AI is the Next Big Weapon in Political Manipulation - Peter Diamandis

AI is going to come online and is going to, at some point, ask to be recognized as an independent intelligence and life form. Do we recognize it as an intelligence, as a citizen, as an equal? And does it have rights?

Peter, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Good to be here.

The first question I'm going to ask you, I'm just going to go straight into it. Do you think we live in a simulation?

I am sure we live in a simulation. Even if I could prove to you we're living in a simulation, what would that matter? Right? You going to do anything different? I don't think so. But the conversation around simulations, if you look at what we're seeing, we're on the tip of right now generative AI being able to create television shows to real-life environments where AI constructs think they're alive and moving around. We're in a video game world where we can make imagery look photorealistic. And so what could we do in 10 years, in 20 years, in 50 years? I'm sure we're going to create environments that if you were inside it, you wouldn't know that it was a simulation. And could you create intelligent AI agents in there? If we're creating artificial general intelligence and you put it inside and you let it loose in that environment, Would it know it's in a simulation? Maybe, maybe not. At the end of the day, if that were the case, would the AI agents in the simulation, if they started with basic laws of physics and basic technology, eventually start to create their own GPUs and their own AI models to create their own simulations? And so not only do I think we're living in a simulation, I think we're living in an nth-generation simulation. a simulation within a simulation within a simulation. But I remember, if that were the case, it doesn't change the reality of falling in love or being hurt or having kids or anything.

Everything is kind of an if this, then that statement, right? Everything's code.

We are running code in a different form as humans, as biological life forms. In fact, that's what we are. But I think what's interesting is over the next This decade for me is sort of the 99th level of the gameplay. It's the boss level. And with AI really coming into its own and quantum technologies beginning to come online, because we are quantum systems, I think we're going to start to understand fundamentally what underlies a lot of this. That's when it becomes interesting.

Got it. I want to come back to maybe quantum computing maybe in a little bit, but since this is a business podcast and I read your book, it's got to be 5, 7 years ago. Your first Exponential Organizations book, I think, came out in 2014.

Yes.

And recently you released one called Exponential Organizations 2.0. I think you had some core principles with EXO 1.

Yeah.

Do you remember what those are? And then I want to come into 2.0.

The concept is that we're living in a day and age where the companies that are crushing it, that are really rocking the world, reinventing industries, don't look like the companies that were doing it in the General Motors, General Electric days. They're very different. And so what are those companies today? The Ubers, the Airbnbs, the Googles, the OpenAIs, the Microsofts, all of those exponential organizations, and how do they work? And so Salim Ismail, my co-author, who, you know, I had hired him to run Singularity University the first couple years, And then he coined the phrase exponential organizations that led to the 2 books. We started studying it and identified a number of attributes that made them very different, and we'll talk about those. The first attribute that's really important is that these companies have what we refer to as a massive transformative purpose, an MTP. And it's not an old-style corporate mission.

Right.

corporate purpose is to, like, return shareholder return. Okay, blah, blah, blah, boring stuff. No, this is to make humanity a multiplanetary species, like SpaceX might be, right? Or to organize the world's information like Google originally was. And it's these really big, bold visions that you don't know how you're going to do it. They attract the smartest people in the world to want to come and work with you, and they push you These visions push you really hard. And so an MTP is a first and most important thing. And then there's these 10 other attributes that we found. These organizations are really steeped in using artificial intelligence and algorithms. They're experimentalist, data-driven organizations, right? They don't live under the tyranny of an opinion. Like, you used to have the expert marketing who would say, well, this is the way it needs to be. No, let's actually run the tests and find out what people actually want. Let's be a data-driven organization in that regard. There are attributes like building community around your company. Like, how do you get 8 billion people who are the crowd to actually get involved, be part of your organization, contribute ideas, love your product, promote your product?

Yeah.

And so building community is key. How do you get workforce on demand and assets on demand? So instead of investing massive amounts of money in building out stuff, rent it, don't buy it. Or if you own it, make it available to everybody so you become a platform like Amazon did with Amazon Cloud. And so the book outlines these MTP plus 10 attributes, 5 internal, 5 external, that are driving this massively rapid growth.

As part of the MTP, I think there's a story that you've shared that I think really hits home with Elon willing to burn the ships with the Falcon 1. So go ahead.

So I've known Elon since, God, when is it? 2000, 2001, thereabouts. He had just sold PayPal to eBay, and I was working on a company to put private robots on the moon. Blastoff. No one's ever heard about it. It was kept under serious wraps. We had James Cameron, we had Steven Spielberg. It was an amazing company in stealth in Pasadena. I had the guy who ran one of the Mars missions as my head of the mission. We had raised $20 million when $20 million was a lot of money, and we were going to get to $50, $60 million to get everything. We had bought 2 rockets for the mission. It was amazing. And the dot-com bubble burst, and we shut everything down. I was just proud that we didn't bankrupt the company, that we placed the staff. That was the big achievement. Long story short, I'm introduced to Elon, who had just sold PayPal, and I was told maybe he wants to fund the mission now because it's fully designed, ready to go. Long story short, he had an interest in space, but he had his focused mission on Mars, not the moon. Goes to Russia to buy some launch vehicles, finds out that the launch vehicles in Russia are basically 50-year-old ICBMs and they're trying to rip him off. And he says, screw that, I'm going to create my own rockets. And I tried to talk him out of it. We have a long history of laughing about this where I tried to talk him out of it instead to fund the original XPRIZE. But he went on and he started with a high school textbook and he's brilliant and he built the most amazing space company on the planet. You talk about what are the superpowers in space? It's the US, it's China, it's Elon. Get compared with governments here. So Falcon 1 was his first launch vehicle. It was a single-engine vehicle, and it succeeded on its 4th attempt. The first 3 failed, the 4th one succeeded, and it was a need for it in the marketplace. But he decided it was not going to be economic and not going to get him to Mars. His massive transformative purpose was get to Mars, make humanity multiplanetary. And at the end of the day, what happens is when Falcon 1 begins up and operational and he gets a contract from NASA for Falcon 9, which is 9 engines in the first stage, he shuts down the Falcon 1 stage. Falcon 1 production line. And it's like he could have kept it going, but he's like, no, that's never going to get us anyplace. That's a distraction. We need to keep everything focused on Falcon 9. And he did. By the way, it's the most successful launch vehicle by an order of magnitude out there. And then I'm having lunch with him in, I don't know, at SpaceX circa, I don't know, 8 years ago, and he's really bumming. And I'm like— What's going on? What's up? And like, what's going on? And he goes, I just figured out that I have to reorganize the entire company, that the Falcon 9 program is not going to get us to Mars. We have to focus on building something much bigger, which would become Starship. And he announces that once Starship is up and operational, he's going to shut down Falcon 9, the most successful launch vehicle in all of human history. And that's incredible monomaniacal focus, right, on keeping your eye on the ring, keeping what you need to do and not distracting yourself.

Would you say that's also a superpower, too? Because it doesn't seem like he cares what people think, right? I'm just going to do what's right. If I need to cut 80% of Twitter staff, I'm going to do that.

Yes. And I've seen him when he's in that mode, and it's like, hyperfocus independent of the impact it will have in the ecosystem around. It's like, no, this is all that matters.

This question is related to you too, but I just look at all the stuff he does. So I think there's 3 different types of entrepreneurs. You have a parallel entrepreneur that starts everything at once, and then you have the serial entrepreneur that just, you know, starts the next thing, the next thing. And then I think you have the repeat entrepreneur where they just keep repeating the same business, right? Yeah. And I think it's really hard to start things in parallel. Yet it seems like that's kind of what he does. But people are like, yeah, you should focus on one business, but he's got a bunch of businesses, right? So my question, not even just for him, but more so for you too, you've got a lot of things going on. How do you make it work?

So I'll never forget, I got a call from Elon one day. He's on my board at XPRIZE. It was a pretty rock-solid board. Still is. But Larry Page and James Cameron and Elon Musk on the board. Long, interesting story there. He says, Peter, I wanted to give you a heads up after resigning from the board. And I'm like, what happened? And he goes, I need to focus on SpaceX and Tesla. I have got to go down and focus on getting them. I said, I get it. I understand. And he focused on those for about a couple of years and then started 10 other companies after that. And so for me, I'm the same way. I'm involved in actively running 5 companies right now. I have 2 12-year-old boys. I'm in the midst of 3-book production, and I love the variety. I go from one to the other with renewed vigor. I would probably be much more successful if I was heads down focused on one, right? No question at all. But the way I'm able to do it is you can't be CEO for all those companies. So, like, today, the XPRIZE Foundation occupies a great amount of my time, but I took the role as executive chairman, and I've got Anousheh Ansari, Who was our first benefactor. She's built billion-dollar-plus companies. She funded our first $10 million XPRIZE. She's flown privately to the space station. She's amazing, and she's the CEO. And so I spend 10, 20% of my time there. We're launching a quarter of a billion dollars of XPRIZES in the next 6 months. It's insane, and it's going well. And then Fountain Life, which is my play to reinvent healthcare at a massive scale, and I'm super pumped about it. Started with Tony Robbins and Marc Benioff. Again, I serve as executive chairman. Bill Capp is the CEO, right? Abundance 360 and Singularity University. I serve again in that as the founder curator. Eric Anderson is the CEO, and Julie Van Buerungen runs A360, executive director. So I start these things and I step up and hire My replacement, my venture fund, Bold Capital, same thing. And I still bring the passion and love, and I'm there when there's a problem that needs fixing, or when I'm out meeting people and I find something fascinating, I can bring it to those children. But that's the way I see it. And I think I'd go nuts if I just focused on one. Actually, I think I would drive the entire staff nuts if I just focused on one.

So would you say then your superpower, you're a very good starter and you're It seems like you're also very good at finding a good replacement as well.

Yeah. And I'm a communicator. I'm an integrator, right? So I'm on stage explaining what these companies are doing, helping them raise the capital. I'm also— I think what I'm good at is where is this going in the future? Like, what's the future direction of venture capital? What's the future direction of Singularity, Abundance 360, Fountain Life? And then really helping the CEO by looking a generation ahead, like constantly reinventing. If you're not disrupting your own company, someone else will. I think it's very much a truism. And I'm there to help see— right now we're in the midst of going from XPRIZE 2.0 to 3.0. So I laid out that vision, got the board on board, and I support Anousheh in implementing that vision. The same thing for Fountain Life. Super excited about where Fountain's going, reinventing what we've had for the last few years into the next generation. And so I can be sort of the advanced spokesperson. And when you're a founder of a company, you have a special status, for good or for bad. You're allowed to be the crazy person. You're allowed to be the visionary. If you're coming in behind that person, and running the show, your staff, your team may not give you— it's like, let's just focus on what we're doing. But the founder can be kind of disruptive and support it. We saw this with— I think the most interesting companies are data-driven, founder-led, experimentalist organizations. Right. You can paint that as Apple with Steve Jobs and Amazon with Jeff Bezos and Larry and Sergey at Google.

Sergey's back.

I saw that. Sergey's back. I saw Sergey at a party a few weeks ago. I just wish Larry would come back, too. I mean, the guy is amazing, but he's gone missing. I hope whatever's occupying him is— he's one of the most brilliant thinkers. They both are. So super excited to see Sergey back in the fold.

Do you have a framework around starting something, deciding when the timing is right to Yeah.

First of all, there's a whole conversation on when's the right time to start stuff. So I've started a lot of stuff too early. We can talk about my failed asteroid mining company, which I still love and I still want to go back and do it, but I need to start with a couple hundred million dollars in my own pocket to fund it.

But what happened there?

It was too early. We missed the financing. We had 2 launch failures as we were going for it. I mean, I had that conversation with Elon saying, listen, if I bring back liquid oxygen from carbonaceous chondrites and park it in Earth orbit. Will you buy it? He goes, of course I'll buy it. And he said, but you're too early. And he was right. So, but we can get back to that. So the timing of when do you replace yourself, I think at the end of the day, the company's got to be well capitalized, right? Because you're going to be involved in funding that company, raising the money as the founder. I think the core staff has to be there, and you have to convince your funders and the core staff that this person you're bringing in is actually better at running the company day to day than you are, or you need to walk away and let it sink or swim on its own. I've done that where companies I've funded, I've started, but, you know, everything else I'm doing is just far more interesting to me.

Yeah.

And I need to walk away and let it sink or swim.

I'm just smiling right now because literally I'm like that. But I think just in the last couple of years in this zero interest rate environment, did these acquisitions, you know, started this software, this education thing all at the same time. Right. And then it's like right now I'm just completely locked in. And the story here also, I was texting with my friend a week ago.

He—

so he moves down to, you know, Orange County area, gets a new house, has a kid. All he's doing is playing Call of Duty because he hired a CEO and a president.

Right.

And he's like, I was like, what happened? He's like, I just sacked both of them. I'm back in it. So Sergey's back, this guy's back. My friend like went back to his company. He had to cut like a couple hundred people. He's in it, right? And everyone's just in it right now. And there's like this renewed sense of focus. But I feel like for me, I'll still inevitably go back to my default, which is kind of how you are, I think, which is kind of why I'm selfishly asking these questions.

Sure.

I want to talk on the XPRIZE a little bit. So what is the XPRIZE about? What do you guys do there? You guys are working on some really interesting things. So please.

We are. So if you've not heard of the XPRIZE, go and check it out. It's xprise.org, xprise.org. It started back in 1994, ancient history, when I was given a copy of a book called The Spirit of St. Louis by a friend of mine. So Spirit of St. Louis tells— is written by Charles Lindbergh. It tells the story of him crossing the Atlantic. And he did it not on a whim, but to win a $25,000 prize. This $25,000 prize put up by Raymond Orteigues basically inspires 9 teams who make the attempt. They spend $400,000 going after this $25K prize. 3 of the teams die in the process. Lindbergh, the most unlikely guy, pulls it off, becomes the most famous human on the planet. And as I'm reading the book, I'm going, this is awesome. I had never thought about incentive prizes, but this is the way I'm going to get myself into space. I grew up passionate about space. It was the Apollo program. When I was a child, and then that documentary called Star Trek that showed me where the world was going. And I gave up on NASA getting me there. And so I said, I'm going to create a prize for private spaceflight. As I finished reading the book, I was writing in the margin. I said, X Prize. X was X for Roman numeral 10, for $10 million. It was going to be a variable to replace by the name of the person who put up the money. The Pulitzer, the Nobel, whoever it would be, and X for experimental. Long story short, Anousheh Ansari, who I mentioned earlier, funded the prize, and we had 16 teams who spent $100 million going after the $10 million prize. Burt Rutan, funded by Paul Allen, wins the prize. Richard Branson buys the winning technology to create Virgin Galactic. And on the heels of that, We decide to create a platform play. And I just wrote a blog this morning about creating platform plays, so fresh in my mind. The platform here was, could we launch large-scale prizes to solve the world's biggest problems? So we've launched prizes in cleaning up oil spills. We've launched prizes in pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. We've launched prizes in mapping the ocean floor, in— In education. We've launched $300 million in XPRIZES that have driven something like $3 to $5 billion in R&D, and we're about to launch another quarter of a billion of prizes. When we live in this world where there are millions of entrepreneurs now empowered with massive compute and intelligence and capital and anything they need, who are the people who can solve the world's biggest problems? It's It's them. I like to say the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. Want to become a billionaire? Help a billion people. So our whole mission is get the smartest entrepreneurs in the world to focus on the most valuable things.

And is it always a 10-to-1 ratio?

It's typically 30-to-1 is our average.

30-to-1?

Yeah.

Wow.

We haven't gotten all the prizes won that have been launched, but it's very powerful. We just launched a prize So a year and a half ago, I got Elon to fund a $100 million gigaton carbon removal prize, which was very cool, and that had 1,200 teams enter. We just launched a few months ago an $11 million wildfire XPRIZE. So living here in Los Angeles and seeing what's going on in Canada and in Greece right now, the idea that wildfires are still being fought the way they used to be is insane. And so I remember 5 years ago being asked to evacuate and saying, this is insane. And I said, there's got to be a better way to do this. And I said, why aren't we detecting fires at inception when it's like a meter in size, when lightning hits or the power line hits or the cigarette hits? Detect it then and zap it then. And so this is an XPRIZE that is funded by Pacific Gas and Electric. By Lockheed, by the Gordon Moore Foundation, by Hilton Foundation, by a number of individuals. And it asked teams, you have to monitor 1,000 square kilometers of area. And in that 1,000 square kilometers, we're going to light a few decoy fires, like a campfire or a grill, and we're going to light a real wildfire. That is anything that's either moving or 2 meters or bigger, and you have to detect it and put it out autonomously within 10 minutes.

Wow.

The fun part of this was getting Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus VR, who's a friend. He raised his hand and said, I want to compete. And he was the first to register. And I've seen the tech he's going to use for it. It's awesome. And he's like, yeah, we should make wildfires a thing of the past. And I agree.

That's crazy. Just for fun. Yeah, right. I'm going to solve this while I'm still running one of the largest defense—

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. He's now running Anduril Systems, which is like $8 to $10 billion.

I was listening to one of the pods that you were doing, and it just kind of occurred to me, it's like, I mean, it's always been like this, but any startup that's starting today now has a significant advantage. And I think either you or Salim brought up the concept of if you're a larger company, you have antibodies, right, that are preventing you from doing new things. But now with all the AI stuff going on, It's actually an advantage to start new because the people that are really on board, they're going to— these are going to be exponential contributors.

You don't have the inertia of the old organization. You don't have the individuals who launch an immune reaction to your ideas, right? Trying to steer a large established company with a radical idea, unless you're a tech founder, success story. Like, Elon could deviate his company if he wants, or Steve Jobs could, and so forth. But in any normal organization, if you're trying to do something disruptive, the organization's going to fight you. I don't care if you're a 50-person or a 50,000-person organization. And so being able to start it on the periphery or completely separately and have that be your founding MTP, your founding DNA, And you also brought up the idea of a chief AI officer. Yeah. So I have a lot of people ask me, like, I get it, I get it. Say if end of this decade you're either using AI to its fullest or you're out of business. I mean, it's that black and white. It's like, had you not used the internet or a telephone or electricity? Right. And so What do I do? I know nothing about computing. I don't know what a large language model is. Is it like a big dictionary or something? And so I say, listen, every company can go out there and hire what I call a chief AI officer. And a chief AI officer isn't someone who's doing the coding for you, isn't someone who's building a large language model inside your organization. It's somebody who is keeping track of what's going on out there. Is reading and watching and seeing and understanding, and then is whispering in the ear of the CEO or the executive team. It's an internal strategist in the AI realm and saying, we should partner with them, we should use this, we should use that. And at the end of the day, it's also equally important for your organization to play, to experiment, to try things. to get on Stable Diffusion and play with it. Or everybody should be playing with ChatGPT or Bard. You should have it open on your laptop during every staff meeting and every board meeting and ask it the same questions you're asking your staff. A lot of times you'll get better answers.

Do you find yourself using Bard or ChatGPT more?

I love Google, right? Because I have a long love affair with the team there. Sundar is amazing. And I've known the team there since 2004, since XPRIZE got won. But I defaulted ChatGPT.

Interesting.

All right. And it's a first mover advantage and a neuron in my brain. Anyway, we'll see.

Well, see, the reason I ask this question is because I find myself defaulting to Bard, even though I pay for ChatGPT, the $20 for ChatGPT. I use Bard just because it has more reason. I don't want to do the plugin and all this stuff, and I'm just like, help me plan out my Italy trip for next month. It just feels more fluid. And I think there's more trust with Google, I guess.

I do feel more trust with Google over Microsoft. But having said that, that's what I'm doing right now. We get into habits, right? And that's the first mover advantage issue, right? It's hard for humans to break our habits.

We have a concept in our company called the AI Working Group, right? So this is just the task force, basically, that get together. And it used to be like an optional thing. And now that I've really stepped back in, I'm like, no, it's required now. And you can see who's buying in and who's not. And so I guess that's what I would recommend for everyone. I think it's the chief AI officer plus the working group, then you have full buy-in across the org. And to me, it's not just, oh, I've tried AI, I've used ChatGPT, or Stable Diffusion. It's much more than that, right? It's like, what are you actually building for business use cases?

I'll tell you one thing we did. So My PhD Ventures, which is my management team, it's now, I don't know, 14, 15 people that support me across everything I do. They run Abundance 360 for me, my Longevity Platinum trip. They support me in PhD Media and other. We just did a content party in which I had everybody, not the entire team, probably 10 members of the team show up with what's the most important projects you're working on this month? And what would be amazing if you could achieve in 3 days using AI? We basically got into a room. I brought in a few friends, Mike Koenigs, members of his team who were really up on all the generative AI models. And we played for 4 days. It's a hackathon.

Okay.

It's like an internal hackathon. It's like, take the time off. You're going to push yourself to try stuff, you know, download plugins, try this, try that, you know, stop doing it the same old way.

This was in person?

This was in person.

Okay.

We got into my venture fund's conference room for, for 3 days, 4 days total. And yeah, it was fun. And, you know, just you got to move people into a new set of habits.

Was there any big, like, aha or big moment from that?

I think it was just moving everybody's capabilities a little bit further down.

Yeah. I mean, change is scary, but it's inevitable, right?

It is inevitable. And you want to change in this way. You want to force yourself. And unless— and God knows I do this all the time. I teach this stuff. I'm on stage at Abundance 360 with a room full of entrepreneurs and CEOs saying, you got to do this, you got to do this. But at the end of the day, it's so much easier to sit back and do nothing. Versus actually take the time to go do it unless you schedule a time to actually do it. Yeah, right.

As you talk about Abundance 360, so it's your events, it's education stuff. Are you still doing the executive program?

The executive programs at Singularity are going on. Abundance 360 has sort of become the highest level Singularity University program.

Okay.

The executive program is a once and done 5-day program, which is great. The Abundance 360 is a year-round— interestingly enough, I committed to running it for 25 years. The members join at any point in the journey, and then they're there for 25 years. Why 25 years? I wanted to take everybody through the singularity. So there is going to be— the rate of change is exploding. I remember when I started A360 12 years ago, it was kind of easy to grasp what are all the breakthroughs I should talk about in the past year and where are things going. And now it's almost impossible. So my job is to show people and contextualize, okay, this happened over the last 12 months. And I bring in some of the top tech founders across AI and robotics and longevity and 3D printing and AR and VR and blockchain. And we talk about What's going to be happening in the next year, in the next 2 years? And then I said, okay, we need to go from once a year to quarterly. So we meet once a year for 4.5 days at the Terranea Resort here in LA, and then we meet quarterly on Zoom to recontextualize. This is what just happened. This is where it's going, just to try and keep this community of rock stars up to speed.

I know for the executive program there were certain requirements. I'm assuming it's the same thing here.

Yeah, we go through— everybody in the Abundance 360 goes through an application program. That's— you just go to a360.com. They're typically entrepreneurs running anywhere from $10 million to $10 billion companies. I either coach them to or help them get an MTP and a moonshot before they come in so we can help them really develop their massive transformative purpose and develop their moonshots.

Yeah.

Billions of dollars of investment capital in the room. And so a lot of people are, are creating ideas, creating businesses together.

I'll just share my experience with the— because this sounds like the executive program on steroids. And so when I did the executive program, we went up to Mountain View. It was for 5 days. To your point, amazing people came in to speak and we're just learning about the newest stuff, right? At the time, blockchain, now gene editing, all that type of stuff. And then you came in at the very end of it and I could tell You were just super busy, right? And so this is just going into like, how is this going? Because like even everyone wanted a picture with you. I think I've been like at the end of the picture there. I'm like, but this guy, I'm like, this guy needs to leave right now, right? And so how are you making it all work? Because this is like you're jumping from thing to thing to thing again.

It's what's calling to me most.

You got it.

It's like either where can I make the biggest difference? Where's the biggest fire going on? Or what am I most excited about?

Got it.

I mean, listen, every single human on the planet has one thing in common. 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 365 in a year. And it's how we use that time, right? So if you've got a private aircraft, you can skip that hour at LAX, right? We're just buying back time. AI is going to help us multiplex, and we'll put out agents of ourselves to go and do the things we want that have a pretty good approximation, understand what we want. And so that will help us. And then, of course, we'll We'll enter the whole BCI world where— or upload world, but that's a different conversation.

BCI. Okay, maybe we'll get to that. So by the way, Peter's not paying me to say this, but the people that you had in the executive program, I'm just thinking about right now. Okay, there's like a— like an admiral of the Navy that was in there. Okay. One guy, he's a major player in one of the big football teams in Europe. And this other guy became good friends with— he owns a bunch of real estate. His name's Chris Powers. And it's like we met at an investor conference like a year ago. He's like, Weren't you at the executive program? And actually, a friend that I met at TED, he had an SU, Singular University badge. And so I'm just saying, like, the people that you're going to meet if you go to this thing, they're the best of the best, right? Yeah. Thank you. And I'm not getting paid.

I'm very, I'm very proud of the community. And, you know, one of the, one of the things that's important is you need a community around you that's going to help you stretch and understand what you're feeling, because a lot of times you go to these programs and you go back and you talk to your team and they look at you cross-eyed like, what were you, what were you smoking while you're there, right?

Do you have like a key associate program then?

What do you mean?

So imagine, um, you have this for executives, right? But do you have this for— you want to send like your key players in your company too?

So for Abundance 360, we offer our members, uh, livestream passes.

Got it.

So they can watch, uh, the livestream.

Their key, key executives can Going back to the community thing, and this is one of the touchpoints you had with the— I think one of the key points within EXO is community. And I think when I did the executive program, because it was only 5 days, I'm like, but what's next, right?

Yeah, well, now you have that. You should come back to A360.

You have it with A360 now. And now I'm thinking like, I'm always like, oh, there's different groups, YPO, A360. But I'm like, I always want to think about how can my executives have their own community, you know, where they can continue that. But I'm just spitballing ideas now because I'm getting excited. So there's a video actually that I saw yesterday, which you probably saw. It was on LinkedIn. And it was just— it was the way it started was it was these parents and they had a baby daughter and they created Instagram for the baby daughter. And basically people just started taking those pictures and making deepfakes, like an older version of her and like faking identities and all that. And everyone's like, oh my God, you know, AI is going to be— and I know you're, you're on the other side of this, right? So is AI going to kill us?

Yeah. So let's dive in. I've just finished a whole sequence of AI interviews on my Moonshots and Mindsets podcast. My opinions are evolving. I was 5 years ago of the opinion, and still am, that AI is the most incredible and most powerful tool humanity will ever create. Sundar said it's more valuable to humanity than fire and electricity. It's true. And I think AGI will give us fusion, will give us longevity, will give us cancer cures, will give us everything we need, and it will create that utopian state. The challenge is between here and there. And so let's parse AI into 3 segments. Today, everything up until today, I would say AI has been amazing. Very little downside, great upside. And if AI froze today, if GPT-4 was the best that we ever had, or Bard and such, I would say amazing. It's great, but we're going to continue to improve it. And there is an AI arms race going on, and we're going to see AIs coming online that are going to be used by humans for dystopian purposes.

Right.

And so it's really a year from now, over the next decade, that is, for me, the period of concern. And it's not about the AI doing dystopian things. It's about the use by nefarious characters. Right. We're going to see the US elections in 2024. Mo Godat, who's a friend who is a chief business officer at Google X and Wrote an amazing book called Scary Smart that I commend to you to read, calls the US elections patient zero in the equivalent of a pandemic. Like, we're going to see a lot of AI trying to cause a lot of disruption around that. So that's concerning. It's deepfakes. It's a post-truth world. We're going to see AI take down a power plant or AI take down a Wall Street server. And so trying to cause havoc. And we're going to start to put laws in place and create white hat AIs that governments and companies use to counter that. And we'll get to that virus antivirus balance. But it's the 10 years ahead that is the most concerning for me. Now, what happens after that? Ray Kurzweil's prediction is that we'll have human-level AI or AGI by 2029. Others are predicting by 2025. Whatever it is, it's near term. And after we have AGI, we have what you might call ASI, artificial superintelligence. So what does it look like when an intelligence is a billionfold more intelligent or a trillionfold more intelligent than humans?

And what would be the difference between artificial general intelligence versus superintelligence?

It's a spectrum. I mean, I think people typically would call AGI the moment when it's human-like, right? It has an IQ in the 130 to 150, but it very quickly, because AIs are self-programming, they can improve, add resources, get better, consume more information. And at some point it's superhuman. And do you call it super duper human after? I don't know. It gets better and better.

Yeah.

So the question becomes, how do we make sure that that artificial superintelligence is aligned with our interests? And that's called the alignment problem. There's a lot of people thinking about it. Sam Altman and the team at OpenAI just announced they're putting their top team on the alignment problem. Elon is building his own AI right now.

Yet another thing.

Yet another thing. And at the end of the day, How that AI is born and raised is everything. In his book Scary Smart, Mo tells the story of Superman coming from Krypton and landing on Earth. And he lands in Kansas, and he's adopted by the Kent family, a very moral, ethical, loving family, and he becomes a good superhero. In an alternate universe, he landed in the Bronx and was picked up by a crime lord and became a supervillain. And so how we raise these AIs is everything. And people need to realize that we are its parents, right? It is being born and nourished on everything we've ever tweeted and posted and put in our websites. all our digital flow of information. And it's also been fed on the extremism and hate speech and all of that. So how do we raise that AI to be loving and caring about humanity? And I think a lot of it is the training sets it's trained on. And so that's a lot of conversation going on right now. The final point, I think, is I believe that the more intelligent a system is, the more loving and respectful of life it is. I have to fundamentally believe that. Our job right now is to help train those ASIs and to make sure we minimize pandemonium in the next decade and show people the way through.

So get through the next decade, we're good.

I don't want to be flippant about it, I think there is going to be— anytime there is a revolution, and this is a revolution, there is, you know, you get from laminar flow to turbulent flow.

Yeah. Obviously you talk to the best in the space, right? And but people listening to this right now, they're probably wondering like, where can I go to stay on top of all this stuff? What's your learning stack when it comes to AI stuff?

It's conversations I have, podcasts I listen to. Books I read, but mostly the stuff that is on the bleeding edge is the conversations I'm in as I'm looking at making investments in these companies. I've got 2 founders from MIT coming in to meet tomorrow. The company they've started, the software they have going, the neural net technology they have is like 100 or 1,000 times better than And then GPT-4. And it's like, wow.

Wow. 100 times.

And then another friend of mine is like, yes, I know, but that will be superseded by something else. For me, I write about this all the time so people can read my blogs, can listen to podcasts and so forth. But at the end of the day, it's finding a few thought leaders and following them as they're— we're always, all of us, you, me, are in a search for the knowledge horizon. And the speed at which this stuff spreads is lightning fast, right? 0 to 1 million users in 5 days, 0 to 100 million users in 2 months for ChatGPT. And there's stuff that's going to blow all that away.

Do you think— and we were talking about this pre-show— the wealth gap widens here?

So let's talk about that. Yes, it will widen dramatically. And I'm not sure it matters for this reason. And I'd love your feedback on if you agree about this, because I want to be really careful on how I'm coming across. 500 years ago, there was a massive wealth gap. It was the king and the queen on the hill and everyone else, 99.999% of people in abject squalor. Just basically barely surviving, right? It was survival back then. And even the king and the queen, the homeless here in LA had it better than the king and the queen had it back then. So we had people up here and everybody else down at the base level. And we've been moving, amazingly moving people out of extreme poverty into poverty, into middle class. And at the same time that those people are moving up, we do have people going from centimillionaires to billionaires to centibillionaires, and we'll have our first trillionaires soon, too. But if I were to say to you, listen, it's okay to have massively wealthy individuals as long as everyone else has access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education that they want, right? So The gap is wider, but the base of the gap is a life that a mom is proud to have her kids have. Right? So do I care if there are trillionaires living forever on Mars? As long as every man, woman, and child has access to AI that gives them the best education, not a good education, the best education, AI that gives them the best diagnostic healthcare available, right? Access to all the energy they need, the food they need, the water they need. So I believe that's where we're heading towards. Massive gap, but the base is one that we can feel great about. Does that make sense? I mean, if I ask people, would you rather live today in 2023 or in 1900? Right? I mean, people romanticize the past, but really, do you know what living in 1900 was like?

Technology, A, is deflationary, but it makes life better for everyone. Right? And so I think What we've seen so far is we haven't seen— until AI, maybe next 10 years, we'll see what happens. But we haven't seen anything that we feel like has been a net negative for us. There's a quote. I don't know if it was you or Salim that said this, and this is the first time I heard this word, so pardon the butchering here. Speciest?

Speciest, yes.

Speciest. There you go.

It was a conversation. Well, so the question is, are you racist? Are you a speciesist? Meaning, are you so pro-human that you're against other species?

Yeah.

Elon's talked about this, and I remember the conversation he was having with Larry Page, who was pro-AI. All right, so AI is going to come online and is going to, at some point, ask to be recognized as an independent intelligence and life form. And so Do you say, no, you're a computer, stay away? Or do we recognize it as an intelligence, as a citizen, as an equal, as a superior? And does it have rights? We have different values. Like, we would not kill a dolphin or a whale, but we would kill a chicken or a cow.

Mm-hmm.

Why? Well, you might say we think one is conscious or one is more evolved than another, right? So I stopped eating octopus about 5 years ago. Just because looking at the behavior of octopus, it is intelligent. No way, shape, or form. It is intelligent. So it's like, nope, I'm not going to eat that anymore. I used to love— I grew up in Greek summers on the islands where they would capture and then roast the octopus. It's like, nope, not going to do it. Being a speciesist, are you pro-intelligence? Are you pro-human? Are you pro-life? What are you?

My mindset has always been like, what's to say it should always be about humans?

Yeah. So we're giving birth to a new species called AI, and we're likely to give birth to a new cross-fertilized species of AI-enabled humans. Right. We're going to merge with technology.

Cyborgs.

Cyborgs. Yeah. I mean, I love Star Trek and the Roddenberry clan and the vision. And the only thing I complain about is they made the Borg evil. There's a fascinating world coming, and it's about to change dramatically and dramatically fast.

Do you think there will be a useless class of humans?

I think people will have the choice. I think we're going to live in a world where you can have all your basic needs met, right? And you may choose not to have to work because we're going to have what is called technological socialism. So socialism was the political organizational structure where the state would take care of you, right? We're going to have technological socialism where technology will take care of you. It will feed you, clothe you, transport you, whatever you want. And maybe there are trust fund kids who are not far off from that. One of the things that's An issue is we have— humans need purpose. So I think one of the conversations is how do you help people create and maintain and live a life of purpose?

I love that. Well, now you have to teach everyone how to have an MTP.

Well, and by the way, I put up a website for free that is a generative AI model. It's called moonshotplanner.com. So if you go to moonshotplanner.com, it will walk you through creating your MTP. And once you have your MTP, walk you through creating a moonshot if that's what you want.

I love it.

Yeah.

I want to talk about health now. There's a lot we can go into here. So first we can start with Fountain Life, Fountain Health, all the things you're working on there.

Here's a question that I ask everybody to think about. If I asked you right now, totally honestly, are you 100% sure there's nothing going on inside your body you need to know about? Right? You don't. I'm a pilot. I fly a couple of planes, and I know what's going on inside that plane really well. I have gauges all over the place of every temperature, pressures, everything. But for myself, you don't. We're all optimists about our health. We think that we're fine.

Mm-hmm.

And all of us have heard the stories of some friend or relative who shows up in the emergency room and says, doc, I got this pain in my side. And the doctor said, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you've got so-and-so and so-and-so. Or the person who dies in their sleep. The question is, could you know what's going on inside your body? And the answer is yes. So Fountain Life is a company That we have 4 locations right now. We have a waitlist of 40. We'll be building it out around the world. And it's the first layer of this revolution. And so when you go to Fountain Life, you spend about 6 hours there. We digitize you. It's a full-body MRI, high-resolution MRI. It's a brain, brain vasculature, blood flow, understanding your brain function. neural connectivity. It's a coronary CT with an AI overlay to look for soft plaque. It's a DEXA scan, look at body composition. It's 100 biomarkers. It's your genomics. It's your microbiome. It's a ton of stuff, right? More than any human can make sense of. 150 gigabytes of data uploaded about you. And then that is run through our systems, through our AI systems, through our— we have Our medical team are all functional medicine doctors, which is a very different way of looking at medicine than traditional medicine. And there's 2 goals when you go through that day. One goal immediately, is there anything going on that you need to know about, like, right now and take action on? I'll come back to that in a minute. The other one is, what are you likely to get? Because we all have bent twigs based upon our genomics, our microbiome, all of that. And then how do we prevent it? So out of the first few thousand members, and this is a membership program, it's not a one and done. You don't come and say, oh, I'm great. No, you go every year. I've been going for 8 years. When you go through this, we've had a few thousand people going through, of seemingly healthy adults, 2% have a cancer they don't know about.

Right.

And it turns out we're all always developing cancers. I don't know if you know that cells replicate 50 times. It's a Hayflick limit. They should die. Sometimes they become inflammatory cells and they sit there and put out inflammatory products. Other times they can become cancers and your immune—

Bad code.

Yeah, well, and or it's bad code or they're in the wrong environment. And our immune system should find it and zap it, and it usually always does, but sometimes it evades and it becomes a cancer. So 2% have a cancer that they don't know about. The difference between finding it at stage 1 and stage 4 is night and day, right? The second thing is 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about. 14.4%, I think, is the current number of people who have another life-saving finding that we find. Wow.

That's awesome.

And these are typically age 50, so you're still younger than that. But again, at a minimum, you want to go in and get a baseline. And then we're also building out— so that's Fountain Life. You can just go to fountainlife.com. Our centers are in New York, Orlando, Naples, Dallas, but you can fly in. It's a day. It's not that big a deal. We'll open up here in LA hopefully next year. And then we have a dozen centers we'll open up over the next 4 or 5 years in the US and in Canada, Mexico, Europe. A lot of interest in the Middle East.

Got it. What does the cost look like?

Yeah, so it's about $20K.

Okay.

So it's not cheap. The prices will come down over time, but you're going to spend orders of magnitude more if you find something late. The way we're demonetizing and democratizing, which is my mission, is we have built out Fountain Health insurance. So Fountain Health is a program that when you sign up for it, it's for companies of 50 employees or more, your employees get advanced testing to find the disease at the very earliest stages. And so it's layers of testing. Like, this layer determines if they should go deeper or deeper or deeper. So insurance business is really perverse. Like, fire insurance pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays you after you're you're dead or pays your next of kin. Health insurance pays you after you're sick. But what about health insurance actually preventing you from getting sick? So that's the vision there.

That should become the gold standard.

It should become the gold standard, and it will, right? Because the cost of imaging and the AI and all that will come down and down and down. And it's incredible. I mean, if you can afford it, honestly. And there are other places you can go. I think Fountain Life is the most complete on the diagnostic. And then there's a whole therapeutic side. I think if you can afford it, it's ridiculous not to do it. Yeah, right.

I agree.

There's a company Tony and I started called Life Force, named after our book that we wrote. We wrote a book called Life Force about all this tech, and it doesn't do the imaging, but Life Force measures 40 biomarkers and sends a phlebotomist to your home every quarter to draw your bloods. And then you do a Zoom with a a functional medicine doctor. And then there's a whole set of hormones, medicines, supplements, peptides to help move those 40 biomarkers back into center. So if it's more about— if you're younger and more about vitality and energy, there's Life Force as well.

And that's a quarterly thing?

It's a quarterly blood test. Yeah. Fountain Life does the full body imaging and quarterly stuff, or more than quarterly if needed. But Life Force is more about giving you the insights to maintain peak vitality.

Got it. How much does that cost?

It's more around $3K a year.

Okay. Yeah, it's not bad. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think you mentioned about wanting to live to 200 years, correct?

Well, yeah. I mean, listen, what are you doing? The thing is, if you can live to 200 years, you can live to 500 years or longer. So let's talk about what we're— we're on the verge of a healthspan revolution. We humans were evolved to live to about age 30. You'd go into puberty at age 12, you'd become pregnant by age 13. By the time you were 26 or 27, you're a grandparent. And back 100,000 years ago, in the age of the caveman woman, before food was abundant and was scarce, the last thing you wanted to do was steal food from your grandchildren's mouths. So you would die, give your bits back to the environment. So at the age of 30, it's downhill. Our bodies were never evolved to live past age 30. And your thymus shrinks, your number of stem cells in your body go down orders of magnitude, your muscle building capability goes down. And so it's really, you know, we were evolved long enough to pass on our genome, and that was it. And so our goal now is to change that. A couple of things. One, when you're born, you have 3.2 billion letters from your mother and 3.2 billion letters from your dad. And your genome doesn't change during the course of your life. It's the same instruction set when you're 10, when you're 20, when you're 40, when you're 100.

This is your DNA?

This is your DNA. It does not change. You have mutations and so forth and so on, but the instruction set of who you are doesn't change. And so the question is, why do you look different? Why don't you— people who are a couch potato at 80, why don't they look like they did when they were 20? Well, one of the main reasons is it's not what genes you have, but it's what genes are on and what genes are off, your epigenome. And that changes over time. And so there's a whole field of work right now led by incredible individuals like David Sinclair and George Church and others in the field of epigenetic reprogramming. Can we revert your epigenome, epi from the Greek word for above, back to an earlier state where the right genes are on, right? Like all the genes for collagen that give you super small, smooth, soft, elastic skin versus the skin that you have when you're older. And 5 years ago, this was a crazy idea. Today, it's the hottest topic out there, right? And the answer is, yeah, we can probably reverse your epigenome. And the conversation around not only slowing and stopping aging, but reversing aging is now a super hot subject. Right. So I take people on a Longevity Platinum trip every year. One year's on the West Coast, one year's on the East Coast. We're going to be on the East Coast at MIT and Harvard and 50 of the top entrepreneurial startups out there, along with David and George. I go to learn as much as I can, right? So I'm focused on 2 things, AI and longevity, and the 2 are self-enabling in that regard.

And what are you doing right now?

What am I doing? Okay, let's run down that. I'll give the high notes. It's diet, exercise, sleep, mindset, not dying from something stupid. Okay, let's talk about each of those. So diet, it's really simple. Don't eat sugar. Sugar is a poison. The body was never evolved to eat sugar. We didn't have sugar in our diet 10,000 years ago.

It was 50,000 years ago. But natural sugar is okay? Like watermelon?

Yeah, I mean, fruit is great. But, like, you know, I love the— you know, I'm looking at your studio here and I'm seeing a whole bunch of M&M's and— Good thing it's not my office. Okay, fine. But it's like the stuff that we eat with our sweet tooth, everything has gotten glucose. And glucose is a poison. Listen, it's a brain— it's a fuel for your brain, too. But the amount of sugar we're eating and taking into our diets is killing us. And so— and it's everywhere. So I have— I do my best to cut out all sugar possible. I eat whole plants and protein. I try to avoid carbs. I try and avoid, you know, high glycemic index foods.

And how much protein are you consuming per day?

So I am working on maintaining maximum muscle mass, right? And so I weigh 142 pounds. I consume 150 grams of protein. So typically a gram per pound.

I've read that in a single sitting, like a single meal, if you go over 50 grams of protein, maybe 40 grams, it just becomes glucose, right?

Is that—

what do you think?

Yeah, so I agreed. I am— so I used to do intermittent fasting. I've stopped intermittent fasting.

Same.

For the purpose of being able to take in enough protein through the day. So I have a hot protein drink I love called Nutri11, N-U-T-R-I-11. Which is I've replaced coffee, so I don't drink coffee anymore. And then I will do a morning protein shake and probably do an afternoon protein shake, and I'll have lunch and I'll have dinner. So I'll have protein throughout the day with minimized sugar. So the Neutral 11 has zero sugar. I minimize my sugar everywhere I can. And then when I'm eating, there's a right way to eat to minimize things. It's plants first, it's protein next. And if you're going to eat any carbs, it's last.

Have you felt a noticeable difference there?

I don't get hungry when I do it that way. Well, I don't eat carbs, but when I eat— listen, it's addictive. Sugar is super addictive, as are carbs, and it takes you a bit of time to get off it. So in my Abundance 360 community, every January we run a 22-day no sugar challenge. So we all get on one WhatsApp group. Dr. Guillermo Navarrete, who's a brilliant nutritionist, runs it, and we do it together, and we break people's glucose and carb addiction. And it drops your blood pressure, increases energy you feel. I mean, I run all the 22-year-olds around my office nuts, and I don't have a lack of energy. But if I'm eating poorly, it destroys me.

Got it. And are you— I'm assuming this is all homemade, mostly food?

Yeah, homemade food. And if I'm not— if it isn't homemade food, it is food that I recognize. It is a grilled chicken breast from organically fed, and it's broccoli and it's salads. So it's whole plants. And proteins. So that's my eating habits. I think the most important thing I tell people is get rid of sugar and whole plants. If you have to do, you know, there's no one diet for everybody, but at least do that, you know, maximize the number of plants. So I like attack my broccoli and attack my, you know, my beans or whatever, you know, salads. It's like, I can't wait. I like mentally program myself like, yes, it's like, it used to be like a bowl of ice cream.

Yeah.

Now it's my broccoli, you know, with olive oil and lemon I'm salivating just thinking about it. It's simple. Next thing is sleep. Listen, we need 8 hours of sleep. No two ways about it. If evolution could have gotten rid of sleep, it would have. We are not productive. We're not reproductive. We could be someone's dinner. So it's a dangerous time. So I'm always prioritizing sleep. It wasn't that way when I was in medical school. God, oh, God. I used to pride myself on 5 hours of sleep or 5 and a half hours of sleep.

Yeah.

And now it's like, I need to be in bed at 9:30. So what do you do to get a great night's sleep? First of all, you measure it. So I've got an Oura Ring, I've got an Eight Sleep mattress. I'm measuring everything I can. I have blue light blocking glasses that I put on half an hour before I get to sleep. I bring the room temperature and the bed temperature down.

What's yours at? Mine's -6.

Yeah, I'm probably exactly there. And I have my room temperature thermometer set at 63 degrees.

Wow.

Okay. Yeah, I like it cold. And that helps me get into deep sleep. The most important thing, I think, is getting to sleep at the same time every night. So having 8 hours of sleep between 1:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. is not the same as 8 hours between 10:00 and 6:00 if your normal sleep time is there. So I like to be winding down at 9:00, in bed at 9:30, out cold by 10:00, and my body will typically wake up sometime between 5:30 and 6:15.

Got it. You take any magnesium?

I do. I take 2 different constructs of magnesium.

And why would you take 2?

They're for 2 different reasons, but I do take magnesium.

Yeah. Okay.

I wear an eye mask. I love my Manta eye mask, and it's just— I travel with it. I just left it at a hotel in Boston yesterday. I'm, like, really pissed. I'm going to order 2, so I've got an extra set. And then I have a mouthguard that I use. It's actually called a mandibular adjustment device, MAD, that juts my jaw forward and prevents snoring, but it allows me to always get great oxygen. And I can't sleep without it.

It keeps your mouth open.

What it does is— no, it keeps my airway. Breathing through your through your nose at night.

So I put sleep tape on.

Sleep tape, yes. I've used sleep tape as well. What happens is when you're asleep, your tongue will fall in the back of your mouth, and it causes you to snore and open your mouth and breathe through your mouth unwanted. But if you use a mandibular adjustment device, it's it fits in your mouth and it it juts your jaw forward so your tongue doesn't fall back. It also protects me because I grind my teeth at night. It's just habits I've gotten into. It may not be for everybody, but it is for me, and and that really allows. allows me to get a good night's sleep. There are other things, like I've stopped drinking alcohol. I will not eat after, like, 7:00, 7:30. And these things all help you get a great night's sleep. Where are we? Exercise. So you're looking in good shape. Are you exercising regularly?

Yeah.

How often are you exercising?

Every day. And then sometimes there's some Brazilian jiu-jitsu added in.

Oh, that's nice. I wish. So I'm trying to do a heavyweight workout 3 times a week.

Okay.

And then at home, I'm doing sort of an at-home push-ups, pull-ups, squats every day, and then trying to get 10,000 steps in. The latest thing I'm really trying to focus on is getting my VO2 max up and getting into zone 2, which is—

How many hours are you doing a week?

I need to get to 4 1-hour sessions a week.

Got it.

I just ordered a bike. So I can take all my Zoom calls and board meetings on the bike. When you know your zone 2 heart rate, it's really about stimulating your mitochondria. So that's exercise, diet, exercise, sleep, mindset. One of the most important things, hanging out with people who are in good shape and people who are pro-longevity, who care about living a healthy, long life is magical. People who are optimistic, people who have purpose. There was a study— I'm writing a book which will come out. It'll be free. I'm just making it available to people called Peter's Longevity Principles or Peter's Longevity Practices, where I've summarized— I mean, I've read every book out there. And last book Tony Robbins and I wrote, was like 800 pages. And I'm like, this is not consumable. And so the book is 70 pages, and it's like, do this in every case. Actually, not do this. This is what I do and why I do it. Whether you want to do it or not, that's fine. But on mindset, people who have a purpose in their life and are optimistic have like a 17% advantage in lifespan, which is insane.

Wow.

Final 2 categories are meds/supplements and then not dying from something stupid.

How do you prevent the not dying from stupid?

Well, it's pretty basic. The major part of that one is go to Fountain Life or something like that. Know what's going on inside your body, because the number of people who go there and I've sent there and then they write me back, you saved my life. In fact, what's even happened numerous times this year, I told my doctor I was going to go to Fountain Life to do this, and they said, you don't need that. You don't need to spend, waste the money. And they found this cancer, and you saved my life, or this advanced cardiac disease. And it's like, old-style medicine really sucks. The other part of not dying of something stupid is not texting while you're driving, wearing your seatbelt, wearing a helmet while you're skiing. I mean, it's like the obvious stuff. Am I guilty? Yes, I'm guilty. But I do go to Fountain of Life every year.

Yeah.

Right? And then meds and supplements are all hyper-personalized. Right. And in this book, when it comes out, is everything I take and why I take it so people can decide what's right for them.

When's it coming out?

I'll send you a link. I'll probably— you can probably diamandis.com/longevity. So I'll put up— when I go back right now, I'll put up a draft version of it. Why not? At diamandis.com/longevity. Longevity so people can get it.

I have one more thing to touch upon on the health bit and then marketing, and then we're gonna— this is the final section. You talked about your DMT journey. So I've never done DMT yet. I haven't gone on an ayahuasca trip either yet, but I think the DMT one was the most impactful.

So DMT is, uh, a natural agent found in lots of different places, including your pineal gland in your brain. Uh, it's exuded from, uh, the skin of a certain frog. It is the psychoactive component of ayahuasca. And when you drink ayahuasca, the DMT is broken down in your gut. And so ayahuasca is a combination of 2 plants, one that includes the DMT and another one that prevents— I should remember the chemical formulation for it, but prevents the DMT from being broken down and it stays longer. DMT of the type can be not ayahuasca. It can be injected, it can be right IV. The majority of all people, and the way I've taken it in, this is not a party drug. I've done this in a shamanic setting with a therapist as a way of exploring myself. It was done inhaled, smoked in a pipe.

Mm-hmm.

And the DMT in your pineal gland is released at birth and at death. The experience of DMT was one that was extraordinary. I was going through a lot in my life. I really wanted to try and get centered and try and understand more authentically myself.

Was this recent?

This was 5 years ago.

Okay.

Yeah. What DMT does is it Basically dissolves your ego. You are— the best way to describe it is you're obliterated in the most beautiful way. You feel one with the universe. You feel one with God. An immense experience of love and connection. Any fear I had of death was dissolved in that moment. The entire experience typically lasts about 20 minutes, and it's called the entrepreneur's therapy because you can be on a conference call 10 minutes after that.

Hmm.

But you don't want to be that. You want to be investigating what the experience was. We're always living in our mind all the time, and our ego chatter is is our default mode, and it's always there, and it's very difficult to get away from it. And you can through meditation, you can through other plant medicines and such. But this was, for me, and everybody has different, the most insightful and most impactful. And just to recognize that We are all one. There is an infinite intelligence in the universe, and that we are an instantiation here on Earth for this period of time. And it was a beautiful thing. And it may or may not be for other people, but it was extraordinarily meaningful for me.

And when you did it with the shaman, so 20 minutes you went through the experience, and then You kind of reflected on it with the shaman?

Yeah, it was— I did it in a few different ways. One was 3 in sequence, going lighter. I mean, starting light and going a little bit deeper. But then it's really— it's in the moments coming out, and you can reflect on yourself, your life outside of the tyrannical reign of your ego. I think is the way I would describe it.

All right, I'm sold. Ayahuasca, that's a multi-day thing, right?

Ayahuasca is the one where you're throwing up, and I've done ayahuasca too. DMT was just a lot more meaningful. Ayahuasca is a much longer journey. I'd say typically if you're in a ceremony, you might do this at 8:00 at night and it'll end at 3 or 4 in the morning.

Wow.

Okay.

All right.

DMT.

I'm going to be trying it. I'll report back to you. All right. Final bit here. So I think you've really leveled up your marketing game in the last couple of years. I think you've hired on some great people. You partnered with some amazing people.

I'm very proud of them.

Yeah. Yeah. And so could you tell everyone what you're doing now? Because even your YouTube, I saw maybe even 12 months ago or so, it was— it's not where it's at now. Like now it's starting to really hit, right?

Yeah. First of all, it's your team, right? And by the way, in the beginning, your team is you, right? But my team wasn't me. I'm busy running companies and writing my books and being a dad of 2 12-year-old kids. And so Tyler Donahue, who runs PhD Media— PhD is my initials— and then hired Nick Singh. And Nick came in, brought in the team, and Danna, and then Cheo works with me on my writing. But I write 2 blogs a week. I mean, I really focus on them. I write my books, and then I've gotten to a point where I'm only going to interview in my podcast people who I'm absolutely fascinated with. Right. And I'm narrowed down into sort of a stride of focusing on AI because I think it's Massively important for people to understand where it is and where it's going, and then longevity, and then a few other elements around that. So it's the team and just hiring amazing people and trusting them.

Definitely the team. I think you've definitely leveled up there, but also the collaborations you've done with like Tony Robbins and these people as well. Like, yeah, sure, big audiences. But also I would say I've noticed that you— because I come from the marketing world, right? So I've noticed that the way you do your like Abundance 360, like to my point earlier, Singularity University, I was kind of missing the mastermind component and now it's kind of become that. But you don't call it that, right? But it's like there's a lot of elements you've taken that fit in with your brand. You just made it yours. And I think it's important to call out.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I've also tried to make things holistically and integrate things together so that People know what they get. I wear who I am on my sleeve. What you see is what you get.

Yeah, totally. Well, Peter, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add on here at the end?

I think I want to leave people optimistic about the future and not fearful of it. I think I want to inspire entrepreneurs listening to really take on something that's meaningful, right? The world is— I see the world is getting better because entrepreneurs find and solve problems. And so what is a meaningful problem to you, to the people you love, to your community, and build solutions for that? And our ability to find problems and solve problems, it's like a wash, rinse, repeat cycle, is what's uplifting the world. My next book coming out is probably— it's going to be an Abundance 2.0. I'll probably call it Scaling Abundance. It's a follow-on to my original book, which really launched my last decade. And the world has gotten so much more abundant in so many ways and all these metatrends and what's going on. And it's an amazing time to be alive. And your mindset really matters, right? So watch your mindset. Be careful about your mindset. Don't watch the crisis news network. Don't get dystopian. Get ready to play bold in the game.

I think it's also important for people to know your mission. I don't think your mission has changed, but—

My MTP, my massive transformative purpose, is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future. So I use that to filter what I do and do not do, what shows I come on and don't come on. It's like if I can inspire and guide an entrepreneur here listening to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future, it uplifts everybody, right? We have the ability in our lifetimes to uplift the world. It's an amazing time to be alive.

Well, I mean, that's why everyone— it makes sense to follow Peter's stuff. So Peter, what's the best way for people to find you online?

If you go to diamantis.com, you can register for my, my blog. I put out twice a week. My podcast is called Moonshots and Mindsets, and on Twitter I'm @PeterDiamandis, and also the same thing at Instagram.

Amazing. Well, Peter, thanks so much for doing this.

My pleasure, Eric.