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We all have a linear mindset, which means we tend to think tomorrow and the next day and next week and next month and next year will look like last year.
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But of course, we re living during a time of greatest change.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation and author of several books including Bold and Abundance, both recommended reading if you re into futurology.
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You should listen to this episode if you want to hear some crazy and very possible futurology predictions such as living 500 years, colonizing space, advances in AI and human achievement,
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how society will need to evolve to respond to increased automation and artificial intelligence, as well as how we can make ourselves more competitive in the long and short term, and something called linear thinking, and why this type of thinking and mindset causes us to miss the mark when we think about technology, innovation, and the advancement of the human race.
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We re glad to have you here with us today at AOC, so enjoy this episode with Peter Diamandis,
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Oh, and by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox.
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That s where we discuss things like reading body language, nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking, mentorship, influence, persuasion tactics, everything that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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If you re in the US, you can text charmed, C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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All right, here s Peter Diamandis.
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One of the many reasons I wanted to talk to you today is because I found that you re in kind of an interesting in-between space where you re building the XPRIZE with millionaires, billionaires, you re giving up what seems like a really nice place of living and kind of an apartment just to make it happen, not caring, going back almost into
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student mode in a lot of ways, and then creating the XPRIZE with the goal of private space flight.
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And then you ve got a lot of sacrifices, a little bit of luck, but probably not as much as some people would have wanted.
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Yeah, not as much as you would have wanted for sure.
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And I think there are lessons there.
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And I think you created space for allowing something like the XPRIZE to actually happen.
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Not that it happened without you, but that you made it happen in a way that resulted from hustle and grind, but also because you were willing to kind of do
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Pretty much anything to get there.
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Do you really want to live more than 500 years?
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Is that true?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think when I was in medical school, I remember looking at the body in a very different fashion.
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There was a TV show that was on that was talking about the
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notion that certain life forms, turtles, whales, sharks, lived hundreds of years, as long theoretically as 700 years.
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The question asked was, if they can, why can t I?
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And in medical school, I realized, you know, it really is a hardware-software problem.
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And I think that we are going to learn how to extend the human lifespan indefinitely.
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And so I picked a ridiculous number of 700 years, because that s how long the longest
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a large life form is supposedly living.
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Of course, if you can live 200 years now, you can live forever.
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But it s something I do desire.
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And I think we re live now during the most exciting time ever in human history.
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We re going to see the universe.
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We re going to understand the foundations of physics.
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We re going to transform what it means to be human.
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And it s all happening now.
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And I think it s happening in the next 30, 40 years.
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But yeah, I d like to live longer than that.
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Is it because you want to see the results of your work or your curiosity?
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It s curiosity.
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It s all about every year is much more fascinating than last.
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I don t know why.
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I guess if you are sick and ill and tired and you don t want to go on, but if you have your health and if you can be vibrant and your mind can be alive and learning, why wouldn t you want to continue?
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I think, so part of it is having a healthy, extended human lifespan.
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It s not just about living old.
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Right, it s not about being 80 for six of your 700 years, or an 80-year-old physical condition.
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So you re watching your kid, you re watching the moon landing, you re enthralled, you tell your mom you want to be an astronaut, and she says you got to follow your dad and be a doctor.
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Well, was she disappointed when you became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur instead?
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So listen, my parents grew up in a small island in Greece called the island of Lesbos in a small town, Mytilene.
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And where my dad went from his small ocean side town to become a New York physician was this massive leap forward.
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And it was just a completely different, orders of magnitude different life.
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And being a physician was, for them, like the highest possible calling in terms of financial security, in terms of helping people, in terms of knowledge.
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And so they wanted the best that they knew for me.
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And my dad had built an OBGYN practice.
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He delivered some 30,000 kids during his career.
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I remember having fun doing those calculations with him.
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Anyway, long story short, that s what they knew.
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But my passion wasn t there.
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My passion was space.
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And so there was an ongoing argument always about, will I become a doctor?
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Will I become an astronaut?
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And after I graduated medical school, and I never went and did my internship or residency, my mom would say, would be two questions.
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One, are you married yet?
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Have you found your wife yet?
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It s like every mom asks, it s not too late for you to go and practice.
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So ultimately, I didn t.
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I followed my dreams, and I m thankful for it.
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And I know they ve been proud of me.
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Sure.
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Do you have any advice for people who find themselves in the wrong career or think maybe they re going into the wrong career, they have a different passion?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So I m very clear, and I do this with all my graduate students at Singularity University, everybody who s in my Abundance 360 community, people who follow me in any way, shape or form.
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It s like you have to live a passion and purpose driven life, because if you can, why would you not want to?
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And so a lot of people just don t understand what their passion or purpose is.
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That s the hard part, you know, and I m amazed at even in an organization or as a group as
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highly selected and as academically achieved as the Singularity University Global Solutions Program, our graduate program, of the 80 students who enter out of 4,000, 5,000 applicants, half of them, when I ask, how many of you here know exactly your purpose and mission in life is, half raise their hands and half don t, which really blows me away, right?
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They ve been pursuing excellence, they ve been pursuing knowledge, they ve been pursuing
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more doing without knowing why.
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And so I say, listen, your job here during this 10-week program is to figure out what is your calling in life.
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And my advice to those listening to us here is if you don t know what it is, it is your calling in life that s so critical for you to find.
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And a couple of tricks for you to think about is what did you want to do as a kid, right?
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What was it that the 9 or 10 or 12-year-old version of you loved to do
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That maybe we re told, no, there s no career there, which is bullshit.
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There s a career in anything.
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Or you can t make a living that way, or that s not possible for you, whatever case might be.
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So what did you want to do as a kid is one strong signal, one strong indicator of what your passion might be.
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Another is if I were to give you a billion dollars and say, go make the world a better place.
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Don t have to worry about income.
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You ve got the money to make a difference.
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What do you want to do?
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Do you want to go cure a disease?
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Do you want to go teach people?
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Do you want to go build art museums?
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What do you want to do?
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You can find some kind of a signal in the noise for your passion there.
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Do you think it s self-serving that if I had a billion dollars, I d be doing something like this, but maybe with nicer equipment?
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No, I think it s a matter of, I think you d be thinking more about what reach you want.
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One of the things that s amazing today is that reach is possible and you know, you do have state of the art equipment and what you re doing today right in this very moment and the reach that you have.
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would have cost orders of magnitude more 10 years ago, and orders of magnitude more 10 years before that, and would have been impossible 10 years before that.
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Sure, yeah, we would have been lugging this in on a truck and setting it up in a room with a reel-to-reel going.
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It is amazing the pace that things have made.
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And I was reading the book, the experiments that you did when you were a kid, disassembling toys, stockpiling chemicals, launching Estes rockets.
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I just saw a lot of myself in there.
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The only problem I had with those rockets is that whenever it launched, the parachute would melt.
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That was the problem I always had.
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You didn t have enough wadding in there.
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I know.
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It was always the wadding.
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I skimped on the wadding because that s when I knew it.
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Some of the things you did when you were young makes me scared to have kids as well because I m thinking ...
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the stockpiling of the explosives.
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I mean, talk about a no-fly list, or worse, at this point.
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Do you think your kids, are they gonna start driving you crazy with their pursuits?
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How much are you gonna be into that?
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Well, so it s interesting, right?
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Because I have two five-year-old boys, and they re already great experimentalists.
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And it s like, what experiment are we gonna do today?
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And it s like, oh my goodness.
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It s like, I can just see where it s gonna go.
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It s only a matter of time.
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It s only a matter of time.
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But the beautiful thing about it today is we can do different kinds of experiments.
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You know, I used to, when I was a kid, and Julian,
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Guthrie writes in How to Make a Spaceship, my stories of my best friend Billy Greenberg and I would order chemicals from chemical supply companies.
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I mean, we d get huge boxes of potassium perchlorate, potassium nitrate,
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and magnesium, and sulfur, and charcoal, and manganese, and just all these chemicals that are explosives.
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We d make our own explosives, our own rocket fuel, our own M-80s, and we blew up all kinds of things, including my friend s swimming pool.
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But, of course, you d be tracked down as a terrorist.
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Yeah, you can t even order that stuff now.
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You can t, right.
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Even today s high school chemistry labs are so watered down as to be laughable.
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But we can do experiments with other things, right?
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We can build things on tablets and run experiments in the virtual world.
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We can create robots.
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My kids  Lego sets are incredible.
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And so it s fun to see how we can experiment.
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We can 3D print stuff.
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Yeah, we ve got two 3D printers from 3D Systems here.
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To have it in the lobby is an almost artistic statement of, we re so casual with creating things, this is what we have in our lobby.
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I don t know how much those things cost, but they re pretty pro-level, I imagine.
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Yeah, they re pro-level three printers.
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Yeah, more than the house I grew up in, I would imagine.
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On that note, people do say, oh, we re heading to hell in a handbasket, or whatever the old timers like to say, these Luddites.
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We see a lot of bad news.
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Do you agree with this, or do you see technology as offering a true solution to existential problems like global warming, and education, and poverty, and things like that?
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Well, yeah, I think the world s going to end.
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I m just kidding.
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I was like, I read a different book than you.
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And this is all chronicled in my first book called Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think.
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And I gave a TED Talk in 2011 or 2012 when the book was launched.
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And one of the things I realized is that we as humans are genetically selected to see the bad news.
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And what that means is we see problems way in advance.
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It s like we see the potential for a problem and then we make it a real problem and it could be years or decades before it actually hits us.
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I see the problems and we advance them in our mind to the point of, oh my God, it s a crisis, we re gonna deal with it right now.
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But the fact of the matter is, even as we go forward in time and we encounter the problem, we forget that there s been five, 10, 20 years of technological development.
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In Abundance, I talk about the environmental crisis of the 1890s.
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if you read that, but the environmental crisis of the 1890s.
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I did, but I don t remember this.
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Was horse manure.
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Literally.
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Literally horse manure.
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Gotcha.
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So as people moved out of the rural areas into cities, they brought their motive power with them, and their motive power was the horse.
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So as people started moving into New York, into Chicago, into San Francisco, into Detroit, whatever it was, St.
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Louis, and they brought their horses, there was piles of horse shit so high that it was causing disease and runoff and really problems, and the predictions were dire.
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It s like we are predicting the number of people coming to cities with their horses.
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How are we going to deal with this?
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And what changed all that was the car.
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The car came along as a more advanced technology and got rid of this problem.
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So with the environmental and energy issues we have today, we have serious issues and if we were to continue to burn the fossil fuels we do, it would get worse and worse and worse.
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My projection and that of other individuals, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, so forth, is that we re heading towards a solar economy.
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And that solar will be so prevalent, so cheap, so available, so decentralized, that it will just be far more the driver for the economy.
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When you look at all of the metrics, we re living in an amazing world.
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Over the last 100 years, the per capita income for every nation on the planet has more than tripled.
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The human lifespan has more than doubled.
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The cost of food has dropped 13 fold.
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The cost of energy has dropped 30 fold.
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Transportation, hundreds of fold.
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Communications, millions of fold cheaper.
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Case in point, this podcast.
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So almost every possible conceivable metric, literacy has exploded around the planet, the cost of access to healthcare has exploded.
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We romanticize the past and say, oh, in the good old days, but we forget that life back in the good old days was short and brutish and brutal.
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80 hour work weeks just to survive.
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Right, hammering things in a factory or something like that.
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So what do you think is the most promising solution for climate change, solar?
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I think solar is for sure where I m putting my bets.
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We get 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the earth from the sun than we consume as a species in a year.
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There s amazing breakthroughs on the horizon for batteries, for solar production, and there s no reason why we can t go to an all electric or majority electric economy in this planet.
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You mentioned working in factories, 80 hour work weeks and things like that.
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What are your thoughts on the increasing effect of automation on society?
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I mean, do you think we re going to see dramatic changes in employment?
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And if so, how do we cope with that if we re automating
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All right, so we are going to see dramatic changes in employment.
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AI and robotics will displace half of the jobs that we currently have.
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But they re also going to create new jobs that we currently can t conceive of.
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And we re going to merge with robots.
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We re going to merge with AIs in different ways.
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We re going to collaborate in different ways.
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We re going to create new kinds of capabilities we didn t have before.
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One of the things that s interesting is I checked a couple of years ago and looked at, there were any polls on the concept of do people love their jobs or do they hate their jobs?
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And it s a pretty staggering situation that something like 70% of Americans hate their jobs.
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Yeah, well, and it s not surprising either, right?
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People don t work the checkout at the local grocery store, because that s what they dreamed about, or don t clean toilets or stock boxes, because that s what they wanted to do as a child.
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It s what the job they have, and it s what s available to them to put food on their table and get insurance for their family.
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And so let those jobs go away.
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And how do we find a time where people can do what they love to do?
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And so I think that there s going to be a transformation
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in what people do and what gives them gratification.
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I write a blog each week and anybody interested
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If you go to dmandis.com, I put out a blog every Sunday, the next blog is gonna be on universal basic income.
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And so this concept that is being tested in governments around the world that everyone who s a citizen of a country gets a basic income.
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And we re gonna demonetize the cost of living, meaning the cost of living is gonna radically come down.
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One case in point that when we get to autonomous Ubers, having an autonomous Uber is gonna be five times cheaper than owning a car.
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Good, amen.
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So you don t need to own a car.
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You don t have to park it.
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You don t have to fuel it.
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You don t have to get insurance for it.
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And you re getting chauffeured every place you go.
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Sounds great to me.
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Sounds good to me.
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How many years until you think we see either a negative income tax or the UBI in the USA?
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Are you thinking 20 years?
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Are you thinking 50 years?
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Do you have a timetable at all?
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You know, I don t for the US.
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We re seeing it being adopted around the world already.
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And we re going to start to see more and more countries bringing it on.
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I think the U.S., we may see some versions of it within the next 10 years.
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It s going to accelerate as unemployment goes up, what I call technological unemployment.
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As that starts to go and people start to outcry and saying, you know, I want my job, the government s going to have to do something about it.
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And UBI will have been proven and tested in different parts of the world already.
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It will be an easier onboarding process in the U.S.
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at that point.
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Over the last 17 years, we have launched our fair share of online courses, coaching programs, and finding the right platform has always been a challenge.
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Hey, Art of Charm listeners.
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I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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Winning is an everyday mindset, and Craig Robinson and John Calipari are here to help.
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On Ways to Win podcast, Craig and Coach Cal use their on-court wisdom to solve your off-court problems.
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Whether it s trouble at home or a workplace dilemma, the coaches will help you find a winning formula for success.
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You ll hear from prominent athletes, business leaders, and celebrities who reveal insights that made them into the leaders they are today.
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And don t miss President Obama sharing how he deals with pressure by projecting confidence, believing in your team, and taking criticism.
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Listen to Ways to Win wherever you get your podcasts.
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What do you think, in a world of lesser employment, or no employment, because of AI, robotics, automation, what do you think constitutes a comfortable or pleasant lifestyle for, at that point, will be the unemployed masses?
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Well, so, interesting, right?
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I m an engineer, and I look at boundary conditions, and in the boundary condition of where we re going over the next 20 or 30 years, is the demonetization of the things that you and I pay for today.
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So, the best education in the world,
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will soon be free.
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SPEAKER_00
Rather than go to MIT or Harvard or Stanford and spend $100,000 and $200,000 on tuition, you re going to get an education delivered by an AI to you, to anyone in your family, and that will be the best education you can possibly get.
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SPEAKER_00
You can get a secondary education at a school if you want for socialization or things like that, but learning the knowledge is going to be best delivered by an AI that knows your passions,
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abilities and follows everything you do and gives you lessons throughout the day.
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Healthcare will be delivered by AI and robots effectively for free.
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SPEAKER_00
There ll be a time in the future where if you need some kind of surgery, the last thing you want is a human surgeon touching you.
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SPEAKER_00
Where that robot s done it a million times perfectly.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so if we can see the demonetization of education
2
SPEAKER_00
of healthcare, of cars, VR, VR and augmented reality plus autonomous cars means you don t have to live in downtown Santa Monica if that s where your work is, where the real estate prices are ridiculous.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can live an hour away or two hours away and commute by VR where the house prices are one-tenth the cost.
2
SPEAKER_00
So all of a sudden, we re going to change what it costs to live.
2
SPEAKER_00
And at the same time, the quality of life, we forget that people under the poverty line in the United States today are living better than the kings and queens did 200 years ago.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
I remember a science teacher when I was in sixth grade said something like, who here would want to be a king in Egypt?
2
SPEAKER_02
And of course everyone raised their hand and he goes, what if you could never have toast again?
2
SPEAKER_02
Because you probably couldn t get a piece of toast
2
SPEAKER_02
In Egypt, it would be really hard.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, sure, someone could fire roast a piece of toast for you, but good luck, you know, making a s more back then.
2
SPEAKER_02
And everyone was kind of like, I really love toast, you know?
2
SPEAKER_02
All the hands went down.
2
SPEAKER_02
On that same token, I mean, do you see technology increasing or decreasing the gap between rich and poor?
2
SPEAKER_02
You talk about demonetization.
2
SPEAKER_02
Looking at something like planetary resources, you could make trillions of dollars, I would imagine, mining an asteroid.
2
SPEAKER_02
We might eliminate poverty entirely using AI automation, or perhaps that gap could increase
2
SPEAKER_02
Tenfold.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so, great question.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what I see is the following.
2
SPEAKER_00
We ve lived in a world of have and have-nots, and it s been changing over time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, take you back a thousand years ago to Egypt, once again, you know, where the pharaoh was the have, and all the slaves, you know, 99.99999% of the population were the have-nots.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s the way it was.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was a few people at the very top of the mountain, the top of the food chain, and the masses.
2
SPEAKER_00
And today, you know, it s changed where we have haves, we have huge middle class haves, and then we have a diminishing number of have-nots.
2
SPEAKER_00
I want you to imagine in the near future, we re going to have a world where every single person on this planet, every man, woman, and child has their basic needs being met.
2
SPEAKER_00
food, water, shelter, healthcare, education, energy, you know, whatever the Maslow s hierarchy of needs are here.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I imagine a world of haves and then some super haves.
2
SPEAKER_00
Super haves, right.
2
SPEAKER_02
So there ll still be people who have their own spaceship or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, other asteroids, living on other planets, living hundreds of years, but a world in which a mom in the middle of Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda,
2
SPEAKER_00
in the poorest parts of the world knows that her children have access to the world s best education, world s best healthcare, all the energy, clean water, tech access they want.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that s the world we re heading towards.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I would rather have a world of haves and a few super haves than a world of have-nots and have-nots.
2
SPEAKER_02
Sure, I definitely agree with that.
2
SPEAKER_02
Who do you think s gonna get to Mars first, SpaceX, NASA, China?
2
SPEAKER_00
I put my, no, I put my money on SpaceX for sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
No question.
2
SPEAKER_00
Will you go yourself if given the opportunity?
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I would love to go.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m someone who wants to travel to space.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d love to go to Mars.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d love to go to the moon.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d love to start an off-world colony.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, I think there s sort of space falls into three groups, the Lunites,
2
SPEAKER_00
the Mars colony first and the people who want to build colonies in free space and not go into a gravitational well.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve spent my time on all, I m thinking about all three.
2
SPEAKER_02
Weightlessness for that extended period of time.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was talking with Mike Massimino and he said, look, after a while, you just, you gotta have that gravity.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s something about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, in my version of a space colony, such as that of Gerard K. O Neill,
2
SPEAKER_00
it d be a large rotating habitat to create artificial gravity.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
I saw you did an AMA on Reddit, or an AMA, and you chastised a couple of people, jokingly of course, about not using their linear mind to think.
2
SPEAKER_02
What does that mean?
2
SPEAKER_02
What do you mean by that?
2
SPEAKER_00
So we are, as humans, we evolved hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago in a world that is local and linear.
2
SPEAKER_00
Put yourself back in the savannas of Africa during the first humanoids,
2
SPEAKER_00
And back then, nothing changed, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
The world was pretty much the same generation to generation to generation.
2
SPEAKER_00
Nothing changed over a thousand years.
2
SPEAKER_00
And anything that affected you was local.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was within a day s walk.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so our brains, the wetware and hardware of our brains are what I describe as local and linear.
2
SPEAKER_00
And of course,
2
SPEAKER_00
The world today is anything but that the world is global exponential so we all have a linear mindset which means we tend to think tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the next day and next week and next month and next year will look like last year but of course we re living during a time of greatest change.
2
SPEAKER_00
And being agile, to be able to have an exponential mindset, have a global mindset is very important these days.
2
SPEAKER_02
Looking at society evolving along with technology, do you think that society will be able to evolve as quickly as technology?
2
SPEAKER_02
What type of adjustments will we have to make as a society, say in the next 10 years?
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s tough.
2
SPEAKER_00
We humans and society do not evolve as fast as tech.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in particular, there are structures in society, governments and religions, that tend to keep things as stable as possible.
2
SPEAKER_00
Humans, our very nature is we don t like change.
2
SPEAKER_00
We like to wake up in the morning and know the world is the same way as it was the night before.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when things change radically, it s very disrupting and very disconcerting.
2
SPEAKER_00
But when something improves tenfold,
2
SPEAKER_00
like digital cameras versus film cameras, or Uber versus taxis.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s a very rapid adoption curve.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then we adopt that as the new baseline.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the challenge is that we re going to have a lot of radical change, and it s going to disrupt a lot of industries.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that kind of large-scale change on the governmental side does not occur.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, for sure.
2
SPEAKER_02
what do you think will permeate society faster?
2
SPEAKER_02
Something like smartphones, which seemed to take a while, but are now in the hands of everybody.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, my parents are looking to upgrade their iPhones at this point.
2
SPEAKER_02
Or self-driving cars, which may also take forever just because of regulation.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so it s interesting, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s an important point that iPhones, smartphones, once the spectrum was allocated by the FCC, there was no other regulatory hurdles to pass.
2
SPEAKER_00
Autonomous cars are hitting a few hurdles.
2
SPEAKER_00
One is pre-existing systems like taxi and rental car companies.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the adoption has been so extraordinarily rapid because the convenience is so high from Uber.
2
SPEAKER_00
And now what s going on is you ve got companies like Google, like Uber, and like Tesla actually getting a lot of data.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they re getting data because they re doing it really smart.
2
SPEAKER_00
I own a Model S and a Model X, and both of those cars have autopilot on it.
2
SPEAKER_00
I drive it on autopilot as much as I can.
2
SPEAKER_00
When it s being driven on autopilot, it s uploading data to the network.
2
SPEAKER_00
Tesla is gathering a huge amount of data with which to train its algorithms.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there will be a point at some time very soon, we re probably there now, that it is safer for the world at large to have autonomous cars driving than people.
2
SPEAKER_02
I agree with that.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you live in LA, you ve seen the driving here.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I think ultimately there s going to be, while it s going to be hard to get the rules placed, there s going to be enough data
3
SPEAKER_00
to make the point that says by not passing the rules, you re harming people s lives.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to become a clearly more dangerous scenario.
3
SPEAKER_01
I predict that the gun nuts of the next 50 years are going to be the, I deserve to be able to drive my own car.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those are the people causing 99% of the accidents.
3
SPEAKER_00
When my 80 year old dad who had this onset of Alzheimer s, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
had his Florida driver s license automatically renewed.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, to take a driver s license away from somebody, there s a whole process.
3
SPEAKER_01
Basically, you have to have full power of attorney over that person to do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s impossible.
3
SPEAKER_01
What are you doing to educate your children?
3
SPEAKER_01
What will you be doing to make sure their education goes well?
3
SPEAKER_01
And what are you going to do that most people are not doing with their kids right now?
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow, so that s a great question, and I think early, my kids are five, so it s early for them, but I think about the notion that they re intercepting a very different world than I did, and they re intercepting a world that s changing at a much faster rate than I did.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, I have a big debate and conversation always about, you know, tablet time, but becoming agile
3
SPEAKER_00
in using tech is gonna become the oxygen, the lingua franca, to mix metaphors here, of the future.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I have a hard time saying no, you shouldn t be using the technology.
3
SPEAKER_00
In fact, they probably, the stronger they are, the more agile they are, the better it s gonna be for them.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I ve realized that, for me, there are three basics that have nothing to do with technology that I want for them.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s one, helping them find out what their passion is,
3
SPEAKER_00
and supporting that no matter what it is.
3
SPEAKER_00
A dear friend of mine s passion was video games when he was growing up, and he became one of the top video game designers on the planet.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, great, all right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So what is your passion?
3
SPEAKER_00
What is their passion?
3
SPEAKER_00
The second thing is helping them remain curious.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ask my kids every day when I drop them off, you know, I say to them, ask some good questions today, and then when I pick them up from school, I say, what questions did you ask?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like just getting them into the mindset of asking questions, as many questions as possible, and then grit
3
SPEAKER_00
which is making sure that they know if they want something, to keep at it, to not give up.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why is that so important to you?
3
SPEAKER_01
It seems like a dumb question on its face, but you are a big mindset guy for reading your books.
3
SPEAKER_01
You love to talk about how you can do anything you put your mind to.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why is that such an important realization for not only kids, but for everyone?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because as individuals, we re becoming so empowered today.
3
SPEAKER_00
that mindset is the only restrictor.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s no lack of capital.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have 15 to $20 billion in crowdfunding.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s more angel capital and venture capital than any time before.
3
SPEAKER_00
So capital s not an issue.
3
SPEAKER_00
Access to knowledge is not an issue, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
With Google, you can know anything you want.
3
SPEAKER_00
Access to experts is not an issue.
3
SPEAKER_00
Access to computing power is not an issue.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you say, what is the scarce resource?
3
SPEAKER_00
The scarce resource is the passionate, committed mind, the person who says, okay,
3
SPEAKER_00
I am going to make this happen.
3
SPEAKER_00
So all throughout Julian s book, How to Make a Spaceship, you ll see my absolute dogged pursuit of this passion of the thousand times the XPRIZE concept died in my
3
SPEAKER_00
not giving up, and she does an amazing job telling that story over and over and over again.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we wouldn t be having this conversation and your listeners wouldn t be listening to this had I given up.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so ultimately, mindset is for me the single most important thing that a person can have.
3
SPEAKER_01
You didn t grow up with a big trust fund or anything like that, so why were you so confident you could just raise $10 million?
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, when you started the XPRIZE, I heard, and I read, you didn t have the $10 million to give away.
3
SPEAKER_01
You took out an insurance policy, the hole-in-one insurance, along with 150-plus rejections from trying other ways to get it, of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I just was so confident in the idea because I was clear that it was a good idea.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you have confidence in your ideas, and I also had done enough
3
SPEAKER_00
in the space world that I had built enough of a track record.
3
SPEAKER_00
Julian starts with the eight-year-old Peter in the book and chronicles my time at MIT and creating a group called SED, Students Exploration Development of Space, which
3
SPEAKER_00
Jeff Bezos started the chapter at Princeton, and it goes on to International Space University, and my launch company, and Zero Gravity Corporation, and eventually XPRIZE.
3
SPEAKER_00
I had done enough things where I knew what was the realm of doable, and I knew what was a good idea, and I was trying not to bullshit myself, and I had enough people who I bounced it off.
3
SPEAKER_00
who got it and said yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so my confidence level grew and to the point where it wasn t a matter of is this a good idea anymore?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like, damn it, someone out there is gonna help me fund this thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a good idea, it s gonna work.
3
SPEAKER_00
And when you can find that idea, and there s so many examples over and over again of companies that were overnight successes after 10 years of hard work.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sure, yeah, this podcast being one of them.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we re no Facebook or anything, but 10 years as of next week, in fact, with this show.
3
SPEAKER_01
Awesome.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nobody knew what podcasting was back then, and hopefully 10 more years, we ll be having this update to this conversation on my yacht or something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Awesome.
3
SPEAKER_01
You seem to have taken a much different route than many normal entrepreneurs in this type of space.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re laughing to yourself, because obviously we... Well, you know, I don t know what a normal route for an entrepreneur is.
3
SPEAKER_00
Me neither.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think the tech space, the normal routine is to go execute on some singular big idea or maybe a few big ideas like Elon.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, you re dedicating your life right now, it seems, to helping other entrepreneurs facilitate and executing on their big ideas.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why did you go that route after the original XPRIZE?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, you have to understand I have always lived
3
SPEAKER_00
and worked on multiple fronts so i m actively engaged in running probably seven companies right now but i m involved typically i know what i do well what do i enjoy and i enjoy the coming up with the idea the the formulation of the vision helping raise the capital getting the team on board and typically taking a role as executive chairman hiring a ceo.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t love the management of the details of the people, the hiring, the firing, and so forth.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I partner with a great CEO.
3
SPEAKER_00
So here at XPRIZE, I m a service executive chairman.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got Marcus Shingles as CEO at Singularity University.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m co-founder with Ray Kurzweil.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s the chancellor.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m the executive chairman there.
3
SPEAKER_00
Rob nails a ceo at planetary resources chris luckey is a ceo and eric anderson are co-executive chairman.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so forth that human longevity and my venture fund bull capital partners new stem cell company called celerity.
3
SPEAKER_00
All of these cases, these are, I m filled with the diversity and excitement of running those companies.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re all science fiction novels, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
They re all crazy moonshots.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then there s a layer separate from those which is sort of XPRIZE helping incentivize entrepreneurs, Singularity University helping to educate entrepreneurs, Bold Capital investing in them, and then the work I do through Abundance 360 and my weekly blogs is really trying to help
3
SPEAKER_00
people see the way the world is changing.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, my mission and purpose in life, I sort of wrote it out when I was at a Date with Destiny, Tony Robbins event.
3
SPEAKER_00
Tony s a dear friend of mine.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I realized that we re undergoing a transformation as a species during our lifetimes.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like going from one fish to the land.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re undergoing a transformation.
3
SPEAKER_00
And my mission and my purpose is to inspire and guide this transformation both on and off the earth.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re going to transform
3
SPEAKER_00
how we raise our kids, how we govern, how we live our lives, where humanity exists in the solar system, in the universe.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s happening now at an accelerating rate.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s gonna be a time which is both scary for many, who don t want change, and exciting for the fact of what we re becoming.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re becoming what I call a meta-intelligence, a multi-human intelligence.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we re connecting in ways like never before.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I think about this a lot, and I write about this, and I talk about this, and for me, it s the highest level of this video game we re playing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s an exciting time to be alive.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you had to pick between all of those different companies, I mean, if you had to achieve just one more significant milestone, what would it be?
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, goodness.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not a fair statement.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m not going to choose between children.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have, I think, three basic thrusts.
3
SPEAKER_00
Opening up space.
3
SPEAKER_00
extending the human lifespan, and solving grand challenges, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So those are the three thrusts that I have.
3
SPEAKER_00
I squeeze a fourth in by helping entrepreneurs take moonshots, but anyway.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s like wishing for more wishes with the journey, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think so.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I wrote something called Peter s Laws long ago.
3
SPEAKER_00
I saw a copy of Murphy s Law on my business partner s wall, and I was like so pissed at it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I stared at it every day and it said, if anything can go wrong, it will.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, that s just like the worst attitude you can possibly have.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I went on my whiteboard and I wrote, if anything can go wrong, fix it to hell with Murphy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that became Peter s law.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I started adding to it.
4
SPEAKER_00
My second law was when given a choice, take both.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so that just has iterated a few times.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yep, and we just did that right here as well.
4
SPEAKER_01
So are you in between companies all day long?
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, how do you kind of manage your time when it comes to that?
4
SPEAKER_00
I manage it going between companies.
4
SPEAKER_00
I typically will spend, you know, yesterday, it was in Panama yesterday, this company called Cellularity, which is a stem cell company, was down there with Bob.
4
SPEAKER_00
Today was PhD Ventures, tomorrow I m at Singularity University all day.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I ll go and rotate, but of course, when shit hits the fan, I ll focus on what the problems are, or when opportunities come up, I ll go and focus on that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And for me, it s a glorious life of ADD.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it sounds like it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Are you doing that in Panama because of the laws in the US?
4
SPEAKER_01
Just too much of a pain in the...
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s more that stem cell science is developed to the point that there s extremely strong evidence of its efficacy, but the laws that the FDA follows are not structured for stem cell science yet.
4
SPEAKER_00
Lots of studies going on.
4
SPEAKER_00
I went down for two reasons.
4
SPEAKER_00
One, there is a stem cell clinic called the Stem Cell Institute in Panama City, Panama, that we re looking at potentially rolling up in a stem cell rollup that we re working on.
4
SPEAKER_00
And second, I went down to get my own treatment on my knee and my shoulder.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I was scheduled to have basically shoulder and knee surgery, which would have taken me out for a couple of months of full mobility.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I went and had Monday
4
SPEAKER_00
afternoon, two days ago now, stem cell injections into the cavities of my knees and my shoulders to look at rejuvenating the connective tissues there.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I ll see in the next 60 days how that goes.
4
SPEAKER_00
The data is extremely positive.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if I can avoid going into surgery, great.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no kidding.
4
SPEAKER_01
The shots in your kneecap sound painful, but it s a lot less painful than surgery.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it wasn t painful at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was taking video.
4
SPEAKER_00
with my cell phone, they were injecting me and sharing it with my community.
4
SPEAKER_01
Really?
4
SPEAKER_01
Periscoping your knee injections?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, basically.
4
SPEAKER_01
How do you quantify success?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re involved in so many things.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is there a metric you use to definitively say, look, I m making an impact with this?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think the metric is, am I having fun?
4
SPEAKER_00
Really?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, am I having fun?
4
SPEAKER_00
And then, I mean, each company has its metrics.
4
SPEAKER_00
Each company has key points.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, early on is, are you demoing the tech?
4
SPEAKER_00
Then is it, are you raising the capital?
4
SPEAKER_00
And are you attracting the clients?
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, my theme for 2017 is experimentation.
4
SPEAKER_00
So rapid experimentation.
4
SPEAKER_00
Are we experimenting?
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the data we re collecting?
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the targets we re setting?
4
SPEAKER_00
Are we achieving those targets?
4
SPEAKER_00
But ultimately, am I enjoying myself?
4
SPEAKER_00
Do I feel like I m making a difference?
4
SPEAKER_01
Looking at it like that probably makes it an easier decision rather than second-guessing all the metrics and all seven plus of your current ventures.
4
SPEAKER_01
It probably simplifies things quite a bit.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s the ultimate goal for humanity here?
4
SPEAKER_01
Continued existence, expansion to the rest of the galaxy slash universe, acquisition of data?
4
SPEAKER_00
So I think, as I mentioned earlier, we re undergoing a transformation as humanity.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re evolving.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism, to evolution by intelligent direction.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re rapidly changing what it means to be human.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think we re creating
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AI we re creating new forms of life we are literally writing genomes of new life forms were beginning the ability to edit our own genomics with crisper cast nine technology and we re going to become a new species and it s shocking to me.
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the timeline that I see, which is a few decades, 30 years at the most.
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Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity in 2029.
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He also talks about the notion that in the early 2030s, we re going to create the ability to interface the human cortex with the cloud.
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such that we re gonna be able to expand our memory, expand our cognitive capabilities.
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Our brain is very limited.
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Our neocortex has 300 million pattern recognizers, 100 neurons each, and when you use that for memorizing things, you ve used it up.
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But we offload a lot of that on my cell phone or all the emails and phone numbers and so forth.
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So we re transforming, and I think we re gonna become, you as a human,
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are a collection of ten trillion human cells.
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Each one of your cells is a life form, but it makes you in a connected form.
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And I think of each of us as humans as individual life forms that are about to become connected into a met intelligence.
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And I think we re going to be conscious on a brand new level.
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And I think that s, again, we re building the backbone with the internet and we re the sensors that we re connecting, creating and connecting into our brains in this next decade.
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I know so many startups working on brain computer interface.
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It s an extraordinary time.
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Yeah, I can t wait for some of that stuff.
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As a language learner, I was speaking with some of these startup folks and they said, yeah, you re learning Chinese.
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That s going to be a huge waste of your time in a few years.
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I hope you re having fun doing it because in five, 10 years, you ll be able to quote unquote, learn Chinese in minutes.
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You ll just have no need to do it.
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speak English and it ll come out Chinese in the listener s ears.
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We have already hearing aids that can translate.
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I saw that and I wondered how well that works because of course the second I posted that online people went oh that ll never work with Vietnamese because the verb goes at the end or it ll never work with this and I m just thinking this is society underestimating AI
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to the point where, just like my dad, when I told him about Yahoo in the 90s, he said, nobody needs that.
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There are libraries everywhere.
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And I thought to myself, this is my dad s comment all over again.
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Oh, well, you know, we won t need that for this, and people are going to be bilingual, or this is going to happen.
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If you don t think this AI can figure out that the verb goes at the end of a German sentence, then completely different pages here.
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You hang out with top people all the time, and by hang out, I mean work with and fraternize with.
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What are a few traits you see in common?
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I know everybody works hard, I know everyone reads a lot, but is there anything, maybe even some dark stuff?
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Are we all scared children that have this crazy desire for power, competitive to a sick degree?
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I think, and I wrote about in my book Bold, I am honored to have
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as friends, investors, and board members, folks like Larry Page and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.
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And I write about them and others.
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And I think to a large degree, they re all massive optimists, really optimists about the future.
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And they are about rapid experimentation.
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about just continually experimenting and trying things and not pre-guessing.
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They re about doing audacious moonshots.
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You know, when you ve reinvented an industry like PayPal or Elon, like, what do you do next?
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They re also driven by passion.
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Probably the most important thing is they re passion-driven individuals.
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And they re creating stuff that they would love to see created and that they want.
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And it s that level of passion, of grit,
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of not giving up, and of course there s a good amount of luck in all of this, but they re all incredibly smart.
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So that s a reality amongst all of them.
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The optimism and the passion are interesting.
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You don t hear about the optimism as much.
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It s probably not as sexy as, well, you know, I grind and I do this and I m always, it doesn t have as much of a cool factor to be optimistic necessarily.
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It s more hyper-driven is what we hear about most of the time.
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How often do you genuinely go offline and take a break and not look at anything?
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At night when I go to sleep.
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Oh, when you re unconscious.
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So every day for several hours.
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Oh man, it s really tough for me.
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That s one of my biggest challenges is shutting down.
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I was in Panama, as I said, and I flew yesterday home in a seven and a half hour flight, and I basically spent six and a half hours doing email, and I allowed myself to sleep for an hour, just so I d be a little bit refreshed when I got to my five year olds.
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But I aspire to doing less, but I d be bullshitting myself if I said I ve really done that.
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I m on seven by 24 by 365,
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And I ve got, you know, at some point I got to say, actually, you love it.
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So stop complaining about it.
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Sure.
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But the thing that is the counterbalancing force is I do put down my phone on my computer to go and play with my boys.
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So
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It ll be an hour in the morning, an hour when they come back from school, and I will do my damnedest.
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I m rushing back after our conversation right now to go and get them from school.
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What is next for you?
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Are you going to put more irons in the fire?
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I think I m always putting more irons in the fire, and I d be bullshitting myself if I said I don t.
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I expect to be starting one or two companies a year.
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investing in a dozen companies each year.
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What s the next X Prize or X Prizes?
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Oh wow, we have some great X Prizes.
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ANA Airlines is funding
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an XPRIZE called the Avatar XPRIZE.
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Can you create a robot that you can plug your consciousness into?
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You can see and hear through the robot s eyes and ears, you can move and walk around through the robot, and you can project your consciousness into a village in Tanzania and do a surgery.
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disintermediating the future of travel.
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Sure.
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And you can explore other planets that are toxic to humans or too dangerous.
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That s a great one.
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With Caterpillar, we re working on an Iron Man X-Prize.
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The president of Caterpillar basically came down with ALS and he s going to have reduced mobility.
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We said, could we build, could there be an XPRIZE to create sort of an Iron Man suit that would allow a person with ALS to actually open the door and get around and communicate and so forth.
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So a lot of interesting technologies along those lines.
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We just launched a water abundance XPRIZE.
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Can you take water out of the humidity of the air in India and give people 20 liters of clean drinking water?
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And a women in safety XPRIZE, can you create an XPRIZE for a technology device that allows a young girl to walk around the most dangerous cities of India safely?
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really a whole lot of it has to be this way and do this.
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You re leaving this up largely to the creativity of the people involved.
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That is what I think, at least from reading your books, it looks like makes the magic.
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Because you can really find ideas that you can t find these ideas with constraints attached.
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It has to be wide open.
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Can you tell us something that s true that you believe
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that just nobody, almost nobody agrees with you on?
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Well, two things.
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One is that we re living in a virtual existence that I think for sure we re in nth generation virtual world.
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We are going to create a next virtual world that AIs that we, in a video game that we re playing in a, in a virtual existence as one
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I believe that, and it s not, it wouldn t change anything I do.
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The second thing is that we re about to transform into a meta-intelligence, that we re about to interconnect a billion people on the planet and become conscious at a different level.
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That is a future in the next 30 years.
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So just to clarify, you think that what we re doing now is we re maybe a simulation or some sort of virtual existence that another civilization has created.
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We just don t see it.
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It s like Westworld where these robots that think we re in reality.
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And we will create the next iteration of that.
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You know, I think a lot of interesting have come to that conclusion.
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AI and virtual reality is gonna get to the point where it s indistinguishable from reality.
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And so it s not just a VR, a virtual existence, it s that we re in nth generation and we re one generation against the next against the next.
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I think of the world that way.
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No one needs to agree with me.
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It doesn t change the way I see or do anything.
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but that s my belief.
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Can I ask why you think that?
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I have heard that before, but only from sci-fi writers and things like that.
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Oh, because I see that s where we re going, and if that s where we re going, then, you know, in a universe 14 and a half billion years old, I believe life is ubiquitous in the universe.
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I think it s a force of nature, and we re not the first ones to have reached this level of technological advancement.
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So it could be biological AI.
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or something along those lines.
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Or virtually, right?
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Or just not here at all.
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Right.
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Where is here?
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We don t know.
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Peter, thank you so much.
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It s been fascinating.
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Really interesting episode, went all over the place with that.
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I really love talking about future tech, how society will evolve with this future tech or not, and especially the concepts of artificial intelligence, space travel, colonization, this stuff is always just super fascinating for me, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.
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Of course, great big thank you to Peter Diamandis.
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The book is titled How to Make a Spaceship, the most recent one about him by Julian Guthrie.
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Also, he s written Bold and Abundance.
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We ll link all those up in the show notes for this episode.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Peter on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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And remember, you can tap your phone screen.
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You should see the show notes pop right up on your phone and just about every app that plays podcasts.
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I m also on Twitter.
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I post a lot of things that never make it to the show.
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Articles, insights, other ways to engage with me and producer Jason.
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I m at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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Boot camps and Art of Charm live program details are at bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Man, the boot camp is so rewarding for me especially because of just how far it takes people.
5
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I love seeing the results people have over the months and years after they come through.
5
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It is truly life-changing.
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I know that sounds like hyperbole, but look, I invite you to see for yourself if you want to check it out.
5
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get in touch with us, we ll get you some info, you can plan ahead.
5
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We sell out a few months in advance, so I recommend just, you know, if you re thinking about it, dip your toe in the water.
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And speaking of dip your toes in the water, if you wanna join our AOC challenge, check out theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the States, you can text the word charmed, C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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This challenge that we have is about improving your networking, improving your connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I also do regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and last but not least, it ll make you a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends.
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The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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