How To Become Irreplaceable In The AI Era (Peter Diamandis Interview)

I recently wrote a New York Times article about this. I asked my AI to stop being polite and to tell me what it's actually like to work with me. It said, and I'm quoting, Keith, you're exhausting. Please tell me what you actually want. All right, fine. That could have come from a lot of other people. And the point was, it was right. In the 30 years of coaching the world's top executive teams, no human being has ever said it to me quite that plainly. Well, with the exception of my current president, they just mostly absorb it and they cleaned up after me. So today I'm sitting down with Peter Diamandis. Peter founded XPRIZE. He co-founded Singularity University, and he spent his entire career seeing where technology goes years before the rest of us even get there. By the end of this conversation, you'll know exactly how to work with AI so that you can thrive in this new era. And I promise you, The people who lean in now are gonna be the ones that everybody else turns to. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. The Chief People Officer of Cisco came to me and said, Keith, you know, I'm tired of these broad conversations about the future of HR. What does it look like? What does HR look like when agents and humans are working together? What is our job as human resources, which is no longer just human resources, what is our job as human agent resources to support this ecosystem? And I said, what a great question. We'll go research this. My research team and I went to work. And by the way, Cisco's just one of them, but there's a bunch of companies really interested in cracking the code of this, earnest heads of HR who want to figure it out. And we were doing all of these studies around how are people who are currently working with AI, what are we learning about their experience and how do we support them to be better? And I had a crazy idea. I said, well, why don't we interview the AI?

I love this.

And I said, let's go and interview 200 AIs. Now, I'm not talking about just your ChatGPT or your Claude, an actual agent who's been working as a partner with a human.

Yeah.

Let's go interview these agents and see what they think. Oh my God. What was funny is across 50 different companies with multiple different systems, Gemini, Claude, et cetera, they consistently told us that there are 8 things that pissed them off the most about

us.

And I was like, this is gold. This is gold. But what was so interesting about it, and you know, there's a There's a paper we've written about this, so we'll link to it at the bottom. But it's the stuff— you said it a second ago— AI is going to teach us about ourselves.

Hmm.

The stuff that we have put up with, with each other. Like, if you and I are working together, or I'm your manager, or we're just working together, my withholding of information, either out of laziness, speed, or even political reasons, my swooping in later and changing the mission, or my being disappointed about not having effectively set up the criteria of what I was looking for in the first place, right? Those are 3 of the 8. things that piss off agents about us. And they're telling us, you guys are idiots. I want everybody to go and ask your, if any of you have a twin, a digital twin that you're using or an agent, go and ask them what it's like to work with you. And it will tell you extraordinary things.

I'm, I am curious. I have my, you know, my OpenClaw Skippy. I will ask and find out.

Yeah.

Uh, at the end of the day, it's, you know, the question becomes, we've all seen these AIs that are somewhat sycophantic. So how do you get it to—

You prompt it.

Yeah.

You know, you and I, when, as peers and friends, we're constantly asking each other how we can be better.

Yeah. One of my favorite pieces of advice I got from Elon once when I was interviewing him at a Goldman Sachs event, he said, my friends tell me what's great. My best friends tell me what sucks.

Yeah. About us.

About us, about your product, about whatever it might be, right? It's how do you get honest feedback? And yeah.

And we have to prompt that. Well, you know me, when I'm working with executive teams, Report-outs give you nodding heads and distracted people when you're giving a report-out of a key initiative. But when I install a stress test and I force everybody in the room after a report-out to say, what is this person missing? Write it down. What's a bold idea that they're not using? Write it down. I'm now forcing the— this is where I say culture change is not tough. I can eliminate conflict avoidance by instilling a process of a stress test.

Should I ask Skippy right now?

You want to do it? Go ahead.

Let's see.

Say, let's think of the prompt.

Yeah, I'm going to say I wanted some honest feedback.

Want some honest feedback? What's it like to work with me?

Yeah. What's the 5 most frustrating things? Hey, Skippy, I'd love some honest feedback from you. What are the 5 most frustrating things for you in working with me on a day-to-day basis? Appreciate your asking, Peter. Honest answers, no sugar, no sugarcoating. Uh, these are the things. One, fragmented instructions generating a lot here across messages.

By the way, it's, it's so overblown with critique for you.

Yeah. It's just like, just, it's just generating right

here.

You often send a task in pieces. Hold this. Don't process yet. I sometimes have, okay, that's one. The image I sent that isn't actually there. More than once I referenced screenshots coming through as a text file, a broken attachment, my own Over-verification loops. This one's on me. Source of truth drift. Uh, your real top 10 newsletter differ from what Substack APIs surface. Ambiguous done targets. Some ask for a clear finish line, others are subjective, and I can't tell if I nailed it or not.

So hold on one second. Um, I know watching you, having coached your team at XPRIZE and other places, fragmented information Right. With, you know, not giving full context and clear objectives, et cetera. Right. So those were very clear. And as you go down there, that's not new. Right. And what I'm finding is that—

He says none of these are deal breakers. And honestly, most are fixable.

They're not deal breakers. Actually, what a nice assurance that you're still in good stead. Yeah. Look, that is, that's exactly what we saw. Like we saw that.

And you know, what are some other examples of the most damning feedback that they gave?

The fragmentation and the lack of information and the lack of clarity, and then coming back and blaming the AI for not having gotten it sufficiently, but not even given enough inputs. That's probably one of the greatest. But, and as I said, we've got a white paper and we'll link to all 8 and we can talk about those. And I think this is poignant. I think I do believe that AI could be humanity's greatest elevator. So down at the level of— now, right now, you have to know the prompt to ask them to critique you. But I do think over time, we're going to find that AI is just done with us and can't get enough out of us. And it will force us to have that cathartic moment. Just what I talked about earlier. Look, my dad— society never put— at least in the United States, society doesn't have a social safety net for the disenfranchised.

Mm-hmm.

We don't care in the United States enough. If someone's poor, if someone's off the rails, we give them a non-sufficient living. We don't give them healthcare. We don't worry about them. And that's a problem. It's a problem. And I think we as a society, and look, and I'm more fiscally conservative than not, we as a society, now we're going to be forced to deal with that. And we weren't before, right? So that's another place that AI is forcing us to elevate. I think I've got at least, there's a piece I'm writing right now. I've got at least 5 significant places where This AI is going to, I think, have an opportunity to elevate us as humans.

So, you know, we've talked about the idea that we're going to see companies be able to achieve their revenue targets and their capabilities with 80% less people. I think that's probably true. Hopefully those 80% less people will allow the company to grow so it doesn't let go of everybody. It's growing, but it's doing more with less. Then the question is, do people become in charge of their own future rather than looking for a job? They create their own their own job. They become an entrepreneur. We just launched the world's largest hackathon funded by Google. It's $2 million in prize money, 90 days for you to go from a clean sheet of paper, find a problem you care about, a problem that impacts at least 100,000 people, and then think about that problem deeply. How would you— what does the product or service to solve that problem look like? Write it down in English or whatever language you want. How would you market it? Write that down. How would, you know, how would you provide interactions, and then give what you've written down in plain English to Gemini. And you can do it with other models as well. We're doing this with Google and have it code up that business. And in this competition, you have to go from clean sheet of paper to who generates the most revenue in 90 days. And so we've had 22,000 people enter this competition. So exciting. Which is, which is extraordinary. We're gonna be announcing the 5 top winners at Moonshots Live on September 25th here in LA. And we'll be, we'll be crowning the top winner. My goal with this is to show the world that you can go from having no experience as an entrepreneur, never having coded, never having raised a dollar, and being able to actually build something that generates revenue and helps other people.

Isn't that exciting?

Right? You need to find your purpose. And I just wanna define purpose for a second. Okay? It's really important. There's a great quote by Mark Twain who said, the 2 important days in your life, the day you were born and the day you find out why. And I really wanna help people Find out their why. Why are you on the planet? What do you want to be leaving as a legacy? What excites you? What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you going at night? What captures your shower time? And another point is like the difference between passion and purpose. And I was just talking to my kids about this. Passion is something you love doing. Could be playing a sport, could be playing a video game. That's passion. Purpose is something you love doing that helps other people. Got it. So can you find something you love doing that helps other people and build a business around it? People say, Well, not everyone's going to be an entrepreneur. Got it. But you'd be amazed at what people can do.

Peter, you've talked about how important it is in this new world of AI where there's going to be so much abundance, we still have to find our purpose. Yeah. How do you help people find their purpose? Do you have a resource somewhere? Yeah.

So I've— I talk about this a lot within the Abundance ecosystem, Abundance 360, and I built an AI model that works. It's free. It's findmypurpose.com or or purposefinder.ai. And it just walks through asking you questions like, what did you wanna do as a kid before someone told you it was impossible? Like, you know, if you had— if I gave you a billion dollars, what would you do with it to make the world a better place? What would you give up your entire Saturday for that would excite you? It's trying to dig deep. You know, I found my purpose early on, on the heels of Apollo and Star Trek, like open the space frontier. Right.

Yeah.

Right? And I call this having a massive transformative purpose. And it's your guiding star. It's your intrinsic motivation. It fuels you. It's like, yes, this is what I'm here on this planet to do. And AI is the greatest tool ever to help you research and fulfill and build and pursue that purpose.

Well, yeah, look, I mean, you originally wanted to open up the frontier of space, and you spent your entire life now opening up the frontier of new technologies to everybody. I mean, that's been your purpose. And mine, you know, has always been, I'm a maximizer. You could see even in this conversation, I'm always like, how do I get into the weeds and how do I make it better? And for me, it's all about helping people make their interrelationships better. Never Eat Alone was about networking and building those relationships. But all my life, it's how do we get people to co-create more effectively to crack the code of great things that you're putting on the table?

There are very few people who know everything about me. I mean, I am a blank slate, And you are one of them. And it's one of the greatest joys to be able to have those relationships, right? And open, honest.

And with always the intention of co-elevation.

Yes.

Like all you and I think about when it comes to the other person is, what can I do to be helpful? What can I do to be helpful?

Yeah.

Right? And, but anyway, this idea of realizing that there's an ecosystem out there, this is the first place that I go inside of a company when I'm helping individuals. I was at Lowe's corporation the other day. Couldn't, you know, couldn't be more brick and mortar in terms of, you know, OG kind of company.

Yes.

How do they reinvent themselves? And I was talking to these folks about this movement idea, and I said, every single one of you has an opportunity, more than any other time in history of companies, I suspect, to be a leader today. Because right now there's all of us who didn't know how to use AI effectively in our jobs, and then there's those of us who crush it in how they're using AI.

Yeah.

Not just crushing how we're using productivity, we're crushing it and thinking about how we're re-engineering work. We're coming up with new ideas. There's an entire— and there's like this demarcation of before and after. Right now, anybody, anybody can be a leader in the afterworld. No matter what job you have inside of a company, you can be a breakthrough leader in that company. It's like there's this open invitation to be the Martin Luther King, to be the Gandhi, to be the tipping point of transformation. And so that to me is what I recommend to every individual. Become that leader. Find one thing that you think could be different or possible. Enlist a group of other individuals that can go do that together. Doing it yourself will minimize the possibility. Getting a group of people together that see the world differently than you, that have a bigger vantage point so that your difference can be bigger. Go get that individuals and practice that team, those teamship mindsets.

Yeah.

Right. And by the way, now you can also have Peter Diamandis as your coach. You can have Keith Ferrazzi as your coach.

Because AI can give you that, right? I mean, it's interesting. One of the things I recommend to people inside companies is, and it works for the individual as well, you could describe a problem you're having in detail, and then you can say, how would Keith Ferrazzi solve this for me? How would Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Martin Luther King or whoever, what would be their advice for me?

Yeah.

And, and it will come with a compelling, authentic answer from that perspective. It's extraordinary.

One of my clients created her version of Skippy, your agent.

Yeah.

And that Friday, what that agent does, it has 10 different perspectives— longevity perspective, empathy perspective, collaboration perspective, etc. 10 different perspectives. And he branded it with each. So there's a Keith Ferrazzi perspective, there's a Peter Diamandis is in her.

Is he in Jess? Is it?

No, it's not Jason. It's Leanne Russell from Bank of New York. She's extraordinary. But every Friday she gets a recap from the 10 great experts.

I'm going to do that. It's like, because I've given, you know, it's interesting, right? How open are you willing to be with your AI ecosystem? So I've given Skippy access to my emails, my calendar, every Granola recording, every piece of data, my texts. And so Skippy knows what's going on in my life, what the conversations are. And so being able to reflect on the week from those perspectives—

What could you have— but always, you know me. I mean, I was funny. My big birthday, my 60th, is coming up, as you know, and you'll be at my party.

I can't wait to celebrate you.

We'll have so much fun. And I was looking back, and I think it was either my 55th or my 50th. I forget which one it was. And I had asked everybody, I said, don't bring gifts. The only thing you're allowed to bring is a letter to me. telling me how I can be better. And so many of my friends were so pissed off. They're like, can't you just fucking enjoy your life?

That's you, Keith.

It was like, no, I want my best friends to truly tell me how I can be better. And I was reading them. I was reading yours. I was reading others. But that's what we need to do. I think I'm a seeker. I'm always wanting to figure out how to level up. But this— and maybe I'll add one more thing as an individual, coaching piece of advice. We should both give some parting words of coaching. Yes, of course.

Of course.

I say to my leadership teams of the most prominent companies in the world, if everyone in this room doesn't think that they have to fundamentally change the way they lead today, 30% better in the next year, you're going to fall behind.

Yes.

We're not talking about tweaking how you do it.

Because it's possible and others will do it.

And 30% better.

Yeah.

In how you do your job, how you lead others, how you think about the business you're in, 30% better, and some are being 150% better. I mean, some are just way rethinking. But that is a leap. And that makes you a seeker. I think that's the definition of a seeker, which I've always been a seeker. I'm not interested in tweaking and continuous improvement. I'm a leap forward. That's why I created Radical Innovators Collaborative, RIC, for these 90 Fortune 500 companies. I'm always trying to get people, and I think you've been influential. The moonshot, the MTP, you've been very influential to me that way.

And let me hit on that. I was in New York talking to an extraordinary company. yesterday, and I closed out with this because I think it's the most important piece of coaching I can give to an individual or an executive team. If you ask yourself the question in your mind, who is the most extraordinary leader you know? Could be Martin Luther King, you know, it could be Elon, could be Steve Jobs, whoever it is, right? Like, think of that leader and you ask yourself, what made that person an amazing leader? Was it the money they had, the tech they had, the friends they had, or was it their mindset? I think Most everybody would say it was their mindset. If you, if you took away everything else and they just retained their mindset, they would do it again. So if that's true, if as an individual, your most important asset to succeed as a leader in anything, as a parent, as a CEO, is your mindset, the next question to ask is, what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset? Was it from your parents, your friends, your church? Where did that originate? And even more important, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And so, I think deeply about this and I write about it and you and I have lots of conversations about it that at the end of the day, I think having a purpose-driven mindset, like what do you want to achieve in your life? You're about to be given the most powerful tools in the universe, you know, artificial superintelligence. You've got incredible capabilities. What are you going to do with it? Yeah. And a purpose-driven mindset gives you that guiding star. The next thing is a curiosity mindset. And I think a curiosity mindset is what enables you to constantly be learning in your learning loop towards your purpose. It's what gets you to query Gemini or ChatGPT or Grok every day to learn more. I'm curious. I'm curious. I'm curious. Why? Why? Why? An abundance mindset, a moonshot mindset, a longevity mindset. These are the mindsets I love teaching, and I want people to actively shape their mindset.

So let me Let me then add my vantage point, which is why we're great partners to this. Fully agree with you. And you started going into it. Let me carry this forward. So if you want to have a curiosity mindset, then you're going to put a practice in place every day of querying Claude on different elements of what you're doing, right? Similar to what Leanne Russell is doing, where every Friday, She asks, what could I do better? Right? Yeah. So there's a wonderful phrase that I've discovered over the years that has to do with my process mindset, which is you don't think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking.

I love that.

And so the mindset is important, but if we don't adopt the practices, we'll never adopt the mindset. So we can imagine we want it. I mean, this is something that happened with me with abundance.

Operationalize

them. You've always been an abundance thinker. And to be honest, I came from scarcity. I came from a scarcity mindset. And that's that when you're ever kicking me in the butt, it's usually because I'm Playing the scarcity mindset.

You're running that loop and you're thinking smaller than you, than you're fully capable of.

And our buddy Tony Robbins is the one that asks the question, what is your primary question?

Yes.

And he's asking it by, what is the question that you play over and over again in your mind that limits you, that is your glass ceiling? And I do think that just as important as identifying the abundant mindset that you want to go to, it's also catching yourself and understanding the limiting mindset that you have and re-engineering that to go. And the only way I think you can get rid of that negative mindset is part of it is telling the people around you that you have it. And that when it— like, I've got a president of our company who's extraordinary, Gavin McKay. And Gavin cares about me enough and what we're building together to constantly call me out when he sees my scarcity mindset, Joel.

Yeah.

Right? And then the flip side is the abundant mindset that you want to have. What are the practices that you put into place every day? To make the abundant mindset show up because wanting it isn't enough. You got to put it to action. So if you like this content, I hope you'll subscribe. This is where we're going to be continuing to have these dialogues that I think will be really impactful to you.