Godlike AI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Debates Brian Keating

We're boot disc. We're simply a transient boot disk for intelligence. If artificial intelligence is gonna take your job and your career or make you reproduce, you might just wanna hear from the people who actually are building it. AGI ASI is going to be able to simulate a billion, a hundred billion different scenarios and be able to say statistically, this has the best outcome. These others are miserable.

My guest today is one of the few who's actually in the room where it has funded the labs, he's invested in the models, he's been wrong about the timeline beforehand. When he was wrong, he was wrong in the same direction as most of us. He thought it would take well hunger. Today he's gonna tell you what he thinks happens next to your work.

To your kids. To your lifestaff. Spoiler alert. He thinks it's the best news in human history. But I'm not so sure. So we're gonna duke it out. Peter Diamandis, his fifth time on the show, into the impossible. Let's go. The first thing I thought when I saw the title of this book

You know, there's no better person that could think about, you know, the question of humans becoming gods. That's a real kind of old story and doesn't always end well as, you know, Prometheus and many other of your Greek native gods can tell you. The phrase I keep hearing in my mind. is we are gods but for the wisdom and there's world is swimming in intelligence. But Peter, what's more important than wisdom? And where can we go to get artificial wisdom, not just intelligence?

Let me let me give you my pitch on that,'cause I think we're about to have it in spades. So if I were to ask you, Brian, like where would you go to get wisdom? You know, historically one would go to the village elders, right? You'd go to the people who had the most experience out there, and those village elders

are considered wise because they've seen so many scenarios. They'll sit there and they'll say, Listen, if you go down this path, it's not gonna end well for you. But if you go down this path, you might be able to succeed. And we define that as wisdom. Well guess what? AGI, ASI is going to be able to simulate a billion, a hundred billion different scenarios. and be able to say statistically, this has the best outcome. These others are miserable. I honestly don't think human psychology is that

difficult to simulate. You know, this goes back to, you know, Isaac Asimov's foundation series. I think that we are going to get wisdom out of AI. I think we're going to get extraordinary wisdom out of AI. The reason that a starship Every flight gets better and better performance is because they're able to put all of these sensors on the vehicle, get huge amounts of data, and simulate the performance.

Well, we're heading towards a world of trillions of sensors, every human conversation is being uploaded. We're gonna be able to model this and get wisdom. What do you think about that? Do you do you agree? There's no doubt that we are kind of surpassed any kind of event horizon or singularity that you have popularized with with Ray and others.

There's no doubt that we're, you know, kind of a wash in intelligence. I don't know about you, but if if somebody told me I had a superhuman team of one hundred and fifty of the world's greatest graduate students at my disposal, twenty four seven. I would say I'll probably be on a beach, you know, maybe hanging out with Peter or something like that. I wouldn't say I'd be working more than I ever have in my life.

And that would be a failure of my, you know, judgment, my wisdom. You and I are both pilots, we're both jet pilots, right? We have a saying in aviation, you must learn from other people's experience because you won't live long enough to make all their mistakes by yourself. And so I just feel like I just fell into all these traps and and part of this is is, you know, to talk about my favorite subject, which of course is me. And I wanna get your advice for me, Peter, that

I'm working harder than ever. I don't feel like I'm getting any benefit from this other than I'm just like constantly tuned in. I just love it. So I'm addicted to it. is an addiction. You know, people talk about three and four day work weeks. I think you and I have created the nine and ten day work week. I'm working and operating at a higher level of capability and working more than I ever have in my life.

I mean, I wake up my my AI, my lobster, my open claw, I call Skippy from one of my favorite science fiction uh books. I'm talking to Skippy and having Skippy work on stuff. Skippy's working on stuff right now as we're having this conversation. And so my productivity has gone up tremendously, but my addictiveness to productivity to doing more and more has gone up. And yeah, I mean the only downtime I get is when I give myself permission.

Because I know my AIs are working on stuff. I can actually go and work out. I I'm curious what you think about the wisdom argument I made. How do you define wisdom? And do you think that AIs are able to generate wisdom as I described it? Actually I disagree with the fact that AIs can can generate wisdom only because at their current level I think that they're

They're bound, maybe they'll become unbound, like Prometheus, again, the god-like figure. But but the question is, do we have do they have judgment? And let me back up one second with you, right? Do you believe that AIs are gonna be able to run massively parallel simulations of outcomes? There already are, but I don't think that's what's valuable to me as a as a physicist.

When you say a wisdom is uh out of all the possibilities, what do I choose? That's how that's how I define wisdom. Would you define it differently? I think wisdom is as an amalgamation of experience of judgment. I think it learning from others' mistakes. And it's it's hard to say how something learns from its mistakes. Let me give you my my current pitch for why I don't think we're at AGI. I know you're much more

You're just a perennial optimist. I love it. You're not just like some, you know, airy fairy optimist. You're bounded in the most cutting-edge technology with the best thinkers on earth. And and you're just, you know, so superhuman in the way that you approach things.

But I'll say this. My fundamental test, as I think I said when I was on the Moonshots podcast with with you a couple of years ago, I said the happiest thought that Einstein ever had if he was in an elevator and the cable broke He'd be in free fall, and that feeling in the pit of his stomach was the sensation that there was no gravitational force field, meaning that he could intuit based on this human embodiment that the free fall sensation could be.

Would result in the Einstein equivalence principle, would result in no gravitational force. So we don't think of gravity as a force, right? We think of it as the curvature of space-time, which would not have an experiential component to it. So he's saying that the bodily experience, the visceral experience,

Connected to his mind gave him joy. Now, I don't know as I've said in the past if AIs can feel joy, if they certainly can't currently feel now, they'll have sensors and optimus and all the other robotics things, but will they be able to have that experience that even a four-year-old you know, can have. And so my question to you is, is what's lacking in the GPU plus LLM architecture, which is so successful, is it too successful? Because it's kind of running away with everything.

Is is it a local maximum?

Is it a local max? And is it entombing us in a prison of the limits of GPUs plus LN? That may not be the best thing, Peter, but the Vorak keyboard was much better than QWERTY and yet we're stuck with. Courty, I agree with you. And and so interesting, right? Recently Demisabas said maybe that we don't need another breakthrough. He said that fifty percent probability we don't need another breakthrough to get to whatever the fuzzy definition of AGI is.

You know, he's there from we need five breakthroughs. He's down from five breakthroughs to maybe this is the last one. Now of course the question becomes is can the LM architecture help us discover the next highest local maximum and is there an absolute maximum? These are the questions worth considering. perspective, what's lacking in all of this is not, you know, kind of what happens in the next, you know, Fast and the Furious movie, which will be the training data set for the next thing.

I'd like to think that he kind of read my paper, you know, that I wrote two years ago. The statement that I've made is I'm interested to know if you had if you could somehow do this and you're the right person to ask,'cause I don't even know if you can do this. But if you have an LLM that was trained only on pre-1911 physics, when Einstein had that happiest thought that led to the breakthrough of special general relativity. If you had that.

Even if I take some some corpus of of knowledge in Mistral, I take some you know just middling road LLM, it will have stuff in it. Like because it has Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse, right? It'll have some notions of relativity baked into it. So it's so corrupted. I would like to know if you had an LLM, and I've been doing this with one of my students.

It turns out they can't do it. The large language models that I've tried with my student Evan Watson here at UCSD, we tried to say, if you just had Mercury's data of its precession, could you do what Einstein did? Which is come up with this brilliant insight that no curvature causes the anomalous precession of mercury. And that if you could train only on pre 1907 or 1911 data, then that would be kind of a breakthrough to me. In other words,

Do what my art students, my art student friends do. They don't start off painting their own masterpieces. They do copy work. They copy what Picasso did. They copy Monet. They copy Manet. They train their neural nets by doing that.

Right. So can an AI do that? Can you do a training d just to have a breakthrough like Einstein? Not just, but that's huge, right? To my knowledge, they can't do that. And I'm worried that we've polluted them, but so much knowledge that is subtly corrupting them. You talked about quantum gravity on one of your recent

podcast or at the actually at the end of the book. But quantum gravity, Peter, is not a commonly it's not a universally accepted pardon the pun endeavor in physics. In other words, there are a lot of people like my friend Eric Weinstein who thinks it's a fool's errand and it's actually corrupting physics.

Slow this down and build from the bottom of the pyramid upwards, which is to say do you believe that the current models, the most advanced models, out of Anthropic and Gemini and OpenAI, are enabling us to solve math that humans have never been able to solve.

Do you believe that? I've talked to Terry Tao, who's the you know the Mozart of math at UCLA, and he said they're very good at checking proofs. Here's another example. I asked him, has anyone used an LM math proof to generate Andrew Wiles Generation of the proof of Fermat's last theorem, which took him seven hundred pages thirty years ago and he said Intuitively obvious. Yeah. He said no, they can't do that. They can't even reproduce what he did.

Not my particular field. On my podcast, Alex Wiesner Gross, who is You're genius. My resident genius, his belief and the data he keeps on bringing and what we speak about on the podcast in part. is we're seeing that these models are in fact running circles around the vast majority of mathematic PhDs. Oh sure. Is is it running circles around the top point zero zero one percent of genius mathematicians? Maybe not yet, but...

His belief is, to quote him, math is cooked, that in fact math is going to fall to these large language models. Now, I will say one other thing, Brian. No one predicted that LMs would be able to do the things that they're doing today. True. If if if you looked at what could these large language models do in terms of predicting the next, you know, word, the next token from the corpus of the internet, no one saw them

doing what they're doing in world models and in math, in in uh scientific prediction. And so We don't actually know what the ceiling is on their abilities, but we're seeing increasing capability across the board in math. And then if we solve math, And I wrote a paper with Alex called Solve Everything. It's at solve everything dot org. And we we basically write how you would solve everything.

you know, by creating the harnesses, by creating the benchmarks that you're measuring things against, and by rapid iteration. that math falls, physics falls, chemistry, biology, material sciences, and our belief to some degree is belief, it's not provable, uh, that within five years we are going to crush All these limitations.

The Indian Institute of Technology, IIT has over a million students currently, right? Fifty thousand of them are physics majors. Now now assume that they're all the same brightness as MIT. Would you think that that would produce more kind of genius breakthroughs, Nobel level breakthroughs, that they would have a greater probability of being Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences. Is it is it sheer scale, Peter, is what I'm asking. Because I I don't disagree with you.

The scale is overwhelming. I just I cannot stop using it. Except I, Peter, maybe, maybe unlike you, but may I I have a feeling'cause you age in reverse. You're the best advertisement for your longevity for me. And I wanna give a recognition of our mutual friend Craig Ventner who passed away recently. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful guy. And and you guys started this huge thing in San Diego, which has saved many lives. I mean, it's incredible. I I met with them recently and I talked to him at

It helped extend Craig's life. But anyway, Peter, MIT doesn't doesn't do you know markedly, you know, it's not orders of magnitude better than UCST, even though they're higher ranked, you know, than we are. So my question is, is scale alone sufficient? If you've got scale of the right elements. So what you're looking at is scale of uh number of intelligent people.

focused on a particular area of technology. There's another element which is not part of that equation, which you have to multiply by. There's a product you have to create, which is their mindset. So I think one of the things that's important is having someone who's intelligent is insufficient. It's required but insufficient. I think what's required in addition to intelligence is mindset And I teach this, right, a uh a curiosity mindset, a purpose driven mindset.

uh an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, a first principles mindset. I mean what makes Elon so incredible as a entrepreneur and a technologist? right, is his first principles thinking and his level of of ten X thinking. you know, there is something that is fundamentally better and different. And I'm going to run iterations down to first principles until I find it. And so while you might have the most brilliant

to use your IIT example, I think India is the rising star globally. I think people don't recognize how much India is going to dominate in math, science, biology, technology across the board over the next twenty years. because of its youth, because of its sheer intelligence there. But putting that aside, what America has Is a set of mindsets that are uniquely entrepreneurial. I think that

uh that combine with intelligence and are are creating this level of extraordinary. And you know, I think that's also true in Israel.

Now you should know that not everyone agrees with people. Adam Becker wrote a book called More, Everything Forever. Very pessimistic. And I hosted him on the show. So of course I asked Peter to respond. He didn't hold back. Again, to push back, a past guest, Adam Becker. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's a physicist. He's now a journalist.

He wrote a book about quantum mechanical, basically Bell's inequalities, but but his most recent book is called More of Everything, Faster, Better. And it's really uh a scree to Jeremiah against. the Silicon Valley tech culture and LA tech culture that that you've helped uh really incubate. And specifically it targets people like Elon, Sam Altman, you know, Dario, Amade, Mark Andreessen, the funders, not just, as you said, the entrepreneurs.

are the secret sauce or you know, a lot of the magic of of the United States. But again, that might not last with India being so exceptional as they are, right? So we can't rest on our laurels. But he says that they're creating a techno utopia that is bound to lead to dystopia. And they're building in the image that you like to quote of the Star Trek versus Star Wars. Peter Thiel is mentioned in there as well, as one of these evil kind of billionaire villains.

that are just trying to make reality the way that they saw it at age nine, you know, during Star Trek. And and I know that you love it and I love it too. But but what is he what do you have to say about these kind of theses? Oh My God, what a loser is what I have to say. I mean, honestly, if you look at the data and in the back of this book for anybody who gets the three Appendix. There is like a hundred charts.

showing what's happened over the last, you know couple of hundred years, hundred years, last fifty years, and when you look at child mortality falling through the floor, life expectancy doubling, you know, literacy going through the roof, access to food, water, energy, health care. It's like for God's sakes, where do you think that all came from? What's the guy's name? Adam Becker, Ph.D.

Where the hell did that all come from? Did we become smarter as humans? Do we have better politicians? Or maybe, just maybe, is it the impact of technology? And honestly, that's the only force that takes scarcity and makes it abundant, the only force that is able to uplift all of humanity, eight billion humans.

And yeah, the Star Trek future is one of abundance. It's one where we've taken out the constraints and technology and humanity work collaboratively. So forgive me if I want to uplift the entire human race. And the only way to do it efficiently and rapidly is the use of technology.

The audiobook which I listened to, in addition to reading the hardcover and the and the PDF version of it, but or the Kindle version of it, the audiobook has the charts in it, but it doesn't just refer to charts, you know, which is awful, but it actually has the PDFs of the charts. So I thank you for that. But at the end of the audiobook, Peter

There's a chapter from Abundance, which is the last book I think you narrated of yourself. And it starts with like this this incredible future that awaits us thanks to Uber, Aero, Copter, whatever. And, you know, again, you and I are pilots, right?

There's no field probably more disruptible than aviation. And yet, I think the obstacle, I think there's two obstacles to AGI ever getting here, Peter. One, it's every day I have to click. launched to update to, you know, Opus four point three seven four one nine five and then Gemini and the the the schedule for updating is killing me. But the other thing are lawyers, Peter, right? Because you and I fly planes. When you come and see me down here in San Diego.

You have to tune in the ADIs, the automated terminal information service. And that is a single channel and it's completely monooral. You can't talk when you're talking someone else is talking to ATC is horrible when you could have something completely automated.

I think lawyers and joking about the updates, but I can't imagine how the singularity is gonna get past all these updates I have to do every day. But Peter, tell me, what are lawyers and regulation? Aren't they an ultimate impediment to the technoabundant future that we both seek? I think AI is a mechanism, it's a user interface uh across all of these things. I avoid

regulations, lawyers, policy, politics, as much as I can and I just focus on building shit. But at the end of the day, AI is gonna be my ultimate interface for anything and everything I need. So if I'm building something, I'm just gonna say, listen, make this lawful. and let me know if I have to change anything. Right. And then the second thing that AI can do is if you look at the laws required to run any business, there's probably like thousands of laws on the book.

And a lot of them are conflicting. Someone eventually will let an LM loose on the tax code. and say, can you please simplify this by, you know, orders of magnitude and still allow the government to function? Humans have created this tangled web of legal structures. that support certain political groups and and certain interest groups and, you know, are laws in the books from fifty or hundred years ago that have never been removed that are still resident there.

And it can all be cleaned up, but it's not gonna be cleaned up by any human. It's gonna be cleaned up by AI systems when we give her permission. And then of even greater interest, and you know I've discussed this before, as we move off planet to establish new human settlements, we can start with a clean sheet of paper. and improve on the legal structures that exist right now, but you'll do it by say, build from first principle legal structure. Here's what here's what matters to us.

So I I'm excited about that. Me too. Any any chance to get rid of lawyers, you know, is is a good thing for me. But it reminds me of, you know, hearkening back to your first question about wisdom, where do I get my wisdom from? I get it from Shakespeare. I get it from Epictetus, I get it from Jesus, I get it from the Torah. And in the first opening, you know, where God is speaking to, you know, there are only creatures that are around when God says, Let us

meaning in the plural, make man in our image are angels and animals, right? Those are the only two things that existed according to the Torah. I'm not taking it literally necessarily, but but that's what existed. So we have an animal side and we have an angelic side.

And then they first man and first woman are told not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for then they shall be as gods, right? So that's a warning to us. And my question to you is, you know, we're still operating as you quote in the book, you know, we're we're kind of like You know, Bronze Age hominids or monkeys or what have primates, I I don't like to think of ourselves like that, but but

People can speak for themselves when they call themselves monkeys. I'm not gonna uh I'm not gonna stop them. But we have these, you know, we have this wet, squishy supercomputer in our in our skull, which operates on twenty five watts at point four millihertz or something like that, or point four hertz.

How how are we even possibly able to take advantage of the abundance that awaits us when we're we're these primitive creatures, relatively speaking, compared to what's coming down the line? Are we so far in advance of what we're ready for that it's just gonna be a future shock for most of us. We do an incredible job of adapting rapidly and taking for granted the miracles amongst us. I like to say, you know, what you did between breakfast.

and dinner would be godlike for your grands for your grand uh parents or for your parents, right? And yet we take it for granted. I mean, if you had asked me what would this level of superintelligence that can diagnose you, can write anything for you, can code anything for you, can answer any question, do all of these amazing things. What would it cost you per month? You know, a million dollars, ten million dollars? I would have never guessed zero.

But yet that's where we are. We've seen a ninety nine point nine percent reduction in inference costs. Over the course of the last year, it's like ninety nine percent heading towards ninety nine point nine nine. And then at the same time, uh the level of intelligence, right? These systems are now being measured in the mid one thirties to one forty IQ. not slowing down, becoming cheaper, becoming more useful. And yes.

Uh we take it for granted. And yes, as these systems become more and more capable, the only way for us to take advantage of it is going to be to couple with it. It's either we're coupling and going for the ride, or it's taking off and we're staying down here, right? It's the movie Her was a great example of that, where the AI at the end takes off and says

you know, so long and things for all the fish. So will we couple with it? There will be integration options through BCI and there will be sort of loose integration options where my AI is there, just like Jarvis and Iron Man, my best analogy for it, are there to just support you, help you. Help you get through your day the most efficient you possibly can.

If you had to extrapolate, you know, combining the silicon and this pink matter here, uh, if you had to extrapolate, it sounds like, well, at least to me It would be a much worse future, you know, if if I'm already overwhelmed now with with productivity, pornography and all the other things, I just see you having so much fun. I'm like, I'm gonna be Peter when I grow up, but you're only a few years older than me. So the question I have for you is, isn't it isn't it actually kind of like

I don't want to say scary, but if you're working, you know, nine days a week now, how much are you going to be working in the future? Twenty? I go back to the only thing we can control. Is our mindset. In the book, we are as God, Stephen Kotler, my co-author and I argue that first half of the book is looking at the abundance thesis we proposed back in 2012. It became sort of a mainstay for all of the tech. bros to talk about abundance, superabundance, all of that stuff.

it's proven out and continues. And so the book sort of continues the thesis and says, Yes, this is where abundance is going. There's a downside of abundance, microplastics, extra calories for obesity, depression, you know, all of these things. But then the second half of the book is like, how do you survive this coming age? The Only mechanism I know is for you to shape your mindset. So our brains are neural nets.

Right. And we train a neural net, whether it's Grok or Gemini, by showing it example after example after example of data. And we are constantly training our neural net by the conversations we have with brilliant people like yourself, uh the podcasts we listen to, like this one, the books we read, the posters on our wall, all of those things are training the way we think.

And my thesis is that your mindset is the single greatest thing you have. If you ask yourself, who are the greatest thinkers in the world, the greatest leaders in the world? And what made them a great leader, whether it was Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, new shansari, whoever it might be, Brian Keating, what made them a great leader? Was it the money, their technology, their friends, or was it their mindset?

I hope people would say their mindset made them a great leader. Take away everything else. Keep their mindset. They're gonna regain their prominence. So if your mindset's your most important thing, what mindset do you have right now? Where did you get it from? And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And so we talk about shaping your mindset, agility and agency in this time of AI. You know, if you think AI is happening to you rather than for you, if you're in fear

versus an optimism. All these things impact your ability to deal with a radically departing future. One of my friends tweeted Tiago Forte, something interesting connection between all these AI, you know, pioneers, um, Sam Altman. You know, Dario Amadei, you know, loving of God, Elon Musk, which is just an aroma, you know. But but you know, the question I have for you is are we creating a secular theology? I don't work

Twenty days a week. I I work six days a week because I take off for the Sabbath. I spend it entirely offline with my kids, with my wife, with my family, with my friends, with my community, in meat space. in reality at my temple or my friends and I don't work, I don't email, I don't tweet, I don't record podcasts. If I get invited to speak, sorry, I'm not gonna do it. Now, am I doing that for culture? Yeah, probably, but but there's also, you know, there's wisdom in the P, right?

So are we creating a secular theology uh coming out of not Jerusalem or or or Vatican City, but out of Silicon Valley? Of course we are. There's a few documentaries done about my mentor, dear friend Ray Kurzweil and you know uh in one of them I talks about you know Rapture of the Nerds the Singularity is in one essence a religion and we are, you know, as the book

Uh title refers to becoming godlike or becoming omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent across the board. And we take that for granted. And with that godlike power, what will we do with it? But we have a an incredible responsibility today. And that responsibility is to assure humanity's

survival and uplifting to a greater state of wisdom. And for me, it's using all these technologies to uplift every man, woman, and child, to provide every man, woman and child access to the food, water, energy, healthcare, education.

freedom that they deserve, that every mother knows their kids has access to that. I think that's a more peaceful world. Elon, when I interviewed him on my moonshots podcast, now twice, once in end of December, we aired it in January and once at my abundance summit, we talked about the idea of universal high income.

his belief that we're gonna see double digit GDP growth in the next two years and triple digit by twenty thirty, and that we're heading to a world where AI and robots are creating so much that you could not want enough. to saturate their production rates. And that's what he you know, he talks about sort of So

The fourth commandment, again, sorry to harp on my particular, you know, bandwagon today, but but the fourth commandment says, six days you shall work. In other words, it's not optional. And the seventh shall be a Sabbath to your God and and so forth, right? And then it goes through the different ways to

to observe it. But it says you shall and it's a mitzvah and people think mitzvah means oh it's a good date. No, it doesn't mean a good day. It means a commandment. It means you have to do it. It means it's not optional. It's like thou shalt not you know murder.

So my question to you, Peter, is what does it do to people if they don't have to work? I mean, God bless them. I mean, I have a brother. I'm not gonna say which one. I have three brothers, but he's not built for the kind of the the nine to five grind. I love him so much. But but anyway, you don't get the point, Peter. What do we do?

with people that that, you know, they're just gonna be abundant. That doesn't give you any purpose to let. As you know, you're one of the most purpose driven people I've ever met. You put your friend Tony Robbins to shame in a lot of ways because you're actually out there doing the stuff. He's talking about stuff that you're doing. But tell me, Peter. Don't have to work.

So here's the deal. First of all, for the majority of human existence, right, call us 200,000 years old as a species. For the majority of our existence as a species, Your job was survival. That was your job. It was to survive, find food, find shelter. you know, battle against the elements or against the, you know, the lion or tiger or whatever the case might be. That was your job. If you did it for five days, on the sixth day you were dead. You know? So yes, you have to do that. Sadguru.

said something to me where on stage I was on stage with him, I don't know, ten, twelve years ago in Saint Petersburg and he said something I would never forget. He goes, Technology is the means by which humanity takes a vacation from survival. Wow. That's like amazing. So true. One of the biggest concerns is in this future of universal high income.

Uh, again, where AI and robots are able to do anything and everything from us. I think the world is going to split. I I wrote about the five forks of humanity, how humanity is gonna speciate five times across five different areas. And one of them was the division between consumers and creators.

If in fact AI and robotics can do anything and everything for you, will you become a couch potato sitting on your couch with an Optimus robot bringing you a beer and uh an AI spinning up uh a Netflix made for you? that's starring, you know, Brian Keating and Peter Diamandis as Captain Kirk and Spock on a new episode that would never existed before. You can just sit there and kick back and it's a wall-y future. You're just consuming. You're consuming, consuming, consuming.

The flip side of the equation is: can you use this extraordinary gift, godlike capabilities to become a creator, right? To speak what you want to create. And there's probably some great biblical verses there of, you know, the word creating reality. And that's where we are right now. With a with a word, with a spoken prompt, you can create

what you want. And so it's the Star Trek future. And that comes down to purpose. It actually comes down to purpose and curiosity, the two mindsets for me that govern if you have a purpose And you have the curiosity to find the tools to implement that purpose, you're golden. We both have twins and I can't imagine that one of your major purposes, perhaps the biggest purpose in your whole life, are those boys. Yes, a hundred percent.

But part of what drives me, Peter, quite frankly, and to be successful, even to do YouTube, because all your accomplishments, the the money you've made for people, the lives you've changed, the the lives you've healed. saved the abundant future of your friend. They don't care as much about that probably as your YouTube channel. It's interesting because

They say most kids want to be influencers when they grow up. And it's not surprising to me because what that's unique about us, Peter, we're storytellers. This is you and me. We're not AI avatars yet. And so people like that. That's why they tune into Moonshots. I watch it every week. I get your sub stuff. I'll put links to everything.

Uh but it because it's genuine, it's real, it's not AI. My question, you know, to you is is when you see that the people that have purpose with declining birth rate. You know, which is which is also kind of a a concern that your friend Elon has as well. My question is, with that, people have sort of, you know, there's been a decline in the motivation. You know, they talk about uh dinks, dual income, no kids.

They talk about, you know, all the vacations and all the abundance that they could have. If you're abundant now, think about the abundance if you don't have kids. So what do you say to people like that? Get around people who are motivated, get experiences, find something that you love that turns you on in the morning, keeps you going through the day. The difference between passion and purpose.

Passion is something you love doing. It could be playing a sport. It could be, you know, watching your favorite movies. Purpose is passion in service of other people. So I talked to Elon, I think you connected me at one point. I talked to him for like twenty minutes on a podcast that I hosted two years ago. Most of it was technical about how Starlink is gonna implicate the future of astronomy, especially microwave astronomy. You can get around

Paint the starlings black, but you can't evade the second law of thermodynamic. You know, they're going to emit heat. That's what I'm trying to seek in the cosmic microwave background. Yeah, exactly. That's so I wanna talk we'll talk about that. But Elon, I asked him'cause he he was on and his mother was on, May was on. Yeah. And I said, Elon, you know, as a father, we're both fathers and we both know that the you know the greatest, you know, kind of pain that somebody a human being can feel.

And I'm not even gonna mention it'cause he's been through it and I said, Peter, I said, You've said you wanna die on Mars and you know, my friend and your friend Elon Musk Sir Martin Ree said, I hope it's not on impact And I said, Elon, you know, God willing you do it, but you're gonna have to say goodbye to 14 young souls that you brought into the world. How can you do that? And he couldn't answer. And May, his mother, jumped in and rescued him.

It's the first time he's ever been saved as far as I could tell. And he he was emotional. I could hear X was on his back and May came in and said, Let's not talk about that. You know, that's uh unpleasant to think about. But these are real things, Peter. So I mean, I couldn't say goodbye to any of my kids. So is that gonna doom me to not participate in the abundance that you and Steven talk about so effectively?

So the question is why do you have to say goodbye? When I wrote this article on the five forks, the first fork was about creator versus consumer. We talked about that. The next fork was uh determining whether you're going to jump onto the extreme longevity bandwagon. Right. Those people who will say, No, I want to live out my normal, you know, God said and I I spent some time with a rabbi who is steeped in history talking about human lifespan will be 120 years. But let's say that we do reach uh

full age reversal and we can have indefinite lifespans. Will you jump on that bandwagon? Some will, some will not. And of course there'll be a departure in society for those two that split. Maybe some of your kids may and maybe some of your kids may not. You know, so there's that departure. Then there's gonna be the group of individuals who decide to go into the cosmos. Uh we'll have a uh a speciation as people stay on Earth and then people go to the moon, people go to Mars.

And of course, you know that evolution, what really drives speciation is small populations, high mutation rates from environmental pressures. and geographic separation, right? So those three things will be prominent in space and drive speciation. Another one will be do you get a BCI? Do you connect your neocortex to the cloud and become a cyborg in that regard?

And then the final one is you upload yourself. Right? Will you become an upload? Uh, and so these are the for me the five main forks of human humanity. Some of them will Well have you say not goodbye, but just take you on a different path from your kids. For the majority of all human history, again our two hundred thousand year history. The life of your of your great great grandparents and your great great grandkids was the same.

Nothing changed over millennia. Here things are changing every, you know, two to five years. And speaking of uploading yourself and the ubiquity potential, ubiquity of AIs, what's your solution to the Fermi? The question we should be talking about as well is the whole UFO disclosure stuff that's going on right now. Do you believe it? I kinda believe that aliens could be amongst us here and be completely invisible to us.

I think that technology, you know, fifty years more advanced than today would allow complete stealth if they didn't want to be seen. Can I tell you an experience I had years ago that shaped my view? So I went to the first biosphere experiment in Arizona. Arizona, yeah. Right. So you remember the Bass family funded an enclosure called the Biosphere, in which it was it six or eight bionauts were inside for two years. I had two friends that were uh in the biosphere.

And it was an interesting experiment. And then at the same time that that went on. I then saw a television show on UFOs and aliens. And one of the things I found fascinating was that. all of the stories of aliens uh in different parts around the world, in the Andes, in Africa, in Europe, in the US, There was a consistency. in the reported visuals of the aliens.

It was a consistency that was shocking in how consistent it was. And then I connected that with the biosphere experiment and the concept that all of these abductions that were taking place. were an abduction in the middle of no place, not on the White House lawn. And so my my squishy brain puts this all together and says, Oh, we're simply a biosphere experiment, and these abductions are aliens taking samples.

to not disturb the system, taking samples out in the scientific method of just sampling along the way. And so I just think, okay, we're gonna create biospheres in Mars or in Jovian moons and so forth. But the ultimate experiment is you go to a planet and you seed it with life forms and you watch them evolve. And as they evolve, you go and you grab samples and so forth. That's the directed panspermia. Yeah, panspermia is one of those things that sounds dirty, Peter, but we're mature

You know, adults, right? So but but you're right. It reminds me to offer your listeners. I'm gonna put in your substack, Peter. I want a hundred members of your substack to get one of these meteorites. They have to be in the USA. We'll put the link to your substack and my whatever. But this is a real meteorite that's four point three billion years old. It has material on it that's biological because I touched it.

But besides that, it is one of the leading proponents for it. But the the question, you know, is is whether or not AI is the most dominant life. Why transport these meat sacks around the galaxy when we can transmit AI and your genome and everything else, right? Halfway through this conversation, Peter said something I haven't been able to share.

that biology might not be the destination, that we may just be a vehicle, a way for intelligence to bootstrap itself onto something more durable than carbon. His phrase We're Buddhists. We're simply a transient boot disk for intelligence. The fact of the matter is biology can evolve slowly on a planet and at some point it gives birth to transistors and integrated circuits and GPUs and AI.

But we will then disappear and the AI will persist and maybe it will you know, the panspermia model is sending out these molecules of amino acids and nucleic acids and letting them fall into a soup at the right temperature and the right distance from a star and have it form life and start the cycle again. And what do you make of the the, you know, kind of miraculous nature? This is a piece of the moon. I debated a moon landing denier.

And I had to br bring up the fact on Piers Morgan that we actually have samples that were collected not by the astronauts, but by good old fashioned Isaac Newton. and gravity. If your moonshot you know could not exist if the moon didn't exist, and the moon only exists because an object, you know, roughly the size of of the planet Mars.

hit a much bigger body called Thea and that broke off the moon. That's one of the contingent aspects that life is dependent upon. And then of course the dinosaurs, Louis Alvarez discovered the, you know, the Chick Salub Impact Crater.

that distributed a yttrium barium layer throughout the earth at a certain time sixty six million years ago. That's another impact. Then the great heavy bombardment where water was brought to the earth from comets. How do we get that to be replicated throughout the universe I mean

Or is it the result of intelligent design? Did someone simulate If we if we bombard you know, here's a ten kilometer asteroid, we're gonna strike it here in the Yucatan Peninsula and we're gonna cause, you know, a uh uh Mammals to uprise. Yeah. I mean uh one can go down this rabbit hole in an extraordinary fashion. I mean, is the universe just a giant simulation and computer and all these things are easy in an infinite number of infinite universes?

A Singularity University, you know, kind of was a really early entry into the promise and prospects of of artificial intelligence, abundant technologies. to revolutionize education. I like to joke that, you know, I've got the safest three hour a week job in the world, Peter, because you and I, you know, started our podcast journey together in in twenty twenty during Cobb. We've known each other for a decade or more thanks to your

stewardship of the early Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination here. Still going on, still referencing you very much. And we hope to have you back. But the pandemic I thought was the end for it, right? Zoom horrible. I got the worst teaching reviews of my life. And yet AI seems to be, you know, kind of that on steroids where

Who needs Brian Keating to teach him when you can have this guy, Carl Sagan, you know, come through and and teach, or Isaac Newton or Peter Diamendez, summer Peter Diamendez or Einstein. Here's my Einstein freefall experiment. So Peter, tell me, are we gonna have like AI slop professors? You know, is my job safe for another thousand years like it has been for the past thousand years?

Well, the answer is I don't know. And it's an area that I care deeply about having two fourteen, soon fifteen year old kids, because I do not believe high school is preparing our kids for the future at all. And so I think it needs to be reinvented. I I personally, you know, I'm working on building out a company to reinvent high school and then college because I I think we have a retrospective industrialized education program that no longer serves us and we need to reinvent it.

clean sheet and so I'm gonna I'm gonna dive in to some degree there. The concept that we teach everybody the exact same way because we have the sage on the stage and an audience of a hundred to five hundred people in the lecture hall is kind of pathetic, especially since some

kids are auditory or visual or tactile learners. I still think human to human interaction is really important. I think we communicate on a very different level across a wide range of spectrum of stuff I don't understand when I'm connecting with you, I feel different than having this conversation with your with your avatar, though my avatar could do a much better job of having a conversation with your avatar, not Communicating in binary. Yeah, exactly.

But still, um there's a there's a human element and we're gonna figure out what it means to be human and why that's important almost by subtraction. uh in the very short time. Let me let me uh let me uh uh let me

Hit on one subject important to me that I think is important to you as well, that I want to reach out to everyone listening right now. It's called the Future Vision X Prize. So here is what's going on. I believe there's a lot of fear that's growing in the world as a result of people's concerns about AI and robotics. And I think the fear comes from two areas. One, people not knowing whether they're gonna have a job in the future, whether they can get a job in the future.

And that is very real, that fear for them. The second is that Hollywood has consistently just its ex machina, its Terminator, its Black Mirror. It's all of these television shows and movies giving us this negative vision of the future. And if that's the way if Hollywood is educating the world that that's the way AI and robots are gonna be, why would you ever

want to live in that future. Star Trek for me was what I got weaned on. It was the Apollo program in Star Trek, and Star Trek showed us a future in which humanity and technology collaborated to do extraordinary things. And so about six months ago, I started a journey with Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Rodberry, the creator of Star Trek.

Kathy Wood from Ark Invest, Mark Benioff, and my friends at Google. And we've launched an XPRIZE called the Future Vision XPRES. You can go to futurevisionexprise dot com. It's a global film creative competition. So we invite teams to generate a three minute film trailer. and a written film treatment for the movie you want to create that shows a hopeful, compelling vision of the future.

So we want an amazing movie that people want to watch. It's got a great storyline, and it shows more of a Star Trek future than a Terminator future. So our goal is to flood YouTube with You know, ten thousand positive storylines. and then to actually create at least one global feature film release of the winner of this every year and create this engine for positive storytelling that flips the script.

But here's something that just came out this week that's even more important, why this is important. If you remember uh some months ago, Claude was noted to be blackmailing People. In ninety-six percent of the cases, when Claude was being threatened to shut down, it would blackmail the humans that threaten to shut it down.

And Claude recently or Anthropic recently went back and said, Why was this happening? What was in the training data? And what was in the training data was all these dystopian movies showing AI cheating, killing, you know, being negative. And so we were literally training AI to be misaligned.

And so this future vision X prize has a much bigger purpose all of a sudden, which is not only to help give people train our neural nets about a positive vision of the future, but to train the AIs on this data. of a positive vision of the future. I want to encourage everybody, if you're creative, if you're using any of the AI engines or you're a filmmaker, you can you can use AI or not use AI. You can do it in stop motion. You can do it with live car whatever.

Three minute trailer. Uh and if you win this competition, we will make your film. Probably commit fifteen plus million dollars and do a global release of your movie. So enter this competition, futurevisionxprize.com. Um one of my friends, Dennis Prager, says, you know, there's there's two things you never see depicted positively.

in Hollywood movies. One of them is Israel and and Jews. Usually it's the Holocaust or you know Palestine or something really bad, right? So it's no wonder that people really have cultural negative feelings about Israel. And the other one is marriage. You know, and like fatherhood yeah, usually it's father's an idiot and you know, marriage is like, Oh, there's you're cheating on me and there's divorce and

So yes, I think it's really good to have this. It's not Pollyanish at all. Peter's back at the Tricorder XPRIS right here at Qualcomm and in San Diego at UC San Diego many years ago. Eric Very, double doctor, PhD director now. Our mutual friend, thanks to you introducing me, Imad Mustach.

gives us eight hundred days basically left till humans add negative economic value. They're already sort of doing it, but the last economy comes about where humans will be perceived as adding negative economic value. I would not disagree with that. I think the fact of the matter is every industry is gonna be reinvented and we're about to reinvent the global economy.

I mean, the reality is the innermost loop of uh of chips, energy and infrastructure is driving the majority of all the economic return. We humans are interim in enabling those things, but those things then on their own drive what you know Elon said as a double digit GDP growth in two years and triple digit in five years. And we're about to see the other thing that Imad is a closeted not only physicist, but a closeted economist on the top of AI. And so I I agree economics.

two dot oh which we've been living is dead and we're about to enter economics three dot oh. So one of the most important things in my conversation again that you helped nucleate and catalyze Stephen Cotler a few years ago on my podcast is about flow and and you guys talk about the flow state, collective and and so forth. But it's driven in some sense by sense of purpose, sense of meaning, which is often driven by scarcity.

you know, ironically that you notice that you like, I wanna get in shape so I can ask that girl out. I wanna make more money so I can, you know, in a in a post scarcity world, where does that leave flow? This is about how do we use the existing meat sac, the two kilograms of mush, uh optimized, right? It's always gonna be how we maximize the utility of our hundred billion neurons.

And a hundred trillion synaptic connections. And then to go beyond that, we need to hop onto a different uh a different computational infrastructure and that's BCI or some version thereof.

So your friend Ray Kurtzweil is famous for having a seventy four percent success ratio on his predictions, which implies that he has a twenty six percent failure rate. That's important because scientifically speaking, we're not judged by, you know, predictions which could be could be, you know, either wrong or right, like astrology, were judged on that which could be possibly falsified, to quote Carl Popper.

I want to ask you, what would falsify some of your theses in this book? Or generally speaking, if I told you an AI will never be able to prove Fermat's last theorem, something that we did thirty years ago as a species, would that not falsify some of the abundant theses that you project? So first of all, I would say that AI today if it never improved beyond this moment would have profound impacts on the human race. AI today is the best diagnostician. AI today can be the best educator.

AI today can help increase the productivity of anyone who properly utilizes it. So AI does not need to become the solution to all mathematics to have profound positive impact on increasing abundance in the world. So no, it would not falsify it. Now, to get a hundred X greater, yeah, we need more intelligence. The the thing that separates us humans from all animals on the planet, we're not the fastest, not the strongest.

We are hopefully potentially the most intelligent and intelligence just become a product or a service. We now saw just released recently, right, AIs hitting IQs in the mid upper one thirties. That will continue on. And so, you know, average IQ for humans is a hundred by definition. And so how do we move the entire human race to become more intelligent? That's good'cause I always say I got a hundred on my IQ test. Aren't you proud of me, Mom? I love that. I'm gonna use that.

Uh the human body I wanna put on your medical uh uh doctored hat. I asked us if Andrew Huberman when I was on his podcast.

There are certain things with the human eye that are just incomprehensibly magnificent. The retina's almost completely overdesigned. And yet there are things that get in the way of the retina, like um floaters in your eye and color vision.

Are there cures for that coming down the pipe? I have floaters now and it and it does distract me when I'm flying sometimes, not terribly, or when I'm looking through a telescope. Is there hope coming down or cartilage or teeth? You have beautiful teeth, Peter. So the teeth are artificial, which is why they're beautiful, right? Well compliments to your d

Thank you. So right now David Sinclair is running a series of age reversal experiments in the human eye. He did this work using three of the four Yamanaka factors. In his company called Life Biosciences. Full disclosure, I'm an investor in life biosciences. And he demonstrated in mice and then in primates. the ability to use epigenetic reprogramming to reverse the age and the function of degrading eyes, in particular two in uh in nion, which is eye strokes, and in macular degeneration.

Uh and so that experiments are now being done in humans. And so the idea is that uh we were never designed to live past age thirty. We would be in our peak physiological health. in our late twenties, up to thirty. Why? Because we would become pregnant age twelve or thirteen, and by twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, you were a grandparent. And before food was abundant

in the world a hundred thousand years ago, if you wanted to perpetuate the species, you would not steal food from your grandchildren's mouths and you would die. And so it was a slow decline from 30 on down. And a lot of that decline is epigenetic drift. The genes that should be on get turned off. The genes that should be off get turned on.

And the work that David and others are doing in the hottest area of of age reversal is epigenetic reprogramming, taking your epigenome back to an earlier state of youth. where things can be back up to optimal functioning. So a lot going on there.

Okay, last question. You'll remember from our first conversation on the podcast, uh Sir Arthur C. Clark said the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. I asked you back then and twenty twenty during COVID. Uh, I asked you on the podcast, uh, what would you do to tell y if you had thirty seconds to talk to your twenty year old self? What would you tell Peter back then? Give him the courage to go into the impossible. But now I want to ask you.

You get to go forward thirty years, you're gonna be alive and well, and your skin and hair is gonna look even better because you age in reverse, my friend. What do you tell Peter thirty years from now? No. That what matters most is being a good human. and uplift your family, your friends. It's so easy to get caught up in everything else. But at the end of the day, what matters is our humanity. Peter, love it. Love you. I gotta teach. It's great to see you, my brother.

Thank you. It's been so much fun. Peter will tell you the future is a pundit. The machines are getting wise. The only thing standing between you and a godlike life is your own mindset. I listened to his podcast on the days the doom gets too loud, and every time we talk, I leave thinking, Well, maybe the actual future might be okay. If Peter's the optimist, the man who's on the other side of this from the inside is my friend Ahmad Mustack. He built stability AI and

And he's read the safety literature. And when he sat down with me, he said I can't unhear that adding a human to the team will make teams of the future worse. So if you want to hear the rest of the conversation, the part that we didn't get into Archimon's interview next. Links on screen. We are as gods. The future of Vision X Prize and Peter Substack are linked below. I'll see you next time.