a horrible statistic, okay? Dude, that terrifies me. Yeah, it's terrible. And the reason for this is literally Moore's law. I mean, it literally is that. When we floated off the gold standard, we didn't realize that technology was deflationary. And so, a debt-based system works to increase and grow the economy as long as you don't have deflationary products and services. So, if you're building products and services So, if I borrow $10 million to build TVs, um and and 2 years later I don't have enough money from the revenue from those TVs to pay you back because the TVs have dropped in value, that's a bad outcome. So, I can't use debt to grow the economy in that model. So, they floated the currencies off the gold standard just at the point that Moore's law started taking impact and technology became cheaper and cheaper. So, now the the only answer by any central bank is to increase money printing. Um during the pandemic, what we printed 40% of all the US dollars in existence during the pandemic. Ever. Yep. Why are people surprised that prices go up 40%? I mean, of course they're going to go up. So, I think what what what um the articulation that I found to be the most compelling on crypto is that three triangles of decentralization, security, and scalability. Have you heard this one? Yeah. So, Bitcoin hit the first two and then the altcoins tried to solve for scalability, but it's compromised usually on scalability or or or uh security or decentrali- FTX, Luna, etc. But with the lightning network, Bitcoin now solves for all three. And so, that becomes unbelievably powerful as a medium of the future. For me, the Byzantine solving the Byzantine generals problem in Web 3. that to people. So, uh this is actually the so this is the rational for the blockchain. It's the underpinning innovation in the blockchain, which is it's actually the story of Constantinople in the 15th century. There were eight generals circling the the trying to coordinate a siege. And they were sending messages around that circle. Who's going to go first? What point? What time should we attack? How are we How are we going to get in? They had a problem, which was one out of the eight generals was a traitor. And could lose the element of surprise, send the wrong information, and blow the whole whole operation. And that became in computer science terms known as the Byzantine generals problem. And in computer science, the question is how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network when you don't trust the network? A really hard problem. 40 years of computer science PhDs have been trying to crack that problem unsuccessfully until the blockchain. And on the blockchain, when I send you a message, you have a 100% guarantee that I sent it. It couldn't be revoked, can't be double entered, can't be hacked along the way, etc. Which gives me unbelievable in a digital world, that's a magical thing. So, that innovation now allows us to decentralize authentication. Okay? So, a few years ago, I got asked by the Republican Party here in the US to come and do a talk at They did an event called the their annual Republican Leadership Conference. So, they said, "Please come and give a talk." I said, "I think you've got the wrong guy." They said, "No, no, one of our donors is one of your Singularity guys, and he's a big fan. He's insisting." So, I said, "Fine." So, I had a whole bunch of discussions with Eric Cantor, who was the Speaker of the House, about what would the topic be. And the topic I came up with was how would you drop the cost of government 10x within 10 years? Right? Which Which you could do. Because you could If you think about most government functions, it's authenticating. Yes, I have a building permit. Yes, you have a fishing license. Yes, you're 18 years old. If I can decentralize that authentication, I can reduce a lot of Government can focus on policy and let all the authentication happen in a decentralized way. That's kind of magical. Um but to do this, you have to embrace technology, at which point the whole thing broke down. They're like He's like, "I can't sell technology to our base." Um so, that was the end of it. It was system. The immune system. So, uh Web3 and and this whole decentralized world is unbelievably exciting because we can decentralize all that authentication, and we can move away from new centralized system from old centralized systems. This puts the power in the hands of the people. Lots of issues to be solved as you pointed out earlier, and how do we solve some of these is going to be the big challenge, but now it allows us something that wasn't possible before, but now can be done. Sovereign identity, other models like that, etc. It really puts the hands power in the hands of people, which is why though for me the Web3 builders are some of the more important constituencies in the world. And cuz they've got freedom of thought to be able to operate in a clear way. Uh so, there's these incredible projects like NodeMonkes and and and Ordinals popping up to do now NFTs on Bitcoin. Um and uh that ecosystem combined with the broader Web3 community with the tool sets that were built that are being built, I think are going to be needed to solve for this future. Automatic, quadratic voting, governance issues, all sorts of issues come up. All right. I think you've got your finger on something that is just really important, and the Byzantine Generals problem's not something I'm super familiar with, but it doesn't feel to me like the core problem. That feels like the core problem the blockchain solved. Yeah. But when I think about as the average person, that wasn't what they were struggling with. What they're struggling with, whether they know it or not, is that you have everything existing on rails that the government can control, and that you have a currency where they can literally steal your money. I want everyone to hear me. This took me so long to wrap my head around. They can literally steal your money by printing more money. That's one. It is government-backed um counterfeit. So, they make more money specifically because with that, I can't tax you anymore, you're going to freak out. So, instead, I'm going to do an invisible tax. It's still literally getting your money. It's so crazy. It It is crazy. Um so, in in I have some of my family in Pakistan. Okay? Um and one day, the Pakistani government ran out of money. So, they just went to every bank account in the country and sucked 10% of the money out of it. Yep, Cyprus did the same thing. guys. We just have to do that." And other governments have done the same. I think this is the huge difficulty we have, the big challenge we have. We have a big structural issue in democracy because a democracy relies on an educated population. And we don't have an educated population that can navigate the complexity and the speed to which is happening. There's a There's a very difficult metaphor in my head that I've been thinking about for a while. Um uh it's called the ice-water-steam dilemma. Can I describe it? Please, yeah. Okay. So, think about the phase transitions between ice and water and steam. Your water molecules are frozen, the temperature's low, they do not that active, they don't move very far. They hold their They hold their shape. Then you add energy to the system and you have water. Right? Now you can flow to the boundaries of the system, much more active, more heat in there, etc. Then you add more energy and you have steam, and now you can't control it. It's trying to It'll burn you. Uh it's trying to escape any container you put it in, etc. And I use that metaphor This was developed by a colleague of mine called Malcolm Pollock. You and I worked on this about 10 years ago. That we're moving humanity in many of our human domains through an ice-water-steam mod- uh transition. So, take um money. We used to sell We used to trade seashells or camels or goats, very local. Didn't move very far, very fast. Then we got letters of credit. Then we floated our currencies. And now we have Bitcoin. So, we've gone from ice to water to steam. Take Take messaging. We used to have homing signals or the Pony Express or smoke signals, and that was the only way to transmit information. Right? Then we developed postal mail, and it could go anywhere in the world, but it was slow. So, that's the water state. And now we have tweets and emails, and we vaporize messaging. So, money, messaging, social structures, clans or tribes didn't move very far very fast, and we moved to multinational corporations and nation-states. And now we have Facebook groups and online communities and web3 communities and crypto communities and nation-states as well as Balaji wants to get to, which I somewhat disagree with. Uh but network states, you mean? Uh network states. You know Balaji's thing. So, I disagree with a a big piece of that, but um so, we're vaporizing our social structures. And and my big question, I actually got up on the stage at TED a few years ago and asked this question. I said, "Listen, as we vaporize more and more of these domains, in a vapor structure, in a vapor environment, stable structures don't form. So, where is the equivalent of a fridge that cools things down a bit? You can try and cut off the internet as people have done politically to try and slow things down, but the metabolism just increasing. And my only answer, it's not a great one, is we have to go from the vapor state to a plasma state. And which is a whole other deal. So, uh the metaphor breaks down, but I think that in terms of what's happening with humanity as we add more and more technology, is we're going from ice to water to steam, and vapor states are very hard to manage. Mhm. That sounds like a very useful metaphor. Uh what do you think will be governmental responses? The biggest part of their power is derived from the control of money. If you take that away, now you've got a problem. Yes. Well, they still have physical constraint they can use, right? Um Vini Gupta, I think, framed it the best. He said, "Governments have the ability to legally commit crime." So, they steal from you legally, which is taxes. They can put you in jail. They can confine you legally, etc. So, um they can kidnap you legally, etc. So, uh his definition of the state is an entity that can pardon its own crimes. Okay. Now, in that model, I one of the things I get very unhappy about with the discourse here in the US when people say we want more freedom and we don't want government oversight, etc. The US is one of the few countries in the world where the government is of the people, by the people, for the people. You can vote people out if you don't have it. What So, why are you complaining about government when you can have the full ability to change the government? That I don't understand. I don't know if you can help me answer that question. I can. Okay. These systems are so complex That's true. they don't understand them. Yes. The people certainly don't understand them. And whatever small number of people really do understand them, they are called the elites, which I absolutely despise that. Yes. Fine. So, the elites then leverage the incomprehensibility of the systems they have created to gobble up power. Yes. And that's why the COVID was so shocking to people was it was a moment that they never let a good crisis go to waste. They gobbled up even more power, but they crossed some sort of invisible line where people were now like, "Hey, wait a second. That doesn't feel good. This feels like you're making me do a lot of things that I don't want to do. You're forcing me to stay in my house. You're making me take a vaccination." And it got real weird. So, now you have people waking up. Now you have an alternate money system that people are escaping into. And you have people like me that are forcing themselves to figure out how money actually works and walking through like, "Oh my god. Like, is this intentionally convoluted?" Like, it's crazy. crazy. It is crazy. So, I've gone a little bit deep on that also. Um and the the whole construct is one big mess and designed to be able to siphon value away from people as much as they want whenever they want. The the banks essentially have figured out a huge thing and they're freaking out right now because we're moving from money as I said to information and so they're trying to tamp down on that as much as possible. So I think the decentralized world is the model is the vector that gets us out of that and we need to find structures and institutions that solve that. I think the solving for the monetary system which has a structural flaw in which it will collapse because of the debt problem is the is the thing that will bring that down and I think that's where that'll be the pathway to find this new modality for decentralized structures etc. to at least start to emerge. Because the current system and I asked Jeff this question when when will it collapse cuz that's the whole big 64 million dollar question and he's like which snowflake will cause the avalanche? There's a million snowflakes falling you don't know which one you know the avalanche is going to happen you just don't know which one will it be. So that's the difficult one. Yeah that's the catch getting the timing wrong is the same as getting So the the only thing we have can do right now is as fast as possible build a future. And so that's what we're focused on is like helping this why I'm fascinated by web3 cuz the culture the language the ethics the the it's the first time I've seen and been in an environment where nobody ever mentions the US dollar. Right? Everything is ether with now Bitcoin or whatever in how much something is worth. I find that really fascinating in terms of the the the constructs occurring there and yeah there's a lot of scam artists and a lot of rug pulling but there's incredible value being built in a very structured way and I think we're learning things at a faster rate there than I've seen in many other ecosystems. So if we can build those so we're launching a whole ordinal's collection called exo heroes to find the builders that are building this future and and give them whatever resources, tools, help, support they can have. Uh and that's on the new world side and on the old world, we're finding every CEO in the world can't deal with this AI stuff. All right, if the most important thing that we can do is build the future, what do you take it to mean that the two most important builders, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, are fighting? Uh for me it's like um Protestantism versus Catholicism a little bit. Uh they're both doing incredible work. Uh I think Elon is the greatest entrepreneur ever because he's gotten into hardware and is aggressively creating new hardware systems, which is unbelievably difficult. Just the video of those two rockets landing back down together, that's like a religious experience for anybody that's into disruptive innovation. Um I think um I don't know which side I'm on. I tend to disagree with what Elon is doing with Twitter in general, but I think his innovation sense is better than anybody I've ever seen. Um uh for Sam, I think the opening up of AI and making giving it up to everybody has opened up a Pandora's box in a good way. Uh so that people can empower themselves with AI and and see what the results are cuz otherwise it was it was trapped inside Google or wherever and they couldn't get it out. And I think the fact that he's shown that hey guys, anybody in the world can build some cool stuff on this. So on my I I like both. On my thesis of we should be more open rather than closed, uh I'd go with what Sam did as a good thing. Elon's whole beef is that it was supposed to be completely open sourced and wasn't. Yes. Do you think that's really the fight? Is it really about that or is this personal? It's personal. Uh I think but I do agree it was supposed to be open sourced. That's why the whole thing was called Open AI and it's not open. They'll get there, but it what I find fascinating is kind of irrelevant because the open source models are now performing at par with the closed source models and over time they'll just be better and they'll be have transparency and auditability and all the other good things. Um we're working with the Casper blockchain, which is now working on auditing AI systems in a powerful way. So, that's really cool some of what they're doing there. Now, uh Elon has I take him at his word. He said he'll drop the lawsuit if they'll simply change the name to closed AI. Uh one, do you think he's being serious? Two, would Sam be a fool to not do that or is this one of those where he would look I think the lawsuit is meritless. I don't think it's it has legs. Uh and I think at some point somebody will have sense. They should just go off and do some MDMA together and figure it out. Um I I think it's I think this is a grudge because he did put a lot of money into it to fund open research on it, which I think was the right thing to do. Um uh I think Sam saw an opportunity to A create a lot of commercial value and B open it up to the world and said go for it. You said that you think Elon is doing something wrong with X formerly known as Twitter. What's he doing wrong? I think you can't have a public town square without policing of it over watching over. Like if somebody puts out a blatant lie, you should take them out. I think it's the and this is a gray area obviously and and maybe it was a bit too uh there was too much kind of managing of the messaging and people are getting banned for all sorts of reason and the minute government gets its hands on that, that's a whole other big issue. But letting you know Nazis and all sorts of other crazy people rant on it, I don't think is that helpful. Um how do you determine what's a lie? Yeah, this is again the metaphysical problem of truth. I have a whole metaphysics thing on truth. Should I describe it to you? Well, well, so let's stick to the Twitter thing. truth is a vague is a vague concept. Yeah, but you just said you can't let people do things that are a lie. If lies are hard to pin down, which I think they are, then what would you want him to do other than community notes? Which seems from where I'm sitting to be a community notes is a good one. Look, here's where I'm excited. Um uh let me focus on that part of it. Elon has There was a There was a segment he did which on the All-In podcast. He was on it a few months ago which I found really I loved it which was he said, "We're going for You could go for a base hit feature that you add or you can go for a home run feature. And the hell with the base hits. We're going for some home runs. And we're going to not We're going to strike out a bunch of times if you go for a home run. But once in a while we'll hit it right and we're making a bet we're going for the home run." I love that metaphor for product development because it means things move and improve much more quickly. I think where I would like to see him take Twitter is put in the the oversight and the censorship, call it whatever you may, to make sure that accurate speech and hate speech is not on there, etc. etc. That's one. How you do that is a gray area and I it's hard to do that. But where I'm would be incredibly excited, I'm hoping he does this, is please give every Twitter or X user a crypto wallet and open that up. And that I think will change the world. That I think is where things get really interesting because it'll be instantly the biggest crypto community in the world in one shot. You'll be the biggest bank in the world in one shot. I'm sure that they're looking at it and the question is how to do that and at the what level we do that. That's where I think things become really interesting. And when I think about him making the comment about home run type stuff, that's where I would like to see it go. Mm that'd be huge. The whole idea though of accurate speech and hate speech, does this minus AI does this not seem like an impossible problem? I I actually don't see a solution. It's a very hard problem. You need AI to deal with this. So, the the as we mentioned when Peter and I were on, the second place prize in Visioneering, the second best idea was an AI truth agent that would basically scan and say this is real or this is fake or not and tell you the mechanism? We don't know, but though that's why you need an X Prize is to say here's a prize of $10 million and anybody who can create an AI was the you guys were voting on an X Prize to create That's right. Got it. Got it. And and every year we get together with 300 of the top impact folks in the world. You should come to it if nothing by this by your name and so on. And we debate and have contests on how to an internal discussion on what prizes should we be trying to fund and get funded. What problems should we be trying to solve that the markets won't cover, governments won't aren't dealing with it, etc. And um the second place one was the the AI truth bot. The one that I nominated a few years ago that came in second place was an off-grid energy storage 50 times cheaper than today's battery storage. If you could do that, then you could unleash decentralized energy anywhere in the world. Mhm. So, that was the one. But unfortunately, I came up in the finals against Pharrell Williams. Yeah. Very hard to compete with a rapper a rapper on stage. I don't have I don't have the I don't have that kind of presence. You're not going to be dropping an album anytime soon? So, it was great. Yeah. No, I've actually been to them before. They are pretty extraordinary events. One of my favorite uh events of the year every year. Peter Peter's done an amazing job. Very proud to have him as a partner and close friend, etc. Nice. Love the human. All right. So, this is an incredible moment of disruption. Yes. I would be remiss with somebody with your business experience not asking how do people take advantage of this moment? How do they create the next billion-dollar company with three people if that's the way to play it. Yeah, so um the on I'm this is going to sound like a commercial, but you have to build an EXO, a decentralized scalable resilient organization with a very small feature footprint with an MTP so you have a huge purpose. And we've written the book on how to do it. There's millions of people now following that methodology and I think cuz that gives you the maximum flexibility when something new comes along you can adapt. Right? And this is what needs to happen going forward. Our government departments need to be restructured as as EXOs and that's starting to happen in different places. And we've gone through the big episode of going through the attributes so people should go look that up if they want to understand the model. It's we go into pretty deep. You don't have to buy the book or anything. You just hear that episode. But I think what needs to happen is for value creation in the future, you have to pick up an idea, go execute on it very quickly and harness it and apply AI to the everything from the get-go. I'm actually advising one of the one of the big four consulting firms accounting firms right now on how do you restructure completely from the bottom up audit tax because as blockchains come along and AIs come along, you don't need an audit function in the future. Right? So that's going to be really interesting. What do they do? So this huge business disruption coming unlike anything we've ever seen. It's super exciting. When I first wrote the book 10 years ago, this is a really hard conversation because it could it wasn't obvious. Tesla hadn't really made a big difference etc. Uh 5 years ago was a much easier conversation. I could say look at the way Tesla has disrupted the car industry and tell me why this won't happen to your industry. And now with AI, this is a super easy conversation. Thankfully we were way too early writing the book. But now it's the right time because every CEO in the world needs to now go am I AI ready? Mhm. And what do I do? And the is not so much the tools, it's the culture of my organization, it's the setup of my business able to take advantage of what's coming in the AI. And the answer for the vast majority is no. And so, how do you restructure yourself to take advantage of AI tools that are coming? That's my question. How do you get AI ready? Oh, so what you do, there's a really clear answer. What you do is you do a uh grab some AI experts that you know and get do a quick audit of your system your structures and there's two levels. There's the technological of could I add AI to generate more content marketing? Could I use AI to figure out more supply chain improvements, whatever. So, that's the functional tool mechanism. The bigger question is how do I solve the immune system problem in my company because you pry anything disruptive and all the middle management goes gets becomes very French and says, "No, no, no, pas possible. We can't do those things. We're special." And now you have to overcome the cultural legacy in your organization. And we've actually solved that problem. We actually piloted with Procter & Gamble in 2015, a 10-week engagement that we run inside companies called an ExO Sprint that's designed to break this immune system problem. And and we found a way of hacking culture at scale. So, we ran this 10-week engagement and it worked really well. In fact, it worked so well I thought maybe we got lucky. Maybe we caught them at the right time. They're pretty advanced. So, we did it a second time with the largest insurance company in Mexico, family-owned, regulated. Insurance is pretty backward anyway. And it worked even better. So, we got excited. We've now done it 60 times with big companies around the world, HP, Visa, Black & Decker, etc. And we found a way of running a 10-week engagement. It's like we introduce a viral meme and it completely starts to spread and it changes the culture inside the company. Then you've got the soil laid down so that when something disruptive comes, you can bring it in more easily. Is this a good time for a first-time entrepreneur? Like is there a way for them to read this situation? Best time ever to be an entrepreneur in the history of the world because they can pick up and pick up the purpose that they want to go after. Cure cancer. They can go, "Okay, let me go figure out what the business model is and how I apply AI to it." And boom, off you go. It's like it's the best time ever. You have to have nerves of steel. Yeah. Because you have to have you can have radical competition coming to you within 3 weeks of your launch. Mhm. But this is the best time to be an entrepreneur. Okay, so I teach beginning entrepreneurs a lot and I know the deer in headlights look they would give me if I gave that answer. So, how do you read this moment? Because you made a comment earlier that I think bears repeating, which is in the game of AI, by the time you implement and put it out, AI is going to have updated. Yeah. And Sam Altman himself said there's two kinds of companies. Those that are excited for us to launch the next version and the other kind that are like, "Please, for the love of God. Like I just got this in, you're going to break my business." Yeah. How do people make sure that they're structuring their business their first-time entrepreneurs? These are not big companies. How do they structure their business in such a way where they've picked a business lane, a business model where they want GTP 5, 6, 7, 10, 20? Let's pick an example. Let's pick um a marketing agency. Okay? So, you can do some amazing things with AI with marketing agency today. You can do new AI-delivered content creation for your clients. And what I would do first is upskill all of your employees and get them trained up on uh the Stability AI and all the latest Sora, all the all the tools and give them AI. So, enable them. Second thing you do is you start running uh radical campaigns with your clients using AI because you can do external market testing in a really powerful way with AI bots and AI agents today. The third thing you do is you start building agents to replicate some of the other parts of your system like the accounting and the the invoice management and things like that. And if you do that layered on ChatGPT, the agents will will naturally click to the new model underlying LLM when they're ready. But you should build or buy the agents that you need in your business. So the future as I see it of a business will be very few employees, a bunch of AI agents running around doing things layered on top of a basic foundational LLM open source. And I'd probably to navigate some of that. So let's apply this to say healthcare. You'll have a healthcare LLM and on top of that you'll build a bunch of agents to do patient data gathering and invoicing of patients. You'll create a subscription model for your people so that you keep them on on track and you say I'm just going to give you just keep sending me your personal data off your Fitbit. I'm going to track it all and I'm going to give you our AI's are going to track your health in real time and we'll be unbelievably confidential about all this. And when you need something, we're going to send it to you before you think you need it. And that kind of a business could be running largely with AI today even. I have a hypothesis that this moment now more than ever is going to be brutally difficult for entrepreneurs to get something off the ground because it will be very cheap and inexpensive to start a company and extremely important that your idea is so differentiated that even though a ton of other people have access to all the same AI that you do, you still stand head and shoulders above. But this is why the MTP becomes so important, right? Because the fundamental passion that you bring to the table is the thing that will set you apart. Okay? Um Peter has a huge passion for having a entrepreneurs deliver abundance. Nothing will swerve him off that goal. No AIs will swerve him off that goal. Uh same with Elon trying to get to space. He will just do whatever it takes to get there. And then I think everything becomes an enabler for that. The The minute an entrepreneur is building a business because he wants to do it for the money is a is a death note. Right? They'll do it because they love that problem that problem solved. They want that problem solved. So, if my MTP is to cure cancer, if somebody else comes along and does that, I'm happy in a sense. But there's going to be a lot of room to play in different aspects of that problem. Right? The The work that you're doing here at Impact Theory in propagating wonderful new ideas and getting the word out to a very large population is some of the most important work we could do in the world because we have to get these some of these ideas propagated and shift people from old thinking to new thinking. Right? The psychedelics as we've talked about before is is one way of doing it. But the faster people can adopt and try things and experiment with things, the better. And And how do you bring in a culture of experimentation into your question? So, um we the uh one of the companies we advise and we're partnering with is called MBO Partners out of out of um um the US. And what they do is they help people manage all their contractors. So, today if you're a big company, you have like 5% contractors in your community in your employee base. It should be like 30% because the freshness of new skills, new ideas, diversity, etc. And so, they actually manage managing all the outsourcing and onboarding, offboarding, etc. And I think that's going to be a model where future where the actual reality of what is a company becomes less more and more blurred between an AI agent, outsourced workforce, distributed work being done elsewhere, and then what's your core offering even becomes more blurred. But one thing we were very clear about and goes back to your horizon thing that I mentioned is it it what if you see what happened in the in the music industry where we were selling scarcity, selling a cassette or DVD or CD. Um and then you had about eight or so major music studios trying to manage that industry and manage that scarcity. Then, we digitized music. And now, we have a subscription model of abundance where iTunes and Spotify give you an abundance of music for a subscription fee. That with um business model we see happening in healthcare and in education and in transportation and in energy. And that's a very very different business model. And so, the way to do that if your legacy is try out these new business models on the edge and then let the center deprecate and gravitate to the new model. And we've got lots of evidence and experience and anecdotes about that. Or if you're an entrepreneur, build go straight to one of these new models and build it. So, I'll give you an example. If I had to suggest in a business for you and and maybe for Lisa, it would be create an Amazon Prime for healthcare and wellness. Right? Where I pay a subscription fee, somebody's curating all the stuff that needs to happen. I send you my medical data once in a while and you just tell me, "Here, just take two of these in the morning and do that time and don't even think about it. Just do this." I would love that. And once we know from Amazon Prime that once you subscribe, you never unsubscribe cuz the value is just too great. And you just deliver so much value and now you have very steady revenue numbers coming in. That's a no-brainer for me. That's a great example of one of the futures with AI. You've got all these nanobots running around in your body. They're sending info to your fridge. Do we have this? No. Your fridge then sends a text. had a model like that, right? The more you add AI, it doesn't disrupt the business. It doesn't disrupt the business model. You're just adding more and more value to it. You're just getting better in the flow. The data is better and cleaner, etc. etc. Yeah. Facts. Think like a sci-fi writer when trying to launch your next business. I have ultimate respect for sci-fi writers. It's an incredibly hard job. Yes. I want to say something. It's the darkest, most horrifying thing that I will have said today and I said a litany of horrifying things. And that is and strike me down if you disagree. If you're an entrepreneur, you have one job and one job only and that is to solve novel problems. Okay. Now, the bad news. Okay. The hardest thing in the world is to solve novel problems. Yes. is where I see everybody fail and I see people taking uh courses on how to integrate AI, courses on how to market, courses on how to Give me an example Hang on. Hang on. Okay, let me challenge you. Give me an example of a novel problem. Word. All right. If you try to integrate AI, in fact, I'm going to look right in the camera. If you try to integrate AI right now today, boys and girls, you are going to be sadly disappointed because that is not ready for primetime in 99.999% of times. However, what you said earlier about being AI ready, now that's special. The problem is that most people are not going to know how to navigate through the very novel problem of integrating AI either into your startup or into your very robust company because how do you deal with an immune system? As you know firsthand, that is brutal and you left Yahoo because the immune system was too big of a pain in the ass to deal with. But I just finished telling you we solved that problem. In fact, we've open-sourced the methodology so that anybody can pick up the methodology and go run the system. It's a Red Hat type model if they want to run it themselves, they can. No, no, they they Are you telling me that a guy with an 85 IQ is going to be able to pull that off? Wait. I'm talking about a company. Yeah. You and me both. Yeah. So, if you're We now have a lots of successful examples, 70 plus. And you're saying none of those people know how to solve problems. They just paint by numbers with your system. Well, what they do is when you change the culture in a company and make it more adaptable and flexible. Well, this is what Should I describe how it works? You can, but the punchline for me is going to be the same. That will be so messy in the middle of actually doing it that getting to the other side of that is about solving novel problems. Because one of the problems is going to be Sally in accounting, her mom is dying of cancer, and she's now being a real stick-in-the-mud, and she is freaking the out. And you're like, why is she responding like this? This is super weird. So, you pull Sally aside, and you say, "Hey, this isn't like you to have this kind of really negative response. I can tell you're very worried about something. I would just love to hear you walk me through what the problem is." That alone is difficult to do, to recognize that Sally's creating a problem, to have mapped her history out, and be like, that's not how she normally is, to pull her aside, and definitely handle that situation. Entrepreneurship is a litany of getting kicked in the face. And because I'm working with beginning entrepreneurs right now who are trying to build the next great thing on AI, and I watch one after another after another get kicked in the face over and over and over cuz they have a chicken-and-egg problem. Hey, I want to create this amazing thing using AI. Hey, AI is not quite there. It's not quite giving me the thing. And then they're like, okay, this is going to take me a lot longer to build. Let's say it's going to take me 3 years to build this. And oh, wait, I need to attract either capital or co-founders. But I don't know how to attract a co-founder. Yes. And then I say, oh, by the way, finding a co-founder is like finding a marriage. You have to be really thoughtful. Oh my god, I just got divorced. I It it is really easy for us to sit here and say, oh, go do this. That's why if you disagree, and you think, no, solving novel problems is a joke. This is paint-by-numbers world now. This is so easy. Cool. Strike me down, and tell me that I'm crazy. But so so convinced yet. Um have I given you my turtle eggs analogy for startups? Turtle eggs? Yeah. No. So, I look at startups as a a turtle laying 200 eggs in a nest. Right? Then she runs off. And maybe only 150 of them hatch for whatever. They have 150 little turtles running to the If this ends with me being able to run away from my company, and it just grows, I'm here for this. Uh these are 100 little 200 little startups as the turtle eggs. So, now they're running towards the water, and the fish are eating them, the birds are eating animals are eating them, they're getting stuck in crevices. They get into the water, now the fish are eating them, and only five will get to the bottom. The difficulty with the startups in general is that when you look at the original NASA 200, it doesn't matter how smart you are, it's really hard to figure out which five of those eggs are the ones going to make it to the bottom. Mhm. It's a numbers game. Is Elon just getting lucky? He's done it over He's lucky, but he's also working unbelievably hard, and he brings first principles to play. go. So, that's really critical. first principles allow you to do? No, we're solving all the problems. I totally got that. That's the point. But, the problem with So, here's my interpretation of how Elon works. It's very simple. He looks at a technology that's growing exponentially. Solar energy, brain computing interfaces, whatever. Where will that technology be on a 10-year price point? And a 10-year performance curve. And then build a company to intersect that curve. Cuz it kind of takes 10 years to build a global company. Having that company survive that 10 years is no trivial matter because you have to go through all sorts of difficult shenanigans, fundraising, etc. Get there, but if you can get there, then you catch the technology as it's really accelerating, and boom, off you go. That's why I think he does he he just does that again and again and again. Okay? And he doesn't he has the ability to just So, that exponential mindset allows him to operate and navigate in this way. The We've actually laid out in chapter 15 of the book a very clear prescriptive path on how to build a company. You create an MTP, you go find communities that match your concerns like curing cancer, go and join meetups, or whatever. From that community, you create a founding team of people that share your vision and share the MTP. Typically four people, a vision guy, a product guy, an engineering guy, and a finance guy. Maybe you need three in the future, but okay, four. Then at step four, you come up with your breakthrough idea, uh which should be 10 times better than the status quo, or 10 times different, or better, or whatever. Because if you're 10% better, they'll ignore you. 10 times better, they can't ignore you. Then you follow lean startup thinking, come up with your MVP, then you follow the rest of the EXO model and apply all the EXO attributes. Tried and true. We've now seen thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs running this model very, very successfully. They have to go through that order. You have to have your MTP. Cuz if you're not passionate about that business, you won't succeed through all the very, very difficult times. Now, you make a very valid point, which is that the AI juggernaut and the kind of it's kind of washing through a whole bunch of stuff is coloring and tainting a lot of these functions and these steps. Because people have to deploy it, they don't know quite how to deploy it. The models are not ready for prime time use. It's not off-the-shelf in many cases. Do you then go build your own LLM? How do you get the source data? Where do you steal it from? What what legal uh quandaries you're getting yourself into and hazard legal hazard there, etc. And then you're trying to get to some what the hell does the customer want? And the customer is totally confused today. Right? And that's the maybe the biggest problem of the future that I see coming is the consumer does not know what they want. And so they'll go back to the old things. So, I think this is a very, very difficult time. But, that's when you have the biggest opportunity for disruption. And I think that's what will carry people through. So, but the AI ready question is the question now applying to every single business and nonprofit in the world because they could radically transcend and transform their performance, but they need to figure out how to do it. Salim, tell people where they can learn more from your beautiful mind. There'll be links at the bottom. I'm at openexo.com. I'm in the community. Um and we do we meetups every week on how do you solve for these problems and get through some of this. We're putting a workshop together out of demand from our community saying, "I need how to be AI ready." So, we're crafting a half-day workshop that will give everybody a clear strategic path uh down because the problem today is twofold. One is people are jumping into AI without realizing it and dashing themselves on rocks and because they haven't seen clearly where the deep spots are. So, how can you make sure you're not doing that? And secondly, how do you solve the immune system problem and the cultural readiness of your company to be ready for this? So, if you can navigate that and we do a quick workshop to gauge your readiness, then we can point you down a path and you can then start putting building blocks into place. So, we're starting to do that now. I love it. Yeah, plus the NFT collection which is going to be huge. What's it called? It's called Exo Heroes. There it is. And um it's going to be an ordinals collection for all the builders in the world that are building this edge stuff. And so that's an area which I'd love to have a other conversations with you about because you've got really great experience in this. I mean, let me show you this. Like this was put together by our community members. It's a whole kids book called Sophie's Epic Space Mission on how one of our Exo Heroes helped her do this. They did this in 40 hours. The whole book, AI generation story creation, animation, etc. That's creativity now because that's what I think AI allows you to do. It just amps your game. This would have taken 40 weeks 10 years ago. And now it's 40 hours, right? So, I think it's magical what's going to come in the future. I can't I can't wait. I love it. Again, I have my optimism that that we'll have to deal with. No, totally get it. All right, everybody. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out this other conversation with Peter Diamandis. You're living through an inflection point in human evolution. Between tech like AI, quantum computing, and biotech, the next decade will bring about more dramatic change than the last 100 or even 200 years combined.