Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Peter Diamandis, Founder of the XPrize Foundation and Singularity University (#045)

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

    Peter Diamandis is a remarkable entrepreneur, and futurist, best known as the Founder & Executive Chairman of XPRIZE Foundation. His new book, written with Steven Kotler, is “The Future is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives.” Already a bestseller, it is both timely and important. In this discussion with Brian Keating, Diamandis shares his vision for technological and educational advances over the next decade and how COVID-19 has accelerated the timeline. Show notes and resources are available here.  04:49 How COVID-19 will change what the next ten years look like. 13:02 The Tricorder XPRIZE and how Star Trek inspired Diamandis. 18:19 Artificial intelligence and human intelligence need to work together. 27:03 “For the first time ever, the human race has a singular enemy.” 36:46 Should universities offer lifelong subscriptions? 45:28 Technology marches forward; make it a force for good. 50:30 Arthur C. Clarke supported Diamandis’ early pursuits. It may have taken a global pandemic for many people to understand exponential growth, but Diamandis has used it for years to explain technological advancement. Understanding Diamandis’ 6 D’s – digitization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization – can help entrepreneurs make an impact. Diamandis is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Medical School. While still in school himself, he co-founded The International Space University which boasts multiple astronauts as alumni. He also co-founded the weightless flight company Zero G that provides training flights for NASA. He is an advisor and friend of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. Diamandis and Steven Kotler have written three bestselling books together. He co-hosts the podcast Exponential Wisdom with Dan Sullivan. Buy books by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler: The Future is Faster Than You Think  BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World  Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think  Learn more about the Tricorder XPRIZE Listen to Peter Diamandis on a previous episode of INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Watch the documentary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

beyond into the impossible. And so we started this podcast four years ago now, I think it is. We've had visionaries, thought beaters, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, all different gamuts. And thanks to you for your longstanding help for that with the center. Thank you. Thank you. I had the pleasure of knowing Arthur Clark and working with him

and visiting him in Sri Lanka a few times. And some fun stories there. We can get it to if you like. Yeah, that will be. a real treat. There aren't too many friends of Arthur that I've had on the show. So today, the occasion that brings you here, of course, I love and take advantage of every opportunity I can to chat with you and pick your brain about things. But it's the publication with your co-author, Stephen Kotler, of the third. This doesn't show up not great unless I

hold it over here, but the future is faster than you think. So this is your third in a series of three books. I believe this is the last final installment of the series that began with bold way back. It began with abundance. Abundance, sorry. Yeah. 2012, right? That was almost eight years ago, nine years ago. There will be a fourth because we're going to re-release abundance on the 10th anniversary. The thesis behind abundance that the world is getting better than anyone knows. And despite, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic that we're in by almost every measure. And we can talk about that, obviously. The world has gotten better on so many different levels

in terms of access to information, computational power, uplifting of people throughout society, the reduced cost of energy, of water, of food, of health care, of education, all of these things. And the thesis around abundance

that we are going from a community, a world of scarcity to a world of abundance, is more valid now than ever before. And the data is extraordinary. And so we're going to do a 10-year anniversary not just an update. It'll be sort of a, the same chunks of what we're covering,

humanity's basic needs, sort of Maslow's hierarchy, but we're going to return to how we're creating energy abundance, water abundance, food abundance, health care abundance, and so forth. And that will be a 2022 fourth book, if you would. Yeah, I want to talk about this and how it reminds me. of Nicholas Nassim Telebs series, which I think he calls the inserto, you know, kind of the Black Swan and Anti-Fragile, and the third book, which is name I'm blanking on,

but kind of this is your triplet, trip ditch and vision into the future, but being well predicated on past accomplishments and looking forward to the future. And since you brought it up, I was going to get to it. But yeah, we're kind of come up on the 10th anniversary in 2022.

And but what I started thinking about is, what if this book came out in this current book, the future is faster than you think, written with Stephen Kotler, if that was written and published in 2021. What would it have been different? I mean, obviously, I think recognition of the pandemic, but I would have recognized the pandemic

as a forcing factor for the acceleration. One of the things that's extraordinarily true is everything we talk about in the book. And a book really focuses on the, next decade and how every industry, food, water, energy, health care, education, you know, insurance, finance, how every one of those industries will be changing over the next decade. And the pandemic is just accelerating that. It's accelerating it by a lot.

So I would have basically looked at that as a forcing function. So we're seeing a real acceleration in transforming the educational world to digital education. We're going to see a massive push towards digital healthcare, healthcare at home, healthcare with your AI. We're going to see robots coming into the workforce because companies can't afford to have a human workforce that is fragile as we've seen. And so we're seeing the insertion of robots coming in. So a lot of what we talk, autonomous cars, flying car, all of that stuff is moving faster and faster. And so I think we're going to see in 2020 two or three years of accelerated digitization and dematerialization, demonitization, and democratization. Yeah, when I look at the book and I see these overarching themes and the impact of what you call the six Ds that we'll get into, undoubtedly, you know, all stemming from the first D, the DMAUnda's D.

but I think Stephen Cotler should at least add a middle initial D to, for parity's sake. But from the perspective that the world is moving more and more towards the scalable, towards this dream of reproducible error-correcting resilient systems, I've heard it said, you know, I can't wait to get back to normal. And I want to get your thoughts. Is this the new normal? Are we going to stop? So, yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. So, I mean, when people say, I can't wait to get back to work, I say, you are at work. This is work. This is what it's like. We are, you know, it takes 30 to 90 days for humans to create new habits of repeated consistency, right? For neural programming, so to speak. And our being in this, you know, sheltered in place, whatever you want to call it, is creating new habit. So I think a lot of companies are not going to rent office space. We're

going to see a real hit on commercial office. We're going to have a lot more people working remotely and virtualized organizations. We're going to see a lot more homeschooling. I have two boys that are about to turn nine in June. And they've gone from a high price. private school to being homeschooling. And, you know, I'm sort of enjoying the hours I get to spend teaching them at home. So am I going to spend a college level tuition at a school? You know, a lot of change is coming. There are elements that will go back, but there's definitely going to be a new normal. And I think even if you could go back the way it was, there are certain things that we're enjoying. I'm in the best health had been. I'm getting the most sleep I've

got in. Look, why. I am refreshed. Pandemic has been good for you. Yeah, well, you know, I want to be sensitive to all the people, and I've had people I know have died. I know people that I know have have been on ventilators and so forth. And I'm, you know, I'm still, there is, but every year there are people who pass away from, from influenza, from car crashes, from all kinds of things. And so, you know, whenever we have anything new, we react. People don't like change. People like waking up in the morning and believing the world is the same as it was

at the night before. So if all of a sudden we had been all on a horse and buggy, and then the car came along and we started seeing, you know, 1.3 million deaths per year from the car that weren't there the year before. there would be global outcries against the car and how are we killing a million people a year. But we've gotten numb to those numbers. Now, that's not to say that coronavirus and one of my companies is in the blood antibody testing and in the vaccine development.

Another one is in the therapeutic side. So I'm privy of what's going on. And this virus is different than normal. And I remember when I was in medical school, I was at Mass General Hospital when the first AIDS cases were coming in HIV infections. And it was like, what is going on here? We have no idea what it was. And it was a great deal of fear. And we now see it as a manageable disease or infection.

Yeah. In fact, we're using, I've heard of therapies that use for sickle cell anemia that use the AIDS. virus, if I'm not mistaken, as a drug delivery network. And we'll talk about that. Obviously, you're an expert on that. You're not practicing a physician, but you were trained as a medical doctor. Yeah, I don't, I would advise anybody to come to me for any conditions. Well, me neither, although, you know, sometimes they ask me medical advice.

But one of the things that's been in a zeitgeist lately has been this notion of exponentiality and exponential effects. And in your first book, in abundance, you start talking about these exponential functions. and in bold, you continue that theme in the second book. And really, it's been amazing to me that people that are completely, you know, non-technical, self-declared Luddites, you know, they're talking about logarithmic plots and graphs. And do you think this is now entered into, you know, the zeitgeist, as they say,

in a way that you couldn't have really forecast a few years back even. Yeah, I was joking on one of my tweets saying it took a global deadly virus to teach people about exponential growth. And it's true. people have gotten that we're in the exponential phase. But, you know, every exponential falls off. And we have what's called an S curve. In the early days of an exponential, we have a deceptive growth period where it looks linear. And then we hit this hyper growth of exponentials, which, you know, in the U.S., at the time we're doing this podcast, a lot of cities from New York

and others are in that phase. And then eventually it falls off. Either it consumes its raw material, in this case, human hosts, or it hits some physical limitations, whether it's the frequency of laser light for creating a microchip. So, yeah, we've learned a lot about exponentials. And yeah, so just keeping on the medical.

theme. I want to draw listeners' attention to events that we've done in the past, along with our mutual friend Julian Guthrie and space technologies, a book really written about you and other pioneers of the early commercial space age. We'll get into that, hopefully. But I want to take an even bigger step back when we founded the Arthur C. Clark Center. We were also deeply affiliated with the X Prize that was dedicated and named after what I assume. is probably your favorite show in history, the tricorder from Star Trek. Yeah. Can you give us an update on the tricorder XPRIZ?

Of course, Dr. Eric Vieri, MD, Ph.D., PhD, is the director of the Clark Center here. But I thought it would be interesting to get your impression of that. And then segueing to how technologies like that could be useful as diagnostics for the next phase. I don't want to say when this goes away, because I don't think it will go away. I think we're going to have to adapt to it as a fact of life. this virus and how it's going to come back and the different permutations that it will undergo. But can you say something about the XPRIZE for the Tri-Quar X-Prize? So, yeah, I mean, the two things that got me going in life and got me excited about science

and got me excited about space was the Apollo program and Star Trek. I used to joke that the Apollo program showed us what humanity could do right now. And that scientific documentary called Star Trek showed us where the world was going. and that was for me always the my vision of today and tomorrow and then when I did see the government program fulfilling that potential then I started getting sad, then angry,

and then okay, how the heck do I do this myself? And that was sort of like the mental evolution that led to a whole series of companies from International Space University, which is where I met Eric. Barry, he was one of my students there, and met Arthur C. Clark through ISU and others. And Star Trek is an incredible universe. I'm calling it a TV show. It's a universe of, and a positive, abundance-minded sign. We can solve any problem. There is infinite diversity.

and it's really a universal tolerance across species and ways of thinking and the golden rule to a large degree. And if you look at Star Trek, it's incredible what Gene Rodbury did. I mean, the ideas that he put forward, the tricorder being one of them, the idea of warp drive, right? I mean, the thought of going from one location to another location by warping space. I mean, you know, how else we're going to get light years away? And so it just, there was a lot of hard science-based ideas that were there. So I've been in the medical world in some way, shape, or form all my life. I had two companies going my last year of medical school.

Like I said, I barely graduated. I think I graduated with the least credits ever issued by Harvard for a medical degree. And I mean, my deal I made with my dean was, listen, if you let me graduate, I'll promise not to practice. And he kept his end and I kept mine. But so the idea was, could we develop the tricorder? And the tricorder was the ability of a device to diagnose an individual's medical goal. And what we have today isn't health care. We have sick care.

We have a world in which you're taking care of after you're sick and then barely taken care of. But what if you had the capability to monitor your state of health with high precision consistently day in and day out? So I'm a pilot. I fly a couple different airplanes as, as Brian, I think you're a pilot as well, is that correct? Yeah, we're a pilot, and we are also parents of twins. Yes, and old-time.

A lot in common. And so before you take off or I take off, I make sure all of my systems are in normal operating zone. Everything is good, and otherwise I wouldn't take off. And because our airplanes are got hundreds of sensors and hundreds of microprocessing, is monitoring everything all the time. But for our bodies, we know so little about what's truly going on and set our bodies. And we go for a health checkup once in a while.

And, you know, what we get is some cursory overview. And it's only when you end up in the hospital with some pain in the side that you say, uh-oh, and you go and the physician digs in. But it's possible to actually monitor your physiology in great detail. And the tricorder was part of that. I wouldn't go into the details, but it had to be able to detect some dozen to 15 different parameters that would give you an indication of disease. But eventually the goal here is to make us the CEOs of our own health, where there is an AI,

our own version of Jarvis from Iron Man, that's monitoring your blood glucose, your all your blood chemistries, your metabolome, everything in a way that, if, anything goes out of whack, it goes, let's go check and see why this is anything other than perfect. Yeah, that kind of segues nicely into one of the topics that you bring up in the future is faster than you think, and that's the advent of wearables due to the decentralization and basically the shrinking effect that technology is having, such that we can all have on our fingers and in our pockets, we already have a supercomputer. computer. So why not link that with 5G networks to a cloud to do diagnostics based on, you know, I wear this, this is an aura ring and this is not the oaring, but I have an o'ring.

I have mine right. Here we go. Good. I was going to say, this is my o'ring. I have the next generation when it's invisible. Just to make you jealous, there's so few ways I can do that. But the o'ring, you know, tracks these parameters while you sleep and it kind of tells you how many times your twins, well, in my case, my twins are much younger than yours, woke me up or disturbed me in my temperature and so forth. But I want to just bring to your attention, I don't know if you ever heard this quote before, but it's a quote from the Talmud, which is one of the sacred books in the Jewish faith that I practice. But the quote always tickles me because it goes like this. It goes, the best doctors go to hell, meaning that there's sort of this prowess that the

doctors have and maybe rightfully so to deal with the tremendous stress and challenges that they deal with. I have many physician friends that when they cure things, when they do things, it's almost part of their makeup. The same way that I feel like I once heard John and Martha King, who you know from the King schools from flying, they said, once you get your pilot's license, it changes your identity. What will happen, you know, when medicine becomes so distributed to use a D word and becomes really outsourced to these Jarvises, these clouds, and so forth. What will that do to the medical profession, to the ego, to the personality, the identity of physicians that are actually practicing in the future? Yeah, so it's interesting.

I think for the next decade, it's really going to be about AI, H.I. Collaboration, Human intelligence, and artificial intelligence working collaboratively. I think that someplace in the next three to seven years, I probably peg it at your four or five. It's going to become malpractice to make a diagnosis without the use of AI. Right. So you can imagine you go to a doctor who looks at you, reviews your x-ray or reviews any other blood workup you have, and then says, you're fine or you have this. That physician, God bless them all,

I come from a family of doctors. There's no way that that doctor is able to understand all of the data available to him or her, right? 3.2 billion letters from your genome sequence, your microbiome, your metabolism, all the imagery and so forth. Or be able to recognize the thousands of journal articles that have come out in the last 24 hours around the world. Or look at all of the data exhaust that you have left, right?

We're leaving data everywhere, how often we have coughed. What the sound of that cough was, right? It can be picked up by Alexa or Syria. I mean, there's a massive amount of data that is, you know, where you've traveled to and who happened to be infected with the SARS-CoV-2 that you were near next to you. So AI is going to be a critical part of this, and I think it's going to allow doctors and nurses, healthcare workers, to be more human versus trying to crunch through all the data and not make a mistake.

Yeah, I went to a talk by, I'm sure you know Eric Topal, who's here at Scripps Research Institute, and the occasion of his book, which hoping to get him on the show at some point, deep medicine where, yeah, he shows a funny, you know, he's great when he gives his talks because he always has these funny cartoons from around the web. And one of them is, you know, a doctor staring, you know, at a computer screen typing away. And this is the view, this is how doctors are seen by patients. And, you know, to them they see themselves as, you know, as these kind of Jonas Saul characters and doing all this great.

And they do. And it's one of the harvest jobs that one can imagine. But looking at it, I think you're absolutely right. You have these devices, these listener. devices, not just the wearables connected to it. You can have instantaneous studies and all serviced up to 5G networks we talk about in the book. And maybe we can take a sidetrack down that route. As you know, we're here in San Diego. Qualcomm is a huge player in San Diego and they're a big force behind 5G. Why, for the average layperson out there that's not as dialed into the matrix as we are,

Why is that so important? Why isn't it just, I mean, my life didn't change much when I went from 3G to LTE. It is a little bit faster, but why is it going to be such a quantum breakthrough that you talk about in the book? Well, so 5G is coming at the perfect time for a number of things. And the parameters of 5G that make it valuable isn't just speed. It's also latency. So a 4G network is able to deliver you in the tens to low hundreds of megabits connection speed. Or 5G squarely gets you into the hundreds of megabits and into the gigabits level.

But then the latency is such that the delay between you taking an action and that action being registered by the computer network, or by the end effector is minimal. And what that's going to allow for is virtual reality and augmented reality and remote surgery and the ability to really take the computation out of the device and put it into the cloud. So right now, my phone is doing a lot of calculations on board, but in the processors in the phone. But as you well know, when I need to do something complicated, the data is set. to the cloud where it is analyzed and then the answer is sent back.

We're eventually going to do that with our brains too, where we offload computation from our neocortex to the cloud and the answers come back as well. I'll be able to understand some of the math and physics that you're able to crunch that I have no idea how to do, but if I've got my processor, I have a thousand Amazon, you know, nodes supporting me, I'll be able to help me.

Yeah, it's not brain surgery. It's just rocket science. Well, I want to talk about rocket science next in all seriousness. So you admitted to these twin muses that got you so they pumped up in your youth, you know, one being Star Trek and the kind of socio-cultural implications of going into space and the other was the Apollo program. I just interviewed Professor David Kaiser from your alma mater, MIT. And David's as a physicist and also a historian of science.

and he's written a wonderful book called Quantum Legacies. And he talks about kind of how the 20th century was this physicist century, and a lot of it centered upon the war effort of World War II. And how after World War II, a bunch of technologies, one started, you know, and fairly heavily associated almost exclusively with MIT, that being the radar project, their MIT Rad Lab, and the other one being the famous Manhattan Project, how those technologies really crystallized physics as kind of the perceived,

stage cornerstone subject of the 20th century, so much so that following the war, you'd have physicists assigned, you know, secret service escorts to go to conferences. You know, that hasn't happened to me yet recently. Now, I'm wondering, you know, with that being the notion, of course, then, of course, the German rocketry program, we're in a Bronbron, as you discuss in your books, you know, brought to America, then launched, you know, what became the Apollo program and the space race that we ended up winning. And I'm wondering, wouldn't you have a situation now, is we don't have, you know, we don't have a foe per se. We have what we're in a war.

We're in a battle. And every life is infinitely precious, I believe. But we're in this battle. We're not fighting an enemy. Can COVID, in your mind, kind of nucleate this progress in biotechnology, beyond the wearables, beyond the commercialization, but can it nucleate a century of biology? So the reality is I think that we are fighting a war and that for the first time ever, the human race is a singular enemy.

There's never been a time like this before. I mean, the entire human race, every planet, every scientist, and what is incredible when I think about it, rough back of the envelope calculation, there's somewhere between 100 million and 200 million doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, technologists, all take an aim at the COVID. 19 pandemic.

And that's extraordinary. Again, and the level of collaboration put aside all the political stuff, the amount of scientific collaboration going on between scientists in every country and physician around the world is amazing. And I think that this pandemic is going to, I think you use the term, nucleate a lot of new sexy professions like epidemiology. biologist, virologist, as well as physician, biologist, and scientists. You know, it's interesting.

We have new weapons to bring to bear in this war, CRISPR, in gene therapy for the first time ever. Yeah, that's certainly, you know, much to look forward to. I tell my physicist friends, you know, we had a whole century, you know, it's time to let our biological colleagues, you know, share in the spot. Listen, as long as we both, as the physicists and biologists, even the chemists, are able to outstrip the MBAs, I'm good with that. Well, I want to get into another chapter in the book. It's actually my favorite chapter in the book when you talk about education.

And I want to talk about the confluence of technologies and of new modalities of thinking. It's not just the technology that enables us to develop these things. It's the way that we think of life once, you know, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but I had my, you know, one of my two-year-olds tried to swipe right, and my, not that she's on Tinder or anything, but she tried to swipe my face like it was an iPad. And, you know, and that just made me realize no child born before, you know, 211 when the iPad came out ever would have done that. And so now as a species, we're really interacting and connecting different ways because of technology and how it enables education, you know, educators such as myself.

And I consider you an educator because you have a university as well as now it's, you know, it's sort of a for-profit university. It's different than the traditional degree-granting universities. But I wonder how much longer will that be true? Will I eventually, will I eventually be sort of outsourced to, you know, another version of, you know, singularity university or will I be outsourced to, you know, I learned from me when you can talk to Galileo himself in Avatar form? Yeah. So I do believe we are going to reinvent how we educate people significantly.

And the example I use normally is I speak about the notion that if my son wants to learn about ancient Greece, rather than picking up a book that is probably boring and written by some historian who has mediocre writing skills and so forth, or trying to read the original works in ancient Greek or some translation, that'd be really tough. But imagine instead putting on your VR goggles. Now, VR today is at a relatively low resolution, but it's rapidly improving, and we have lots of drivers, and we're seeing lots of companies going into this, obviously, HTC and Facebook with Oculus and Apple and others. And Qualcomm, again, part of the San Diego, Arthur Clark ecosystem, is creating ships driving

a lot of this revolution. But we are moving towards time when I'll be able to put on my VR goggles and I'll be in ancient Greece and it'll be photorealistic. And I see some dude with a toga on a piece of marble over there. And floating over his head, it says Plato. And I walk over and I say, hey, what up, Plato? And he goes, hello, what's your name? And we have a conversation.

And I say, tell me about your day. What did you eat? What are you writing? What are you thinking about? And I have an experience that is unlike anything I'd ever have in a book or even speaking to the best of professors. So that Plato is an avatar driven by a neural net, an AI, that is everything ever written by him or about him, you know, instantiated in that in that in that in that avatar. And that's going to be true for any historical figure or fictitious figure.

And so it's immersive education. So when will we get there? I mean, Ray Kurzweil, my co-founder of Singularity University and our chancellor, believes that will have human level AI by 2029. I see, you know, he has been holding steadfast on that. So I'll believe him on that. So that's, yes, we're going to reinvent education. The best AI, the best educators in the world will be AIs.

In the interim, it'll be, again, we're in this next decade. It's a decade of human-machine collaboration. But at some point, it will be just, you know, and just the same way that Google has demonetized and democratized access to information. And AI will demonetize and democratize access to the best education and the best health care and it will effectively be available to everyone equally for free.

Yeah, and that's sort of what I brought up with David, I read an article that said something to the effect that MIT's president or president of the board said something to the effect that we could actually accept, you know, twice as many, five times as many students as we do with no degradation in student quality and performance. And that seems to me to say that, you know, look at all these people from not just America, but around the world being denied access to an MIT education or UCSD education, et cetera. And the question is to, because I think it's true here too, that, you know, what relevance will there be for a place like this? When you can scale up a partnership between San Diego and call a calm to deliver, you know, this incredibly immersive experience. And when I talk with my friend David Kaiser, he said, no, you'll still need a, you know,

a sage on a stage, is scraping away one piece of rock and another piece of rock. And, you know, I'm too much of a gentleman, as you know, to really stridently disagree with him. But I am worried about the future of my profession that I don't, know how it will compete. This is a model that goes back to, you know, the first century of the, of the last millennium, you know, with the University of Bologna and Alexandria, you know, basically thousand-year-old institutions. How many of those survive? And he thinks that's a sign of their resiliency. I wonder about your, I mean, it seems to me that you're saying your alma mater, you know, days might be numbered in its current form. If so, what will replace it? Will it be, you know,

online only? Yeah, so we have to think differently about education. First of all, Education is not one thing. There is education is human-human interaction. I became an adult in college, right? Living on my own, dealing with problems, not being under the roof of my parents. So there's a whole growing up at a distance element. the human, the human side of that experience.

There is learning skills, and those skills come into different forms. I mean, there's stuff that if you're a physician, you can do a lot in VR, you can do a lot in AR, but being there, the old saying, watch one, do one, teach one, it's probably going to hold true until we have brain computer interface and you can do a full-on simulation

that you can't distinguish from reality. And then there's going to be learning facts and figures and equations and bodies of work, but a lot of that is going to be done better in an AI, VR environment where if I'm learning quantum physics, I can visualize it in a way and see experiments done

and feel quantum physics versus just seeing some guy out with chalk dust and a blackboard on there. So we're going to differentiate different parts. But the other, here's the most interesting thing. Going back to the universities, and you're right, the first universities started, a lot of them came out of the religious world, 1,000 AD, and then the last 500 years, we've seen the growth of the large universities.

And even 100 years ago, you would go to get your graduate, your university degree, from age 18 to age 22. And by the time you were done, first of all, two things happened. One, the world was not moving very fast. Things were not changing dramatically. And then you were dead by 40. So your education that had to last you 18 years

while things didn't change. And today, the world was changing at lightning speeds. And so I think what is really going to happen, Brian, is that we're going to go to university subscription models where it's a lifelong membership. So when I join, when I'm accepted to MIT or UCSD or wherever it might be, yeah, I'm, I am, I'm subscribed to and constantly learning. And that learning is going to come in very different modalities where if I'm wearing

augmented reality glasses and this month, I'm focused on history. As I'm walking down the street, my MIT algorithm is teaching me about the history of wherever I happen to be. And I'm thinking in that way. I'm constantly upgrading my knowledge base and experience base. Now, when you look forward, it sounds, you know, that these things could be negative for college presidents, but these often offer opportunities for...

Yeah, so here's what I talk about. I talk about when you digitize something, you dematerialize it, you demonetize it, you democratize it. So here's the example. You know, instead of paying $100,000 or $200,000 for a four-year degree, what if I'm paying, you know, $5,000 a year, but I have an MIT membership that's going to last me 50 years? And I can offer it not just $4,000 of grads and $4,000, but I can offer it to, you. you know, a million people. So, yeah, I think that we're in agreement there.

I think that this, especially due to the COVID experience, you know, I've had my colleagues be, you know, extremely frustrated and I'm preparing lectures given a week to do so, you know, that take universities that are only online, a lecturer at an online university might take two years to construct a real, brand new Avonitio course. and these other universities like you're saying with your twins, you're finding out, well, how much are they actually getting education, how much of it is babysitting, how much of it is socialization, which is very important, I think, and other types of activities.

I want to move from that to talk about some things, because I always think of you as this irrepressible optimist. I think that you're data-driven, you're driven by facts, you're rational thinker, but you're intrinsically optimistic. And I always like to, yeah, and I always like to kind of take the contrary side. If you're a pessimist, I'd ask you what you're optimistic about. But I want to talk about these kind of the dark side of some of these 60s, as you describe in the book, including, you know, this potential for the lowering of cost and the

demonetization and the lowering of the potential barrier, as we say, physicists say, to entry for many of these things. a lot of times in the past, that's been a good thing. The high barrier has prevented rogue nations from getting nuclear bioweapons. What happens when, you know, you can get Edmund Scientific's CRISPR kit and some rogue state can then take over, not even a rogue state. It could be a rogue individual or deploying drones. You talk very favorably about, you know, the sky darkening with these Uber taxis and so forth. But what about the dark side of these being used by malicious actors?

So, but that's always been the case. I mean, we have how many millions of cars, which are, you know, two-ton devices traveling at 100 kilometers an hour. It's a lot of energy. And they could be used any time, shape, way, or form to, you know, to kill, you know, 30 people in a crowded area. This is not the new technology that offers these dangers. They've been around what new technologies offer is the potential to monitor these problems and to solve them. One of the things that makes me hope is we're heading towards a world of what I call

radical transparency. So in 2020, we have something like, 20 billion connected devices and a trillion sensors. And by 2030, 100 trillion sensors and 100 billion connected devices. And what that means is we're going to enter a world in which you can know anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. And it becomes harder and harder to do anything as secret. So, you know, when there's a drone flying over a herd of rhinoceros or elephants, the poachers stay away. It's, you know, most people do things, you know, in the cloud of secrecy.

But when secrecy becomes more and more difficult, then you think twice about what you're going to do. And I teach my kids, got to be careful, you know, whatever you do, there's a camera watching, there is digital trails. So, you know, the question is, and I ask people all the time, do you really think we are living in a world of privacy? I mean, so Brian, what do you think? Do you think there's privacy out there? No, in fact, I had this conversation with Dave Rubin's a well-known podcast or YouTuber.

And, you know, he's complaining about getting demonetized or de-platformed. And, you know, I asked him the kind of, he's also an optimist. And I said, you know, are he claims to be? And I said, we sound kind of pessimistic. And I wonder how people are, how many people are going to feel bad for you if you go from a million YouTube subscribers to 99,000. And I said, you know, you're really inverting the hierarchy. And this is the point of a that he and I had, whereas it used to be, you know, in the 50s and 60s, it was the kind of far right or the government, really, that was suppressing or invading privacy, McCarthy, et cetera, et cetera. Now it's been kind of open source. And you're absolutely right. I think you have to

come and if you come a range in this digital era, you have this recognition of the benefits and the faults of these massively prevalent devices. I'm a technologist. I love technology. I'm a geek of a nerd like you. I love it. I think I breathe it. I breathe it. I want to see, you know, they once asked, you know, Richard Feynman has another MIT grad like yourself. And they said, you know, like, how long do you want to live? And he was like, I want to live forever. And, you know, that's something we can talk about in the medicine and the future of living chapter. But he said, and the interviewer said, isn't that depressing? Like, all your friends will die. And he was like, no, think of all the great theorems I'm going to get to see in the future,

like proved and new particles discovered and all these amazing. things and he died, you know, relatively young in the 1990. But I wonder, you know, there is, you know, kind of this, I call it sort of this, the malaise of progress. We have this ubiquity of things. Just I'll give you an example, GPS. Like many people can't get around, you know, even their own hometown without GPS. And I wonder if it's, as it has with my children, you know, trying to swipe my face because of the prevalence of iPad technology, if the GPS, if the GPS, has made us collectively as a species, you know, it used to be if you didn't remember where that, you know, cassava melon tree was, you were dead, you know, like that's your brain implanted

dopamine so that you could remember where it was and never forget it. And so I wonder, you know, are there sides, again, this is on the only pessimistic part of, I'll challenge you on, is just, are there ways that technology is increasing this ability, both for people to have, you know, everybody to have equal say in the democracy side of things? not just to have equal say, but to do so with zero cost. Like, it used to be, if I want to tell you, Peter, you know, I don't think you're going to make it as a center for the Celtics. You know, I think, you're not big enough to do that, Peter.

Like, I could only do that in person and you could punch me, you know, where it counts. But now I can do it online. Now, Peter, you can't make the same. So what is that? Is there a downside to that? Just the democratization of everything. Should some things be kept behind gates, just being devil's advocate? So here's the deal.

We don't have a choice. I mean, it's like there's no velocity button. There's no velocity dial or on-off switch to stopping technology and so forth. So it's a evolutionary force. We are the carrier way for technological evolution. The only way to stop it is to like end everything. And we can set it back wars and different things. depressions set it back, but it doesn't stop it. And the question is, what are you trying to

maximize for? You know, I would argue that if what we are measuring at the end of this continuous progress is the uplifting of humanity, meaning the ability for every man, woman and child to have access to all the food, water, energy, health care, education, entertainment that they want, that this march of technology is amazing. But yet we romanticize the past. And yeah, there's going to be trades. I mean, just face it, I can't milk a cow. I can't go and plant enough diverse food products to make.

make a meal that I would be proud of. But that's fine because I spend my time doing other things. You know, there's an Indian yogi by the name of a Sad Guru. I don't know if you know his name. I had a chance to meet him, a brilliant man. And he said, we are finally able to take a vacation from survival. And that just really stuck with me, right? if you look at all of human existence, human species, homo sapiens are about 5 million years old,

give or take, by whatever definition you want to make a cutoff for the human coming on scene. And for 99.999% of that, it has been fundamental survival. Pretty brutal. Brutal survival. And it's just now the last, you know, 20, 30, 40 years that we can sort of take a break from that and say, yeah, you know, let's find some good entertainment or I'm going to choose this wine over this wine or this, you know, fruit from whole foods, within a thousand different options to have.

That's insane. That's amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And soon you'll be able to us 3D print it as you bring up in the book. And another trend that you brought up just to push a little gently on a button, you know, you talk a lot about the value of cities in the book and, you know, the efficiency of the city. And I think, you know, one thing that COVID at least has brought out to me is this realization

that I'm pretty happy not living in a megalopolis. And although I have to say, in all fairness, you do talk about the ability of a flying car, you know, being able to take you from a suburb or an exurb or even the rural. areas of the world into the city should you need to go in there or you just work remotely from home or on the farm while you're kind of being a

you know just learning about how to milk a cow. I don't know. I mean, this time has been good. One of my hobbies has become, you know, growing seeds. And just as you started out, the podcast talking about your checklist, your pre-flight checklist, you know, I started growing like the heirloom tomatoes like in these tiny little burpee seed boxes.

And I became, like, I'm ashamed to admit, but like there was a day when like the sprouts started coming up and I could see there were little flowers going to be like an heirloom tomato, you know, it took five weeks to get this damn seed. You know, soon you'll be able to print it out, I suppose. But for now it was a seed shortage. And that one of my kids, my, I think it was my seven year old, he came on and he like knocked it over. And I'm ashamed of saying, you know, I kind of like, how could you be so careful?

Like it took me so much time to go, this little three inch full thing, you know, putting the fertilizer in water. it putting it in the sun, taking it out of the sun, because it was cold in San Diego last year, whatever. And I realized how much attachment you have to things when you make them yourself. And so I do think there'll be a positive side when you're actually make 3D printing, you know, different things or when you're actually involved in the education of your children instead of outsourcing that to the state, you know, in all cases. So I think there is a tremendous amount of optimism that your book brings up. But it's realistic. I think that there is, there's so much, you know, that's why I want to live forever, because I want to see what the future brings.

And, you know, we can, maybe we'll talk another time. I know your time is a little bit short, but I do want to hit a couple of things. First is your recollections of Arthur C. Clark, you mentioned that you met him on at least one occasion. Can you tell us a little bit about what you remember about him? I met him in 1982 at, I was a college student. I was at MIT at the time, and I went to the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful uses of outer space, and he was giving a talk. And I was there with two of their colleagues, Bob Richards and Todd Hawley, Toddson's passed away. And we were there representing students of exploration, development of space, said, and we were there as a guest of David C. Webb, one of our advisors. And we ended up

befriending Arthur and a long story on how that happened, but we're having dinner with him. And we, over dinner, we're talking about SEDs and our goals and our missions and all of that. And he was telling us about the stories of post-World War II. He's working with German and Russian scientists and what the world was like. And ended up giving him the moniker Uncle Arthur. And he agreed to become an advisor to Seds. And he then went from becoming an advisor to Seds. to becoming the chancellor of the International Space University.

And I would meet him every time he would come to New York to focus on his next books. I were there when 2010 was being filmed. And then I went twice to Sri Lanka to meet him in Colombo. And he was just an amazing supporter of our work. And it was, he had such a deep British voice. He said, you go, hello, Peter. Yeah, I can't do it.

But it was just, it was, it was amazing to get to know him. Yeah. So, yeah, it was great. No, that's wonderful. So I want to finish up the conversation with some questions that I call the final five. And that's really kind of your outlook and some advice that you can give, perhaps. But the first thing I want to talk, you know, you talk a lot about, you know, DNA and kind of this, this magical invention that allows us to have this diversity.

and the sundity of life as we know it. And I think, you know, with your many books now, this is the third in this series. Hopefully they'll be the next edition will come out in 2022 on the 10th anniversary of abundance. I want to ask you some questions about books because I love books.

You were kind enough and gracious enough to endorse losing the Nobel Prize in my book. Deeply appreciative for that. But I want to talk about what books mean to you and, you know, perhaps the future of these books. Actually, we have a copy that will give away to a listener this copy here. I also I also had the Kindle and the

audiobook version that I bought myself and those are wonderful. All formats are wonderful, but what about the physical book? What do you feel is the... And I apologize you. I've got the governor of Utah waiting for me on a conference line. So,

I do a lot of reading in audible. I love physical books. I love the fact that we've got, I have a whole library of books, but I do a lot of my consumption on audible these days, which is why I read my book myself. It was extraordinary. It was a fun experience, but I love books. Books for me are a moment of a conversation with the author. And most of my greatest inventions and business ideas have come out of my reading books and taking notes and

thinking about it and so forth. Anyway, so that's my experience. Let's take one more of the final five. The last one is, I'll just say that the title of this podcast, of course, is Into the Impossible. And I want to know what thing at age 20 or 30 perhaps seemed impossible to you, but now seems perfectly feasible because you took that venture into the impossible. Oh, man, God. I mean, just the ability to start companies as quickly as possible and find amazing people and go after moonshots, right, to be, when I'm driven by my. massively transformative purpose.

I talk about that in bold, extraordinarily, and how to go from an MTP to a moonshot. Just the ability that, you know, I don't have to read about someone else or hope someone else is going to go and do this thing, build this thing, and so forth. I can do that. We're so empowered as entrepreneurs

to go and make stuff happen. It is absolutely extraordinary. I want to thank you and your call for Stephen Kotler for making this happen. The future is faster than you think, how converging technologies are transforming business. industries in our lives. Peter, thank you so much, as always. You're the best. And I wish you all for success and health. Bye-bye. Thank you for your, thanks for your passion and for your

spraying the word of all the things that you do. Be well, my friend. Bye, Peter. Take care. Bye now. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.