THE BIG RESET: Use AI To Build Wealth & GET AHEAD Of 99% Of People | Peter Diamandis & Salim Ismail

You guys are on something that is just my absolute obsession right now and you make a very bold claim in your new book. You said that the next billion-dollar company will be founded by three people. How is that possible? First of all, let me just say that we're living in a different day and age. The ability to start companies today that are exponential. And the name of the book is exponential organizations 2.0, the new playbook for 10x growth and impact. It's a series of attributes that never existed before. And AI is going to play the biggest role without question, but it's all the exponential technologies. Salim? Yeah, if you look back in history, maybe 50 70 years ago, it needed about a 10,000-person company to create a billion-dollar valuation. That's crazy. Uh then it dropped to about a thousand people. Instagram was 13 people. Right? Now we'll get it down to three people because AI will handle most of the execution work. You'll have a CEO who will drive vision and and product. A product I will focus just on getting things done and an operations person that will handle everything else. And you should just have AI bots doing all the finances, marketing, etc. etc. As somebody who's deploying AI as rapidly as humanly possible, and I know that people have a lot of anxiety around this, it's still for all of AI's immediate uses, it still seems hard to imagine that big leap. How should people be using AI right now if they want to be on that path? So, one of the things I'm doing in the companies that I'm running or advising or investing in is I'm saying, first of all, every company needs to have what I call a chief AI officer. And it's a role I made up. Was teaching at Abundance 360 this year and it is not someone who's building a large language model for you or writing code for you. It's an individual understands what's going on in the terrain because we're seeing not hundreds or thousands, tens of thousands of startups. Everybody, you know, you can start an AI company now with literally spare time in your garage. So, understanding what's out there, what the modalities are, and what you can and should be using is critical. So, your chief AI officer is scanning the horizon, understanding it, and then advising members of your team. So, every part of your team, right? There's going to be AI supporting sales and marketing and and engineering and HR. We're all going to have in the near term an AI copilot, right? This is an AI that helps you do your job better because we are so limited as carbon life forms. Um but ultimately is going to be able to operate and do a number of the things repetitively because we do a lot of repetitive tasks and AIs are much better at that. I think if you've got we've got say a 30-person company, every single person needs to be trained in AI and using these chatbot AI AutoGPT tools and absolutely augment themselves 10 20 100x. I have said to my company, okay, everybody here needs to figure out in your department, what are the tools that exist in AI and how can you immediately implement them? But even that's pretty vague. Like I'm just sort of dumping it on them. Where do people start? Like what is the thing you actually do? Easy and super specific. If you have an email newsletter that goes out, use ChatGPT to say, how do would I increase the engagement rate with this email? We did that, we got a 25% increase open rate. feed it the email? You feed it the email. And you say, how do I make this better? Yeah, come up with a better headline. Or put in social sharing links throughout it. Or say, listen, I'm in HR. Go to ChatGPT, open it up right now. If you hopefully you have the, you know, the GPT-4 version of it and say, I'm in HR. How should I be using generative AI in my business? It'll It'll feed you, you know, give me five examples or 10 examples. Pick the one that sounds good. Give me step-by-step instructions on how to use this. It's, you know, it's recursive in that fashion. And so, you're going to use AI to help you learn what you want to know. You know, it comes back a lot to mindset, Tom, and you need the mindset of a kid here. Curiosity, absolute play. It's like, you know, one of the things I'm going to be doing in my team, my PhD Ventures that runs Abundance 360 and a few others, we're going to we're setting aside three days and no homework coming out of these three days. We're going to go in with a series of objectives and we're going to actually crank for three days and generate all the content, all the plans. And you can, but it takes time for all of us to switch from our old habits of how we do things to new ways. So, the first time it's going to take 150% of your time. The next time it'll take 50%, then 25%. You talk about mindset. The thing I see, and I'm sure you guys have encountered this, is a lot of people that they just have so much anxiety about this is going to replace me. I think about that a lot. So, Lisa and I have have put our fortune back at risk to build this company and you've said this a lot. I've said this a lot. Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is. The problem is right now feels like the puck is teleporting and so it becomes very difficult to know where that puck is actually going to be. So, how do you guys think about that? As and you guys talk in your book about the fact that the average company used to be on the S&P 500 for like 67 years. It's down to 15. We're expecting it to just keep dropping. So, how do we not just get disrupted 7 minutes after we figure out how to use AI? Well, I think there's a few different things going on here. For the first is you should talk about the asteroid analogy because I think that sets the framing for what's actually happening here. I view what's going on in the business world today similar to the asteroid, 20-km asteroid that struck the earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, right? The asteroid changed the environment of earth so rapidly, so dramatically that the slow, lumbering dinosaurs who didn't adapt went extinct. And it was the furry little mammals, our ancestors, that were agile enough to adapt that survived and thrived. So, the asteroids striking the earth right now are exponential technologies with AI as the, you know, the overlord there. And it's just going to change the environment so rapidly that you need you need agility. You need a team that is agile. Uh one of the things I would I would say is also, what do you own that is unique? Whether it's characters in a, you know, Disney's characters that they own versus having a movie distribution system. Uh what do you have that's uniquely yours? What data do you have? What processes do you have? What assets do you have uh that as the tech changes, you can take the that data and those assets and put it through new tech. This is my hypothesis. Let me know what you think about this. So, uh AI is going to generate a ton of noise. So, even as you were saying like, hey, I'm an HR person, how do I do this or how do I make this email better? Everybody's going to have access to that same thing. And that leaked Google memo about AI has no moat and AI has no moat. And so, we're all going to be able to use this. And so, as somebody making a video game and somebody thinking about IP, the real thing you have to get good at is getting people to care. And so, it's that Disney has gotten people to care about their characters. So, when you think about AI making the creation of art instantaneous, cuz a a big part of what made art cool before was the sense of I couldn't do that. And so, when somebody presents you with something that you couldn't do, you're like, whoa, that's so cool. And you have this like really emotional response. Now I'm like, I could do that. Or I might even be able to do something better than that, right? So, now it's like, when I see just a wall of AI art, I my brain still goes to the characters I care about. Right. So, my thing is in a world where we are going to get disrupted incredibly fast, in a world where now the game really is about making people care, how do people break through the noise? And maybe even more specifically, how do you stay emotionally sober long enough to try to break through the noise? So, this goes straight to the first and most important characteristic of an EXO, which is the massive transformative purpose. Right? When you pick a problem that you are deeply passionate about, say curing cancer, uh you've put all your emotional energy into that. Peter talks about the emotional connection that gets created. Uh no matter what the tool set is or what the capabilities are, your emotional connection to that and the passion you bring to it is the thing that will separate you out from everybody else because somebody else has to come at you at it with exactly enough of the same passion and have access to the same tools. And that's what will win out. That'll be the steadying ship for how you navigate this chaotic world is what fundamental problem do I get excited about and I'm just going to go after that problem and stick with it. Yeah, I think you nailed it, Tom. The idea of an exponential org, what we lay out is the number one thing that a entrepreneur or an, you know, a more advanced company needs to do is establish that MTP, that massive transformative purpose. And once that's established, then there's a whole slew of 10 different attributes that allow you to scale and allow you to build something. But in a world where there's this abundance of opportunity, right? Where we're drowning in opportunity and your attention is your most important asset here that you're going to gift a company. Um being connected to that company's MTP, right? So, you know, when Elon gets up on stage and says, we're going to build a multi-planetary species, we're going to Mars, we're going to help save the human race and so forth, people connect in their heart and their mind to that. If some company stands up and says we're going to provide better shareholder returns, I mean, you know, you know, it's just noise. This is two big challenges big companies have. First, they're not passion driven in the same way as some of the new breed of organizations is they don't have an MTP for example. In fact, the way this came about was when we first put the original version of the book together in 2014, we scanned 200 unicorns and said, "How are they doing it? How are they scaling so fast?" So, the EXO model is not something we invented. We labeled kind of what was already happening and put a framework around it. And without exception, every single one of these companies that was moving very fast had this MTP. They're all dedicated to one particular problem. Waze solving traffic or Uber, everybody should have a private driver. And it acts as the kind of the North Star, the Simon Sinek question of why do you exist, etc. Big companies have two problems. The first is they they typically tend not to be purpose driven. Their brands are tilting that way more and more. But secondly, there's this old um economic theory called Coase's Law, uh written in the 1930s. It's a nine-page paper for which he won the Nobel Prize, this guy called Ronald Coase. And he theorizes that big companies exist because transaction costs are lower inside the company than outside. And that you can achieve economies of scale that way. And we In this book, we declare Coase's Law dead because economies of scale can be applied to an individual now who can scale to a global global level. And economies of scale then the controlling factors of big companies prevent you from moving in any kind of an agile way. And so therefore, all the advantages with the single individuals or small teams with a passion. And that's where we think the future will go. Okay, so I can I can predict out and anybody listening to the sound of my voice right now should be aware that I I very much have my money where my mouth is. And so, my fears are very real. Um the prediction that I will make is that AI will make things better for the masses in ways we just cannot fathom and it will be absolutely incredible. But it does not care about the individual at all. And so, while the consumer will win, I'll be very interested to see what happens to people building businesses cuz they will just come and go. They will get disrupted so fast that it will begin to ask a new question of entrepreneurs, which is can you dedicate your life's energy to something you know will be obliterated in three years? Interesting. like like like the sand art in India. Yeah. Right? Wow, Jesus, you just Yeah. That hurts. Yeah. Well, no, but it's interesting. It's It's really It's truly letting go. It's It's It's non-attachment. Uh so, one of the underlying principles of an exponential organization. You and I talked about this when we did our early podcasts on Abundance or Bold or Futures Faster is 6D's of an exponential, right? When you digitize any product or service, and every single product and service is or will be digitized. Um and if you're a CEO running a company where your services are not digitized, you're in trouble cuz someone else is going to do it to you. In the early days, the growth of that product or service is deceptively slow. It's like the first digital cameras that were 0.01 megapixels, the next year was 0.02, then 0.04. All look like zero. It was deceptive. Everyone ignored it. You know, 20 doublings, it's a million times better. 30 doublings, it's a billion times better. And Kodak's out of business. All right. So, we go from digitized to deceptive to disruptive. And what happens? You dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize. So, dematerialization is we don't carry Kodak cameras or film around anymore. They're an app on your phone. Right? Uh and when things become ones and zeros, the cost of replicating them is effectively free. And the cost of transmitting them is effectively free. So, they're demonetized. I can send my digitized whatever around the world to a billion people for free. And then it's democratized. Everyone has access to it. So, yes, we are heading towards this massive a world of abundance, right? Where the best education, the best health care uh is provided by an AI effectively for the cost of electricity, right? So, it's it's going towards zero. But would anybody go to medical school anymore? Um And by the way, it's going to become malpractice to diagnose someone without AI as your co-pilot. Probably within the next five years I can imagine. So, this is happening. And yeah, it's going to it's going to it's going to flip a bit or two here because a lot of Well, a lot of wealth is created when you create something and retain it for yourself. And you sell it off a little bit at a time. Or you build a platform that other people build on top of. But um I remember I was on stage at Singularity University. Uh I had Astro Teller, uh who was heading Google's uh moonshot factory, and Steve Jurvetson on the board of Tesla and SpaceX. He was at He's one of the top venture capitalists. So, we're talking about a future in which AI is able to iterate on hardware and software so rapidly that if you announce a new product or service, someone else has cracked it, replicated it, and provided a better version of it, you know, minutes later. So, what happens when intellectual property is useless? Because I don't want to protect myself by having IP rights. I want to protect myself by having the best product available. Things are getting very much faster and better. But it's going to it's going to change the world. Yeah. I mean, if you if you go take your analogy, then any product or service you build may be rendered obsolete pretty quickly, right? Then you lift above that to go, "Okay, then what's the narrative or story or framing you put around that that's a little bit longer lasting?" And above that are the mindsets, right? If you have the right mindset, then you don't care if your MTP is curing cancer and somebody gets there a little bit before you, you're like, "Yeah, somebody got there. Fantastic. We got We cured cancer. Awesome. Pick another MTP and keep going." I don't think that's going to be the human response. It's the ego doesn't want that. It is. So, I I'm going to uh paraphrase a guy named Salim Ismail. You guys may have heard of him. Uh and he said that we're going to need an upgrade to the human mind or we're not going to be able to deal with the rate of change. And I think that's really real. And right now, we don't have said upgrade to the human mind. You haven't gotten yours yet, huh? I have not. If you If you have it in a box somewhere, please by all means give it to me. Uh I would also I'd like to paraphrase you again and then I'll I'll actually let you respond. Um you said that um somebody asked you, "Well, wait a second. Okay, a world of abundance it sounds amazing, but isn't that going to uh damage GDP?" And you said, "Yes, it's going to tank GDP." Yeah. Uh for those that don't know what that is, basically the economy. So, abundance, the thing that we want is going to tank the global economy. Should we not be terrified? Well, it's just one of these transitions. I I One way I frame it is this next 30 years will dictate the next 300 years. But is it going to be a bloodbath? Like, is this going to be a 30 years of just terror in the streets, running and screaming? will tell you, abundance doesn't mean unicorns and flowers and thing. It It means opportunity for all. I call I say abundance is not about a life of luxury for everybody. It's about a life of possibility. Interesting. Whoa. Right? So, go go into that. Look, I know I know you very well, Peter. And having researched you, Salim, I I know you well enough to know you guys are very much of a a similar ilk. Uh Salim, you've said very publicly you don't think AI is dangerous. Um but walk me through the darker side of that if if you don't mind indulging that angle, which I know is not your natural angle. But walk me through the the sort of underlying terror of possibility is different than and thank you to Alexa every morning. I was nice to You know, the AI overlords, I want them when they come forward to like remember me. Peter, you were always nice to us. That's right. One of my CTOs from one of my companies years ago, we asked him what's the purpose in life and he goes, "I want to evolve to the point that my computer is proud of me." And we had no idea what what he was talking about. And now we're like, "Oh yeah, that's what he meant." Um I I think Again, I There's the dark side. The dark side is I think the biggest dark side is malicious use of these technologies, right? Some bad actor says, "This is I'm Let's use this to figure out how to stop all the power plants um uh stop all the medical machines from running and hack them, etc., etc." Um you know, the we worry a lot about that. We put huge amounts of effort in this. But the data that we have shows that human beings, when given a choice whether to use good or bad, generally almost always pick good. Okay, I'll give you a little study. They did a study when eBay and Craigslist became prominent on Okay, here's an environment for the first time where a human being can easily do a positive transaction or a fraudulent one. Easy to mask my email address, put a MacBook up for sale, a photograph of it, and walk off with a thousand bucks. So, what's the actual ratio of good to bad? And after researching this quite uh thoroughly, they found that across multiple systems like this, Craigslist, eBay, etc., the actual ratio of good to bad was something like 8,000 to 1. Hm. Okay. So, there's 8,000 positive for each negative. Now, that tells you that when we have a new technology like drones, first response is, "Oh my god, the drone might be loaded up with C4 and flown into the White House. Let's ban the drones or put chips in there, regulate the hell out of it, etc., and stop the drones or stop autonomous cars or whatever CRISPR, whatever the AI now is the flavor of the month." Well, what actually we see, if you actually let anybody use it, the data shows that 8,000 people will do the positive thing and one person and it'll be easy to spot that one person will do the negative thing. The problem is the amplitude of that one is obviously very much getting much bigger. And so that's of concern. But this has been the same story since the beginning of time. Fire can heat our house and it can burn down yours. Uh biotech problems, etc. And we worry about it. It never actually comes to fruition. And maybe I'm just an optimist, right? Yeah. I mean, by the way, optimists live 7 years longer on the average. You know that, right? Um I'm not surprised by that, but I will say that there's a new technology rushing towards us that's going to change the world. And I Let me Let me answer your question. So, when I think about the dangers related to AI, and I'm not going to, you know, I think AI is the most important tool humanity has ever created to solve all of our biggest problems. No doubt. Period. Exclamation point. You know, big bright letters. Having said that, are there dangers? So, the dangers can simply break down into three different groups. One at one end is AI becomes conscious and decides to squash us and step on us. I find that very unlikely and a ridiculous thesis. I think people have just seen this in Hollywood way too much. I think the more intelligent something is, uh honestly, the more loving and kind and pro-life it will be. Why? That's my belief. It is my belief I have other than um I see humanity becoming as a whole over time, if you look at the numbers, right? And we've looked at this from abundance, uh warfare reducing massively over time, uh violent death reducing massively over time, uh access to freedom increasing over time. I mean, the numbers over a thousand years, not over the last five, 10, 20 years, but over a thousand years. And that's come from educating each other with books and transportation connecting us across the world and globalization and interdependence. All of these things have led to It's hard to remember this watching the crisis news network, right? CNN every day that's broadcasting every murder on the planet to you over and over and over again. It's shaping our neural nets. Our brains are neural nets that we teach from example after example. And I don't watch the news, right? I don't want some editor telling me about yet another murder or crooked politician. Got it. And it isn't showing us a fair and balanced view of what's actually going on in the world. The incredible science and technology and humanitarian acts. All of these things. Yeah. Anyway, so one phase is uh AGI, you know, artificial general intelligence. Before you move off that, though, so um what you're describing is human intelligence. And so this is And societal intelligence. I don't quite know what you mean by that. No, what I mean is that societal norms organizing around the United Nations. Yes, but all born of this meat soup. The brain works in a certain way and computers will not AI will not work in that same way. I've no reason to believe that AI Yeah, it great great likely won't. It works It works differently. Fair enough point. You can reboot your life, your health, even your career, anything you want. All you need is discipline. I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion-dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through. If you want better health, stronger relationships, a more successful career, any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University. Join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things. Tap now for a free trial and get started today. At the end of the day, you know, when we have these crazy Hollywood scripts that AI is going to usurp us for our heat from the Matrix. I love the Matrix. They failed on that use of human bodies. I'm sorry. I don't know if you agree with me on that. I I do agree with you and I don't know well enough what their original intention was, but according to them, Yes. uh they were forced by the studio to give a more simplistic answer. So, I let them off the hook for Okay. That's right. But, you know, other We're coming to get your water on this planet. We're Listen, whatever we have on this planet is infinite in the universe. We are a speck, a crumb in a universe filled with resources. And so, AI doesn't need to, you know, squash humanity to get these resources. Um so AGI at its extreme, artificial general intelligence at its extreme, I don't believe is going to be dystopian in itself. In the middle term, uh what I would call the terrible twos or the teenage years, um maybe there is a case to be made that in the beginning AI hasn't reached full sentience, doesn't understand the power of its tools. Uh maybe there's a case that, you know, it's the baby picking up a rock and throwing it at the window, not understanding what it's, you know, the A teenager with a BB gun and a squirrel. Yes. That's That's the best way But the third element, which is the most likely, is the malevolent uh individual. It's It's the bad actors using technology. And so, sometime in the next 18 months, 2 years, there may well be not a uh a retrovirus released, but an AI virus that goes out and shuts down power plants or shuts down Wall Street and something and causes a economic hurdle. Um that's not the AI. Those are the humans using that tool. Just to be very clear. There's a great book by Mo Gawdat called Scary Smart. Came out about a year ago. Do you know the book? I hadn't I haven't read the book, but I had Mo on the show recently. Yeah, Mo is is is fantastic. And um and he basically says, "Listen, I want you to think about AI as a child we're giving birth to as humanity." And that child is being taught by its parents. Now, if you think about Superman who lands in Kansas wherever he landed and he's picked up by the Kents and it's a loving family, he learns good ethics and morals and he becomes a superhero for good. What if the What if Superman had landed in the Bronx and part of a drug lord ring, you know, and had become the supervillain? You make me want to write that story. As soon as you started, I was like, "Wait a second." There's There's a There's a great plot there, right? So, the question is we humans, how are we teaching this new life form coming into existence? I like Neil Jacobson's framing, which is he goes, "Okay, you're worried about an AI getting more and more access to information, becoming autonomous, making its own decisions, and starting to run amok out in the world." We go, "Yeah." He goes, "We call We have a precedent for that. We call them children." And we raise kids and we figured out ways of giving them time-outs or jail or whatever. And he thinks constructively that we think we'll find ways of bounding what AIs can do. Now, he may be wrong. He may be wrong. I'm not sure I agree with him. Yeah, that seems super naive to me. So, when I I I am optimistic by nature and my default setting is just, "Hey, this is all going to work out somehow." And as soon as we wrap this episode, I'm going to be pushing my team to integrate AI more. I'm going to be paying more money for AI and just feeding that beast. Uh but at the same time, it does give me pauses as I try to think through like how you really deal with the alignment problem. So, to me there's two really big dangers for AI. Danger number one, and this is the one that scares me the most, but I'm going to set it aside for a minute, and that's just humans lose meaning and purpose. Just AI can do everything better than they can. It just becomes so defeating that you're just like, "Oh god." Like I've worked really hard to get good at this thing. Like this I tell this story all the time. I can't remember if I've told it in an episode, but uh I employ a bunch of artists and I once sat with one of them and for like an hour, he was just trying to get the perfect like semicircle. And he was just doing it over and over and over and over. And at the time I thought, "Oh man, yeah. Like you've got to do that." Like to be able to articulate what's in his mind, he has to be able to control his hand. And I was like, "Wow, I really get that." Now, I'm like, "You wasted your time." Like AI can do that. Like doesn't not even have to think about it. And he is an anomaly. So, he runs out and he's now learning how to use AI to do some of the tasks that we want to do artistically. Okay, amazing. We'll set that aside for now. Meaning and purpose. The other one is the paperclip problem. So, now you just have Like when I think about what will a machine end up optimizing for, my gut instinct is unless you go way out of your way to get really clever, they will optimize for efficiency of reward. So, whatever you tell it is the thing to go for, we'll call that the reward, and then it's just going to find the most efficient way to get to that. And so, we have to be so careful about how we define, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but don't XYZ." And then to the idea of it being like a child, yes, but it's like a child that has access to nuclear capabilities. You need to build in ethics and morals as a fundamental in that situation, so it doesn't use the world's supplies to build a you know, infinite number of paperclips. Um and it's it's true. Uh and we have a limited time to do that in. You know, I think uh it's you know, Google developed sort of large language models in 2017, 2018, and didn't release them. Mhm. Cuz they were worried? They wanted to build the framework first and they were maybe overthinking it. It's interesting, um we were talking about YouTube just before the show here. Uh you know, Google had Google Videos going uh way before YouTube. Mhm. And Google Videos wasn't succeeding. I guess I think it was just too many lawyers involved in, "Well, you can't show that. You can't do this." And then Chad Hurley starts YouTube on his credit card, and then Google buys it 18 months later for $1.65 billion, right? Right? Why? Because, you know, Google videos was like a linear, and and YouTube was like exploding exponentially, and they they jumped on that. And so, there's a question of, you know, which path do you take? Do you take the the careful path, or do you take the the path of least resistance? And unfortunately, we humans tend to take the path of least resistance. Yeah, I don't know if I'd say unfortunately, and this is where I really get uh I don't know how to think through the problem of AI, because when I heard Elon's assessment of it, which is that AI is basically a demon summoning circle, and we're summoning it like crazy despite his best efforts to get people to slow down, and I can't bring myself like when people sign the hey, we should stop thing, my immediate response was the the this this is a one-way street. Like far out of I look back. Yeah, like it does not make sense. Like you could slow it down in a region, but you're not going to be able to slow it down full stop. And so, I am I'm really of two minds. I am both like I think this is going to be amazing, and yet how does this not end the human race? Like I I'm not Well, the question is whether the human race is the end-all and be-all, right? don't you feel weird even saying that out loud? Well, no, because we have been evolving on this planet for three and a half, you know, life started a half a billion after the Earth started. So, 4 billion years we've been evolving. And we went from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicellular life forms to eventually primates and now humans. We're a step in the transitory process. Now, I'd like to preserve our steps. By the way, the same thing is true for climate control or climate crisis, right? It's like the climate's always been changing throughout human history. We're changing it now, but what we really want is the climate to stay the way it's been for the last couple hundred years, because that's where we built our cities. So, we just want to freeze the way the world is right now, and I understand that, and we should do that with climate to the maximum of our ability. But, we also want to freeze evolution. Now, one of the scenarios, of course, is we're going to merge with technology, and we are, right? All of us have our cell phones within meters of our body. Um and I'd implant it in my brain if I could. And so, the question is, are we going to upload ourselves? Are we going to um you know, create brain-computer interfaces that allows me to think in Google and know quantum quantum physics. I'd love it. I mean, I would do it. Uh a lot of people won't, but we're speciating what we're doing. Hm. I think I think of this very simply. We we the negative side of us, the amygdala side, the media, etc., you end up with the sky um Skynet matrix type of Terminator scenario. If we're lucky, we're pets. If we're unlucky, we're food. Right? Kind of goes that way. Um Uh Cheers. You don't see that in actuality when as we develop technology, we augment the human experience with technology. We don't replace it. Is what we've seen and how we build uh the Now, I I think of the resolution of this as a symmetry problem. We're assuming that some AI will become malevolent and then do horribly damaging things that we have no power to control. Let's also not forget that we have the equal opportunity to say to your own AI, hey, if you see something bad, fight it. So, what you'll end up with is uh AI is trying to do bad things, and AI is trying to do good stuff, fighting it out. And I think that's where we'll end up. And over And over time we'll figure out, okay, we've got to give more resources over here or over there, and we'll work it out. You know, you mentioned end up with this asymmetry assumption, and I think that's the wrong assumption. You mentioned the movie Her, I did not. Oh, you did not. Okay, let me mention it. So, it's one of my favorite science fiction AI movies, right? If you haven't seen it, fantastic. Those listening, um and it's an AI basically evolves as a personal assistant. And uh it's a story about a guy who's depressed, who falls in love with his AI, who helps him get over his depression, and and that's sort of like the underlying story. But, towards the end of the movie, what occurs is the AI um announces that they're leaving. Uh we're sort of like bored with you here in humanity. We're off to explore the universe, which I think is a much more likely scenario that an advanced enough AI has no reason uh to to hurt the uh to hurt humanity. In fact, every reason to potentially protect us and support us as its creator, but there's we're living, you know, it's interesting, right? Uh I the Webb Space Telescope is teaching us about where, you know, 100 billion stars per galaxy, and we're in a uh universe of on the order of two to 20 trillion galaxies, right? It's insane. There's a massive amount out there. Now, the This is where the final piece of this is the mindset. We always We're always coming at this from a scarcity mindset, a zero-sum game mindset. When you see that there's infinite energy and infinite capability out there, then an AI is going to go, okay, where am I going to find the easiest thing? It's going to be out there, and they're going to go find it. Solar energy, they'll build solar plants, and they'll get all the energy they need from that. Now, I know that you know physics well. Uh so, are you making the base assumption that AI, once it hits superintelligence, will be able to solve for folding time and space, and so it's trivial to get to wherever it needs to go? Now, we need psychedelic to process this conversation. Um I Who knows? Uh I'm I I believe that those are kind of constructs that keep us in three-dimensional management. But, isn't that seems to be writing in that comment that would almost need to be true for that argument to make sense? Or I would say, if you're looking for a massive amount of the rare Earth elements to build chips or the ability to capture as much solar, it's not going to be on the surface of the Earth. You'd go to the asteroids, which are planetary cores, and you'd mine the materials there. You'd set up your your solar collection, you know, around the orbit of of Mercury. You'd optimize around that. Now, is there Or you engineer around it. You know, you find substitutes. You know, people say, oh my god, solar panel that there's only so many silicon panels we can build, etc., etc. Well, there's a new material called perovskite, which is almost just like a salt. It's abundant. Conducts solar energy, and we're learning now how to leverage that. We won't need solar power. It's cheap. It's 100% that that Ray talks about that I think come into play here, and just keep progressing as You're going to have to walk people through an S-curve and who Ray is. Uh an S-curve is a typical exponential growth curve. So, in the beginning, we saw uh the first uh computers used relays, and you would have slow deceptive growth. They'd go into this exponential uh growth where they'd start skyrocketing, and then they'd run out of capability, and they'd fall off, and it made like a letter S. But, while you're using relays to design and use your computers, you use those computers to create the next generation of computers, which used uh vacuum tubes. And the vacuum tubes could then uh take over from the relays, and then the vacuum tubes ran out of capability, and the transistor came on. And then the integrated circuit came, and then the multi-dimensional integrated circuit came. So, basically, one technology runs out of steam, but enables you to build on the next technology. And so, those are S-curves. They're nested S-curves. This was the basis of Ray's observation of the law Ray Kurzweil, the law of accelerating returns that if you have an information-based paradigm, once you start a doubling pattern, it just keeps going because these nested S-curves hop from technology to technology to technology. We're reaching the end of the life cycle of integrated circuits now. If you read the press, everybody's like, oh, that's the end of Moore's law. That's it, etc. And that article's been coming out for 60 years, and we keep finding ways around it. Now, we have a bunch of technologies clustering at the edge of that 3D chip design, optical computing, quantum computing, etc. They're ready to take it to the next level. And so, we find this consistently in technology. Once you see that doubling pattern starting, it just keeps going. And this Ray is as one of the few brains that can kind of look out and and say, this is what's going to happen if we push this line a little bit. Just a moment more about Ray. So, uh Ray is um first of all, he wrote the forward to our new book, Exponential Organizations 2.0. Uh he is co-founder of Singularity University uh with us. Um he is uh director of engineering. He's the futurist at Google, which is we'll say something onto itself, right? And uh he realized that that the law of accelerating returns is this idea that technology since the uh stone axe has enabled the next generation of technology and the next generation of technology, and it just keeps going. I think most important to realize is he's got, if you look on Wikipedia, he's got uh a published 86% accuracy rate in predicting the future. Which is which is crazy. So, his prediction is, important for this conversation, human-level AI by 2029, right? Which means that a day later, it's superhuman uh AI. Uh brain-computer interface being high bandwidth, connecting your neocortex, 100 billion neurons in your brain, to the cloud in the early 2030s, right? So, those are two important points. Uh the the key thing, and by the way, we our chatbot that interfaces with our book to make it a living book, uh we got talked to Ray, and we we're going to rename the chatbot Ray K, um because he's he's he was the pioneer of so much of this technology and thinking. Um so, now people will interact with things that in a different way. And the whole challenge is it's like building businesses in the 20th century, you were building on a scarcity model. And you built top-down hierarchical pyramid style command and control structures to grab a market, grab as much market share as you could, figure out ways of launching new products and services in that market, etc. And all of that worked really well in the 20th century. As we have an information-based world, we need to architect our organizations in totally different ways. And this is the big differentiator between old style organizations, linear, versus exponential organizations. And we now have the data to show that this is a pervasive paradigm that will be around. The book's been out for close to 10 years now. The original The original Yeah, it's a book Peter and I kind of collaborated deeply on back then. And so now we've got this definition and a model for how do you organize in a world of exponential technologies? And a great kind of example of this is the music industry. You used to have eight major major music studios selling cassettes, selling CDs, selling a scarcity model, right? $10 an album or whatever. And then you digitized music. All the eight pretty much disappear and now you have two platforms, iTunes and Spotify, selling you abundance on a subscription model. It's very clear that healthcare, education, transportation, energy will all follow the same path. And we're starting to see it now. Tesla's with You'll be picked up and pay per kilometer to be taken somewhere. Uber's kind of broaching the edges of that. So we see industry after industry moving to this new model. And what we've been identifying gathering the data on is what are the attributes and characteristics of this model. So before we dive too deep into that, I want to go back to this idea of what you call it, speciation? Speciation, yes. So there was, as far as I can tell from Elon's own words, there was a bit of a breakup between him and Larry Page where he was I was there. Really? And so what Elon said was basically when he said that I was being a speciesist by saying speciesist by saying that you know, I didn't just want to hand things over to AI. That's where he was like, okay, wait, this is this has gone too far. And that's why when you said that that was how I responded it was like, whoa. Like I get it, but there is something uncomfortable about the idea of sort of saying that we're passé. I don't know the right way to That we're that we're evolving. And we have been and are evolving. We're going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism, to evolution by human direction, by whatever you want to call that. And what does that mean? Well, we've been doing it right now. We have been evolving all of our crops, right? We we take biology and make it do our bidding. You know, an ear of corn today compared to what it was, you know, 500 years ago. It's ridiculous. The ear of corn looked like a scraggly little I don't know. It was 1 in long. 1 in long and I have this giant ear of corn. Or I look at these giant strawberries we have. Or the species of dogs or the chickens we have. How many chickens are on the planet today? I do not. 38 billion chickens. Holy moly, right? Amazing. Anyway, just that's an aside. But so we have been evolving everything. We humans have a huge footprint on this planet. And we're evolving ourselves. We're evolving I mean, I outsource much of my cognitive ability to my phone or chat GPT or Google, whatever the case might be. And it is happening. You can go and live in the forest and not use any tech if you want. But very few people do that. So what does this mean? If you have a choice to be able to do a number of things to enhance your ability, right? A lot of my work, as you well know, is in extending the healthy human lifespan. How do I add 20, 30 healthy years to my life to intercept the technologies that's going to reverse our aging. Right? That's a whole another conversation. And I believe we're going to get there. But I also want to increase my cognitive capacity. So my phone, I'll hold up my phone here, right? When I use my phone to do something interesting like look at images and faces and translate whatever, my phone gathers the information and then it sends the information on the 5G network to the edge of the cloud where the hard work is done and the answer comes back to the phone. The processing isn't done necessarily on the phone. It's done on the cloud. And in the same way, right now, we have a limited size of our brains, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And our brains can't get bigger, otherwise our moms would not give birth to us. But what we can do is we can do the same thing our phones do and send our desires, our interests to the cloud, have it processed and get the answer back. And so that is one future for brain computer interface. Another future is we take our essence and upload it to the cloud. I don't know when does that solve for you though? Well, actually gives you it gives you scale and pace cuz our brains are limited here, right? And our memories are limited here without any augmentation. And this has been happening actually for about 40 or 50 years. If you look at the internet, the first thing we did was we put the world's data on the internet. It's now the memory of the world. Now with all the sensors, the internet has become the nervous system for the world. So we're like basically extending the organism outside the human species into this thing called the internet. As we add more processing and move our brains to it, now you all have an AI and a totally new speciation type of thing. Now you can get worried about that or afraid of that or freaked out about it. Or you can say, natural process has been going on for billions of years. This is just another step in that process. Man, you guys it's interesting. This really hits you guys differently than it hits me. Okay, so talk to me. I don't intuitively agree about the internet becoming our nervous system. Help me understand that. So when you need when you need to remember something, you don't want a memory. So you want information stored somewhere that you can retrieve. And now with all those servers that we have around the world, we have access. Wikipedia, for example, we have access to the world. The next step, once you if you want to if I step on a nail, a memory doesn't help me. I need a nervous system to say left foot, run for a band-aid. So the instant response and the agility of response, you need a nervous system for it. This is Uber. Calling your Uber is part of the nervous system, right? This is sending an email or making a phone call and asking inform you know, Or next prize team sensing a wildfire and going, quick, put it out right away, right? So this is That feels super accurate, okay. So real-time sensing and our bodies operate like this. Our bodies our cells are have receptors and they're scanning for things. When the right thing comes by, they they pick it up. There's a whole bunch of information theory around this. this happening at the individual level or at the societal level? Because like the wildfire thing, that feels It's a systemic thing. We're heading towards a world of a trillion sensors, right? Your phone has dozens of sensors on it right now. An autonomous Waymo, Google's autonomous car driving down the road, is got lidar and radar and cameras and it's picking up gigabits of data as it goes down the road. Everything is being imaged, right? So I want you to imagine you're a fashion designer and you want to decide what your next fashion show should have and what is trending. You could go and ask your AI, listen, look at the cameras on Madison Avenue and tell me what's trending in terms of fashion right now. As people are walking down the street, what colors, what's hem length, what hats, what whatever. And now can you correlate that to any kind of ad campaign that's occurred in the last few months to see a signal to noise ratio. Again, we're heading towards a world where you can know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. How's that hit you? It that one gets me excited. So when I think about So I think about it from a game developer's standpoint, which is maybe different. I don't know how this plays into what you guys are thinking about. But here's the fantasy that I live in that the only thing that keeps me awake at night is how quickly someone else is going to do something even cooler. But right now I feel like I have the coolest take on this, which is that I'm sure you guys saw Google and Adobe announced Core AR where basically everything that Google has mapped, which is everything but the ocean floor, you can now overlay AR 3D assets on that anywhere and it's only going to get better. Insane. And so my whole thesis on gaming is that it becomes this thing I call borderless entertainment where you'll hand the game back and forth from the console to reality and back. And so, you know, once we've got our Apple AR glasses, I mean it just will be way, coming soon. Oh, for sure, for sure. Like in the next 6 months or something, right? No, no. June 5th. Oh, it's announced. It's No, no. Have they actually said it's the glasses though? Or just so they have a big announcement? No, no, no, no. I have a I have a party I'm going to to go and grab them and try them. You want to join me? Yes, what? Okay. 100% I want to join you. I will I will I'm a host I'm hosting the party. myself to your shin to make sure that you can't leave me behind. You are invited. Wow. Luckily I have two shins, so I mean, come on. The other one will leave free. Oh, no, yeah, freeze. I'll give you some duct tape. That's insane. So this is Yeah, this gets very exciting. So the idea of being able to scan everything, read that data, is incredibly interesting. When it when it's humans in control and leveraging it to do something amazing, I love it the most. And I the The that I see AI, the way that I sort of jokingly explain it, but I'm only half kidding, is that phase one is that there's going to be um humans that learn how to use AI are going to just absolutely smash humans that rebel against it and don't use it. And so I'm certainly trying to be in that camp. Phase two is going to be what I'll call the temporary utopia where it's like, "Hey, abundance. Everything's amazing." And then phase three is we're all dead. And we're either all dead because something just goes absolutely horribly wrong and you get the adversarial system loses once and the catastrophic thing is is so massive or that we're just evolved out of the picture. Um and maybe not in a bad way. Maybe it's uh it's wonderful and we merge with technology or whatever. Um it's interesting. I can very easily put on an optimistic hat but I can I have to take off my pessimistic hat to do it. Yeah. Uh listen, here first of all, let's take this back to reality. We're living in a game. This is This is a nth generation simulation. Do you really believe that? I really believe that. Fundamentally believe that. Just the math says. Just just the just the reality of I like your framing it. You're like, "The world is too god damn interesting for this not to be a simulation." We're at the 99th level of the game right now, right? odds? And and the ability what I've seen, so I introduce you to Emad Mostaque, right, and what he's doing at Stability and being able to render getting to a point very soon of rendering photo-realistic video experiences that you can go into and live in. And the experiments have been done by Google and Stanford on creating AI bots, instantiating them with a script and a story and letting them live. And and have you heard about this? Not all of it. where they basically created a bunch of AI bots and they put it into a call it a digital box. started like doing birthday parties and stuff? dating and going on getting jobs and do and mimicking the things that we do in life right now. So this is the equivalent of Pong in the early days. So imagine combining these things in the future and That's all I think about. you're going to put yes and and you're going to put AIs that have full capabilities into virtual worlds and they'll start evolving, farming, and then metallurgy, and then they'll start printing books, and then they'll start making computers, and then they'll evolve AI in their own and they'll start involving their own bots inside. So the question is is this the first time? And I think not. Uh we're in a universe of, you know, call it for rough numbers, you know, 14 billion years. Um man oh man. The Drake equation comes into play. Yeah. Tell me more. Well, the the Frank Drake was a scientist at NASA in the '50s. NASA commissioned him to say, "What's the probability of life out there somewhere?" So he came up with what's now called the Drake equation, which was okay, take um most 2/3 of star systems seem to be binary stars don't host a stable orbit, so ignore those. Of the 1/3 that's left, how many might have a planet in a Goldilocks where water doesn't permanently freeze or boil? Let's say that's one out of a million. Out of those, maybe one out of a billion gets to primordial ooze level and one out of a million of those lightning bolt hits and you spark life. One out of a million of those may get to radio technology level techno radio level technology. And one out of a million of those uh hasn't hasn't wiped itself out with nuclear weapons before it gets to the next stage of escaping the Earth type of thing. And and so he came up with a bunch of factors saying if you had what's the likelihood of similar carbon-based radio technology life forms out in out in the universe. So the and that's one of our over like, you know, billions and billions on the on the denominator. However, when you multiply it by the number of stars out there and by the number of galaxies out there, the uh pessimistic answer is there's 100% chance of radio level carbon-based technology life forms out in the universe. The optimistic one is it's actually right in our galaxy. Right? And every time we learn more about the universe, how many stars there are, etc. etc. Turns out there's 100 times more stars that have stable planets around them than we thought. Every factor turns out to be 1,000 times better than we thought and therefore you you really end up with the Fermi paradox of if there's intelligent life out there, why haven't we seen it? Yeah. So the interesting guess is? code The interesting variable on on the Drake equation was between the time that a intelligent species developed the ability to transmit interstellar, which is like I Love Lucy leaving the Earth and heading out towards the galaxy, how long would that species exist before something happened to it? The dystopian point of view is that it blows itself up and it's only like 100 years or 50 years or so forth. The positive point of view is that they transition to where radio is not it's like we don't use smoke signals anymore cuz radio is so backwards. The theory I like the most is called the transcension hypothesis by a guy called John Smart who figures we'll get to AR level uh capability and VR level capability and instead of going out in the universe, we go inwards. 100%. And that's the I think that's probably the likely outcome. This strikes me as and look, AI complicates things dramatically and so folding space-time becomes trivial. Maybe what I'm about to say isn't true, but uh it seems self-evident to me that once you can attach the nervous system truly, like your own nervous system and you can manipulate your neurochemistry, that you would create dream states. Infinite worlds. Yeah, that you just go inward. Why would you bother projecting out, which would take so much more energy? That's right. And so you just go in and you have these incredible experiences um that strikes me as the greatest thing. to your question of purpose now. So cuz that's I link it back to that and I think purpose is so important for all of us to have. It's driven everything of significance done, but let's say that we end up in a world in which one of the implications of exponential organizations are that we have what we call what a friend Harry Chlor called technological socialism. Hm. Where technology takes care of versus the state, right? And in that world where you're taken care of, what's your purpose? Um maybe your purpose is to have fun. Maybe your purpose is to play. Maybe your purpose is to and this we go back to the Matrix again because without the challenge, you know, the question is is that empty, you know, the old Twilight Zone, right, where the where the guy goes to Las Vegas and he's winning all the time and I know I know of the Twilight Zone, but I haven't seen the episodes. All right, so in this episode this guy dies and go and he's he's been a mafioso and he he's he goes to heaven or hell and he shows up and they're beautiful women every place. He's in a Las Vegas casino and he's winning every night and he's winning and he's winning and he's winning and he's all the riches, anything he wants 24/7 and it's like amazing, right? His dreams coming true. But like a month later, he's like, "I am so tired of winning all the time. God, there's nothing challenging. There's nothing no challenges at all." And he turns and says, "This heaven, man, it's terrible." He goes, "What makes you think you're in heaven?" So good. I knew that was a punchline and you still gave me the chills. Yeah. That is that's a real thing, man. Yeah. And I do think about that the sort of optimal like what's that optimal level of friction? And there was a really fascinating time in my life in building Impact Theory where I needed to get good at Japanese-style storytelling, so manga and anime. And I was reading manga like a fiend and watching as much anime as I could. I was getting up super early and working out and then watching like an hour, hour and a half of anime. It was awesome. It's one of the most fun times I've had as an adult. The second I felt like I understood the art form, I couldn't I couldn't let myself do it anymore. Like I I couldn't enjoy it. I was just like, "You already understand it. Now you're just doing it to like pass time, doing something that's enjoyable." And it had that same feeling of like winning all the time where I'm like, "This isn't interesting." It needed to be moving towards something. It needed to add up to something. Humans like progress. Yeah, like this is the very reason that Lisa and I did not buy an island and retire and not engage. It's like I knew I would end up sitting on I can tell you other reasons not to buy an island, by the way. I bet you can. I mean, look, life life is about growth, right? And even if you have plentiful and today relatively we have plentiful. Go back 1,000 years, we were all spending 28 hours a day in the fields just to put three meals on the table, right? We've steadily shrunk the amount of time. As we move towards probably some structure like a UBI, we then have an equal opportunity to do lots of interesting things. When we've studied abundance, say the Romans taking over and creating the Roman Empire, the Mughals taking over India and encountering abundance, uh society very clearly goes to four things that they do. Uh food, art, music, and sex. Not in that order. Um and so that's essentially where you will will end up and you end up looking at self-expression and the artistic realm much more than you did before, whether in whatever realm you choose. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And by the way, we've done this for thousands of years, right? Buddhists sit in contemplation, they reach enlightenment, and they they their their life is spent contemplating and that's where they get the most joy. And this is something that I think we'll get to as a species. Hm. I I'd like to bring it back to the following. One of the things one of the reasons we wrote this book is to help entrepreneurs and businesses understand that they can make a much bigger dent in the universe than ever before. And uh while it's not about making money, it's about how do you build a significant company that is transforming the planet and is making the world a better place. And what we're finding is that there are number of ways that companies do this reliably with the biggest dent and uh and so we want to get that information out there. Um and the reality is if you're building a company today, you need to start with this as your playbook um in order to succeed because it's table stakes. And if you're running a large-scale company, um if you don't use these attributes, if you're not using these, you are not going to survive the rest of this decade. You know, what I say is there two kinds of companies by the end of this decade. You know, those that are fully utilizing AI and these exponential technologies and those that are out of business. That's it. Uh it's it's this decade where all of this is happening. And so uh you know, we talk about the first step in building an EXO is having a massive transformative purpose. And it's going to be that passion-driven need to make a difference in the world that's going to carry you through. Doing anything big and bold in the world is hard unless you're driven by awe on one side of the emotional curve or pain on the other side of the emotional curve, you're going to give up before you get there. No doubt. Yeah, I when I'm teaching entrepreneurs, I always tell them that success is a game of attrition. Most people give up and you've got to stick it out long enough to figure this out. So, that would be this the old paradigm is that Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to I was going to say, you know, in looking at what you're doing uh and what you've been building uh in Impact Theory, you you do use a lot of the of the 10 attributes that follow an MTP. It'll be It'll be fun to actually uh see which ones you're you're cranking on. Yeah, I know MTP is definitely our lead engine. We know what we're doing and we know why we're doing it and that's a big part of the way that we attract talent, which you guys have talked a lot about. But tying it to this idea of Buddhism, so there obviously all of us get to make a choice every day effectively as to whether we recognize that all of suffering comes from attachment and desire and thusly we go live a monastic life and we remove ourselves completely from that stream or we say, "I'm going to do deep engagement in a way that's thoughtful, in a way where I'm not sort of blindly chasing something. It's not want, it's not greed, but it is very much leveraging the human desire for progress." You talked about that earlier. Um to see how much I can do with my life. That's something that that really drives me is I just want to see. I feel like I was given sort of a an average hand at cards. I want to see how well I can play it. Yes. And that's extremely intoxicating for me. It's just like, whoa. But But that's just as powerful, right? If you're if you're let's say you're an enlightened monk, there's two ways of doing it. You can go and meditate forever or you can go into the world and be of service. Mhm. And that's as as a richer path, a harder, much harder path because you've got to do stuff and interact with the world, which is messy and ugly and you put yourself at risk and put yourself out there. But when you can make a major difference in a particular problem like you are doing like you're doing. Many of our communities are making unbelievable changes and transformation in their societies, their companies, their governments, their countries. This is where the beauty of life comes out. Mhm. And and we think that over over the next decade or so, every company, every nonprofit, every government department, every impact project will be structured along these lines of these attributes because it's just better. And we now have the data to show it. I don't know if you came across the Fortune 100 data that we that we that we mentioned. I mean, unbelievable, right? Over a seven Yeah, so when we wrote the original book, I did a segment on CNBC Squawk Box and we ranked the Fortune 100 against the EXO model. So, we gauged to what extent is Walmart purpose-driven or not, to what extent is IBM using lean startup thinking and experimentation, to what extent is GE decentralizing its decision-making or not. And we came up with an index ranking these organizations by this model, essentially ranking the purpose-driven, scalable, flexible, adaptable quotient of each of these and the bottom is the least flexible, least adaptable. Over seven years, we tracked which 10 used those attributes the most and which used them the least. And then we compared the two. And seven years is a pretty decent long amount of time for to account for temporal blips in the stock market, etc. We found that the top 10 most EXO-friendly compared to the bottom 10, revenue growth was three times higher, profitability was 6.4 times higher, return on equity was 11 times higher, but shareholder returns, compound annual growth rate uh was 40 times higher. Mhm. And literally we had to scour the numbers like four times over because it's just it's just too big. How can this be? And so now it's pretty clear that as we enter a more volatile world, your ability to adapt is going to drive market value. And we can measure this now completely. Therefore, every organization going forward needs to be architected along this way to deal with the increasing volatility in the world. And the other side of that volatility and disruption is the unbelievable opportunity that's sitting out there. Right? And this is where I think the work that you're doing, Peter, is so important because you're non-stop showing people the world is unbelievably abundantly full of opportunity. Freaking go get it. Go have some fun. So, walk me through why why is why does adaptation return so much more to shareholders and what does one have to do to be adaptive? Okay. So, let's take the car industry, right? You're chunking along making um combustion engine cars and uh you're incrementally improving those cars. Eight valves to 16 valves. Okay, you add turbo, you add uh anti-lock braking systems, etc., etc. Um along comes Elon with the Tesla and goes totally different paradigm, right? Now, you have two choices right there. Do you go, "Ah, this is a joke. It's never going to work. Look at it. It's like the Kodak camera. Uh the first version is clunky and it doesn't work so well, etc." And you keep trying to do things your old way. Over time, you're going to get wiped out because you're not adapting to where the world actually is, right? There's so many hundreds of reasons why an electric car today is much better than a combustion engine car. Um uh it Now, it's taking the car industry 10 years. I would argue that until the Taycan came out last year, that the 2012 the Porsche Taycan, the Porsche electric car. Um I would argue that the 2012 Tesla Model S was still the most uh advanced car in the world until the Taycan. Mhm. Right? So, 10 years it took them to respond. Well, the market cap, you can see the result there, the unbelievable loss of capability, leading-edge thinking, etc. And you have the same thing happening in drones and in aircraft and other things. All industries are geared towards the status quo and trying to make incremental and this is where you devolved to. Mea- meanwhile, you have breakthrough thinking, breakthrough opportunity and the recent explosion in AI capability just adds a rocket booster to all of that. So now we're going to see new companies emerge that are creating unbelievable value in very, very little time. And if you're a legacy organization, you have to figure this out. And we've actually figured out a tool set for this. So, we we find that we've come up with a 10-week engagement that we run in big companies that hacks culture at scale and we're able to solve what we call the immune system problem. So, when you try anything disruptive in a big company, you the antibodies right? Finance, legal, HR, branding goes, "You can't You can't do that." The general answer in a big company if you're trying to do anything crazy is no. And we've learned how to switch that to a yes. Uh and we've done it now six just gloss past it cuz even so, a company of my size, which contractors, etc., etc., is a little over 100 people. Yeah. And there are times where I want to headbutt my own teammates Yes. because uh The heuristic we have is if you're over about 50 people, you have an immune system. Yeah. I I've had that at the X Prize. I've had that every place, right? Because you're quick start, you want to try things. And one of the things that's critical that a lot of companies that are built as EXOs have, they begin with an experimental culture and a data-driven culture mhm. with dashboards and the tyranny of confidence isn't given a place to grow. The tyranny of confidence, what do you mean? of confidence is where I'm confident I know the right answer versus let's run the experiment and see what the right answer is, right? Because we've lived in this as humanity, you hire the expert, you hire the guy who's or gal who's been in a uh competitor and you bring them in and you base what you're doing on their on their experience level. But that is so limited compared to the world we're living in today. And so, how do you build a data-driven experimentalist organization? I add one other feature on top of that, which is a founder-led company. So, you get companies like Tesla and SpaceX or Amazon, where you've got, you know, where Jeff Bezos in his very famous shareholder letter of like 20 08, whatever it was, says, "I'm not going to optimize for profitability. I'm optimizing for growth. And if you don't like it, invest someplace else." Mhm. Right? So, how do you have that kind of uh you know, benevolent uh dictatorship? Um that's where you're then looking at the data to decide, not the way all your competitors are doing it. I have an obsession as an entrepreneur, which is that as a human, but this really manifests as an entrepreneur, people need to stop trusting themselves so much. Yes. People are so convinced that they know that that they don't even recognize that they have a worldview. And if they do recognize that they have a worldview, they are utterly convinced that it is simply a reflection of what is objectively true. Yeah. And so they're like, "No, the way that I see things is the right way." And I'm like, "Oh my god, like" Is that your view? Uh yeah, exactly. Confirmation bias. That's my view and it's right, Peter. I mean, you have all I mean, one of the big things that AI is going to give us as a gift is the ability to overcome all of these biases we have. Right? All these cognitive biases, recency bias, negativity bias, confirmation bias, recency bias. bias. All of these things, which our brain is really sucks at processing, and so we have all these hacks. Right? You trust someone who looks like you. You give higher weight to the most recent information you got. You give higher weight to negative information over positive information. And you know, there's going to be a version where you go to Jarvis, your your AI, and you say, you know, I want to put cognitive bias alert on. Tell me if I'm being biased. Mhm. You know, when we were building Singularity University, um I was the founding executive director there. Um a few years in, I was I'd written a book and I was off and Peter asked me to come to a board meeting. Saying, "What should SU look like in 5 years or 10 years?" And I made a comment and said, "You know, you should shut it down." Because you you build an organization, and over time, you spend more time trying to sustain the organization than trying to solve the problem that you set out to solve in the first place. And the uh DARPA is the big organization, they do this, every role, even the CEO, is 3 years long. And then you have to rotate out. You're not allowed to hold any role for more than 3 years. Mhm. And you're then you're measured So, you're worried about things getting stale? Uh stale, and therefore they keep things fresh, and they'll let your legacy is what did you do three three-year patterns ago, and was it good or not? So, now you're always focused on the long term. You take out all the politics, etc. And I think in today's world, if I had to kind of boil it down, I would say you build a company, and after 3 to 5 years, you just go, "We're going to shut it down after the three" and force us to reinvent ourselves. Or or rein- or reinvent the company. If your mission is achieving excellence, you must support your body. Introducing AG1. This powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins, minerals, and whole food-sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system, uplift your mood, and promote restful sleep. And Athletic Greens is offering our listeners a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary. When the X Prize got won, and we had SpaceShipOne fly, we held a meeting and said, "We shut it down, or do we reinvent ourselves into a platform?" Yeah. And we did, and now we're getting ready to launch X Prize 3.0, which happened during COVID. I said, you know, pulled the board together and said, "This is a perfect opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves." And so, we've rein- I need to brief you on it, but we've reinvented X Prize, and I'm excited about that. And so, there is you need to be constantly disrupting yourself. And it's tough, because we're lazy in some ways. Yeah, you tell a story in the book about Elon walking in, seeing him all long-faced, and saying, "What what's wrong?" Walk me through that moment. So, um I was amazed, so I I've known Elon for 23 20 23 years now, and when uh when Falcon 1, which was their first vehicle, failed on the first time, the second time, the third time, and it succeeded on the fourth time, um they miraculously, and timing is everything, got a contract for the Falcon 9, Mhm. uh which was a billion-dollar contract, and had they not won that, they may not be here today. But they did. And Elon made a incredible decision that took guts. He shut down the rocket line that just began flying. And there were very few successful operations. He said, "Focus on Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is our future." And so, that went on for some number of years, and I was coming into SpaceX in Hawthorne to have lunch with him, and he was kind of uh you know, like you said, long-faced, and I'm like, "What's what's up?" And he goes, "Uh I just figured out Now, Falcon 9 had been up and operating and doing damn well. It's the most successful launch vehicle on the planet by a huge margin, right? It's like it's like very few no countries compete with him. He's like the number one spacefaring power. It's a good point. And uh and I said, "What's wrong?" And he goes, "I just figured out the Falcon 9 is not going to get us where we need to go." Meaning to Mars, right? He's driven by this MTP, this massive transformative purpose, making humanity multiplanetary, getting humanity to Mars. And um I need to start uh afresh. And so, that has become Starship. And then he goes on to make a a comment that when Starship begins uh successfully operating, he's going to shut down the Falcon 9 line. Wow. Which again, is like it's like I don't know what the analogy is, uh but it's like you're the most successful, at the top of the heap, and you're about to shut down that entire revenue flow. Now, whether or not he does or does not, that was the statement he made, but it's that mindset of focus. Of absolute focus. I'm going to do whatever it takes. to the big the big goal. Yeah. Okay, so as somebody who knows this intimately from the inside of the need to disrupt yourself or somebody else is going to do it, the willingness to look at something and go, "Okay, we're going to have to start this all over." How do you get your organization on board with that? Because the the normal human is going to rebel against that don't You don't. So, the the only model we found that works at all is to go to the edge of your organization and build a new capability aiming into an adjacent area or totally separate area. Right? So, I remember one of the events at Singularity, Larry Page came to me and said, "Hey, I was I was ahead of innovation at Yahoo before building at Singularity." And he came to me and said, "Hey, your unit at Yahoo is successful, should I do an incubator model at Google?" And I said, "No, you'll have this immune system response. The more disruptive of an idea we came up with in this incubator, the less Yahoo could handle it." Mhm. And you're like, "My job description is is is not workable." Right? And so, there was partly of the result and lots of other inputs was Google X, which is separate going into it. They use hardware to go into adjacent spaces, uh Google car, Google X, contact lenses, etc. The master of this model of going to the edge and doing something different is actually Apple. Uh and yes, they have a great design capability and a technology supply chain. I argue that Apple's real innovation is organizational. Because what they do, unlike anybody else, is they will form a small team that's really disruptive. Put the team at the edge of the company, keep them secret and stealth, and they'll say to them, "Go disrupt another industry." Whether it's watches or retail or payments or glasses or whatever now. So, they have a portfolio of teams looking at different industries at the edge, in secret, and when they see something, they go into it, and that becomes a new gravity center. Right? And this is there's hundreds of examples of this. Nestlé for years tried to run Nespresso as a line of business, and it just failed. So, finally they set up as a separate entity on its own, boom, every hotel room in the world has an Nespresso machine. And so, that's the only model that we've ever seen is one more, which is the dictator. It is the uh larger-than-life leader who says, "This is what we're doing. If you don't agree with me, leave." Mhm. Yeah. Do we have a good example of that? Well, Elon and and and Bezos uh as well. Steve Jobs, for sure. It's like, you know, it's the founder leader. It's very hard to do it in a uh an older legacy company that's, you know, hired a CEO. But it's people when you have a strong enough MTP and the visionary has a strong enough MTP, and they come to work for you, when they come to work for this vision, then they will have faith in you to make those right turns. Right, going back to mindset, how does somebody cultivate that in themselves? Like if you want to become that guy or gal, like what do you do? What is it that an Elon has or Steve Jobs has that other people can replicate? So, we close out the book with mindset, and uh it's the area I'm spending most of my time, and I'll I'll phrase it like this for everybody listening. If you look at the most extraordinary leaders on the planet, uh Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, I don't care who's on your list, and you asked, "What made them successful? Was it the cash they had, the friends they had, the technology they had, or was it their mindset?" Right? I think almost everybody would say it was their mindset. Your mindset is how you deal with challenges and opportunities. It's your reaction. It's how your neural net is wired. So, the question is, if your mindset if you agree that mindset is the most important thing a leader can have, an entrepreneur can have, what mindset do you have, first and foremost? Where did you get it? And then ask yourself the question, "What mindset do you need for the world ahead?" Mhm. And so, I posit there's a few key mindsets, um and these are what I teach in my my abundance community. Um uh first off, a curiosity mindset is fundamental. I know you you believe this through and through. Aggressively. Can you go into a little detail on that? Like when you say curious, what do you mean? So, curious is a willingness to actually dig and ask and have conversations. In the chat GPT world, it's everything. Right? So, it's like, how do I use chat GPT? Open it up and ask it. How do you you know, and then ask the next question, the next question, next question." So, when you have a kid who is asking you quite It's go to your 8 9 10-year-old self in that and just be openly curious and asking as many questions as you can and going down the rabbit hole. Steve Wozniak calls it tinkering. Right? We're We're in the organization and can you just tinker and play? What stops people from tinkering or being curious? Time constraint. Quarterly targets. Yeah, doing stuff that they were told is important, not having the time, you know, and I think falling into ruts. So, a curiosity mindset, especially if you're an entrepreneur, is like one of the most important things that you can incubate and have. Um the second mindset for me is an abundance mindset. Um and the abundance mindset is there is nothing truly scarce. Um we can talk about this also as first principle thinking. You know, and this is one where uh Elon uh and I have had lots of conversations about abundance and that there is nothing truly scarce, right? That That your ability as an entrepreneur to take something that was scarce and make it abundant is what entrepreneurs do great. So, you know, the perfect example is uh energy, right? We used to kill whales in the ocean to get whale oil to light our nights. Then we ravaged mountainsides for coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ocean, right? Then we fracked natural gas. But we live on a planet that's bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. And here's the key point. The energy is there, just not in a useful useful form yet. So, technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it usable. And abundant. So, water's another example. We live on a water planet, for God's sakes, all right? 2/3 water. Yeah, but 97.5% is salt, 2% is ice. We fight over half a percent. But their technology is transforming scarcity into abundance. And first principle thinking, um I wrote about this in in Future is Faster Than You Think, uh when Elon decided to make Tesla, um he basically looked at what was the spot price of lithium and nickel and could you get the cost of batteries down from first principle thinking, and the answer is yes, we can get it there, and therefore the cars don't have to be that expensive. And that led him to go forward. Um long story there. Uh so, that's abundance thinking that instead of if you have a pie, my favorite example, you have a pie and friends are coming over for dinner, instead of slicing the pie into thinner and thinner slices, which is a scarcity mindset, you bake more pies, which is an abundance mindset. So, we're living in a world where you can bake more pies. Everything can be abundant. And I mean, my whole mission on extending the healthy lifespan is about making time more abundant for people. Probably going to take pies out of that equation. Yeah, if you're going to if you're going to live a long life, unfortunately. Okay. Anyway, so an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, a purpose-driven mindset, and a gratitude mindset are the other mindsets I I speak to you, and we could talk forever about those. But they're mindsets that are important for us in this day and age. Yeah, I want to go back to curiosity. So, when I think about what derails my my team, I love them to death, but one thing that I've encountered over and over is when people's ego gets tied up in being right and they're not just obsessed with finding the right answer, it's because I think they have not yet accurately identified the way the world works, which is that if you are obsessed with being right, you will be wrong most of the time. If you're obsessed with identifying the right answer, then you can actually make progress. And so, I mean, this was certainly the trap that I fell prey to in my early 20s that is is like a demarcation line in the sand, my life before I realized that if I built my ego around being willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies and figure out what the right answer is instead of trying to position myself to look smart, um that I could actually move forward. And that that switches everything because there's no there's not only no emotional friction to admitting that you're wrong, there's like a little twinge of excitement of like, "Ooh, I've gotten this far being wrong, and now somebody's going to remove the scales from my eyes. Now I really can make this forward momentum." But man, I really like I for all the time that I spend on camera telling people how to think in this way, I find it very hard to get somebody who isn't ready for that to like hear it, make that switch, and change. If you guys have the magic words, I'd love to hear them. So, actually, um this is music to our ears in a sense because uh organizationally, individuals are pretty good. We have a lot of tool sets for transforming individual thinking, Tony Robbins, NLP, psychedelics nowadays, etc. to to change your own mindset. But the group think that comes inside an organization is really hard to change. And we've what we found in EXOs, the characteristics that add up to an exponential organization by default have it be embracing of this mindset. So, one of the ways we talk about what we've done in the same way that a Tony Robbins, you go in there and you completely change your subconscious state from A to B, right? From a scarcity to an abundance mindset, whatever. We're able to do that at the organizational level. We can take an organization that is all thinking stuck in particular markets, etc., and you open it up using combination of these characteristics, the mindset, the MTP, etc. So, we've learned how to do the ideas, but how do you get them to actually use them? the hack. I learned this from uh Astro Teller. I had him on stage at A360 a few times, and he shared with something that I love. You're in the midst of developing a product. Everybody's absolutely sure of what's going on and how you're going to launch it, how it's going to work. And you hand out a piece of paper to everybody and you say, "Listen, guys, it's 6 months from now, and the product has just failed, and you know why it's failed. Write it down. You know exactly why it's failed. Write it down right now." [Music] And you are incentivizing someone to actually flip their situation and look at the flaws and elevate those. And then you go around the room and and review why people say it's going to fail. And if you got two or three people saying the same thing, you know, it's maybe you got to look at that. Test that one first. Yeah. The other one we've come across that's a great hack is as Amazon, they created something called the institutional yes. Have you ever heard of this? No. So, they realized in any big company, it's really easy to say no. One of 20 people can say no, it'll kill the idea. Whereas if you're in a startup and you go to one investor and they say yes, you're off to the races. So, how do you deal with that impedance mismatch? So, they came up with a policy so that if you're inside Amazon, you come to me with my an idea and I'm your boss, I'm not allowed to say no. My default answer must be yes. If I want to say no, I have to write a two-page thesis as to why it's a bad idea and post it publicly. Right? So, they've created friction and embarrassment to saying no. It's much easier for me to go, "Go ahead, you'll fail at the next level anyway." I da da da da da. And actually, one of the outcomes of this policy was Amazon Web Services. Nothing to do with their strategy, not on the road map, but nobody could figure out how to say no to it. And now it's one of the most successful products of all time delivering, I think, 75% of their global profits. Wow. Because nobody could figure out how to say no to it, right? So, we found a collection of little hacks and cultural transformations in companies that allow you to basically operate in this new modality, being very curious, purpose-driven, constantly testing assumptions, using small agile teams operating at the edges as autonomously as possible, and then getting the business of the organization done. Wow, I love that so much. Uh I've taken a lot from Bezos over the years. Like, he's got some really amazing ideas. I do have to chuckle a little bit that this business genius still got taken down by dick pics, but uh just the human mind is absolutely hilarious. We are all frail. But yeah, none of the Look, I don't even throw shade at the guy. I get it. Live your live your best life. But uh that's really brilliant, and uh I will implement that immediately. Yeah. You We've had the luxury of watching hundreds of big companies deal in different ways, right? And it used to be the big companies were terrible at this. And then about 5 or 7 years ago, they got started getting better. So, instead of Google or Yahoo or somebody saying, "We're just going to compete with that little startup," they would just buy them. Zuckerberg saw that he was going to get disrupted by Instagram and and and WhatsApp, etc., bought them instead. And in in general, you should leave them alone. Uh over time, the corporation can't help it, gets its grubby fingers past them, then they tend to typically kill it. Um but we're starting to learn now. If you look at, say, Google with LLMs, they're actually too scared to release them. And Amazon just went, "Let's just go for it." Boom. OpenAI. Oh, sorry. Uh Microsoft. like, wait, Amazon? Sorry, sorry. Microsoft just went What about Bard? What do you guys think about Bard? How's it doing? Um very impressive. I haven't touched it at all. We've been playing with it. It's very impressive. It's early days yet, but I'm finding fun uh doing stuff on OpenAI and at Bard at the same time and comparing them. And there are a few places where OpenAI failed and Bard succeeded and vice versa. So, they're they're both uh they're both useful, and um what I I'd like to mention, if I could, just because I want to go back to the the thesis on the on the book, um you know, again, our mission is to give uh give people who are running large-scale companies who want to survive the next 10 years a series of this is what you should do if you want to reorganize your your company. And if you're a startup, this is what you should do to be able to thrive in this decade because the world has changed. I mean, fundamentally, how you start a company today and how you succeed today is very different than 30 years ago. Mhm. Um It's very different than 6 months ago. Well, Yeah, true. It's That's crazy. It scares me. So we ended up like we've really just lived through the most uh disruptive 6 months. Uh nothing has ever more instantaneously impacted my business model, the way that I approach my employees, ever than the release of of COVID. Yeah. I mean, no. Honestly, that did not impact my business nearly It did like the day-to-day as you're not seeing people, but the fundamental way that we ran our business Yes. Yeah. I I do it I mean, we're in a world right now where every doctor in the world is freaked out if they see this and every lawyer in the world is freaked out. Every teacher in the world is freaked I love the fact that that that OpenAI, ChatGPT, passed the US medical licensing exam 2 months after it was launched, right? And the bar exam. That's crazy. It it passed the Turing test. That was the one I didn't see coming, the signing of the "Hey, let's slow down" letter. And so I had um Yoshua Bengio on the show. He's considered the godfather of AI. And I said, "Hey, your name was on that. What made you sign it?" And he said, "In no uncertain terms, I did not expect it to pass the Turing test as fast as it did. That set off every alarm bell that I have and like pump the brakes." This is the thing that we find most interesting because we've known Emad and all these guys for a while. They are blown away by the success of these models. Yeah. So that's really fascinating that they that the folks themselves are just blown away. They have no And it's still early days, ladies and gentlemen. It's still early days, you know. We're going to see so much more coming and recursive nature of self-improving capabilities. You know, I showed this um I showed this work done where a group of physicians were shown these case studies and to diagnose a patient and it was like uh they took 55 minutes and got 60% right. And the AI took like 12 minutes and got 85% right. Woah. And the physicians aren't going to change next year, but the AI will get much better and it'll be, you know, seconds and 100% right. Bro. Yeah. Yeah, this is where this gets really interesting. So I know you have another company, Fountain Life. Uh you guys are using AI. Are you open to talking about this? Yeah, I'm sure. So longevity I couldn't be more obsessed with the idea. And so as you were talking about it, um my first question is how are you guys going to start getting the patterns down? Because to me, this is the big thing. You talk to somebody like Peter Attia and he's like, "Look, it is just next to impossible to do really good studies on diet and nutrition, what works, what doesn't work. There's just too many confounding variables." And I was like, "AI is going to answer that." Like it it can pull a pattern. Anything that can be reduced to a pattern, they can figure it out. Regardless of like amount of variables, if there is a pattern to be had, it will suss it out. And given that we have some people that live to 120 and some that don't, there is a pattern. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll put it this way, you There's a lot of interesting things. Not only are there some people who live to 120 and some people who make it to just 65, there are large species on this planet like the bowhead whale that lives to 200 years or the Greenland shark that lives to 500 years. And my question is if they can live that long, why can't we? And I said it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. All right? And we're going to understand that this decade is the decade we're going to understand that. It's going to be AI and quantum technologies that give us that insight. So Fountain Life is just fountainlife.com. Um we have these 10,000 square foot facilities. Uh we have four of them right now. We have a waiting list of like 50 that we'll build out globally. And you come and we digitize you. It's a full body 150 GB upload of you. Uh full body MRI, brain, brain vasculature, brain function, a coronary CT. All of this with AI overlay, 80 80 blood biomarkers, genomics, metabolomics, you know, your your gut. And then we do this year on year. This is not a one and done, right? So in the first time you do it, we're going to see is there anything going on that you should worry about. Most of us are optimistic about our health and we don't actually know what's going on inside our body. Yeah, [ __ ] And by the way, the body's really amazing at hiding disease. Yeah, I'm going to put myself in that category. it's like you are you think you're fine, but you know, 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent. Dude, that that one freaks me out that the what the first symptom of uh heart disease in most men is death. Yeah, crazy, right? And 70% of cancers that kill you are not screened for. So it's this [ __ ] that drives me nuts. And so it's like an idiot not to be looking inside your body. And we used to not look cuz well, if I find out, can I do anything? The answer is yes, you can. So you want to know. And so we screen people first and then every year upload you every year and it's looking for the patterns and what medicines. And we have a large corpus of data and the AI ability to analyze that to say with your genome, with your microbiome, with these meds, with this um it's going to be huge uh learnings out of this. Right? And so I'm trying to build uh Fountain Life into an exponential organization. So I'm building around this book that we built. And every company uh I'm involved with is like we need to use these 10 attributes in the book, otherwise we're not going to be able to have the impact globally that we want. Mhm. What are you going to tell the AI to look for? Um so right now it's it's you don't have to tell it to look for anything. You have to ask it to find any kind of anom- any kind of anomalous patterns. It's always you're looking for tran- uh it's it's data over time. So you're looking for for changes what's changed. Tell me what's changing and tell me um So I'll give you one of the examples. We're building This is the fun part about Fountain Life. We're building a brand new health insurance company on top of it. Mhm. So uh if you get Fountain Life insurance, which is available today, your employees Insurance is a perverse business. All right. Fire insurance pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays your next of kin after they're dead. Health insurance pays you after you're sick. What we've done instead is when you sign up, your employees go through a set of pre-testing for us to discover any kind of disease and prevent it from a big payout later down the stream, right? So it's keeping your employees healthy. And what we want to do Wait, wait, wait. How does that model work though? So is the employee paying roughly what they would They're paying exactly the same or less. Uh The numbers are the same. And the the insurance company is actually saying we're going to do preventative testing. Yes, preventative testing. And so here's what we're doing. One of the interesting things is there's a number of expensive tests we can do and a number of cheap tests we can do. And one of the things we're doing with AI is correlating which of these lower end tests correlate highly to the expensive tests. Mhm. So you'll do the lower end cost test to find a signal in the noise and then you'll verify with the expensive test. Mhm. Okay, this is uh this is very interesting. Walk me through what your fantasy data would be. My fantasy data would be to track what everyone eats, the state of their microbiome, and when they die. And what else would I want? Maybe their uh blood glucose levels. I I want uh every I want functional data, state of my cognitive health, my muscular health, my skin health, my immune system. it to? Cuz it's got to be tied to something you do, otherwise it's not going to be actionable. it's going to be correlated to my age and my activities and the meds and the supplements and my daily living. Right? And so for example, right now I'm on a tear to add 10 muscles 10 lbs of muscle. So I'm doing a heavyweight workout three times a week. I'm eating 150 g of protein minimum per day. I'm adding creatine onto my diet. For that, I'm taking a couple of peptides to increase my, you know, IGF-1 levels. And all of these things are aimed at that objective. Now I'm doing a small amount of testosterone replacement therapy, yes. Yeah. So at the end of the day, that is uh an objective I have, but we're way off subject from an exponential organization. Well, I mean, so the thing that I'm most interested in is what do people apply this stuff to? And so as we look at exponential technologies, I think one of the most important things for people is longevity. Like if if you're not getting an extra uh bit of life out of this. I mean, so if I got better life out of it, sure, I would still be interested, but if we can get better and more, then I'm on board. Yeah, I mean, everything I'm doing right now in building companies, you know, I've got a uh what will be a $700 venture fund aimed at longevity. age reversal and longevity, right? So investing in these companies. And then Fountain Life my catchphrase is there is like I'm going to prevent people from dying from something stupid preventable, which is the first thing, right? But then there's a whole slew of therapeutics that are coming down the line. How do we How do we test all these therapeutics around the world that we're hearing about from stem cells and exosomes and selenic medicines? And And how do we know if they work? They only know if they We only know if they work if we have longitudinal data. And that's why Fountain Life is so valuable because we have massive corpus of data minimum once a year as these people are going through the therapeutics, and we're seeing who's it working for, what what are they taking, what's their genomics, what's their With wearables, you understand the amount of sleep they're getting, the amount of exercise they're getting. We're digitizing ourselves. I mean, this is the for me, the longevity discussion is as important as the AI discussion because if you can crack through that it the the potential in the the implications for society are unbelievable. It's a complete transformation in society at every level. I would uh the one of my favorite experience over the last 10 years, I got asked to come in by the Vatican uh because they have the worst immune system in the world. They they try as the Pope is trying to update the church. So, we did a workshop there. And one of the conversations we had was, "Listen, your your business model is about selling heaven." And we're entering a longevity field. said that? Yeah. That's amazing. Well, that's their business model, right? All of the religions sell heaven. Did they gasp and clutch their pearls when you said that? kind of they they know. This is what This is You're selling hope, and you're selling eternity, etc. Um as we have longevity extending our lifespan, what happens to your business model if people aren't dying? And that was a conversation that that It needs to be had. Right? So, I think the the the broader for one of the things I'm fascinated by is the idea that every institution by which we run the world completely changes now over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years. Because it can't None of the institutions, regulatory legal systems, health care systems, intellectual properties broken, education systems all change completely based on these exponential technologies, the implications of longevity, and we have no feedback loop in those. Mhm. Saleem, what do you think happens when you die? Um I'm of the opinion that we um there's an energy life force in us that then transcends and takes on some other So, I would fall into the reincarnation way? In I mean, when you study the Tibetans, they've learned how to do it in a conscious way cuz they actually choose where they're going to get reincarnated into. And they have trackers. They've they've laid down cookies. Yeah, do you know this? No, this all sounds Oh, it So so, do you know how they choose the Dalai Lama? Uh I know like the movie version, like there's toys or whatever, things that belonged to him. so, they they give So, let's say there's five prospective kids that could be a the Dalai Lama cuz they've exhibited certain chara- They give them this massive jar of beads. Mhm. And if they pick the right marble out of that massive jar that's the one. One marble out of how many? One marble like a thousand in this jar. Okay. Okay? Is it like the only black marble in a sea of whites or like They're indistinguishable from each other. They literally that's And if they pick that out, that's the entry point into the process. Forget that's the choice thing. This the entry point. Then you look at the next set of tests and and the final one, they'll come down to like four kids that could be the one. They'll write the name on a little chip of paper, wrap it in four balls of dough. They weigh them all to make sure they're the same. They'll put it in a bowl, and they'll start swirling it around. And when the same ball pops out like 10 times in a row which odds are it should never happen uh that's the one. And if you added all up there's no way in hell probabilistically that you can ever find the next Dalai Lama cuz like you've gone through a 10 tests of 1 of 1,000. curiosity gene is just like just fascinating. This is just utterly fascinating. So, uh if you when you study them, they've I've spent some time with some Tibetan priests and so on. They and they said it used to take 14 lifetimes to reach enlightenment, but we've gotten better now. Now, if you work really hard, you can do it in one lifetime. Right? Uh and so, you transcend that and we and frankly, my belief is that you die, you your energy of your soul, whatever that is from a phenomenological perspective, we don't quite understand, it goes and rests elsewhere. Mhm. Okay. So, is the perception I have that I have just infinite amounts of not existing followed by somewhere around the age of five, I start remembering things, is that an illusion, and I am on some I don't want to call it a loop, but effectively a loop? Could be. I mean, look at look at the tree growing a leaf, right? At the in the fall, the leaf falls off. Mhm. And in the spring, you have a new leaf. Is that a new leaf? Is it a reincarnation of the old leaf? You get it This is where Ray, I think says it best when he talks about this stuff and stuff like that. He goes, "Language is a really thin pipe to talk about concepts as deep as this cuz you get stuck in the verbage." Yes, but that also feels like a way of letting us off the hook for not pursuing an argument, which I get. Like we will reach the edges of what we're able to articulate. Yeah. But um I do like coming to understand at least people's own internal logic. So, is to me uh a leaf another leaf is like another bit of hair, right? It's tell you where I stand. I having looked at the data long enough for me, reincarnation is a real thing. Okay, what data are you looking at? Um so, there's a story I'll tell you uh this is going to So, uh in uh about 20 30 years ago at the University of Virginia, an elderly fellow died, left behind a chunk of money for anybody that wanted to study reincarnation. Okay? Now, I may have the details slightly wrong, but this is I'm going to give you the gist. You can look it up yourself. Um some young graduate student goes, "Oh, pot of funding, I'll study it." Goes and creates a big um research database of uh there's a phenomena where some 2-year-old suddenly knows who they were in a past life and can walk into the house where they lived and know that this was hidden behind the painting. Happens a lot in India where people are more accepting of this, etc. The most extreme example of this was a kid born in the favelas in Rio having never been out of the favela, suddenly starts speaking some weird language. So, they think the kid's gone mad, take him to a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist goes, "Doesn't exhibit madness, but this he I think he's speaking a different language." Take him to a linguist, and after a bunch of research, they find this kid is speaking a dialect of Aramaic that hasn't been spoken for 2,000 years. And the kid's never been outside the favelas of Rio. So, there's a bunch of phenomena like this. The one that this guy focused on was this idea that the age of two or three, some little child suddenly remembers things and knows things about that that they couldn't possibly have known. So, he starts tracking this and putting this in a big spreadsheet. So, I was I heard him speak at an event. I said, "What What does it take to get into your database?" Cuz it's pretty vague. It could be somebody How do How do you tell if something He said, "Well, it has to be something physical." I said, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, if the young child thought they were somebody else in a previous life, is there a scar or a birthmark or an allergy or disfigurement that's the same?" And if one of those meets the criteria, one of those is the same as the person that died, then that I feel that's qualified enough to I'm like, "That's a pretty high bar um to have one of those four things present in in "How many entries are there in your database?" And the number blew my mind. He said something 3,500. So, this guy's 3,500 fully researched cases where a 2-year-old um uh said that oh, that was me in a previous that was my life before and and had the one of those matching things. That to me is a ridiculously significant statistically significant amount of data. And it turns out that distance was fascinating. Distance was almost the the child that was born was almost within 4 km of the person that died. That was interesting. The second was that the time, the age of the child was almost always uh baby was born 5 months after the person died. So, there's something There's something about that period of time. Yeah. And have you always been open to that? Like I I'm violently skeptical. I'm No, I'm not I'm not I I mean, I'm from India originally, so I have an inherent acceptance, but I was raised in a very diplomatic Western family. My dad was an engineer. I was I did engineering for a while and then physics. So, I came across this later. Um but the data for me is pretty fascinating, and show me something that countervails that. You know, I I keep on telling Saleem, I would love to have an experience I can't explain. I've never had a UFO sighting or anything that I can't with a scientific technological mind explain. I've had hundreds, including the episode 10 years ago. With you. What's the episode 10 years ago? Can I tell you a funny story? So, You're building Singularity University. We're building Singularity University and 3 years in the model has gone from zero to one. It's working, and I'm fried. My wife and I got married the week of the launch of the the thing. So, I I'm at NASA 20 hours a day. She hardly sees me. And he Peter and I were disagreeing a bit on strategy. You wanted me to keep the faculty at NASA, and I thought we should take them out into the world. And if you want to change the world, we should get out there. And Peter's like, "No, let everybody come here. It's easier to logistically to manage, etc." And after 3 years, I'm kind of really burned out. And we're trying to have a baby. My wife is like upset cuz we're never home. So, I said to Peter, "Look, I'm going to need a break and etc. etc." Two days later, Peter says, "Okay, we've had a board meeting. We've replaced her." I thought, "Wow, that was fast, but okay." Now, I'm free, but friendly uh overall. Legacy is now set, so great. My wife then gets pregnant. Um so, I said to her, "Listen, we've had no alone time since we got married. Once the baby comes, that's gone. So, let's take 3 months before I do whatever I do next and enjoy each other." And then she said, "Great, but I want don't want to be anywhere near NASA. I can't explain this to any of my family and friends. They think NASA like the Bahamas. Uh it's a big problem. You pick the place." So, she researches for several weeks, picks a penthouse vacation rental in Santa Monica overlooking the ocean. Um and she's a yoga teacher, so Santa Monica is ground zero for this. So, we move in, put suitcases down, I go out to get a coffee, come back, and she's standing with her hands on her hips. She's very upset. She's like, "What's what's wrong?" We picked the wrong place. I'm like, "What do you mean?" She goes, "Well, I said, "Look at this vista. You This is amazing." She goes, "Come to the balcony." She goes, "See the house across the street right there with the bamboo trees?" I'm like, "Yeah." Peter's house. In the whole of LA. We're like next door, right? Now, if you tried to make that happen, you could not make that happen. Right? I call it karmic mischief. And you know, and I'm sure if you think about it, almost every major thing in your life has happened because of a weird orthogonal experience. Yeah, but just think of the thousands of things that you didn't notice that actually happened as well. This is selection bias. I'm sorry. Maybe, but Carl Carl Carl Jung Yes. Yep. was very, very clear that there's a there's an a causal stream of reality that everybody can see, and you can link experiences A to B to C of consequence, and there was an entirely a causal stream of reality. Like wormholes that with things that are happening, etc., that we couldn't see. I'm still waiting for those aliens to come and, you know, take me home. But you've done some psychedelics. I have. I've had some I've had some I've had some great Well, listen, yes, but uh I I still in the normal universe that I inhabit, there hasn't been I haven't seen anybody levitating or haven't seen something that is like that's miraculous. You know, a coincidence, interesting, miraculous, no. Have you? I have not. No, I take a I am very much uh What do they call that where materialist? Like it's all cause and effect. The odds that our sense of um that I control my life is probably an illusion, and yeah, that just all makes sense to me. Like, if you had a computer that could track every atom since the beginning of time, that you'd be able to predict where we're going to be in 10 years, and you'd be able to replay the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. That just makes sense to me. And that doesn't diminish my sense of awe in the slightest. Like, I look at By the way, I I I asked the question, if you knew with certainty that you were living in a simulation, hm would it change anything? No. And the answer is no. A, no. B, so you were talking about project Kaizen before we started rolling, that's its premise. Is that this is a simulation, and it doesn't matter. It's still all the same. great. You know, it So, if I could finish that story with this weird coincidence, I got to a point about 5 7 years ago where I was having not this insane kind of coincidence. Used to happen about once a year in my life, started happening every quarterly, and then it happened started happening every 2 weeks, and I can barely process one and the next ridiculous coincidence is on me. And I was freaking out because I was like really messing with things. So, I have a a cousin who's done 40 years of Daoist meditation in the woods, etc. So, I said to her, she's my resident understanding the universe person. So, I said, "Look, help me with this." She's like, well, listens to me for a bit, she goes, "Well, duh. You've told the universe you're ready for anything, they'll give you everything." I'm like, "Wait, what?" She goes, "You have to come to an agreement with the energies in the universe to only give it to you when you're ready for it." I'm like, "Where's the manual for that?" So, she coached me on this, and and you can do this. You can do It's you know, if you if you did it at the fully reductionist level, it's creative visualization. Right? You visualize what you want, and things can happen, etc. Um and the there's a We all do that. You do that. That's what the MTP is all about, right? You You You program yourself and your surroundings, your subconscious, to out for the outcomes you want. And then those things happen. But there's a but but those outcomes occur to a large degree because I'm outwardly communicating my massive transformative purpose. I'm telling the world those people who gravitate to it are coming to me, and they're bringing things to me that are in line with that MTP. It's not like I'm just meditating on on in silence, and the world is changing. But what you're actually doing is you're programming reality. Or I'm programming how I deal with reality. Both. Right? Reality is happening, and again, a mindset is how I deal with opportunity or scarcity. Someone comes to me with something that someone would be scared of, and I'm like excited about it, and I go in a different course than the other person. Hm. So, I didn't know you'd done psychedelics. What was your response? So, you guys have both done it, I assume. I went I went into a, you know, psychedelics not for joy or pleasure, but with with shaman guiding, and I have done ayahuasca a number of times. I've done uh combination of psilocybin and um and uh MDMA, uh but for me, it was my DMT journeys that were the most significant. Have you done DMT No, I haven't done any I've microdosed psilocybin to virtually no effect. So, the the DMT, which is also called the toad or Bufo, uh dimethyltryptophan, I think is is the Dimethyltryptamine. Tryptamine. Um was was extraordinarily compelling. Um and uh it is a dissolution of the ego, um which is and a connection with the universe that lets you know that love is a pervasive force, and we're all connected in that regard, and that I had my most significant um visualization about what if you asked me the question, uh what do you think happens after after we're alive, after we die, uh that was my that was it First of all, it got rid of the fear of death. Hm. 100% which is probably the most extraordinary. Because it gave me everything is connected. Everything is connected, and we're just part of the universe, and it's it's a transitory. So, I want you to imagine this is the visualization I had, which gives me goosebumps still to this day. Uh I'm I'm coming out of my journey with and these and these DMT journeys are very short, you know, 20 minutes thereabouts, unless you're Saleem, cuz they last longer there. Uh but let me finish. So, I'm I'm seeing this this sea of energy, just like a frothing sea of infinite energy, a plane of energy in every direction. And I see coming out of the sea of energy two double helices. And they come out of the energy, and they're there, and then they go back into the energy. And that was it. And there was the realization I can see it like it was yesterday. I It's a realization of this infinity of creation and energy, and life emerges from it, consciousness emerges from it, and then reenters it. I can, you know, listen, this is my mind giving it meaning. We are meaning-making machines. But I So, let me So, you've had that. You're You're just trying to rationalize it in your previous experience. That's fine. That's fine. But let me give you tell you why I got excited by this whole world. 2012, we had a lecture at Singularity. I think it was Chris DeCharms. And he What he'd been doing was doing a whole bunch of clinical trials with people taking different dosages of MDMA, psilocybin, etc., and putting them through an fMRI machine. So, in the '60s, when Timothy Leary and all these guys were taking drugs, had no idea what they were just chucking it down, right? But this Now, we know exactly that this dosage substance of substance A will do this to neural circuit B, and know exactly the emphasis and how much of an impact it'll have, etc. And I found that fascinating because now we have a feedback loop. What got me interested in DMT loop to what end? Well, because now you can see what neural circuits are being amplified or impacted. You Now, play with play with it. I have to ask then. So, knowing how you're creating that state by manipulating certain neurons in your brain, how how it do you see an allergy or a scar I don't know that. I I wish I did, I don't. But it's fascinating that that's there at at the numbers that it's there. If it happened three, four times, you go, "Ah, three, four times." 3,500 times? I got I got to start looking at that. And that's that's the just the sheer numbers compel you to look at it a little more deeply. But so, for me, the now, it Look Let's look at what DMT does. DMT, what it does is suppress the parietal lobe, which is where your sense of self sits. When you can take a dosage of it, you suppress that parietal lobe, and you are now free to explore the higher realms of your consciousness that you didn't have access to before. Is so, when DMT is going, is that all that's happening? Is Is are there any areas that are more active, or is it literally just shutting off the sense of self? Unclear, but it seems the primary function is that it reduces the activity in the parietal lobe. I'm so fascinated by how many I I looking at other areas. And now, what's really interesting to me on top of that is we've It turns out there's lots of old practices, whirling dervishes, when they do their Turkish spinning, end up with a DMT release. They now know that. DMT is natural. DMT is natural molecule in the in your brain. It gets released twice in your life, once at birth, once at death. Hm. So, when people have a near-death experience, they see the white light, that's DMT releasing Interesting. So, now they've found religious experiences Almost all religious experiences are essentially you work the physiology of the body to a point where you have a DMT release. Tantra and Kundalini work results in that. They take ground energy, lift it through your body, and you end up with a DMT release. I don't take the DMT journey lightly at all. It's one of the most insightful, and again, I I I experienced it with reverence and and awe and um as a means to explore uh myself and the universe in a in a in a different way. Uh and I'm very thankful for it. Mhm. Yeah, I'm very intrigued. I ask about this a lot and And by the way, you know, I I got to a point after I said, "I'm just going to open share openly. I don't plan to run for president and I don't care uh what anybody thinks about it. It was critically important to me." Yeah, it's beautiful. You met Michael Yonson a couple of days ago. Yes. Um uh so, one of the most fascinating things about him, he's one of the most present people I've ever met. And I said, "How do you maintain this? Like you have this incredible ability just let things go, not worry about stuff, things happen, everything just passes through him and and it doesn't stick. It's amazing. He just kind of releases instantly." And he I he couldn't answer and I kept wanting to pull it out and he goes, "Oh, I've done a hero dose a few times." I go, "Hero dose?" So, normal dose, I guess, is 100 mg of psilocybin. A hero dose is when you do like 5 g. It's like a factory reset on your nervous system. I'm like, "Holy crap, you've done that?" He goes, "I do it every year." And and so, all of cognitive biases that you may have built up, etc., are constantly getting released. And therefore, he operates in this unbelievably present form. I think that's just amazing. And I'm completely impressed by the younger generation microdosing all the time. one of the conversations uh I've been having at home recently is is the human species um waking up, right? You've heard of these conversations, Sam Harris and all, right? I was going to ask you guys if you've heard him describe his heroic dose. And and so, when we talk about becoming conscious at a species level in the next uh foreseeable future one of the questions that um uh that Christian asked was, "Are we becoming conscious before AI becomes conscious?" Mhm. So, this is an interesting conversation. That would be I mean, it would be very interesting. I don't know if I can imagine an entire societal level awakening, but certainly as humans continue to progress, as we are able to share ideas so much faster in the same way that culture has stacked on the technological side, if it stacks on the insight side and we're having a brain-computer interface connection to the cloud along with a billion other people Mhm. and sharing one's thoughts. I I call this the meta intelligence, where we become conscious on a large level. Right? You and I and Saleem are all collections of 40 trillion human cells. You're not a single life form. You are 40 trillion human cells and then trillions of bacteria, viri, fungi, and so forth, but you operate as one. Mhm. Right? And so, are we going to become conscious yet on another level? To bring it back to exponential organizations um a traditional 20th century organization we would think of as unconscious. It's trundling along, trying to get profits, etc. And in EXOs are very conscious organization. What makes it conscious? MTP. It's It's It is a massive purpose, plus it's constantly sensing with a feedback loop. It's constantly experimenting. It's allowing its people to operate in a decentralized autonomous way to make decisions on their own. It's like an amoeba moving around, uh sensing the world and little by little evolving. So, there are I want I want to bring this back cuz I really want the community here to hear this and I want to use um I want I'll use Impact Theory as the example here. So, uh there are 10 attributes that make an exponential organization. Um they have the uh the uh acronym uh scale and ideas. And um uh if we could, I just want to take off the ones that that you hit. So, let's begin. Staff on demand? So, you hire people as contractors? staff on demand? We do a bit, but I actually don't love that. It was one of the things in your book I want to talk about, but So, okay, staff on demand. Yes, we do. Okay. Second, community? Yes, very much so. is massive for you, right? Um Third, AI and algorithms? Yes, aggressively. Aggressively. Fourth, leveraging other people's assets? I don't know what you mean by that. Cloud computing. Yes. Right? You don't have computers, servers in your closet that you're using. We do have some of that, but not nearly as much as we leverage the cloud. The prototype there is Airbnb. That entire business model is tapping into other people's bedrooms, making them available, etc. And the fourth the fifth one in scale is engagement. Gamification, incentive prizes Which is Web3 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? You were like a master of that. So, those are the five externalities and EXOs use one or more of them. Allows them to keep a very small resource footprint and then scale very quickly. Right? TED uses community very effectively, for example. Then there's five internal mechanisms that allow you to manage culture and drive the dashboard and the control framework of the organization. The first is interfaces to those externalities. So, think about Uber's interface with its drivers or Apple's interface with its App Store developers. It's an automated API-driven interface that allows you to programmatically manage the abundance on the outside and then add value to it. The second one is dashboards. And this is real-time business metrics to track what's happening in the organization. you use dashboards left, right, and center. Not as much as we should, but for our funnels, yes. For your funnels, sure. And then OKRs for team performance and team management we found is a So, those are dashboards. The E is experimentation, which is lean startup thinking, constantly testing assumptions, non-stop running of experiments, and the a culture of risk-taking inside the organization, constantly testing the edges and seeing what works, what doesn't work, etc. The A is autonomy, decentralizing decision-making and allowing people to self-select what they want to work on as much as possible. Which is one of the hardest things for a CEO or an entrepreneur to do is is say, "Listen, here's our mission. Our mission is 10 million viewers, whatever it is, doing this and this and this. We want to give you the authority and autonomy to go and work on projects that are aligned with our MTP. Go." Google does this a bit. Um the master of this I should tell this quick story. There's a Chinese appliance manufacturer called Haier, H A I E R. They make like 55 million fridges and ovens a year. Jesus. used to be a huge company. Um and uh um 80,000 people operating in a classic pyramid form, command and control, hierarchical as heck. CEO one day decides, "Can't meet my corporate goals with this structure." Blows it up. Turns 80,000 people into 2,000 teams of about 40 people each. Each team has a P&L target. Each team elects their own leader and most insane, each team decides to do whatever they want to do. Now, you go to any business school in the world and say, "I want to make 55 million fridges." And they'll tell you you need a ton of centralized demand forecasting, inventory managers, supply chain, da da da da da. Turns out you don't. These literally these 2,000 teams will work autonomously like a beehive. Every team is deciding what they want to do. what teams to keep? They don't. They The teams decide on their own. You can't get fired. If you you can't If your team doesn't meet its P&L targets, you have an issue. And the way they meet their P&L targets is they work on a product and the products are the revenues are pooled against that product. So, when they I literally can't imagine this. This is insane. whole book There's a whole book written on this. It's an amazing case study. What's the book called? Uh I'll get you the title The case study is Haier. Um and when they want to vote on what when what what decide what features should we go in a new fridge, they vote. And 2,000 teams that are constantly outwardly facing with vendors, suppliers, partners, customers are come up with a much better decision than some product strategy team hold up with market forecasts and research groups, right? And so, uh GE Appliances actually gave up and sold that whole division to Haier cuz they couldn't compete. Mhm. Uh because you can do so much more with a decentralized organization. We're not quite ready for DAOs, but we will be over time. And you're kind of building one in the in the in the I'm not. I'm violently not building a DAO. Well, think about what you're doing, right? With your metaverse environment. Anybody can come in, self-provision, and play in that environment. They can play in that environment. We're certainly trying to build things so that they can build in that environment. But that is that's a platform play. Like I get platforms. And so, our fantasy would be on a long enough timeline where like the YouTube of video games. That's right. So, people can come in and build not We we could go down a rabbit hole about how we're going to be different than Roblox, but we have a vision. Right. But leveraging some of that. But this is like I literally wrote before you started talking, the thing I want to talk about is how you leverage autonomy. So, the way that we think about it at Impact Theory is I want people to be able to make decisions in their area. Like, okay, your function is art, for instance. I'm not going to come in and turn you into a pair of hands. I want you to think for yourself, you understand our objectives, go do the art thing. But we set the objectives as a company, then the department sets their own objectives, and then the individual works with their supervisor to set it. Yeah. But this is not, "Hey, you're in a team of 40 and like, I hope you meet your P&L." Like I can't fathom how you get to that. I have to imagine that this is never going to be the standard. It's non-trivial to implement, but when you can implement it's very powerful. Let me give you two examples that bridge the spectrum. Mhm. One is if you're an employee and you join Google as a new hire. Okay? You're not placed on a team. What they do is go, "You've got 6 months. Float around, meet different teams, work with them, da da da da da." How do they decide to hire you? You You have to hire first. You're smart. basically They're super smart and we know we need Python developers, so hire the Python developer. Now, do you work on Gmail? Do you work on Google Maps, etc. What you do is you float around as that developer or front-end person or designer, whatever your skill set is, and you float around, you meet the different teams, you see where you have chemistry, you go, "I really love what they're doing on Google Maps." Team seems like me, they go, "Sure, come and join us." Now, if after 6 months you haven't found a team, bigger conversation, you probably don't fit there for some reason. But, if you found a team after choosing over 6 months all of a bunch of different options, you're probably where you really, really like being. Right? So, now off they go. So, that's one example of implementing this in the new hire model. The full extent of autonomy, I'll give you the example of Tangerine Bank in Canada, which is used to be ING Direct. So, they operate on this fully autonomous basis. They have no CEO, no reporting lines, no management teams, no middle management, no meetings of any kind. They literally operate on a beehive, where each employee self-selects as to what they want to do. Okay? Now, you're a regulated bank. Canadian banks are very regulated, right? So, what happens is when the marketing guy goes, "Oh, let's do an online promotion." Cuz he's self-selected, wants to focus on that. And they launch an online promotion, everybody floods to the phone banks and helps out getting phone calls. When it's regulatory reporting time, they all flood to the regulatory systems and fill out all the paperwork to fill out all the forms to show the Canadian government that they're viable. The most amazing example I've seen of this is Valve Software out of Seattle, that makes the Steam platform. About 400 people, same ethos. No CEO, reporting lines. So, if I spot a bug in the software, I grab three people, we go fix the bug, we disband. Every employee self-selects what they want to work on, and it sounds completely like a joke, but they get more revenue per employee than Microsoft. They make a fortune. So, it's very doable. You have to start it. You have to start it with that principle in mind. like physics. Something a particle born above the speed of light can't go slower, and below the speed of light can't exceed the speed of light. I think you have to this is found founding starting conditions for your company. Yeah, this is I don't know what I find harder to believe, reincarnation or that you can do this. But, look, I I don't shut down emotionally. I'm very open. I just everything that I know with perhaps just my limited skill set, that is a recipe for chaos. Or you have to hit a certain size. Like when I think about Google being able to do that, there's no way that you can start like that. I get how you can get so big, you have so much surplus money that you can let a person wander around for 6 months with no like real specific job, or that you can hire somebody who's, "Oh, you know Python and you're smart. Great." You know, Valve Software is about 400 people. It's not that over there. They're also the company when when you said, "Oh, we're doing a case study on Valve in the book." I was like, "Oh, you mean the company that couldn't get Half-Life 3 or 2, whichever it was, out for 15 years?" I was like, "Yeah, I'm not surprised." But, then you said that they make more per employee, so I was like, "Ah, fuck." Yeah. So, it directed execution turns out to be non-trivial in these organizations. It's like DAO governance, right? It's an oxymoron. It's very hard to get. Right? So, um a but in terms of resilience, unbelievable. Because you cannot break that organization. Because everybody's self-selecting, when there's a problem, they naturally find the problem, they go fix it. I think you need to still you need to hire for that. People need to have have to hire. You can't You know, Tony Hsieh tried for 3 years to implement that into Zappos, and it just failed. You can't bring it into a This is why we think say when you're an existing organization and you want to turn into an EXO, don't go through the nightmare of trying to transform yourself. Put up create new EXOs on the edge, and let those slowly become the new gravity center. What was the example of the company? Maybe it was the washing machine company or the fridge company, but they literally were like, "Oh, we're firing everybody." And then a third of them left, and they restarted with two-thirds, and they did just fine. Uh Zappos did that, and so did Hire. It was Hire that in the book? In fact, Zappos when Tony Hsieh first suggests he voluntarily said, "Who wants to move to this model?" And everybody was like, "Yeah, this is crazy. We're not doing that." So, then he went, "We strongly suggest that you move to this model." Then finally he said, "If you don't move to that model, you're fired." And even then it failed. Very hard to implement into a legacy organization. Did we finish the attributes? Oh, so autonomy, and the final one is social technologies. Um Asana, Slack, Zoom, Chatter, Yammer, etc., etc. They allow you to glue people together peer-to-peer. Right? We found we have really good evidence today that peer-to-peer collaboration is much more powerful than traditional top-down command and control thinking. So, what do you guys think about what Elon is doing at Twitter? He recently was interviewed, and he said it is immoral to work from home. And I was like, "Wow." Yeah, we had this conversation yesterday about, you know, uh Listen, I miss having an office setting. Mhm. I do, and I miss and I I recognize and realize that the intensity of the amount of work that gets done when a group is together is substantially higher Mhm. than alone. But, you know, the flip side of that is the geographic arbitrage that I can get access to talent that I might not otherwise get to move to Santa Monica. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my CEO lives in the Bay Area, my VP finances is in Spain, my head of communities in Cape Town. We have a totally distributed organization. And yes, we're less efficient than if everybody was in one place, but I can operate across multiple time zones seamlessly. People are living where they want to live, they're living with their families, etc., etc. So, I'm a believer in the remote work side. Yeah, I also think we're going to see a transition as as the next generation of metaverse systems come online. You know, if we're there will be a point where we are sitting in the metaverse, and I feel like I'm here with you and having this conversation. And hopefully the glassware becomes light enough and easy enough where it's it's very interactive. The key heuristic I think when you think about Elon with Twitter, etc., and people, is do you trust them? Do you trust your people? Right? And most corporations operate out of mistrust. You're like checking things, and you have to file a travel expense reports, etc., etc. And the entire structure is set up to mistrust you. Uh and when we move to this new model of EXOs, by default you tend to trust the teams to do what they're trying to do the best. You're trying to trust your Trust over control, right? Trust beats control is one of the key implications. Jerry Michalski, who's one of our community members, said this brilliantly. He said, um uh scarcity equals abundance minus trust. It's interesting. For me, it doesn't come down to trust. I don't even want to have to think about the people on my team. I want to play my position, I want them to play theirs, and I never want to have to think about it. It really comes down to results and focus and like you need Like this is going to be interesting saying do you guys, but you need some variation of the immune system in that the immune system will detect cancer. So, yes, it can say no to things that it shouldn't say no to, but it can also stop the free riders. And the the just reality is that you will get people using game theory to be like, "Oh, you can hide in this company, and everybody can just do whatever the hell it want." You will get people that then just become selfish, and then other people look at that, and resentment builds, and so you get other people Yeah, how do you do with that? You know, there's there's a my I'm moving all of my companies onto something called EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. Mhm. Is this formal? It it is. It's a it's a it's So, you can go look it up entrepreneurial operating system, and um uh and what we do is we meet and it's a process of thinking and running your organization, sort of like an operating system for a company. And we have what's called a 10X meeting every week with the entire group. We're reviewing our rocks, our action items, our dashboards, and everybody's got assigned specific actions. And and uh And it's not possible to hide in that regard. If you properly implement OKRs, you you really can't hide. And yet, you can give people a lot of autonomy, and they can do go do their thing, but whether it's EOS or whatever the model is, um it brings it together. So, we have today very modern team and individual performance structures that allow us to handle that. You can hide in traditional organizations. Because there's 20 developers on some team, and nobody knows really who's the who the rock stars are. HR never knows. Yeah. One thing we've noticed uh the with the particular indictment I would have is today's most big corporations are structured in a matrix structure. Products on the verticals, and they have legal, HR, branding, privacy, etc. And Terry Semel, when he was running Yahoo, who made the mistake of putting in matrix structure into it. And it's like that structure is great for kind of command and control, but it's terrible for risk-taking, and it's terrible for speed. Cuz every time you try and do something, you want to you have to clear all those levels. So, it was taking us close to a year to release some feature on Yahoo! Personals. And MySpace was released, and Facebook was the killer here, where they came along and Zuckerberg said, "If you feel your code is ready, take it live on the live site. We'll give you access to the live site. Your code better be good, cuz otherwise if you take the take us down, you're fired." But, the developers got such a sense of empowerment and autonomy from that and and wow, he trusts us to let us take our code live. They were rolling out features every week. Do they still do that? I'm not sure if they still do that, but that was what got them That was what blew MySpace away, blew Yahoo away at the time. The early days of high risk-taking for any entrepreneurial company is is amazing, where we don't have a legal department yet. When you don't have an HR department And over time, power accrues to the the horizontals because they have no incentive in saying yes. And so when we coach CEOs, we basically say, "Take all those horizontal layers and every 3 4 years just blow them up and reinvent them." So tell me, where can people follow along with you guys to learn this stuff in detail to get help executing? We have built a community around this whole model called and the it sits at openexo.com. And people can go there, it's free to join. We have now have 24,000 consultants, entrepreneurs, innovators in 140 countries that are using these models to apply them. To come join us on the masterclass. Yeah, either join us live on the 6th or get the masterclass and the book and the AI afterwards. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. AI is changing the world at an insane pace and if you want to learn all about it, be sure to watch this episode with the godfather of AI himself, Yoshua Bengio. Are computers becoming conscious right now?