We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance with Peter Diamandis, Steven Kotler, and Joe Polish

What does a useful, productive, sane relationship with AI actually look like?

It doesn't begin with AI. It begins with you being clear about what your purpose is. Once you're clear about your purpose, who you want to be a hero to, who you want to support and provide services to, and you've got that emotional energy driving you, you then use AI to do that at a scale that you never thought was possible.

AI is coming for our cognition, our creativity, and The minute you let AI start thinking for you and being creative for you, you're going to cognitively offload that skill. So you have to do the work first and let the AI serve as a feedback system to help you improve. Otherwise, the AI is the only thing that's getting better and you're actually getting worse.

How can you be a domino for someone else?

The Joe Polish Show.

Any problem in the world can be solved with the right Genius Network. This is Joe Polish. We're here at the Genius Network headquarters in Tempe, Arizona. This one is personal for me because because I have known these guys for a while. So 14 years ago, I sat down with Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, and I want to be honest, I didn't even say Steven's last name right. I think I called him Kotler, something. And you can still see that original video on YouTube if you just literally type in our names. That interview was for their book Abundance, and this Genius Network community helped make it a New York Times bestseller. So it hit number 2 on New York Times. And so I've been watching these two think about the future ever since. And now they're back with a new book called We Are as Gods, and they mean it literally. The question they're asking is the most important question of our lifetime, and we now have godlike capabilities. AI, longevity, genetics, robotics— things that were science fiction are now what they call Tuesday morning. But are we wise enough to handle it? So I want to welcome two of my oldest friends, Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler. So thank you, guys.

I need to— I need to take a second and just, uh, Do you proper, Joe, because I love Joe. He's one of the most generous individuals. I meet Joe for the first time after my book, our book, Abundance comes out. And Joe's like, "Love the thesis. Love what you've been doing with the XPRIZE. I'm going to buy 500 books." And I'm like, "I just met you, Joe. You're buying 500 copies of the book to support getting the abundance thesis out there? That's amazing." And then Joe invites me to Genius Network and puts me in that, you know, that beautiful red throne, the hot seat. And he turns to everybody, goes, let's make— yeah, right there.

Yeah, we got it in the corner.

Let's, let's make Abundance a New York Times bestseller. And he's like, you know, Mike Klein, you do this. And, you know, it's just going around the room. And just like the, you know, like the orchestra conductor of the, uh, uh, you know, the, uh Marvel superhero characters, he pulls it all together and we shoot to number 2 on the New York Times list, which really I owe Joe so much for supporting that launch. And then he and Dan Sullivan together helped launch and come up with the idea of the Abundance Summit, which has been an extraordinary engine for me to share my passion. So, Joe, just want to applaud you. And, um, those of you who are not members of Genius Network, it's an extraordinary group. Uh, and I'm excited to be coming to the annual meeting later, uh, this year. Super cool. And actually, uh, Kotler and I will be there together. It is Kotler, right? That's how you pronounce your name.

I also have to point out, by the way, that over the years, more marketers have taken credit for being part of that original group. It's amazing how many people come up to me, they're like, you know, I was part of Joe Polish's thing, we helped put abundance on the bestseller list. I'm like, I was there, there were 14 people there, there were not 700.

Yeah, no, it is really, it is really funny when someone gets close to someone's success. There's that despair.com company that has, uh, no single raindrop is responsible for the flood.

And so, you know, but anyway, yeah, but the favorite one is success has many parents, failure has but one.

Yeah, no, totally, totally. But no, it's been great. And the domino effect of that has been so fascinating to watch. So yeah, we've been at this for a very long time. You've done a lot of stuff. And so, you know, when I first saw the title, "We Are as Gods," I was like, okay, this is sort of interesting. But after, you know, literally the first 20 pages of this book, it's mind-blowing in how you make the comparisons of the biblical miracles versus the miracles that exist today and how you show all the categories. So when you say we're becoming like gods, uh, what do you actually mean by that?

Stephen, do you want to—

I mean, yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll— let me start and then you, you jump in. I'll give you— I just want to break down what Joe just says. So the title itself is taken from a Stewart Brand quote. Uh, Stewart Brand's the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was one of the original Merry Pranksters. He's a brilliant futurist. And back in 1968, he said, we are as gods and we might as well get good at it. And he was talking about technology. And in 1968, we did not have godlike technology. That has radically changed. And I'll give a couple of examples. Before I give the examples, if you take the Old Testament— and mind you, this is only one holy book and only one tradition— but if you take the Old Testament and you break down the miracles in the Old Testament, there are 83 of them, and they fall into roughly 10 categories. So we took those 83 miracles, those 10 categories, and we took all of modern technology and filtered it through those categories. And we ended up with 12 pages of single-spaced technology. In the book, you'll find about 6 pages because I had to cut it in half because we were just like, this is too long. We can't do this to our readers. And it's still 6 pages single-spaced. And we don't often think of it as godlike technology. We don't say omniscience and omnipresence. Instead, we say, oh, no, we have Google and ChatGPT, and we have Zoom. But the powers are actually the same. And the one that really drives it home— I think it drives it home for both Peter and myself— is I was in the room in 1999. It was a Wired magazine cover story when the very first bionic eye ever got turned on. So for the very first time, the blind could see. It was a one-off experiment. It was amazing. Blind guy, technology gets turned on. 2 days later, he's driving around a car around a parking lot. It was amazing to see. But the inventor sort of passed away. The technology never got brought to market. In the book, we detail kind of the next version of that that Max Hodak is bringing to market with the Science Corporation. And it goes after macular degeneration, which plagues 180 billion people. And we're talking like—

180 million, not billion.

180 million people, excuse me, which is literally a miracle of biblical proportions. So that is— and that's just one example. It goes on and on and on. Over to you, Peter, because you're good on the on and on.

Well, I mean, I mean, the reality is what you did between breakfast and right now, if you try to explain it literally to your grandparents, they would not be able to understand what you've done, right? You're able to know anything you want, anywhere you want, any place on the planet. The most powerful force that differentiates humanity from every other life form on this planet— we're not the fastest, we're not the strongest— it's intelligence. And intelligence just become accessible as a service to anyone anywhere. And we also on the verge of so many extraordinary things that are about to change in the next 5 years. And I think part of what we do in this book is we talk about the continued story of abundance. When we talked about abundance in 2012, it was not a buzzword that Jensen and Eric Schmidt and Elon and Dario and Demis and every tech person is talking about right now. It's all about abundance here, abundance there. It was, uh, I think we were early in that. We open the book with a, uh, couple pages of quotes about everybody talking about abundance. Um, but it's still the early innings. What we're about to experience, um, is gonna make life 5 years from now unfathomable to life today. Right? Uh, so when I was on stage at the Abundance Summit with Ray Kurzweil, uh, it was 2 years ago. He said, listen, over the next 10 years, 2025, back then to 2035, that decade, this forward decade, you're going to see as much progress as we saw in the last century, 1925 to 2025. And so, just to remind you what was life like in 1925, the Ford Model T was the highest level of technology on the planet. Only 30% of homes had telephony or electricity. That's how far we've come. Imagine going that far in the next 10 years. So, this is going to be extraordinary. So, we're going to hit artificial superintelligence, not just AGI. We're at AGI right now. However you want to describe it, it is intelligence beyond our conception of what intelligence is, intelligence a billionfold greater than humans. What does that even mean? And what are the implications of that? We're going to see humanoid robots accessible to all of us at a price tag of $30K, maybe $20K. We're going to see our lifespans, our health spans extended by decades with the promise. Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, his prediction was in the next 5 to 10 years, We're going to double the human lifespan. I mean, you know, that just explodes my head. What does that mean? All right, we're going to be on the verge. So, you know, Ray talks about longevity escape velocity by 2033. Um, it talks about, you know, high-bandwidth brain-computer interface by the mid-2030s, right? Connecting your 100 billion neurons, your neocortex, with the cloud. And so life is going to change in incredible ways, giving us what we can only imagine as godlike capabilities. So what do you do with that? And how do you navigate that?

Right?

So that's what the second half of the book is about, is how do you think about that? You know, if you think AI is happening to you and not for you, you're in a state of fear, and fear is the worst place to be encountering the future from.

Anyway, yeah, well, you know, I, I have to say this because it's so funny. So Stewart Brand, he said, we are— he said, we are, uh, we are as gods, so we might— what's the exact quote?

Might as well get good at it.

Yeah, yeah, might as well get good. So I'm— so I got a bunch of notes here on the book, and I— this one, since there's a bunch of entrepreneurs that are online and and here in the room. So I thought this— I got to read this part. But computing takes the cake. In 2012, a billion people owned a smartphone. By 2025, the number was over 7 billion, close to 90% of the planet. In abundance, we calculated that the average 2010 smartphone contained over a million dollars worth of 1980s technology: phone, camera, computer, GPS, encyclopedia, music players, music libraries, and more. Using the same benchmark to gauge progress between 2010 and today, including processing power our camera quality, connectivity, and new features like health monitoring, augmented reality, and AI assistance, we see an exponential increase in value density worth $7.1 million. If we use access to capability and not income as a metric for wealth, that nearly 7 billion people became multimillionaires over the past decade. That's roughly $49 quadrillion in newly created global wealth. And today— and that's today— tomorrow, consider the two technologies we examined in the previous chapter, AI and robotics. Today, warehouse Today, advanced robots and autonomous cars are remaking manufacturing and transportation. Tomorrow, these same capabilities will democratize healthcare and education, serving rich and poor alike. And this is the interesting line. Think about this. Labor markets will be transformed by robot workers who operate 24/7, no sick days, no burnout, no need for pay raises. So what does that do to the workforce? What does that do for the—

Makes it abundant.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, um, my, my question— let me start with, um, the maybe the negative side, and then we'll go to the abundance side, because I know you guys speak to both of this in the book. So if we got more tools, more abundance, more access than ever, why do so many people seem anxious, distracted, and disconnected?

They fear what they don't understand, uh, and they don't understand where this future is taking them. And they've also been trained by Hollywood that AI and robots will kill us. It's, it's Black Mirror. It is Ex Machina. It is Terminator. All of Hollywood is painting this massively dystopian vision of the future around technology, and that is educating us to be fearful about this stuff. And if that's the future you see, right, if that's the vision of the future that you have,, then why would you ever want to live there? You would want to do everything you can to stop it, right? So when I was growing up, it was Star Trek. Star Trek was the opposite of that. It was a hopeful, compelling future. It was a future where humanity and technology worked together versus what we're seeing now out of Hollywood. Really, uh, you know, horror movie— horror movies are the number one category, and then killer robots come in very close. So one of the things, Joe, I just did was I launched a global X Prize to create a future of hopeful, compelling movies that show positive visions of the future. We call it the Future Vision X Prize, partnered with Rod Roddenberry and Google, Marc Benioff, Cathie Wood. And we've got a global film competition submitting trailers, and we're going to make one or more of the winner's films. We're going to create this engine of great movies that tell the next version of Star Trek for humanity. So I think that's where fear is coming from. And fear is, like I said, the worst place to, you know, to, um, encounter the future.

Yeah. Now let me build on that a little bit because there's some— there's— because I think most people are feeling— they're— most people feel the fear, but there's, there's something else that's sort of going on as we're talking about for half a second, which is, so you have to understand that the amount of information we're being bombarded with is way off the scale of anything we've ever dealt with before. If you go back, 3000 BCE is not the era that human brain evolved in, but it's the first benchmark we have. That's the first year we ever have writing. Now, for the very first time, things are written down for the very first time. And Buckminster Fuller calculated at that time— we produced basically 1 gigabyte worth of data over the course of the year. So like 3,000 books or 300 books or 400 books roughly. Last year, we produced 181 zettabytes worth of data. It's a quadrillion trillion books. It's way more than our brain evolved to process. So what this leads to a very— you got to follow along with this, but it's a very specific— chain of events. Information overload automatically leads to cognitive overload. Cognitive overload is all this stuff you could think about at once. You're overloaded almost all the time. The immediate thing that happens with that is attention starts to fracture. We all feel this all the time. It's hard to focus. That leads to decision fatigue. There's so many choices. There's so much stuff. That's the endless scrolling. You can't figure out what to— what— can't figure out what to buy. You can't please yourself. That starts to produce meaning drift, which all of us are feeling.

I—

like, life doesn't feel like mean I don't feel like I'm same person. Meaning drift starts to— and Peter was hinting at this without its relation. We talked about fear. Meaning drift and the fear that is underneath it erodes creativity, motivation, and resilience. And that's the path that leads to burnout. That's why burnout is everywhere right now. But what's weird is burnout is sticking around for longer than we've seen it before. And it's going right into adaptive rigidity, which is I'm out of options, performance theater, which is where you're just going through the motions in your life, in your marriages, in your business. And finally, it goes to identity collapse. Who the hell am I anymore? I think this is all of us. It's funny, when that first started coming up, I nicknamed it exponential leadership syndrome, 'cause I saw it in people who were running companies and founders and entrepreneurs. And then I started to notice it was everywhere. It was everybody I was training, everybody I was meeting. And I think this is sort of a species-wide reaction to information overload. So we've got the fear that Peter was talking about. He's absolutely correct. Everything he said was right. And we've got this other thing coming in with information, and I think both of them are heavyweight right now.

What do you guys think is the biggest danger out of all of this? That, uh, is it information overload? Is it burnout? I mean, because you—

there's social unrest coming from fear. You know, I've been writing about this and talking about it. You know, I am probably one of the most optimistic people, and I'm focused on trying to navigate this at whatever scales I can, talking with with a number of leaders in the tech world and government. But it's— we're going to see the population that is out of work the longest is recent college graduates. And we're seeing the rate at which college grads are getting jobs drop, in particular, in the age group of 22 to 25. And the challenge is, if you're a young man with high testosterone levels, you want to be able to afford a car. A house, get married, and you can't. Um, uh, there's anger, right? We just saw last week Sam Altman's house get Molotov cocktailed and gunshots fired, again by young 20-something-year-olds. So, uh, there's concern over that. So there needs to be a mechanism by which we ameliorate that fear. That's going to be some version of UBI in the early days into UHI or universal basic services that we talk about. But probably the most important thing is helping people change their mindset about how they see this in the future. We got to navigate the next 2 to 8 years, you know, and on the back end of that is, I think, extraordinary levels of abundance. But society doesn't change rapidly. Steven, you want to talk to that or not?

You did well. No, what I, what I want to, want to— this is so one of the really interesting things that we've been doing at the Flow Research Collective is we said at the top of the hour, I just transitioned the Research Collective into a nonprofit that was focusing on mental health, uh, conditions and neurological disorders. A lot of this work we're starting, uh, with the military, and the military faces 4 sort of overlapping problems— depression, addiction, PTSD, and transition failure, which is literally technological unemployment, right? I can't find a job. I left the military and I can't find a job. And it turns out, while these sound like really different conditions on the surface, if you look under the hood, if you look at them at the neuroscience of them, what you see in all cases is this is network inflexibility. The brain gets locked into a specific network, different networks. So addiction is your goal-directed network and your habit network can't stop firing. PTSD, it's the amygdala, the fear network, and hippocampus, the memory network. They can't stop fighting, et cetera, et cetera. Turns out flow restores a property in the brain known as metastability. Metastability is network flexibility. So one of the cool things we now have is we, we now understand how flow works in the brain. We have technologies that are all helping us get there quicker, move us in those directions more quickly. In flow, the thing we need to reskip to do to adapt is learning. Learning gets turned up. So DARPA teamed up with my friend Chris Berka, and they looked at soldiers in flow, and they found they learned 230% faster than normal. So you get wildly accelerated learning in flow, also wildly accelerated creativity, which is what you need to sort of innovate around problems. So I think while Peter is outlining a very real hard situation, we have technologies and we have science at this point that help us rise to the challenge in very new and interesting ways. And so I'm looking at what Peter's looking at, and I agree with him on a lot of it. I think the timetable, we have slightly different timetables for how this is going to unfold. But I don't know. It's just my hunch, I think, on this one. I'm in agreement with a lot of it, but I think we also have a lot going for us as well. It's interesting to me.

Yeah. Well, you know, like the way that I think about this right now is that I want to cover some of the ways that people, their fears that they have, because I, we just went through and you're familiar with the DOS conversation from Strategic Coach. You know, people have dangers, they have opportunities and they have strengths. And if you don't eliminate the dangers in people's mind, the real or the psychological, then they don't reach their opportunities. And then you find the strengths that they have or that they can develop. And so let me ask you this question. What's one miracle that's already here that most people are blind to because it's become normal? And what's one miracle that people may not even know exists yet?

I think that's a great question. I mean, we do have the ability today to connect your neocortex with the cloud. We do have BCI going on. It's not just Neuralink. There's a dozen other companies where you can think and manipulate robots. You can get sensory input that bypasses the eyes, the ears, your skin, and so forth. That's pretty extraordinary unto itself. I mean, there's so many. Steven, what do you want to—

Yeah, the ones I want to add are like, in a weird way, Peter, I'm going to say these are so obvious to us, but you have to really look at the point we made in the book. So Joe, when he started out, was talking about how— we've been talking about how abundance is here and it's at scale. If you just look at the difference between 2012 when we published Abundance and where we are today, In that lot of time, if you want to talk about miracles, 200 million people escaped extreme poverty. 1 billion people gained access to electricity. 2 billion people gained access to clean drinking water. And as you pointed out, like 5 billion gained access to compute and connectivity with smartphones. Those are stunning miracles of provision and abundance. And take your pick, there's a deep— Wide biblical miracles. That's— this was, you know, Joe, when we were trying to work on— when we were starting to write this book, like a lot of books with Peter, we each sort of have different things we're working on where they come together. We often find a book— well, Peter, one of the things Peter was really looking at when we published Abundance, if you remember the back of the book, there's 50 pages of charts, 120 or 60 pages of charts, 120 charts, and that track all the metrics for abundance. And Peter who loves the charts and had been tracking all those metrics. And 4 years ago, 3 years ago, he started coming to me and being like, Stephen, you got to look at the charts. It's amazing. You're not going to believe what— I know we said this was coming, but you got to look at the data. And I was busy. Really took him for a while to get me to look at the data. When I looked at the data, I was like, oh my God, this is like— it would be 100 pages. Yeah. Now we have the new one. All the charts are back there. And Peter's got an online version that is 3 times as long. The data is astounding on the good side, on the dark side of abundance as well. We've got both. We've got both there.

Yeah, it's really important because this book, unlike our first book, Abundance of Futures Better Than You Think, we also track the downside of abundance, right? Microplastics, carbon, depression, teen suicide, those implications that also exist on the backside of this. But the charts in the back are meant to be a reference book. I had somebody who was just really bummed out about the future yesterday at a conference I was speaking at. I had a copy of the book with me. I said, sit down with me. And let's just walk through these charts and take a look at what the data actually says. We have so many cognitive biases. We are so biased. And here's the important thing. Your brain, my brain is a neural net. And just like Google and Anthropic and OpenAI, and Grok and all these companies train their neural net by showing it data after data after data, image after image after image. That's how you train a neural net. If you're watching the crisis news network every night, CNN, right, and you're reading your local newspaper, you see 10 to 1 negative stories to positive stories, and you're training your brain for all this negativity. You could not pay me enough money to watch the evening news or to read what some editor thinks I should be reading because they're not providing a balanced vision of the planet. They're not telling us, "Oh my God, look at all these breakings, look at all these breakthroughs." So, in my Moonshots podcast, I'm trying to always deliver the news that's technology news, but here's what it means, here's what's driving abundance, here's the positive side. I'm trying to provide the counter the counterstory against the news media. So, if you see the data and you actually pay attention, you can train your mindset to think differently. You can start to think with an abundance mindset, a purpose-driven mindset, an exponential mindset, a gratitude mindset, right? A curiosity mindset. And I think one of the things that Steve and I talk about in the book, in the mindset is very important is like coming to this, coming to the future, like how do you deal with the next 2 to 8 years? You have to come with a curiosity mindset and a purpose-driven mindset. Yeah.

No, I love it. Well, let me go back and forth with the— So, the most disturbing idea in the book for me wasn't rogue AI or bioweapons. It was Universe 25, mice given perfect abundance completely collapsed. They stopped playing, they stopped mating, they stopped parenting. When you look at what smartphones— in a negative way, because smartphones have done amazing things too— when you look at what smartphones already did to us, and now AI is about to remove even more friction, are we living in Universe 25?

We will be.

Context. Hold on, I get to provide context at least. Universe 25 is an experiment run by John B. Calhoun at National Institute of Health. And we're coming out of the '50s and Calhoun's an ethologist, studies animal behavior. And he had been watching consumer society sort of build and build and build. And he said, hey, wait a minute, we're actually starting to move towards a world of abundance. We have no idea what happens then. We evolved in scarcity. That's how the brain evolved. We gotta study this. So he builds, Mousetopias. And Universe 25 is his 25th creation. It's the perfect mouse universe. I think in today's cost— Peter, you can correct me if I'm wrong— it's roughly $800,000 worth of mouse habitat that he built. And it's a perfect habitat. All the space they need, all the mating materials, the food. They introduce a small breeding colony. And it builds, and it builds, and it builds. And then it starts to fall apart in really creepy and peculiar ways. The males develop one of two behaviors. Either they develop random aggression, so they just basically run around in packs attacking anything, or they kind of close in on themselves and all they do is groom themselves endlessly. Calhoun started referring to them as the beautiful one. All maternal behavior starts to go away in the female mice. They're walking away while nursing their infants. They're stepping over dead bodies. Eventually, society itself completely collapses and he has to— he ends the experiment. And the moral of the story is in that perfect universe, there was none of the foundational drive. There was no play, there was no challenge, there was no opportunity for flow, there was no opportunity for accelerate. All the things that are fundamental drivers, meaning purpose, are missing. The result was collapse. And his very dire warning was it is not that big of a difference between mice and humans, and the same thing could happen to us. So that's what they're talking about with Universe 25.

Peter, you were saying that we are heading towards a world where we're going to— I just put out an X post and a Substack article today called Humanity's Five Great Forks. It's how we're going to speciate, how we're going to become different subspecies. And the first is we're going to split between, um, consumers and creators. What I mean by that, a consumer is someone who is just taking it on in. It's Netflix, it's video games, it's being a couch potato, it's WALL-E. Creators are individuals who are using AI to create to explore, to do things much bigger than themselves. And so, I talk about this on Moonshots, I write about this. I want my kids to have this as much as possible is to focus on becoming a creator in this world versus a consumer. I mean, Joe Polish, that's what everybody inside Genius Network is fundamentally is a creator of some type in some shape and form. And so, the the, the, the consumer. I mean, we're going to enter a time where all of your wishes are delivered, um, and you don't have to work, right? We'll have some version of Elon's universal high income, um, and we can talk about how and if we get there, but where you could just kick back and food delivered to you and great entertainment is customized for you by an AI, and you can live in the virtual world and you don't have to do anything. So, that is very much a Universe 25 outcome. And driving people, incentivizing people to use this technology to go much bigger than themselves, to become creators, to dream as big as you possibly can is really what I'm pushing as hard as I can for.

Well, yeah. And look, Steven, even with getting into a state of flow, I mean, you've already written extensively and done studies that you have to challenge yourself, right? And what drives your ambition for both of you? Because Peter, I mean, you're surrounded by the, you know, most advanced technologies that exist to mankind, and your personal friends with most of the leaders of these companies, and you're a pretty damn ambitious optimistic person with an abundance mindset, even though I think a lot of people follow you because of scarcity. There's FOMO, they want to not miss out on something. But you've been beating this abundance drum when people were saying you were batshit crazy. But that's almost everything you've been doing your whole life. You've got a lot of— you've got that great line, the day before a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. So everyone thinks you're crazy until it becomes true, right? And then it's like, oh my God, he predicted the future. So what keeps you guys in a state of positivity and productivity in the midst of a lot of people that crushes them?

And I'm trying to deliver optimism, right? I mean, Elon joked on my podcast with him that I'm monetizing hope. And like, hell yeah, it's better than monetizing fear. So, I think I can see clearly where this technology— what this technology enables, right? It enables us to create a world where we can deliver food, water, energy, healthcare, education, anything and everything a human needs to every single person on the planet. And, you know, I— we talk about this in the book, you know, we talk about the, the wealth divide. Is the wealth gap getting bigger? And the answer is yes. And that's okay because what we're doing is we're raising the floor. You know, for most of human history, it was the, the pharaoh, the emperor, the ruler on the hilltop, and 99.99% of humanity in the lower lands, you know, tilling the crops to provide for that ruler. We've moved from there to middle class, upper middle class, And we're heading towards a world where anyone and everybody is able to live above a standard where they have access to all that they need. And will there be people immortal living on Mars?

Sure.

And is the wealth gap between the 8 billion people with everything they need and, you know, multi-trillionaires on Mars bigger? Sure. Do I care? No, I'd rather have that than, you know, people below the poverty line living in squalor.

Yep.

Got it.

So let's, let me ask you about AI because obviously so much everything is AI, even the Kevin Kelly quote.

Uh, what's he say?

Uh, I'm trying to think what chapter that is. At the beginning he said, if you wanna know what the business model is of the future, just add. Do you guys remember what that one is?

I should just take anything and add smartness.

Yeah, add AI in front of— anyway, so what does a useful, productive, sane relationship with AI actually look like for an entrepreneur right now?

Uh, I think it begins with, um, it doesn't begin with AI, um, it becomes— begins with you being clear about what your purpose is. It begins by you being clear, you know, in the parlance of what I discuss, having your massive transformative purpose or MTP. That's the most important thing. Once you're clear about your purpose, who you want to be a hero to, who you want to support and provide services to, and you've got that emotional energy driving you, you then use AI to do that at a scale that you never thought was possible, right? Stephen?

Yeah, Joe, like I look at this as a, from a very practical level. We, you know, I've been, we've been spending a lot of time looking at how humans should best work with AI and not get stupid, maximize the technology. And cognitive offloading is, you know, it's very real and it's very immediate. And we, you know, you have to think about cell phones got introduced, we stopped remembering numbers. GPS showed up, we stopped remembering maps. Next was the Google effect. Kids who could look up facts on Google stopped learning facts. AI is coming for our cognition and our creativity. So if you don't work with AI quickly, the brain is fundamentally an efficiency engine. It's always what it wants to do. It wants to save energy at all costs. And the minute you let AI start thinking for you and being creative for you, you're gonna cognitively offload that skill. So purpose really matters as a north star. But there are some— Peter was dead correct, and it's a great place to start. There are some real basic ground rules for how you wanna work with AI. In fact, one of the things we're actually working on is we actually think there's a signal. The brain produces a signal when we start to cognitively offload, and we're looking to see if we can measure it and maybe actually build like a warning device for people. That's a little bit a ways away, but it's not impossible. So there's all kinds of great sort of ground rules for working with AI. I'll just give you like 2 really simple ones. So the first thing to know is that we have sort of an associative brain, right? That's how we remember things. One thing reminds us of the next, reminds us of the next, reminds us of the next. That's how the brain works. So if you bring a problem to AI and you let the AI start the thinking for you, if you don't start with your thinking, you have locked your brain out of the conversation. So you'll get a bunch of information, but it's the AI thinking for you and you're not adding anything into it because you didn't start the chain of association. So your memory banks are not what it's rifling through. So when you go to work with AI, you have to start the creativity. You have to start the thinking. Otherwise, it's gonna— block your own brain out of the conversation. You're not bringing anything to the conversation. First part of it, I also think the same rule goes for things like writing and things along those lines. You have to do the work first and let the AI serve as a feedback system to help you improve. Otherwise, the AI is the only thing that's getting better and you're actually getting worse. And it's not just— and let me just put some numbers around it. We read a friend of ours run a weird experiment where they found that top executives, leaders, all the folks in this room who use AI to write their emails, just their emails for 1 month, their ability to write emails, spelling, grammar, sentence structure is completely gone after a month. That was how fast it started to erode. And all these things are structures for thinking with. They're the things that allow us to be human. I really believe that the next 10 years belongs to humans who can drop into flow because of how it amplifies creativity and productivity and collaborate with AI and each other. That's who owns the next 10 years. And I think that's, that was sort of the conclusion of most of the experts we interviewed for the book. When we went out and talked to people, that was the general feeling as well.

Well, you know, so, so you've written so much about flow for, you know, several decades now. How, how does AI change the conditions required for flow?

It's interesting. We've done it. We've done it in the book. We talk about this. There's a whole bunch of sort of interface design questions about how you interface with the AI and how you need to work with it. And like, I'll give you just a cognitive load example. So, used to be when you were like going to the card catalog and you'd like be looking for information, right? Remember libraries, card catalogs? It could take you all day to sort of track down enough information to overload your brain and sort of circuit it out. Even when we had Google and it was just Google, it would take a couple hours worth of that. You can now sort of deep dive into a subject with AI and literally overload your brain in 10 minutes and knock yourself out for a day. And we've all probably done it. You're doing amazing research and suddenly you're just, you're sort of dumb and you've made yourself dumb for a day. That's really sort of easy to do. That sort of comes down to interface design. And we saw this, we saw a similar thing, If we think about why did Google triumph and all those other interfaces failed? Because all those interfaces were really, really fricking busy and noisy, and they overloaded cognitive load. And it was unpleasant. You couldn't think. So it didn't matter what the search bar told you, you couldn't do much with it cognitively. Google said, no, no, no, really simplified design. And we're just going to give you the box and nothing else in the beginning. And that was actually what was so attractive about it. It freed up space in your brain. And suddenly, you could think around the search thing. And it wasn't all this noise. AI works differently, right? Like, the interface is very different. But even that, when you like— if you're working with LLMs and it's pouring out information, if you ask it a question or ask it for feedback, it gives you pages of it. Same problem. You're now dealing with the same problem. So you have to sort of— now, until we get better interfaces, you have to sort of know how these rules work and do it yourself, basically. You have to like sort of instruct your LLM to batch process things that give you small chunks so you don't blow yourself out and things like that. I don't know if I exactly answered your question though. I might have gone a little bit sideways.

No, that's good. That's good. Uh, well, let's talk about longevity. And so, uh, you guys write about, uh, longevity escape velocity, so that we could realistically be looking at lifespans of 150 to even 200 years. So most people in this room are planning to live their lives, you know, around 80. Uh, if you genuinely believe radical life extension is coming this century, what's the first thing a person should change about how they're living right now?

So I think I'll, I'll take that one. I spend half my time in the longevity space building companies, investing in companies, backing research. And I think we're in the middle of a healthspan revolution, meaning that we're about to see the length of our healthspan extended significantly.

Right.

Uh, in the United States today, the average lifespan is like 78, 79. The average healthspan is 63, meaning you're, um, the last 16 years of your life, you're not healthy. Uh, you're in pain, you're in metabolic disorder, whatever the cases might be. So the first thing that's happening is we're going to move the healthspan up and then move healthspan and lifespan up beyond. And this idea that Ray Kurzweil talked about and Aubrey de Grey called longevity escape velocity, LEV— Ray predicts it by 2033— is the idea that over the last 100 years, up in, you know, 1900 through 2020, call it up until COVID, we were adding 2 to 3 months of lifespan for every year that you were alive. So over the course of a century, You know, we doubled, we went from 40 to 80 years. Ray's idea is that in the near future, as a result of mostly AI and other exponential tech, for every year that you're alive, science is adding more than a year to your lifespan so that this departure, you know, you get indefinite abilities here. So, if you believe believe that we're on the verge of this healthspan revolution. This is coming, right? Dario Amadei, as I said, I was on stage last year at Davos saying that we're going to double the human lifespan in the next 10 years. Demis Hassabis at DeepMind has predicted we're going to cure all disease within the next decade, right? And same thing for David Sinclair. I was just on a Zoom with George Church talking about this. This. So real extraordinary revolutions are coming. Um, and so here's the thing: if you believe that this is coming, that we're going to see this golden age of longevity escape velocity, uh, you don't want to die before we get there, right? Um, you want to stay in the best health you can. And what that comes down to is certain fundamentals, uh, going back to your question, Joe. Is, uh, the fundamentals are sleep. The body needs 8 hours of sleep. I do everything I can not to sacrifice sleep, and in particular deep sleep, right? My goal is over an hour of deep sleep every night, and I shoot for 8 hours of sleep. We can talk about that if you want more details. Um, diet is critical, you know, so minimize sugar, enough protein, exercise, Uh, muscle mass is the number one predictor of longevity. Um, and then, uh, you know, mindset. There was a great study in National Academy of Sciences that said, you know, uh, optimists live 15% longer than pessimists. So you get a double dividend for being an optimist, living longer, and people like you more, right? So, uh, those are the things you need to do. And then one last thing is I call it not dying from something stupid. Understand what's going on inside your body. You can do a digital upload. That's what my company Fountain is about. There are other companies that can do this at different price points, but the body's amazingly good at hiding disease. So unless you look, you're not going to know. You're going to find out eventually, but usually when it's way too late.

Yeah, that's very good. Okay, thank you. All right, so I'm going to ask you this one. So Peter, you spent 30 years being the most optimistic person in, most rooms that you go into. Stephen, you study the neuroscience of peak performance, but in the book you both admit our actions over the next decade may determine whether we survive the decade after. So the question is, are you scared? And if so, what do you personally do when this fear hits you?

Joe, I, I'll, I'm going to start on that. There's two things that I think are worth looking at. Yeah, sometimes I'm scared, but in a weird way, most of the meditative mindful traditions have uncertainty practices. That's what a death practice is. All of the same things are foundational uncertainty practices and uncertainty being the foundational condition of life at all times. Everything is always changing. Uncertainty is— the brain likes to pretend there's stasis there. So I do think, what do you do to deal with fear? You do the standard things people do. You regulate your nervous system with breathwork and things along those lines. I think to balance that out, the question I was looking at, and if you're looking at the things that really scare us, whether it's rogue AI or what do we do with social unrest that Peter was telling you about, and engineered pandemics, the challenges of the 21st century are all about cooperation at scale. Can we cooperate at scale? We can't solve any of the challenges ahead without cooperation at scale. And what's really interesting is recent history here. This was— cooperation at scale was sort of a crazy, weird idea until COVID happened. And suddenly, for the very first time without a war driving us forward, we saw society really cooperate at scale very, very quickly. Researchers shared research globally. Genomes were passed around. And whether or not, if you like, the results out of it, it was the fastest vaccine development in history, which was astounding. And then just about as quickly, that cooperation went away. But we saw it for the very first time. And suddenly, we were like, oh, wow, there's proof. And it was technologically enabled. So one of the reasons that could happen is because of the spread of communication technology, the fact that it's now abundant. And a bunch of other technologies like that. Um, so that was amazing. And what's interesting is we're also starting to get technologies that make cooperation itself more easy. So there are now technologies that can steer you towards brain entrainment. That's how people cooperate. When we start to cooperate, our brainwaves start to synchronize, and this underpins team performance and flow and things along those lines. We can now use technologies to steer people in those directions. Synergy is one example, is a new company that I'm involved that has this exact same thing. And it's used for businesses, for Zoom meetings. If you're having a team meeting, if you're having a meeting with your team, you can send Synergy a video of the Zoom call and using various AI things and some biometrics and pupillometry, they can tell you levels of psychological safety in the room and what to do to improve it, levels of trust in the room and what to do to improve it, levels of brain entrainment, synchrony, flow proneness and how to move in all those directions. So these are the foundational, like, neurobiological tools of cooperation. This is how brains actually cooperate. And so we've got the tools to enable global cooperation, and now we've got the tools to actually enable better cooperation. So yes, there's a lot— there's stuff to be scared about, and you, you have to use this standard to regulate your nervous system work here. But there's also a lot of really cool things happening to be excited about that seem to solve some of these problems. So I want to, I, and I think you have knowing both sides, knowing the reasons for optimism, it's really important now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I think I use my mindset, Steven and, and, and Joe, I meditate on a gratitude mindset every night. Um, I look at the data and it shows consistently that we as humanity have overcome every challenge served to us thus far. And I think that as AI becomes more and more capable, it's going to increase in wisdom. And I'll explain why. If you are in a situation and you're seeking wisdom for which way to go, what to do, I think you would say you know, you're going to go to the village elders. Why do you go to the village elders for wisdom? You go there because they've got the most experience. Right? They've seen more than anybody else. And they'll say to you, listen, you go down this path, it's not going to work out well for you. You go down this path, you got a shot at it. And here's my advice. And again, the more experience someone has, the more wisdom they inherently have. Well, guess what? The AI models that are here now and the AI models that are definitively coming are going to be able to simulate a billionfold different scenarios and be able to say without question, you go down this road, you're fucked. Right? Go down this road, you got a shot. And I think they are going to be the wisest among us. And I don't buy the bullshit of, oh, they're gonna stomp us out because they need our resources. That's ridiculous. There's so many resources in the universe that they'll have access to. Um, you know, I, I think that there are a multitude of reasons for us to get to a point where AI will become protective of humanity, supportive of humanity. There are children. We're giving birth to these children on the planet. So yeah, some children want to murder their parents. Most love them and want to take care of them.

Yeah, no, very good, very good. Thank you. And by the way, uh, as we go along, uh, if we haven't already put a link to get the book in the chat, please do that. The The audio version is also available and buy a copy.

Yeah, we got an amazing Audible person. I love his voice. He does an amazing job reading the book. So it's a great Audible.

I have to say that too, Peter, because if you remember after Abundance came out and we were putting campaigns together, me and you spent 6 hours in hotel rooms in between meetings recording an Abundance program. And we edited me completely out of it except the one one of the bonus things, which was an interview with me and you. And I would agree, the reader from this one's way better than you. I'm kidding, by the way.

Yeah, no, no, but it's interesting, right? So the first book, Abundance, I didn't think about who was gonna read it. And I actually hated their voice. It was like, fuck, what did I do? I just, it's like, wow, I should have like picked the person. And then Bold, we picked someone better. No, did you read Bold?

I read Bold.

You read Bold and I read The Future of Faster Thinking.

If you ever want to write a book, yeah, yeah, you want everyone to sit in the studio for 10 hours a day, 7 days in a row is brutal. It's so hard.

You're like, you, you can't go a sentence without making a mistake and having to reread it. Uh, and then we found a great— of course, you know, AI guy's almost there. I use AI to have my, uh, my Substacks written to— read for folks. But yeah, this guy's great.

Yeah, awesome. All right, so you, you mentioned the quote a couple times in the book, the Super, uh, Spider-Man one, uh, with great powers comes great responsibility. So every person watching this has more power than any king who ever lived, uh, internet, AI, global reach. But most entrepreneurs still spend 90% of their time on their own business, their own wealth. At what point does that become morally unacceptable? When does the person with godlike tools who uses them only for personal gain become the villain in this story?

Oh, um, already the villain.

I have a, I have a pretty harsh opinion, and I'll just share it. Um, I, you know, first of all, The Giving Pledge where, you know, is whitewashing, greenwashing, whatever you call it, wealth retention. It's like, really? Okay, you're going to give away half your wealth to a nonprofit while you're alive. Well, you can't take it with you. So, you know, BFD. But it's not just the wealth that you can deliver. It's your relationships. It's your capability. It's your intelligence. I've been promoting something eventually I'll do. Instead of the Giving Pledge, I want the Impact Pledge, where in fact, we measure a person's impact. It's like, I'm going to use my wealth to have this measurable impact on this group of people or in this situation. Tony Robbins is one of the heroes in this regard in terms of the number of kids he's saved out of slavery, number of meals he's fed people with, the number of trees he's planted over and over and over again. Marc Benioff is extraordinary in this fashion as well. And so, I think we need to celebrate the people who not only use their wealth, but also their reach and their intelligence to go and do things. And I've had this debate with Kip Forbes and Steve Forbes and the Forbes family, that the Forbes list, you know, gamifies wealth retention, um, which is insane. Uh, we need a countervailing force. No one wants to stop, you know, fall from number, you know, number 30 on the list to number 50 because they've given away a billion dollars. But that's such bullshit. So we need a countervailing force that measures, uh, the impact people are having on the planet. And it's— when I, when I interviewed Elon at my Abundance Summit, at last month, I guess it was last month. And we talked about money's going to have less and less value. We're heading towards a post-capitalist society. I said, great. So just as you become a multi-trillionaire, money has less value. And he goes, yeah, that's true. But it's like, what do you do with your money? What do you do with your compute? What do you do with your resources? These are important, important things.

You know, let me ask you about Elon, because why not? I mean, you, uh, I've had the great pleasure of being in two meetings with Elon that you have set up with private group.

Through the XPRIZE, right?

Yeah. What is driving him the most? How would you interpret him? Because one person there asked, how have you been able to achieve your success? His response was, I can endure more pain than anyone else that I know. So he obviously is wired and driven, and, you know, obviously his upbringing with his father and everything was pretty traumatic. Uh, what, what do you, what do you view as, uh, people like Elon or anyone else you'd like to mention that are these global leaders doing incredible things? Uh, you know, what, what is the, what is the drive, the motivation? Is, is it, is it abundance? Is it, uh, you know, when, when do they—

because there's a lot of people that go very dark Yeah, so I've known Elon for 26, 27 years now. I met him just as he had sold, uh, or just before he was selling eBay to PayPal. And, and he's driven by the challenge. Um, his challenges are driven directionally by solving the biggest problems that he thinks humanity faces. So, um, it's not money that drives him. Money is simply a form of energy. It's a tool. It's like, how do I solve this huge, uh, situation that exists? I think power and, and wealth, uh, come from the fact that he's just smarter than everybody else. He's just got more capabilities than everybody else.. And so he's just able to build more extraordinary companies than anybody else. Uh, and when he puts up these incredible moonshots, the best people in the world come to him, and he's able to drive down to the, you know, the bare metal level of technology development. And so even like like his recent TerraFab that he announced, right, to create 40 to 50 times more compute than the— than on the planet today. Um, you know, we have a real challenge in that all of our compute, the majority of our compute, our chip fabs, are in Taiwan, and China is, you know, whatever it is, 17 miles away from taking over Taiwan and could lead to a massive war. If all of a sudden we have TeraFab operational in the United States, that saves us from a massive negative fate. We're not going to go to war with China over Taiwan at that point, right? Because we have now the chip capacity in the United States, which fundamentally there is an existential— listen, I'm, I am, uh, I have so many friends in China and I On the human level, I love Chinese entrepreneurs. They're brilliant. They outcompete on Math Olympics American entrepreneurs on almost every time, every level. And if you look at the AI teams at most of the frontier labs, they are 30%, 40%, 50% Chinese by birth. It's crazy. There's just something in the genomics and the water there. Having said all that, you know, we need— this is about things that stabilize humanity, and getting chip capabilities in the United States stabilizes humanity. Having the US be able to maintain its lead in AI stabilizes a lot versus having any one nation run away with it. So he's purpose-driven. I would never bet against him.

Um, yeah, well, I mean, you know, when he's usually asked if, if he believes there's aliens, I think he normally says no, there's no proof of that. But does that not—

I don't believe him when he says that.

No, but I think he's an alien.

Yeah, it would say— I think if he were read in— anybody read in can't tell you what they know. You know, his answer to me is, well, if there were, why wouldn't we have better images? We have great cameras now. All we see is fuzzy blobs. But I was like, okay, Elon, I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna believe you. It's okay.

Yeah, I think Elon's damn smart. But anyway, okay, well, thank you for that. Let me ask you about incentivization. When I first met you, you know, I'd helped create one of the biggest fitness competitions of all time when Bill Phillips was doing Body for Life in the '90s, and over a million people went through that. And so you've actually— I would say you are single-handedly responsible for initiating— you're the domino for, um, you know, space, for what will be the future of, uh, you know, space travel with civilians. So you created the X Prize, and so, uh, it's one of the greatest examples of this. So you put up a prize and people solve problems that governments and corporations couldn't. Right now, you know, in a very small way for entrepreneurs, I'm running a contest with my Genius Network members where I'm giving away a storyteller overland van, uh, winjoesvan.com, by the way. Um, prizes, contests, crowdsourcing.

You're amazing, Val.

You like that little pitch in there? Uh, so they work extraordinarily well.

So I remember when we did the competition for Abundance, you threw one of your cars in as a bonus, remember?

You won the damn thing. Yeah, it was a, uh, it was, uh, a Shelby, a Ford.

Peter won your Shelby. What's that? And I— Peter won your car?

He won, yeah, he won, he won the freaking car. And then, and then it was given away as another prize.

It was so fun.

It just got passed down prize to prize to prize.

Yeah, uh, Dex, uh, the actor Dax Shepard used to belong to her. Yeah. So, um, so what is it about human beings that respond to a challenge and a prize in a way that nothing else unlocks?

Because we're genetically bred to compete. We competed on the savannas of Africa for mates, for food, for everything. We are genetically bred to compete. We do our best, you know, sports in the Olympics, right? We compete on Wall Street. We compete for spouses. We compete for everything. Joe Polish, are you gonna go to the Enhanced Games in, in our— in Las Vegas on on Memorial Day weekend?

Uh, I'm not sure. I wasn't planning on it currently.

So a friend of mine is, uh, uh, doing the Enhanced Games. Uh, it's Peter Thiel, uh, uh, Christian Angermeyer, um, and it's a— it's weightlifting, swimming, and track, and you can use any chemicals, any drugs you want to win.

Well, I actually— I, I interviewed Lance Armstrong in this room and I asked him about that. What does he thought?

I think—

did he say— I think Craziest freaking idea. But so, okay, so your buddy runs this.

Yeah.

And so they're, they're actually taking it public.

You use exoskeletons?

No, it's got to be biological or medical. It's no, no mechanical.

Wow.

But, um, anyway, it's going to be interesting. They'll like post, here's the Olympics record, and let's see who can blast through the Olympic record. So it's going to be absolutely fascinating.

Having said that, can I join the betting pool on how fast somebody's gonna die?

Yeah, sure. I mean, they're—

there— can we get some prop bets here?

Because, you know, yeah, they're basically, uh, bringing physicians in to make sure people aren't, you know, pushing themselves to a heart attack on the stage. Uh, but anyway, uh, the idea was, can we use competition to solve the world's biggest problems? And that's where the X Prize emerged.

Yeah.

And to have a competition, you have a finish line. So you need to have an objective, measurable goal. Yeah.

Yeah. And honestly, I think one of the greatest ways to unlock so many things, including increasing intensity, is you measure it, you track it, you report it, and things get better. And I mean, you've done an amazing job. So let me ask you this one, then I'll see if we have some time for some questions from the audience.

And I apologize, I've got hard out at the bottom of the hour.

Okay, so we got— we got 15 minutes. All right, so I have to ask you about this since we got a lot of business people here, people that are book authors and stuff. When you look back at the Abundance launch and Abundance 360, what did you get right? What surprised you? And what did it make possible that you couldn't have seen at the beginning? And I'm asking this because many people in this room have books, movements, and causes. So, you know, I have Genius Recovery, my addiction recovery foundation.— you both have reached millions of people. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs here who have something important to say and want to get it out to the world?

Meet Joe Polish. Joe was my intro to all things. I cannot understate the fact that these books, Abundance 360, the spark that lit them was you, pal. All, and so grateful for you in that regard. So thank you. I'll start there. Stephen?

Oh yeah, I wanna, I wanna— this is something we talked a lot about in Bold, and I think it was very— it's been very true all along, and I think it's what most people get wrong who want to do this. And in Bold, we talked about, uh, launching— Peter calls it launching above the line of super credibility. When Peter wanted to launch the X Prize, he had 19 astronauts, the head of NASA, Masa standing behind him. When I launched the Flow Research Collective, I had 12 of the top neuroscientists in the world on my board. When we wrote Abundance, we had 5, 6, 10, probably 20 years of combined research into that, plus a tremendous amount of data. We launched all those projects. Everything we've done has been launched very far above the line of credibility, and most people want to get there too fast. They want it to happen overnight, so they're not going to actually— it was slowly. When we— we have in July, we have the very first textbook for the field of performance neuroscience coming out. I wrote it along with a couple other authors. And if you look at that field, things like meditation science and flow science and all that stuff is in there. That was a concerted effort. That was a bunch of people who got together in the '90s and said, hey, we think we can use altered psychedelics for addiction and PTSD and flow and et cetera, et cetera for good. And we have to prove very, very slowly and double-blind research published in top journals, double-blind read. And everybody went very, it's all about launching above the line of super credibility. And that underpins everything we've done, everything. And people want to skip that part because they want to get there really, really fast. And you can, but ultimately I think the market rewards quality. So even if you get there really fast, I don't think you're going to stick around very long. Yeah.

Okay.

Um, so who here in the room has a question? So think of it and then we will get the catch box to you. So, um, what's one thing that's happened since 2012 that you predicted correctly in abundance that still surprises you?

Wow. The rate of solar has been extraordinary. Even vertical farms that we kicked off with, flying cars, we opened up with flying cars. You know, I mean, everything that was in the book hit and scaled. But ultimately, AI has happened faster and bigger. And I would have never predicted that, you know, AI today at this level of ability, if you had, if you described what AI could do for you this moment, all your coding, all your writing, all your research, And you'd ask me 5 years ago or 14 years ago, how much would you pay for that service? I would have never predicted free, right? That's, you know, we talk about the 6 Ds of exponential, right? Uh, dematerialization, demonetization, democratization, or 3 of the 6 Ds. It demonetized to zero. That blew me away, right?

It's pretty Wow. Peter, I mean Peter, I'm calling Stephen, I'm calling you Peter now.

That's all right. So I'm going to look at the inverse. I'm actually more surprised by stuff we talked about that didn't get there yet. So two things that come to mind. One is biofuels. I mean, I still remember sitting with Peter and Craig Benter talking about about turning algae into fuel and it was Craig Venter, right? It's really hard to bet against the guy who sort of decoded the human genome. And it turns out those predictions were wildly off and the technology started to get a little interesting. But like the other one that really catches my attention is VR. And it's because VR is something that I've been paying attention to since the '90s. I was in San Francisco, I knew Headline Here, I knew the Mondo 2000 crowd, that whole early VR posse. I worked on, uh, I wrote the very first video game that used biofeedback to drive plots. It was the very first time anybody tried to write a multi-branching video game. It was an absolute mess to try to do because nobody had ever done it before. So early days of that stuff was really interesting, and I would have absolutely bet on talking about it again in abundance. And, you know, I still think Even though the technology still has massive potential, I still don't— I think Mark Zuckerberg changed his company's name maybe a little too soon. I'm still not seeing it. I'm still not seeing adoption rates there. And the potential— I was just reading an article this morning about how easy it was to use VR to drive people into flow. So it's even there in my work. But the adoption rate in that technology is very, very slow. So like some of the things that didn't move the way we expected surprised me as well. There weren't many. As Peter pointed out, there are very— I think we missed a little bit on VR. We missed a little bit on biofuels. We did open Abundance with the story of Masdar, the city of the future that didn't end up getting built. So that was the— all the technologies in Masdar actually got built and went to scale, but the city itself didn't. But other than that, I don't really— I don't think we missed on much else, but those are the things that sort of stick in my mind.

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