The Jordan Harbinger Show - 477: Peter Diamandis | Creating a Future Bold in Abundance

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Peter Diamandis (@PeterDiamandis) is the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, co-host of the Exponential Wisdom Podcast, and co-author of Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World and Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. What We Discuss with Peter Diamandis: What does the future hold for human longevity, space colonization, artificial intelligence, and beyond? How can we adapt — individually and as a society — to deal with increased automation in the workforce? What is linear thinking and why does it cause us to miss the mark when coping with technology, innovation, and the advancement of the human race? If you don’t know your calling in life, your calling in life is to discover what that is. What experiments can kids curious about science do that won’t get them put on a no-fly list for the foreseeable future? And so much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/477 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. Virtual reality is going to get to the point where it's indistinguishable from reality. We're about to transform into a meta-intelligence that we're about to interconnect billion people on the planet and become conscious at a different level. That is a future of the next 30 years. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of the time. top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional arms dealer,

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That's what keeps the lights on around here. Today, one from the vault. We're talking with Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZ Foundation. If you've heard of them, X-Prize offers cash prizes to teams that can do things like remove 100 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, or get a rocket into space and landing on another planet, anything from space exploration, the environment, the fight to end COVID-19. Peter has also written several books, including Bold and Abundance, both recommended reading if you are into Futurology in the prediction of the future in terms of technology,

AI, humanity. You should listen to this episode if you want to hear some crazy and very positive Futurology predictions, such as living to the age of 500, colonizing space, and some incredible advances in AI and human achievement, we'll also delve into how society will need to evolve to respond to increase automation and artificial intelligence, as well as how we can make ourselves more competitive in the long term and the short term. Also, why certain types of linear thinking causes us to miss the mark when we think about technology, innovation, and the advancement of the human race. Enjoy this episode from the Vault with Peter Diamandis.

Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week. It's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network, whether it's for professional or personal reasons. The course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they're in the course, they subscribe, they contribute, so come join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Peter Diamandis. 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, or giving up what seems like a really nice place and living in kind of an apartment just to make it happen, not caring, going back almost into student mode in a lot of ways, and then creating the XPRIZE with the goal of private space flight, and then you've got a lot of sacrifices, a little bit of luck, but probably not as much as some people

would imply. Right. Yeah, not as much as you would have wanted for sure. And I think there are lessons there, and I think you created space for allowing something like the XPRIZ to actually happen. 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 pretty much anything to get there. Do you really want to live more than 500 years? Is that true? Yeah, I mean, I think when I was in medical school, I remember looking at the body in a very different fashion. It was a TV show that was on

that was talking about the notion that certain life forms, turtles, whales, whales, sharks lived hundreds of years, as long theoretically as 700 years. The question asked was, if they can, why can't I? In medical school, I realized, you know, it really is a hardware-software problem.

Yeah. And I think that we are going to learn how to extend the human lifespan indefinitely. And so I picked a ridiculous number of 700 years because that's how long the longest, you know, large life forms supposedly living. And of course, if you can live 200 years now, you can live forever. But it's something I do desire.

And I think we're live now during the most exciting time ever in human history. We're going to see the universe. We're going to understand the foundations of physics. We're going to transform what it means to be human. And it's all happening now. And I think it's happening in the next 30, 40 years. But yeah, I'd like to live longer than that. Is it because you want to see the results of your work or your curiosity?

It's curiosity. It's all about every year is much more fascinating than last. I don't know why. 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? I think so part of it is having a healthy extended human lifespan. It's not just about living old. Right. It's not about being 80 for six of your 700 years or an 80-year-old physical condition. 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've got to follow your dad and be a doctor. Well, was she disappointed when you became a multimillionaire entrepreneur instead? So listen, it's, my parents grew up in a small island in Greece called the island Lesbos in a small town of Mictilini. And, you know, where my dad went from his small Oceanside town to become New York physician was this massive leap forward. and it was like, you know, just a complete different orders of magnitude, different life. 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.

And so they wanted the best that they knew for me. And my dad had built an OBGYN practice. You know, he delivered some 30,000 kids during his career. Remember having fun doing that calculations with him. Anyway, long story short, that's what they knew. But my passion wasn't there. my passion was space. And so there was an ongoing argument always about, will I become a doctor, will I become an astronaut? And after I graduated medical school, and I never went and did my internship

or residency, my mom would say, would be two questions. One, are you married yet? Right, of course. You know, it's like every mom asked, you know, it's not too late for you to go in practice. So ultimately, I didn't. I followed my dreams and I'm thankful for it. And no, they've been proud of me. Sure. 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. So I'm very clear, and I do this with all my graduate students at Singular University,

everybody who's in my abundance 360 community, people who follow me in any way, shape, or form. It's like you have to live a passion and purpose-driven life, because if you can, why would you not want to? And so a lot of people just don't understand what their passion or purpose is. That's the hard part, you know. And I'm amazed at even in an organization. or as a group as highly selected and as academically achieved

as the Singular University Global Solutions Program, our graduate program, of the 80 students who enter out of 4,000,000, 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? They've been pursuing excellence. They've been pursuing knowledge.

They've been pursuing more doing, without knowing why. And so I say, you know, listen, your job here during this 10-week program is to figure out what is your calling in life. And, you know, 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. And a couple of tricks for you to think about is what did you want to do as a kid, right? What was it that the 9 or 10 or 12-year-old version of you love to do that maybe we're told,

No, there's no career there, which is bullshit. There's a career in anything. Or you can't live a living that way or that's not possible for you, whatever case might be. So what did you want to do as a kid is one strong signal, one strong indicator of what your passion might be. Another is if I were to give you a billion dollars and say, go make the world a better place, don't have to worry about income, you've got the money to make a difference. What do you want to do? Do you want to go cure a disease? Do you want to go teach people? Do you want to go build art music? What do you want to do? You can find some kind of a signal in the noise for your passion there. 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? No, I think it's a matter of,

I think you'd be thinking more about what reach you want. 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 breach that you have would have cost orders of magnitude more 10 years ago and orders of magnitude more 10 years before that. It would have been impossible 10 years before that. 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. It is amazing the pace that things have made. And I was reading the book, the experiments that you did when you were a kid disassembling toys, stockpiling chemicals, launching S-Disc rockets, I just saw a lot of myself in there. The only problem I have with those rockets is that

whenever it launched, the parachute would melt. That was the problem I always had. You have enough wadding in there. I know. It was always the wadding. You know, I skimped on the wadding, but that's what I knew it. Some of the things you did when you were young

makes me scared to have kids as well, because I'm thinking the stockpiling of the explosives. I mean, talk about a no-fly list or worse at this point. Do you think your kids, are they going to start driving you crazy with their pursuits? How much are you going to help me into that? Well, so it's interesting, right? Because I have two five-year-old boys,

and they're already great experimentalists. And it's like, what experiment we're going to do today? And it's like, oh my goodness, it's like, I can just see where it's going to go. It's only a matter of time. It's only a matter of time. But the beautiful thing about it today is we can do different kinds of experiments. You know, I used to when I was a kid, and Julian Guthrie writes in How to Make a Spaceship, my stories of my best friend, Billy Greiburg and I would order chemicals from chemical supply companies. I mean, we'd get huge boxes of potassium perchlorate, potassium nitrate, and magnesium and sulfur and charcoal and manganese, and just all these

chemicals that, you know, were explosives. We'd make our own explosives, our own rocket fuel, our own M80s. You know, we blew up all kinds of things, including my friend's swimming pool. But of course, you'd be tracked down as a terrorist. Yeah, you can't even order that stuff now. You can't, right. Even today's high school chemistry labs are so watered down as to be laughable. But we can do experiments with other things, right? We can build things on tablets and run experiments in the virtual world. We can create robots. You know, my kids' Lego sets are incredible. And so it's fun to see how we can experiment. We can 3D print stuff. That's a 3D printer in the lobby. Yeah, we've got two 3D printers from 3D systems here. 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. I don't know how much those things cost, but they're pretty pro-level. Yeah, no, for a level three, Pridger's. Yeah, more than the house I grew up in, I would imagine. On that note, people do say, oh, you know, we're heading a hell in a handbasket or whatever the old timers like to say, these Luddites. We see a lot of bad news. Do you agree with this, or do you see technology is offering a true solution to existential

problems like global warming and education and poverty and things like that? Well, yeah, I think the world's going to end. I'm just kidding. I was like, I read a different book than you. And this is all chronicled in my first book. called abundance, the future is better than you think, and I gave a TED talk in 2011, 2012, when the book was launched. And one of the things I realized is that we as humans are genetically selected to see the bad news. And what that means is we see problems way in advance. 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, I see the problems and we advance them in our mind to the point of, oh my God, it's a crisis. We're going to deal with it right now. But the fact the matter is, even as we go forward in time and we encounter the problem, we forget that there's been five, ten, twenty years of technological development. In abundance, I talk about the environmental crisis of the 1890s. If you read that, but the environmental crisis, 1890s, was horse manure. Literally. Literally horse. 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. So as people started moving into New York, into Chicago, into San Francisco, into Detroit, whatever it was, St. Louis. And they brought their horses, there was piles of horseshit so high that it was causing disease and runoff and it really problems. And the predictions were dire. It's like we are predicting the number of people coming to cities with their horses. how are we going to deal with this. And what changed all that was the car. The car came along as a more advanced technology and got rid of this problem. 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. However, my projection and that of other individuals, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, so forth, is that we're heading towards a solar economy. 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. And so when you look at all of the metrics, we're living in an amazing world. Over the last hundred years, the per capita income for every nation on the planet is more than triple. The human lifespan is more than doubled. The cost of food has dropped 13-fold. Cost of energy is dropped 30-fold. Transportation hundreds of fold. Communications millions of fold cheaper case and point this podcast. Right, sure. Almost every possible conceivable metric,

literacy has exploded around the planet. The cost of access to health care is exploded. 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, 80-hour work weeks just to survive. Right, hammering things in a factory or something like that. Sure. So what do you think is the most promising solution for climate change? Solar. I think solar is for sure where I'm putting my bad. 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. 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. You mentioned working in factories, 80-hour work weeks and things like that. What are your thoughts on the increasing effective automation on society? I mean, do you think we're going to see dramatic changes in employment? And if so, how do we cope with that if we're automating? Right. So we are going to see dramatic changes in employment.

AI and robotics will displace half of the jobs that we currently have. But they're also going to create new jobs that we currently can't conceive of. And we're going to merge with robots. We're going to merge with AIs in different ways. We're going to collaborate in different ways. We're going to create new kinds of capabilities we didn't have before. 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? And it's a pretty staggering situation that something like 70% of Americans hate their jobs. Oh, that's depressing. Yeah, well, and it's not surprising either, right? People don't work to check out 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. 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. And so let those jobs go away. And how do we find a time where people can do what they love to do? And so I think that there's going to be a transformation in what people do and what gives them gratification. I write a blog each week and anybody interested, if you go to deamandis.com,

I put out a blog every Sunday. The next blog is going to be on universal basic income. And so this concept that is being tested in governments around the world that everyone, who is a citizen of a country, gets a basic income. And we're going to demonetize the cost of living, meaning the cost of living is going to radically come down. One case in point that when we get to autonomous Uber's, having an autonomous Uber is going to be five times cheaper than owning a car. Good. Amen. So you don't need to own a car. You don't have to park it. You don't have to fuel it. You don't have to get insurance for it, and you're getting chauffeur at every place you go. Sounds great to me. Sounds good to me. How many years until you think we see either a negative

income tax or the UBI in the USA? Are you thinking 20 years? Are you thinking 50 years? Do you have a timetable at all? You know, I don't for the U.S. We're seeing it being adopted around the world already, and we're going to start to see more and more countries bringing it on. I think the U.S., we may see some versions of it within the next 10 years. It's going to accelerate as unemployment goes up, what I call technological unemployment. 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. And UBI will have been proven and tested in different parts of the world already. It will be an easier onboarding process in the U.S. at that point. 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. Well, so interesting, 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. So the best education in the world will soon be free. Rather than go to MIT or Harvard or Stanford and spend $100,000 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.

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, your abilities, and follows everything you do and gives you lessons throughout the day. Healthcare will be delivered by AI and robots effectively for free. There will be a time in the future where if you need some kind of surgery, The last thing you want is a human surgeon touching.

Oh, yeah. Well. Right? Where that robot's done it a million times perfectly. And so if we can see the demonetization of education, of health care, of cars, VR, VR in 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. You can live an hour away or two hours away and commute by VR where the house prices are

one-tenth the cost. So all of a sudden, we're going to change what it costs to live. And at the same time, the quality of life, you know, 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. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Peter Diamandis. We'll be right back. Now, back to Peter Diamandis on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I remember a science teacher when I was in sixth grade since something like who here would want to be a king in Egypt. And of course, everyone raised their hand. And he goes, what if you could never have toast again? Because you probably couldn't get a piece of toast in Egypt. It would be really hard. I mean, sure, someone could fire roast a piece of toast

for you, but good luck, you know, making a smore back then. And everyone was kind of like, I really love toast, you know, all the hands went down. On that same token, I mean, do you see technology increasing or decreasing the gap between rich and poor? You talk about demonetization. Looking at something like planetary resources, you could make trillions of dollars, I would imagine, mining an asteroid. We might eliminate poverty entirely using AI automation, or perhaps that gap could increase tenfold. Yeah. So, great question. And what I see is the following. We've lived in a world of have and have-nots, and it's been changing over time. 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, 99.999% of the population where the have-nots. And that's what it was. It was a few people at the very top of the mountain, the top of the food chain, and the masses. And today, you know, it's changed where we have halves, we have a huge middle class, halves, and then we have a diminishing number of have-nots. I want you 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, food, water, shelter, health care, education, energy, you know, whatever the Maslow's hierarchy of needs are here. So I imagine a world of halves and then some super haves. Super haves, right. So there'll still be people who have their own spaceship or whatever.

Yeah, whatever. Their asteroids live on other planets living hundreds of years. But a world in which a mom in the middle of Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, in the poorest parts of the world, knows that her children have access to the world's best education, world's best health care, all the energy, clean water, tech access they want. And so that's the world we're heading towards. And I would rather have a world of halves and a few super haves than a world of have-nots and have-s. Sure. I definitely agree with that. you think it's going to get to Mars first, SpaceX, NASA, China? It's not going to be NASA. I put my, no, I put my money on SpaceX for sure, no question. Will you go yourself if given the opportunity?

Oh yeah. I mean, I would love to go. I'm someone who wants to travel to space. I'd love to go to Mars. I'd love to go to the moon. I'd love to start an off-world colony. You know, I think there's sort of space falls into three groups. The Lunites, the Mars colony first, and the people who want to build colonies in free space and not go into a gravitational well. I've spent my time on all, I'm thinking about all three. Waitlessness for that extended period of time. I was talking with Mike Massimino and he said, look, after a while, you just, you got to have that gravity. There's something about it. Well, in my version of a space colony, such as that of Gerard K. O'Neill, it would be a large rotating habitat. Oh, right. Artificial gravity. Great artificial gravity. Yeah. I saw you did an Ammon

on Reddit or an AMA. And you chastised a couple of people, jokingly, of course, about not using their linear mind to think. What does that mean? What do you mean by that? So as humans, we evolved hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago in a world that is local and linear. Put yourself back in the savannas of Africa

during the first humanoids. And back then, nothing changed, right? The world was pretty much the same generation to generation to generation. Nothing changed over a thousand years. And anything that affected you was local. It was within a day's walk. And so our brains, the wetware and hardware of our brains are what I describe as local and linear.

And of course, the world today is anything but that. Today the world is global and exponential. So 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. but of course we're living during a time of greatest change. And being agile to be able to have an exponential mindset, have a global mindset is very important these days. Looking at society evolving along with technology, do you think that society will be able to evolve as quickly as technology?

What type of adjustments will we have to make as a society, say, in the next 10 years? So that's tough. We humans and society do not evolve as fast as tech. And in particular, there are structures in society, governments and religions, that tend to keep things as stable as possible. Humans, our very nature, is we don't like change. We like to wake up in the morning and know the world is the same way as it was the night before. And when things change radically, it's very disrupting and very disconcerting. But when something improves tenfold like digital cameras versus film cameras or Uber,

versus taxis, there's a very rapid adoption curve. And then we adopt that as the new baseline. 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. And that large-scale change on the governmental side does not occur. Yeah, for sure. What do you think will permeate society faster? Something like smartphones, which seemed to take a while,

but are now in the hands of everybody. I mean, my parents are looking to upgrade their iPhones at this point, or self-driving cars, which may also take forever just because of regulation. Yeah, so it's interesting, right? And that's an important point that iPhones, once the spectrum was allocated by the FCC, there was no other regulatory hurdles to pass. Autonomous cars are hitting a few hurdles. One is pre-existing systems like taxi and rental car companies. But the adoption has been so extraordinarily rapid because the convenience is so high from Uber.

And now what's going on is you've got companies like Google, like Uber, and like Tesla, actually getting a lot of data. And they're getting data because they're doing it really smart. Like I own a Model S and the Model X, and both of those cars have, you know, autopilot on it. And when I drive it on autopilot as much as I can, and when it's being driven on autopilot, it's uploading data to the network. you know, Tesla is gathering a huge amount of data with which to train its algorithms. 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, double autonomous cars driving than people. I agree with that. I mean, you live in L.A. You've seen the driving here. 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 to make the point that says by not passing the rules, you're harming people's lives. Right. It's going to become a clearly more

dangerous scenario. I predict the gun nuts of the next 50 years are going to be the, I deserve to be able to drive my own car. Those are the people causing 99% of the accidents. When my 80-year-old dad, who had this onset of Alzheimer's, you know, had his Florida driver's license automatically renewed. Yeah, to take a driver's license away from somebody. There's a whole process. Basically, you have to be, you have to have full power of attorney over that person to do it. It's impossible. What are you doing to educate your children? What will you be doing to make sure their education goes well? And what are you going to do that most people are not doing with their kids right now? 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 in a much faster rate than I did. So, you know, I have a big debate and conversation always about, you know, tablet time. But becoming agile in using tech is going to become the oxygen, the lingua franca, to mix metaphors here of the future. And I have a hard time saying, no, you shouldn't be using the technology. In fact, they probably, the stronger they are, the more agile, they are, the better it's going to be for them. But I've realized that for me, there are three

basics that have nothing to do with technology that I want for them. It's one helping them find out what their passion is and supporting that no matter what it is. 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. I mean, great, all right? So what is your passion? What is their passion? The second thing is helping them remain curious. I ask my kids every day when I drop them off. I say to them, ask them good questions today. And then when I pick them up from school, I say, what questions did you ask? It's like just getting them into the mindset of asking questions, as many questions as possible. And then grit, which is making sure that they know if they want something to keep

at it, to not give up. Why is that so important to you? It seems like a dumb question on its face, but you are a big mindset guy for reading your books. You love to talk about how you can do anything you put your mind to. Why is that such an important realization for not only kids, but for everyone? Because as individuals, we're becoming so empowered today that mindset is the only restrictor. There's no lack of capital. You have 15 to 20 billion dollars in crowdfunding. There's more angel capital and venture capital and wait time before. So capital is not an issue. Access to knowledge is not an issue, right? With Google, you can know anything you want. Access to experts is not an issue. Access to computing.

power is not an issue. So if you say, what is the scarce resource? The scarce resource is the passionate committed mind, the person who says, okay, I am going to make this happen. All right. 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 XPRIZ concept died and my not giving up. And she does an amazing job telling that story over and over and over again. And, you know, we wouldn't be having this conversation and your listeners wouldn't be listening to this had I given up. And so ultimately, mindset is for me the single most important thing that a person can have. 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?

And in fact, when you started the XPRIZ I heard and I read, you didn't have the $10 million to give away. He got an insurance policy, the whole and one insurance, along with 150 plus rejections from trying other ways to get it, of course. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I just was so confident in the idea because I was clear that it was a good idea. And if you have confidence in your ideas, and I also had done enough in the space world that I had built enough of a track record. You know, 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 Jeff Bezos started the chapter at Princeton.

And, you know, it goes on to International Space University and my launch company and Zero Gravity Corporation and eventually XPRIZE. 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 out to bullshit myself. And I had enough people who I bounced it off, who got it and said yes.

And so my confidence level grew and to the point where it wasn't a matter of, is this a good idea anymore? It's like, damn it, someone out there is going to help me fund this thing. It's a good idea. It's going to work. And when you can find that idea, and there's so many examples over and over again of companies that, you know, were overnight successes after 10 years of hard work. Sure. Yeah, this podcast being one of them. I mean, we're no Facebook or anything, but online.

You seem to have taken a much different route than many normal entrepreneurs. in this type of space. See, you're laughing to yourself because obviously we... Well, I don't know what a normal route for an entrepreneur is. Me neither. 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. Well, first of all, you're dedicating your life right now, it seems to helping other entrepreneurs facilitate and executing on their big ideas.

Why did you go that route after the original XPRIZE? Well, I mean, you have to understand And I have always lived 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 and what I enjoy. And I enjoy the coming up with the idea, the formulation of the vision, helping raise the capital, getting the team on board, and then typically taking a role as executive chairman and hiring a CEO.

I don't love the management of the details of the people, the hiring, the firing, and so forth. And so I partner with a great CEO. So here at XPRIZE, I'm a service executive chairman. I've got Marcus Schingles as CEO at Singular University. I'm co-founder with Ray Kurzweil. He's the chancellor. I'm the executive chairman there. And Rob Nail is a CEO at Planetary Resources.

Chris Luki is a CEO. And Eric Anderson and I are co-executive chairman and so forth at Human Longevity. and my venture fund, bold capital partners, this new stem cell company called Cellularity. All of these cases, these are, I'm filled with the diversity and excitement of running those companies. They're all science fiction novels, right? They're all crazy moonshots. And then there's a layer separate from those, which is sort of X-Prize, helping incentivize entrepreneurs, Singulari 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 people see the way the world is changing. 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, Tony is a dear friend of mine. And I realized that we're undergoing a transformation as a species during our lifetimes. It's like going from lungfish to the land.

We're undergoing a transformation. And my mission and my purpose is to inspire and guide this transformation both on and off the earth. We're going to transform how we raise our kids, how we govern, how we live our lives, where humanity exists in the solar system, in the universe. And it's happening now at an accelerating rate. And it's going to be a time which is both scary for many who don't want change and exciting for the fact of what we're becoming.

We're becoming what I call a meta-intelligence, a multi-human intelligence, and we're connecting in ways like never before. 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. It's an exciting time to be alive. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Peter Diamandis. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Your support of this show, it keeps me going every morning, gets me out of bed all happy, bushy-tailed, and your support of our advertisers keeps the rest of this thing going.

To get all the discounts and the codes, all those things in one place, so you don't have to freaking rewind or go to the show notes if you don't want to, all of them are on one page at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you're going to make a purchase, you're looking for a way to support the show, please go to Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we have worksheets for the episodes. If you want some of the drills, exercises, big takeaways from the show, they're all in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Peter Diamandis. If you had to pick between all those different companies, I mean, if you had to achieve just one more

significant milestone, what would it be? Oh, goodness. That's not a fair statement. I'm not going to choose between children. I have, I think, three basic thrusts opening up space, extending the human lifespan and solving grand challenges, right? So those are the three thrusts that I have. I squeeze a fourth in by helping entrepreneurs taking shots. But anyway, that's like wishing for more wishes with the Cheney, right? I think so. That's, yeah. So I wrote something called Peter's Laws long ago. I saw a copy of Murphy's Law, my business partner's wall, and I was like so pissed at it. I just like stare at every day and it said, if anything can go wrong, it will. And I was like, that's just like the worst attitude you can possibly have. And I went on my whiteboard and I wrote, if anything can go wrong,

fix it to hell with Murphy. And that became Peter's law. And then I started adding to it. My second law was when given a choice, take both. And so that just has iterated a few times. Yep. And we just did that, right here as well. So are you in between companies all day long? I mean, how do you kind of manage your time when it comes to that. I manage it going between companies. I typically will spend, you know, yesterday, it was in Panama yesterday. This company called Cellularity, which is a stem cell company, who was down there with Bob Haruri. Today was Ph.D. Ventures. Tomorrow, I'm at Singular University all day. 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. And for me, it's a glorious life of ADD.

Yeah, it sounds like it. Are you doing that in Panama? because of the laws in the U.S. just too much of a pain in the... 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. Lots of studies going on. I went down for two reasons. One, there's a stem cell clinic called the Stem Cell Institute in Panama City, Panama, that we're looking at what potentially rolling up and a stem cell roll up that we're working on. And second, I went down to get my own treatment on my knee and my shoulder.

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. And I went and had Monday 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. And so I'll see in the next 60 days how that goes. The data is extremely positive. And if I can avoid going into surgery, great.

Yeah, no kidding. The shots in your kneecaps sound painful, but it's a lot less painful than surgery. And it wasn't painful at all. I was taking video with my cell phone. They were injecting me in. Oh, wow. And sharing it with my community.

Really? Parascoping your knee injections? Yeah. How do you quantify success? You're involved in so many things. Is there a metric you use to definitively say, look, I'm making an impact with this? Well, I think the metric is, am I having fun? Really?

Am I having fun? And then, I mean, each company has its metrics. Each company has key points. You know, early on is, are you demoing the tech? Then is, are you raising the capital and are you attracting the clients? You know, my theme for 2017 is experimentation. So rapid experimentation. Are we experimenting? What's the data we're collecting? What's the targets we're setting? Are we achieving

those targets? But ultimately, am I enjoying myself? Do I feel like I'm making a difference? 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. It probably simplifies things quite a bit. What's the ultimate goal for humanity here? Continued existence, expansion to the rest of the galaxy slash universe, acquisition of data. So I think, as I mentioned earlier, We're undergoing a transformation as humanity. We're evolving. We're going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism, to evolution by intelligent

direction. We're rapidly changing what it means to be human. And I think we're creating AI. We're creating new forms of life. We are literally writing genomes of new life forms. We're beginning the ability to edit our own genomics with CRISPR Kempark past nine technology, and we're going to become a new species. And it's shocking to me the timeline that I see, which is a few decades, 30 years at the most. Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity

in, you know, 2029. 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. such that we're going to be able to expand our memory, expand our cognitive capabilities. You know, our brain is very limited. Our neocortex has 300 million pattern recognizers, 100 neurons each. And when you use that for memorizing things, you've used it up. But we offload a lot of that, right? On my cell phone or all the emails and phone numbers and so forth.

So we're transforming. And I think we're going to become, you know, you as a human are a collection of 10 trillion human cells. Each one of your cells is a life form, but it makes you in a connected form. And I think of each of us as humans as individual life forms that are about to become connected into a met intelligence. And I think we're going to be conscious on a brand new level. 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. I know so many startups working on brain-computer interface. It's an extraordinary time. Yeah, I can't wait for some of that stuff.

As a language learner, I was speaking with some of these startup folks and they said, yeah, you're learning Chinese? That's going to be a huge waste of your time in a few years. I hope you're having fun doing it because in five, ten years, you'll be able to, quote-unquote, learn Chinese in minutes. You'll just have no need to do it. Well, you'll speak English and it will come out Chinese in the listener's ears. Right, exactly. We have already hearing aids that can translate. I saw that. I wondered how well that works. Because of, 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 to the point where, just like my dad, when I told him about Yahoo in the 90s, he said, nobody needs that. There are libraries everywhere. And I thought to myself, this is my dad's comment all over again. Oh, well, you know, we won't need that for this, and people are going to be bilingual or this is going to happen. 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. You hang out with top people all the time, and by hang out, I mean, work with and fraternize with. What are a few traits you see in common? I know everybody works hard. I know everyone reads a lot, but is there anything, maybe even some dark stuff? You know, are we all scared children that have

this crazy desire for power? Are they all competitive to a sick degree? I think, and I wrote about in my book, Bold, I am honored to have as friends, investors, and board members, folks like Larry Page and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and I write about them and others. And I think to a large degree, they're all massive optimists, really optimists about the future. And they are about rapid experimentation, about just continually experimenting and trying things and not pre-guessing. They're about doing audacious moonshots. You know, when you've reinvented an industry like PayPal, or Elon, like, what do you do next? They're also driven by passion. Probably the most important thing is they're passion-driven individuals. And they're creating stuff that they would love

to see created and that they want. And it's that level of passion, of grit, of not giving up. And, of course, there's a good amount of luck in all of this. But they're all incredibly smart. So that's a reality amongst all of them. The optimism and the passion are interesting. You don't hear about the optimism as much. 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. It's more hyper-driven is what we hear about most of the time. How often do you genuinely go offline and take a break and not look at anything? At night when I go to sleep. Oh, when you're unconscious. So every day for several hours. Oh, man, it's really tough for me. That's one of my biggest

challenges is shutting down. I was in Panama, as I said, and I flew yesterday home in a seven and a half hour flight and, you know, 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. But I aspire to doing less, but I, you know, I'd be bullshitting myself if I said I've really done that. I'm on 7 by 24 by 365. At some point I got to say, actually, you love it, so stop complaining about it. Sure. 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. So it'll be an hour in the morning and an hour when they come back from school, and I will do my damnedest. Like, you know, I'm rushing back after our conversation right now to go and get them from school. What is next for you? Are you going to put more irons in the fire? So I think I'm always putting more irons in the fire, and I'd be bullshitting myself if I said I don't. So I expect to be starting one or two companies a year, investing in a dozen companies each year. What's the next XPRIZE or X-Prizes?

Oh, wow, we have some great XPRIZE.A Airlines is funding an X-Prize called the Avatar X-Prize. Can you create a robot that you can plug your consciousness into? 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. So it's disintermediating the future of travel. Sure. And you can explore other planets that are toxic to humans are too dangerous.

That's a great one. With Caterpillar, we're working on an Iron Man XPRIZE, the president of Caterpillar basically came down with ALS, and, you know, he's going to have reduced mobility. We said, could there be an XPRIZE to create sort of an Ironman suit that would allow a person with ALAS to actually open the door and get around and communicate and so forth? So a lot of interesting technologies along those lines.

We just launched a water abundance XPRIZE. Can you take water out of the humidity of the air in India and give people 20 liters of clean drinking water? 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? Oh, wow.

And it's funny because there's not really a whole lot of it has to be this way and do this. You're leaving this up largely to the creativity of the people involved. That is what I think, at least from reading your books, it looks like makes the magic. Because you can really find ideas that you can't find these ideas

with constraints attached. Yes. It has to be wide open. Can you tell us something that's true that you believe that just nobody, almost nobody agrees with you on. Well, two things. One is that we're living in a virtual existence

that I think for sure we're an nth generation virtual world. We are going to create a next virtual world, AIs that we're in a video game that we're playing in a virtual existence as one. I believe that and it's not, it wouldn't change anything I do. The second thing is that we're about to transform into a meta-intelligence,

that we're about to interconnect billion people on the planet and become conscious at a different level. That is a future of the next 30 years. 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, we just don't see. It's like Westworld. Yeah. We're these robots that think we're in reality. And we will create the next iteration of that. AI and virtual reality is going to get to the point where it's indistinguishable from reality. And so it's not just a VR, a virtual existence.

It's that we're an nth generation, in a word, one generation, be that next, begins the next. I think of the world that way. No one needs to agree with me. It doesn't change the way I see or do anything, but that's my belief. Can I ask why you think that? I have heard that before,

but only from sci-fi writers and things like that. Oh, because I just 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. I think it's a force of nature and we're not the first ones to have reached this level of technological advancement. So we could be biological AI or something along those lens. Or virtual AI. Or just not here at all. Right. Where is here? We don't know. Peter, thank you so much. It's been fascinating.

I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a sample of my interview with an emerging infectious disease expert that's taking a proactive approach to identify, prepare for, and stop viral threats before they become pandemics. Here's a quick look inside. A new influence of virus that is transmissible and is deadly. That is what will then sweep around the world as a pandemic. The 1918 flu at the end of World War I, we had 50 to 100 million deaths. That was 50 to 100 million deaths when the world's population was. 1.8 billion. So think about it today. Even if it took us 300,000 years to hit the billion mark, we've been able to add 6 billion in just 10 decades.

6 billion people. Yeah. And by the time we get to the end of this century, we're going to be right on the age of 12 billion. Oh my God. The speed with which an influenza virus could move is staggering. Were a virus to emerge today within one year, a year later, 2 billion people would likely be infected. And if it were as lethal as the 1918, which had a mortality rate of 3%. You're talking about hundreds of millions of people. Oh, my God.

The fact of the matter is time marches on. The societies we live in today that we take for granted will be a footnote in history 500 years from now. The architecture that we surround ourselves with, they will be ruins or forgotten. It's not a question. question of if there will be epidemics, there will be pandemics. It is a question of when. For more, including why a future influenza epidemic is not a matter of if but when, and why

vaccine hesitancy is one of the top 10 health threats in the entire world. Check out episode 320 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Dennis Carroll. Big thank you to Peter Diamandis. His books are bold and abundance. We'll link to those in the show notes. Also, this is from the vault, right? So remember this is recorded several years ago, he turned out to be right about space X being the first viable commercial rocket company. He was very right. Although by the time we recorded this, if you're kind of on the inside, maybe that was a foregone conclusion. I guess we'll never know. We'd have to ask Elon Musk if we're ever given the chance. Big thank you to Peter for coming on the show again. Remember, we're going to link to the books in the show notes. If you buy the books,

please use our website links. That does help support the show. Worksheets for this episode in the show notes, transcripts for the episode in the show notes. Feel free to reach out and connect with me. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system, software, and tiny habits that I use to keep in touch with hundreds and hundreds of people, if not thousands, now that I think about it. It's our six-minute networking course.

The course is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company, and that's where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My amazing team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie O'Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

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