We have two futures in our world today. Either a Mad Max feature or a Star Trek feature. Do you think that as we transition over to AI, that it will take us through a valley of despair, or is this going to be a straight line to you, Toby? Oh, no, big values of chaotic despair.
AI is going to be a billion times smarter than you. This is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen. How do they create the next billion dollar company with three people if that's the way to play it? This is what needs to happen.
Describe the most likely sequencing over the next 30 years. I think we, for me, the AI transition is typewriter to word processor. It's just an uplifting and enabling of all sorts of capabilities across multiple multiple sectors and industries, and it transforms how we do things pretty fundamentally from creativity to rank and file work, to do color work, et cetera. I think the robotic stuff is further down the line than most people think.
Peter's very excited about it. We have all the human on our robots, but robotics is really, really hard, and will take much longer, in my opinion. But the AI stuff will actually allow us to uplift ourselves very quickly. And we talk about scarcity to abundance.
I think AI gets us to abundance very, very fast. And I think that's, for me, the most exciting and optimistic side of things. We have two futures in our world today. Either a Mad Max feature, which you can see playing out in Gaza or Ukraine, or a Star Trek feature, where we have abundance and we're operating on a much more highly conscious basis, et cetera.
And so which future do we pick as a human species as the choice that's in front of us right now? Okay, so you believe that there's a branching path before us, and we get to choose which path we go down? It's a little, we're actually heading down the Mad Max path. So if you look at our politics, you look at what's happening, you look at the political rhetoric here in the US, there's a huge transitional shift happening.
And my favorite and sensible way of dealing with that is a centralized to decentralized shift. We run the world today on very centralized systems, governments and corporations and the military industrial complex, et cetera. We're moving to much more decentralized and bottom up peer-to-peer systems. And you could call that a male archetype versus a female archetype if you want to go there.
But when you get to abundance, you want a female archetype to be running the world. Because the female archetype shares resources around naturally. So for example, the male archetype, when it meets abundance, relates to it as power and tries to hoard it, middle-east oil, Wall Street money, et cetera. Female archetype meets abundance and shares it around it.
So you really need a sharing, decentralized model as we move the world to abundance. And that's the tension that I think I see in the world more than anything is that centralized to decentralized architecture. And we've started to see the rise of this of the last few decades of the Burning Man philosophy, open-source movements, DIY movements, the maker movement, et cetera. Democracy itself is a bottom-up movement as a reaction to feudal systems and top-down empires.
And we're moving in that direction. It's just slow and painful. And centralized systems don't like to relinquish power. We know that very clearly.
So that's the tension that I see that's playing out. That's underpinning all the other how it's showing up. So for example, when I think about Trump or Brexit, it wasn't left versus right. It was actually urban versus rural.
Brexit was 100% London versus the rest of the country. So there's a- I have to break point. There's a lot of tension in cities and how do we allocate resources to cities versus the countryside where people, because the metabolism of a city is much faster. Innovation happens very fast in the city.
And so therefore that's the environment in which we're doing most of our innovation work and technological development today. And if you're left behind, you get very unhappy with that. And so this is the tension that I think we're seeing around the world. So we have this fundamental tension between things could go well, things could go poorly, splitting between the different archetypes, male, female, how we respond to abundance, power or sharing the resources, urban and rural.
I'm starting to get a sense of where you're going. Do you think that as we transition over to AI, that it will take us through a valley of despair? Or is this going to be a straight line to utopia? Oh no, big values of chaotic despair.
These types of transitions, I think this is the biggest transformation in the history of civilization. Maybe the history of species on Earth. It's that big. And that transition is going to be very painful.
They never are clean, right? Like the asteroid hits and the dinosaurs get wiped out. And now you have Cambridge explosion types. I think that's the kind of transition we're seeing here.
Okay, that is arguably the most devastating thing to ever happen to life on this Earth. Yeah. Wait, I don't believe AI gets us there. But it's...
Meaning AI will not have that kind of cataclysmic. That's right. Actually, I'm hugely optimistic about the future. So that's a really important framing point.
But there's no question in civilization at least. This is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen. And I think the next 30 years defines the next 300 years. Why will the next 30 years define it?
What does that look like? Is that the period of transition? Yeah, it's the transition period. And this is chaos theory, right?
The initial conditions are really critical. And how you navigate those initial conditions with as much experience, guidance and a lot of luck will then guide the rest of the future. If you know chaos theory, the idea is that if you drop a pebble down the top of a mountain, it doesn't matter how many times you drop the pebble is always going to take a different path. Because some micro change in the initial atmosphere or the pressure when you released it or the first bounce or the density of the first thing it hit or the change in humidity along the way will have it go down a different route.
So you never know what's going to happen, but it just knows we're just in the really big transition. And it's super exciting, but it's very, very chaotic. I have heard you that this is going to be very difficult to predict. However, one of the most interesting descriptions of quantum mechanics I heard is that yes, while all things are simply probabilistic, the world that you see is the most likely.
And I thought that was a really great explanation. So assuming that, knowing that no matter how many times you drop the pebble will be different, but there's there's a most likely sort of cluster of effects. Yeah, think of it as a stock market chart, right? You never have a clear straight line.
It's always a choppy and then it stabilizes then it has a breakthrough moment and then it's choppy again. It's kind of like that. I think that's the pattern that we see. OK, what causes that?
Like I can actually explain economically what's going on in terms of human greed, fear and the way that cultural energy will move through a medium that can be an economic medium. So you can actually see cultural energy move through a stock market. If anybody paying attention to Bitcoin, I would just tell you right now, that's simply a cultural idea that is spreading through the medium of cryptocurrency. I won't derail the conversation on that, but like with that in mind that to me, my base assumption about those jagged lines is that is human, the human brain responding in a somewhat predictable way.
And you can watch that idea ripple through, including sort of bounding it. So it's only going to go up so high and it's only going to go down solo. And so you see this sort of bounding fluctuation and you can look back through history and you see that same sort of bounded fluctuation. Now those bounded fluctuations to me are terrifying.
And if you read history, because, like I said, the long arc is bending towards prosperity for all. And if you zoom out long enough on human timescales, it's unbelievable. The part is made. Oh, my God.
But that does not help. The guy who's family all gets rolled up in rugs by the Mongols and trampled to death. Yes. Like that's just no consolation.
That's right. We're all that guy, right? We all live one life. Yes.
We are bounded from a time perspective so far. And so it matters to me a lot where I am on these jagged lines. So going back to AI, what are these jagged lines? Do you buy into my thesis or do you have a different one?
Oh, I agree with you, but with some caveats. So for example, the economic outcomes of AI, I think, are pretty clear in terms of what's going to happen. I think we're going to see massive productivity gains across the board. The challenge we have is the underlying system is flawed in terms of economic development and economic growth, right?
Our entire system, global system, is money is the main mode of discourse in the world today. And it's good, because if you think of money as a form of energy, we've freed money, energy from religious structures and feudal systems, and then the power of ideas came along and the power of technology came along. And now it flows very nicely, very quickly to new ideas and good ideas, via venture capital, via private equity, Bitcoin, new ideas can pop up and money will flow where the best ideas are. So that's fantastic one level.
But we're moving from money as a main mode of discourse in the world to information as a main mode of discourse in the world. So for example, any startup would much rather gather data about things rather than getting money early, because it can monetize the data much more. They're fungible today. You can convert money into information and vice versa.
Over time, information becomes a higher order bit, right? Because take your health. You're much more interested in the different biomarkers you can track than how much it'll cost you to fix things, et cetera, because the information is more valuable. So I think as a very metaphysical level, we're shifting from the quest for money in the quest for greed, et cetera, and energy that way in shifting into information.
When we move that transition, now things become really powerful. I think this is the massive insight that Ray Kurzweil had when he was started tracking Moore's law, that as we digitize, we turn things into information. That information can then be manipulated into back into matter, back into money, and vice versa. And you have this amazing cyclical pattern that can take place.
And little by little, we're moving more and more into that. Over time, money will become less important on this scale. If you went back a thousand years ago, we were all working 18 hours a day in the fields to put three meals on the table. And some of us still are still are.
But you didn't have a choice then. You pretty much had to do that. Only a very small percentage of the population could not do that. Today, that number of that population that doesn't have to do that is much, much bigger.
And little by little, as we do better vertical farming and solar energy into all sorts of remote parts in the world and satellite internet and water extraction out of the atmosphere, pretty much we'll be able to have an amazing life anywhere on the planet for every level of humanity. That's why Peter gets so excited. That's why we get so excited about the technological progress. The problem is our social systems and all our infrastructure and all our institutions are not geared for smooth progress in this thing.
I think to summarize those lines that you were talking about, I would quote E.O. Wilson, the famous biologist, who said the problem with humanity is that our emotions are paleolithic. Our institutions are medieval and our technology is godlike. Pretty much all the problems in the world come from the gaps in those layers.
And I think the pressure is so intense today that any leader today will spend the next 20 years of our lives basically dealing with the gaps in those layers. Yeah, let's name that the human problem. The human problem. So my thing is the human problem is not going anywhere.
So for instance, you were just talking about right now, people are seeking money. That becomes the game. But now the information is going to become the higher order bit. People are going to start pursuing that.
But what I will ask is why. And the answer to me seems self-evidently. It's more powerful. So you still have humans playing a game of power, which is why I'm still very concerned about these values of despair.
Because unless something changes in our biology that makes us pursue different things, we will simply derange AI. We will simply derange the pursuit of information. And while you and I share a very optimistic vision of the long-term future because of that long arc, what way do you see us? So going back to your branching choice between Mad Max or Utopia, how do we nudge humanity to not go down Mad Max, which you're saying we're doing currently, and instead go to Utopia?
How do you solve the human problem? I think you open up as fast as possible and decentralize as fast as possible. Okay? So the number two to Zelensky in the Ukraine is one of our community members.
So I've got a global OpenExO community that are building for the 21st century, building companies and transforming governments, etc. And I was chatting with him. He was asking some advice, turns out they've been using my book a bit in dealing with what's happening there. And one of the comments I made is how is it that you've become so resilient as in terms of the in the face of the aggression?
And he said we decentralized the country. We decentralized the country. So there's no single point of attack for energy or for infrastructure or for electricity, etc. And we've been doing that for 10 years because we could see this could be a likely possibility.
So I think what happens is when you decentralize things, become much, much more resilient. Just take energy, for example, if we decentralize, we can have solar energy powering lots of small communities, then there's no need for security at the central power grid because there isn't one. And anybody can generate solar energy at a very local level. And the efficiency means we'll get better and better at storing it and better and better at generating it.
And now you have amazing resource capability anywhere at a wonderful level. Most of our wars over the last 100 years have been over energy, oil specifically. So when we free ourselves from that, hopefully you should get to a peaceful nature. Now I was under the impression for a while that, huh, when we get to abundance, we won't be fighting anymore.
And I got disillusioned from that by a couple of the deep thinkers who said, no, we'll still have lots of human conflict because humans are really geared towards conflict. And XPRIZE, we try and push people towards healthy competition and let's work things out that way. We've got all sorts of really great ways of dealing with the natural conflict that we bring up in human beings. For example, sports teams, the Olympics, et cetera.
And that allows us to vent a lot of aggression that might otherwise come out in other ways. But we still have to deal with the fundamental human nature problem. And hopefully the abundance side gets there faster than some lone small team of people trying to use AI to design a virus that will attack all middle-aged Indian bald guys. Right?
That would be the hope. Okay, so decentralization. I am one of the few people that is beyond obsessed with cryptocurrencies, Web3, and believes that decentralization is just deeply problematic. So the reason I think that decentralization is deeply problematic is that you cannot galvanize the energy of humans well.
And so while some things will respond to decentralization very well, so take the very nature of the blockchain, the fact that it is distributed, that they all run as nodes is brilliant. I'm here for that. I love it the most. However, I am doing battle with Coinbase, for instance, which keeps wanting to verify my identity, keeps asking me where I got my money, I'm like, bro, I'm about as public as you get.
I don't know what else you want me to show you. But I want them to be centralized because I don't want to have to do a bunch of crazy stuff to make sure that I'm getting my crypto exchange in a safe way, all that stuff. So I'm making a willing trade for simplicity, for security, I know all the memes, but nonetheless, and I think that more people are like me. Okay, so people want centralization.
And you have a hard time aiming everybody's energy in the same direction when all the decision making is completely distributed. You also have what our founding fathers are trying to protect against, which is the tyranny of the majority. And so there are reasons, I think, to be skeptical that decentralization is a magical solution. So let's use Ukraine since you brought them up as an example.
There's a guy named John Mearsheimer, brilliant political thinker, military, I don't know if he's officially strategist, but anyway, seems to deeply understand that. And he just keeps saying Ukraine is going to lose. It is inevitable. And they're going to end up at dysfunctional rump state.
And when I hear that rhetoric, I'm like, okay, one, let me just be very clear. I'm not close enough to the problem or to just that thing in general to know if he's right. But there's so much internal logic to the way that he approaches it. So I'm looking at your argument.
They decentralized a bunch of things, so it becomes harder to attack. But that also makes it feel like each region is going to be easier to overtake. And so if I'm Russia, I'm just going to go zone by zone by zone, being like, I don't have to worry about the whole collective because you guys are decentralized. So I'm just going to eat this node and then eat this node.
Yeah. However, the problem with eating these nodes is keeping that node as non-trivial. Okay. So for example, they installed a bunch of Russian mayors in some of the initial towns that they, and they just put car bombs on them and started blowing them up.
So now who wants to go be a Russian mayor of a local Ukrainian town when your lifespan is going to be very short? So the resistance is going to be strong just because they don't have a choice, right? This is their, this is the existential for them. And this is the same thing why it's difficult to take over Afghanistan or take over a country.
It may become a rum state that's possible, but if that's the case, it was going to become that anyway. And you might as well fight it, which is what they're doing right now. The question is, can they win? And I think they can't win without obviously a huge amount of Western aid, but I think they could win in that situation.
What do you think becomes the galvanizing force? So you mentioned Afghanistan, I have a feeling without a sense of cultural identity and possibly religion, it would be easy to disrupt. But there's a galvanizing force that allows the distributed nature of all of that to work, that they still have this thing that sits over them that unites them. Yeah.
So this is a great question. Is what is that binding force? Because it used to be religion, right? We started actually used to be tribal structures, because we would cooperate on nomadic tribes and the tribes and then fight.
And over a time period of time, the technology became better. The tribes would become bigger and bigger in foreign countries and empires, right? The Mongols, as you mentioned earlier, my favorite thing about the Mongols is an old BBC documentary that said they destroyed anything they got angry at, and they got angry at anything they didn't understand. So they came around from the steps down to Han, China, found a million Chinese farmers doing agriculture, didn't understand it, got angry at it, and literally wiped out a million farmers, just because of that cascading logic, right?
Now, if you grow an empire at a certain level, can you keep it or not keep it as one area? The ones that worked best are the ones that decentralized the administration and navigated local preferences in a powerful way. Akbar in India, the Mongols did it pretty well. Alexander, the great manager pretty well.
The Roman Empire did pretty well. There's that whole idea of the fourth turning and all of the cyclical aspects. I look at all these folks, Piketty, Redalio, Yuval Harari, et cetera, and I think they're incredibly insightful about the past. I find they're not that useful about the future.
Why? Because I think this inflection point, and I know this is a tired kind of meme of this time is different, but I think this time is really different. The combination of energetic abundance and lifespan that we're about to break, life extension plus AI makes it a completely different cocktail than we've ever seen before in the history of humanity. And so I think this is a complete step change, and this is why it's so exciting to be around today.
For the audience that doesn't know you, you have a business framework that I think is going to be really useful to help us think through, because I keep finding you drift to the... Well, once we're on the other side of this, there's energy abundance, and it solves all these medical problems, and those are the things that I think calms everybody down in the long run. But they do not help us in the next call it from now to seven years. It's sort of the time window where I think things are going to get really weird.
So really fast, walk people through. You're thinking around how in business we can use some of these strategies to become an exponential organization. Sure. So, you know, if you went back to the 20th century, the most successful organizations were the biggest top-down hierarchical command and control structures, pyramid-structured with a C at the top, designed for two things, designed for efficiency, and designed for predictability.
Right? If your pamper is, you're trying to deliver the same box of pamper as in a million locations around the world, or McDonald's, or healthcare services, or whatever. Today, you need to be architected for agility, flexibility, adaptability, and speed. And we found in the last episode, we did with you that the top 10 of the Fortune 100 that are the most flexible and agile compared to the bottom 10 in our opinion that the least exo-friendly had delivered 40 times better shareholder returns over a seven-year period than the one.
So, there's a clear economic thesis here that as the world becomes more volatile, your ability to adapt will drive market value and drive have a better organization. So, how do you build that? And we call these exponential organizations where you have a massive purpose, like cure cancer, Elon has three, take us to space, solve transportation, solve the climate. And then you build an organization with a set of externalities, like leveraging community, like Ted does, leveraging assets that you don't own, like Airbnb, not hiring your own staff, like Uber, and then a set of internal mechanisms, like the lean startup thinking ideas and decentralized org structures, because you can push decision-making to the edge.
We found that the more of these characteristics are used the better. And we're clear now over the next decade that every government department impact project, nonprofit, for-profit will tend towards these structures, because we now have enough evidence to show that that's better. So, for example, when we talk to CEOs today, they are not AI-ready at all, because their old 20th-century organization structures is absolutely not set up for what's coming with AI, right? They're not AI-ready.
So, all asking is, can you please give us a workshop, set us up with some help on how do we navigate AI? And I see two problems that are paramount today with companies implementing AI. The first day is they jump in very quickly and they can't see the rocks before they dive in, and they get into trouble, either by accidentally putting all their data into chat GPT, or putting the wrong models into place. And the second issue, which is the bigger issue, is the immune system problem.
So, I first came across this problem at Yahoo, and I was running their incubator. And the more disruptive an idea we came up with in the incubator, the less the company can handle it, right? I was like, wait, you hired me to do disruptive stuff, and I bring you something, and you guys can't cope, right? You can't integrate it.
Why? Because of that efficiency and agility problem. That really stuck in my head and going through seven years of building singularity and noticing that we have 20 Gutenberg moments hitting us. AI is hitting us right now, but we have biotech.
We have blockchain as a Gutenberg moment, solar energy as a Gutenberg moment, life extension as a Gutenberg moment. We will not be able to manage the future with our current existing organization structures or current government structures or institution structures. So, we architected this model. We now can see that it will work.
And we have to solve two things. One is, what's the thoughtful way in which you apply technology to derive great value from it? Secondly, how do you navigate that immune system response? And so we're coaching companies and so on and how to do this.
Because if you push AI into a company, all the people go, whoa, Nelly, and they freak out, and the antibodies attack you, and nothing moves. This analogy was first given to me by the CTO Autodesk. I was chatting with him, and I was complaining about it. He was like, oh, you've got an immune system response.
And I went ding, it's the best articulated framing. You try anything disruptive in a big company. And it's worse in the public sector because we have taxis fighting Uber, we have bankers fighting Bitcoin. We're not progressing society along enough quickly enough, because when there's new technological breakthroughs, all the antibodies freak out.
So we have to solve that problem at a cultural level. Because companies have their immune systems, and governments have their, but institutions have really bad immune systems. Education, God help you if you try and update academia. Religion has probably the worst immune system because they'll kill you in literally in those cases, right?
So I remember having a conversation with Salman Rushdie a few years ago, and he was talking about the fatwa and asked him, how was that like for you? And he said, you know, I grew up in the 60s. And he had this really tired tone in his voice. He goes, I grew up in the 60s.
We thought we nailed religion. We thought it was done. And then in the 80s, it comes roaring back and boom, immune system problem. Did you talk to him before after?
Because he got attacked. You got attacked by the academics? Yeah. That was just recently.
I haven't talked to him for decades. They laid in weight. They were not laid in weight, but the problem is that when you have deep-seeded institutional or political beliefs, they don't go away. They're wired into your limbic system.
So all religions work in the following way. Okay. You take a young child below the age of 10, you give them an absolute truth, and a sumptive truth, like Virgin Mary, Muhammad is the last prophet, Jesus is the son of God, whatever. And then you bind it into them with the ritual repetition, and a lot of sweets, a lot of sugar.
And all religious functions operate on this. And then when the neocortex forms from the 10 to 13-year-old age, the kid's brain is already deeply wired with these absolute assumptions of truth. And if you stress at that point, you evoke a fight or flight response. This is why the Jesuits say, give me the boy until the age of seven, I'll give you the man, because you can wire a young child.
So all religions operate that way. We have to undo some of that damage that we're doing to kids with religion around this. But the problem that you pointed out that's really important is, what's the binding, coagulant that holds society together in the absence of that model? And that's the big challenge we have to figure out.
Storytelling is one aspect of it. We have modern myths like Star Wars and Star Trek and others that are popping up, but they're not connective enough as tissue to hold us together. Yeah, agreed. Also, I think that even though I've dedicated my life to that form of storytelling, it does not touch the realm of religion, which is why I'm utterly fascinated with what's going on right now.
What I think of as the the radicalization of society. So we are going to be radicalized in the direction of the traditional. I think where the next three years is really going to be marked by that. And I think because of AI, it's just going to massively fuel those flames.
But before we get lost on that, the idea of the immune system, which I think is incredibly important as you were talking, this is so hilarious to how my mind works. I was like, he's setting his own trap. Okay, so keep in mind what I really want people to understand is, I think, and I think you'll agree with this, the world is going to be fundamentally different three to five years from now. And to a point, you start stretching that out far enough, and it becomes absolutely unrecognizable.
If you have a kid that's in kindergarten now, by the time they reach high school, the world will look nothing like it does now. This is a very near-term concern. What you're calling the immune system, which to me is a reflection of what I'm calling the human problem, which is humans long for power. Humans have pursued, dialed to 11.
So they want to get better. They want to accrue more power. We also have this massive quest for control to make sense of the world, to control the world, right? Because if you go back to our evolutionary roots, it was a survivor die.
Either you manage the world around you, or it manages you, and you're done pretty quickly. So you have to gain control of your environment as fast as possible and as aggressively as possible. In that model, we are now controlling most of the species on the planet, whether we like it or not. We're controlling the atmosphere, whether we like it or not, accidentally, badly.
Now we're trying to manage this future of technology. And this is where regulatory comes in. We try and put in guardrails for how we manage technology going forward. And over the centuries, we've done a pretty good job of it.
The big challenge with regulatory is, how do you extract the promise of technology without the peril? Like I can use fire to keep my house, and I can use it to burn down your house. How do we navigate that? I tend to be really optimistic about this because of the old eBay study that I think we talked about last time.
So when Craigslist and eBay emerged, for the first time, you could study human nature at scale. And because I can, on Craigslist, very easily put up a fake picture of a Macbook. You send me $1,000 and I'm off to Fiji. And I can mask my email address pretty quickly, same thing with Craigslist.
So sociologists and anthropologists got pretty interested in this at all. We can actually study human nature. I can equally do good or bad. What's the actual ratio?
So they started studying these systems, Kijiji and Canada Craigslist here, eBay, etc. And it turns out very consistently across the systems where a human being can do a positive or fraudulent transaction, the actual ratio turns out to be something like 8,000 to 1. Consistently, which is really surreal and incredibly exciting actually, because that means if you opened up drones and said anybody do whatever they want with drones, you'll get 8,000 positive use cases to the one bad guy. Which is fantastic for society.
Except our current model is drones come out. The regulatory goes, oh my god, somebody might load up a C4 on a drone and fly it into the White House. This can't ban all drones. And then slowly open that tap and over a 20-year period, we get the benefits of that technology.
So we have a ton of problems with prisons today, with drones flying cell phones and cameras and money over the board. Prison walls and dropping them into the prisoners. And the wardens are going crazy. So hello, let's deal with this in a different way.
So now there's technologies to solve the drone interference problem. We'll get there. But this is a technological arbitrage problem. And so the challenge is, how do we make sure we're doing good things with technology, not the bad things with technology?
And over the years, I think we're doing a pretty good job of it in general. But I think that with the democratization of technology and the easy access to anybody that has access to AI, or can home build a drone, this becomes harder and harder. So we have to lift human nature and get to abundance and give everybody what they want materially as fast as we can. So they don't go down the dark path is one path that was an obvious one.
I think even if I were to accept the ratio of good actors to bad actors, the thing that's missing is the level to which a bad actor will exploit. Yes, important point. The amplitude of that negative is growing. So the amount of damage one person can do is growing exponentially.
And so our ability to control one person is dropping exponentially. That's not a great equation. We have Mark Goodman as one of our community members. He's a he was a futurist for the FBI.
So if you can get him drunk, he has awesome stories about how criminals and terrorists use that use technology in a negative way. And it's actually fascinating to see how creative they are around some of this. But the big challenge is the amplitude is actually going back to the Middle East, Indian ball guy virus. The people who win, they're not smarter.
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Hopefully they never made it honestly. I would be very sad. Even though most people are going to do good things, you're going to have these moments of exploitation. People will take advantage of that.
The amplitude of that is growing. You also have the immune system response that is just trying to stop change from happening, which can be good or bad. But ultimately, I think it is to your point, you have a creature that is born of evolution, that had to learn to control its environment, that had to have pursuit dialed to 11. So it would try to go out and try to control its environment and do better things for the group and all that stuff and acquire power and all that.
So I am still at this moment of before us is a fork in the road. And you have really done a great job of laying out what humans are like. But I still don't see the thing other than AI finally begins delivering on some of the promises. And then we all go, okay, yeah, cool, like I'm going to embrace this.
But I still think we have to go through mathematics. I don't see any way around that equation. So if you feel like there's an argument left that will convince me, if not, please detail for us. What are those amazing things that AI is going to deliver us that will make having gone through this valley of despair well worth unleashing AI upon the world?
Okay, so important to note that we don't have a choice about unleashing AI under the world. Kevin Kelly wrote this book, What Technology Wants? And basically, it showed in very clear things that technology is moving at its own pace. And our only hope is to really keep up with it.
Because it's taken on a life of its own sense. Because if we try and regulate AI, then other people go run amok with it. And so it ends up being an arms race and you end up having to do it anyway. So now let me give you some use cases where AI can radically change things in a short period of time for the radically better.
I'll channel Imad Mustak here. The head of Stapu is the head of stability. And one of the projects he's working on is can we take all the health care data in a country and load it up into an ILM and all the legal legislative, the law books and put that into an ILM and all the software code base globally and put that into it. And you give every child three or four links, a doctor, a lawyer, a software programmer, and a general AI helper.
Okay, now if you give every kid in Africa a link with a doctor, and there's a medical problem at home, they will just start using it and transforming their health care locally for free. And this will completely change the world. Same thing with education as we load up all the educational content into an AI. It's going to do a way better job of teaching kids and kids can self-learning in a much more effective way than our current systems can do it.
So you do those two things and health care and education suddenly become free and adapted and personalized to every child in the world. That's an unbelievable future. So the whole ecosystem and the methodology we've been building is how do you enable those people to build as fast as possible and build that optimistic future as fast as possible. And that's what exponential organizations, so EXO as we use it as a metaphor, is the thing at the edge, exoskeleton, exoplanet, exothermic reaction.
So we don't want to find EXO builders and EXO heroes. That's the collection we're launching on finding people that are building things at the edge, because we need to build at it very fast and let that become the new gravity center very fast, because the current system is imploding. I think like a sci-fi writer for me for a second. So a sci-fi writer's job is not to imagine the automobile, it's to predict the traffic jam.
So if we're giving people access to all this information around health care, they have a private doctor or private lawyer, they're educated, it's hyper tailored to them, we're going to unlock as much of their intelligence and their creativity as is going to be possible. What are the things that are born of that? Well, I think there'll be some negatives. You'll may have accidents, people will misinterpret the data, people do source the wrong information from their bodies and put it into the AI and we'll get the wrong diagnosis.
Lots of issues can come along. But the general outcome is the benefits will so outweigh the negatives that I think it's absolutely worth doing. There's no question in my mind that giving kids the ability to learn at their own pace on their own and then socializing as they need to in different ways is going to transform the education system in a much more powerful way from a push system to a pull system. Can I just delve into education just for a second?
So we've been doing education for a couple of hundred years on what I call, John Hagel used to call the push system. You get a bunch of kids into a classroom and you try and cram algebra into them. Mostly they're thinking about lunch. Little by little, we move to a pull basis where I take a new job or a new role or a new gig and I pull down the knowledge I need to do that job.
That's great. Now, the whole education system for the last few hundred years has been supply side. Go become an accountant, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber and sell that in the job marketplace. Acquire a set of skills which universities do, they give you that job schooling, which is all that universities do today.
And then you go to the job market, the demand side and you try and sell those skills in the demand side. I think what we're going to see happen is we're going to go from push-based education to pull-based learning but demand-driven. So for example, if you take Elon, he's like, I'm going to build an electric car and let me go find the technologies, the skills and capabilities I need, no experience or capability of doing it at the time, but he'll pull them towards him and solve that problem. So what we see kids doing, this is what's encapsulated in the massive transformative purpose in the EXO model.
Pick a huge purpose, cure cancer. And then go find the technologies and skills and capabilities and pull those two as you need to solve those problems. That I think is going to be the future of education. Getting there from the existing system is impossible.
So you need technology to help you bridge that gap between A and B and you need it to be permissionless. So one of the most exciting vectors of human development that I'm seeing today, something I call PDI, Permissionless Disruptive Innovation. If you want to do disruptive innovation throughout history, you had to get a sponsor, an investor, a government to bless you. Somebody had to give you permission to go do that or give you the resources to go do that.
Look at Ethereum. Vitality, we turn middle-class kid out of Toronto, gets together with eight friends, boom, they go create Ethereum. For no money, with no cash, no resources. And boom, it's now a $400 billion ecosystem.
My favorite example is this is a car that's called Vega. It looks like a Lamborghini. It's the third fastest car in the world, 900 horsepower, this thing. It's being designed and engineered and built in Sri Lanka, which is an island of fishermen and farmers with no investors, ecosystem, experience, education, or track record.
I'm going to suggest that if you can build a third fastest car in the world on an island, I love showing it to German car executives. Their brains literally melt when they see this, right? I'm going to suggest you can do anything anywhere. So now, we can give people the tools to build radical new solutions in vertical farming and a new battery technology all over the world and just let them go and they'll figure it out.
And that's why we're trying to de-… That's why the decentralized world is so important. We need to de-centralize innovation as fast as possible, and that vector might pull us out as faster than the Mad Max vector. So that's my hope. Okay, it might pull us faster than the Mad Max vector.
Okay, so that's… Well, it might get us to a secure place faster than Mad Max will destroy us. Got it. So we are going into Mad Max territory, but hopefully before that can completely destroy everybody. Yeah, for example, we're mostly in the Middle East fighting for the last hundred years because of oil.
If we have solar energy delivering an energy abundance, which will happen in the next four doublings about eight to ten years, then you don't need oil. And therefore, what are you fighting over? So that's the hope. Now, we'll be fine.
Other things to fight about? Absolutely, because we're human beings. But it'll be less existential, I hope. If you look at the number of people dying in wars today, it's actually incredibly small compared to 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500.
So the data is very clear. The trend is very good, but we need to get out of our current structures because our current structures will take us back. My biggest observation I've ever had about human beings is that human beings would much rather be comfortable than happy. Can you give me more detail on that, please?
Yeah, I may not embrace health care technologies that may deliver longevity because I'm so stuck in a Judeo-Christian religious framework of the world that heaven is a good thing and I want to get to heaven as fast as possible. That feels like either familiarity and fitting able to thrive. Comfortable. Comfortable.
I think of comfortable as I'm warm, I'm safe, I'm relaxed, and both may be equally true. Emotionally secure, let's use that as an easy moniker for comfortable, right? So you could put something amazing in front of somebody. Okay, I might tell you a story about the Trump election one.
So I'm Canadian. And my Canadian passport, I'm like golden with the precious, like hold on to that thing as the US goes into ulcers and chaos. About three months after Trump has elected in 2016, I was in an Uber going to a conference and the driver is looking very unhealthy and I said, are you okay? How much do you drive?
And he goes, oh, I drive 18 hours a day. I said 18 hours a day. Hopefully you're not at the end of your shift because that's not great for me as a passenger. And then he tells you this amazing story.
He was a C of a 300 person construction firm and they voted as a company should they get rid of corporate health care or not. And they vote as a company, he lobbies for it because less admin for the company. Bit more expensive for the people but more choice. So he votes lobbies and they vote and they vote and they get rid of corporate health care.
Three weeks later, he's not feeling well. Goes to the doctor and finds out he's got multiple stage three cancers, riddling his body. And now he's got a major problem because they got rid of the health care. He can't get covered because of the pre-existing conditions problem.
And so one of those pops of stage four and he's a deadbed. So he literally starts planning his funeral, gives away the company, plans his end times, like really right there. I'm like, that's incredible. But you said that happened a few years ago.
You're here now. What happened? He goes, Obamacare passed. I'm like, OK, he goes, then I could get the insurance.
I got the treatment. I saved my life. I'm like, wow, what a journey to go through. You think you're going to die.
And then this thing happens and it saves your life. We pull him to the hotel. I'm getting out of the car. And it kind of was a joke.
I said, I guess in this last election you must have voted for Hillary Clinton. And he goes, no, I voted for Trump. And I was gobsmacked. And I said, but you just said Obamacare saved your life.
He goes, yeah, I did completely 100%. Obamacare saved my life. But then you voted for the guy that said he was going to get rid of it on his first day. He goes, yeah, and he's getting rid of it.
And now I'm back to planning my funeral. I've never been able to square that circle. You didn't ask him the follow-up question. That was so if you could go back and do it again, what would you do?
What would be the follow-up question you would ask? I would have asked, did you know that was going to be the outcome? And if so, did you there's that leads me to believe you have a base assumption that something trumps your own personal safety? I've never I've never I've sat with that like anecdote for years now.
I've never been able to figure that out where people will literally vote against their self-interest. I don't think anyone votes against their self-interest. I think there are things that they care about that they may not be aware of yet. So he may have a philosophical underpinning that he's not even aware of.
A value system that drives him forward. Because he the very thing and look, I don't know this guy who knows, but just hearing what I've heard that what I would say drives him is freedom over everything. So hey, we have a health care plan, but I can make it better by giving people choice. Oh shit, that bit me in the ass.
But my value system is still there. Trump in his mind stands for more freedoms. And so I'm going to vote for more freedoms even though it brings me to now. Obviously, I want to push him and like really understand if that's what he's saying.
But I find most people are driven by a value system that they don't understand. But they are driven by every choice they make is an echo of a value system they don't understand. Can I say something out of a little bit of anger? That all times.
I've lived in eight countries around the world for more than a year each. So I've seen a lot of different systems, healthcare, governance, etc., Canada, Europe, India, you name it. This whole vector of freedom drives me fucking crazy because it's a complete, it's complete horseshit. I feel less free in the US than most other countries in the world.
Why are you here? Oh, great place to do business. Fascinating. It's a great place to do business.
Because here in the US, the reason the US is successful is there's a latent entrepreneurship that is unbelievably powerful. And it epitomizes in Silicon Valley where if you build a business and you fail, we call it experience. Anywhere else in the world, you build a business and it fails, you're a bad guy. And this is true around the world.
So we have one freedom, the freedom to fail. Freedom to fail is a huge one and it's institutionalized in bankruptcy laws. You can fairly elegantly shut down a company here compared to other places. I built a subsidiary for one of my businesses to do software development in India and the mothership failed and it orphaned the subsidiary.
It took me seven years to shut down that subsidiary in India because all the regulatory blah, blah, blah crap, just the thing. Am I likely to ever do another business in India again? Never because who wants to go through that help? Whereas in the US if something fails, so we just merged by the way, opening it into a public company a couple of weeks ago called Genius Group.
So we're super thrilled because it's a global platform for teaching entrepreneurship. And that's the constituency that we're most excited about. So we're very excited about the future there. The unbelievable potential of the indelior when you are doing a merger or whatever, does this incredible legal framework called a reparations act or something?
Whereas if you haven't done your corporate paperwork that you forgot about, they give you one chance to kind of fix it all and come clean before you do a major transaction. It's fantastic, right? Never is that happening anywhere else in the world. Because if you do something in Paris and under French law and whatever later, I'll tell another quick story.
I had a French girlfriend when I was living in Paris for a few years and she was trying to get her identity card because the French government said, everybody has that, get an identity. So she goes to the government and says, here's my identity. I want to apply. And they're like, looking at all the paperwork and they go, blah, blah, blah.
She's like, what's wrong? She says, well, you were born in France. You have a French passport. Your father was born in France, but your mother was not born in France.
That's a problem. And she's like, but my mother was a French citizen and the reason she wasn't born in France was her parents were the commanding forces for the French forces in Vietnam. She was a military kid. So she got born in Vietnam, but she's a French citizen and they're like, problem.
She's like, wait, what do I do? So we need affidavits from all four of your grandparents saying, that was actually our daughter dot, dot, dot, dot. So she goes to all of this hell to get that and she shows it to them and puts it all together and they go, problem. She's like, what is it now?
They said, your birth certificate has expired because in France it turns out a birth certificate only is valid for three months. And then when you want one, for some reason, you have to apply to get a birth certificate. So this is the bureaucracy that most of the world deals with, that the US has cleaned up a lot of counties even better, by the way, because that's a newer country. Okay.
So that lack of that less bureaucracy makes it easy to build a business and do interesting new things. And that's why I live here. I think, by the way, I'm going to say it also for the record. I think the US Constitution is the most important document ever written.
But doesn't have anything to do with freedom. We'll get to that in a minute. Yeah. In what country did you feel the most free?
Most European countries at an individual level, I felt very free. Businesses, nightmare, because the regulatory and crayons and bureaucracy, nightmare, but I can drive without ever getting a speeding ticket in Europe. Can I drive here without getting a speeding ticket? Is that the parameter for freedom?
I don't know. I'm just telling you. Another example, if I'm anywhere in the world, I never ever see a police car. Whereas here in the US, I just see police cars all the time every day.
People get arrested in the UK, a place where both of us have lived. Yeah. People get arrested in the UK for a tweet. Oh, that's separate issues.
So I'm trying to pin you down a freedom because I really want to understand this. Yeah. So look, in India, if I railed against the government, I would be in big trouble right now. So freedom of expression is a big problem around the world.
And I think freedom of expression is more powerful here. There's definitely freedom here for freedom of expression more than anywhere else in the world. Okay. But this whole vector of being more like the if you vote Republican because you want more freedom rather than less is I think bullshit, just my personal view, having lived.
Well, so that to me, I interpret very differently. So that just sounds like I don't think Republicans are the party of freedom. Okay. Yeah.
But you said that you don't feel as free in America as you did in European countries. I feel yeah, when I it's it's and there's good and bad to this. So I'll give you an example on both sides. Okay.
So I came to the US once and my name is Salima Smell. I look a little dodgy, right? And they go, sir, we have a problem. Your name matches the name of an Afghan warlord wanted in Kabul for popy trading.
He's one of the FBI super likely is his real name. And I'm like, okay, he goes your vice president. Yeah, who you're clearly not an Afghan warlord. I've got good news and bad news.
And I'm like, what's the good news? So the good news is I'm pretty clear. You're speaking at conferences. We've looked you up.
You're not enough. So that's right. What's the problem? What's the bad news?
He was, I'm not allowed to make that decision. I have to check with Washington. I have to check with Washington. It'll take about four hours.
You're going to miss your flight. Have a seat. No, so you're kidding. And literally I was coming across the border enough times that I got to the point where the border guys were like, hey, Mr.
Smith, how are you? Please come aside for this security check because we have to check with Washington again. So that's the bad side, right? Because you can get stopped for all sorts of bizarre things.
I've never seen that anywhere else in the world. Okay, here's, I'll give you the good side. Um, I had a very surreal incident in at 9-11, where one of my family members who's psychic calls me up in the last two weeks of August and says, what are you doing the first weeks of September, uh, 2001? I said, well, I'm working on doing so.
And she said, I want you to leave. I want you out of New York City. And I kind of learned enough to kind of pay attention to this, that I took a vacation when I was in Switzerland. Um, and 9-11 happens.
And I found out later, looked up later, I had canceled a meeting in the world trade towers that Tuesday morning to go on the strip. Um, and just by accident with that. So now I have to get back because the company I'm the COO of is in big trouble. And I'm on the first plane that lands into JFK, uh, after 9-11, the first flight, the first plane that lands back in New York City.
Um, and, you know, Salimah Smell, I look at the Middle Eastern. My Canadian, my US visa for Canadian visa to the US was expiring the next day. So I'm in deep trouble. And I got to the border guards and they could not have been more constructive and helpful and, um, sensible and common sense in that environment that I could ever have seen anywhere else in the world.
Unbelievable. So at a very deep political level, there's lots of unbelievable freedoms, which is why I think this country is very powerful. However, day to day, I feel less free. Hmm.
Okay. So here would be my take on that. Let me know what you think. Um, it sounds like you have had run-ins that sound more racist to me than they sound anti-freedom, but I get how if somebody's stopping you every time you turn around, uh, because of your name, because of your nationality, whatever, uh, that would leave a horrific taste in my mouth.
Now, Canada throws people's bank accounts because they donated money to a, uh, rebellion, the protest on, you know, the trucker, the trucker, Conway, uh, that was ultra terrifying. They have bills that compel speech. So not just, you can't say this. You must say this.
Yes. That's insane. From a freedom perspective of people who have worked, they should get what they want. Yeah.
But that certainly does not feel free. Uh, so when I think about what freedoms matter for me, what you're calling freedom of expression, what I will call free speech is, is quite literally the ability to think. And any country, and that would be every country but America, as far as I know, does not have freedom of speech, at which point they are 1984 style, compelling the breakdown of your own ability to think properly. Yeah.
And then your staff will innovation. You look at China as the extreme where they were shutting down the CEOs of the tech sector, right? They're going to just kill innovation companies. Shutting down.
They are literally absconding with them, taking them somewhere. That's right. Doing something that makes their expressions very different when they come out. And you don't, you know, this is an important point.