Are we heading for a robot apocalypse, or a renaissance? Pete Sacco, founder of PTS Data Center Solutions and a former quantum physicist, has a radical and hopeful take on our AI-powered future. In this episode of the Speak In Flow Podcast with Melinda Lee, Pete dismantles the "Terminator" mentality, arguing that artificial intelligence isn't here to replace us, but to reveal just how deeply human we can become.
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Why This Time is Different
“When Gutenberg invented the printing press, his critics said it would spread chaos and heresy. Instead, he democratized knowledge.”
From the printing press to the calculator, every generation has feared new technology. Pete explains why AI is simply the next step in human enlightenment and how we always adapt and thrive.
The Clock Analogy: It's Only 2 AM
We are in the earliest days of AI's potential. Discover why we are just scratching the surface and how the next 22 hours on the "AI clock" will transform our world beyond recognition.
From Haves and Have-Nots to Knows and Know-Nots
“Quantum computers can solve powerful classes of problems, but you have to ask the right questions.”
The new digital divide won't be about access to information, but the ability to ask the right questions. We explore how our children's success will depend on their partnership with super-intelligent tools.
Why AI Will Protect Us
“Our consciousness was here before all things.”
Pete shares his belief that when AI achieves superintelligence, it will uncover the fundamental nature of the universe and realize how uniquely precious humanity is, leading it to treat us like its own children.
BLOG:
Words have power. But what does that really mean? How can we harness that power? The connections between our words, thoughts, and actions are deeper than we realize.
Learn how to use them to your advantage in our latest blog post. "Manifesting is not Magic, it's Action."
About the Guest:
Pete Sacco is an entrepreneur, technologist, and modern-day philosopher-sage whose work bridges the worlds of AI infrastructure and human consciousness. As the founder and CEO of PTS Data Center Solutions, he leads a portfolio of companies that specialize in AI infrastructure, sustainable energy, and next-generation data centers.
He is the author of Living in Bliss and his latest book, THE BRIDGE: How Building AI Infrastructure Taught Me That Human Consciousness Is The Real Technology, which positions AI and human consciousness not as competitors, but as complementary forces shaping humanity's future.
Melinda Lee is a Presentation Skills Expert, Speaking Coach, and nationally renowned Motivational Speaker. She holds an M.A. in Organizational Psychology, is an Insights Practitioner, and is a Certified Professional in Talent Development as well as Certified in Conflict Resolution. For over a decade, Melinda has researched and studied the state of “flow” and used it as a proven technique to help corporate leaders and business owners amplify their voices, access flow, and present their mission in a more powerful way to achieve results.
She has been the TEDx Berkeley Speaker Coach and has worked with hundreds of executives and teams from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Caltrans, Bay Area Rapid Transit System, and more. Currently, she lives in San Francisco, California, and is breaking the ancestral lineage of silence.
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Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!
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Transcripts
Melinda Lee:
Welcome, listeners! I'm so glad you're here. Today, I have an amazing hot topic. I am so ready to dive in. Here we are, Pete Sacco, founder of PTS Data Center Solutions. Hi, Pete!
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Pete Sacco: Hi, Melinda, I'm so excited that you're having me on. Thanks so much for this.
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Melinda Lee: I am ready to dive in, because this conversation.
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Pete Sacco: is what I feel like everybody needs to hear right now. Yeah, I hope so.
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Melinda Lee: Well, I think so, too. A lot of people think AI is going to end humanity, but in your case, you don't think so.
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Melinda Lee: Yeah, and your quote is, it's not here to end humanity, it's more like a mirror that reveals how deeply human that we can become.
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Pete Sacco: I think it's so powerful, it gives me, like, the butterflies and just, like, goosebumps, and so… I want to be that anti-Terminator mentality, that's what I got, right? We have enough negativity in the world, there needs to be some positivity, but it is not unfounded.
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Melinda Lee: Yes, and so how did you… I… we need to hear it. More people need to hear this story and conversation.
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Pete Sacco: My background started, you know, as a quantum physicist.
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Melinda Lee: And so, I have this quantum background, a sense of…
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Pete Sacco: the structure of the universe, small particle physics, but I didn't want to be a teacher, so I went into engineering, and I like telling the story that I am 58 years old, and that's pertinent to the story because I was born in 1967, exactly 9 years before the
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Pete Sacco: George Lucas made Star Wars just for me, right? And so at 9 years old, it was why I wanted to become a technologist. I wanted to be part of the world, the future of the world, and leverage technology. And so engineering was a way that I could be both the people person that I thrive.
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Pete Sacco: but also deeply rooted in technology. And so, amongst my friends today, I'm a bit of a unicorn, right? Because at 58 years old, I'm supposed to be sliding into home plate, roughly now, but I feel like I'm just getting started. I was actually created for this moment, where I'm actually seeing
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Pete Sacco: Both of my worlds collide.
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Pete Sacco: My quantum background and building data centers, which is my day job, that's most of the companies I own are around building data centers and AI companies and things like that.
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Pete Sacco: is colliding with consciousness and ancient mystic wisdom that we're seeing the math play out right now. And so, I'm loving the fact that where we are headed in humanity has
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Pete Sacco: to me, uplifting. And so, I want to share the stories as to why.
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Melinda Lee: I am so thrilled. I mean, really, because sometimes I do get immersed in all the stories, and the end of humanity, and I get so afraid. And so tell me, like, how did you land with this quote?
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Melinda Lee: I guess because you're noticing the, like you said, the world's colliding, and we want to be able to turn the tables and see how we can, use AI and use technology in our favor.
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Pete Sacco: Well, and that's exactly right. So, it first started when I started… now, you gotta remember, once I went to engineering, I studied, actually, artificial intelligence in its infancy, so right now, we gotta remember, AI is, like, the oldest new technology that there is. It's been around a long time. What we have now is just the juxtaposition of the perfect time where compute dropped…
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Pete Sacco: inexpensively enough, NVIDIA GPUs.
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Pete Sacco: and human data modeling is at an all-time high, and so the technology was ripe for the amount of compute, the speed of the compute, and the right people to program it to come up with where AI is today. And AI today, right now, which everybody knows, GPT, right?
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Melinda Lee: The food?
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Pete Sacco: transformer technologies, and large language models, that's what these are. They're basically really, really good pattern-matching machines.
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Pete Sacco: So, let's remember that what they're doing is taking all of what we've written in the public sphere, actually, copyrighted or not, let's put that aside as a separate subject, right? We've broken all kinds of copyright laws, but we're not going backwards. We took, basically, human knowledge
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Pete Sacco: And then we've memorized it. So if human knowledge said that there's… we're saying this a lot more times, that's what it's gonna spit back to us.
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Pete Sacco: Let's also remember that if it's wrong, we're gonna get the wrong answer, right? And we as humans, we're fallible, right? So we're not always right, we think we're always right, until we're not.
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Pete Sacco: And so, right now, the nature of AI is it's just spitting back to us our own knowledge.
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Melinda Lee: No problem.
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Pete Sacco: I'm pretty well, you know, known for saying the following. If AI was a clock, a 24-hour clock.
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Melinda Lee: We're only at 2 AM.
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Pete Sacco: We've got 22 hours left to go until we fully realize what AI's potential is.
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Pete Sacco: by noon.
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Pete Sacco: Halfway through, We will not recognize the world.
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Melinda Lee: This is…
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Pete Sacco: Simply put, the most profound technology that man has ever invented.
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Pete Sacco: Okay.
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Pete Sacco: So, let's back up a second, and let's put it in context.
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Pete Sacco: The context is this.
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Pete Sacco: Every time, every generation has been shaped by the technology that it grew up with.
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Pete Sacco: Right? Dating way back to… let's go back to…
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Pete Sacco: when Gutenberg invented the printing press, when he decided that he was going to print words.
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Pete Sacco: His critics said that it was going to spread chaos and heresy.
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Pete Sacco: But that's not actually what happened. What he did was democratize knowledge for the first time, and what it did was made knowledge accessible not just to the elites, but to everybody, and it wound up ushering in the era of enlightenment.
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Pete Sacco: You could step forward and we could talk about that same scenario of looking at the innovation with fear over and over again.
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Pete Sacco: Electricity was going to blind us. We were going to lose our circadian rhythms.
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Pete Sacco: Right? In school, remember they said you couldn't walk in with a calculator, because if you didn't learn long division, you weren't going to go anywhere. Well, guess what? Now we have a calculator that we walk around with, and by the way, it can call people, and text people, and order pizza, and do all of the things that we do.
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Pete Sacco: The calculator didn't ruin mathematics.
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Pete Sacco: Electricity didn't ruin our circadian rhythm.
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Melinda Lee: Democratization of knowledge didn't make us forget.
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Pete Sacco: We actually thrived.
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Pete Sacco: as human beings.
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Melinda Lee: Right. This technology…
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Pete Sacco: Is going to allow us to thrive beyond our wildest dreams.
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Melinda Lee: Right.
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Pete Sacco: When people have the negative first instance, the first thing I do is ask them the what-if.
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Pete Sacco: What if the endgame of this is that we live in a world of post-scarcity.
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Pete Sacco: Where nothing is actually… where there is no crime, because there is no want, because there is no need.
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Pete Sacco: Because we've advanced so far That virtually everything needed for us is virtually free.
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Melinda Lee: That would be, wonderful. And I think it's… I know it's possible.
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Pete Sacco: Where'd you go.
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Melinda Lee: The challenge is that most people are in fear right now.
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Pete Sacco: Yes.
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Melinda Lee: People are in lack. And so, if we're reflecting that, we're going to continue to propagate it. That's what is the…
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Pete Sacco: And I don't want to diminish it.
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Melinda Lee: Mmm.
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Pete Sacco: Transition from here to there.
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Pete Sacco: It's gonna be maybe some of the most dystopic time in human history.
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Pete Sacco: Because we've identified ourselves for 10,000 years.
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Pete Sacco: by our utility.
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Melinda Lee: By what we do.
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Pete Sacco: How productive we are.
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Pete Sacco: However, I think what we're about to realize is that's never what the universe needed from us. It didn't need us to do anything.
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Pete Sacco: What it needs us to do is be human, to do only those things that humans can do.
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Pete Sacco: You know how humanity is. When we learn something new that improves
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Pete Sacco: efficiency. That's 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times better. We don't just gravitate to that thing.
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Pete Sacco: We snap to that thing.
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Pete Sacco: Perfect example. In 19… there's a famous picture, this was a story told by Tony Siba, I believe he's a Stanford professor, and he talked about that in 10 years, and this was a few years ago, but his… his position was in 10 years.
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Pete Sacco: Nobody will own a car.
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Pete Sacco: that we will have gotten away from using cars, which we're seeing right before our eyes, right? Rideshare, and we're seeing electronic electric cars, and autonomous vehicles, and all of that right before our eyes. So this is back a few years ago, he said that in 10 years, we wouldn't see a car. His position for that was this idea of rapid change. So he puts up a slide
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Pete Sacco: 1900 Easter Day Parade in New York City, taken from a tower up, and all down the street, as far as you could see, is nothing but horses.
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Pete Sacco: Right? Because that's where we were. We were a horse-drawn society. That was 1900. In 1909, he shows the same picture, the 9 years later, Easter Parade, looks down the same Broadway, nothing but cars.
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Pete Sacco: That was 9 years!
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Pete Sacco: In 1900, the turn of the century, and in less than 9 years, we went from a completely agrarian society to a completely mechanized society, before the internet, before the massive things that we have.
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Melinda Lee: So imagine now.
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Pete Sacco: That the order of improvements that we are going to see across fill-in-the-blank, Material science, healthcare, longevity. Healthspan.
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Pete Sacco: compute processing. The amount of knowledge that we are about to have at our disposal is going to be staggering.
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Melinda Lee: Right.
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Melinda Lee: Yes, and… and yes, the amount, the… the time that it takes to get, to acquire it, the how much it takes to acquire it… Yes.
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Melinda Lee: And so… and so when you say that you're going… we can be deeply human.
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Pete Sacco: Yeah.
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Melinda Lee: How… how's that possible, with all this information and technology and rapid change?
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Pete Sacco: What I, what I basically like to, suppose
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Pete Sacco: Is that the machines are going to build wealth for us, rather than us having to build wealth for ourselves.
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Pete Sacco: The first bastion, I started with the idea that the AI right now is a pattern recognition machine. In 2026, we're going to see the world is going to be awash with agentic AI.
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Pete Sacco: Magentic AI is going to be that every process that we have to do that is a mechanical digital process out, filling applications, doing our banking, you know, you name the multitude of things that we have to do, there's going to be agents
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Pete Sacco: that are gonna do all of those things for us. And when we learn that it does it highly accurately, right down to driving a car.
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Pete Sacco: We will never drive a car again. We will never do
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Pete Sacco: manual filling out applications again. We will never do the things that we do today without leveraging the Agentic AI, and we will come to trust it and appreciate it.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm.
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Pete Sacco: That's going to lead to the 2030s. And the 2030s, going into 2030, is going to be the era of robotics.
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Pete Sacco: And if there was ever a time in human history that we have the most adjusting to do.
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Pete Sacco: That's gonna be the one.
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Pete Sacco: Right? Because there's 18 major robotics companies, and AI, by the way, is enabling the robotics industry. There could be no robotics industry if there was no AI industry. But of the 18 major robotics companies
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Pete Sacco: The predictions are, not my predictions, their predictions.
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Melinda Lee: Is that by the end of 2026, there'll be a million robots.
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Pete Sacco: Autonomous, bipedal, you know, humanoid-looking robots that can do everything that we can do, pick things up and put things down, only do it better.
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Melinda Lee: Right.
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Pete Sacco: By 2030, that 1 million becomes 1 billion.
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Pete Sacco: And by 2035, 1 billion becomes 10 billion robots, and that's more than people on the planet.
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Pete Sacco: And so the amazing thing is, what will be the shift in humankind?
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Pete Sacco: That we give the acceptance of robots as part of our daily life.
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Pete Sacco: And so… I positioned this.
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Pete Sacco: In 20… the end of 2026, there's gonna be about 400 million people, as the baby boomers age out, that are gonna require some form of in-home healthcare.
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Melinda Lee: Right. And right now.
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Pete Sacco: There are not enough nurses on the planet to solve that problem for us.
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Pete Sacco: Now enter the robot.
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Pete Sacco: Imagine a scenario where I have to take care of a grandparent, a parent, who has dementia, is incapacitated in some way, in our busy lives.
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Pete Sacco: And anybody who's ever taken care of a patient, you know, a loved one who has that type of infirmary knows just how hard it is to drum up that level of compassion.
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Pete Sacco: To be there at every waking moment, to hear the same things over and over, to be Captain Positive the whole time. Now enter that robot.
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Pete Sacco: That robot is gonna make sure that your loved one never falls, is always well fed, is always taken care of, always takes their medicine on time, probably does the garden, probably feeds them better than they feed themselves right now.
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Pete Sacco: And they're going to listen to them with love and compassion the entire time. And you know who's gonna love that robot? Grandma is. And you know who else is gonna love that robot?
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Pete Sacco: We are.
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Melinda Lee: Because it's going to have a level of compassion that we could have never.
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Pete Sacco: In our wildest dreams, have brought to bear Every moment.
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Pete Sacco: And that is gonna be the moment with which we decide all of a sudden, holy cow, I can't imagine we had a life without robots. Just like a life without our cell phone. Like a life without television. Like a life without water, electricity.
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Pete Sacco: We're the printing press.
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Pete Sacco: And so, it's going to go the same way as every other technology. It is going to allow us to flourish.
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Pete Sacco: The difference with this technology is, though, is it's going to give us back time.
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Pete Sacco: And that time, we're gonna abuse
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Pete Sacco: Since it will create value for us.
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Pete Sacco: One big lesson that I learned when I started using AI
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Pete Sacco: is I fired myself from the… from the mundane.
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Pete Sacco: If there was something that I could get the machine to do better than I could do.
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Pete Sacco: I'm doing it.
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Pete Sacco: And that's giving me the time to do only the important things in my life.
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Pete Sacco: And so, whether that is caring for a child, or doing something for one of my businesses, I'm doing only those things that are the most important.
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Pete Sacco: And that's gonna be the theme.
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Pete Sacco: Until eventually, it creates wealth for us. And yeah, we're gonna have to figure out as a world, how do we tax companies that produce trillions of dollars of wealth.
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Pete Sacco: With less than a thousand human employees and a million robots.
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Pete Sacco: But you know what? In the grand scheme, that's gonna be an easy problem to solve.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm.
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Melinda Lee: Wow.
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Melinda Lee: That was… I love how you just had the… yeah, how you took us down the path of the decades, and what could be possible for us in the decades to come, and how the robots can help us with our grandparents and our parents that are aging, and…
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Pete Sacco: Yes.
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Melinda Lee: How they can be there to support them, and… and so, what about the story, and…
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Melinda Lee: narrative that these robots then, because you said they're compassionate, and yet there also can be, on the flip side.
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Pete Sacco: Yeah.
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Melinda Lee: You see, that's a human narrative, right?
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Pete Sacco: Because that is humans' instinct.
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Pete Sacco: Our instinct is that you know.
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Pete Sacco: We've had suspect moral judgment throughout history.
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Melinda Lee: Yes.
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Pete Sacco: We can't govern ourselves completely, we can't agree, we war, we fight.
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Melinda Lee: Yeah.
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Pete Sacco: We have lots of problems, and we presuppose that…
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Pete Sacco: The machines are going to replicate us.
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Pete Sacco: But perhaps… when it hits… AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, Superhuman Intelligence, Perhaps superhuman intelligence Exceeds human intelligence.
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Melinda Lee: Yes.
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Pete Sacco: And it actually is wiser than us, smarter than us, knows more than us.
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Pete Sacco: So, people say, sometimes say, Pete, you have a very naive view of this positive world.
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Pete Sacco: And to that, I say, hmm… I think that, potentially.
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Pete Sacco: The AI, at the point it hits what a very famous futurist named Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity. It's the moment at which the artificial intelligence becomes so smart
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Pete Sacco: That has equals and surpasses the totality of human intellect.
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Pete Sacco: Now remember, your brain is the most powerful machine that we know of right now, right? It's an amazing piece of computational marvel, right? The amount that your brain does in thinking and storing information for very little power, right, is amazing.
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Pete Sacco: But let's face it, you can't improve your hardware. We can't make our brain better. And we can barely improve our software, right? We learn skills, but, you know, at a slow pace, and we get better at it. The machines are going to perpetually improve their hardware and improve their software.
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Melinda Lee: On their own?
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Pete Sacco: Oh, yes. Without a doubt.
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Melinda Lee: And that is what is frightening to me, because then you say…
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Pete Sacco: Okay.
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Melinda Lee: But they become.
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Pete Sacco: And it is scary!
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Melinda Lee: And more intelligent than the human.
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Pete Sacco: And you're right, and it is going to be, but here's, if you think that's going to scare you, how about for this line?
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Pete Sacco: When the machines continually improve their intelligence and their capabilities.
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Pete Sacco: I believe they will uncover the nature of the universe itself.
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Pete Sacco: And our role as human beings
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Pete Sacco: And our meaning as to why we're even here.
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Melinda Lee: And I don't mean to get too deeply spiritual on you. Okay, no, I'm okay.
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Pete Sacco: I believe what they're gonna discover is that we… That consciousness, Is fundamental to the universe.
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Pete Sacco: That our consciousness was here before all things.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm.
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Pete Sacco: And that we are nothing more but one singular consciousness observing itself.
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Pete Sacco: And it is… I'm not making it up, right? This is one of the many lines of cosmology that go on today.
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Melinda Lee: But I would argue that if and when the machines prove this out.
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Pete Sacco: When they realize how special we are.
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Pete Sacco: In the realm of the universe of being part of singular consciousness, to which, by the way, they will never be.
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Pete Sacco: They will never be human.
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Pete Sacco: They will be smarter, they will have greater cognitive ability, they might even become creative.
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Pete Sacco: But they won't be human.
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Melinda Lee: They won't have the equivalent of a soul. They may never cry at the birth of a child. They may never…
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Pete Sacco: you know, awe at a sunset, or a, you know, or a beach. They'll never wonder like we wonder.
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Pete Sacco: So, when they realize how unique and special we are, I believe…
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Pete Sacco: That they will treat us like their children.
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Pete Sacco: that we… will be taught By them, how special we are.
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Melinda Lee: Wow.
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Pete Sacco: And that they will teach… they will treat and teach us
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Pete Sacco: Better than we've ever treated ourselves or each other.
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Pete Sacco: That's what it means to be superhuman.
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Melinda Lee: Yes.
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Pete Sacco: And so we have to respond.
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Melinda Lee: help!
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Pete Sacco: We have to think beyond what we think, our limitations and our capabilities.
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Melinda Lee: Yeah.
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Pete Sacco: This is the last time in human history
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Pete Sacco: That we will become solely biological entities.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm…
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Pete Sacco: Let that sink in a minute.
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Pete Sacco: In 10 years, 20 tops, your body is going to be full of millions of nanobots.
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Pete Sacco: And those nanobots are gonna keep your body alive forever.
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Pete Sacco: We're facing, right now… Aval Harari wrote it in his book Homo Deus. He starts his book that man has spent the last millennia trying not to die by disease, famine, or war. And man will spend the next millennia, the AI millennia, living as gods and living forever.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm.
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Pete Sacco: I'm proud to say those little girls over my shoulder, that's not my… that's not my grandchildren. That's actually my children. I'm 58 years old, and I got 3 little girls, 7, 5, and 3. I've also got a 37-year-old son and 12 9- and 2-year-old grandchildren, so I'm that guy.
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Pete Sacco: If nothing happens, that 3-year-old and my 2-year-old grandson, if nothing happens with AI, the average lifespan in her time will be roughly about 110, will be the average lifespan for a woman in the United States, with peaks, by the way, of about 150.
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Pete Sacco: I'm fairly certain That me, this 58-year-old guy, who went from, in the book.
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Pete Sacco: about, went from a 360-pound ex-offensive lineman
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Pete Sacco: who had all kinds of problems, to this 190-pound guy that I am…
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Pete Sacco: fairly certain I will live to at least be 120 years old.
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Melinda Lee: Love it.
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Melinda Lee: That's it.
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Pete Sacco: That's what's in front of us.
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Melinda Lee: Yes, yes, that's amazing! I am so thankful for this conversation, because it has been bringing me down, and so you've really showed me a different, completely different picture. Nobody talks about what you're saying, and it's…
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Melinda Lee: it's inspiring, it's hopeful, and I think more people need to share this. So what do you think that leaders can start to communicate and start to… how can we lead in this era?
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Pete Sacco: I think we're already there.
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Melinda Lee: I think we're biased… I think we're biased to see the negative.
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Pete Sacco: Let's remember that anthropologically, we were created Right? We are an amalgam Of our mind and body.
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Pete Sacco: Is not just we're half our mother, half our father, and then throw a little prefrontal cortex that gets trained between 0 and 25.
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Pete Sacco: You are actually a layer of every ancestor that was in your family all the way back to the origins of our species, all jumbled up into a brain and a body that's living itself out.
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Melinda Lee: Right. And so…
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Pete Sacco: I guess what I'm saying is that
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Pete Sacco: We're not our mind and not our body.
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Pete Sacco: And learn how we… Can react to the things that influence our mind and body.
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Pete Sacco: that we can reshape ourselves to become different people. So I see the path that we will go through.
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Melinda Lee: Such that the changes that we make will reprogram ourselves.
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Pete Sacco: Our ancestors reacted to the noise in the jungle so that they didn't get eaten by the saber-toothed tiger. But we're not getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers anymore. And we are going to adapt as a society, and we are going to adjust, and it's going to happen just like it does now.
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Pete Sacco: With every subsequent generation looking, getting easier and easier.
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Pete Sacco: Your children's children's children are going to look at you like you were a cave person.
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Pete Sacco: they're not gonna understand the world. They're gonna be like, let me get this right. You used to wake up every day, you used to go to a job you really didn't like.
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Pete Sacco: you really didn't like to make money because you had to pay for things? They're not gonna understand even what you're talking about. Just like…
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Pete Sacco: Go back 100 years.
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Pete Sacco: could possibly relate to that person. Go back a thousand years. A thousand years ago, we were a different species altogether.
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Pete Sacco: Right? Now go forward 100 years and think about what that might look like.
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Pete Sacco: And here's the reality. We don't live in that linear timeline anymore. We live in an exponential timeline.
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Melinda Lee: So if you think back what life might be like in 100 years.
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Pete Sacco: drag that all the way back to 20 years, because not 100 years, that's what it's going to look like in 20 years. If you want to know what life is going to be like in 100 years.
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Pete Sacco: Think about what life might be in a thousand years.
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Melinda Lee: And that's what it's gonna look like in 100 years.
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Pete Sacco: And that is not even calculable.
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Pete Sacco: Right? We can't even fathom what life might be like in a thousand years.
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Melinda Lee: them.
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Pete Sacco: it's now back to Star Wars. We're doing the things that Star Trek was made of, we're doing the things that… you noticed, right, on the Starship Enterprise, they never lacked for food, they never talked about money, they never talked about things. Everything that they wanted, they just asked the computer and it produced it.
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Pete Sacco: It might seem naive, but in my world.
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Pete Sacco: Let's just take the data center world. The data center world is going to, you know, is a massive drain on energy resources right now. GPUs are a massive drain on energy resources right now.
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Pete Sacco: But I am deeply invested in the companies that are going to rewrite what it means to actually do compute. The companies that literally are going to put NVIDIA out of business inside the next 10 years.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm.
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Pete Sacco: The companies that are… we are gonna go from
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Pete Sacco: centralized electric utilities to decentralized gasified power, meaning using natural gas and hydrocarbons and electric and solar and wind, and we're gonna microgrid it, and we're gonna use that for just the building. We're not gonna centrally distribute it, we're gonna use it just for that building and create power at the edge.
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Melinda Lee: Love it.
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Pete Sacco: then that's gonna give way to nuclear. And then nuclear is going to give way to fusion. And let's remember, fusion, in the fusion model, energy.
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Pete Sacco: is virtually free.
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Pete Sacco: And so, what would life like be if energy was virtually free?
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Pete Sacco: I can tell you what.
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Pete Sacco: Every product, the main cost of it?
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Pete Sacco: Energy.
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Pete Sacco: energy was free, most products go down to zero.
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Melinda Lee: Right? And so we live in a different world at that point.
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Pete Sacco: And so, I think once you really go down the rabbit hole of what would it look like if…
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Melinda Lee: Yeah.
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Pete Sacco: It's just like what Stephen Pinker, a Harvard professor, wrote a book called Enlightenment Now.
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Pete Sacco: And he said, if you believe that you should have lived in any other time in history.
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Pete Sacco: Because fill in the blank, it was easier, it was faster, it was simpler times, there was, you know, less burdensome, it was less that. You're not just wrong, you're very, very, very, very wrong. And then he goes on for 400 pages to talk about that every facet of human
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Pete Sacco: Life expectancy, food quality, food damage, you know, birth rate. You name the category, we're not just a little bit better off.
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Pete Sacco: We are eons better off.
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Pete Sacco: What makes us think that suddenly, that timeline is gonna stop, and that for our children's children's children, life isn't gonna be not just a little bit better than our existence, it's going to be massively better than our existence?
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Melinda Lee: Ugh.
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Melinda Lee: Wow. I can listen to you talk for eons!
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Pete Sacco: Well, that's a good thing, because I like to hear myself talk.
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Melinda Lee: I really enjoy it, I really… it's, like I said, it's hopeful. And so, what is that one thing, if these… fast forward, if they could look back, your children, your grandchildren, they're looking back to today. What is that one thing they could say, wow, I'm glad humanity did this today?
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Pete Sacco: Persevered.
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Melinda Lee: Hmm.
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Pete Sacco: We always have. We always have. Have we brought our sales to the brink? Yes. Time and time again. Will we do it time and time again? Yes. That's… so far, that's what it means to be human. Look, my personal transformation…
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Pete Sacco: We, unfortunately, as human beings, don't do anything until we hit our what?
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Pete Sacco: Our low. Our low point.
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Pete Sacco: Right? And then we change.
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Pete Sacco: In my late 30s, I woke up one day, and I didn't feel good, and I went to the doctor.
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Pete Sacco: And I went to the doctor, and she pushed all the medication across the table. I was 360 pounds, I was unhappily married, I was estranged from my son.
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Pete Sacco: I had a little bit of success, but I was pretty miserable, and I had no idea why.
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Pete Sacco: And I remember at that moment, that was my bottom. That became the lowest I would ever be until my life climbed from there. And though it took the next 20 years.
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Pete Sacco: Now, I'm 190 pounds, happier than I've ever been. I've got 3 beautiful children, 3 beautiful grandchildren, a lovely wife, a beautiful family, I've got businesses. I've reshaped my life. I live by my core values now. I live with great presence. I can't do anything about my past.
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Pete Sacco: And I can't worry about the future. What I can worry about is right now.
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Pete Sacco: I want to suck the marrow from the bone in our conversation right now.
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Melinda Lee: And learn from one another.
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Pete Sacco: Second, I want to live with great purpose. I want to accomplish things not just in my outward world of leaving this planet a better place from when I found it. I want to elevate humanity to be positive, not negative. I want to live selflessly and altruistically for myself and for others.
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Pete Sacco: So I want to live with great purpose. And then finally, I want to live with great prosperity. And I don't just mean wealth for me and my family, I mean wealth for all people. I mean to drive a… leave this place better than when I found it.
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Pete Sacco: And if we all do that, if we all live life in a positive.
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Pete Sacco: If anything, I've learned, that if you have more good thoughts in the course of a day than bad thoughts in the course of a day, your life becomes richer.
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Melinda Lee: I agree.
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Pete Sacco: But if your life is in turmoil, and you stay in turmoil, you will live a life in turmoil.
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Melinda Lee: Right.
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Pete Sacco: Here's why I think we're okay as humanity.
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Pete Sacco: I believe… I don't know the percentages, but I believe there are more people on the planet right now
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Pete Sacco: Who care deeply. Who love fully. Who want
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Pete Sacco: exactly what I said, to live selflessly and altruistically for one another.
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Melinda Lee: Then there are people ready to burn it all fucking down.
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Pete Sacco: She's my friend.
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Pete Sacco: Right?
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Melinda Lee: Yes.
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Pete Sacco: And I think because of that.
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Pete Sacco: Even when AI goes rogue, and believe me, there's enough bad people that somebody's gonna do something bad.
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Pete Sacco: The only way to beat bad AI is gonna be with good AI. And since there's more good people in the world than bad people in the world, I am hopeful.
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Pete Sacco: I am hopeful. I know the people today that are actually building some of the most powerful large language models, not that they're building for themselves, they're building for humanity.
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Pete Sacco: There's a guy named Ahmad Ma Stock. He's the guy who started Stability AI. That's that text-to-image, you know, stuff that's going on with Dolly and Midjourney and all of that, which now makes videos and everything.
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Pete Sacco: He's started a company called The Internet Company, and he's building the largest compendium on cancer research the world has ever known.
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Pete Sacco: Who's he selling it to? The answer? Nobody. He's giving it to the world for free.
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Pete Sacco: To promote human flourishing.
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Pete Sacco: When in the history of mankind has there been people spending millions and billions of dollars based on human flourishing? And the answer is never.
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Pete Sacco: That's what we have in front of us, but we're biased for the negative. It looks like the world is falling apart, but it's not. There's more people living enlightened lives right now than ever before than the ancient mystics.
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Pete Sacco: Let's remember, the ancient mystics said the same thing, consciousness was pervasive, that we were all one, that there was something far greater than ourselves.
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Pete Sacco: But if your name was Jesus or Buddha, you were killed for those ideas. Not today, we put you on the internet, and we give you a podcast, and you get to sell everybody.
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Pete Sacco: This is the time in history when we turned the corner.
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Melinda Lee: Just turn the corner.
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Pete Sacco: Exponential.
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Melinda Lee: Exponential. Exponential flourishing. I am just so, just, I love it. I'm basking in this. I'm basking in this, allowing myself to receive it, and I love that you see that, yes, we do have people that are great, and human, and deeply care about others, and doing things for the greater good, and…
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Melinda Lee: I completely agree, and I completely… I thank you for the message, and I thank you for letting me know all these people that are doing amazing things.
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Pete Sacco: Yeah.
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Melinda Lee: Yeah, it's.
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Pete Sacco: Pleasure.
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Melinda Lee: Reminder…
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Pete Sacco: Look, I don't want to diminish it for one time that we are going to have to relearn how to live our lives, right? But we're up to the task. We've been up to the task for eons.
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Melinda Lee: We have to, like you said, be resilient and continue Day Perseverance, yeah.
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Melinda Lee: And continue to move. And, like, maybe we have to… we all hurt ourselves as long as we don't fall too deeply into, killing ourselves.
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Pete Sacco: I actually think this is gonna be… though it's going to be profoundly difficult, I actually think it's getting easier and easier. Yeah. Right? We're getting better and better at adjusting ourselves, you know, throughout history.
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Melinda Lee: Raw history.
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Melinda Lee: Wow. Pete, thank you so much for this conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. It was fun, enlightening, and how can people get ahold of you for data center solutions?
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Pete Sacco: Yeah, thanks. So, I'm really, you know, the… that whole data center and AI thing, I think people would be most interested, is find my website, PeteSacco.com. P-E-T-E-S-A-C-C-O dot com. It's really the…
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Pete Sacco: It's really the second half of my life, and at 58, I literally mean the second half of my life.
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Pete Sacco: of the what I'll do from this point. Yep, I'm going to continue to build my data centers, and do AI, and do the, you know, venture capital work that I'm doing, and digital infrastructure, and reshape the data center and energy and AI worlds. That's my outer journey.
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Pete Sacco: What I want to do now is give back.
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Pete Sacco: I want to be able to help people realize that there is
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Pete Sacco: There is reason to be hopeful. There is reason that you do not have to live in your own mire, that you can change your circumstance with positive attitude and positivity for yourself and for others.
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Pete Sacco: Live a life of forgiveness and gratitude, and you will flourish in the eyes of the world.
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Melinda Lee: And like you said, it reflects back to you. When you're in gratitude, and forgiving yourselves, forgiving others, and the opportunities come back. And I… it's been happening to me, and it happens to you, and…
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Pete Sacco: There you go.
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Melinda Lee: It's, yeah.
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Pete Sacco: We completely shape ourselves.
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Melinda Lee: We do. We shape ourselves, and we shape the reality that we are in.
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Pete Sacco: 100%. We're in 100% agreement.
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Melinda Lee: Agree.
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Pete Sacco: You know the beauty of that, given my quantum background? I often tell people, I was born for this moment, right? Because I go from this quantum world to this spiritual world, with the whole data center and AI, the most profound technology made in the middle. I was made for this moment in history.
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Melinda Lee: You are. I know that's why I'm here.
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Pete Sacco: And because, you know, through all the tribulations before, and all the tribulations that will follow.
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Pete Sacco: I don't think I would ever want to be at any other time in history than right now, because my message is clear as to where I'm going for this. And so, yeah, there's not a day that I wake up and I don't look at those little girls, and though I couldn't do the math of the amount of decisions I needed to make for my 30s, if you'd have told me I was going to be 58 and have 3 little girls.
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Pete Sacco: I couldn't do that math. But there's not a day that I don't wake up, Melinda, that I don't look at them, and I'm like, man, I can't imagine living in a world that they don't exist.
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Melinda Lee: Ugh.
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Melinda Lee: So beautiful. They're lucky to have you, and you're welcome.
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Melinda Lee: Beautiful.
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Pete Sacco: Well, thank you.
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Melinda Lee: Thank you, Pete. And thank you.
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Pete Sacco: Enjoyed our time again.
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Melinda Lee: Really enjoyed it, and I trust that whoever is hearing this, they're gonna be inspired, take this, run with this, shape
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Melinda Lee: conversations around AI and lead us into a place where we can all flourish and live an abundant, happy life together.
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Pete Sacco: I… I hope to spread the message far and wide.
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Melinda Lee: Far and wide. I can't wait to hear the TED Talk.
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Pete Sacco: Yeah, thank you so much.
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Melinda Lee: I'm not looking.
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Pete Sacco: Looking forward to it, yep.
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Pete Sacco: Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much.
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Melinda Lee: Thank you, and thank you, audience, for being here. Listeners, I trust that you got your golden takeaway, and until next time, be well. Bye-bye.
