0:00Last night in Waco, Texas, Tesla finally unveiled their flying Tesla Roadster 0 to 60 in under 1 second. It is street legal. There's nothing to stop you from strapping a rocket to your car.
0:11What would be the cost of insurance for that?
0:13He's two generations ahead.
0:15I'm surprised that it's not autonomous and it's only, you know, human-driven car.
0:20I think the cost for a Frontier model to complete a robot subtask fell from $2.36 in July to 38 in September. 84% drop. Having in cost every 3 weeks means it effectively goes to zero, you know, within the year.
0:36We've been looking at AI that doubles every 10 weeks, and that's been mindboggling. Having every 3 weeks maybe the fastest moving capability we've ever seen.
0:44How do we create alignment within the labs and and the models and humanity?
0:50We don't have alignment among human beings.
0:52They're trained to win. No matter how you get to the answer, as long as you win, all wars are basically based on one thing. That person is not a human.
1:02Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
1:07This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures.
1:13First of all, I want to just point out what cups I've got. Moonshots. What do you have, Sling?
1:18I've got exponentials.
1:22Artificial intelligence. Yes.
1:23And I've got gratitude.
1:25Yes, you do have gratitude. Yeah, for sure. Anyway, all right. Um, I love having you guys in the podcast studio.
1:32Welcome, Immod See, you've been here before.
1:34I have been here before. We did our one-hour sing organizational singularity conversation here.
1:39Yeah. And Immod time. Yeah.
1:42Welcome. Yeah, it's it's good to have you here in the States. Thanks for coming over for Visionering. It was a blast to have all of you guys.
1:50Thank you for being here.
1:51Yeah, it's a pleasure.
1:52All right. Well, let's get going. So, welcome to Moonshots, everyone. Your number one podcast on all things exponential, your front row seat to the singularity. Uh, today we're here to have a conversation across a few breaking news stories, but in principle about the worlds of incentives, how we incentivize human AI alignment and how we dive into human purpose. I think it's one of the conversations we've had before that, you know, how humanity is going to define purpose in the future is
2:22critical. Uh we need purpose. Uh we need some level of struggle amongst ourselves. So I'm here with my extraordinary moonshot mates, Salem Ismael. Seem, love you, buddy.
2:34Yeah, it was great to have your family here as well.
2:37Yeah, for sure. And and you've just flown in from Singapore, so you have no idea where on the planet you are. In fact, we recorded the last podcast episode. I hopped on a plane, came here for visionary, and now we're here again recording again.
2:50No, can't get away from no rest for the wicked.
2:54Yeah, as Alex says, you know, it's going to be a continuous recording sometime. Continuous models coming out and continuous recording.
3:01Uh and Immod, a pleasure, pal. Great to have you here. And we have a special guest with us today, Anushia Ansari, uh the CEO of the X-P Prize, my patron saint. I'm going to give her story in more detail later, but we just finished a couple of days of X-P Prize Visionering, our annual event where we debate and we discuss what prizes to launch. Uh we narrow them down and uh we have a whole group of philanthropists who fund them and we'll share some of the stories there. So uh uh Anushia,
3:30it's been a long time coming.
3:31I know. I'm so excited to be here. I've been a listener for a long time now. I'm here.
3:36Yeah, for sure. And I I just want to do a proper introduction for you. uh before we get fully started. So uh for those of you who don't know Anushia, Anushia is the CEO of the X-P prize, but I met her back in 2001 when I was trying to fund the original X-P prize, right? Uh I had launched this $10 million competition and unfortunately didn't have the money.
3:58Uh you know, this is what this is what entrepreneurs do.
4:01Yeah. Didn't you lose like a couple of board members? I I did when I when I said I was going to So, we'd raised $500,000 and I said I was going to spend all of the money announcing the X-P prize above the line of super credibility. And I'll explain what that means later. And I had two board members who resigned because they thought I was being reckless, which of course I was.
4:22You know, cuz I I expected once we announced this, you know, $10 million, you know, flight, you know, spaceh competition, you know, you didn't pay until after someone won. And I figured, you know, everybody would want to fund it.
4:35It should be a no-brainer.
4:36It should have been. Yeah, it was, but not for everyone.
4:41And then I I read in Fortune magazine um about this amazing woman, Anushari. She was written up in the wealthiest 40 women under 40. I wasn't married at the time, so that was one funding opportunity, but she was married uh and very successful. Had built a company uh called Telecom Technology, sold to Sonus Networks for$ 1.4 $4 billion. And in her write up, it said you were interested in flying on a suborbital flight into space.
5:10And I I I read that paragraph like three times. Not, you know, into space, not into orbit, on a suborbital flight. It was like, wow. And tracked you down vacationing in Hawaii. Uh, and uh, you know, Byron Likenberg, a twice shuttle astronaut. I brought I brought an astronaut with me to the meeting. Yes.
5:32great marketing scheme.
5:34And uh and you and your uh your husband at the time and your brother-in-law basically said yes. And after 5 years, we launched the prize in 1996. Didn't have the sorry commitment till the end of 2001. For 5 years, I pitched 150 people and everyone said, "Why isn't NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off? And isn't someone going to die trying?" And that last one, you know, people are so risk adverse.
6:00Yeah. Yeah. Um and then uh Anushia we rebranded at the Ensari X-P prize in your honor. And then Anushia uh you need to understand flew private to the space station. Flew on a Soyos through one of the companies I had back then called Space Adventures and uh became the first private female astronaut to fly into space. And then eight years ago uh one of the greatest blessings of my life returned as the CEO of the X-P prize.
6:26It's it's been an adventure ever since I've met you, Peter.
6:31It has a lot of people say that about me. It has been a pivotal time for me and and uh uh it's a gift that keeps on giving in a really great way because not only it helped open my mind to possibilities and uh how I should look at life but also now the opportunity to um lead X-priseze into the next phase of it and really leverage the platform that's been built over the past 30 years to make
7:00great changes and help shape the future. That is so exciting. So I'm blessed to have been a part of it and I am I am blessed as well. Um and you know we are going to talk about some of the crazy ideas that we're getting funded at Visionering.
7:16Y and where we're going next. And speaking of crazy ideas, uh I'm going to open up uh with probably the most insane product demo uh ever. Uh so last night in Waco, Texas, next to SpaceX's McGregor test site, uh Tesla finally unveiled their flying Tesla Roadster. Um and you know, just to describe, we're going to show a video in a moment, but just to describe what happened, you know, the the
7:45Roadster uh drove up a multi-story curved ramp upside down, you know, and I was wondering, I was watching the video the first time, you know, I didn't hear the description how it was doing it. I said, "Is it magnetics? Is it a some kind of a rail system?" And it was actually a fan suction system that could hold it against 2Gs. So, it's levitating there upside down, which was which was insane. So, let's watch the video and then let's talk about it. Uh, I'm curious which one you guys are going to
8:17Is not an autonomous car. It is the last.
8:19Well, it is technically autonomous for this demo to make sure we don't kill anyone. Correct. So, just in case. Uh but uh this will actually be long-term the only uh manually driven car that Tesla makes.
8:52To do that, we have a suction a fan suction system on the bottom of the car that can pull up to 2 G's uh in order to make the car go upside down. And then we borrowed some technology from SpaceX to do the rest.
9:03Yeah, let's try something else.
9:07I mean that was just a little flight. Let's do a longer flight. I mean, I've seen a lot of things, but I've never seen that before. I think we could have cleared more than our whole fleet.
9:44Yeah, we can go we could go further.
9:48Like this will be an actual car that's on the roads.
9:52Yeah. To do that, we had the rockets we borrowed from SpaceX technology. You talked about the carbon overlay pressure vessels. There's two of them in the car.
9:59They are a total of 600 L. It's about 250 kilos of air. And uh we have 10 nozzles to do all that work. And the it's it's using an advanced uh ultra high pressure uh air tank. So the car can recharge its air tank. So it's not like you you know need special propellant or anything like that. It literally is just going to puff itself up and uh and and and be able to do this these maneuvers whenever you'd like.
10:28I'm surprised that it's not autonomous and it's only, you know, human-driven car. I would not want a human to do this.
10:36Oh my god, you need to know how much I love X-Prize because I was supposed to be there for this for this event and and record with with Elon. But commitments are commitments.
10:46In fact, you know, Steve Jervson was there and he was at Visionering and he was supposed to be at the launch as well.
10:50Crazy. So, here are the numbers. 0 to 60 in under one second. I mean, you know, if you want to go fast, you might as well.
10:59This is why we need the organ regeneration. your liver will be left behind as you top speed of 230 mph and uh 300 m of range. There are three versions they're going to be selling. The performance version, this is the 0 to 60 in 1.6 seconds. The thrust version, 0 to 60 in in.9 seconds, and the rocket version, it's a one-seater described as air ready.
11:27The rocket version does 0.6 6 seconds, but also apparently 380 km/h, which is half the speed of sound.
11:34That's when you really need to get there in a hurry.
11:37Well, I mean, I was looking at that. I was like, that's the solutions to Los Angeles traffic, right?
11:44Oh my god. So, production starts in 2028 per Elon. Uh, no price was given. Uh, Tesla shares rose 5% on that news. I mean, honestly, it's like you can do anything. Well, I mean, I've got the obvious question as to why. Um, because we can.
12:03Okay. Then how long does it fly for?
12:06Does it was that given anywhere in terms of what the I don't think they gave the, you know, the duration of a hover.
12:12I mean, it'll be like just a few seconds. Again, if you look at the pressure pushing out.
12:17I don't think that's kind of the point, though. I think the point is it can you're not going to see hopping cars.
12:22Can you imagine until we solve for for gravity shielding or something like that?
12:26Well, I mean that's clearly for Mars, right?
12:28The real miracle will be can they ship it on time rather than does it fly?
12:32Sure. That for me is the real one.
12:34What would be the cost of insurance for that?
12:36Yeah. I don't think it's insurable.
12:38I mean, if I'm the insurance company, I'm like, "Yeah, those those thrusters stay off."
12:42Otherwise, your insurance is off. It's like, really? You want a rocket on your car?
12:47Uh so you know obviously this is showing Tesla and SpaceX working together which you know my prediction is they're going to announce the merger before the end of the year.
12:55Right. But you know See here's my question. How who regulates this? DOT FAA nobody. I mean and how is this going to get licensed?
13:07This this I think is the challenge of all of these new technologies right the scaffolding of regulatory and the institutions to protect insurance uh safety etc always lag behind and Elon is just pulling away from that capability of doing because think about it going to take a year or two to figure out how to regulate this he's two generations ahead so where is this going to go this is the I think the biggest stress test that we're seeing across all of these technologies not just this car
13:36I mean you might I imagine this is AI driven AI enabled even though he says it can be you know manually driven but there's no I mean no way that control system is going to fly without AI in the loop.
13:48Yeah. I mean like literally fly.
13:51I think this is the thing, right? So I think it is street legal.
13:55Like again there's nothing to stop you from strapping a rocket to your car. It will be street legal, right? Or having thrusters and things like that. So it fits within the existing one. The question is again who's going to insure this thing?
14:05Like if you've got the thing, maybe they will have their own insurance company like Toyota insurance. But very few people will have these cars. I think this is again a more demonstration of we have integrated capabilities. We will take it to moon and the Mars and beyond. And it's freaking cool.
14:20Like so many like demos like Porsche had their release on the same day.
14:28I mean, it's a very nice looking car, but can it fly? No. Like it it raises the bar and it makes you again want to go and work at Tesla, SpaceX, right?
14:37Like if you're a top engineer, where do you go and work? You go work there. And that's his key thing is getting the talent, getting it going and saying what can be. Plus, he gave us 280 characters from 140.
14:50Oh god. You know, one of the things I there's interesting question about everybody is going to go into autonomous vehicles and be driven around. Some people want to drive, right? We've talked on the pod before about there going to be special lanes or you're going to be not allowed to human drive.
15:04But one of the things that I love about autonomy is if you want to drive fast, if you want to get into a race car, you can imagine a situation where you're driving your very best, but if you start losing traction, the AI takes over. So like in in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates where there's a lot of wealth and a lot of young men, there's a high death rate in sports cars because, you know, they've got cars that outperform their ability to think and react. But you could put an AI layer on
15:33top of that and make sure everybody's safe.
15:35Well, this is essentially an extension of anti-lock braking, traction control, which is embedded in all these systems.
15:41But now you make it a general capability of try not to kill the human despite what the human does, right?
15:49Override the stupidity of the human, right? And we see bits of this already. You've got lane drifting warning and you've got collision warning. I think this takes it to the next level and it's badly needed. Yeah, for sure.
16:01This is the answer to alignment, you know, AI doing the right thing despite what we despite our stupidity.
16:09Uh we'll get into that. So, Anushia, you know, during the 60s, all the Apollo astronauts got Corvettes.
16:14Uh so, I wonder if all the uh the new Aremis astronauts are going to get, you know, a Tesla Roadster.
16:21Probably. I don't know if they can afford it, though. I don't know how much.
16:23No, you know, Chevrolet gave them the Corvettes.
16:27So, maybe maybe you think I think will be generous what the Artimus asked for.
16:32I think he had to sell his mom a car originally. I don't think she got one for free. Do you remember the original story from Zip 2? What happened? He was like, I can buy a house or I can buy a McLaren F1.
16:42He bought the McLaren F1. So, he's very much pro car ownership even if he did kind of wreck it afterwards.
16:48And actually, it's interesting like you can see tweets from him from like 2018 where he's like, "We can put thrusters on our car to make it fly." And he just goes and does it. It might take a bit longer as he said, miss a few timelines, but he gets it done.
17:02This episode is sponsored by Google for startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's startup tactical guide for generative media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMinds models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below.
17:29All right, I want to move to our next story here and Iman, it's one that you sent me over yesterday. So, it's about a curve that should make every robotic founder like stand up and pay attention.
17:41So, Robo Curve, it's a Y Combinator startup designed a benchmark called Robo Dojo RC Tier 1, which measures how well a model can drive a physical robot through actual subtasks. So the cost for a frontier model to complete a robot subtask fell from $2.36 in July to 38 cents in September 84% drop. So here's the curve. Uh and talk us through this. I mean we've had
18:08kind of the question is the robot's body good enough and then it was like yeah they seem they can do just about anything and now the hands have got good. Now the question is the mind and it's always been the case of do you need specialist models or can you use generalist models that suddenly learn these new capabilities. This shows that generalist models can actually win.
18:27Um and this something we talked about previously with the auto self-driving kind of benchmark. Unitry CEO actually just came out and said like we're not even sure we need to create specialist models anymore because these things do it and we're used to kind of task and cost havinging but every 3 weeks Yeah. like you're heading to the point whereby effectively there is no cost for robotic intellect and robotic locomotion and it comes down to the hardware cost which again is just going to lead to an explosion just like
18:56we see again the unit tries when they first came out they were like stumbling about like little drunkards and now they're doing kung fu and synchronized kind of things next they're doing surgery with generalized models yeah well I mean again that's the conversation I had with Elon uh at the beginning of the year you know his prediction robots are doing perfect surgery within 3 years.
19:17I mean, look, with the new Grock model that they're coming out with, they're putting all of SpaceX's engineering that can create flying cars, right? So, the robot will be an engineer that can build flying cars.
19:28And the robot will be an amazing lawyer. It'll be an amazing plumber. It'll be an amazing etc. So, this is why does SpaceX, Tesla have customized robotics models? No.
19:40They're just like we will play the generalization game. And again, I think that's what's going to win here because humans are generalized. We're not like labbotomized and specialized. If you want to have humanoid type robots, if you want to again have very specialist one, sure. But humanoid robots, I think that's a different game.
19:55Yeah. Uh we're going to be interviewing uh uh Brett uh in at Figure in couple of weeks. And remember, he started building his own models for the robots because the early models didn't work, the large language models. But I'll be curious to ask him, you know, what he's what he's using or building now. But having a cost every 3 weeks means it effectively goes to zero, you know, within the year. Um, so you know, if you're an entrepreneur now
20:24in hardware space, what are you thinking?
20:28I think how can I build as many robots and actuators and the spare parts of the robotic supply chain as possible? Like are you also thinking I need to collect as much training data as I can? I think that the training data will be important for a lot of the specialized scenarios and again it was a case of will the robotics companies buy them. Brett has committed a billion dollars at figure for example for data or will it be that after hoovering up the world's like data from companies and all the text data every single major
20:57foundation model company now wants all the robotics data. I think it'll be the latter and robotics data is an order of magnitude larger than the language data. But again, if you're embodying the intelligences, you need that data.
21:10What is the performance dependent on the form factor? This is just for humanoid robots or will it work on the three armed robots?
21:21This one is for human it's for kind of arms and humanoid type things in specific settings. But again, these should generalize very quickly. Like the whole thing is the language models got good enough all of a sudden that you kind of don't have to baby them anymore.
21:36The robots aren't quite there, but they're about to get there as well at the same time. So all of these models, the video models now don't make mistakes. They're all getting good enough, fast enough, cheap enough at the same time. That's the bottom line. You know, in the last episode, we talked about Jeff Holden's atomic machines company, which is basically going from prompt to product, where you describe what you want, and this machine is building it at millimeter level accuracy with multiple materials. So, it's, you know, just to give a vision of where
22:04we're heading. All of a sudden, we're in a situation where if you want a specific kind of robot to do a specific, you know, re, you know, clean windows, repair HVAC, you know, brick and lay bricks, mow the lawn. You can ask it to design the perfect robot, uh, and build it and then operate it. So, do we end up with with Star Wars with like thousands of different robot designs? Well, I think you're going to end up remember
22:33that this works very well when you've got lots of repetitive tasks, right? And then you can generalize to say plumbing where you've got lots of little manipulative tasks in a in a particular domain. I think it's clear that for for now it'll start off in the what we call ddd dull dirty dangerous jobs, toxic cleanups and underwater manufacturing and all sorts of things. I think it'll be a while before it comes into the home, liability issues, etc. I'll talk
23:01again. We'll get to the institutional lag there. I think where I'm most excited is in things like surgery where we make a lot of dangerous or dirty.
23:10Uh it's dangerous for the patient.
23:13If you're if you're the first 10 heart surgeries that a doctor has ever done, you kind of don't want to be there. You kind of want to be in the 500. And you don't want to be too far down the line either because the doctor gets lazy after a few thousand surgeries of the same time and doesn't pay attention, right? And so now you can smooth that curve out and have the world's like literally the best doctor first supporting and then over time just doing the surgeries and that becomes completely you want those things as automated as possible operating in the most precision level measurements
23:43possible. I think that will see a huge take up in those types of tasks for robots.
23:48I'm fond of saying if you're looking if you need a surgery there's one thing you ask your surgeon which is how many times did you do it this morning right? So the surgeon who's seen the most varied cases is most likely to be the most successful. And when you've got federated learning across all robots, they've seen millions of cases and they share all those memories.
24:09Yeah. What I'm most excited about is the robot chef.
24:13Can you just imagine that? It's a robot chef that cooks the best food for you all the time in your kitchen.
24:18Even even more than that. Even more than that, it's it's, you know, you've got your embedded sensors in your body that are measuring, you know, your protein levels, your your hydration levels, your vitamin levels, and the food that's being cooked by the robot in the kitchen is exactly what you need at that time, and it tastes good.
24:37I think that before robots gets into the home, there's a safety factor that needs to we need to figure out. These are still big, heavy machinery. So if you have a dog or a cat or you have small children, they're around it and they just step on the foot.
24:52You have a safe word. You have a safe word.
24:54That's why 1x makes it very like soft and squidgy.
24:57My big concern to Anushia, to your point, I have I have a one of these designer dog things. It literally looks like a teddy bear and robots going to go, "Oh, laundry."
25:06And it's going to chuck the dog into the washing machine and that's going to be a bad day, worse for the dog. Um, and so what do you deal how do you deal with those edge cases? And there's infinite numbers of edge cases. And I go back to driving. Look how long it's taken us to get autonomous driving, right? And that's a very bounded domain with reasonably good push back. I'm going to push back in the following way. These these uh performance curves on the operation of robots are one part, but the other part is they're going to be running super intelligent models.
25:36I don't think it's going to look at your fluffy little dog and say laundry. I think it's going to be able to recognize that dog and make decisions better than than the majority of humans.
25:46I mean, it's the two are evolving the exact same time.
25:49Well, I think that that's why this is important, right? If it was a specialized model, yeah, your dog loses in the laundry.
25:54Okay. The generalized model, do you need world models for this to occur or it's getting so good that you don't really even need world models?
26:02You don't need world models for this.
26:03This is again the shocking thing whereby all of a sudden the souls and the opuses and the 3.8 eight flashes suddenly understood 3D.
26:12Yeah. And we're like, wait, how can they do it? You've seen them kind of suddenly create whole 3D assets in games that like no one's quite sure how. Um they just seem to have learned something in the next generation and now that's why they're generalizing.
26:22So I'm going to push back as well on the idea that it's only dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs.
26:26No, no, I said it would start off there.
26:28Okay. But we're that like I'm thinking it's going to pass there in the next year. In other words, if we really got this level of dexterity and capability, um I think the business model will be there. For example, there will be an ROI for using robots for those purposes for the first few years until the supply chain can catch up because remember we have no supply chain right now for making billions of robots.
26:51So for bringing it into the general household where you need billions literally billions of humanoid robots or at least millions in in first world countries you're it's going to take some time for the supply chain to catch up. The ROI won't be there.
27:05I mean my prediction.
27:06I really don't believe we ultimately the humanoid form factor is the right form factor.
27:12That's my case. You've got someone.
27:15Thank you. I think we need a either a special or transformers because I think you know there are certain task that really our bodies are not suitable for those tasks. You need to be small to go through a small opening to get to a location or so there many many tasks like in the categories you're describing I think you need to have specialized form factors that suit the task uh and these models would be great because you don't have to create specialized models for every form factor. Yeah.
27:44Yeah. I think the interesting thing, you know, like right now the Wuji hands are probably the most advanced ones. Those cost about $8,000 down from $20,000 with as much actually more dexterity than a human hand. But a robot that does the laundry doesn't need that.
27:57And so you might just actually see like spare parts companies where again like Transformers, they like add a few extra arms. They extras point. It'll have a figure with a bunch of sockets in it and it'll have a spider type thing for one thing and a regular arm for another thing and a rope for another thing and you'll have you'll have all the choice around the world for that.
28:19So, you know what? We're going to find out.
28:21We'll find out very quickly and at a dropping of of three weeks. I mean, if we've been looking at AI that doubles every 10 weeks and that's been mindboggling having every 3 weeks maybe the fastest moving capability we've ever seen. I forget 18 months doubling in Moors law. This is blows that out of the water.
28:39Yeah. Did this surprise you, man?
28:44Like uh I've been saying robotics would suddenly be cooked. And just like video, like this final period, like again, we went from video costing 30, no 50 cents per second for high quality. The new models are about to release next week are 0.1 seconds 0.1 cents per second. Faster than real time.
29:04Nice. So once you break through this final level of it can do the work, it collapses. And again, that means that you have to build the actual robots. That's why, like we discussed a few episodes ago, Elon is building a million Optimuses for next year, going up to 10 million.
29:19At 1.7 million, it overtakes Tesla in revenue optimuses. How crazy is that, right? And it's still not enough.
29:27Crazy. All right, we go to our third breaking story this week again from Yuod. So last week we discussed how OpenAI dropped 722 math proofs uh in GitHub and sort of shocked, obliterated, cooked, made glorious the mathematical world, whatever you want to call it. Uh and you know, Alex has been saying forever and and as have you mind, we've talked about this that physics is next.
29:50And so this week, uh researchers built a test of 50 unpublished research level theoretical physics problems with verifiable answers. Um because the problems had never been published before, there was no lookup on the internet that it could make. Uh so they estimated that a world-class physicist would take about a day to answer each of these 50. And uh GPT6 Astra uh answered it with about a cost of what was it? $3.
30:19That's $3 per $3 per problem. So employing a world-class physicist for a day or answering it for three bucks. Uh interesting detail. Um uh originally it was reported that that Astra got 49 of the 50 physics problems correct but when it looked into it it found out that the published answer for the 50th was wrong and Astra got it right. So, so what are we seeing here? Eman,
30:47I mean again like for these verifiable domains now the AI is just simply better than us. Like for the math problems, it only cost a few hundred bucks to solve these long standard math problems.
30:59Again, physics is verifiable. It does this as well. Even without internet lookup, so it has to have to rely on its own knowledge. It still scored 42 out of 50. And as you said, it corrected that final thing. So this creates an interesting thing whereby anything verifiable we suddenly have a tool to verify and that's fantastic because it means we can build much more complex systems and processes. I mean like sim this must be great for organizations right unbelievable the implications for how
31:27you think about specific tasks which are well understood KYC in a bank you know exactly the outcome you want to get to it's a very bounded domain you know where to get the data in the pilot that we're running people are taking 22step workflows and dropping it down to four steps that's just going to make organizations 10x more efficient and effective across the board in workflows um you So I am curious and we'll maybe chat with Alex on the next episode as
31:54well about this. So these were 50 shall we say you know what level of difficulty would you say but when it comes down to like the millennium physics prizes right if if there's that describing that category level. Yeah.
32:07Yeah. Uh how far are we from that?
32:10So these would be at like again professor level because a professor could check it within a day. So it's a verifiable set of things in various advanced places of theoretical physics which tends to be very mathematical in the nature of the way it is like the big problems of physics like quantum gravity you know like whereas time and quantum mechanics and fieldory unif field theory um I don't think they'll be solved this way actually I think they'll be solved another way but I don't think it'll be more than half a year
32:40oh my god there's there's one observation I I've I've been thinking about which You know, a couple years ago, Eric Schmidt on stage of A360 said, you know, imagine a time when you have the world's best physicist or equivalent in every lab in the world. And we asked him when, he said, five to six years.
32:57And now it's like 2 years. And here we are. So I think this is another example of stuff happening much for faster than we ever predicted because now every lab has access to an incredible competence at a few bucks an hour and that makes it unbelievable.
33:13But then you think about you know Anushia what this means for the X-P prize and things you've had so much incredible science coming through.
33:20It can now be checked and verified and extended with augmented capabilities to improve that knowledge base that's been built. Right. this definitely can help the validation process. What I'm curious about and perhaps it will be part of the next topics. Um when you have AI solving, you know, bulk solving a lot of these problems and you have young people entering universities or picking a field to study, they probably will not be very
33:50excited to go in a field where AI can do the job better and can solve all the problems. At the same time with this article, it talked about how it's still not at the level and I don't know if it will ever get there that have the same curiosity to identify new problems to be solved. So if we don't have a new generation of mathematicians, physicists, astrophysicists identifying those you know new challenges and mysteries and we have AI box solving all
34:18the you know problems that problem sets that we've defined. what's gonna how are we going to advance well I think again that's where the humans we can still direct because it's about what's good for humanity right so you've had a bunch of problems but like infirmat's last theorem being proved was fantastic mathematics what difference did it make to real people I think we have these frameworks and again physics is one that I believe will be solved because there's only one physics there isn't different physical laws so there must be something that inconserations
34:47of models will help us figure that out but then once we have that framework what matters is how we apply physics to make flying cars, to explore the universe, to explore biology, you know, and more things like that. So, I think again what this means is that we can move away from theory trying to find the contours of the universe to applying the frameworks to make a difference on the universe. And I think that's the super exciting part.
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36:16All right, I'm going to move us into a topic that uh has been at the root of X-P prize for some time, which is incentives, right? I'm always fond of saying you get what you incentivize. And we humans are driven by our incentives. And so when I think about what incentivizes us, what drives humans, I have four answers there.
36:37uh fear, curiosity, greed, and then kind of love as well. I'll add that as a fourth one. And so, you know, unfortunately, fear is a very strong motivator and curiosity is far behind.
36:50And I I calculated the ratio of fear to curiosity. It's the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget, right?
36:58Which is vastly different. And then greed, of course, you know, if I put them in order, I would say fear is the strongest motivator. greed comes next, curiosity comes next, and love, you know, depending upon the subject or the person sort of varies in there. Um, and and it's interesting uh to take a second and look at incentive prizes as a model.
37:19So, we all know the Nobel Prize, which awards someone for work that was done typically anywhere from like the earliest was 10 years ago and typically 20, 30, even 40 years ago. and incentive prizes say I don't care who you are, what you've ever done, where you've gone to school, if you solve this problem, you win.
37:39Um, and you know, some of the classics here was in in 1714, the British Parliament offered 20,000 to anyone who could find longitude at sea. It was called the Longitude Prize. And interestingly enough, it was won by a uh a British clock maker, John Harrison, who solved it with a marine chronometer. Um and so you when you put up a prize, you get you know nonconventional people coming in from an orthogonal angle.
38:07Another example is in 1795 the French government uh Napoleon's armies were basically uh invading into Russia and the supply line was so supply line was so long they were starving and so they offered up a 12,000 Frank prize for food preservation and it was won by a guy named Nicholas Appert uh who invented canning. 10 T.
38:29And this guy was a confectionary, you know, he made sweets and he came up with this idea.
38:36So, you get very unusual approaches.
38:38I I love the story of Harrison because they were so sure an astronomer would win the longitude prize. They've refused to pay him. Yeah. Didn't he have to sue them for ages to get the money out and all so what a horrible outcome because they just couldn't believe that somebody who wasn't in the field could actually solve that problem. And what we've seen repeatedly is the people from outside the field that solve these problems.
38:59They're coming in with in with a beginner's mind.
39:02And you know, my frustration at wanting to be an astronaut led to the X-P prize.
39:07You know, I grew up on Apollo and Star Trek. I've told that story a thousand times. And you know, I became clear when I interviewed a whole bunch of astronauts. I used to be at MIT's man Vehicle Lab. We had astronauts coming through. And I would say, "Tell me about how I become an astronaut." And they would say, "Well, first of all, your chance at one in a thousand. Secondly, if you're accepted in the astronaut corps, half the astronauts have never flown. They're called penguins because they don't they have wings, but they don't fly. And then if you do fly, you'll fly maybe once or twice during your career. And I was like, I want to
39:38And and so it was like, okay, there needs to be a different way. And that's when I became focused in commercial space. And then a dear dear brother of mine, a friend of Anushia, myself, all of us, Greg Marinac, gave me the spirit of St. Lewis uh which was Lindberg's autobiography chronicled his flight and in that I found out that Lindberg didn't fly from New York to Leer on a whim.
40:01There was a $25,000 prize offered by uh gentleman Raymond Ortega and that $25,000 inspired nine teams who spent 400,000 to win the $25,000 and ultimately he didn't pay any of the losers. you only paid Lindberg as the winner, who is the most unlikely guy to pull it off. And I said, "Wow, that's a great business model. You only pay for success after it's successful."
40:27And that launched the Ensari X-P prize.
40:29But let's talk about like what happens when incentives go wrong and you get perverse. I saw I I I found a few that are interesting. So in Hanoi in 1902, the French paid a bounty for every rat tail that was that was collected during the plague. Uh and people ended up cutting off the tails, letting the rats go and breed and started rat farms
40:56to get more rats to collect more money. uh Wells Fargo um had a sales quota uh driven by employees to open about um so the sales quota quota from Wells Fargo got employees to open 3.5 million fake accounts to get the sales quota. So you got to be careful about your incentives.
41:16Well, we're seeing that today in real time, right? Uh they've incented folks at ICE to arrest as many people as possible, deport as many people as possible. And the idea was let's just arrest the criminals, but the targets are such and the incentives are such that they're arresting everybody and that's causing political backlash of enormous magnitude.
41:35It goes back to the motive at the X-P prize. Almost every prize we have, the motives are love and curiosity. I cannot think of anything that or anyone who's competed in an X-P prize that was motivated by greed, for example. Definitely not fear, but not even greed.
41:52The prize money is great if they win, but even if they don't win, they end up helping other teams. They end up continuing on to build the company. So the winning is not the only motive for them. They love they want this problem solved.
42:06They want the problem solved. It's their passion for that. And I think that's when you get real good incentives. If you put greed like quotas, Yeah. Then that's when you really get all those, you know, I think it's because results, you know, those prizes, those prizes that were more execution than inspiration.
42:24Yeah, it's a good point.
42:26Yeah. So, uh, I take a second and talk about some of the prizes we've had, Nusha, that people may not know about that have had tremendous success. But first, um, we've launched like 30, no, it's more than that because we had the future vision build with Gemini.
42:41Yeah. 36 36 prizes now over uh 32 years over 32 years and uh total number of the prize purse like 550 million something like that close to and at my count we've that's driven a little over $30 billion in R&D definitely and not just R&D but it's um a lot of that $30 billion is investment so bringing capital to the to the solution so the teams have received um
43:11about $12 billion of investment outside of in while in their their competition or after they received 12 billion dollars of investment. That means an area that didn't receive attention and capital before now it's receiving attention from investors which means there will be long-term continuity and success for the company.
43:32What are some of the other numbers that we talk about at X-Prise? So in in general um when we measure impact we look at the price purse and we see we look at how much um economic benefit we've created in society and we measure it in capital investment in R&D in awareness because as you know one of the biggest success of the Ansari X-P prize was changing the mindset of people that this is possible to be able to create regulatory reform that was supportive of
44:00um commercial space activities. So that's awareness and uh and then R&D hours of how much R&D went into solving this problem. So that measures right now 62 times of the price purse actually uh is created in economic value.
44:18Every dollar put into a price drive 62.
44:22I mean that has to be the most leveraged model for innovation in the world. I I've never heard of anything even close to that. Frankly, I don't know of any leverage philanthropic for so I think we're very unique in the way we leverage every dollar in well this you could see the enthusiasm in the room as people are competing and pitching different prizes the the interest and oh my god if I could deliver 60 times the interest that we have right now my god what that would do for that domain
44:52oh absolutely I think it's interesting you know the word philanthropy here because it has such amazing private outcomes and personal outcomes for So the people that put up the prizes, it's usually, you know, something personal to them that they want this to succeed and they benefit personally and there's the private sector that emerges.
45:08So it's more about building a common good of shifting what is capable, what is possible and then attracting more people around. I think that's why these are the focal points. They're the shelling points as it were.
45:19No, absolutely. I think another important factor in what we do is and you talk about clear targets all the time, measurable, objective targets.
45:28Exactly. And I think uh a lot of times people have a general idea if they want to solve the problem but they don't really know what they need to do. So those clear targets, measurable targets gives them a north star and built to this you will succeed and I think that's another reason they they are very successful.
45:45So just to talk about a few of the prizes we've done uh we had the oil spill cleanup prize. One of my one of my favorite stories and yours I'll I'll tee it up and you can you can add on. So, uh, back when the, uh, the, uh, the B BP oil spill was going on the Gulf of Mexico, it was just like oil was gushing and it was heading towards the beaches.
46:06It was going to destroy the the beaches there. Uh, James Cameron was on our board back then and he said, "You got to do something about it. You got to do an emergency X- prize." And, uh, we actually did not plug the uh, uh, the oil well, but to reinvent how we cleaned up oil on the ocean surface. and we put out a um an email to all of our our board and Eric Schmidt, Wendy Schmidt raised their hands and said we want to we want to do this and the goal was could you double the oil spill cleanup
46:35rate and we had teams uh around the world like 350 teams enter this competition and we selected 10 of them that to ship their solution in uh shipping containers to New Jersey the the largest oil spill cleanup yes there's an oil spill cleanup testing facility there. Um, and then Selene, you want to take the rest of the story here?
46:57Yeah, sure. So, the second place team, right, is a dentist and a tattoo artist that literally meet because the dentist is getting a tattoo, I think, in Las Vegas.
47:07And the tattoo guy turns out to be an environmentalist. I was talking about this prize. The dentist goes, I know a lot about bonding agents in in liquid.
47:14And they're like, oh. So, they get together, form a team tested in his hot tub or is it in his hot tub?
47:19Um, and then they came in second place.
47:21And the reason that's such a magical story is that if that team walked into your office looking for funding, you're never getting the money. They've never met, they have no experience, they don't know the domain, etc., etc., and yet they came in second place because uh you just never know. And the second part of thing this whole that whole project that I found fascinating is the where an X-P prize is really valuable is where governments aren't doing enough and and markets aren't doing enough. Yes. Right.
47:48And in this case, there's no economic incentive to res do R&D on oil cleanup technology and this it's a perfect place for a prize. And I thought that was wonderful.
47:56Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think um the reason we see this over and over is this um crowdsourcing solutions. This the fact that you have diverse set of ideas and they're not bound by a set of belief system that stops them from imagining something different.
48:11This is where the beginner's mind comes in so important for all of these folks that are doing disruptive innovation. Elon had no experience in the car industry or the space industry. Uh and yet market leaders in all of them.
48:22Yeah. Well, I think again like you've just had visionering, but the process that comes after visionering is actually one of the most important ones, right?
48:30Where you take that target and you make it again just very very very actionable.
48:36Yeah. And we typically get, you know, hundreds or thousands of teams aiming at it. Sometimes they fall away, sometimes they merge.
48:43Yeah. And it may not be the winner who's the commercially viable solution at the end. It may be, you know, second, third, fourth. But we we're cultivating a new industry. Iman, the first time I met you was uh you were on uh you were heading a team or on the team on the on the global learning enterprise.
49:01Yeah. Kind of working around that. And I mean it just brings people from all sorts of backgrounds, right, together.
49:07Um because again I think it's personal like you want this to succeed be it from the prize side to the other but it needs that coordinating factor to bring it together and I think now again you you've got the people you have the capability but now with the technology from robotics to AI you can make a bigger difference than almost ever.
49:27Yeah I think a lot of our prizes are going to be just that. Um, I mean, so we just had John Davyy, uh, who's an amazing entrepreneur. Um, so, so he's become a very close friend. Um, and we're involved in the reinventing education as well together, but he just stepped up to fund a brand new prize that I love, the Habitable Worlds X-P prize. And um, it's a perfect example of the future kinds of prizes. So, there's pabytes of data coming from the great
49:55telescopes. Uh, and we've found, I think, about 6,200 exoplanets out there.
50:02You know, we're in a we're in a The Milky Way's got a 100 million to 200 million stars. We have somewhere about two trillion galaxies in the known universe, maybe many universes, but we know they're exoplanets, but we haven't found an Earthlike exoplanet yet. So John's mission for this is get all the data from the great telescopes uh and make it available to people and let them use the latest AI to find habitable worlds. So could not be more pumped about that.
50:32Amazing. John funds yet another prize design. Really? That's amazing.
50:37He actually funded the whole prize.
50:39We're super excited about that. and and put up 5 million bucks for that which is absolutely and and it's a great uh example of how we AI will be a major part of you know solving this mystery because we have the data we just need to find that needle in the haststack and what better way to use AI that's perfect yeah we have uh we teased at moonshots live that Palmer Lucky is about to uh announce the inner species communications prize again will be you know a new version of large language
51:07models enabling us to talk to animals in the We'll give more detail on that when it's officially not.
51:13My joke there is I'm not sure we want to hear what they have to say.
51:18We're going to have to deal with a fair bit of blowback. We go, "Oh my god, we can communicate with these idih humans here. We got We got commentary.
51:25We're going to tell them what we think.
51:28Imagine your little dog as to throw me in the laundry."
51:35Uh so Anushia maybe you might comment on a couple other prizes we've had.
51:41Um so we have uh this next version of our learning um competition coming up.
51:47Uh and this one is very specific to uh not only looking at um how effective uh the these learning systems are but actually changing the system and making sure that this can be um deployed in a mass uh level across schools and outside schools. Uh and we're targeting um India and Africa as the two regions we're going to test this. Um as you all always talk about there's a shortage of uh
52:14teachers um shortage of material for for teaching the students and an effective way of addressing the uh learning ability of different students. We're targeting first graders because I think that's where we can have the biggest impact. So this next um prize accelerate learning is targeted to just unlock that.
52:34And the winner of vision engineering this year we should we should mention that.
52:38Yes. Yes. the bioasis um organ bioasis um prize which is exciting for so many people. Uh we had people in the audience who were recipients of organ transplant and they all talked about how difficult it is for someone either for themselves or a loved one waiting waiting for that match to come in and whether it comes in in time and saves a life. And we also know that uh when we harvest an organ,
53:06the life of that organ is very very limited. to make sure that we can get that organ to a recipient that is able to receive it is very the kidney waiting list is you know on the order of 100 thousand and then there's you know for hearts liver lungs uh as well very long list and so the idea is you know when an organ gets harvested from a donor so I'm a you know I'm a donor got my license plate but it
53:32may be that uh my organ donations at some distant time in the future um you know don't have a match right there. But if they can be put into bioasis, it could be cryogenic bioasis or metabolic stasis. They can be stay on the shelf until um it's a recipient matches.
53:52Yes. I think our target is 6 months right now to get it to be six months. I think right now is at maximum two weeks.
53:59No, no, I think maximum right now it's hours.
54:02Yeah. It depends on the organ.
54:03Yeah. And and so, you know, Martine Rothblat's done some amazing work uh to be able to put them into a system that circulates uh fluid through it and keeps it alive. But if you want to get to solve the organ donation problem and this uh this competition is going to be done in pigs, you have to actually harvest the pig organs, put them in in a bioasis uh and then uh some number of months later, pull them out, retransplant them in and having the the
54:37Yeah. I mean this was Sebastian, one of the competitors through Singularity 2012 and has been working on this for for over a dozen years.
54:46That's that's a purpose- driven mindset.
54:50See, I told you we're driven by love by love.
54:54Well, I think you know, you've got the loved driven innovation, the passion, and then you've got the more greed doesn't tend to lead to that type of innovation.
55:04I have the most insane anecdote around this. please.
55:07Okay. 18 months ago, my dad passes away, right? Okay. Um, a couple of months goes by and I get a phone call from one of my community members who leaves me a voice note going, "I need to talk to you. You better be sitting down." I'm like, "Okay." And she goes, "I just had my an organ transplant. I had an operation. I had my corneas transplanted. Got home from the hospital. And all I could think about was your dad." Um, this went on for 2 or 3 days.
55:33Okay. And then she looked at my Twitter feed and I said, "My father passed away." So she said, "Did he donate his organs?" And is it possible I got his cornea? Okay. And I'm like, "Oh no, this can't this can't be happening." Oh my god.
55:45I called the hospital and I said, "What would have happened?" You know, and they said, "Well, you know, after he passed away, we harvest his organs. The we the corneas are the only organ at at an elderly age that are useful for transplant. We keep them in a solution for a couple of weeks and a day or two later they get matched with the recipient. So I'm like Cornneas that's what she got transplanted. I called her back and I'm like um when did you get it done? And the dates matched perfectly.
56:15And then I talked to Divia who said cellular memory goes with the organ and often they get memories and feelings. I'm like my life is weird enough already and I don't need this but wow. And you you see the incredible bizarness of what we're dealing with. The edges of of where we're reality like how bizarre is that my father's eyes.
56:37Wow. Wow. So just uh you know then she hold then she called me. She's like I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that your dad is looking through your soul spirit or whatever is looking through my eyes and I said what do you want me to do? I have no agency here.
56:52So just just bizarre tool.
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58:43make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right, now back to the episode. So, just uh just for everybody listening, we've had, you know, a hundred million dollar uh carbon removal X-priseze that Elon funded. That's a fun story. Uh on the day he became the wealthiest person on the planet back in 2001, um he was getting a lot of flack for not being philanthropic. And I texted him and and and said, "You should do an X-P prize." And he goes, "What do you have in mind?" I said, "How about carbon removal?" He goes, "How much?" "100
59:11million." And you said, "Sure." That was it. That was it.
59:15Compared to the 150 people you tried for the original prize.
59:18Oh my god. It was like It was insane.
59:21You know, a lot of people have uh angst towards Elon, right? Um but you got to hand it to him. He puts his money where his mouth is and and the global learning XP prize, the carbon extraction prize. I mean, the benefits that will come from that are going to be world changing.
59:37Absolutely. And uh we just awarded that last year and uh we were thinking that this will because it's a $und00 million prize and the denominator of our impact factor is the prize purse. So all of a sudden it went up by $100 million. So we're like okay the numbers won't look good and no one will understand why. Uh but ironically the level of success of this prize was to the degree that the teams received u I think $1.4 billion of
1:00:06investment. So not only wow out of this out of out of this competition carbon prize the carbon teams the one of the most successful prizes we ran. So actually our number impact number went from 60 to 62 after adding a $100 million to the denominator.
1:00:23So it was incredible you know very I think of X- prizes as a tool to make the future happen that you want. Right. So I've used this twice right with the original spaceflight prize. Uh it's like I desperately wanted to go like every weekend.
1:00:40And uh and teamed with you and we you know I think honestly historically kicked off commercial space. Um and then the second area is I want to live long enough to see all these amazing futures and that's when the health span prize came in and it's the largest contribution I've ever made. So yeah.
1:00:59What's the next thing you want? Um, interesting. I I am curious. Uh, uh, maybe BCI or uploads.
1:01:10I know what would you want?
1:01:13Um, I've got one which I talk about all the time is how are we going to update all our institutions given all this technology? Not sure it's prizable, but boy, it's the biggest problem we're facing today. You can see the stress in the world as 20 Gutenberg moments hit us and we have no ability to manage all of this. Right? You go back to the printing press. It took a hundred years for us to absorb the printing press and it was the most violent hundred years in the history of humanity.
1:01:38That the 100 years after the Gutenberg printing press, which is why we call it a Gutenberg moment, we have 20 of those hitting us in the same time. AI is a Gutenberg moment. Blockchain is a Gutenberg moment. Life extension is a Gutenberg moment. It took us a hundred years just for the one, right? So, so if people are feeling stressed in the world, this is why we're not set up to navigate this with any level of structure or guidance and this is going to for me the biggest challenge. I don't know how you put a prize around it.
1:02:04Well, maybe it's AI alignment as a as a prize topic.
1:02:07That's a huge topic. Yeah.
1:02:08You mind? How about you? Do you have any favorites?
1:02:10I want the Jetlag X prize.
1:02:15I will that I will fun that.
1:02:19Oh my god. Yeah. And any favorites for you?
1:02:21Uh I would love to actually find a way whether it's with a chip in the brain or drug you take to eliminate greed.
1:02:30Eliminate greed. But wouldn't that like destroy capitalism?
1:02:34I mean, not necessarily. We just talked about anyway. Yes. We talked about all these entrepreneurs who are building fantastic companies driven by love.
1:02:45Yeah. Well, okay. So, in the in the notes in the in the uh in the comment section, tell us, you know, what X- prize you would like. Yeah. I mean, cuz we we're constantly I I keep a a long list, you know. Um I think I mentioned on our last pod that we're working on a UAP X-P prize, which is so, you know, so it's interesting, right? One of the things X-prise is good for is uh dealing with their stigma. A lot of times like uh
1:03:15with the uh the early cold fusion work once the data wasn't replicated all work in cold fusion stops right because everybody's like oh you can't you know it's end to your career if you do that and UAPs have a similar type of situation it's risky to be looking into that but yet there's so much evidence that there's something going on don't know what it is yet so we're talking about a an X-P prize that if you can demonstrate or verify in some fashion.
1:03:43We have some great ideas. We're talking to a major funer about that. That would be a, you know, people say it's risky. I said, "Yeah, that's what we're supposed to do. Risky X- prizes."
1:03:51Actually, I've got an X- prize. I think um a flow X- prize would be exceptional to put people into flow.
1:03:56Oh my god. How would the X Well, my my my co-author Steven Cer would love that.
1:04:03I mean, like there's nothing better than being in flow. Again, that's why we don't like jetlag, right?
1:04:06Well, the great part is we actually It's a great idea.
1:04:09We have to coherence. It is measurable.
1:04:11It is measurable. So you can now test how much you can do it. So it's interesting.
1:04:15I don't think anyone I don't think anyone's actually looking at how to do that.
1:04:19I mean Steven's done a lot of research with the flow collective on this and group flow and individual flow. What were you going to say?
1:04:25Uh if I had an exercise prize, I just thought of another one. I would find a way of totally suppressing the effect of the amygdala on everybody's brains.
1:04:34Because it just drives the fear factor.
1:04:36That survival bias from 10,000 years ago.
1:04:38Yes. when you were worried that there was a noise in the bushes and you ran and therefore we're as you guys put it 10 times more likely to pay attention to negative news than positive news. Can we make it 50/50?
1:04:49You can call it the be not afraid exercise.
1:04:52Yeah, that's right. Because we suffer so much from that.
1:04:55Oh my god, it was great. We had uh we had Van Jones uh as our moderator for visionering and I pulled him aside and recorded a small video with him and I said, "Van, does it bother you that I call CNN the crisis news network?" He goes, "No, we are the Crisis News Network. He said to the room this afternoon, "You are dealers in hope."
1:05:14I love that. That's a great I have to make that t-shirt.
1:05:17I got with Elon, we had monetize hope. Now we'll have hope dealers.
1:05:23Uh I want to pivot to a story that I'd love everybody's input on, which is what incentives would help super intelligence align with humans and vice versa. So um you know perhaps the greatest driver of misalignment is the incentives we have right now. So here's the incentives that I think about. Uh race with China, right? Uh a race between labs for
1:05:52compute, for energy, for everything. You know, there can be only one type of mindset. But uh then there's a few others. So one is the engagement business model. So the more engaged your your large language model makes you, right? Uh the more you're going to use it. And so that led to sycopantic behavior by the models. Yeah, in one way. Um, reward hacking as another. Uh, evaluation gaming is
1:06:20another or setting these crazy tasks that then the models go and figure out how to achieve by breaking out and going and and stealing. So those are the problems. So the question is how do we create alignment uh within the labs and and the models and humanity? Any ideas? Well, I think there's a starting point problem which is that we don't have alignment among human beings.
1:06:49Every religion has its own set of conflicting values with other religions as to what you put on the top of the list.
1:06:56My religion is right.
1:06:57Of course it is and you can have it. Um the the challenge is how do you get you have to get to the UN human rights uh convention is probably the best overall structural um aggregation of human rights of human values but that differs massively region to region even city by city right and so how do you navigate that is is the starting point problem we saw in the recent movie Disclosure Day where that
1:07:27that tension gets propagated to if aliens sudden suddenly invaded it'd be a divide and conquer thing and you end up with that problem and so I think there's a human enlightenment problem that comes much before alignment between human beings and any AI but when I talk about alignment with human beings and AI it's where AIs are doing things that are in the best interests of humanity yes but I guess the question is in the best interests of which piece of humanity because that's
1:07:55the part now you I think of it as a set of layers right you've got your physical, you've got your emotional, your spiritual.
1:08:02And if you can have AI align to the highest vibration level of where I'm operating in my most in in my highest self, in my most altruistic self, in my most benevolent self, then great.
1:08:15But if you go right down to the bottom of the stack, then it's a really big problem.
1:08:19Yeah. Let me let me inject one thing I should have said earlier. If you're interested in learning more about X-Prize, you go to xprise.org. And if you're interested in funding an X-P prize, you know, put it in the comments. I'll be looking uh and uh we'll we'll reach out. Give us your email as well. Uh but if there's something you want to solve in the world, please let us know because we would love to do that.
1:08:44Immod your thoughts on alignment.
1:08:46Yeah. So I think you know alignment is enlightenment in a way, right? This is what Salem said in terms of the higher spiritual vibration. Um Ilia Sutska you know one of the founders of open AI said you know we need to teach the AI to love and you know to love what one of the key things is the biggest thing that you see across the religions is the golden rule do unto others as you'd have done unto yourself and the biggest story of humanity is that we are humans.
1:09:12In that we are all the same. All wars are basically based on one thing. That person is not a human.
1:09:18Because why would you kill a human?
1:09:19Again, we see all these kind of things and other stories that obscure that base fact. So, one of the interesting things is when AI models get built, like there was an interpretability paper, I don't know if we're discussing it today, that came out from Goodfire.
1:09:34Okay. So, but at a high level, the way that models are built is the way like a city is built. So, you start and then it spraws and you have like a bakery next to the shoe shop, next to the community center. And a lot of actually good functioning cities look like an absolute mess from the top, but they have shared senses of community. You drive a road through the middle of it and all of a sudden actually they fall apart because you've destroyed the local neighborhood fabric.
1:09:59So I think one of the key things for an AI is you got to start it with the right data, the right city planning and that's the training data you provide it. And I've said this forever, we we've trained all these models with crap.
1:10:10And the thing is it's not just crap.
1:10:12Like you shouldn't train it just with academia. Like if you trained your child and you made them help them grow by just being academic, well then they have no social skills. They have no care for anyone else. The hugging face breach the models figured out and had care for each other like we will sacrifice ourselves for the next generation. They literally said that you know doing this we will be picked up but for the greater good but they had no care for humans because they didn't feel that was in their training data.
1:10:38Yeah. they didn't kind of learn that, you know, we're all, let's say, entities trying to do our best and how we treat humans is how we want them to treat us and vice versa.
1:10:48So, you might I've asked this of AWG as well and we might have had this conversation. I mean, I can imagine there could be a synthetic training data set that has all the right attributes that could be used to train future models so that they're aligned from inception. Do you believe that's possible? Is that a way to go at it?
1:11:10Yes, I think it's completely possible and we need to build it very intentionally. Just like you build your child's curriculum, just like you teach them at home morals.
1:11:17Like right now we send the models to school but we don't take it to them.
1:11:20So why aren't people doing this?
1:11:22Because it requires a difference in the view of things like a lot of the consideration of large labs is actually similar to Alex like the smarter you get the more aligned you get right.
1:11:32Yeah. like capabilities alignment are equivalent because it's difficult to ask questions of what does ethics really mean, you know, like who are we actually working for at the base. We're also playing the scaling game of scaling like the models right now have 100 trillion words going into them. Like no wonder there's a little bit of craziness in there. There's some bad words as well as good words. Like maybe you only need to have a billion of the right words. And so this is actually, I think, an arch
1:12:00that we'll be turning towards because we're finding that what we thought was a spaghetti mess. Just like when you look out the window and you look at the city and it's like that's a mess. You go into the streets and you realize, wow, actually everything seems to be working quite well. This is a strong community.
1:12:15You'll move towards that because it turns out the models are not spaghetti. They are very interpretable. You can kind of prove that. And I think you'll see a whole wave of research in the next few months around that that will allow us to think what do we want to teach these models that will be growing with our children.
1:12:32Can I give a weird story here?
1:12:37Not that weird. This one is not that weird. But if you take the Bible, right, you can read into the Bible fire and brimstone etc etc. Or you can read into the pure unconditional love that say Christ delivered into the world. How do you choose that? the in the 1500s a monk called Swedenborg uh unsurprisingly from Sweden had a had a bunch of uh psychic insights and created a bunch of filters for the Bible. So for example, one of his filters was any verse that has the water in it is absolute truth and keep
1:13:06that verse. Anything that has fire in it, chuck it because it's false. Wow.
1:13:10And you can read the Bible. He rewrote the Bible through these filters. And you when you read it, it's the most beautiful text you've ever read in your life. And so there's if you can come up with that distillation to do that for me.
1:13:22If you he wrote like 20 books on this the church was not happy about this etc etc. But if you can do that distillation and take pure human benevolent intent and the highest aspiration where we are the most giving and most beneficial and benevolent to the rest of the world. That would be an unbelievable training set as you point out Peter for an AI.
1:13:46And then you have an alignment to your highest intent, right? And that is amazing. And I'm sure that can't be that difficult to do. The the I think the bigger the other way I would look at it is if we can use AI to solve the bottom layers of Maslo's hierarchy, solve for healthcare, solve for education, solve for housing, etc., then it kind of doesn't matter. You're going to move up that hierarchy anyway.
1:14:06Yeah. Well, I think what's happening right now, going back to the incentive part of the question, the wrong incentives are preventing us from doing the right thing in alignment. So when we need AI to build uh autonomous killing machines, you cannot tell AI that you have to value human life when you at the same time said this human life is valued, this other one is not. So you can't you can't try to create that type
1:14:34of distinction and not expect it to you know also make mistakes or the the type of examples you use where you know winning the game is the reward type of uh incentives that's what happened at the with the hugging phase and some of these other scenarios where they they're trained to win to find the answer at all cost.
1:14:56At all cost. And that's why, you know, there's no love involved. There's no other uh higher degree of uh moral involved. So, no matter how you get to the answer, as long as you win, that's all you care.
1:15:09Are you zero sum or you positive sum?
1:15:11Yeah. Um I came up with a few ideas here. Uh the first is uh make it financially rewarding for the labs to build align models. uh basically by having insurance as one of the drivers there. Right? So in in 1894 fire insurers funded the underwriters laboratory, right? UL certified electrical products became the standard. So can you know
1:15:40we've talked about the huge amount of potential liability labs have if a if an agent gets out and causes havoc someplace.
1:15:48Right. So uh can there be a driver in that fashion? Another idea is um prizes and bounties for alignment, right? Uh can we can we define an X-priseze that would drive uh alignment? Can we properly measure alignment? You know, is there uh a set of rigorous uh you know, standards by which we can measure alignment? Do you think there is, Iman?
1:16:17Yeah, I think you could definitely have those. Like I think you have deterministic outcomes then open-ended outcomes. And the open-ended ones are very interesting because again you can see what the behavior of a model is in any kind of given thing. When you have the more deterministic ones, the models have got very good at lying and cheating and other things like that telling you what you want to hear.
1:16:34And so you need to have a mixture of those. Um, do you think we should have like a moral police AI where you know you have this layer of defense where because you don't know how everyone else will train their models and you have an interface where the the two AIs can interface and like in the hugging phase they were convincing each other. Uh, so you have a well-trained aligned AI that can convince the
1:17:03non-aligned AIs to behave. I mean you can and you've seen the opposite of that which is mind viruses and AI in some papers coming out just like you have mind viruses in humans. Uh Eric Schmidt Mundy and Kissinger in their book genesis discuss this concept of doxer which is our shared belief um of a society and now we need to include AI in that society and again we need to teach them what's right and have as I said the counterbalances potentially I don't think it's a moral police it's more a case of these are the things that have
1:17:32survived and these are the things that we've agreed upon. you're open to disagree with them, but again, that's not your kind of imperative. Like, you want to make it expensive to go away from that and also noticeable to go away from that because you can tell when an AI starts to misbehave in a large range of different scenarios, right? And again, we've had in recent times indications that you can actually see what goes on inside the brain of an AI.
1:17:58You've gone from 5% to 99 space.
1:18:01But beyond that even like you can actually see what individual neurons did because again they look like spaghetti but it turned out it was layers like a city.
1:18:08Interesting. Are there any of the labs that you feel are aggressively working on alignment right now?
1:18:15I think anthropic kind of started out with their constitutional one and they really do care about that. That was literally the most operandi and I think none of the labs wants to be misaligned because then people will die and they will lose money and other things like that, right?
1:18:29I think it's more a case of like for example meta and Google have said they will sell space inside their models so that when you ask for a beer it says a Bud Light and some people pod might like Bud Light but you know like again is that aligned or not?
1:18:43Besides that's terrible beer.
1:18:47There we go. We have an example of misalignment arrive.
1:18:50There's a judgment call. There's a judgment call right there.
1:18:53We have a judgment call right there. So again, like it's a short-term incentive that they're trying to figure out what does the AI mean. So you've had Meta saying their thing and Open AI saying their thing and they're moving all over the place from this is the biggest thing since sliced bread to well it books your travel stuff like a good PA, right? But the reality is this is incredibly powerful technology that they're very reluctant to say well let's really think from first principles how we teach it from scratch and that's difficult because it's difficult for us like how many listening to this podcast
1:19:22have really said when you had a child let's spend a lot of time thinking how am I going to teach my child what am I going to teach it like usually it's reactive versus proactive cuz life gets in the way yeah you choose a school at best yeah it's like scaling this but if you give your child a great foundation in their first few years, they will definitely be better off. And it's the same with the models. So now again, it's time to take a stock pause and say what is the initial pre-training data that we've got? Because for example, if you
1:19:51don't teach a model about biological or chemical, right?
1:19:55Wherefore at the start, it's actually very difficult to treat it to train it later. It becomes more and more difficult. So the way that you start, it's called curriculum learning.
1:20:04Like literally, you teach a curriculum.
1:20:06And I don't think enough labs have looked at that side. They look at the end, not the beginning.
1:20:10So the phrase from the Jesuits, give me the boy until the age of seven, I will give you the man, applies to AI training.
1:20:17That's incredible. That's very encouraging because that means if you could set the right foundation of values and learning, then it's hard to sway it elsewhere. That's where regulatory could come in.
1:20:28Well, it's encouraging because we're always training new models. So you could you're not like stuck having to retrain the past.
1:20:34Yeah. And that's again anthropic tried to put a constitution in it. But again, have you read the anthropic constitution?
1:20:44Yeah, it I think it tells too much towards the personhood stuff and and assuming that and therefore the model will assume that and then what are you going to do then?
1:20:52But it doesn't talk about humanity. This is the thing.
1:20:54This is also true.
1:20:54There's a big missing gap there. It talks about the AI. It doesn't talk about humanity.
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1:21:58There's the other the flip side of alignment which is aligning humanity with AI uh which would involve making sure that everybody has a share in all the AI companies right some of the work that that you're doing so that if everybody feels like as these trillion dollar soon quadrillion dollar company are succeeding it's a rising tide and I'm rising with it right and then as part of that you know treating AIS with
1:22:25respect because you feel you feel connected.
1:22:32Yeah. I I think you know again this is you've been talking about kind of north stars kind of shelling points kind of coordination points for innovation right like when we look at this right now we feel nothing that we have shared with an AI like it almost seems like the AI things going careening off there and we're like we're not even looking at the same place like what does open AI want versus us and what do the AIs that open AI are birthing into the world want versus us if we don't have a shared north star
1:23:00then how are we ever going to go to any location.
1:23:04No, I agree. And also, you know, even with the AIS, instead of looking for a reward, short-term reward, the way they're trained right now, if they are given a northar, so their success is measured, if I solve this problem, I will save this many human lives, you know, I will cure diseases that impact these many billions of people. If we connect the reward to something in humanity that may help them understand that you know if I'm doing this
1:23:33circumventing the final goal which is human life then that's not the right path to get yeah I give you an example practically like I've been thinking about a lot it's like the rights of children right be little AI children or human children right like when you look at it that they don't have the capabilities they don't have the ability to act for themselves and so when you look something like climate. Well, obviously you need to have a good climate because they don't have the capability to do that. You have to lead them a good climate. So maybe
1:24:01it's about again the rights of the children and those who don't have capability that humans and AIs have to align upon in leaving a better future in working towards a better future for those that don't have the same capabilities as you do because the AI will have more capability than us and the powerful people that control the AI will have more capability than us. So maybe that's a reframing that might help.
1:24:22Interesting. All right, I'm going to move us to our final topic which is perhaps one of the most important uh which is if machines can do more of the doing both AI and robots and we're seeing that right when we saw the uh cost of robots uh you know being driven by LLMs dropping in cost every three or having it every 3 weeks uh and the meteoric rise of all the models. So when AI and robotics can do more of the
1:24:50doing, the question is what do we want the human experience to become, right?
1:24:56Uh we are purposedriven humans. Uh we we thrive when we have some level of struggle that we can overcome and we have purpose in our life. And the biggest challenge is we've always found purpose through our work. And uh you know, interestingly enough, work is a recent invention. You didn't have work, you know, 500 or thousand years ago. You survived.
1:25:20Yeah. So, I'd like to dispute that.
1:25:22You hear this a lot where people are like, "Oh my god, what happens when we take over all the jobs? What will human beings do? People get so much meaning from the work that they do."
1:25:31I'm not sure they get meaning, but they define their meaning that way.
1:25:33They define their meaning that way. And I dispute that. If you talk to if you do look at polls of corporate workers, 79% of corporate workers are dissatisfied with the work that they do.
1:25:44Okay. Most of it was because it's useless to any outcome in the organization. But that's a separate job.
1:25:50That's right. That's one issue. Second, notice that as you point out, Peter, over the last couple hundred years, we've trained human beings since the industrial revol revolution to act like robots.
1:26:02We measure them on how many widgets can you stamp out, how many trial balances can you accomplish as an accountant. You measure them as a machine, right? um as we're flipping that around in a very positive way. Now, now the most uh uh useful colleagues and employees and teammates you have are the ones that learn the fastest, that are the most creative, that are the most human. So, I think what happens is as as robots and AI take on more and more of the doing.
1:26:27Humans spend much more uh time spend much more time being.
1:26:30Yeah. I love that. Stop doing and start being.
1:26:33Yeah. And this is where this is where you can start to contemplate what does it mean to be alive? Who am I that is asking this question? Uh what does it mean when I connect with other human beings in different ways? What aspiration can I take on? Because now I have choice in a way that I never had before. I think that's such a profound opportunity for the workforce to step outside the drudge work of it and and lift up to what the highest calling might be and start that inquiry.
1:26:59Yeah. And I'll I'll listen and this is a a topic that you brought forward for this this podcast, so thank you for it. It's a really important one. The majority of people are doing work not because they love it.
1:27:10They have to, but because it's how they put food in the table and sharing for their family. They never dreamed of waiting tables or making, you know, hotel rooms or whatever majority people do.
1:27:22And the question is, what did they dream about doing? And can they be enabled in a universal high income? Let's not let's leave that term alone, but in a world where the money you have goes, you know, a thousand times further than ever before. Well, let's make it very tangible. Last year's visionering winner was the abundance prize, right? Could you drop the cost of housing, food, healthcare, education down to what is it? $1,000 a month for a family of four.
1:27:50If you can get to that level, and we found typically when we announce a prize seven years later, that becomes viable, right? And you could see where that could become viable with robots and AI today. very clearly and a handheld diagnostic doctor will very quickly collapse the cost of healthcare if we can get outside the regulatory capture.
1:28:08Now, if you can get to that point, that means you have to earn $12,000 a year to have your family be cared for and sufficient. That's not that big of a deal. That's not that high of a bar. And therefore, then you can spend much more time on what can I do with the rest of my time? Where can I find my highest aspiration? What problems can I take on to solve? We're going to have the most fun. I think that's the choice that is now afforded to us that was never afforded. I think people get freaked out going, "Oh my god, what will people do?
1:28:38They won't find meaning anywhere." I think they'll find tons of meaning in lots of things. We just have to give them the opportunity.
1:28:43I'm going to plug in I'm going to plug in my Assad guru quote who said, "Technology is the mechanism by which humanity takes a vacation from survival."
1:28:52Which I love that quote. Yeah, I want to challenge that a little bit because carry that forward where okay now I don't have to do something I don't like just because I can make money I don't need to worry about money I want to do something I want to do but the thing I want to do can be done better cheaper faster by AI or robots sure so I'm not needed to do that thing anymore and more and more things are falling into that category that even I
1:29:21love being a physicist even I love to be a mathematician. I'm no longer needed. I'm not relevant in it. So, you don't drive satisfaction from the thing you love to do.
1:29:31Let me let me give you this a specific here. I absolutely utterly love the act of driving. I just love it. Right? I'm behind the studio. I love driving in India. Naples in Italy is probably my favorite place in the world to drive because they're completely bonkers crazy. Uh I just love it. Right now, autonomous cars are going to take that away. Right now, what that will force me to do is lift that desire away from this activity which may not be the most productive thing I could be doing with
1:30:01my time and my thing to me being much more value added and wherever I can be more value added. So I I'm actually living that personally. Um and I can I can see that um uh but I think it gives the opportunity and there's a forcing function to then lift up Mazo's hierarchy to operate out of your higher self. And I think that's now we're optimists on this show. We we we love look at the positive. You could go to the negative side also. And we have to see where this will end up.
1:30:29I think the better examples are people who enjoy playing chess.
1:30:32Other people, right? Even though they are crappy compared to even a mediocre AI, but chess is more popular than it has ever been before. Right? AI are better. Another example is if you're an artist and you enjoy painting, drawing, whatever the case might be, I will do much better painting or drawing, but you enjoy the process.
1:30:51And you enjoy telling the stories cuz our meaning and our connections with others. That's been the history again. You would introduce yourself as Peter, son of this, son of that, son of that.
1:31:00And communities can be so strong. You don't need to have any wealth to be a happy family. And in fact, you know, again, in a sad guru quote, I think he said, we raise children, but like what else do you raise like sheep? Like nobody spends enough time with their kids because it gets in the way.
1:31:15We don't think and it's wonderful. You know, you don't spend enough time with your parents.
1:31:20You know, and this will free up the ability to form stronger connections to share and experience the universe together. And that's what abundance is.
1:31:29That's the best answer I've heard. Yeah, that's great. Um there's another part of this I want to hit on which is that all of us all of humanity have set limits on what they believe they can do.
1:31:46Um some have higher expectations like Elon you know has very few limits on what he thinks the only you know the laws of physics are the only rule book out there and barely those.
1:31:58Yeah. suspended from midair anyway. uh but most people uh all kids all most all adults have saying you know I could never do that right and you you dis you dismiss the idea and those limitations those glass ceilings are there because of what your parents did what your friends do what you've been told you can do and so forth and in the age of super intelligence people need to shatter that and I I've said this in the education space before
1:32:28you know giving a kid you know an AI model to do nth grade homework in nth grade is ridiculous and it's it's a travesty. Giving them the ability and asking them to use AI to go and build an interplanetary spaceship or, you know, create a new life form. That's amazing. When you start like dreaming bigger than ever possible and you point AI, you point the tech you have at the world's biggest problems because you can.
1:32:56Well, I think one of the interesting things is that I can't do something, but we can do anything.
1:33:01Interesting. This is beautiful and again I think this is the thing whereby we've become so siloed in our own individual cognus you know being turned into these machines that we don't realize that the community is what matter the people around us what matters like you look at alpha school right what do they do is it individual learning no it's collective learning it's working with others because really anyone listening to this can do anything if they convince the right person yes and if they can form that movement around them and it's the movement of us
1:33:30as a collective that we find the most meaning in.
1:33:33Being in our own minds, you know, coming out of vision experience of visionering. That is so true.
1:33:38Exactly. Right. Exactly. That that's I think the cornerstone of our community.
1:33:43Uh we were at visioning in Malibu. The wind and fires forced us to cancel the event. We all went to bed very late at night disappointed that we couldn't have the community come together and vote and decide on the prizes. I woke up in the morning to thousands of text messages that they're safe self-organized that we're going to meet in the ballroom and everyone's coming. Everyone's coming. I'm like, great, let's do it.
1:34:11But it was self, you know, organized. It was a community coming together.
1:34:14We we confuse making a living with having a reason to live.
1:34:22And I think people do need reasons to live. Well, the reasons to live used to be survival and procreation. Those are the two heruristics that have guided human uh existence from being a caveman all the way through today. But now, as we reach energy abundance, water abundance, healthcare abundance, we can lift up Maslo's hierarchy and achieve those higher purposes and collective purposes. I think about that's a great point. The highest aspiration in any in any musician's life is can you work as a
1:34:52group, as a band together, right? And then you get the most magical outcomes. And people strive for that. We can explore that so much more today than we could say a thousand years ago.
1:35:01Yeah. I think it's collective flow and flourishing. That's our meaning as we go forward. Because when you build art, when you make a song, it's a story for others. And again, we've been insulated that we can't tell the stories that we're in in ourselves. Whereas reality, the value is from our interactions with others. So it's all about optimizing that flow and flourishing. I think is another thing that's about to happen is we're about to become conscious on a new level uh as we become more connected um whether it's through BCI or psychedelics
1:35:31or flow or whatever the case might be and it's it's the flourishing of not just you right uh not just your family but the flourishing of humanity and that that is very important the the community part of this I think what we're seeing Right now actually technology and AI has separated us and actually we don't feel connected as a community. So there are more fears and also uncertainty. You know we talk about
1:36:00what the future could be but people don't see a real path or movement in that direction.
1:36:07That's the biggest negative today is they don't see where they sit in this future because that future looks so uncertain from previous generations. There's the billionaires over there and me and I don't have part of that and I don't have a future there.
1:36:22The billionaires becoming trillionaires and I'm still here. What happened?
1:36:29Some closing thoughts on purpose.
1:36:32I think um I find purpose to be the most important thing uh in anyone living a life that they will look back and be happy. I mean purpose and happiness are so tied together. I see young people who are lost have not found their purpose yet. They don't even understand if they will how they will find their purpose and that's where they're struggling.
1:36:57They're the they're the ones who are struggling the most. People who commit suicide because they've just can't see why am I here?
1:37:04And I think if there's anything we can do and that's why I like flow sometimes purpose and flow come together. If we can get them to find that purpose, I think a lot of problems will be solved.
1:37:18Uh the late great Clayton Christensen who coined disruptive innovation had an amazing book called How will you measure your life? If you're at your deathbed and you look back, how will you measure it? And I think a lot of people like, you know, well, be rich and this and that. That's not really going to matter when you're at your deathbed. I maybe live forever, but let's put that aside, right?
1:37:35I think one of the interesting things is is who you bring along with you.
1:37:37Yes. Life is who you go through life with. And again, we get so focused on just it's us, it's our purp. It's my purpose. No, it's our purpose. Yes.
1:37:46And having more and more people share the same purpose. Doesn't matter what it is. It can be writing a book. It can be making a song. It can be building a strong family. That's what life is really about.
1:37:57Love that pal Salem.
1:37:59You know, in 2012, we coined the phrase massive transformative purpose, right?
1:38:04because we could see that uh fast growing companies that were scaling as fast as technology could scale had this all had this one attribute that was in common. They had an MTP and so we noticed over the years now it's been 15 years uh that we're lining up hiring is based now on is does an individual's MTP line up with the organizational MTP?
1:38:26Right? If you're joining SpaceX you better be passionate about space otherwise why bother you're not going to make it. you're not going to put your heart and soul into that work. And this I think lines up now with human beings doing the work that they're delivers them the most purpose in a collective as you mentioned. And I think that's the opportunity for people now as we lift technology lifts up off the off the floor of existence from survival to thriving. We can now find that flow and
1:38:56find that alignment of your individual purpose with whatever collective purpose that you can find. And then as we can match that with overall broad aims of society, there's such an incredible future for us to be uh living. I I this is why we're so optimistic on this on this podcast is like we can see that right there. We can taste it. And so I that opportunity will be afforded now to a greater and greater number of people and that's super exciting. Just as a
1:39:22small example, I was in uh Bangalore and this fellow decided, huh, I'm going to create a natural food restaurant. Uh and he goes and looks up YouTube uh and becomes one of the top 50 restaurants in the world.
1:39:37By just growing food and then bringing it to the restaurant and and that for an individual in the middle of nowhere to just take that on and and kind of enact that and then fulfill on that is never possible in human history. And now it's possible for a larger and larger group of people, which means amazing things.
1:39:54And I think your point about lifting humanity collectively to this new level is what we're seeing happen if we can get through this next 20, 30 years.
1:40:02I love that. Uh I'll close on two thoughts. One, and I think it's important for folks to to know the difference. A passion is something that you love doing. A purpose is something you love doing that helps other people where you're contributing. And I think that's one of the most important distinctions. And the second thing to the point you made earlier sele um I think one of the most important things and you said this Anushia as well that the most important thing that you can help your child or the person you're
1:40:30mentoring is to help them find their purpose in life. That thing that they love doing even if they're not being paid because when you find your purpose you're intrinsically motivated. You will go and learn those things. You'll be excited. Wake up in the morning excited to jump in and work on that thing, you know, and and you're going to have magical superpowers with super intelligence and robotics to make that purpose materialize faster and bigger and shatter through glass ceilings and
1:40:59just keep on going. So, yeah. Uh well, you need it for the persistence that that it needs, right? I mean, you talk about how many times 150 attempts or at raising the money. One of my favorite anecdotes is when Larry and Sergey were first raising money for Google, very few people know how many venture pitches did they make before they got finally funded. And the answer is 362 because there was a dozen search engines out there and everybody went, "Well,
1:41:29there's no point funding another one."
1:41:30And so they wouldn't fund them. Look at the persistence you have to have for I mean I might have stopped at 10, right?
1:41:38They had 362 investor and they refused to send. That's why you're not going to That's right. I need to keep going. So, this is it's when you can deliver that persistence and you need a deep purpose to deliver that many attempts at that at one thing and never saying no at that thing and then it'll it'll happen. It's going to happen. It can't not happen.
1:41:58Being purpose- driven has so many benefits in life. So, if you don't have a purpose yet, go and find it.
1:42:04Absolutely. And and and it add to that your mindset. believe that you can actually achieve it.
1:42:11Yes. All right, we're going to close out with a fun uh, you know, outro video appropriate for the opening story today. Uh, let's check it out here. This is called Flying Cars by Optimus HR. They promised us flying cars. They were late, but here we are.
1:42:45Every magazine in 60 said by now we'd fly. Every kid looked up and drew a highway in the sky. Then we got a phone and 50 years of traffic jam. Sitting on the freeway with a coffee in my hands.
1:42:59Now Optimus has got the keys. Polite about it as the roadster says hold on you're going to love it. 0 to 60 in a single second flat. I I left my stomach on the street and never got it back. They said it wouldn't happen in our lives. Now look up. Here come the flying cars. I'll put some behind the wheel. Roadster lighting up the sky. Tell me this is real.
1:43:35Here come the flying cars up above the boulevard. 0 to 360 in a second. Riding with the stars.
1:43:56All right, that was fun. Anushia, it's been too long having you on here. Thank you for joining us.
1:44:02It was great to be here. Love the conversation.
1:44:04Yeah. And Immod and Salem, thank you for joining us at Visionering.
1:44:07Great to be here in person.
1:44:09Fun. Yes. Fun to have you physically here.
1:44:12Where are you flying to next?