How AI Will Change the Music Industry Forever w/ will.i.am | EP #70

Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform? Well, now you can trade all in one place on Robinhood. That means you can trade individual stocks and ETFs and also buy and sell crypto using seriously powerful and intuitive tools at one of the lowest costs on average without needing to manage multiple apps. Robinhood makes withdrawing and depositing crypto seamless. Send crypto to your Robinhood account or send crypto from your Robinhood account to other wallets without deposit or withdrawal fees from Robinhood. Trade all in one place. Get started now on Robinhood Trading. Crypto involves significant risk Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto llc. Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not FDIC insured or SIPC Protected network fees may apply to crypto transfers. Crypto transfers may not be available to all customers. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal securities Trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC member sipc, a registered broker dealer.

You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options.

Or.

Let'S do a little research. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart out of all the.

Times to be alive, this one here is like wowzers. We could get it right. And as an optimist, I think we will. Or it could be very wrong. We're skirting on a very thin line between authenticity, ownership, do I own my facial math and facial recognition and AI right now? Nope. Does Beyonce own her timbre on her voice right now? Nope. We should if Leonardo DiCaprio's voice can be mimicked and cloned to the T with AI, shouldn't he own that just by his, you know, physical right of how his timbers produce his voice? I believe that AI should not mimic a person. I'm preparing myself for this time where humanity has to be more human than we've ever been, because machines are going to outdo a lot of the shit we used to do, and it's going to force us and push us to be more human to one another.

In March of 2023, Keith Ferrazi, the CEO of Ferrazi Greenlight, and I sat down with Will I am, for an extraordinarily vulnerable conversation about Will's creative genius, his childhood upbringing, and his views on AI and how artificial intelligence is going to be empowering the next generation of creators. Who owns what when it comes to AI and The input it provides to creatives. We're going to dive into this with Will I am.

If you don't know Will, you will in a moment. He is a musician, a producer, the entrepreneur extraordinaire who has won multiple Grammys.

And sold over 33 million records worldwide.

He's a technologist, he's an inventor.

He's creating extraordinary software, which he'll tell you about.

He's one of the biggest promoters and.

Benefactors of First Robotics. He's the creator of the I Am Angel Foundation. So sit back for a beautiful conversation with Will.

I am.

And how one of the leading creative thinkers of our time views AI. His views may surprise you.

They did me.

All right, jump in.

This took place during my private summit.

Abundance360 in March 2023.

I'm super honored to introduce our next speaker who is a legend in many different industries, but also someone I consider a friend. He embodies leadership and innovation and huge positive impact on many people in the world of entertainment, of technology, of STEAM education, philanthropy. A key element of his global success really is his multi tiered career track and the amazing people he knows globally around the world. He most definitely is a futurist. Whenever I get a chance to see him, he is on the cutting edge. I mean, across all telecom, all compute platforms, he's teamed up with Accenture and Apple and Atom bank and Beats and BBC and Coca Cola and Gucci and Honeywell and IBM and intel and ITV and JPMorgan Chase and Marvel and Mercedes Benz and Microsoft and Penguin Publishing and Pepsi and Salesforce, just to name a few. Like him. He and I are both huge fans of Dean Kamen and I pride myself again to call a friend. Do you want to bring Will up on the stage and then embarrass him or.

Yeah, no, listen to that first.

Please welcome William.

So on the embarrassment piece, I didn't quite know what to do with somebody who's been interviewed as much as he's been interviewed. So I thought, all right, let me make this easy. I'll go to ChatGPT and ask what are the five questions will I am does not want to answer. And so that's what we've got to start with. Just kidding. But by the way, you should do that. It's really interesting. So let me do a slightly different introduction. A very dear friend of mine has been working with Will on some of this philanthropic contributions in the world. And I said to him, I said, you know, what are the things that we wouldn't naturally know? And you probably know of his great musical talent. But you know that he actually sold more than 60 million records, won seven Grammys. Now, probably one of the most interesting songs that he's ever written actually won a presidential election, if we remember yes we can song and its contribution to the Obama election. And actually, if I'm not mistaken, he broadcasted a song from Mars in collaboration with NASA. I don't think you were personally there, but you broadcasted it from there. Otherwise Peter would be terribly jealous if you were personally there in terms of your philanthropy. He grew up in a very poor community in Boyle Heights. But he then went back there, which is one of the reasons of being here. Success to significance. He went back there and made sure that every one of the projects had 5G Internet in the entire community. If I'm not mistaken, his I Am angel foundation now in Los Angeles alone serves 12,000 students in youth robotics. He gave $1 million to then Prince Charles to really start the stem cell program at the Prince's trust. He also got in pretty early at Beats by Dre, which is probably not a bad investment after it exited, I believe, to Apple.

Well, yeah, no one put money in that. That was just like ideas. Jimmy Ioving is like the best.

It's like my hero split equity on that one.

No. So I would come home for tour. Jim Basile. Jim Basili was one of the first people that were like, you got crazy ideas. Why don't you come up to Waterloo? So I'd fly up to Waterloo to the rim, guys. Back in 2005, six. Around that same time, it was Paul Jacobs and Jim Bacilli who would like, encourage my wild, crazy ideas.

Paul Jacobs from Qualcomm?

Yeah, they were like, you know, took me serious, going to Global GSM in Barcelona. And I came home one year in 2006 and told Jimmy, let's use our music to sell our own stuff. Let's make our own stuff. Cause Jimmy one year was like, you know what, Will? Maybe we need to make ketchup. I met the Hines family. They took tomatoes, put some sugar in it.

They're billionaires.

We need to find our ketchup. So one year I come, I'm like, yo, Jimmy, let's make our own shit. Sell our own stuff, bro. Like, we're always selling somebody else's stuff. Imagine if we sell our own stuff. So then, 2007, he's like, you know, I was walking on the beach with Dre, and his manager wants him to sell sneakers. And I remember our talk that we had last year. And I Told dre, fuck sneakers, let's sell speakers. You want to be a part of it? I'm like, yeah, but I was thinking of, like, computers and shit. He was like, yeah, we're gonna start with headphones, then we're gonna do computers. And that's how it all started. So I had, like, a small piece.

Well, he went on from there to be a real creator, if he hasn't already, and his talents. But how many of you in this room can say you have custom designed six distinct cars, of which one of them, the flip is something that Mercedes actually made? He then went on to pitch an idea to Coca Cola, which was an entirely new venture using their residual plastics, taking that to market along with the brand, and most recently, in the world that we all know, which is the Web 3.0 and all the conversations we've been having of it today. His new company, FYI, which I think maybe would be a good place to kick off and just understanding what is your intention in building this regenerative AI community for creators?

So we're in Geneva. We're at the first global competition. You're on stage. I'm going on stage. And you're like, peter, check this out. And Will shows me this platform, which is the combination of WeChat and Zoom and five other tech companies, and it's working flawlessly. And I'm like, holy shit, what is that? Well, it's FYI, and it's now powered by GPT4, which you got early access to. What was your vision? What was sort of the creative moment of you? Because you've been building. How many companies have you generated ideas for Will over the years?

So when we sold Beats to htc, so one year, Jimmy says, you know what, Will? One day you're gonna realize that you shouldn't be the talent you need to collect talent. So I'm like, wait, you collected me? I'm a part of your collection. Get the fuck outta. Wow. You got me, Dre. Pharrell. Wow. You got a collection of talent. I was like, wow, Okay, I need to start collecting talent. Ooh. I want developers. I want rappers and beat makers. I want developers that could develop software to make Beats, software to write raps. I'm gonna go out and find real talent, Next level talent. When we sold Beats to htc, I went to Israel and acquired a machine learning team. Went to Bangalore, acquired Natural Language Understanding Team in Singapore, Natural Language Processing team back in 2013, 12. We created a voice operating system by forking Android. And who did I call? Paul Jacobs. To give us a Snapdragon Qualcomm chip. We forked Android, put it on a Qualcomm chip, got technical acceptance from AT&T. And it was a watch.

I remember the watch came here. Yeah, we're at XPrize Visionary we used to hold here.

Yeah. And there's this dude by the name Naveen Jain who was like, gave me all this energy of like to make me believe certain people spark plant a seed to make you go out there and believe that your ideas are valuable. That got us from AT&T technical acceptance to 3 mobile technical acceptance. That has everything to do with FYI. Then we sold that to Vonage, that team Tavonage and Majad Al Futaim. So if you're in Dubai or UAE and you are at Carrefour or the Mall of Emirates or Vox Theaters and you're conversationalizing the softwares, that voice AI is built by a team that I sold to them. It's called I am AI. And that was from 2014, 15, 16, all the work, 15, 16, 17 till now. So during COVID I realized that the creative community had no software made for them. So if you're a finance, there's software for you. If you're any field, there's software for you. But when it comes to creatives, creative across all disciplines, you're working off of WhatsApp or some messenger. And to do that you need a Dropbox. And if you're having conversations about the things that you're working on, some of the conversations are in the comments, some of them are on the text, some of them are in the email and shit's all over the place. And meanwhile your IP and your team flow is all scattered. So I was like, wow, imagine if there was like a singular interface for creative enterprise where the messenger was the file storage and the digital asset management and the calendar and the conferencing and elliptical cryptography keys. Because why should an NFT have more controls and safety and privacy than your conversations and your digital assets when you're working? Why just the nft? Why just the cryptocurrency? Why can't it just be all my conversations, all my data and all my shit? And then let's put generative AI in the middle of it to where you and your team can collaborate with different AIs, collaborating not just you and the AI on a silo and then you send screenshots of what you and the AI talked about to your friends. But what if AI is all in the mix with you and your group not just one AI, but a whole bunch of them. And so that's FYI, FYI, AI. Focus your intents with AI. Focus your ideas with AI. Not for your information, obviously it's. That's focus your ideas and intense with.

By the way, it's not an idea, it's. You know, we were just playing with it a few minutes ago.

I just. We saw him earlier in a four way conversation on two different phones. So two different individuals, two different creatives basically getting into it and co creating together along with two AIs. Or there'll be infinites and there'll be those individuals. It was, it was just crazy to watch. It was very cool.

Yeah. So you said a sentence with scarcity. Technology takes scarcity and makes it abundance.

Yeah.

So let's say like Marc Benioff yourself, Dean Kamen, you guys are hyper networkers. So any idea that you guys have, you go to your Rolodex, you call anybody in your Rolodesk to get things done, but the random person in Boyle Heights or Compton or Watts, they don't have an awesome Rolodex. They have ideas but nowhere to actually manifest that idea. So what used to be like your amazing Rolodex, it's going to be an amazing Rolodex of AIs to help people materialize their ideas on FFO.

So you have a clone of Tony Robbins and Mark Benioff and Dean Kamen that you can bring into the conversation with you.

Not clones, just awesome, awesome AIs. Because you want to be careful with that word clones when it comes to AI. Because I believe that AI should not mimic a person because I write songs and I own those songs. But we're skirting on a very thin line between authenticity, ownership. So if you do I own my facial math and facial recognition and AI right now? Nope. Does Beyonce own her timber on our voice right now? Nope. We should. If Leonardo DiCaprio's voice can be mimicked and cloned to the T with AI, shouldn't he own that just by his, you know, physical right of how his timbers produce his voice? There's so many things that we have not crossed and we have not protected people yet. So we can't say clone and AI because then it brings up a whole bunch of ethical stuff where there's no regulations and governance on people's safety, their ownership, their identity, because identity and data is identity. And we need to make sure that identity protects people, their individualities and their communities when it comes to distinguish yourself from AI and people.

If we Wind back to half the statement you just made. A bit ago. You were talking a bit about your mtp, your massive transformative purpose around bridging that digital divide. What are some of the things that you're really cranking on, like FYI, that you think are going to be crucial in that journey that you're on? What are your moonshots within your massive transformative purpose?

Well, this decade is a very, I think we're all, if you had to, if we spiritually had to pick what time we wanted to be alive at some point in time in our spiritual journey. We all decided to be here at this point in time because this is the most transformational point in time for humanity.

It's the 99th level of the gameplay.

Right out of all the times to be alive. This one here is like wowzers. We could get it right. And as an optimist I think we will. Or it could be very wrong. There's no middle ground. This is more transformational than like electricity. Even though I was a pretty big one, I wasn't around. But thank God they got it right. We got lights, bitch, but we got it right. This one is a different level of illumination.

What are you worried about in the short term that we could, what's the inflection point that we get it right or get it very wrong?

Well, the digital divide is so wide. Algorithmic bias. We haven't seen how disruptive it's going to be for communities yet because we're just in the beginning of it. Data bias. We know that they exist, but yet we don't have a flock, a herd of inner city, poverty stricken kids that are learning to write algorithms and build systems, training systems, training data. And the only way to fix algorithmic bias is to have a more diverse, inclusive participation in making those algorithms that are going to be serving communities and people that live in them. So that's the reason why the work that we do at I Am angel is super important to have people of color in and around. Robotics, computer science, engineering.

Earlier, when we were talking to you, before this conversation, the question was put to you. You've used your celebrity, your fame, your wealth on multiple different dimensions to try and make the world a better place. And the question was, was that a recent transition or is that who you are? Please answer it as you did before. And then I want to ask a follow on question for those who are parents listening. How did your parents make you who you are today? Because I think one of the, one of the things we need to do is help make our kids contribute to society as part of their core DNA.

I'll start with today I'm staying at a hotel, because if I'm in LA for so long, I just stay at a hotel because I don't want to stay at my house if I'm. So I've stayed at a hotel. And then I wanted to drive, which is like two minutes, to get some breakfast, but it took me two hours because it was the marathon. And in that, had to drive all the way to Brentwood just to cut across to come back around to Fairfax to come back up. Took me two hours. In that two hours, I remembered my bus ride from East LA to Brentwood to go to school. And now I'm in my freaking GT63 Mercedes and I'm just giving flashbacks of my childhood, going through the rich neighborhood, knowing that last month I was in Alfaderbach with the Mercedes team, brainstorming on how to improve the driving experience in the car. I'm like, wow, what the fuck? How did my life. How did this happen? It's freaking amazing. But I grew up in a very poor neighborhood and I got bused out to Brentwood, and somebody came up with that concept to have a magnet program to send kids from poor neighborhoods to rich neighborhoods to get better education. But while I lived in a poor neighborhood, my mom would sign up for government assistance and there were like food drives. Where Brentwood, the rich kids would come to school with canned foods or box foods to give to the poor families. For many years, that food that they collected came to my house. And during the summer when we would get summer lunch programs, because when you're poor and your kids are not in school, you only have one meal a day, not three. Because breakfast and lunch at school is a very important experience for families that can't afford to have three meals a day. So during summer, these kids, we were hungry during the day, so we had summer lunch programs. In the summer lunch program, our family gave out the free food because what you don't want to have is rich people giving poor people free shit. Because the dignity, how they feel is bad. So my family in the neighborhood, we always signed up to assist. And my mom was the after school teacher, my uncle was the after school basketball teacher. My aunt worked at the homeless shelter, my grandmother worked at City Hope. So this is what we did when we were poor. So now that I've had success, I would be doing this shit even if I was poor, because that's what my family still does today. So it's not like that's just the way. The way my mom raised us. But, yeah, today was awesome. Cause I remember driving in the yellow bus through Brentwood, like, wow, look at those big houses. Damn, that's crazy.

So that two hour drive you had is going to be able to be 30 seconds with your new Jetson that you got today.

Oh, eventually, when we're able to drive it through the cities. But I remember going through those neighborhoods like, wow, look at those big houses now. I'm like, damn, these houses are small.

You know, by the way, I just.

I saw. I saw the child and will light up when he saw the Jetson preview earlier today. Wow. When it comes to somebody who likes his toys, I think I've never seen.

A faster Yes, I want one. No, I want two.

We're giving two for one, right?

Here's why. Because I always have these projects that I Side projects that I'm working on. So there's like three projects that I'm working on currently. One of which, when I asked the guys from Jetson like, yo, how much? How big is your team? How long did it take to build this? What did it cost? And as I was excited, I was furious because there's this one project that I'm currently working on, which is like a three seater electric vehicle that has a tilt, goes 0 to 60 in 1.5 seconds.

And it's called a rocket.

Huh? No, it weighs a thousand pounds. Yeah. And I'm like, darn it, I should have just like, not did that and just like invested all my money with these guys. But we're still gonna push it through. You don't. Don't give up.

But yeah, wait, wait, before you go there, you just said something. You said you don't give up.

No, hold on.

How many times have you looked back and said, I should have given up? Maybe a little earlier on that one.

Or how do you think about this.

Idea of abandoning things versus perseverance dreams that you might have had that you today are willing to say, well, not anymore. How do you think about that trade off?

If you have the ability to see something through, no matter how long it takes, you're supposed to see it through.

If it's your highest calling. Right. It's not just. I mean, there's times where you do something for the money and it gets super hard.

Never do things for the money.

Okay, so just make that premise right?

You never do things for money. You do it because, like, your heart's burning.

Yes.

Like, you do it because, like, oh, my gosh, you waking up like, oh my gosh. Like every moment of the day is like, oh my gosh. And if you have a project like that, you'd never give up. Don't care if, like there's gonna be these twists and these turns, there's gonna be ups and downs. If you're not a roller coaster rider, if you don't know how to freaking like ride it, you shouldn't be here in the first place. But you never give up. There was this one thing like fail fast. Like whoever said that's weak as fuck. You only fail fast if you're in it for money. If you love it, you go through it and you're going to come out learning so much more at the end. There's so many folks. The reason why they say fail fast because they're afraid of failing and they don't want people to know they failed. So fail quick. Right? So that's what an investor would say.

We're going to go back and rewrite all those agile operating systems in your organization.

No, but dreamers should not. A dreamer should not fail fast.

That's a good one.

There you go.

So will the conversation here is success to significance. We've got a room full of successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, business owners. And there's a point at which you make enough money and you can't spend it in a lifetime. You don't want to leave it to your kids and ruin their lives. You don't want to leave it to your lawyers to give away after you're dead. And I guess one of My missions through Abundance360 is help people play at a bigger game, right? To do those things. I believe that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. And why not go and solve the world's biggest problems? As you think about huge scary ass problems that you want to go after, do you dive blind? Do you go pull a team together? How do you think about going to do something big, bold, a moonshot?

Teams putting teams together, the team building. Having dream partners to tackle collectibles. Yeah, you want to have dream partners to tackle nightmares. The only way out of a nightmare is to dream out of it. Like the moment you wake up from a nightmare, you're eventually going to go back to sleep and face that nightmare. But you want to create the dream and that dream team, that assembly of that dream team is how you creatively solve problems. But I wouldn't even look at them as problems you're just creating. And that creation of whatever that issue is is A beautiful task.

But you create to create a better world in not just to go and flip money to make more money. Yes. Is that true? How do you think about that?

I think that's my biggest issue. I don't look at it from making money. I've been blessed to have made money to fuel my idea manifestations. And some of my ideas have made money, but I don't go in it from making money. And it's the same way with songs. There's some songs that I wrote that are like, yo, this is going to be a smash. And then there's some songs that are like, oh, this is how I feel right here. And I gotta get this out. And that where's the love Is this is how I feel right here. I gotta get this out. I got a feeling is this is gonna be a smash. But where's the love is the special one. I wouldn't be able to be at the seat to write I got a feeling if it wasn't for where's the love. So purpose from the heart questioning what's going on that. And I apply that same methodology to coming up with ideas and having the, you know, being audacious and ambitious and fearless to then go to Muhtar Kent at the time when he was the CEO of Coca Cola and say, hey, companies the size of Coca Cola should be verbs in society. If you don't believe me, Google it. And your verb is Coke backwards. For Ekoc, for eco consumption, eco collaboration, eco concept, eco cycle, eco community. And let's take your byproduct, create a new base cloth and license that to other companies to execute their sustainability efforts. And we call that Eco C. So are those ecocycle Levi's? Are those ecocycle beats? And so they bought that idea and so we arm wrestled for a while. Who owns Coke backwards? So I own that with them, which is another crazy shit.

Like what?

Who the fuck would have thought that one?

So everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life from or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life and.

It'S a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body.

We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side.

You go to the physician in the.

Emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world.

These centers give you a full body.

Mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, D DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire site of therapeutics. We look around the world for for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers.

So if this is of interest to.

You, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.

All right, let's go back to our episode tomorrow morning.

This group of titans are humbly going to meet each other and have a conversation about some of the places they're struggling, some of the places they're looking for transformation in their lives. We believe that through empathy and vulnerability, great relationships are created. So question I would have for you is whether it's personal or professional, where are the opportunities for your transformation? What are some of the things that right now you're working on? That's a big deal.

Preparing myself for what's coming. And AI is an amazing. Like I said, we all came here spiritually for this moment. And what we're experiencing is a massive transformation to how we do things. If you're a mathematician, a calculator wow. Probably can't out calculate a calculator. You're not going to out logic a logic machine. And these new creative tools, it's amazing. It's going to render a lot of jobs obsolete. If you're a bus driver, that won't, that won't be your job in 2030. Truck driver, delivery driver. If you're a legal assistant and you read through the contracts, that's not your job. If you're a finance manager, that's not your job. A lot of jobs are going to be gone in these next 10 years. And but for the hyper creative, that person that can't, that never was able to sleep, the person that exhausted their friends and family and their close ones with like another idea, they're like, oh, come on, Bobby, dude, I'm sleep, dude. And that person felt like, gosh, I've exhausted every single person with an idea. Now they feel liberated because now they have a freaking ping pong partner to freaking go head to head with and they've never felt freer. AI is going to supercharge that hyper creative. I know what that feels like when you call your friend randomly because you got another idea to fine tune and you've exhausted your whole freaking Rolodex. So I'm preparing myself for this time where humanity has to be more human than we've ever been because machines are going to outdo a lot of the shit we used to do and it's going to force us and push us to be more human to one another. And that's going to be. It's an amazing time.

At your core, what do you believe your superpower is that can't be chatgpt out.

Right now. It's not gonna out idea me like original idea ever. No. And I don't say that arrogantly. It won't because it doesn't have the heart. And what's generating that idea? Yeah, it's going to come up with ideas, but it's not going to relate to the human.

It's not going to have the emotional drive behind it.

Yeah. So the ideas, the ideas are like human ideas that are human connection. Yeah, it's cool. It's going to come. It's going to do some awesome shit. Don't get me wrong, this shit is fucking amazing. But I just know that it's gonna push people like me to fucking do even more awesome shit. I don't sing like Michael Jackson. I can't dance like freaking James Brown. I can't play the piano like Stevie Wonder. I can't wail like fucking Jimi Hendrix, but I got some fucking ideas, right? And so hyper creatives do not let other genius dim their light. It makes your light even brighter. Like, oh shit, I'm inspired by you. Look what I can do. And that's what AI is going to do. But this time it's going to do it from a human to human perspective. We're going to be more human with one another. And if you think about like body dysmorphia, what filters have done to people, how I'm worried that there's people that look at themselves on Instagram filter and that's what they want to look like now. And they go and change their body around, they change their face around, they don't. They're depressed inside. And if that's what happened to camera, imagine what's going to happen to people when they rely on the machine to think for them. Imagine you're on a group chat and you feel daunted that everybody's firing off and now AI is fucking firing off more than you are. So you feel like, oh shit, I'd rather be represented by my AI version of myself. There's going to be new types of psychologicals. I don't feel I'm not there. Adequate, adequate. So these are things that we have to be, we need to empathize on. We need to make sure that we are, you know, more patient with one another. You see how, remember when we were in elementary school, remember being in the classroom and the teacher said, raise your hand. Some people didn't raise their hand. The ones that were like extroverts raised their hand. Those folks that felt like, I don't know, I don't want to, I don't want to be called upon, I don't want to be judged because I don't want people to think that I don't know, you know, what's coming, how people are going to behave and conversate. We are in a society right now with the most awesome tech and we are talking with memes and emojis and sms, short sentences. That's what most people behave in conversation. They are responding with pictures, memes and emojis at the time where AI is rifling off deep, complex thoughts. Look at how unbalanced we are already starting off now. Imagine the body dysmorphia that filters have done to people. What's going to happen psychologically to people when mental health is a big subject moving forward. This is how we're starting off. ChatGPT. Oh my gosh, look at this. Ask all these questions. People who graduated college, they leave college remembering things. Now, it's about not knowledge, it's about being curious and the right questions to ask.

I'm not, I'm not sure that anybody else has heard the term intellectual dysmorphia, but I think we might have coined it this evening, thanks to you.

Yeah.

You know, Will, there's a lot of fear mongering around AI and I just want to talk one second about the ability it has to level the playing field at the same time that we're concerned about a digital divide. Right. To make health care democratized and demonetized, education democratized and demonetized. We're going to have Sal Khan on stage with us on Tuesday from Khan Academy, who just partnered up with OpenAI. We'll have Imad Mustach tomorrow. He's about to roll out an educational program across all of Malawi using stability AI. There is the potential for this to. Looks like Google is the same for the poorest child and the wealthiest child. As long as they have a smartphone, there is the potential for this to level much of the playing field out there. Yes.

Yeah. Forever learning and health. Yeah, that also comes with forever learning. So the reason why we have health issues because people really don't know much about their bodies and nutrition. What a calorie actually is the junk food, survival food that's around them at disposal. So forever learning is super important where we're going. So I believe that AI will play a big role in that concept of forever learning. Not you go to elementary to go to junior high, to go to high school to go to college for eight more years and then that's all you know and you're never going to learn anything. And then you work for some odd years and retire. That's old school. You're going to have something that's in your life, like aspirational gps. Right now we know GPS is geographically. I could get from here to there. You tell Siri or whatever directions to lax. And if it tells me to make a right when I should have went left, it does a recourse instantly and eta. But the same isn't for like, I want my bank account to be X in the next five years. There's no aspirational gps. This is what I want to accomplish in my life. This is what I want to be in the next five years. There's no aspirational gps. There's GPS for destination, not GPS for destiny. And so is AI going to play that role for us and if it is, how ethical is it going to be? Are there regulations? Are there governance to make sure that we're protected? And with all of that, how are we safe?

I think you just created a new product for Merrill Lynch. What, the Aspirational Financial gps?

No, that's FYI, bro.

Okay, got it, got it. Hey, how long are you going to live and what are some of your really big bucket list items between now and then?

What? How am I gonna live? How long do you live?

The conversation we have here, a lot is, you know, how long do you want to live a healthy life?

How long I live one.

10 is mine. What's your number?

I'm gonna live forever. Sorry, sorry. How long am I? That's a freaking scary question. Yeah.

Without a target, you'll miss it. So what's your target?

With all the technology that tomorrow you can sign up for.

120.

Good, there you go. And so bucket list items between now and then, one or two biggies.

I have a school and that school teaches kids that have no parents or come from some poverty stricken area forever learning that campus is for R and D on all things tomorrow. And it's like a hybrid of MIT and yeah, that's my dream is to have that.

You still thinking about being a dad?

A dad in ways I am a dad. Cause of the kids that I support. But one day I would have my own kids. Unfortunately, I'm gonna be a Grandpa Dad. I'm 40, just turned 48 two days ago.

Young man, very young.

I had my kids when I was 50.

Yeah. What's up, bro?

You got plenty of time.

By the way.

It's one of the best longevity programs ever. They keep, keep you young. Well, people here who have like gotten to the pinnacle, they've sold their company, their company's running on automatic. They're, you know, they're a little bit bored in what they're doing. They're excited here. Going back to the success to significance. What would you tell them? What's the steering question about how they use their talent, their treasure, their tech, their connections. How do you think about that?

Building teams, identifying leaders to expand those teams to solve whatever problem. There's a bunch of problems to solve and there's ways to solve them in a beautiful way that encourages that empowers and enables and maybe business comes out of it. Maybe a solution comes through that journey of 12 years. It's really a 12 year program.

Meaning you should, if you're going to get into something, be prepared to take it on for a Dozen years.

Yeah.

I mean, people don't real, you know, people forget that most successful companies that you think are overnight successes, you know, it's overnight success after 11 years of hard work.

So I remember it was 2008. We just did. Yes, we can. And I was jazzed and pumped. And Mark Benioff introduced me to General Colin Powell. And I'm sitting next to him, he's to the left of me. We're in San Francisco. And I'm like, hey, General Colin Powell, nice to meet you. You know, now that, you know, people that got activated and, you know, did our part, what do you think a person like me should do to keep the momentum going now that Obama is elected? He said, if I were you, Will, I would focus on the neighborhood that I come from. That you come from. I'm not, I don't want to be assumption to assume, but I'm pretty sure it's some inner city. I'm like, yeah, it is. He was like, focus on that. There was nothing to hold you back or slow you down. And you could, you could do some serious work with the energy that you have and the commitment you have. So I started there in 2008 with 65 kids. And then Ron Conway introduced me to Lorraine Powell Jobs. And Lorraine Powell Jobs had a program called College Track. And I asked her, hey, can we bring that to la? She says, well, I have no plans taking it to la. It's only in the Bay Area. And if we consider it, it's a big responsibility on you because you have to fund it and that's a 10 year commitment. So I'm like, I have to fund. This is your program. You got a whole lot of money. She was like, yeah, but to be fair, we only focused in the Bay Area, had no intentions on taking it to Los Angeles. And it's a $10 million commitment because you have to see these kids through high school and to college. And you have eighth graders, they haven't even graduated yet. So it's 10 years, the last two years of middle school, four years of high school, four years of college. I'm like, all right, at that point in time, I didn't have that much money. So I'm like, 10 million bucks. Fuck it, let's do it. I'll figure it out. So we figured it out. 65 kids now is 12,000 students. We sign up another 10 years. That's what a person can do when they have no money. Imagine what you can do with the money you guys have.

Here you go, drop the mic.

One Time. Dean Kamen in Dean Kamen's house. And Dean's like, so much energy. This dude's energy is like. I thought I had energy. This Dean Kamen guy, he's freaking like a free electricity. So Dean's like, we've been doing first for 20 years. Nobody knows about it. So I'm like, have you put it on TV yet? He's like, nobody wants to see a robotics competition. At least that's what they tell us. I was like, oh, we're playing the super bowl this year. I think we could figure out how to put it on television. So I called abc, I said, hey, how much does an hour of time cost? I was like, well, round you about a million bucks. So I was like, okay, I'll buy an hour of time in September Back to school program. So they sold me an hour. So then I called Dean. Hey, Dean, I got an hour of tv. It's gonna take. Take the robotics Pro competition that we play the halftime show. We're gonna put it on television. The problem was nobody wanted to put up the risk money. Everybody wants to do things, but who's putting up the risk money? Quiet. So somebody has to put up the risk money. So I was like, fuck it, I'll do that too. So we did it. Made our money back. At least we broke even. But more importantly, more people knew about first. And that's when General Charlie. Sorry, General Charlie Bolden from NASA then calls me. That's how I got the song to Mars. Because he says, how can you do what you did for first for NASA?

Hey, everybody, this is Peter.

A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice open week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies. AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmanandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now Back to the episode.

Can I ask those of you who are supporters of first, can you stand up one second? Just go ahead, stand up. If you're. If you're a First supporter here.

All right.

So every year, we raise money through the Longevity Platinum program and through a360 for first. Take people to Dean's home. First is one of the most extraordinary programs, and you are one of the faces, advocates, promoters of first. Can you take a second and just tell. Because it's religion. I made a deal with Dean the first time I met him. He would support xprize, but he said, first and foremost, you must support First. And it's been a deal I've kept, and I donate and support every year. What is First? What does it do, and why is it important?

So FIRST is.

For inspiration.

First of all, first is the most inspirational program for youth Robotics or Youth Empowerment. Youth Acknowledgement. Seeing how amazing these kids work and solving problems and how technical they are to building tomorrow's tools, it's amazing. I was transfixed the moment I saw the kickoff in New Hampshire in 2009. Since then, vowed to bring that program to inner cities like mine. I started with, I think we had three teams, and that three teams now turned into 400 schools across LA. So out of all the programs, our LAUSD collaboration with FIRST is the biggest school district that has the most robotics teams across America. I think I thank Dean all the time for trusting. Imagine what his board must have thought when I went and said, hey, I want to. Like, he's in a rap group. He goes out to clubs all the time. Is that who we want to represent First? And the reason why you have to take that in consideration on. On how protective and concerned they might have been, because it's not like there was another person that comes from popular culture that was working with First Robotics before I came there. So, of course, the board would probably have been a little concerned, but to Lily and Tatiana and the I Am Angel Foundation. How delicate. And that we've been at the same time as, you know, taking it to our heart like it was our program. Like it's not. That's not my program. It's Dean's program. But you adopt it like it's your program because it is the best program. And when you have something that is someone else's that you adopt like it's yours, that is now my North Star, because I acknowledge the responsibility and the accountability and how it's transformed my community. Like, it truly has transformed my community. We've sent kids to Dartmouth To Brown, to Stanford, to mit. I mean, not mit. That's where they want to go. That's the dream. And one of our kids said, you know, I couldn't get into MIT or Carnegie Mellon, but I got into Brown. So we're really, really, really happy with the results. 70% of our kids, 100% graduation rate, 70% of which go to school for a STEM skill set. So, yeah.

So the question. You've been so crazy generous in the world and to so many causes, there's a lot of folks here that might be able to be supportive of you. I would ask two questions. One is, is there an ask for this audience in terms of their individual participation in anything you're working on that you'd like to say?

I Am angel foundation first, whatever it is.

And then the second thing is, at a minimum, you've got a lot of influencers here. Is there a specific behavior change you'd like to ask this group of individuals to consider how they walk around in the world? Is there some X to Y that you could imagine that the world would be better if they picked up some behavior change? So a cause that they could support in and some behavior change.

I'll answer the second one first. The fact that everybody's in this room, the idea of a behavioral change is not needed because they're rocking. We're all rocking in the vibration of the optimism of Peter, and we all rhyme with that vibration. So to say that there's a behavioral change would be, oh, nope, we're all vibing. So this is an awesome group. If there was a behavioral change, then that will reflect Peter's magnetism and how he's curated this event. So everybody's like, rock solid. First, for some reason, raising money to make machines smart is super easy. Raising money to make kids smart is super hard. Wow. So at I Am angel, that's all we want to do is making sure that we make kids smart. Because if there's any time kids needed to be smart moving forward, it's right now. As we face intellectual dysmorphia as a issue that no one's thinking about. We're excited about GPT. Whoa. These nature language models, you know what's going to happen to kids? You know what's around the corner. If somebody can program, you could create AI to do a bunch of stuff. You can create an AI to scrape all your Facebook information that's for sale, by the way, to scrape facial data from your family members on your Instagram page as they posted all their snacks and foods that's for sale, by the way. To then call you mimic your family, which is not regulated by the way, and fuck with people's minds and hit you with all the targets that affect how you feel. Because there's no governance, by the way. That's where we are, by the way. And none of that is, like, we have to be super empathetic. We have to be super, like, mindful. And at the same time, make sure our kids are prepared for this tomorrow. That's starting now, by the way.

Let's take just two or three brief questions and then let's give Will a chance to actually have dinner. Nora, hi.

I have a question related to that sort of intellectual dysmorphia, but generally ways that we could potentially combat knowing whether something is human or not. Authenticity, which has a whole bunch of other consequences. Anyway, there's a log that is, I think was used by the SEC that predicts, like, anything that's naturally or organically occurring is going to have a certain number of, like, the number of volcanic eruptions or the number of hairs on your head or stars in the galaxy. It all falls on, like, this distribution of, like, if it starts with a one, one, it's way more likely, starts with a two. Like, second most likely. I think three is somewhere there and it, like, drastically drops off at 9. I was wondering if there's ways that you could use that or even, like, personality typology to program AI to combat bias. Like, are there ways we can use certain tools that capture humanity in a distinct way to solve some of these problems?

I don't know the answer to that. All I know is this deep fake stuff, it's going to get even more indistinguishable from real stuff.

Ray, who's a dear friend, Ray, will be with us answering questions on Thursday. This prediction is 2033. High bandwidth BCI to the neural to the neocortex of the brain. How do you feel about that? Are you number one on the waiting list or never?

Never. And that's because I don't know what's on the other side of that. And I grew up apostolic and I don't trust. I don't trust the algorithm to put my mind that's connected to my spirit there.

Fascinating. All right, one last question from Annie here behind you.

Hey, Will, you've been an incredible creator your entire career, and we work with startups all the time where founders run into big blocks. How do you get past that? If you ever run into blocks where, you know you've got a dream. You've got something in your heart. What's your technique? What's your advice?

Oh, when you hit a wall or an anxious. A muddy anxious, do you just create more? I've never had a block. The reason why you have a block is because you're worried about getting it wrong. And improv tells you. Jazz tells you there's no such thing as wrong. You create, and you wake up, you look at it, maybe it's horrible, but you still created. And the moment you create and you're judgmental on your own stuff is when you hit a block. But you're not supposed to create and judge yourself. You're just supposed to keep on creating, free of judgment of your own self, because. Yeah, that's. Yeah. You don't judge what you create.

Thanks, Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Will Am.