EP #11 The Future of Twitter, American Democracy, and AI w/ Salim Ismail

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Earn skills in weeks, not years. Visit phoenix.edu Twitter is essentially the global public square. And if you start acting out in a global public square, the police come and take you away.

And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm gonna do. This is the dent I'm gonn the universe. Welcome everybody, to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with one of my dearest friends on the planet, an extraordinary thinker, someone who you know, Salim Ismail. All I can say about you is we have fun together. And there's probably no subject we will not dive into. Sometimes we dive in and hit the bottom of the pool. And sometimes we fly. How are you doing today?

I'm very well. I'm doing great.

Yeah. Those of you who don't know Saleem, he was the first president of Singularity University. We can talk about how I conned him into running su. He was the head of the incubator. Was it Brick House or Brickworks?

Yeah, Brick House.

Brick House at Yahoo. He's the head of OpenExo. He and I are writing a book together on exponential organizations. It's the second book in the series. Salim wrote the first one. I was supposed to co author, but my publisher wouldn't let me do it. Long story. Is there Godfather to my two boys? Saleem, where are you today, pal?

I'm in Miami dealing with the hurricane.

Yeah, that's right. I was talking to my mom and she's in Boca and dealing with the same thing. It's a pain in the butt.

Luckily it is. In fact, it's one of the reasons we came to Miami eight years ago from the west coast was because we ran a bunch of numbers and worked out that in about 20, 25 years, Miami's gone. So Better enjoy it while it's here as well. That's one of the rationales we have for getting here.

Oh my God. I wanted to always create a map of the United States that had the dangers laid out. Florida would have hurricanes, California would have earthquakes. The Midwest would have boredom as the major disaster that you. Anyway.

What you would do. And you know, people moved to the Pacific Northwest because they thought it was safe. And then you have wildfires, unexpectedly, heat waves. I remember talking to climate gurus about the heat wave last year and they said we can't even create models that encompass that. Like we're just, we just can't even replicate that.

Well, you know, Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest is in for a massive earthquake sometime soon.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's one of my favorite stories of, of the inability of human beings to deal with systemic change. It's worth telling the story if you.

Yeah, go for it. I've got all the time, the world.

So in 1700 there was like a nine point something earthquake, one of the biggest ever. 50 miles off the coast of Seattle, took out a thousand miles of the coastline from Vancouver all the way down to Oregon. And so. And there's been rumblings under the water recently. So they've been going, hey, wait a minute. So they start researching and they go over to Japan because they worked out that this must have created quite a tsunami and asked, hey, did you see a tsunami? And sure enough, at that time. Exactly. A stonking huge tsunami came over the Pacific and took out half of Japan. It's that big. So they're like, wow, this is great. We found it. Fantastic. And they're starting to leave and the Japanese researchers go, wait a minute. You know this happens repeatedly, right? And they're like, wait, what? And it turns out because the Japanese have been keeping records for thousands of years, it turns out every quarter, every 250 years, like clockwork, this happens. And a giant tsunami comes over and takes out half of Japan every time. So they come back to Seattle kind of really unnerved and start looking at tree rings and core samples and find out, holy crap, this is the earthquake. It's been happening roughly every 250 years for 20,000 years. And the last one was 300 years ago.

Yeah.

So any minute now, this earthquake is gonna go off and take out a thousand miles of the.

So if this podcast releases on the day that happens, I don't know if it's gonna be prophetic or people are gonna blame us for it.

Well, you know what blows My mind is, if you ask people in Seattle, many of whom know this story, you go, does this affect your decision to buy a house, whatever? No, they are. Everybody's merrily going about their lives as if nothing happened. That part. I don't get that part. Like, we're so bad at that.

Well, it's the human challenge of we're dealing with. We don't actually value the disasters that are coming in any way, shape, or form that makes sense. And all we focus on is what's happening this morning, like in politics or on Twitter.

Well, as you're fond of saying, everything important happened within a day's walk, right? Yeah.

I mean, that's the mind. The human mind evolved 100,000 years ago, a million years ago, and it was nothing that affected you that was not within a day's walk that you care about. And nothing changed generation to generation. It was always the same. And that innate wiring is a pain in the ass right now.

It is a pain in the ass. We actually. I think the only way to solve humanity is an intervention into our brain chemistry and brain makeup. I mean, it's really the only way.

Is that plant medicine or is that.

I think that those are the beginnings of it, but there's all sorts of other mechanisms, whether it's brain computing interfaces or something. But we needed intervention because we're kind of operating off our limbic systems for so much of it. Right, like the news cycle that you like to talk about.

Yeah, it's still the animal brain. We're operating from a position of fear and scarcity, and it's a problem.

I remember when I was researching this, we had this lizard brain, and then the neocortex evolved very, very fast. And when you talk to anthropologists, it was literally like a tumor got created.

It's a couple million years ago, we created the frontal lobe and the neocortex. I mean, it's fairly recent.

When you talk to those guys, what's amazing is how fast it grew. It didn't kind of evolve a layer by layer by layer. It went from half a liter to 1.5 liters almost overnight in genetic terms. And it didn't replace the old brain. It just sits above it. And so this is where religions, I often call the ultimate marketing, because all religions work by taking a young child whose neocortex hasn't fully formed. You give them a bunch of absolute truths, like Jesus is the son of God, Mohammed is the last prophet, Mary was a virgin, whatever, and then you bind it into them with ritual repetition. And a lot of sweets. And once it's wired in, you can't get rid of it. You provoke it later, you end up with a fight or flight response.

We are so screwed.

Yeah.

Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second and tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels, and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do. And sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact that the foods that I eat. By monitoring my blood sugar, for example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to Levels link. Peter Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. Speaking of screwed, how are you feeling about Elon and Twitter these days? I mean, it's.

You know, I could go both ways on this. On one level, it's a very, very complex problem that you can't just take a meat axe to, right? So you've got a one end, you want freedom of speech, in which case you get this vomit of racist and misogynist crap. And on the other end, you want advertisers. And so you can't have both. And so you have to pick which one you want. And managing that balance is very, very delicate. I think the way to think about this is Twitter is essentially the global public square. And if you start acting out in a global public square, the police come and take you away. You can't just stand there and throw out stink bombs or. Or start shooting people.

You can't, because if you. If the police don't come take you away, the people who are worth hearing or speaking to go away. That's right. Either we keep some sanity or not. But it's interesting. I remember.

So I think Twitter should be a utility, and it should be an open. It's the commons, and it shouldn't be owned by one company. And it should be delicately moderated by government, but not heavily.

What, you want to make Twitter a government organization?

Well, no, but if you have a town square, you need some governance around that to say you can't drive your cars through it at high speed. You can't just yell at Everybody that goes by, we have norms that operate and laws that work for this, and you need some of those laws.

Let me slow this down a second and talk about the fact that Elon, on top of all the other things that he's doing launching rockets and brain computer interface and reinventing the energy ecosystem and driving drilling tunnels, decided to jump onto buying Twitter. But here's the other question. I know he tweets. I've direct messaged and tweeted and all of that, but, I mean, the volume, I can't imagine he's putting all of those tweets out himself. There's got to be an army of.

No, I'm sure there's an army of tweets. The one person that I know that actually edits every tweet that. That he. Before they go out, is actually the Pope. The Pope actually looks at every tweet put out under his name and unauthorized.

Oh, I thought you would. I thought you were saying the Pope actually edits Elon's tweets.

But there's definitely an army or he's so active on that that he's not. You know, I think many of us with that brain of his would rather him focus on the really hard problems. Right.

Yeah. Well, listen, I'm an investor in Tesla and in SpaceX, full disclosure. So I'm not happy he's spending his time on Twitter, though. I remember years ago when I asked him, what would you want to conquer next? He did have a vision. He called it Pravda, which is sort of the Russian version of truth newspaper. Yeah. And so if you could advise him, would you go back and say, don't buy Twitter?

Oh, I think if he could go back and undo it, he would do it. He would choose. They're trying to do. 45 billion is a ridiculous amount. I think the actual value. So I know a bunch of the ex Twitter engineers, and at Brickhouse, many of my guys went and worked at Twitter and vice versa.

So what are they saying?

They basically think it's really worth about 10 to 12 billion. So 45 billion is absurd at one level from a revenues type of thing. However. However, let me spin the other way. If there was somebody that could take on Twitter and go after it, it would be Elon.

Right.

Because he's got the gumption. He doesn't give a damn. He can focus on what's the best thing to do and just do it. But I think that tension between free speech and advertisers will kill it.

So the question is how many things can he give a damn about is the biggest challenge. I Remember back in 2004, he joined my board of trustees at Xprize. I was on my way to go get Larry Page to join the board and I called Elon, who I could call on a regular basis back then before he became techno God incarnate. And I asked him, would you join the board? I'm about to go meet with Larry Page. I want him to join our board. And if you're on the board, he may likely join. He said yeah. And that was it. And Larry joined the board. It was great. Fast forward eight years later, he calls, he says, listen Peter, I'm jumping off all boards other than SpaceX and Tesla because I need to focus on those companies. And he did until now. He's on everything, doing everything at the same time. So how many things can, I mean the guy is, people don't realize how extraordinarily brilliant he is. He's not just the CEO of Tesla, he's the chief engineer. Right? I mean the Merlin engines, the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy Starship, they have emanated from his mind. He is a genius extraordinaire. And Tesla, while he didn't originally found the company much of its vision, its execution, 100% is him. So yeah, you know, the question becomes if he's not building spaceships and reinventing our energy ecosystem, you know, what is he? What is he? How does he spend his time?

I mean, look, solving the public discourse problem is a worthy problem, but it's not an engineering problem, it's a cultural problem. And so given the incredible engineering nounce and gumption and capability has, he's better off focusing on brain computing interfaces or avatars or getting us to Mars. We need an off planet strategy desperately the way we're doing it.

Right?

Yeah.

And so my, if I could, you know, something we could do is put together a cabal of 10 or 15 people and he has to do what the connective vote is of what he should focus on. Don't focus on that. Focus on that.

Yeah, I mean the challenge is he's never found anybody who he would have be the CEO of Tesla. I've had these conversations where he said if I could find a CEO to run Tesla, who is a great CEO that I could trust. Please, I would love to have him do that so I can focus on Space X. You know, going to Mars is in fact his number one objective, making humanity a multi planetary species. So it's the, the biggest challenge is not the value of Tesla, it's It's the, it's the time division multiplexing of Elon's brain, you know, and I don't know, I hope he settles it. I hope he finds somebody who can run it for him. Talking about current sort of massive situations, going upside down. Ftx. Holy shit.

Yeah, well, you know, when I had a bunch of my people who are kind of deep in the crypto web3world, they've been saying to me for about a year and a half that FTX is not going to work. They're offering insane interest rates and at that level you get into a Ponzi scheme. So that's great for short term market penetration, but at some point that, that's going to come back to roost and you burn through your cash reserves. So it's kind of. There's a few big hand grenades left in the crypto world to, to deal with Tether being one of them and the, in the, the credit worthiness of the USDC and Tether. But once we're through those, I think then we actually see this as a positive thing because it's clearing out the, the, the crud for all of the incredibly worthy projects that are out there. So I think we'll hit bottom at some point in the next two, three months. I think there'll be one more big sell off as we tack end of year tax things where people have to reconcile taxes. So there'll be a bunch of selling and buying. I think January we start a new bull market in crypto that will be incredible.

Yeah. I was watching some of the predictions both from Cathie Wood and from. Who is our buddy, well, besides Michael Sayer, our buddy who bought all the bitcoin in the auction, Draper. We're going to hit quarter million. A million dollars. And so people keep on predicting these highs, but no one holds their feet to the fire when they keep on missing their predictions. It's like it's, I guess it's just easy to predict it's going to be at 100,000 a quarter million. A million dollars of bitcoin. I mean, I hope it is.

I mean, I'm in the maximalist camp, right? It either goes to a million dollars of bitcoin, it goes to zero in my mind.

I agree with that. I agree with that.

It becomes a something that's 10,000, 15, $20,000 and it's either going to go up to a million or down to zero. This is the biggest asymmetric bet you could ever make.

That's a good point.

So, so you put in 100 grand, it's going to go to zero, it's going to go to 10 million. I mean, it's a really easy, it's a really easy equation to put some money against.

I mean, would you mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin?

Yes. Now I say that, and I may be completely wrong. Just because a bet on Bitcoin is a bet against the existing monetary system.

Well, that's easy.

And then therefore it's. The question is not if, it's when.

Right?

Yeah.

And so when you have that kind of an equation, as long as you're willing to hold for the long term, then you're fine. So I think that's the way to think about it. And I'm, I'm super fascinated by the different experiments. And it's worth actually touching on why Bitcoin is interesting right now with the three triangle points.

Sure, let's do it.

So Jeff Booth talks about this. I think of Jeff as the kind of the patron saint or the chief economist of the abundance world.

Right.

And he thinks about monetary systems and the transition between them. He gave me a great framing. He said, you've got three things you have to hit from a crypto perspective. Security, decentralization and scalability. And those are three important kind of bullet points to hit. Bitcoin for the first time in history, solved decentralization and security. And nobody had ever done that before in a, in a, in a digital currency. That's, that's huge to be able to solve for security and decentralization. Uh, but it didn't handle scalability very well initially. And so that's where you got the rise of all the altcoins, because they handle secure, the scalability very well. So people got very excited. But in doing so, they all compromise on one of the other two. So you get altcoins that are scalable but not decentralized, um, you get altcoins that are scalable but not secure, but decentralized. You don't get any of all three. So you had this problem. They're often called shitcoins by the bitcoin world for that reason, etc, etc, but now with the lightning network and liquid, we now have the engineering capability to make Bitcoin scalable. And when people were moaning about bitcoin scalability, my thing was always wait, that's an engineering problem, it's not an invention problem. Right. We've solved the invention problem. That's huge. Scalability is an engineering problem. We'll solve that. We always do. And so now we've Solved the engineering problem. So now bitcoin hits all of those three layers. That's why there's people that are so excited by bitcoin. What's fascinating for me is the smartest people I know are the most excited about bitcoin, the goddamn smartest. So that's an interesting indicator. One of them actually told me, your ability to invest in bitcoin is. Your ability is literally an IQ test for the.

I was going to say that. It's definitely something I think about a lot.

Egotistic, of course.

Right.

But still.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you and I were both. This year, I gave the Ayn Rand Award, the Atlas Award, to Michael Saylor, and you were there as my guest. And that was fun. I mean, seeing Michael Saylor on stage at Calamigos accepting that incredibly beautiful award and waxing beautifully about bitcoin. I mean, yeah, I think at the end of that evening, everybody wanted to pull out their Coinbase wallet and just start buying.

Yes. And for the people listening, if you've not seen the Michael Saylor Ayn Rand acceptance speech, absolutely, go see it. It's a brilliant piece of oratory because he talks about the fact that we now have freedom. It gives you freedom. No government can take it away. No company can take it away from you once you have it.

I was talking to a dear friend, a mutual friend of ours, Dave Blunden, who's on our board at xprize, and we're talking about the future of using cryptocurrencies in African nations, both to replace their currency, but also to create contracts for land ownership and real estate ownership. The reason I wouldn't go and invest in beautiful real estate on the coast in various African nations is I don't know whether I'm going to own it at the end of the result, whether it's going to be a revolution. But if there is a cryptocurrency that is secure, if there is a ability to track ownership on the blockchain, I think that could open up massive investments.

It does. So I was talking to Hernando de Soto, the famous economist who's done a lot of work on property rights, especially for the poor.

Right.

And he, he. So there's 280 trillion of global real estate value. And he worked out that if you put land titles on the blockchain, just did that, you'd release about 10% of value because they would be analyzable, transferable, lookupable, referenceable, etc. And that's a massive number to think about. The challenge you have there is the immune system problem. Because when you say the blockchain will be authoritative of who owns what land and you take that provenance away from governments, they really, really don't like it.

No, you'd have to have a government that wants to do this.

Yeah.

I mean, so look at what happened with El Salvador, pal. So El Salvador goes and adopts bitcoin.

Yeah.

And it was a huge fanfare at the beginning and we don't hear much about it anymore. Success, failure.

That's because, in my opinion, it's because it's working.

Okay.

What you hear is a lot of negative stories. The IMF is going bananas on this because if a bunch of other countries start adopting it, you have massive change in the hegemony of the US dollar. And that's a big challenge. When you talk to people on the ground in El Salvador, it's amazing. It's actually working really well. Transferring bitcoin around for payments and stuff. There's a bunch of corruption at the government levels, as there is always, but it has enabled microtransactions at a very local level in a very powerful way. I know a bunch of small countries that are looking at this very aggressively for exactly that reason. This is the biggest inflection point in 500 years.

Right.

Where we're taking power, monetary power, away from a centralized government and giving it to a peer to peer environment. And so this is, when you talk about scarcity to abundance, it's that level of a transition. I think it's, in my opinion this, what we're going through right now is the biggest transition in the history of humanity. Like this next 30 years will dictate the next 300 years of humanity.

Well, it's, it's everything. I mean, we're reinventing fundamentally what it means to be human and what it means to have a society. Yeah, every, everything.

That's why I like your framing of we must be living in a simulation because it's too goddamn interesting.

Yeah, we're at the 99th level of 100 level game and it's all playing out during our lifetimes, and it truly is. But we'll get to a simulation later. So we watch FTX just skyrocket. Right. And Sam Bankman Fried becomes a hero for every MIT grad and every techno entrepreneur out there. And then it crashes. We've seen NFTs and entire Luna systems. So I mean, easy come, easy go. Is it just basically, if it's moving, if it's skyrocketing too fast in value, should people Be do you sell at the top and diversify?

I think you have to look at two reasons why things are exploding out of the gate. One is that the fundamentals are unbelievably strong and therefore track those carefully. And there's a long term commitment by the project founders, et cetera. And then there are the quick get rich quick schemes and things that are engineered for short term massive value creation but not long term sustainability. And from what I've heard, the FTX model fits into the ladder. They were offering massive interest rates for people to put money into FTX, etc. Which essentially you're creating a Ponzi scheme. At some point that has to come home to roost. And when it does, then the whole thing tumbles down like a house of cards.

But you know, it's.

So that's one big challenge. The second is there's a lot of. The Crypto world is very much the Wild West. There's a lot of manipulation. Luna got taken down by a bunch of manipulation by vested interest that didn't want an algorithmic model like Luna had.

I mean, you invested heavily into the NFT world in the early days.

Yeah.

Was it hype or was it real? I mean, whenever there's something that is not providing real value, when it's all perceived value, I get concerned. You're minting bananas.

Yeah. Yes and no. So, yes, there's a ton of hype. The thing. You have something new. Let's take the 99.com boom, right? Everybody and their grandmother creates a website, pet food online and grandmother's shoes online and whatnot. And then you have this massive culling of the herd because it's that Gartner hype cycle. Sure. And you go through the trough of disillusionment and this is what we're in now called the crypto winter. So a lot of the projects that are crazy flame out. And I'll give you an example of one. I won't say the name, but there was an NFT project that launched about a year ago where the guy said. A guy got up and said, listen, I'm selling 2000 NFTs, buy them for an Ethereum each, and I'm going to do such amazing stuff for the community that you will. It'll blow your minds.

Okay.

That, that was it. He didn't say what he was going to do. He raised 2,000 Ethereum in 50 minutes.

Right.

Okay, now $2,000 and $4,000. That's like $8 million or something insane like that.

Okay.

Yep.

In 50 minutes. Okay, now the thing, you look at that and you go, okay, if you apply the smallest common sense filter to this, A, he's it's basically, it's A, security because he's promising returns. B, he's not saying what he's going to do, and C, this is full use car salesman mode, right? So a project like that, you kind of go, yeah, not into it.

Okay.

You take, say, the Bored Ape Club, which also has elements of the hype.

But of which you're a member.

I have a bored ape number 5304. Right now, when I have a Bored Ape, A, it's mine in perpetuity, B, I have all the IP rights to that, so I could go create a movie or put it on T shirts or do whatever I want with that character, which is kind of surreal. But you get connected into a community, right? Then they start offering things to that community. And what they're doing is what they. What the crypto economics for these projects that are good is they offer high rewards over for the early adopters and then they tail off over time. And now you've built a thriving community.

Okay?

Now the Bored Ape Yacht Club is still worth like something like a billion dollars in a year and a half. I took some lessons from my guru, Michael Johnson, who's been guiding me through this, and he said, the minute you get land or you get apecoin or whatever, sell it. So I've paid back all my initial investment twice over, and I'm still sitting on my board, Ape. And it's a fascinating community to be a part of to see what's going on. Now, the reason I'm excited about NFTs is that you can program the NFT. So for me, digital currencies and cryptocurrencies are not interesting because they're digital. The US Dollar is digital and has been for quite a while. The fact is, I can program the money and I can't program a dollar bill, right? So imagine I buy your sweater that you're wearing. This looks like a very nice sweater. Okay, thank you for your price of $100.

Okay.

And a system in the future can say, right, I'm going to send you the $100 in crypto. It holds it in escrow, you know, not now. Know that I've sent the money, you send me the sweater, I receive a sign for the FedEx receipt, and then it releases the money to you. So we can programmatically manage that transaction and no fraud is possible in that transaction, which is kind of an incredible Thing for two parties that don't know each other.

Right.

So now we can scale. This is a hugely important point.

Without. Without a. Without a central. Like.

Yeah. And if it's worth it, I can touch on the Byzantine generals problem, which for me is the magical piece of gold.

I remember in 2011 or 12 when you started talking about bitcoin. I mean, we were on stage together all the time at Singularity University running the executive programs and running the GSP program. And I remember the first time exactly where I was sitting when you went over the Byzantine generals problem and explain Bitcoin to me. And the only problem was we need our time machine to go back and say, Peter, just put 500 bucks in.

You know, I didn't do it.

I know you didn't.

I did it a bit later.

Otherwise you'd be buying dinner next time.

I'll probably be buying dinner anyway. But there are, you know, the enthusiastic. You know, for example, I watched Real Time, the Ethereum ico.

Yeah.

And there's a piece of me that's like, throw a thousand bucks into this, why not, like, go for it?

Right?

And there's another piece of me going, what is this thing? I don't get my head around this. This Turing complete system, and my brain was just not the size of Vitaliks and it wasn't young enough.

Right.

There's some bylaw. You have to be under 25 years old to understand.

Well, there's. There's no. I think you have to be under 25 to have not seen all the things go wrong that people. You become more dubious. And also the agility and the what the hell factor.

Well, let me flip it the other way. Take somebody that's a banker and they've been. They're 60 years old, and they've been in banking for, you know, 45 years or 40 years.

Okay.

Their brain is so entrained, and all the neurons are so entrained on fiat currency, et cetera. When you show them Bitcoin, they literally get hives. They can't cope.

Right.

And this is the. We all have that to some extent. You know, we had that famous interaction about SU a few years ago. We had an offsite. And you said, hey. And I asked the question, you know, we should think about what would SU look like if we had to recreate it today? And it was about eight, nine years. And you said, okay. And the board said, okay, go think about that. What would it look like? And I tried four times to do that exercise, and I failed. Miserably because we were so successful in what we did initially that my brain kept going back to that.

Right.

And so that's. And that's clearly the wrong answer because Facebook didn't really exist and E commerce sites didn't exist and MOOCs didn't exist, and there was no. We would do things incredibly differently. And it's incredibly difficult to step outside your old paradigms. This is why psychedelics are interesting. It gives you an accelerated path to break through some of these old mental and structural cognitive traps that we have.

So we're recording this on the day after November 8, after the US midterm elections, and talk about a system that has been sort of osseified and stuck, and that's democracy. So we're voting through a representative democracy, and we're doing it using a system that's hundreds of years old. And I'm just sitting here thinking about how archaic the process is. It's better than any place else almost, but still archaic. What do you think about the future of democracy here, pal?

Where to start? Okay, so important for people to just hear a couple of things. I've lived in eight different countries for more than a year each. I've lived everywhere from India to Europe to the US To California, all California and Florida, which is a separate world of its own. So I've seen different systems across the wide spectrum of socialism, to pretend democracy in India versus here, et cetera. And I think the US Constitution is the most important document created in the last thousand years because it enshrines individual rights into that and then kind of dictates to Congress and Senate to pass laws around it.

Almost all individual rights.

Not almost all, but at least it makes an attempt for the first time in history to do that. Now, when I go bananas over with the conservatives today is that they have this concept of originalism and they want to go back to what the founding fathers thought, and that's actually completely wrong because they intended it to be a living document that should be amended from time to time because they recognize, and I think of the Constitution as the software that runs the country. Right. You have to upgrade your software now and then. Times change, values change, slavery is an obvious example, et cetera. So having said all of that, the challenge that we have with democracy is the metabolism of decision making. And change in a democracy is too slow for the change of technology, for sure. Almost all policy is defensive and reactive.

Right.

Something happens and we kind of go, oh my God, drones or Bitcoin, what do we do about it? And we Try and tamp down on it. The FAA with getting vertical flight, Right?

Yeah. Zero G flight and space flight. I mean, the reality is most laws are in place to maintain the status quo and to keep the primary players as the primary players. Any revolution, any breakthrough, fundamentally disrupts the existing socioeconomic structure that exists and puts everybody who's funding the politicians in danger.

And let me do a shout out here, right? You and Stephen did something incredible in. In abundance and bold, where you recognize that people see something new as danger because they've never seen it before, and it triggers the limit. The. The. The amygdalas. Yeah, the. The amygdala, right. And then you go, oh, my God, we should. Autonomous cars. Oh, my God, it might kill somebody. Let's ban the car.

Right.

As Brad Templeton says, we people don't want to be killed by robots. They'd much rather be killed by drunk people. Right. And, and, and that's a terrible response to a new idea that clearly has incredible value. So we kind of block the entrance of new ideas. Then we open that tap slowly, and it takes 20 years to get the value of that technology. And that cycle we have to break. And we were better at it than we used to be, but it's still too goddamn slow. With all of the 20 Gutenberg moments that we talk about, or asteroid impacts that are changing the world, the advent of CRISPR and crypto and. And solar energy, etc. We have to get better at implementing this. So my view on democracy is big nation state democracies are going to fail. I think what succeeds is micro democracies at a city state level.

I mean, so this is biology. And his, his.

I disagree with Balaji on the network state in a couple of important ways.

Okay.

It's brilliant thinking, and it's very important thinking.

Okay.

But I think when the idea of city states and the rise of city states came to me via Paul Safo from Singularity. Right, sure, Paul, forecaster, futurist. And he talked about this in detail 10 years ago. And he got up on stage and said, I don't expect the US to exist as a country in 30 years.

Wow. Pretty provocative statement.

Pretty provocative statement. So everybody went, wait, wait, wait, hold up, hold up. He was getting off stage where he had to yank them back and go, you can't make that comment and walk off. And he said, look at the discourse that's happening. The country's literally pulling itself apart. And he gave us a couple of really interesting nuggets. I'll give you two of them. One was, everybody in the world knows who the mayor of New York City is. Nobody in the world knows who the governor of New York State is. Even New Yorkers don't know who the governor is. So the importance of the city. And he gave a second anecdote. When Schwarzenegger was governor, the Dalai Lama wanted to visit Hollywood and visit la. And George Bush said to him, please don't receive the Dalai Lama, it'll cause me massive problems with the Chinese, right? And the sitting governor of California said to the sitting Republican president, and they're both from the same party, screw you. I'm receiving the Dalai Lama because it's important to my constituents that he comes and he's like, that tells you that there's a gap that's increasing and we're moving to city states as the future. When you think about Brexit or Trump, it wasn't left versus right, it's urban versus rural. Completely. Brexit was completely London versus the rest of the country. And you look at the map from yesterday, the election map, all the urban centers are blue and everything else is red, right? It's completely. That's the fundamental tension of the 21st century. So in that model city states, micro democracies work, national democracies don't work because they're too slow and it's too hard to bring a whole population along. And then you have fake news and all the other things. Difficulties in this. So India, Brazil, the us, all a mess.

You know, one of the conversations you and I have had as well is which countries are going to be best suited for an AI enabled future, right? So communism did not work when it was humans actually trying to decide how much supply and demand would be done in different places. Because there was no way it was the marketplace that enabled incredible rise of capitalism. And full disclosure, listen, I'm a libertarian capitalist. I love capitalism. I'm an entrepreneur, it's my art form. I love starting companies and I love democracy and all of that. Having said that, if we're getting to human level AI by 2029, I just had a podcast with Ray and Ray Kurzweil, and Ray sticks very much to his 2029 date. We're going to have human level AI, which means 2030, we have superhuman level AI and it doesn't slow down after that. There's no on, off switch, no velocity meter. It is on a tear. And so what happens if the leadership of a city, state or nation says to the AI, listen, come on over, be my partner, you run the situation over here. That might be an interesting future for running a nation, but it's not going to work in a democracy where no AI is going to wait to get a human opinion. It's going to say, no, no, no, this is the answer. I've done 5 billion simulations and it's come out the exact same every time. So just. I don't care about your wetware opinion on the situation. This is what you should do.

Yes.

What do you think about that?

So. Oh, God, where to start? Okay, so I publicly disagree with the idea that AI is dangerous.

I agree with you. I think AI is the single greatest tool we have for solving the world's biggest problems.

Yes. And I think when you have. If you get AIs that are human level and you end up with AIs that are conscious or whatever, I think they look at human beings, they transcend us and they go, oh, nice people over here and a nice little species over here, and they go off. And the best representation I think of this is the movie Her. Her.

Yes, her was amazing. Right. They got bored with us and they left.

That's right. The guy dates an AI and he falls in love with. Of course, it's Scarlett Johansson. I wish you could make him do that better. But okay, he dates an AI, falls in love, and after a while the AI breaks up with him. Why? Because she can now interact with 10 million other AIs in real time, at scale. And he's one little limited brain talking about what he ate for breakfast.

Right.

And so I think what will happen is the speed of evolution will move so fast, they'll just go, and they're gone. And they'll live in the Internet, etc. I remember talking to Dan Barry, who is our robotics.

Yes, our astronaut.

We asked him a question in one of these sessions of is there a system today? Because the challenge with AI and consciousness is when will you know? Because we don't have a definition for consciousness, we don't have a task for it.

Right.

You look like you're self aware, so I attribute self awareness to you.

Thank you.

I think I'm self aware, but my wife Lily disagrees. Where do you even start that conversation? We asked the question to Dan. He's watched a ton of animals in labs because NASA does experiments with free floating animals, et cetera. And he said, huh, I think a frog is. Where is the boundary point where, like frog he goes. In his opinion, a frog is sophisticated enough just about to know that, oh, I'm a frog, like a dog definitely knows it's. A dog, right?

Yes.

A dolphin definitely knows it's a dolphin. In Dan's opinion, mosquito doesn't know it's a mosquito.

Okay?

It's just an automata wandering. But the level of a frog kind of gets you to the boundary condition. I'm a frog, okay? So that's one observation that the level of a frog is the kind of level of consciousness, awareness of the thing.

Okay?

Now it won't be that hard for an AI to get to that level right now. So we asked him, is there a system today out in the world that has the requisite inputs, outputs, processing where it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a system and generate self awareness? And he went, huh, let me think about that. So he goes out for a day and comes back and goes, I have an answer. I've thought about the different systems in the world and his answer was traffic systems.

Okay?

In his opinion, traffic systems have the input output feedback loops and the processing that one day it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a traffic system.

Right.

And that begs two questions, okay? One, what would it do? And B, what would we, how would we find out that it did that? Like we would not know. We have no mechanism for seeing this. So I tend to be less paranoid about the AI side when I think about the HER vector. It's going to be utterly fascinating to see where this goes. And there's so much unbelievable benefit that will come. I think it's incredible.

Hey everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family and I'd love it for you. If you're Interested, go to mylifeforce.com Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. So going back again to the question of democracy and AI, talk to me about, you know, in the future we have human level AI.

Yeah.

How do you feel about turning over leadership to an AI and saying these are the things that matter to our society. I mean let the humans sort of set the objectives like we want maximize happiness, we want maximize health, we want maximize whatever and run the nation state for us.

Let's use an analogy which is the Google energy conserving AI that they applied to their buildings, right? So they deployed a machine learning intelligence to analyze all the sensors and lights and energy usage and said we want to optimize for energy conservation. And the AI, because it's got access to so many different inputs, outputs, calculation capabilities, was able to what, drop 40% their energy needs, which is a massive amount. A human being can't do that because it can't monitor this stuff in real time, et cetera. So when you think about what AIs could do if you said hey, maximize for conserving human life, you basically take the Constitution, the US Constitution, say go generate the policies and the legal structures that will maximize for these things. And I think you come up with something quite incredible where the AI could. So I think that's one side of it which is policy and regulatory generation and you could create policies around this. I'll give you one that I would love to throw at this AI which is stop signs. The amount of fuel we waste coming to a full stop at first stop sign and the brake power and the energy wastage of a million cars coming to slow.

No humans, no dogs, no car. I mean you could know you can have imaging better than the human.

Not that hard, right? You need two sensors, one at the stop sign and one in the car and you're done. And we should really solve that problem. AI could kind of go oh frickin just go do that.

Well, I mean this is the autonomous car solution, right? Where cars are actually able to drive closer to each other at higher speeds and have far more efficiency. That's right, and we'll get there. But it's the idea first of all that we're turning over decision making capability to an AI in a car and then even turning it over to an AI in a government in leadership. Right? Because listen, if you believe, and I think you do, and I do, that we are going to reach a human level AI, I would, I personally would rather have if, if I knew the AI was able to maximize for a set of human desirements and safety and health and all of those things, I'd much rather have an uncorruptible AI that isn't influenced by the color of my skin or my gender or my age or anything be making Decisions.

So I would. It's very. For me, it's very simple.

Okay.

We have Asimov's three laws of robotics.

Yep.

Okay.

You basically say to the AI, these are your constraints or something similar, right? Don't kill or allow a human being to be killed, et cetera, et cetera, and then do the instructions that we give you as long as they don't interfere with the first two.

Okay.

And then you trust. Now we trust our existing human beings with those things. We trust our police not to kill people, not always successfully. I'd much rather have an AI policeman than a real policeman who's got all his regular biases. He's having a fight with his wife at home. He had an army wound and was shot out, therefore has a trigger response. You have no idea what they're going through. And the stress of being on the job with guns everywhere.

Right?

And then basically the AI should be able to say something like, for frick's sake, why do you need guns? Get rid of all guns.

Yeah.

And you could make some good decisions.

That way, as you and I see the same on those politics. So when do you think we will have. Have this? Let's go to the. To The Ray Kurzweil 2029 prediction. A second human level AI by 2029. We're seeing the rapid rise of large language models. GPT3, GPT4 is coming. DeepMind made its announcement about Gato. I think the tweet was game over. AGI, artificial general intelligence is coming. What's your thinking on this?

So let's really be careful not to trigger the amygdala, because the first thing that happens if people go, oh my God, this bad. It must be bad. Et cetera. Okay, let's take as an important principle Ray's commentary that technology is a major driver of productivity and progress in the world. Actually, technology might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen.

We're not getting more intelligent. Political systems aren't becoming better.

I would argue with that.

Okay, how would you argue with it?

So if you look at all of the stuff that you track on abundance, right? Poverty and mortality and maternal mortality, infant mortality, the big challenge with technology is how do you get the promise without the peril? You want to have fire that will heat your house and not use it to burn down your. We've overall done a pretty good job of it.

We're still here.

We're still here. And we're overall pretty thriving. I so love the positivity framing you have in abundance in all your talks, because it's so important for people to see the real reality that we're better off today than we ever have been in the history of the world by such a huge factor, right? Just go back 500 years ago. Somebody goes off. A husband goes off to do something and never comes back because he got killed by a bear. And the wife never knows. No idea if he's ever coming back. Has he run off or has he been killed? Kids are being raised now. What do you do? Do you remarry or not? I mean, there's a million chaotic things like this. I have a very banal example that I like to use for today's world. People go, oh, my God. Technology. We know, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Cell phones are bad. I go, you know, if you're waiting. If you're a couple and you're waiting for your babysitter, sitter to show up 20 years ago and they're late, you have no idea. Are they coming? Are they not coming? Should we cancel the restaurant reservation? There's all this consternation and uncertainty and unknowing around what's happening with the babysitter because you can't do much until the damn person arrives, right? And now we have infinite knowledge. They're running three minutes late and waiting.

You're tracking their Uber, right?

We have exact. We can say, call a restaurant, and we have. People don't recognize the unbelievable peace of mind that a million examples like that give us in the form of technology. And so now we accelerate that radically. And I think when you look at AI is able to look at the complexity of policy making and say, Listen, Mr. Mayor, you're allocating resources in the wrong way. You could achieve this by doing this, this, this. I think initially it starts off as a guide by the side and a reference check. And over time, people go, it's great that you want to make that policy. Have you checked with your AI yet?

Okay. Before we got to babysitters and policy changes, we were talking about what made the world better. And I said, Yes, 100%. It's technology. We haven't been improving ourselves cognitively or whatever. You said you disagreed. But putting that aside, technology is making the world rapidly better at a rate that is staggering. The problem is, of course, and I'm going to do my rant that I have to, which is the Crisis News Network, all the negative news bombarding us constantly with every murder, every problem on the planet that we actually.

Real time to 20 devices in HD.

Yes. Over and over and over again, 10 times, 10 times an hour. So when are we going to see this AI that is going to help us govern and when are we going to see it accepted in society? Is there a pivotal moment that people are going to say, yeah, I think I'm going to allow it to govern Because.

Let me use an example.

Yeah, sure.

Okay, so let's use a real example. Pandemic hits and there's a bunch of news and stories and misinformation about masks. Should we wear masks or not?

Right.

Massive, like consternation. Governor Desantis over here in Florida is like, masks never work, Chuck. The masks, I mean, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, now I would have a really interesting, it would be a really interesting use case to have an AI Jarvis call it right.

I know, let's stick with Jarvis.

I love Jarvis. Let's stick with Jarvis. And the Jarvis goes, hey, I've done the clinical. I've researched this already. I've scoured the web for this. I've looked at it, the clinical trials and the experiments are very clear. If you wear a mask, you prevent 75% infection outward. And somebody else wearing a mask presented or is able to stop 25% of inward affection. The combination gives you 90% effectiveness. But at least wear a mask to prevent outward. That's very clear. There's no controverting that evidence. If better evidence emerges, great. The problem is that we used to operate policy and so on on an evidentiary basis.

Well, even worse, even worse than that we would ignore the evidence and, and state what was what was most politically efficacious for us.

Exactly. And almost always you go to the. You're affecting the person's limbic system. Yeah, sure, they're taking away your freedom.

We're all about freedom, fear and scarcity.

And I love getting into arguments with Republicans on this, and I don't mean to harp on Republicans, but everybody sits there and goes, we need freedom. Like, if I drive three miles over the speed limit, I get pulled over by a cop in the US where's your freedom now? Because it's a free country in Europe or Canada, I never even see a police car ever. Like, you want freedom? Let me drive a little faster, for God's sakes. Right, so there's such bullshit around the, kind of, the pat generalisms like freedom or whatever and goes bad, just as bad on the left in its own way. So going back to Germany, go back to Germany.

When are we going to see this system enabled and adopted? Now, humans don't adopt new Systems until they're 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, and the switching cost is worth it.

Okay, so I think we're almost there. So think about this. I have my mobile phone, right? And I'm sitting in Miami and a hurricane's coming.

You are, and it is right?

And I can say hurricane nicoletracker, show me when the hurricane will hit Miami Beach. And the AI says to me it's coming tonight and that'll be the danger point. And maybe that's when you move your car to the second level of the car park or whatever in case there's a storm surge. Is there going to be a storm surge? I don't know. But the AI will know. Sure right now. So you take one step further. We're only one hop away from an AI tracking our behavior and looking at our world of activity and going, hey, he's sitting in Miami. His car is parked on a ground floor thing. There's a storm surge coming. He will need to move this car by X.

Or better yet, I will move your car for you. Take over and optimize, protect me. It's ultimately take care of me is right.

And we're there. I'll give you another example. I wake up one morning and my left big toe is blue. And I'm like why the hell is my toe blue? No blood circulation. What the hell happened? What do I do? I look it up on Google and research it myself. I figure out what the condition and it's some Latin sounding name and this is how you treat it. And literally you will print that out, take it to a doctor and the doctor will go what the hell is this? And how did you figure all this out? Because we now have better understanding and we can analyze all these conditions better than a doctor can and self treat for the vast majority.

Right?

So if I just put an AI go AI my toes blew. What the hell do I do? And it scours around and comes back even better or my bodily sensors will go, hey dude, your toe's about to turn blue. Please do these three things to prevent that. So we're like right there. And Ray said something very profound in one of the recent talks. He said look, we talk about implemented hardware that can connect, but your phone can iterate much more effectively. So all you need is the communication capability between you and the phone and we're just about there. Between voice and other sensors, we're just about there.

So.

So I give it a year.

You, you give it a year before what?

Give it a year before you Have a Jarvis type AI that can handle initially basic things. We do calendaring now with AI pretty well.

All right, all right, so let me, let me piece this down for everybody listening because it's really important. I, I, I say to all the CEOs that I mentor, listen, there can be two kinds of companies by end of this decade. Those companies fully utilizing AI and those out of business. And I think it's that black and white. So let's begin with Ray's prediction 2029 for human level AI. Do you believe that that is correct by whatever measure you think it's going to be sooner or later?

No, I disagree because I disagree with the premise. Let me explain what I mean by that.

Dude, it's so hard to get an answer from you.

I'm sorry, you can't just put out a thing like a pathing like human level AI. The problem is we don't know what AI, what intelligence is. So there's about a dozen facets of intelligence. There's spatial intelligence, many different discretions, the eastern concept of presence or awareness, that's a whole other form of spiritual intelligence. We have our, with the IQ test, you measure two things, speed of thought and the ability to match concepts across frameworks.

Okay?

But you don't measure any of the other things. So what the hell do you mean by intelligence? Is number one question, right? And the second question, which is why I go even doubly more crazy, is what would you, you know, we talk about the technological singularity is intelligence, machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence. So number one, I have an issue with what do you mean by intelligence. Number two, the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, a robot or AI is going to do a much better job of it anyway. So it's a non sequitur. So when you say human level AI, I come back to you and go, what aspect of humanity are you talking about? Now if I can have an AI that makes me more present, that's really valuable, or routes around my emotional biases.

By the way, I want that AI. We have all these cognitive biases that we don't actually notice that we're hitting. Like when I look at somebody or I hear something, an AI that is simply saying, Peter, you're being biased about, here's the actual data and the way you should see it. I mean, most people will turn it off, I think.

But think about that. How far are we from that? We're literally. That's not a difficult thing to do to track my language and go, look, you've got a positivity bias. You think everything's going to be so goddamn rosy. You need to tone it down a notch.

Well, you and I don't have that. We're obviously unbiased and we're not techno optimists.

You know, when you see things that can transform the world for better, how can you not get enthusiastic Machine X Prize or the Avatar X Prize? Like amazing.

We just had it. We just had it. One in Long Beach. Team out of Germany won the $10 million from ANA Airlines. So we've got human level AI, however you define, multidimensional human level AI coming. And you've been speaking about Avatar. You've obviously been tracking Optimus, Tesla bot. Right. And there's other companies like Beyond Me and Sanctuary. So Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics, sort of large scale. These other companies are focusing on human labor marketplace.

Right.

Being able to create a bot for, you know, Elon says 20,000 or less, less than the price of a car that can be available to do labor for you. So I want to transition, I want to talk about that, but I want to transition as well to the idea of universal basic income. Because I've been thinking about this a lot in the world of abundance.

Yeah. Can I just cover to say a final comment on the robot side before we move to ubi?

Well, yeah, let's talk about robots first.

Okay.

And then my premise is that we're going to need to have AI and robotics change the global economy and then we can afford ubi. But let's.

Okay, yes, I totally agree.

Let's talk about robots.

Okay, Robots. So I think it's coming for sure to have a general robot that can do household tasks and work tasks, etc. But I think it's further away than people think. And I'll use the analogy of autonomous cars.

Right.

Maybe the biggest predictive failure that we had at singularity is we thought autonomous cars would be there in five years.

Because Brad Templeton was just.

Because technology is there, like it's there. And his concept was workable. He said, look, you don't have to be. You don't have human intelligence to drive a car. You need horse level intelligence to navigate around. We kind of have that. The problem is that it turns out to be deceptively difficult because you're often driving and routing around a pothole or there's a bike who's overtaking another bike. And so you need to. You watch that and you see that there's like a million little adaptive situations that you drive that you don't realize and trying to counter for all of those without a sensor based road system is very difficult. I think once you have sensors in the roads, then driving becomes autonomous. Driving is a piece of cake and the sensors become cheap, though.

I disagree with that, by the way. I mean, I think our eyes are just two human eyes. Not radar, not lidar, not ultrasound. Just two human eyes are what enables a human driver to drive.

So I dispute this with experience because I've now driven a Tesla four times from Toronto to Miami and back.

Yes.

So I've done something like 8,000 miles in autonomous. In the width of the Tesla in autonomous driving mode.

Okay, listen, I'm not saying that autopilot on Tesla is anywhere near ready, but I do believe that we're going to be able to get there. It's a data processing issue. It's not a data collection issue.

Yep, it could be. Could be.

Right. So if it's not data, let me.

Give you one more.

We don't need sensors the road, if it's not a data collection issue.

Okay, fair enough. But you need a ton more data processing and a lot more use cases and interpretive things.

Right.

For example, I would normally overtake the bike, but my wife's in the car and she gets a bit nervous. So I'm going to take. Hold it back a notch.

Right.

There's a million little nuances that we don't take note. But let me go make the point in a slightly different way. One obvious thing for a home robot is folding laundry.

Yes.

Right.

And we've struggled mightily with a robot that can fold laundry.

Do you remember the videos of Scott Hasson's Willow Garage?

Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

It can do a T shirt.

Yes.

But really hard to do anything else.

Right.

Like it turns out, even it's difficult.

For me to do anything else.

I'll give you a third one, which is the vacuum robot, right?

Yes.

People buy a shark robot or Roomba and it's great in like 20% situations, but the minute you have a curved stool with a base, that's a little odd, it doesn't work. And you end up spending more time arranging the furniture so the robot can do than just vacuuming yourself. And people kind of go, after a while, I'm just going to myself, you're.

Telling me that that's a problem. But governing is going to be a.

Year from now because government, because it's so language oriented.

Right.

An AI can read a policy paper and make way more sensitive than the human being can.

Right.

Like show me any Congressman or senator that's actually read the 800 page legislation on any bill. They actually.

Well, let's not go.

Let's go there. You need it to kind of get your head around that.

Yeah. By the way, it's the same thing for, same thing for medicine. I think the daily number of medical publications is like 7,000 a day. You tell me how many your doctor has read.

The Daniel Kraft one is there are 2,500 research papers on cancer published per day.

Yeah.

Right.

So if you're a, if you have a cancer doctor, you can ask him, has he read the 2005, when it came out yesterday, the day before? No. Obviously you need AI right there to, to think about it. I just want to make one last point and let's move on to UBI because I think it's so important. Yeah. You know the part that I find most interesting and fascinating around this is I use the example of PageRank.

Right.

Google's AI that's scanning web pages and it's developing a unique intelligence.

For those who don't know, PageRank was the algorithm that Larry Page came up with while he was a grad student at Stanford that Scott Hassan wrote and that he and Sergey created into Google.

It was called Page and scours a million web pages and scores them and tags them and categorize them. PageRank has developed its own kind of unique intelligence of how to scour the trillions of web pages in real time around the world. That's an orthogonal effect and complementary to human intelligence. It's not replicative human intelligence.

Right.

We are localized sense making machines. So I think of AI will be for the vast, vast, vast majority of use cases will be complementary and that should take a lot of the fear out of it. They're not there to replace human beings, they're there to amplify and augment. Just like my phone augments my humanity. I can video with my son, I can project empathy around the world, etc. Etc. So I think AIs are going to massively add to productivity and labor automation in a magical way. Coming. And the general thesis leading to UBI is that we've been increasing productivity with machines for thousands of years and now we get to a point where the productivity gains of technology allow us not to have to work for a living.

Yeah, it's. So let me hit on a couple things on humanoid robots. I mean, I love the fact that Optimus is a humanoid, meaning five fingers, two legs, bipedal, and it fits and operates in our human built environment. Doorknobs car pedals, all those things. And if in fact he's able to achieve it, and the thesis is he's going to be using AI and sensors and capabilities built for Tesla's autonomous driving. It's a massive market. I mean, how many car manufacturers are there? Well over 100. And how many humanoid robot manufacturers are there? Like none. And if you can get it, I mean, I'd want one. Would you put one in your closet?

Sure, I would love to.

I mean, especially if you lease it out, right? So think of a $20,000 car. What's a car lease going to be? Like 400 bucks a month. So for 400 bucks a month, you've got a slave robot. Now be nice to it because the robot overlords are coming. But for 400 bucks a month, you've got something that does anything you want, anytime you want. I mean, that's the vision and it is going to. So it solves a labor issue. Now we're living in a time today in which the numbers, when I last looked at them a few weeks ago, we have twice as many job openings as we have people looking for jobs.

Yeah.

Now that will change. But the notion is most people don't take work because they love the work. People who are cleaning up hotel rooms and cleaning toilets or working at a cash register, they didn't dream about doing that. They're doing that because they want income for their family, they want insurance for their family. So is there a future in which the work that no one wants going back to Dan Barry. It's dull, dangerous or dirty. Remember those three?

That's right.

Can we get robots to do that?

Well, I think we've been doing that anyway. Like mining robots and agricultural robots, right?

Yeah. Shop.

98% of human population was employed in agriculture and now it's like 1.8%.

Yep.

Because we've automated the hell out of it. And because you don't need strawberry pickers and apple pickers, you have machines to do it all. And that is difficult and house. So I think that definitely will be automating. Our assembly lines have done a lot of that for us. I think what's more more powerful as things get to cognitive abilities where people can handle most day to day task call centers and routing call centers, et cetera, et cetera.

And we're almost there.

Yeah, yeah, we're almost there. And I love the writing software. Even is being automated pretty fast right now. I love the. There's a great example of bank tellers around this, used to Be that when we created ATM machines, everybody freaked out saying, oh my God, we'll have millions of bank tellers out of the work. What will we do with all the bank tellers?

Right.

And so there's this massive concern about robots taking all the jobs, which. The first article that appeared about robots taking all the jobs appeared in 1964, by the way.

I love this story. I love this story. Can I tell it a different way?

Go ahead, tell it.

Okay, so there was this letter written by a group of Nobel laureates and top scientists sent to the President saying technical automation is going to destroy the banking industry. And that letter hit the desk of Lyndon B. Johnson. Right. People think about it as a recent event, but no, it occurred in, like you said, 1964, thereabouts. And it was people concerned about replacing room filled mostly with women, copying ledger to ledger to ledger. And we have more bankers and accountants than we've ever had on the planet.

Yeah. So the second half of that is people got concerned what will happen with all the bank workers if you automate banking? The actual outcome was that because of cost of building and running a branch dropped so dramatically, the banks just created a ton more branches. And the number of bank workers has not changed at all. So it turns out, and we have multiple examples of this, the Germany, the factories in Germany are all automated. There's nobody on the factory floors. And it's not like unemployment has dropped. We just move people to higher value work. So it turns out when we automate, we don't lose jobs, we increase capacity. As we increase capacity, we have that much more economic activity and productivity. And the idea behind UBI is you get to a tipping point where you can now people don't have to work for a living.

Yes. So UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. And it's the idea that you get a check and you can do with that money what you want. If you live in Alaska, you have UBI already, the Permanent Fund. Alaska takes all of its oil money and it makes, you know, it distributes a portion of that to everybody. I don't know what the check size is. It used to be like $5,000 a year per person. If you live in the Middle east, there are equivalents of that in Saudi and the Emirates. I was having dinner with Reid Hoffman two days ago and I asked him about UBI and I said, what do you think of it and who should I be speaking to about it? We've had this conversation. I want to bring someone talking on the subject at Abundance, 360 this year. And he said, he sent me an email yesterday saying I've been asking around regarding UBI and he said most smart people think that the numbers are still off and could be solved if we get the kind of massive increase in productivity that we hope for. And so if we've got robotic labor and AI labor. The first time I heard something around this was Jeff Bezos said, in the future we should tax the robots. So if you replace a job, a labor job that's normally held by a human with a robot, then you should tax the robot and that part of that money should go to pay the human who's replaced. Yep, it was something like that.

I've heard something similar. If you automate truck driving, then you tax the truck driving companies and that goes to pay for the drivers to find some other work over a period of time. It turns out the financials are very close to working because the key is the key. And let's talk about two issues around ubi. One is people get fat and lazy and don't want to do anything. And that's the people worry about socialism and you're paying.

That's the concern. Will use the money for beer and tobacco.

The second concern is we can't pay for it and we'll have to raise taxes. And this does. This is a stupid idea. Those are the two. Now increasing productivity will solve for one. And the second one is actually solved because of the 14 major experiments that we've seen around UBI. It turns out if you find the right balance where you give people enough to survive but not be happy, that's the level.

Right.

So you give people enough that they can make it and they don't have to work. But it's not enough that they want to buy the new tv, they want to buy the nicer car. So they go, so then you have a, still have a thriving economy and a job market, et cetera, et cetera.

Meaning they're going to use, they're going to use the money to further their education, get better training.

That's right.

And go and get the job.

I mean, what's the number? 40% of the US cannot put $400 together in an emergency today.

That's insane.

That's the most ridiculous commentary I've ever heard for the richest country in the world.

Right.

It's a travesty. So I think the UBI side will solve for a huge amount around that. And the case studies are, we have a lot of data now, entrepreneurship explodes under this model because people find their Passion and follow it.

Yeah, and you made a point. It's important. These studies have been done in the us, in Canada, in parts of Africa, parts of Europe, where a government has given a population of people who are at the subsistence level, if you would. It was done in Stockton, California. The mayor, Mayor Tubbs, gave $500 a month to a population of a few thousand people. And 99% of it of them use that money to do further their careers. Less than 1% used it for, you know, beer and tobacco. Amazing. I mean, you would bet against.

In India there was a famine and they gave 4,000 people a UBI because they had to give them some money. And the government workers freaked out and said, you can't just give people money. How would they will spend it on alcohol and gambling? How do we extract bribes if you just give it directly. But they were starving, so they had to do it. So they said just do it. And they tracked it for two years. And they found in the similar to the Stockton, 95% or 94% went to clothing, housing, healthcare, food.

Yes.

And the attendance of those kids, of those families at school doubled because they were fed, clothed. I mean, the challenge is that once you run it for a while, a government realizes, oh, we're not needed anymore and then cancels the program. Because then you need government. It's literally what happened in Canada and Manitoba. They ran the program unbelievably successfully and the government came in and went, oh, wait a minute, this is terrible. You literally don't need government. The challenge I think we have with UBI is to go from a taxation, labor, employment, job model to this is such a huge leap. I have no confidence in our public sector to get us there.

Well, the AIs will. The AIs will do it all.

The AIs will propose it and then we'll have a big fight.

Well, I bow to our AI overlords. So there's a term that a mutual friend, Harry Kluwer, gave us of technological socialism.

Yes.

Right. So we talked about communism earlier on being failed when humans were doing it. Maybe when AI is doing it'll be more efficient socialism in the same fashion where the, where the state is taking care of you has failed, that experiments failed over and over again. But technological socialism, where technology is taking care of you. Right.

Yeah.

Is something that I think is most definitely going to come. Right.

Where you're not just going to come. I think it's here already, you know, so. So socialism fails because you have centralized allocation of resources, which is a Inefficient and B leads to corruption. Inevitable.

Right.

I'm dictating which family should get what food. I'm in a huge position of power.

Right.

As a bureaucrat or technocrat. So that fails the other side of the coin when you look at the free market. Free markets also kind of don't work over time because they get corrupted in their own way. But if you have an algorithm matching in Uber, matching driver and passenger, optimized for close proximity, the driver and star rating of the passenger, driver, etc. Uber is actually a socialist application. It's the sharing of assets amongst a large group of people. And this is, I think it's a profoundly fascinating opportunity to bring in collective use of assets that gives us hyper leveraged in terms of productivity and repeated use of it, et cetera.

But it's not only the sharing economy, it's the shared use of assets, it's the crowd economy with the shared using of cognitive assets. I don't employ a person 100%.

Yeah. My favorite example of a socialist application is a restaurant. When you go and eat at a restaurant, you're sharing the table with other people that have just eaten in the cutlery, the people who have just used before you. It's not your cutlery or your plate. Your food is coming from the same chef. It's actually a socialist environment. And we don't, we do that without thinking. We sit on an airplane seat that millions of other people have sat on and we don't freak out about that. I think this is definitely there for the taking. And creating a capitalist or a market based environment that's algorithmically driven gives you the best of both worlds in many, many environments.

Yeah. So AI and communism, technology and socialism. Let's talk about the elephant in the room here, pal. We are living in a simulation, aren't we?

So as a Buddhist, life is an illusion.

Yes.

So on first principles. Yes.

Right.

David Roberts, I remember giving this point that he said, if you stretch the electromagnetic spectrum, X rays to visible light, to microwaves, and you stretch it out to the width of the US okay, okay. 3,000 miles across, the visible light that we see entering our eyes is two feet. Oh my God, out of that 3,000 miles. So we live in that little narrow spectrum of reality when the full spectrum of electromagnetic is that much.

Right.

I think it's just a great example of how narrow our pathetic little eyes are compared to what's, you know, you've things operating with X rays and other things, operating with sonar and all sorts of infrared sensing, etc. So we, we are by. So that's one second when light comes in your eyes, revert it and our brain flips it back around. So it's an, it's an, it's an image that appears at your brain anyway.

Yeah. And of course, we only process a fraction of 1% of all of our sensory input because we can't possibly handle it. And we fill in the blanks with our own imagination of what we think is actually happening versus what really is happening.

I remember a couple of years into singularity, Luke Lemur, who used to run Lew Webb, said, come and do a talk and pick whatever topic you want. So I picked neuroscience. I said, all right, let me do a talk on the brain. And it forced me to go talk to Divya and a bunch of neuroscientists around.

Okay.

So first question I asked them was, what is the brain? And it was unbelievable. They couldn't agree. I finally came up with a sentence that they all agreed on. I'm going to try and remember. It said, a brain is a fractal, chaotic sense making machine that may or may not result in consciousness.

Obviously that was it.

Like, oh my God. And that was the only one they could roughly agree on. So we've got so much amazing investigation, analysis to do.

Right.

On our, on our, on our brain. What got me interested in psychedelics was the FMRI studies that showed you can now see exactly what dosage was, what psychedelic does exactly this to this circuit. And now we have a feedback loop that makes it amazing.

I was listening to a program this morning on the idea of does consciousness impact our quantum universe? We know so little. We are so filled with ourselves and our bullshit every day in politics, in the world. We're just scratching the surface. It's amazing.

You know, I did my degree in theoretical physics.

No, I didn't know that.

Yes, my degrees, my bachelor's degree is theoretical physics. So you do three years of Newtonian classical physics, relativity, and in third year you get quantum mechanics tilt, and the first thing that they tell you is, okay, so you know that last three years just chuck everything. And now everything is a probabilistic environment where an electron has an 80% tendency to exist. It's such a hard shift, it's such a hard pivot, it's impossible. I've been fascinated by the domain ever since with entanglement and spooky action at a distance. And it really is true how absurdly little we actually know.

But I want to close out with two questions. They May be the same answer for you. But I ask all my guests if you were to launch an X Prize. If I were going to say, I'm going to say, Elon's going to fund it. I'm going to fund it. Salim, what is an X prize that you would want? What's a grand challenge problem that you want solved? And you're, you know. Full disclosure. Salim is on the board of directors at the X Prize, has been on this journey with me for multiple years. Is there an X Prize that you would love to see launched? What is a challenge you want to solve?

Yes, I would like to see an X Prize that improved emotional intelligence by 10x and by doing so, kind of cleansed out all the emotional trauma that we grew up with.

Scratch the surface a little bit more. What does that look like? What would a team have to do to solve this thing?

So the problem there is a little bit. The diagnostic, what's the before and after test?

Right.

The Ansari XPRIZE is easy. Take a plane to Suborbital twice within two weeks. Great. Very clear metrics. It goes back to the hard question, which is, we struggle often at xprizes. How do you define the domain properly? What do we mean by emotional maturity and how would you measure it to increase a 10x, et cetera, et cetera? There's some work to do in defining the boundaries, but for me, we. You know, there's two major problems that I see in humanity. One is in the west, we tend to be very logically driven and operate on just pure rationale and Western medicine, Western thinking, objective reality. And so that's one danger point because you lose the subjective and the softer side, the spiritual side, etc. And the problem in the east is you do what people call a spiritual bypass. Like in India, you grow up, you have all this family baggage that nobody deals with. You jump straight to praying at a temple and you never deal with the emotional baggage.

You go straight to enlightenment.

You try and go straight to enlightenment and yet there's this carcass of family skeletons in the closet of crap that your grandfather was an alcoholic and epigenetically you're now an alcoholic and you don't even know it. And yet you have tendencies in that direction in lots of different ways and you've no idea and you don't know what you don't know, and yet you skip straight through to trying to achieve enlightenment.

Right.

You can't do that without cleaning up all the rest. So I think a prize like this would balance both these Out. It would also solve the problem of techies in Silicon Valley trying to go for technological supremacy without really understanding the human nuances along the way, et cetera. So that would be the prize I would go after. It would make human beings infinitely happier and more at peace with themselves if you could achieve it.

And your moonshot, what are you working on right now? That is in the realm of moonshot, buddy.

Moonshot is can we create a new model for society that creates a layer of resilience in. In our systemic, global human society. So we have. If you look at the history of civilizations, every civilization got to a very complex level. The Incas, the Mayans, the Romans, then they had some boundary condition and they instantly collapsed, right? Like just literally hit a cliff and boom. Every single one of them. By the way, okay, this is. And if you talk to the U of all Hararis and Neil Ferguson's of the world, all those conditions are there now, where we're like, we're at that tipping point. We may be sliding down and we don't know. Our monetary systems are an easy example of the crash in crypto. Today is one example. It looks like, by the way, Solana may be being wiped out today.

Wow.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's down a massive amount today. So when you look at what's happening in global human.

Wow. Bitcoin's down to 16 something.

Yeah. It's great buying opportunity.

By the way. This is an entrepreneur's mindset, everybody. This is how the judo move. When it goes down, it's a buying opportunity, right? Big problems, fantastic opportunities to start a company to solve those problems.

The biggest problems are the biggest markets. That's your stock phrase. I think it's such an important way to think about the world is hope. Huge problem, huge opportunity. And I think this is maybe the biggest gift that you've brought to the world, Peter, is having people think at a global scale via XPrize or Singularity. I remember I got together with a bunch of the Singularity alumni in Spain when I was there, and they're like, we hate you. And I said, what happened? He goes, you infected us. You get us to think at a global level. And then you can't go back to thinking, how do I create a better mobile ad network? You just can't get stuck at trying to solve systemic global issues, which is what we wanted anyway.

Yeah, I know, it's. And by the way, I can't believe we were both in Spain the same day in Madrid, and we missed each other by hours.

We've had the opposite. Remember I was at the New York Hilton over Grand Central and I was typing an email to you kind of going, really need to talk to Peter directly about this. And you were literally walking across the lobby by accident.

And how many times have we done that and didn't even know it?

Yeah. I have a teaser for your people for all the viewers. John Hagel and I, we're talking about serendipity. John Hagel and I, who does a lot of work in writing around engineering serendipity, have been working on a model and we've come up with like a very simple two by two diagram where we define luck and we can measure it.

Okay.

And I'll leave that there.

We're going to talk about this some other time or you're going to happily can. All right, well, we'll come back.

Yeah, it's worth it. It needs a reveal because we need to finish it up, et cetera, et cetera. But it's there because think about how much our lives run on luck and serendipitous events.

Right?

Every single one of us. The most meaningful things in our lives were weird coincidences for the risk. There's no normal explanation.

And we have plenty of those between us.

We have plenty of those between us, right? So can you prescriptively create luck? In fact, the exo book was actually a practice book for me. Had a crack at writing a book on luck.

Okay. Which is going to come out. You're going to write a book on.

Luck at some point. John and I need to agree on the final framing and definitions. But think about the exponential organizations. The first half is analytical. What is it? And exo, what are the attributes? Second half is prescriptive. And then we have a diagnostic test. And the second half is prescriptive. How do you start one applied to mid market and big companies, et cetera. It was actually the practice run to say, could I get a meme into the world because luck is a really hard topic.

Right.

Rookie author. I'm probably going to make some stupid mistake and screw it all up. Let me. You know, exponential organizations is so obvious, needs to be done. And then the book took off. And I've not been able to get away from the paradigm yet. But John and I have been working on the side on this other topic because all of us, they think of any of us, our lives run on luck.

They run on hard work and caffeine.

And those are the table stakes.

Okay?

Think of any Silicon Valley company. You have to be talented, you have to Work your ass off. Table stakes. That lucky break to hit the right strategic relationship, hit the market at the right time with the right feature footprint, and that's actually what makes you successful. So how do you generate serendipity?

So, you know, there's a great TED Talk and a DLD talk by. By Bill Gross.

Yes.

Right. And it has to be related, right? Where he says, listen, he analyzed like 100 companies that succeeded. 100 companies that failed. And he said, what was the parameter? That was the number one thing of all the companies that succeeded was the amount of capital they raised. Was. Was it the experience of the, of the CEO? Was it the field that was. They were in? And you know the answer to this?

Yeah, it's totally lucky.

Well, it was luck by virtue of their ability to stick around. In other words, the companies that were able to last the longest intercepted a lucky event like the space shuttle crashing and being shut down was what launched SpaceX. The 2008 fiscal crash is what launched Uber and Airbnb.

Zoom.

Zoom. Oh, my God.

I was on a panel with Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, a month before the pandemic, and he was saying, Jesus, you know, I've been working my ass off for several years building this, and I need that one thing to happen to help us take off. And a month later, boom.

Coincidence? I think not.

Well, it is and it isn't.

I'm joking.

I'm joking. The Seneca definition that preparation meets opportunity is the best definition we've seen, right? And so the question then becomes, how do you increase preparation? How do you increase opportunity?

And can you live long enough to live forever? Which is paraphrasing Ray Kurzweil on longevity. But it's true for companies. I tell all my companies, listen, get to cash flow, break even as soon as you can, right? Make sure you've got years of lifetime, because you're going to screw it up over and over again and you're going to run. If you're dead and you do not exist, there's no way to run into that perfect investor or customer. But if you're able to hang on long enough, you'll intercept the pandemic, you know, or the big.

You know, maybe the hardest question is, something's not working. Do you keep struggling or do you shut it down and start.

Oh, my God. It is one of the hardest question black hole. We should talk about that next time, because it's. It's a. You know, I've. I've had. I'm now my 27th company. I think. And there are those companies that I look back and say, man, I should have killed them far earlier.

I'm terrible at that.

Right. I've taken money ever. I've taken money, my company's labor forever.

And I should just, like, be merciful and shoot them in the head. And I'm just, I'm bad at that. The ones that, the successful entrepreneurs are the ones that just go astro teller, right? Google Ads, they have a very specific thing. It's having these metrics or it's not what will make it fail. And test those first and then kill it.

So we're going to do this again, right? You and I on this podcast. Okay. At that. When you talk about luck, we're going to talk about how do you, you know, when do you kill your. Your favorite child or company, as the case may be. And lots of other subjects. In fact, we'll. We'll ask people who are viewing this what they want us to talk about, and we'll do that. We'll catch up on where Twitter is and FTX and democracy, where AI is. And, you know, pal, I love you and I'm thankful to have you in my life.

Likewise. I mean, the serendipity that brought us together is pervasive in everything that happens in my life right now.

Yeah.

So. All right, brother, have a.

See you soon.

Talk soon, Peter.