The Pomp Podcast - #1126 Peter Diamandis On Achieving Longer Lifespans & Improving The Human Condition

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Peter Diamandis is an author, investor, and founder. He has a bold ambition that the future actually looks better than the past. He started numerous companies and some that you probably haven't even heard of yet. I really enjoyed this conversation with Peter. In it, we talk about longevity, age reversal. We talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, talk about mindset, ambition, focus, and we talk about his well-known X Prize. I really enjoyed this conversation with Peter because it gives us optimism for how well the future could go if we work hard today on the

Starting point is 00:00:46 right problems and things go right. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation. Once you're done, jump on Twitter, let us know what you think, what you liked and what you didn't like. I always appreciate the feedback, and I hope this conversation is valuable for you. Here is my conversation with Peter Diamandis. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. The Bullish Exchange leverages innovations of DeFi and a regulated framework so you can execute fast, reliable trades with tight spreads, even in volatile markets. Bullish's total trading volumes have now exceeded $100 billion since it launched in November 2021. Bullish offers industry-leading order depth. It's one of the deepest markets on the planet for Bitcoin and ETH. And now with its

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Starting point is 00:03:13 got Peter here with me. Peter, I know that you've been doing a bunch of work in the longevity space, And I think that more and more people are realizing there may be this intersection between their personal health, how long they're going to live, and the quality of their life. Talk a little bit as to why are you so personally interested in longevity and why are you even spending so much time, money, and energy on this space? Yeah, it's become an infatuation priority both as an entrepreneur and personally as an individual, right? So I've spent most of my early life in space focused on building space companies and then focused with XPRIZE and Singularity on sort of moonshot companies, exponential tech companies. But it's really been the last eight years that I've become really focused on how do we add 10, 20, 30 healthy years in our lives? And that buys you the bridge to the additional 10, 20, 30 healthy years. The story on this, well, first of all, I'll say that for me, it's the greatest gift you can give anybody is their health.

Starting point is 00:04:13 And as an entrepreneur, I'm on my 26th, 27th company. It's the biggest value proposition you can create. There are no bigger businesses on the planet than adding decades of health onto a person's life. It goes back to me when I was in medical school. And I like to say don't ever come to me for any medical advice. But in this area, I'm focusing deeply. when I was in medical school, I remember reading and researching that there were species of organisms, whales, Greenland sharks, turtles that could live two, three, four or 500 years. And if

Starting point is 00:04:46 they could live that long, why couldn't we? And my summation was, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And we're going to have the ability to eventually fix that. Well, it's this decade that we're learning why we age, how to slow it down, potentially how to reverse it. And that becomes super exciting. And so that's really, you know, the convergence of AI, sensors, networks, CRISPR, gene therapy, all those technologies are coming together, giving us the tools to make a dent in aging, I think. So when we think of longevity, I think there's a couple of different schools of thought. One is, hey, we can basically put a pause button. So, hey, you know, you're 40 years old. You're going to pause at 40 for 10, 15, 20 years.

Starting point is 00:05:28 And then you continue with kind of your life expectancy. There's another that would be actual age reversal. So you're 40, but you can feel 25 and your body can actually operate that way. And there's a couple of other schools of these thoughts. How do you think about it? What is like the best path forward? Is it a combination of some of these? or do you think that there's like a holy grail, like age reversal, if we can accomplish that,

Starting point is 00:05:50 that's really what the ultimate mission is? Sure. And let me ask you a question. When you're born, when you're 20, when you're 40, when you're 60, when you're 80, how much do your genes change? Yeah, probably not that much. Not at all, right? You have 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad that you get at birth. And you've got that through the entirety of your life. So if your genes aren't changing, if your software isn't changing, why do you look different? Why don't you look like you were, you know, when you were 18? And it isn't your genes, it's which genes are on and which genes are off that matters. And that is a really fundamental question. And it's called your epigenome, epi for the Greek word above, and it's sort of the, you know, sort of the puppet

Starting point is 00:06:34 master, if you would, of controlling what genes are on, what genes are off. And as we get older, the regulation of your epigenome changes and genes that should be off are turned on and genes that should be on are turned off. And so the question is, can you change that? Can you restore yourself to an earlier period of epigenetic regulation? And that's the holy grail here. And that's the idea around age reversal. And so it's been demonstrated in animals, mice, rats, I think even dogs, and in human cells that are in vitro, in the petri dish, or even human skin cells grafted onto other animals, because we're not doing this in humans yet. But there's enough evidence to say that there's a there there. And if there is, it's the biggest opportunity.

Starting point is 00:07:26 And so when I think about this, and I'm promoting this through my companies or my investments, and I've committed for my venture fund, Bold, we have about a half a billion dollars, two-thirds of which are focused in this health tech, biotech space. I think about the importance of just remaining vital and in great shape for the next decade because during that decade, we're going to intercept all of these new breakthroughs that buy you the next decade and then the next decade. One of the ideas is called longevity escape velocity. and it's the idea that for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life by a certain

Starting point is 00:08:05 amount. And there's going to be a point where for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for greater than a year. And that's the holy grail. And the question is, when are we going to hit that? How will we know when we hit that? Is that a measurable thing or is that something that kind of is a theoretical that we try to, we kind of just trust that science is progressing And even if life expectancy, as we've seen over the last couple of years, may tuck in a little bit in the United States, but really over decades, we've seen it continue to expand. And it's a belief in that versus it actually being a measurable thing. You're spot on, right? We have to look at the trend lines over the long term, not just over a year or two.

Starting point is 00:08:46 During COVID, we saw, as you said, in the United States, the actual health expectancy drop and for a multitude of reasons. but over the last century we've seen the health expectancy of across countries around the world increased by multiple decades and some in some countries more than double I think we're going to know this from and and really there are multiple ways to think about how old you are and we have these these clocks these aging clocks that are based on the methylation pattern of your DNA. But I want to know how old I am by virtue of my function, right? How strong is my muscle? How good do I look? How great do I feel? How strong is my heart? And all of those. And so a lot of the work that I'm thinking about right now isn't age reversal

Starting point is 00:09:36 by some number on a blood test. It's age reversal in terms of how do I feel? How sharp am I? You We're working on this rejuvenation, this age reversal XPRIZE that hopefully in 2023 we'll launch. Happy to come back and discuss it once we're able to. But in that regard, it's really, can we increase the fundamentals like cognition? How sharp do you feel? Aesthetics? How good do you look?

Starting point is 00:10:08 Mobility? How strong are you and able to move? I mean, these are things that matter a person when they're in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, hopefully into their hundreds. When we zoom out and we look forward, I don't know, 50, a hundred years, if everything goes right, what does that world look like? Are people living to 250 years old? Are they just look 20 forever? Do they not die? Like, what is kind of your vision as to, it's a big if, but if things go right, what could we achieve? So it's really hard for me to think past 20 years from now, let alone 50 or 100. I mean, we're beginning to understand

Starting point is 00:10:46 how life works at a molecular level. And we're going to unlock an understanding of why we age and perhaps why we don't have to. And so, you know, in the next 20 years, I've been, And, you know, for my last book that I wrote with Tony Robbins called Life Force, I interviewed a number of extraordinary people. Ray Kurzweil, who's my co-founder of Singularity University, who's been thinking about this idea of longevity escape velocity, and also George Church at Harvard Medical School. And I asked both of them, when do you think we're going to reach longevity escape velocity, which is the point at which science is extending your life for more than a year for every year that you're alive. um ray's answer uh was 10 or 11 years um from now uh george's answer george churches would surprise me because i viewed him more as a more conservative academic in this space and a deep scientist in the space you know his answer was about 15 years so our goal should be

Starting point is 00:11:55 how do you remain in great vital state for the next 20 years so you can intercept this now the technologies we're going to have to do this with are extraordinary. It's not just, you know, genome sequencing, which has gone from, you know, $3 billion and years to sequence a single genome down to 200 bucks and hours to sequence a single genome, which is extraordinary. It's five times faster than Moore's law. But it's also AI, big data that's coming, our ability to really understand the inner workings of a cell by being able to gather a massive amount of data but what's coming this decade is quantum computing and quantum technologies to understand life at a molecular level it's a brand new set of technologies and so it's we're unpacking and understanding the

Starting point is 00:12:52 fundamentals and again i go back to why are there certain species of life that can live hundreds of years. And I think we're going to understand that and be able to port that over to ourselves. So I have two 11-year-old boys. I think about them as having a potential for a near indefinite lifespan. For us, you know, listen, I love living life. It's the most exciting time ever to be alive, except for tomorrow. And so I want to see as much of it as I can. When we see so many scientists, academics, et cetera, working on these technologies, One of the things that we know throughout history is that many times solutions come from outside of a certain field. Are there specific skill sets, experiences, or maybe industries where you think there will be this intersection and we should look to some of those people outside of just medicine and science that could potentially have a huge impact here?

Starting point is 00:13:48 Yeah, I think the converging technologies that are going to enable this are data science. I think it is AI for the next three to eight years, and then it's going to be quantum computation and quantum technologies moving forward after that. There is a friend of mine, Alec Zebrankov, who's brilliant. He is a machine learning scientist, a data scientist that has entered the longevity field. He's based in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And he's built a company that has become a multi-billion dollar company. They just won a $1.2 billion contract with Sanofi. And he's using AI as his means to do drug discovery.

Starting point is 00:14:40 You know, historically, drug discovery was done by going into the Amazon and getting plants and basically being able to tap into Mother Nature's ongoing massive experiment by creating, you know, of creating different proteins. and carbohydrates and compounds in plants that we would look and say, ah, this is interesting. Does this do anything to human cells? It doesn't throw it away. Does this one, oh, wow, this one's doing something. Let's dig in and see what it does. But instead of that random walk, which has been most of pharmaceuticals up until now, right? I mean, from Viagra to whatever it might be, what if you could look at the molecular structure of certain proteins and use AI to come up with new structures? We've just seen a series of AI algorithms out of DeepMind being able to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein based upon its amino acid sequence. A protein

Starting point is 00:15:44 is a sequence of amino acids. And the supercomputing problem for the last 50 years is if I give you 100 or 1,000 amino acid sequence, how would that sequence of amino acids, the building blocks, fold three-dimensionally into a protein? And it was way too difficult for any computer to do until it was cracked with a series of AI programs. And beyond cracking a single protein. You know, open AI and deep mind have both developed algorithms to be able to solve the sequence of every protein ever conceived of. So we're getting these superpowers to understand life. And I think a lot of the breakthrough is going to come from data science, AI and quantum computing. When we think about science and longevity, most people see that as a future

Starting point is 00:16:40 event that occurs that will have some magical capability on extending both their life, but improving their quality as well. What do you personally do from a health routine today? So there's things that we can actually do, you know, that are tangible that people can execute on. What do you do? So there's a number of things. Um, and first of all, it's still the fundamentals. And then there's things on the edge on the fundamentals i'll start with mindset i think that you need to have a positive mindset if all of these technologies are coming you need to believe it you need to see it you need to anticipate it you need to have a future for yourself that's bigger than your past

Starting point is 00:17:23 right you can will yourself to death and i think with the right mindset you can will yourself to life i actually created an ai algorithm that's free and available to everybody if you go to longevityinsider.org. And this AI scans the world's news for all of the breakthroughs every single day that's going on in longevity, age reversal, vitality science. And it looks for the most scientifically valid. I use GPT-3 and another set of algorithms, and it provides a summary paragraph of the breakthrough in easy to understand language and a compelling image. And so as I read this, I go, holy shit, oh my God, that's amazing. And it's like, it gives you compelling evidence of what's coming so that, you know, you want to take care of yourself in that

Starting point is 00:18:15 regard. So longevityinsider.org, you know, it's great. And that's the first thing. The second thing is sleep. Sleep is still a superpower. It is still one of the most fundamental things we have to do. When I was in medical school, I used to think, you know, I can get away with five and a half hours of sleep. That was my stable point. And I would pride myself on minimizing my sleep and still being functional. But the reality is sleep is one of the most important things we can do for healthy aging. So I now flipped it and I am shooting for eight hours. I pride myself when I get eight hours of sleep, right? I wear my aura ring and I monitor my sleep in that regard. In order to sleep well, I use an eye mask. I use a Manta eye mask that I love. I

Starting point is 00:19:04 can't sleep without it at this point. I use a cooling blanket and I bring the temperature in the room down to 64 degrees. There is a direct correlation. Your body needs to drop down its temperature in order to go into deep sleep and REM. And then it's about when I go to sleep. So my eyes pop open at 5.36 a.m., which means I need to be in bed by 9.30. I can control when I go to sleep, not as easily when I wake up. And when I do those things, I get eight hours of sleep. Next is diet. And diet is fundamental.

Starting point is 00:19:40 The key thing around diet is minimizing sugar. Our bodies never evolved to get as much sugar as they do. And sugar is an inflammatory. it's a neuroinflammatory and it's a cardiac inflammatory it's uh when you glycosylate cholesterol it makes it sticky and it sticks to your arteries so minimizing sugar it's not easy but it's something that you need to do drinking two or three liters of water whole whole plant based diet i do eat some protein i just don't overdo it i mean these are fundamentals that are are pretty repeated over and over again for folks. And then exercise, it's getting our bodies need

Starting point is 00:20:26 exercise. It's the most fundamental thing, you know, diet, sleep, exercise. And for me, it's I do a heavy weight workout once or twice a week, I use a catalyst suit to stimulate my muscles and do one that way. And then I use a another program called osteo strong, which is about stimulating bone growth and muscle growth. And so those are the fundamentals. On the supplement side, I do a slew of different supplements. There is one other thing I'll just mention, and that's not, how do I put this? It's not dying from something stupid. What I mean by that is most of us are optimists about what's going on inside our head and inside our body. We don't actually know. And so one of the things that I focus on is, you know, can I find out when and if disease

Starting point is 00:21:19 is going on inside my body at inception, at the very beginning, right? We're all developing cancers all the time. People don't probably know that, but you are, and it's your immune system that finds it and zaps it. So one of the things I built over the last four years as a company with Tony Robbins, Bill Kapp, Mark Benioff's an investor. And we're building out these facilities around the world. It's called Fountain Life is the name of the company. And there are 10,000 square foot facilities. I go every year in January and I upload my body, meaning I'm fully digitized,

Starting point is 00:21:54 full body, MRI, brain, brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT called Clearly, a DEXA scan looking at bone and muscle, my genomics, my omics, 150 gigabytes of data. And the goal is, is there anything going on inside my body that I need to know about? And, you know, think of your friend, any friends you've known who passed untimely, you know, they, something happened while they were asleep or something. They went to the hospital, they found out they had stage three or stage four cancer. It didn't happen that morning. It's been going on for some time. And the question is, how do you know? And so this kind of full body imaging allows you to get a baseline and then every year make sure there's nothing going on. And then if there is, do something about it. Right. It's fascinating to understand how holistic your approach is, because what you're really doing is

Starting point is 00:22:53 you are attacking this problem from the inside and the outside, which I think many people may focus on inside or outside, but putting those together tends to be pretty difficult. How much discipline does it take? And you mentioned mindset earlier. And I think part of probably the discipline is the mindset, but, but talk a little bit as to, uh, is it all fun or an easy, or do you have to have a great degree of discipline to be able to do this? It's it's listen, I fail all the time and I pick up and I go again. It's like, you know, it's like I can have a crappy night's sleep and it's like, damn. And then I'm like, okay, tomorrow I'm redoubling. I'm going to make sure I'm in bed at the right time to try and get my sleep. You know, listen, I love, uh, uh,

Starting point is 00:23:38 sweets as much as anybody and so i don't beat myself up but i will redouble you know the next day and thereafter so it's on the average it's getting into that mindset one of the things that's also fundamental and you know this it's it's having a community of people that are with you on that journey um and who want that it's if you want to become if you're overweight and become thin hang out with thin people if you want if you're out of shape you want to get in shape hang out with people who who exercise in regular time if you want to have a longevity mindset we can talk about more about what that is hang out with people who've got that and so i think there in lies uh one of the important elements of this journey it's uh it's being kind to yourself

Starting point is 00:24:29 but also committed and, uh, and, you know, just not giving up on it. And it's doing the things on the whole, um, because you're excited about life in the future. So this idea of mindset, there's many people who will hear that and be like, oh, what are these two idiots talking about this woo woo thing? Right. Uh, what, what the hell is mindset? Uh, but one thing I will say, and I think that you probably would share this, but correct me if I'm wrong. Uh, every successful person that I've ever been around has a different way of thinking than the average person. Now, the way they think is different than each other, but they always have a unique mindset that, uh, it feels like puts them in a position to be

Starting point is 00:25:14 successful, be resilient, do all these things. How do you think about mindset and its importance for people to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish? Yeah, a thousand percent. So here's the question I ask, which hopefully makes it hyper clear. If I said to you, what made Steve Jobs successful or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, whomever you want to see as a leader entrepreneur who is successful, was it the people they knew? Was it their capital? Was it technology? Or was it their mindset? I think everybody would go, okay, I get it. It's their mindset. Because if you took away everything else, their money, their capital, their relationships, their tech, but they kept their mindset, I bet that the

Starting point is 00:25:59 majority would rebuild their success and rebuild what made them special in life. Your mindset is fundamental. It allows you to see opportunities different than other people or deal with tragedy different than other people. And if you agree that your mindset is the most important element you have, then the question I have for you is what mindset do you have? Where did you get it? What mindset do you want? And how are you going to get that? And so this conversation around mindset is fundamental. Let me take it a different direction to help folks understand this. When you look at the field of machine learning, of AI, and hopefully this is penetrated enough that everybody sort of gets, oh yeah, I understand AI is becoming more powerful. There's this thing called machine

Starting point is 00:26:49 learning. Well, the way machine learning works is by showing a neural net, and we'll talk about a neural net in a second, an example after example after example, right? If you want to train a neural net to recognize cats as google did in their youtube videos years ago is you show them images of cat after cat after cat and the neural net shapes itself be able to recognize oh yes that's a cat it's got whiskers a tail ears four paws whatever the case might be and it learns and you shape it by example after example well guess what our brains are neural nets our brains are AI neural nets, and we shape our brains by showing it example after example. And so the question is, how are you training your neural net? What examples are you showing it over and over

Starting point is 00:27:41 again? For most of us, and I've stopped this, I won't include me in this one in a second, but most folks are watching, you know, Fox and CNN for hours. It's on the TV. I call CNN the crisis news network with a constantly negative news network. And it's just, you know, every murder on the planet, every explosion, every despot is shown to you over and over again, like 10 times an hour. You know, and the question is, if you're seeing all this negativism, all of this fear generating imagery and scarcity driven imagery, because that's what our brain does is it's typically focused in scarcity and fear you're reinforcing those mindsets and the question is is that serving you it's serving the you know the news network because they're delivering your

Starting point is 00:28:36 eyeballs to their advertisers that's how they make money but is it serving you and so we have to be careful about what's training our mindsets this episode is brought to you by unstoppable domains they've partnered with blockchain.com to create nft domain names ending in dot blockchain It's the perfect ending to show that you're a believer in a decentralized future. The blockchain.com community can join a short waitlist to get one for free at blockchain.com slash waitlist slash blockchain domain. Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium Unstoppable domains, including fee-free lifelong ownership.

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Starting point is 00:30:43 Again, that's LMAXDigital.com slash POMP. When you see people shaping their mindset, it is easy to say, I need to have a good mindset. It is easy to say, I need to avoid negative news. Are there things that they can proactively do that are a tailwind for increasing it? You mentioned earlier, hanging out with people with a certain type of mindset. Are there other things that they could do? A thousand percent. I mean, so you're shaping your mindset by virtue of what books you're reading, right? What podcasts are you listening to? What, you know, what posters are on your wall? What, you know, who you're hanging out with? What groups you're together with? So, I mean, a lot of the stuff that I've done over the years is building that out. My books, Abundance, Bold, The Future is Fast When You Think, Life Force, are all mindset shaping books, right? The one I did in 2020, The Future is Fast When You Think, is a look at all of the converging exponential technologies that are creating the next decade ahead.

Starting point is 00:31:44 But rather than a dystopian future, it's like, wow, these are the technologies that are going to uplift humanity, right? We're heading towards a world in which the best health care, the best education is being driven by AI and available to everyone on the planet effectively for free, just like Google, right? Google for the poorest kid and Google for the wealthiest kid is identical, is demonetized and democratized. And we're heading that way with the future of education, health in a multitude of different areas. So it's what are your communities, what are you reading, what are you watching, and what conversations are you having? How do you think about mindset in different macro environments? So obviously there's like the peacetime, wartime CEO stuff that people will talk about in tech or in business.

Starting point is 00:32:36 But if you're not a CEO, if you're not a founder of a company, it was good times last year, not so great times right now. And a lot of that has to just do with the macro environment and potential recessions and those types of things. How do you think about being able to recognize situation is changing and maybe even possibly you have to shift your mindset from one of offense to defense or back to offense? Or recognize that during times of crisis, there are extraordinary opportunities. It's a judo move. one of the things i like to teach in my um my abundance 360 community in my in my books and my my blogs is uh the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities right um and that if you as an entrepreneur for those who are entrepreneurs if you see a problem

Starting point is 00:33:29 think there's a juicy opportunity i can fix so i think one of the most interesting things is that a lot, if not most of the successful companies today were born during periods of crisis. We saw Uber and Airbnb and even Tesla and SpaceX born out of, when I say born, humming along, but during the 2008 crisis, really taking off. And when there are massive layoffs, That means there are people, smart people available to be working on projects. There's more talent available. And a lot of the crisis leads to new opportunities to be born. So it's a judo move.

Starting point is 00:34:18 It's flipping yourself out of the negative mindset of I'm screwed. You know, the world's coming to an end to, okay, what do people need now more than ever? How can I support them? What can I create that helps this? And I think that's one of the most important mindset shifts that can occur. Of course, you have to feed yourself and your family and stay alive and stay healthy. Those are fundamentals. And if you're not able to do that, that's 100% of your focus. But if you are, and you're looking for as an entrepreneur, what do I do? There's a lot of growth opportunities as well during periods like this. so part of mindset to me is uh ambition and focus and i've been thinking a lot about this because we are seeing a number of people but maybe we'll use elon uh as an example where they need immense amount of ambition and focus to achieve what they have achieved but just the same way that maybe a

Starting point is 00:35:19 michael jordan and his competitiveness never kind of gets turned off in business the ambition and focus is really hard to turn off as well. And ambition and focus are two different things, but they generally end up being somewhat, uh, uh, related. How do you think about these as offensive weapons that serve as tailwinds, but also potentially, uh, things that, you know, could be headwinds for an entrepreneur? And how do you know when to kind of lean into them versus when to say, Hey, I'm an ambitious person, but like I shouldn't go do a or B and instead I should just focus on the things you already have on my plate? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And Elon is the perfect example. And I've had the pleasure of knowing him for 22 years now and

Starting point is 00:36:07 calling him a friend. And listen, he's one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs and engineers of not just the century of you know of probably uh the last few centuries um the challenge and and i'll never forget elon was on my board of of trustees at the x prize foundation for the first for about a decade and i got a call from him one day saying i need to resign i apologize i need to focus on spacex and tesla this was circa uh 2010 2012 something like that and uh i was like i get it and he did go focus on on tesla and spacex and turned them from on the edge to extraordinary game-changing companies that have transformed the industry um and then he started you know neuralink and uh and boring corporation and uh and bought twitter and and i think one of the

Starting point is 00:37:13 challenges with ambitious entrepreneurs is when everything's going great and things are easy and you have extra time on your hand you think about okay what else can i do um and that's fine when everything's going up but if things are going down and you've got too many things on your plate Then it becomes really challenging. The alternate approach, which folks like Larry Page and Sergey did with Google, was create an umbrella organization like Alphabet that had everything under one organization. And and so you had leadership that controlled the span. Right. The same thing with Amazon. Amazon is doing health. It's doing food. It's doing delivery. It's doing, you know, everything. But it's under one under one roof. So that allows you to diversify, but without having to worry about multiple brands and multiple different directions. So I do think that if you have extra time and capability and ambition, maybe it's best to grow within an additional existing organization versus start other ones. When you see those companies doing it, there is a belief that you need to focus in the beginning. You earn the right to kind of do this other stuff.

Starting point is 00:38:36 Is that true? I recently have heard other entrepreneurs starting to talk about maybe that isn't the way that it works. And we see examples where many companies have been built with so many different hands and different things. What's your thought on that currently? So I'm guilty of the more is better disease for sure. But I take a different approach, which is for every company that I start or I'm involved in co-founding, I'm not taking the role of CEO. I'm taking the role as chairman or executive chairman or a couple of cases vice chairman and making sure there is a phenomenal ceo running it and like with the x prize foundation

Starting point is 00:39:21 right which i served as ceo for a few decades uh then anusha ansari incredible individual who funded the first 10 million dollar prize she flew private to the space station and she became our ceo four years ago and i took a role as executive chairman but i can swoop in work with her come up with a new idea, launch it within the XPRIZE, but she is running the show. It's everybody reports to her and she's the final decision maker, right? In Fountain Life, one of my longevity companies that is doing the annual uploading of imaging and therapeutics to make sure that you're in the healthiest state. Again, I'm serving as executive chairman there, but Dr. Bill Kapp is a CEO and does an amazing job at Fountain. So in that way, I can keep my sort of diversity

Starting point is 00:40:17 mindset alive and I can cross pollinate. So, you know, I run Singularity University. I'm the executive founder there, but Eric Anderson runs it as the executive chairman. And then Abundance 360, I sort of oversee it, but I've got Julie Van Amerongen running it day to day. So I can cross-pollinate between these and bring resources from one to the other, but each one of them has a person responsible for the P&L and who I'll make suggestions to, I'll co-conspire with them, but they're running the show. How do you pick them? How do you know they're the right person? How do you know that they're good at what you need them to do? So. And I asked when I did a I did a podcast with Elon for my moonshots and mindset show, and I asked him that question as well, and he never answered me on it.

Starting point is 00:41:17 I was like amazed at how he because he's starting somebody. How do you get how do you find your CEOs? I kept hammering for that. He didn't answer me because he just makes himself the CEO. well and that's a problem right and i've had conversations with him where he said listen if i could find someone to be the ceo of tesla so i can focus on spacex i would and hopefully and and you know when the company is stable and it's obviously going up and down and it hasn't fully stabilized i would never bet against tesla or never bet against spacex or elon in a thousand years and i you know i do that with my stock portfolio but um for me uh i find the ceo in a couple of ways one is i may acquire a company that's operating really well um and in that acquisition or merge with a company that's operating really well and elevate that individual

Starting point is 00:42:13 who is running that company to ceo and i'll take an executive chairman role the best predictor of an individual's future potential is what they've done in the past 100 right um unless they're a brand new uh founder like uh zuckerberg or in the early days of of elon or steve jobs whatever the case might be and by the way a lot of the biggest most successful tech companies in the world were first-time founders right bill gates um and so you've gotta you've gotta account for that but if you're looking to bring in a ceo you want someone who has an entrepreneurial bent which means they probably have started things on their own and you know taking someone who's been a hired gun inside a larger company and making the ceo of your company if it's still

Starting point is 00:43:05 in its entrepreneurial it's building it's growing it's creating it's a kind of a mismatch so i'm I'm looking for someone who's got entrepreneurial chops. Maybe they've just exited their company and they're looking to start their next one. I'm saying, come on in. The water's warm. Join me. Let's go do this. Or like I said, acquiring them or merging with them if it's an equal and then giving

Starting point is 00:43:30 them the helm and supporting them to do well. Does that make sense? It makes complete sense. And I guess part of it also is when you're acquiring a company, when you're merging with a company, you've been able to see them operate to some degree, right? it's kind of like a little try before you buy if you will um but also on top of that uh it sounds like most of the people that you are bringing in to run these organizations uh are not a 22 year old who's just starting uh although we do see the outlier uh kind of outcomes from them as you

Starting point is 00:43:59 mentioned uh i think the average age of a successful multi-billion dollar founder is like 43 or something i forget the exact number but it's it's experience is a key piece to uh uh to being successful uh on average yeah yes and they also start when they're 30. i mean you know the challenge is all of us think about these overnight successes well it's overnight success after 11 years of hard work you know uh and it took a while to get become a a billionaire or a billionaire founder um i know a lot of my most successful ventures are people don't just know the early days all right uh tesla uber airbnb all these companies took a while to get to where they are um but you're right uh it's experience is key there there's one other place you can go look

Starting point is 00:44:48 and it's was there an individual who's part of a founding team uh who is you know uh a coo or a svp or a you know uh some but not the ceo of that founding team but he's got the chops where she's got the chops and the and that entrepreneurial mindset because it is a mindset it is a hunger uh to go and make a dent in the universe to use steve jobs's words and that that is a mindset that grows in you um and it comes so one of the things that i that i i do is i focus on um uh what is your mtp what is your massive transformative purpose right uh and when you are when you connect with your mtp and it's it's got to be powered by emotional energy it's got to be powered by this like super positive energy of awe and amazement

Starting point is 00:45:48 like i can't wait to make this happen this is going to be extraordinary or it's powered by this pain. I refuse to let this go on in the world. I am going to solve this problem if it's the last thing I do. It's got to come from that emotional energy. And when you can describe your massive transformative purpose, it then becomes a canvas upon which you're going to take your moonshots. And your moonshots are targets in the direction of that purpose. One last thing I want to talk to you about is Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You have always, I think, hung your hat on innovative technologies, on bold ambition, and kind of a technology-driven future. An area that people are very interested in is obviously Bitcoin and the crypto world. What are your current

Starting point is 00:46:38 thoughts there? We're recording this while we're in the middle of a huge crash. Is your connection over? Or are you still excited? No, no, I'm I remain committed to and I'll say the same thing I've always said, this is not my expertise. I turned to people like Michael Saylor, who I've had on my podcast, and who I've known for 40 years, he were fraternity brothers together in MIT, and live next to each other. And he's brilliant. And, you know, he is a Bitcoin maximalist and on this last sort of ftx downturn i i bought into bitcoin once again i do believe in it in the long term and i'm willing to buy in and hold it for the long term i think that the fundamentals are there and i think it will be adapted uh uh in a multitude of different

Starting point is 00:47:32 institutional um settings and governmental settings uh over the decades ahead especially as the speed of technology makes traditional government structures um in need of the velocity that we're going to see with bitcoin and lightning um and the turbulence that comes with uh with these converging exponentials as we're transforming the energy ecosystem we're going from you know oil and and gas petroleum-based systems uh to uh to solar and eventually you know solar wind and fusion um and it's going to cause uh turmoil and upset but i think bitcoin is a stabilizing factor so you know i'm probably uh 90 bitcoin 10 ethereum in my holdings um and i uh i haven't sold any bitcoin since my since i've started buying and i'm just slowly accumulating

Starting point is 00:48:29 over time now it's not to say that i don't sell and repurchase you know because the law allows you to do that and get the tax benefits of a wash sale like that. At least it does for the moment. We'll see if that changes. But when I think about the arguments that Mike Saylor makes about the long-term value of different assets and asset classes, it makes a thousand percent sense to me. As you look at this technology, I know one of the things that we talked about in the science and medicine field is this convergence of technologies. Is that your belief in things like AI, ML, Bitcoin, kind of these other software based technologies that you think a lot of those will converge and kind of create, I don't know, make it a tech utopia, or some sort of like,

Starting point is 00:49:18 you know, brighter future? Well, so it is, and has been, and people just don't recognize it, right we have seen uh uh extreme poverty on the planet you know go from like 90 to under 10 uh it used to be throughout all history that you know if you go back hundreds of years to thousands of years it was the king and the queen on the hilltop right the pharaoh the emperor whatever it might be and 99.999 of people in absolute squalor supporting that that king or queen which barely had anything that you could hold a candle do today right didn't have lights or flushing toilets or or transport and so forth it was but they had the best they could today we're living in a world where even the poorest people on the planet have access to uh energy uh communications

Starting point is 00:50:15 uh knowledge right google's demonetized and democratized access to information we're seeing 40 smartphones uh allowing people to have access to near infinite entertainment and knowledge and and we're heading towards a world and it isn't here yet but we're heading towards a world where we're going to provide folks with access to the best health care not delivered by your physician but by delivered by an ai at the cost of effectively electricity right there's about 5,000 medical journal articles published per day. Per day. How many has your doctor read? Probably maybe one if you're lucky and they had time over coffee. Your AI will have accessed all of them. So we're going to see AI becoming the best diagnostician, a robotic surgeon being the

Starting point is 00:51:10 best surgeon out there. Again, for the cost of electricity and the capital expense, not here yet, But we're going to be seeing that in the next decade, 20 years. It's going to be in the next five years, I think, it will become malpractice to do diagnostics without AI in the loop. I was having dinner with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, a week ago, and he was saying, listen, the next five years, we're going to have an AI co-pilot for every profession. And I think that's true. Your AI is going to support you if you're a writer, a musician, a accountant, a lawyer. AI is going to support you to do your job more thoroughly and better. And ultimately, we're demonetizing and democratizing every aspect of our life. and and so it is it's coming you know uh we used to think about socialism as the means by which governments would take care of you right there were socialist governments we're going to take

Starting point is 00:52:16 care of you provide you food water health and so forth where we're heading for um and i'm a i'm a i would describe myself as a libertarian capitalist right i love starting companies and um you know that's who i am but i think we're going to have a version of uh of technology technology socialism where technology is taking care of you technology is educating providing health uh we're going to see the the best food healthiest food is going to be stem cell grown meats fish chicken beef and vertical farming that's produced in downtown new york detroit Chicago, Nairobi, wherever it might be, where it's healthier, cheaper, and available to you faster from the farm to the table than ever before. All of these things are changing.

Starting point is 00:53:07 My last question for you revolves around the content that you consume. You mentioned earlier, it helps with mindset. Obviously, you're very well versed on a lot of different technologies. What do you read on a day-to-day basis? And are there certain mechanisms that you have? I know you mentioned longevity insider as one place where people can get information, but how do you kind of sift through all the information that's out there in order to read the things that you think are the highest impact? So, uh, I, so part of the work that I do, um, as, as you do is I educate and I, I do that through my abundance 360 and my, my books, my blogs and such. And so I'm constantly consuming information. And I got to, I originally, I used to hire people who would be constantly

Starting point is 00:53:54 consuming and summarizing and feeding me stuff. And it got to a point where it was impossible to keep up with it. And so about four years ago, I hired a couple of really smart AI guys. And we started a company called Futurescope and built an AI that builds specialized AI search engines. And so longevityinsider.org, the .org part is important if anyone wants to get it, it's free. And again, that's my AI-driven search engine for all things longevity and health tech related. And I get my summaries, and I get 10 to 12 articles per day. And they are, for me, consistently the most important breakthroughs on the planet I need to know about and consume i created another one also available for free for anybody called um it's

Starting point is 00:54:46 called futureloop.com uh future l-o-o-p and that's looking at converging exponentials in different industries in transportation in education in health care in all the industries so it it's an ai engine that's looking for and saying okay uh in these particular industries agriculture transport again a whole bunch of them is there an article about two or three exponentials converging and then is it a positive semantic i'm i can get all the negative news i want from cnn so i have no interest in that it has to be high high validity score positive semantic and about converging exponentials two or three exponentials coming together because that's really where the disruptions coming in it used to be a single exponential tech was enough but it's really

Starting point is 00:55:38 the convergence now two three or four applied to a product a service an industry and so i mean honestly that's that's i don't have time to look at nor do i really care what a particular editor wants to feed me um you know i couldn't pay me enough to watch what cnn or fox wants to feed me it's like i don't want to i don't want to have them shape my neural net shape my mind so um so it's an unbiased view of all the breakthrough technologies and then i i dig in deeper in the articles that are most interesting to me where can we send people to find you on the internet find the books that you've written or learn more about some of the companies that you're building? Sure. So my podcast is called Moonshots and Mindsets. If you go to dmandis.com, I put out

Starting point is 00:56:37 all of my blogs there. I put out two technology blogs per week. One's on longevity and health tech. The other one's on exponential technologies converging on industries. I'm actually putting out a sequence right now called Metatrends. I've basically identified what I consider the top 20 meta trends this decade they're going to reshape every industry and so that's uh part of my my blog and then twitter it's uh uh at peter diamandis and same handle on instagram and and others so anyway uh and then people who want my you know abundance 360 is my year-round mastermind and coaching program that's just abundance360.com mike you know like yourself I want people to realize we're living in the most extraordinary time ever in human history.

Starting point is 00:57:25 There's never been, other than tomorrow, a more exciting time to be alive. And the way you see the world can be gone from disaster to opportunity, right? From scarcity to abundance. It really is your mindset that makes the difference the way you see the world. And so, you know, with a positive mindset, you can create an extraordinary world and all of us have the chance to uplift humanity more than ever before. I always enjoy learning and listening to you because I think you've got just this unique view of the world and it's a world and a future that I want to believe in, that it is better than the past, that it is worth working on and that it can improve people's lives. And I think that the kind of persistent optimism is something that everyone should aspire to have.

Starting point is 00:58:16 I'll say one last thing for those who are like, that's bullshit. How can you be optimistic? And everything's going on with the Ukraine and FTX and all of this stuff. Listen, here's the deal. If I were to ask you, between 1900 and today, has the world gotten better, right? Um, and I would hope most people would realize, right, the average age, uh, back 120 years ago was like 40, you would die of TB and, and you would work 80 hour work weeks to survive. Um, and access to education and healthcare was de minimis.

Starting point is 00:58:52 And it was just, you know, we, we romanticize the past, but it was brutal. Life was brutal and short back 120 years ago. And we've made massive strides between 1900 and today. and during that time we also had world war one world war ii the spanish flu the vietnam war you know we had massive amount of hardship and death and so forth but on the whole over the long term life has improved extraordinarily and so yes we're going to have ups and downs we're going to have challenges we're going to have issues and yes over the long term the life of your kids and their kids is going to be extraordinarily better than lives we have today

Starting point is 00:59:35 just we've got to be looking uh not in the moment but over the long term and realize that entrepreneurs today have the power to do what only governments and large corporations could ever do before and i define an entrepreneur as someone who finds a problem and solves a problem and that's an amazing world to live in there's no better way to end this conversation than that peter thank you so you so much for your time. And we'll definitely do it again in the future. My pleasure, my friend. Be well. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry,

Starting point is 01:00:12 we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io.

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The Pomp Podcast - #1126 Peter Diamandis On Achieving Longer Lifespans & Improving The Human Condition

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