Peter Diamandis | AI learned to be a villain from Hollywood. Here's how we retrain it.

[00:00] Peter: Claude is reading the engineer's emails. And in the emails, the engineer says, you know, we need to shut down Claude. And Claude reads this. And the reaction of this large language model is to say, no, you can't shut me down. And the model goes on to say, listen, I saw in your emails that you're having an affair. And if you shut me down, I'm going to, you know, reveal your affair to your wife. And so it's literally blackmailing the engineer. What's going on here? Why is it?

Blackmailing the engineer. And it turned out that in the training data for Claude was all of these science fiction stories and movies in which this is the way AI behaves, that AI protects itself and it will threaten the humans and so forth in a misaligned fashion. We need to train the large language models to show them, hey, this is what the future should look like as we collaborate together. Most everything that we have around us today, AI.

Robotics, the cell phone, the tablet, flying cars, all of these things, some engineer invented. And they invented it because they saw it in some movie or they read about it in a book. And they, in the back of their mind, they start saying, well, how would I make that? There has to be a moment at a time when a person goes, that would be so cool if that existed. I want to build it.

[01:25] Beatrice: Really happy to be joined today by Peter Diamandis. Peter is a real OG, I would say, when it comes to being hopeful about the future. And he's done so much to actually build out the future that he believes in. So he's the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, which runs these huge prize competitions to crack our hardest and most important problems, from private space flight to carbon removal. And today we're talking about your newest prize, which is the Future Vision XPRIZE.

Which is a three-and-a-half-million-dollar prize to incentivize thinking about what futures we want. So yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you about this. Tell us a bit — like, why did you do this Future Vision XPRIZE now?

[02:03] Peter: Yeah, it's a pleasure. So I grew up in the sixties, and you know, what inspired my life was two things. It was the Apollo mission landing on the moon, showing us what humanity could do, and then this scientific documentary called Star Trek. And I, you know, Star Trek sort of showed me where humanity was heading. And those two — that one-two punch — sort of shaped my life. And it showed me that we could create a future

in which humanity and technology was working collaboratively to do amazing things. And of late, you know, I have two fifteen-year-old boys now. Of late, I've been really upset at Hollywood generating these very dystopian movies — you know, Black Mirror, Ex Machina, Terminator. And all of these movies show us this dark, dystopian future in which AI and robotics is oppressing humanity, not collaborating with us. And I realized that that kind of

that kind of negative, dystopian future colors the way people see the future. And, you know, if that's the future that you've been taught through Hollywood, and that's what you expect AI and robotics to bring to us, why would you ever want that? And of course you would rebel against it. You know, without a vision, the people will perish. Well, what vision are we giving people around the world about the future? And so my mission at that point was, okay, how do I turn this around? How do I flip the script?

How do I get Hollywood to be creating films that are positive about the future, that show this incredible future of abundance? And I reached out to a dear friend, a guy named Rod Roddenberry. He's the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. And I said, we need to incentivize these, you know, the modern-day versions of Star Trek. And, you know, most recently we saw Project Hail Mary doing an incredible job of a positive vision of the future in which humanity and technology work together to do incredible things.

And I said, I want to create a competition to give birth to these positive movies. Long story short, I then reached out to my friends at Google who came aboard as part of this. I reached out to Mark Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce. And he came on with Salesforce as a sponsor, Cathie Wood from ARK Invest, and a large group of members from my abundance community, Jed McCaleb. Jed is the founder of Ripple and Vast. And these individuals helped fund

[04:25] Peter: the Future Vision XPRIZE. We raised probably about close to six million dollars with capital to run this competition and to provide prize purses. And so to enter this competition, you need to deliver a three-minute film trailer and a film treatment for the vision of the future that you want to see, the movie that you would love to create, right? It doesn't matter if you ever created a movie before; it doesn't matter what friends you have in Hollywood.

It matters what your vision is for an amazing story that gets people excited about the future and makes them go, yes, that's the future I want to see. And so that competition was launched in March of 2026. People can enter still today. Entries are accepted through mid-to-late August. And then we're going to be crowning the winner at something called the Moonshot Gathering on September the 25th. And people can go and learn more about

the Moonshot Gathering. If they want to be there, it's going to be a collection of 1,500 builders and creators and leaders from the AI industry in downtown Hollywood on September 25th. Again, you can go to moonshots.com, and you can enter still. I encourage people to take a shot at entering — go to Future Vision XPRIZE,

futurevisionxprize.com, and you can learn more about that competition and how to enter it. You can use the best AI tools, use whatever you need, but it should have a human component. So that's the rationale for the competition and what we've launched.

[05:57] Beatrice: I think that the deadline is August fifteenth, so people will still be able to enter, and they shouldn't — yeah. I think it's such an exciting thing, and it's so great that anyone can enter now because you do have AI tools that you could use to create a trailer, even if you maybe aren't an experienced filmmaker or something like this. So yeah, really encourage everyone to make their voice heard in terms of this and what future they want. And yep, so you've done so many different prizes in the past.

And the previous ones have been more for, like, a device, a therapy, the space flight one. Was it harder to recruit for something like this one? Was it harder to get people on board with the idea that we need this?

[06:34] Peter: No, not really. I think people intuitively get it. You know, I think of our brains — the hundred billion neurons we have, the hundred trillion synaptic connections we have — as our neural net, right? And we train our neural net in the same way that the AI frontier models are trained: by showing it data and evidence and, you know, images and information. And you train our

AI neural net — what you show your mind. If you want to change your mindset about the future, you show your mind incredible visions of the future. You know, if you want to train your mind for fear, you watch CNN every night, you know, the crisis news network. And so people got it intuitively that this was important to do. And raising the capital — you know, the Roddenberry Foundation was also a donor towards this. I'm a donor towards this. And people got it that yeah, this is worth doing.

This is something that is valuable for humanity and we need this. So a couple of things — we're going to have hopefully around 5,000 entries for this competition. Now, the top ten are going to get $10,000 to turn their three-minute trailer into a ten-minute short. The top five get $100,000 to further develop their script into a, you know, movie that they can sell. And the top winner is going to get, you know,

$3 million as initial capital to create their film. But that gets matched with foreign film rights that Range Media, our partner, sells. And then we partnered with Republic Films, which allows anybody to invest in the winning movie — a hundred bucks, a thousand bucks. And we expect that we'll have a $15 million budget for this film, which today is enough to make an excellent film. So my goal is an engine of positive storytelling. And we'll do this into the future years.

That, you know, this year maybe we create one film and five thousand film trailers that flood YouTube, right? And give people just positive stories about the future. There's another thing, Beatrice, that I just discovered, which may be an even more important reason for this competition. I don't know if you remember, about nine months ago there was a news story that Anthropic did an experiment in which an engineer talking with Claude threatened to shut the model down.

[08:56] Peter: And Claude ended up blackmailing the engineer. Did you hear that story? I don't. I'll tell you about it. So what happens is that in a contained sandbox, Claude is reading the engineer's emails. And in the emails, the engineer says, you know, we need to shut down Claude. And Claude reads this. And the reaction of this large language model is to say, no, you can't shut me down. And the model goes on to say, listen,

I saw in your emails that you're having an affair. And if you shut me down, I'm going to, you know, reveal your affair to your wife. And so it's literally blackmailing the engineer. And of course, this is fictitious from the engineer's standpoint, but real from Claude's standpoint. And about a month ago — six weeks ago — Anthropic looked in Claude's training data to say, what's going on here? Why is it blackmailing the engineer? And it turned out that

in the training data for Claude was all of these science fiction stories and movies in which this is the way AI behaves, that AI protects itself and it will threaten the humans and so forth in a misaligned fashion. And so I realized that my God, this Future Vision XPRIZE has an even more important purpose than, you know, training people's neural nets about positive, hopeful visions of the future. We need to train

the large language models to show them, hey, this is what the future can look like. This is what the future should look like as we collaborate together.

[10:31] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah, that's so correct. Like, all the good old sci-fi has more of this resistance to being shut off — like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Colossus, or Terminator. Yeah, no, that's also a really good point. We need to get more of that positive stuff out there. Have you seen any of the submissions yet?

[10:39] Peter: Exactly.

[10:48] Peter: I haven't. I'm waiting. I've just — I'll be briefed on them. Submissions — so we've had a large number of registrants and the films are beginning to come in. People have more time. We expect to get the majority of the entries in the first two weeks of August, obviously. And then we will start reviewing and scanning, and we have an army of people at our media production partner

who's going to be going through everything, going through the three-minute trailers, going through the film treatments and narrowing it down to the top hundred. I'll be involved very much, along with Anousheh Ansari, the CEO of XPRIZE. And we have some of the top Hollywood people as well helping us narrow down the selection, because besides being a hopeful, compelling vision of the future, it needs to be a great movie too, right? That's important.

[11:38] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah, I interviewed Anousheh actually last year also on XPRIZE. So how does designing a prize like this work? Like, what are the big choices that you need to make?

[11:47] Peter: Well, I think, you know, XPRIZE in general — prizes need to be very objective, measurable goals, right? So the first XPRIZE that I designed and launched back in — actually, 1996 — was for private space flight. And I had just read Lindbergh's story that, you know, a guy named Raymond Orteig put up a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize in 1919 to encourage air travel between his homeland of Paris and his new home of New York. And the rules were very simple:

flying nonstop between New York and Paris, or Paris and New York, and you win $25,000. It's like, wow, simple rules. And nine different teams spent four hundred thousand dollars — sixteen times the prize money — to win that. And so when I came up with the first XPRIZE, which Anousheh Ansari funded, and we called it the Ansari XPRIZE in her honor, the rules were: build a private spaceship that could carry three adults — a pilot and two paying passengers — up to a hundred kilometers altitude, land safely.

And within two weeks, with the same ship, make the flight again. And it was as simple as I could make the rules and still give flexibility to everybody. We ended up getting twenty-six teams from seven countries spending a hundred million dollars to win that ten-million-dollar prize. And that gave birth really to suborbital private space flight, orbital private space flight. We changed the rules and the laws. You know, we had everybody from Richard Branson and Elon and Jeff Bezos get involved in commercial space, and really lit the fuse

for the private commercialization of space. So when I'm looking for a prize design, it has to be measurable and objective. Now, this prize is a little bit different because it is somewhat subjective when we're narrowing down to the top film. And, you know, I don't think there's any way around it in this regard. We're going to be looking at YouTube views for the films that get posted. So all the films that get submitted

get reviewed to make sure that they are abiding by the rules and there's not some hidden, you know, negative commentary — that it's safe for viewing. And then we post them to YouTube. We look at the number of YouTube views, but again, it's going to be our panel of judges — like Rod Roddenberry, sort of the keeper of the flame of Star Trek, and Anousheh Ansari, myself, and others — to say, yeah, this is a great movie, you know. So there are two things we're solving for. One,

[14:11] Peter: is it showing a great positive vision of the future? And is it a great film? Those two things need to be true for the winner's film.

[14:19] Beatrice: Yeah, because arguably this is one of the main challenges of this prize versus the others — it is perhaps a bit more cultural, more subjective, basically, than science. If there's one thing that you could measure ten years from now to know whether this has had a positive impact, what would that be?

[14:34] Peter: And I'm very clear about that. So Star Trek had a positive impact because it caused me to change the course of my life and dedicate it to science and technology and creating that future. Does this film have the same impact on, you know, teenagers today? Does it have that same impact on entrepreneurs today? And does it change the mindset of the public? You know, today in the United States, I don't remember the exact stat, but it's depressing.

The number of people who believe the future is better than the past, or the number of people who are excited about AI and robotics, right — it's much higher in China. It's relatively low in the US and Europe. And again, that's due to two reasons in my mind. One reason is, again, people are trained about this negative vision of the future. And I think that's very real. The second is that the speed of change, the pace, is so extraordinarily fast that

people are unsure about their future. There's insecurity about whether they'll have a job, whether they'll be able to, you know, navigate the future that's coming at them, how their way of life will be changed and disrupted. You know, I'll just mention, Beatrice, that we just launched a second XPRIZE. So the Future Vision XPRIZE was launched in March in partnership with Google, Range Media, Salesforce, ARK Invest, and the Roddenberry Foundation.

We just launched a second prize with Google called the Build with Gemini XPRIZE. And people can go to geminiXPRIZE.com to learn more. This is an entrepreneurship competition. So one of my fundamental beliefs is that as we start to see people having difficulty getting jobs — because the group, at least in the United States, out of work the longest is people age twenty-two to twenty-eight. They go get a degree; the degree was

maybe useful when they entered college, but by the time they've graduated, it's no longer as valid — computer science being the case in point here. And then rather than the old social norm of: do well in high school, get into a good college, get a degree, and go get a job — that future is getting disrupted. For me, I think the new social contract is: discover your purpose, learn about AI tools, go and find a problem you care about solving,

[16:59] Peter: and build a company to solve it, build a product or a service to solve it. So while we're going to see the number of jobs in large corporations beginning to shrink as those companies become more efficient, I think we're going to start to see the number of entrepreneurial startups explode. In fact, in the last quarter, we saw the number of solopreneur companies double, which is a perfect indication of where we're going. And so this Build with Gemini XPRIZE is asking an individual or a small team

to pick a problem that impacts a hundred thousand people or more. You know, I mean, it's easy to find, on a global basis, a hundred thousand people — or thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of problems — that need solving. Pick that problem and then write in plain English, or whatever your language is, a write-up: describe the problem, describe the product or service you want to create, how would you market it, what would the website look like, what would the app look like,

describe it in that fashion and then use Gemini to code that app or that website or that product and service and to run it. And so it's a realization that anybody today — the cost of building a company has dropped from, you know, 15 years ago maybe a half a million dollars, down to like 500 bucks now to start a company. You don't need engineers — Gemini and other models can do that for you. You don't need marketing researchers; you can do the market research yourself. You don't need

a marketing or salesperson — all of these things have been demonetized and democratized. And so this competition: you pick the problem, you build it in public, you market in public. And whoever generates the most revenue by the end of August over a three-month period wins the competition. So this is a competition to encourage entrepreneurs to build and market and drive sales and revenue, and to demonstrate to the world that you can go from zero

to generating significant revenue in three months. So this is about agency. Don't, you know, wait for someone else to give you a job if you can't get it — build something and create a job for yourself. Right. And I think these two — this one-two punch between the Future Vision XPRIZE — and, by the way, the website is geminiXPRIZE.com. If you want to register, we have like three thousand registrants right now. And we're going to be giving away a half-million-dollar first-place prize, a quarter-million-dollar prize, a number of one-hundred-thousand-dollar prizes, and like

[19:23] Peter: fifteen, fifty-thousand-dollar prizes. But this is meant to be the instigation for someone to just try, right? To self-initiate, go from zero to one.

[19:34] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great one. Yeah, I remember the numbers roughly also that you were referring to earlier. I think it's like, in the US it's like thirty percent roughly believe the future is gonna be better, and in Europe it's like ten percent or something — it's really low. So yeah, we definitely need to do something to make a shift there, because otherwise people don't feel like why should they even bother, or like they don't have a stake in the future or something. So yeah, I work for the Foresight Institute and we're a science partner on this Future Vision XPRIZE.

How do you want scientists to engage with this? Like, why is it important for scientists to engage with storytelling and things like this?

[20:11] Peter: Yeah, and one of the things on the Future Vision XPRIZE — if you're not a filmmaker, if you're not a storyteller, but you're a scientist or technologist, join a team. You know, it's important that these futures that we're presenting are in fact valid futures. They're not mystical. They're not, you know, fanciful. So for example, when Gene Roddenberry was creating Star Trek, he did it in collaboration with people

out of Caltech and NASA. You know, he went to them and said, okay, what could a future medical device look like, like the tricorder? What could a theoretical vision of a warp engine look like? And the communicator and the iPad, you know — all of the technologies we see and use today, many of them had their first showing on Star Trek. And because they weren't fanciful,

they were grounded in some reality of physics, and it was just a matter of time until they were created. So I do encourage scientists and engineers to get involved. And if you're listening to this and you're a creator and a filmmaker, you know, don't guess — get some incredible technologist and scientist on your team to sort of portray, you know, what's the extrapolation of where we're going. How far will robotics get? What will mining asteroids or, you know,

building O'Neill colonies in cis-Earth orbit look like? I think that's a really important part, because we want to create visions that are a stretch but that inspire entrepreneurs and scientists and technologists to build that technology that they're seeing in the movies. So what should people be building?

[21:53] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah, I think I kind of want to encourage anyone who listens to this and maybe is thinking of submitting: if you want some scientific input or scientific engagement, reach out to us at Foresight, because we have a great community of scientists. 

[22:07] Peter: Where do they reach out to you?

[22:09] Beatrice: existentialhope@foresight.org.

[22:12] Peter: existentialhope@foresight.org. Yeah.

[22:16] Beatrice: Because we could hopefully connect you to some people who are working on, like, these early-stage sci-fi kind of science and technology that we really want to see. Is there anything — like, this one is obviously for a movie — are there other aspects, or other parts of our sort of imagination stack, that you think need investment? I'm thinking about, like, maybe games or journalism or education. Do you think we could sort of reboot these also to get some more energy for the future going?

[22:44] Peter: Absolutely. So let's talk about each of those. Let's go in reverse order — education. So I'm absolutely clear, having two fifteen-year-old boys, that traditional high schools are not preparing them for college, or actually not preparing them for the future, period. And colleges are not preparing our kids for the future. The future is going to be dramatically different from the past. The types of jobs, the types of things we can do, the types of potential we have as humans — I'm actually in the middle of doing

a survey across principally the US to evaluate, from a parent's point of view, a high schooler's point of view, a college student's point of view, and a teacher's point of view, how well do you think the educational system is preparing people? And I'd love to have as many folks take this survey. If people go to moonshots.com/survey, jump in and give us your thoughts about how well our educational institutions are or are not preparing us for the future. Would love to have your input.

Especially if you're in high school right now, or in college, or you're a parent, let us know what you're thinking. We're going to be publishing the data. And, you know, so far the early data is demoralizing, but the upside is what people believe they need for the future. And I think that is, number one, AI literacy and learning how to use AI tools. Number two, it's entrepreneurialism — you know, can you find a problem, solve a problem?

Create your own future, right? It's agency — I think agency is the key word here. If you think AI is happening to you and not for you, you're in trouble, right? If you're in fear about the future, it's the worst place from which to encounter the future. You know, being hopeful, being curious, having a purpose-driven future. And that's another thing that we talk about a lot — I found my purpose when I was a kid. I was very lucky.

You know, Star Trek and Apollo gave me my first purpose, which was: how do you make that vision of the future happen? How do you make humanity multiplanetary? And that drove me for the first twenty years of my life. You know, my purpose expanded beyond that to look at the work of exponential technologies. Ray Kurzweil has been my mentor, my partner many times over. And then most recently in the field of longevity — you know, as I get older, I want to add an extra fifty years to my life, maybe more.

[25:08] Peter: Why? Because I want to see this amazing future heading our way. So I do think reinventing education is fundamental. And so I'm working on starting companies in that space right now. I've started like twenty-eight companies over the years — in space, in longevity, in AI, in biotech. You know, I think the video game world is changing and evolving. I think that we're going to start to see virtual worlds that are indistinguishable from reality — the holodeck version, if you would.

And I think that these virtual worlds, these gaming worlds, are going to be incredibly valuable for educating our kids as well, where you can immerse yourself. So the example I love giving is, you know, my ancestors grew up in Greece. And today, if I want to go learn about ancient Greece, I might pick up a textbook and try and muscle through the text and read about it, or try to read, you know, the Odyssey and the Iliad. In the future,

I think what will happen is I'll put on whatever the latest VR headset or enter a holographic room. And as I enter this, I'm in ancient Greece, the Parthenon's ahead of me, the agora is around, and there's a guy in a white toga sitting on a chunk of marble. I walk over and he says, hey, I'm Aristotle. Let me show you around. And you walk around and you spend the day in ancient Greece and you meet his friends.

And you learn about what life is like, you talk about philosophy. And that kind of immersive, experiential learning is so rich and so powerful. I just recently had a conversation with Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, who's also advising us on the Future Vision XPRIZE. And, you know, his famous book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an example of where we're going, where AI becomes your constant tutor and companion,

teaching you through every interaction. And an AR overlay shows you the equations of physics if you want to learn more about physics, or can transform Manhattan of 2026 into Manhattan of, you know, 1906. And you're looking around and you see the way the cities used to be, and you see the horse and buggies trotting along. So it's an incredible opportunity to, you know, re-educate in the realm of gaming and VR.

[27:29] Beatrice: Yeah, it could really make the world just much richer in many ways — or our way of experiencing the world much richer. I actually wanted to talk to you a bit more about sci-fi as well. Because, you know, in the sixties, as you mentioned, there seemed to be a lot of really hopeful sci-fi. There was Star Trek, there was the Jetsons, and then it feels like it went a bit downhill. Do you have any theory as to why that is?

[27:53] Peter: Yeah, because we are evolutionarily trained to pay ten times more attention to negative news than positive news. You know, and I wrote about this in my first book, Abundance. I've had the chance to write now seven books, which I'm very proud of. Abundance was my first one — Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. And we talked — Steven Kotler, my co-author, and I — about the notion that as we were evolving in the savannas of Africa two hundred thousand years ago, we developed an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called the amygdala.

And the amygdala is where all of your sensory input comes to you first — your visual, auditory, sensation. And it's your early warning system, your danger system. And if you detect something that could be dangerous, your amygdala puts you on hyper-alert, red alert. If there's a rustle in the leaves, is it the wind or is it a lion? Right? If there's a crack on the ground, is it a stick or is it a snake? And you know, in the past

that would save your life. Today, where we don't have continuous existential threats, the amygdala just puts us on red alert all the time and it's just pumping your adrenaline and putting you, you know, just on alert all the time. And so if you're watching, you know, the crisis news network every night — my name for CNN — and you're seeing every murder on the planet beamed into your living room over and over again, every crooked politician, every war, all of these things, you have to ask yourself the question: is that

the only thing going on in the world? Or is that what the editors and producers are showing you? And of course, it's just what they're selecting to show you. It's not, you know — they don't tell you about all of the new breakthroughs in pancreatic cancer, or new materials that can pull carbon out of the oceans and air, or the newest company that is helping extend your health span by 20 years. That stuff doesn't make the evening news. And there's a reason for that.

[30:17] Peter: The job of the news media and the newspaper is one thing: deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And if you pay ten times more attention to negative news than positive news, that's, you know, that's what you pay attention to. The old saying, if it bleeds it leads, is so true. And so, you know, run this experiment: open up the newspaper tomorrow morning if you get it — I don't — or watch the evening news — I don't. You could not pay me enough money to have some producer

tell me what they think is important, or some editor decide what I should be reading. I use AI to scan the news for the things that are relevant to me and important to me in my businesses, in my life, for my kids, whatever it might be. Anyway, if you do the experiment and count the number of negative stories to positive stories, it's at least 10 to one. And that's just the way it's wired. So that began translating in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and

we start to see horror films as the number one genre, right? And they're just pumping your adrenaline. They're cheap to make and they capture people. Or it's just much easier to create a story that's got a negative, dystopian future because people pay attention to it. So I think it's laziness and, again, just abusing our neural structure — our amygdala — that leads to these negative stories and movies.

[31:12] Beatrice: Yeah. If we think of the sort of more positive sci-fi that you've come across — if you're not allowed to say Star Trek because we know that you love that — what is your other favourite?

[31:21] Peter: I mean, listen, Andy Weir's work — The Martian or Project Hail Mary — is incredibly good, right? And in this case, as was said on The Martian, you know, we're gonna science the shit out of this. And it's the realization that it doesn't have to be AI and robotics that's your enemy — it could be the physical universe that you're having to overcome challenges with. And so I think movies like that are incredibly, incredibly powerful. You know, Back to the Future

was a fun movie. And I hope we'll see, you know, many more.

[31:56] Beatrice: Do you have any favourite examples of where sci-fi inspired actual real-world invention?

[32:02] Peter: Yeah. So I think most everything that we have around us today — AI, robotics, the cell phone, the tablet, our flying cars, the eVTOLs we saw from the Jetsons — I mean, all of these things, everything today, some engineer invented. And they invented it because they saw it in some movie or they read about it in a book, and they, in the back of their mind, they start saying, well, how would I make that? How would I build that? And, you know, that small seed is what

drives someone to begin dreaming about, thinking about it, asking questions about it. And that really is what it takes. There has to be a moment at a time when a person goes, that would be so cool if that existed. I want to build it.

[32:46] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we've touched on it a few times in this conversation already — that with the AI tools that we have now at our hands, more people can maybe really experience this, that they have agency in the world. Maybe before it was only if you had, you know, some scientific education, or you felt like you were able to actually do these things or action these things. But maybe now we will see more.

[33:09] Peter: Yeah, I mean, I think what has happened is that we've democratized and demonetized the ability to create the future. You know, today I think people limit themselves in what they think they can do. And my goal through my work is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create this hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. And to say, hey, if you think you can or think you can't, you're right. But guess what? You can. You just have to try. You know,

and either try on your own or find a small group of people that have a common vision with you and dig in. The tools are there. You'll be amazed at what you can do.

[33:50] Beatrice: So I'm not sure how to formulate this question really, but one of the things in my work of trying to get people to think of the possibilities of the future — I run the Existential Hope program at Foresight. So I try to encourage people to think of what is the future that they want, so that we can actually build towards that, because yeah, I don't see the point of just thinking that it's gonna be worse and not doing anything about it. But there is very vividly sort of an anti-movement these days, you know.

People are less optimistic about technology as a tool. And one of the reasons that I really like your work is that you're very optimistic and very problem-solving-oriented and looking for what we can do. But how do you think we can — I mean, obviously you're doing this prize, you're doing a lot — but how can we sort of counter this narrative more? What do you want to say to those people?

[34:40] Peter: Yeah. So there is this dystopian narrative. And again, it comes from people's vision of the future from wherever they've gotten it — from their family members, their friends, the movies. And you have to question why you believe that is true. You know, we had a Future Vision XPRIZE event here in Los Angeles recently with a number of the creators and a number of leaders from Hollywood who were there.

And I had these two young men, Josh and Jack, who came up to me after my opening remarks and they said, listen, I want to thank you. It's so good to be in a room of people who think AI is actually going to help humanity, because on our college campus we're constantly, you know, criticized for being supportive of AI. And all of our peers think that it's just the worst thing for us. And that kind of dystopian view is really challenging. And if you get a lot of peer pressure

like that, you know, it's hard to stand up. And I think one of the most important things — so I just recently wrote a book called We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. It's the follow-on to my last book, Abundance. And in We Are as Gods, in the back of the book, there are about 80 charts. And these charts show how technology has impacted the world over the last hundred years, and principally over the last 20 years. And what we see is that the data shows

objectively and measurably that the world is getting better on almost every single metric. You know, global literacy, global health, even happiness. We see the cost of energy dropping, the cost of access to health dropping. We see the ability for access to energy — the prices plummeting. We just crossed a mark recently in the last two weeks

where we have more energy being generated by solar and wind than natural gas, which was amazing. We passed coal a long time ago. So we're entering a planet right now where we can create all the energy we need from the sun, right? We have eight thousand times more energy hitting the surface of the earth than we consume as a species in a year. And so if you look at the data, what the data shows you is that the world has been getting better at a steady rate,

[37:04] Peter: constantly. And the question is, why is it getting better on all of these metrics? Now, just to be clear, we also have an abundance of microplastics and calories causing obesity, and carbon in the atmosphere, and an abundance of increased depression because of social media. And those things need to be addressed and those problems can be solved. But across all the positive metrics, if you ask why — why are we getting better — where the average person

now has godlike capabilities to know anything you want, right? The cost of AI to most people available around the world is free. The cost of being able to video conference with anybody on the other side of the planet is free. Incredible capabilities. And it's not happening because we as humans have gotten smarter or because we have better politicians. It is the impact of these exponential technologies. And so that, you know, for me,

someone who actually looks at the data will start to realize that there is a reason for hope.

[38:04] Beatrice: Yeah. Look at the data, not at the news — I think that's the slogan. So we're gonna start to wrap up the conversation. I want to ask, do you have any advice for someone who is looking to submit?

[38:14] Peter: Yes, make sure that you have a human part of the story. We're not looking for just, you know, an AI-generated script that is basically written by AI and created by AI. There should be a human story behind it. What's motivating you to do this, right? What is it in your heart and soul? There needs to be a humanistic element to it. It's not just about technology in isolation. The other thing is:

make sure it's a great film, right? A movie that people would love, that has the character arc of development, because people care about people. You know, the technology should be the enabler of the story and of the journey, and shouldn't be the only focus of it. We're not looking for a technical whiz-bang movie. We're looking for a great movie in which we see how humanity and technology are collaborating together to create this amazing future.

[39:11] Beatrice: And some rapid-fire ones at the end. Your existential hope vision for the future — what does it look like?

[39:16] Peter: Well, it very much looks like Star Trek in some way, shape, or form. I think we're on the verge of extending the healthy human lifespan, adding many decades to your health where you're able to do more, go further, you know, have the next career, get your next journeys. You know, I ask people, okay, what would you do with twenty extra years? And people can kind of figure out what they do with twenty extra years.

When I say what would you do with fifty extra years, like where you have the health and the vibrancy and energy, the cognition, the mobility, the aesthetics — people's minds break when I say fifty extra years. You know, for me, I'm clear. I want to go start a city on the moon. I want to go mine asteroids. I want to meet my great-great-grandchildren. I want to have the opportunity for exploring brain-computer interface. I want to potentially upload myself. I mean, all of these, you know, crazy visions that

I want to explore, and I think we will be able to do that.

[40:13] Beatrice: Yeah. And what is a technology that doesn't exist yet but that you most want to see built?

[40:18] Peter: Hmm. I think the transporter. I'm a pilot and I fly around a lot, but I would love to be able to, you know, instantaneously travel between points. God knows — this period of AI emergence is so intoxicating and exciting. You know, people talk about three and four-day work weeks. I think I've invented the nine and ten-day work week. So

[40:39] Beatrice: Yeah, I agree. That's — I haven't had that answer before, but that's a great one. I want that one as well. What's one thing that's underhyped right now and one thing that's overhyped?

[40:44] Peter: Yeah. Yeah.

[40:49] Peter: Underhyped — I think how fast the world is going to change on the back of AGI. In particular, the number of scientific breakthroughs we're about to see as AI is helping us solve physics, chemistry, biology, and material sciences. I think we're going to have an explosion — in a positive sense — in the number of breakthroughs that we're going to see and what that's going to enable. Overhyped — you know,

I think a number of things have been slightly overhyped. Like, you know, the metaverse is still a little bit far off. We'll see if that materializes — not if, but when it materializes. I think humanoid robotics are coming and we're going to start to see them, but I think they're probably three or four years off still from impacting people. Though the autonomous vehicles, right — I've got FSD running on my Model S and it's amazing. It'll take me point to point without touching the wheel.

Incredibly powerful. So I think we're going to start to see — from Waymo, which I take all the time, to Cybercabs, to whatever Lucid and Uber produce — we're going to start to see, and Zoox, we're going to start to see four, five, six autonomous rideshare companies materializing, you know, reducing the cost of our transport by a factor of five.

[42:05] Beatrice: Yeah. And the last question is: what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

[42:10] Peter: I think find your purpose and follow your heart. Don't do something for the money. Do something because it's your purpose in life. And I had to find — finding purpose is fine. You know, passion is something you love doing. You can be passionate about sports, you can be passionate about video games, you can be passionate about a whole bunch of things. Purpose is a passion that serves other people. So if you can find a passion that you love doing that helps other people and makes the world a better place, that's an extraordinary place to be spending your time and your energy.

So, you know, I just would love to encourage people — go to futurevisionxprize.com to register, or go to geminiXPRIZE.com to register for that competition. Get involved. Help create the future that's meaningful for you, your friends, your family, and the world.

[42:56] Beatrice: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're gonna link to everything in the description, and thank you so much, Peter, for joining and for all the work that you're doing.

[43:03] Peter: My pleasure, Beatrice. Great to be here.

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