We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP272: X-Prize Founder Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler on the speed of technology (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Boy, oh boy, this was a really fun interview. On today's show, we have the distinct pleasure to talk to Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler. Peter was recently named one of the world's 50 greatest leaders by Fortune Magazine, and he's the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation. Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and he has an expertise in neuroscience, exponential technologies, and peak performance. These two have a new book that's coming out that's called The Future is Faster Than You Think.

Starting point is 00:00:34 And let me tell you, this is a mind-boggling discussion about what kind of technology is coming in the next 10 years. So without further delay, here's our chat with Peter and Stephen. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. All right, everybody, thanks for joining. us here at the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Prest and Pish and, as always, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson, and boy, oh boy, is this exciting? Peter, Stephen, we got you guys here. This is super exciting for me to be able to talk to both you guys. So thank you so much for taking

Starting point is 00:01:27 time out of your busy day to be on our show. So let's start out by discussing technologies that you think, I guess I'm just jumping right into this, right into the heart of this discussion. and what are some technologies that you guys think are going to be the biggest disruptions in the coming 10 years? Because there's so much you can talk about. But I guess we're interested most, and I'm sure you guys are as well, AI, robotics, virtual reality, we got digital biology, all these big themes that you guys talk about in your new book. I'm kind of curious which one you would pick out of that mix to talk about first.

Starting point is 00:02:03 I would say that it isn't about any one technology. I think what Stephen and I focus on in the book is the convergence of technologies. And what's different about what's happening this next decade and beyond is it used to be that you could be an expert in any one technology and you'd be amazing. But today, it's really the combination of three, four, five of these converging and creating new business models. It's not just augmented reality. It's augmented reality plus 5G, plus.

Starting point is 00:02:33 plus AI, reinventing retail, 3D printing, plus machine learning, plus robotics, plus material sciences, reinventing transportation, right? It's these combinations. But, Stephen, do you have a favorite? Whenever you point at AI, you ask yourself the question, is it going to be AI or is it going to be quantum computing underneath the AI also, right? So I agree with Peter. I think the point is that we're getting converging exponentials.

Starting point is 00:03:00 You know, the big point with that is with solitary. exponential technologies progressing, nanotechnology or AI, but the level of disruption has been huge, right? But it tends to be along the lines of products and services. When you get converging exponentials, it scales up, and suddenly its whole markets are being disrupted or institutions are being disrupted. That's what we're talking about now. And the point of the future is faster than you think, is that it really is right here, right now, next 10 years, pretty much every major industry on Earth is going to be massively reconfigured. There's a great quote from Sundar, the CEO of Google, who says that, in his opinion,

Starting point is 00:03:42 artificial intelligence is going to be more important than the invention of fire, electricity, and humanity. And I would agree, and one of the things that I'm fond of saying that we talk about in the book is that, you know, in the next decade, there are going to be two kinds of companies, those that are using artificial intelligence and those that are bankrupt. And I think it's that critically important. It's like not having a using the internet. It's going to be fundamental to the competitiveness and the success of any company in the future.

Starting point is 00:04:14 It's fascinating how you look at this. And I guess for our listeners who might be thinking that we add a tipping point with technology, one thing comes to mind. what is driving the exponentially speed of the progress of technology? You know, it's, I mean, at a foundational level, Moors Law, right? This is what all the technologies that are exponential technologies that we've been talking about. What that means is they become digital technologies, right? You can program them in the one and zero is computer code.

Starting point is 00:04:45 And once that happens, technologies jump on the back of the Moore's law, and they begin accelerating exponentially. So underneath it, right, the core thing that's driving this is our computers are getting twice as fast for the same price every 18 months. And we're using our computers to build even faster computers and even faster computers and even faster computers. And while there's a lot of people have been talking about sort of the end of Moore's law, while it is true, we are moving in that direction. There are six or seven different replacement technology just sort of waiting to take its place to continue kind of. kind of this grows for it. So I think, Peter, you might have something to add, but that to me is what, you know, is driving most of this forward. We have in our book a chapter called acceleration of the acceleration in which we basically show these series of forces that are compounding on top

Starting point is 00:05:37 of each other, which are actually accelerating the rate at which technology is accelerating. So, for example, there's more capital than ever before, right? There's more capital every year. In the last three, four years, we've hit an all-time high in venture capital, in crowdfunding, in sovereign wealth fund investments that are coming down into the venture startup space. And that abundance of capital is causing people to invest in riskier and riskier things. And the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. And we're seeing more and more breakthroughs.

Starting point is 00:06:13 We're seeing more and more crazy ideas becoming real. And so those are accelerating things. At the same time, we also have this massive demonetization of all of these technologies. So for massive bandwidth, it used to be very expensive. I remember back in 2000, you know, buying bandwidth from Akamai was my largest budget item. Today, bandwidth is demonetizing so quickly. Genome sequencing went from $100 million for a single genome to $100 for genome sequencing. So for $100 million, you can now sequence a million people.

Starting point is 00:06:46 Things are getting cheaper and faster, and they're more people connected and people are living longer. All of these things are accelerating the rate at which technology is transforming the world. One of the forces of acceleration, Peter mentioned it briefly earlier, is the creation of new business models. And I know that sounds like the kind of thing that doesn't sound particularly revolutionary, but if you look at the 20th century, we got roughly one new business model a decade. So in the 1920s, it was what they call bait and hook, right? By the razor is free, you're going to pay for the blades later. The 50s, it was franchise models, right? McDonald's.

Starting point is 00:07:28 And then in the 60s, it was super stores, right? We are now in the book, we look at eight different business models that either they're unfolding now or they're going to be rolled out over the next decade. These are entirely new, radical new ways of business that unlock. I mean, think about what franchise models unlock. Think about what Bade Nook unlock. Think about what one of these things unlocks in terms of change to the markets, change to how we do business, and then think, oh, wow, we got one a decade for the last century

Starting point is 00:08:00 and we're about to get 10 in the next decade. That's a lot of change very quickly. Do you think that, and I know blockchain is one of the areas that you guys have an expertise as well, do you think that with all the credit that's been created unbacked fiat currency over the past, call it 30, 40 years that has provided this influx of capital. And Peter, you made the comment that the capital that's being provided to the markets is going into risky or risky areas. I could make the argument.

Starting point is 00:08:29 I think other people could make the argument that one of the reasons that blockchain, Bitcoin, whatever you want to refer to it at has emerged as a technology is because there hasn't been this backing of capital, and that has led to this massive influx of investment in startups and in this entrepreneurial space. So if blockchain does become a technology that is a global standard in the future, do you have the opposite thing taking place because now you have sound money that is forcing central banks to act reasonably and appropriately? Is that a concern for the speed at which technology is going to be adopted in the future? I don't think so. I mean, first of all, let's differentiate cryptocurrencies from blockchain,

Starting point is 00:09:12 right? Blockchain is a technology that is beginning to see traction and beginning to see utility in this hyper-connected world. And one of the things that enables blockchain technologies to be useful is that we're heading towards a world where all 8 billion people are connected at gigabit connection speeds, and we have sensors measuring everything everywhere. It's something that people are not speaking about enough. And blockchain is simply a technology layer that's going to enable us to connect with individual items and track movements of data and assets. But one of the challenges when it comes to the financial world and capital is that

Starting point is 00:09:55 the old world economics are broken. and how we measure economics of a person's productivity, a country's productivity. All those things are invalid in this day and age. If I had an extra year of time, I would pitch Stephen on writing a book on 22nd century economics. But we're heading towards a post-capitalist society. I have to tell you, we finished abundance. I turned to you and I said, you know, Peter, I think the most interesting problems we had covered are all in economics.

Starting point is 00:10:26 and we have a spare four or five years, we can go back to school, get a degree and write another book. I'm for it. The challenge is that, you know, the whole sharing economy, AI, robotics, all of these technologies, which are creating value creation, they're creating agility of capital, they're creating value in ways that have never been measured before. Steve and I talk about this in our first book, in our first collaboration called Abundance, the Future is Better Than You Think, in which, you know, we say, listen, a kid in a Maasai warrior or a kid in Tanzania with a smartphone or feature phone has a million dollars worth of apps on it that has never been accounted for in the economic system.

Starting point is 00:11:09 And when all of a sudden autonomous cars in the next four or five years are giving people back two hours of productivity a day, where is that going to be accounted for or the efficiencies are coming? So economics are fundamentally broken. One thing that really impressed me is how you think about scarcity and how nothing truly is scarce. Peter, Stephen, could you please talk to us about that concept? Technology has this ability to take resources that were once scarce and make them abundant. And the example we're all familiar with, and that we give it abundance that is still, I think, relevant is film.

Starting point is 00:11:49 When I was growing up, when Peter was growing up, and we went on to become. and we took our cameras, you took limited photographs because the photos were expensive to develop, the paper to develop, it cost money. And, you know, I was growing up in a rural highway, we had to drive far away to get our film developed. Now the problem, that was a scarcity problem, right? Now the problem with photographs is I take so many of them, right? I have a sorting problem. I have an abundance problem. I don't have a scarcity problem. I have an abundance problem. Information is another phenomenal example. Think about how expensive information used to be.

Starting point is 00:12:26 Think about how much money, like a world book encyclopedia was, an encyclopedia Britannica, or if you get afford the Oxford English Dictionary, right? Like, that was something when I was in college. We were dying to have. Now it's free. The whole things are free and abundant and everywhere. I say this a lot.

Starting point is 00:12:45 You like to talk about energy, which is a great example. we have very scarce natural resources until we go to renewables and we go to solar and you realize, you know, we get 16 terawatts of power every 88 minutes from the sun for free. And, you know, so it's not a question of scarcity now. We have to capture it, right? It needs technology to make it usable, but technology that tends to be a resource liberating mechanism. My favorite example is, you know, what would you think of as much? more scarce than a perfect diamond, a four, five, six-carat perfect diamond.

Starting point is 00:13:23 There's a friend of mine who runs a company called the Diamond Foundry up in the Bay Area, has built a machine about the size of a large refrigerator. In one end comes methane, water electricity. At the other end comes perfect diamonds, six, eight, ten, twelve-carat diamonds. Would you like a flaw in it? No problem. What color? Sure, you can add that.

Starting point is 00:13:42 And so this is again and again, there is nothing that is truly scarce, Even time is being made abundant, right? If you think about it as we are, you know, on this podcast together, years, you know, decades ago, we would have to fly in an airplane, spend the day, getting together in a recording studio, and doing this now we can use bandwidth and technology to instantly connect with each other. In 1900, the average person living in America did 58 hours of housework away. week. Fifty-eight hours. It's now an hour and a half, thanks to labor-saving devices, right? Like running water, a shower, a vacuum cleaner, take your pick. But that's astounding. We've taken what

Starting point is 00:14:31 was really like a work week and a half of ours and essentially removed it and can now spend it doing podcasts with you. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world. many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses, and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people are using right now.

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Starting point is 00:18:51 Which I am extremely grateful for. And then you just think about how you're replicating this conversation into other people's lives and then the access that they're getting. It's just, it's totally mind-blowing how we're able to disseminate that information and then the access and the gatekeepers that are gone and everything else. It's just fascinating. Pulling a little bit more on the thread with time and scarcity, let's dive a little bit into

Starting point is 00:19:14 biology because, Peter, I mean, you're a doctor from Harvard University. I mean, come on, this is crazy. Listen, it's crazy what's going on, right? And we have a chapter in the future is faster than you think on both how healthcare is going to be reinvented this decade and on longevity. So one of the things that's extraordinary is we really have moved into a digital biology space where, you know, the cost of sequencing a single human genome, 3.2 billion letters of your ATCs and Gs of your life used to be $100 million. Now it's sub 1,000, soon to be $100.

Starting point is 00:19:49 And to the point where every child born or when you enter the hospital, you'll be sequenced just so that they know what drug is working best for you, not for people who are your general, you know, age range, but specifically for you. We're also seeing a revolution in, you. We're also seeing a revolution in gene editing. Everybody's heard of CRISPR or CRISPR CAS 9. A new variant of that that was just announced recently at Harvard and MIT at the Broad Institute can do very highly precise single nucleotide changes with the promise of being able to correct something like 89 percent, 89% of all genetic disease.

Starting point is 00:20:28 32,000 different diseases, genetic diseases are single, single-based parents. errors that, you know, CRISPR 2.0, right, is what I think what they're calling it. That's amazing, right? Like one development that erases 32,000 diseases literally permanently. This might be a lack of my understanding when you get into the biology space, but some of the stuff that I've read from David Sinclair, and he's talking about how the epigenetic portion of a person's genome is what's causing a lot of the information loss. It's causing aging. But you guys are talking more down on the DNA strand, specifically not how the histones are and the histone factors are interacting with the epigenome. So when you talk about those two, how they

Starting point is 00:21:15 correspond with each other, do you find that one's more important than the other in reference to epigenetics versus on the actual DNA strand? So first of all, David Sinclair is amazing, and I loved his new book, Lifespan and commended to everybody. So after you read, the future's faster you think, read lifespan. So, but there are two different things, right? Our genome, there are 3.2 billion letters, again, of four letters, A, T, C, and G, the four nucleotides, codes for the digital information, as David talks about. And an error in that can cause fallacymia, sickle cell anemia, can cause a multitude of

Starting point is 00:21:55 different diseases. And if you inherit that sequence, you have that disease. And up until now, you could not cure it. The best you could do is treat yourself. And these latest version of CRISPR gene editing could potentially cure it. Go into your own genome and replace that letter for you. It's like going in a word processor and correcting a spelling error. The epigenome is critically important.

Starting point is 00:22:21 And David talks about the information theory of aging. He points out there's a particular system in the body that does, two things. It corrects genetic mutations that you accumulate as you get older, the Sertouin system. And it also turns on and turns off genes so that a kidney cell acts like a kidney and not like a liver cell. And the Situin system does both. And as you get older and you accumulate more and more genetic mutations, your ability to regulate at an epigenome level becomes weaker and weaker. There are nine different things that kill us, basically, at this that we know of. And as Peter just pointed out, there's three or four different approaches

Starting point is 00:23:05 to each disasters. And so when you talk about the field of longevity or anti-agent, you're talking about people going at all of these nine causes of death, basically. So we talk about these in the book. We talk about where we are with stem cells. We talk about wind pathway communications, which are cell to cell communications. And ultimately, when we're talking about an abundance of time, one of the things that we're excited about, and we write about is that people can begin to expect a longer, healthier lifespan. Interesting. All right, so a lot of people in the audience are huge Warren Buffett fans.

Starting point is 00:23:42 He always asked this silver bullet question to the management, basically asking if you could remove one competitor from the marketplace, what is it that they do specifically well? Now, I would like to spin that question a little and then ask you, which large industry gets the silver bullet, meaning which large industry will be completely disrupted next and how? Healthcare education, top two. I think the whole educational system is fundamentally broken.

Starting point is 00:24:15 I have two eight-year-old boys in school. They're in a great school, but, you know, our school system, testing to test, having, you know, this situation, and it's the majority of schools around the school. the country, not all, are built for, you know, 200 years ago. They're built for the industrial revolution. Everybody had to learn a certain number of skills. The bell rings and people move into the next teaching slot. You know, when's the last time you sort of did algebra or, you know, factored a polynomial? It's just, you know, we spend so much time doing and teaching that, but we don't teach the fundamental things that are critically important for us in society today. You know,

Starting point is 00:25:00 how to pitch your idea, how to find your passion, how to be empathetic, how to be a great storyteller, you know, how to be an entrepreneur, whatever it might be. So we need to reinvent education fundamentally. Stephen, what are your thoughts? Cattle ranching? I think agriculture is going to massively change. I think it has to for environmental reasons, but I think the technology is coming. I think that's one that doesn't see it coming at all. And I got to reiterate with Peter with healthcare. Retail's gone as we know it. Like retail as we know it is gone. And some of that, the writing is already really visible. So I don't know if that's as surprising. But if you look at the changes that, you know, AI bring to retail and you start walking them

Starting point is 00:25:46 forward, you know, and you get 10 years out and you realize that we're not even the ones doing the shopping anymore in our A's eyes are doing the shopping. And that takes out advertising with it because if you're not doing the buying, you can advertise to an AI. The shift there, I think Peter's right. That's the point of the book. It's hard to point at one thing because the book looks at 10 years to change. But the question I would ask, and maybe I'll ask Peter this in the middle of your podcast, which is Peter, can you think of an industry that's going to be the same in a decade? What's safe? That is a critically important question. And I mean, we made the statement that nothing is going to remain the same, that we're seeing a transformation in every industry.

Starting point is 00:26:29 You know, we are just beginning to see the inflection point in AI. We're just at the earliest days of gigabit bandwidth globally. And AR hasn't even hit. We're seeing, you know, we're seeing Magic Leap and HoloLens and Apple's announced a product. for a circuit 2022. But the thing that we really hit on in the book is we're going to create more wealth in the next 10 years than we have in the entire past century, and every industry is going to change. So I'm kind of fascinated because you two can ask each other questions that are way beyond

Starting point is 00:27:07 the scope of somebody like me that's way on the outside of this technology front. So I'm kind of curious because I really liked what happened there, Stephen. Peter, if you could ask Stephen a question and vice versa, what would be a question that you would play Stump the Chump with with your counterpart? So here's a question, right? And I ask this now, every audience I go to, what is something that AIs will not be able to do that humans can do, right? And we're going to find out what it truly means to be human because of that.

Starting point is 00:27:38 So how long will it be, Stephen, before an AI is much better at right? writing novels and books than humans? That's an interesting question, right? The best we know this past, I guess it was two years ago now, and AI came very close, right, to winning one of Japan's big writing awards. It's interesting. I think it's going to be 10 years, 15 years. How long until AI can produce things that are as interesting and riveting and everything

Starting point is 00:28:08 else as a human? Three to five, six, seven years, I think. I mean, even like, you look at something. some of the AI films that are now floating around online, they're not like normal films, right? You wouldn't watch them in the same way you would go home and watch West Wing episodes, but there's something really weird about watching them and they're fascinating to watch because you're like, wow, this is a non-human consciousness built this thing that I'm watching, and that's a very interesting experience.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Wow, I never heard about such a thing. So to clarify, you're saying that films are being made right now, that No humans have touched. It's just purely AI generated. There's a couple of shorts out there. We write about one where they let an AI read hundreds of horror scripts and then write one of their own. They used an AI. Morgan, I believe was the name of the thriller. They used an AI, had an AI watch a hundred different horror movie trailers and then they used it to make this trailer. Just type AI movie into Google and you'll see some of this stuff. Yeah, there is a number of AI-generated films that have come out.

Starting point is 00:29:18 And it's just the beginning, right? So, you know, for everybody listening, it's like, will an AI be the best comedian in the world? Will an AI be the best artist in the world, the best writer in the world, the best musician in the world? And, you know, the interesting thing is we're going to find out soon enough. There will never be an AI who's the best writer in the world until, you know, especially if longevity, you keep me alive for a while I can hold on to that title, of course. Everything else, I totally agree with what he said. You got to think big. So, Stephen, what would be your question, another question over to Peter?

Starting point is 00:29:53 So, Peter, like, I know, like, first of all, you just made your comments, all your feelings on education really clear. So we, and I agree with you, right? And you've, you've taken an active participation and helping to reinvent education with the Global Learning XPRIZE, which was kind of aimed at reading where I think in arithmetic. So you did that. If you were going to reinvent education, what's the next step? What do you do next?

Starting point is 00:30:16 I mean, for me, the thing that makes education amazing is going to be living it. You know, in medical school, we had the old saying, watch one, do and teach one. And in the virtual world, you're going to be able to easily do that, right? Where, you know, the example I talk about a lot. And, you know, if I want to study ancient Greece, what I want to do is put on my VR headset and go and walk around ancient Greece. And there will be some guy who looks like Plato is sitting on a piece of marble over there. And it'll be an AI-generated avatar that everything ever known about Plato is driving that

Starting point is 00:30:54 AI algorithm. So when I speak to that AI, it is as close as possible to Plato. You think that's the next step. That's where you would go next. I think that's the most impactful transformational. next step. I think they're interim steps. I think there are things like, you know, everybody learns in different ways. Some people are tactile, visual, auditory. And, you know, can a person get their education in the exact way it's best for them? Can we measure a person's brain waves to know,

Starting point is 00:31:27 did they understand that concept or not? Because there is an ability to, you know, you know when you get to the aha, that aha moment, that's brain chemistry. There is a signal when you have that happen. And if you don't, if you're confused, there's signals there. In fact, I just came back from China and one company that is using for kids, using tablets, and he uses the forward-facing camera to do facial recognition on the kid so that if the kid is not getting the idea, it can see that. And it tries it in a different way. And it tries in a different approach.

Starting point is 00:32:00 And it learns the best way the kid learns. and it knows if the kid got something by the answer and by their facial. Yeah, it's the first step towards illustrated primer. It's the face rating component. Yeah, yeah. So those are things that are coming now in the near term. So let's talk about a very popular topic these days, augmented reality. And for those people who might be not too familiar with this,

Starting point is 00:32:26 you have likely seen it before in just one shape of form. It is a real-world environment that is just a real-world environment that is just enhanced by computers. And one example could be Pokemon Go, or it could be filters on Instagram. And right now you see a very interesting development with glasses with new features for augmented reality. Could you please talk to us about that

Starting point is 00:32:49 and how prevalent you think it will be in the future? We have HoloLens, we've got Magic Leap, we've got a dozen other small companies, the Kahuna that's going to be coming in is Apple. and this device, the cell phone that they all carry around, and everybody is attached by this, you know, invisible tethered to your cell phone, that phone is eventually going to dematerialize into a pair of glasses that you're wearing. And Apple understands that, and Apple's heading towards that direction. Augmented reality, 5G, and AI is going to transform every marketplace.

Starting point is 00:33:26 in particular retail and entertainment. The upside is giant. It's not about the hardware, really. It's going to be about the software integration. And it's this decade. 2022 will start to see something. I'm sure we'll have seen the third-generational HoloLens, a third-generation of Magic League,

Starting point is 00:33:48 first generation of Apple's headset, and then it's going to rapidly iterate from there. 22, 23 is what they just recently said, and they may come out before then, but it's been rumored and unrumored and rumored again. They're doing it. It's a big deal. We quote Tim Cook in the book saying he thinks AR is an idea as big as the smartphone itself in potential, which is considerable. And it's certainly, it's going to add an input. information layer to reality. Right. Reality is about to gain. We haven't changed reality in like the 200,000 years since we got our basic brain. We hadn't really changed reality. It's happening.

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Starting point is 00:37:59 All right. Back to the show. So Magically, we're doing something different with the optics, I've read a little bit that seemed like it was different than what Microsoft had done with their. I saw some type of lens that they had, but Magically was doing something optically that was transmitting something right onto your cones and rods. Is that a similar path that Apple's going to take? Is that the most predominant technology that's going to be able to bring the most amount of data

Starting point is 00:38:24 to that sensor on the human? So there's a multitude of different approaches. This work goes back years and years to the late 90s where the human interface lab up in Seattle, fellow Dr. Furness did the early work. And early on, it just literally had a half silvered 45 degree mirror that would like to see through and then project into your eyes as well. One of the things that is the Holy Grail here is what's called a virtual retinal display where there's a laser that paints an image on the back of your retina.

Starting point is 00:39:00 One of the companies we talk about in the book is one that's created hard contact lenses that you would wear that would generate an audits. augmented reality image. So you can look through the contact lens and see an image superimposed. And if you close your eyes, you can watch a movie. I mean, that's pretty insane. So it's just beginning. We don't actually know what Apple is going to be rolling out with, but whatever it is, it'll be beautiful and expensive. I can definitely say for Preston and me, and I'm sure for everyone else listen to this, we're just amazed how you, Stephen and Peter have access to the newest groundbreaking technology way before the public gets any insight into what is on the horizon.

Starting point is 00:39:47 So I'm very curious about your response to my next question. Over the last two or three years, what did you guys see that really just gave you goosebumps where you were like, oh my God, what is going on here? I'll tell you my first one. There's a technology for a company that's called Lifekind. and what they're doing is they are digitizing people. They're creating AI personas. The first person they're working on is Tony Robbins.

Starting point is 00:40:17 So I want you to imagine the following. You create a neural network, which you train on all of Tony's videotapes, audio cassettes, live events, all of his books. And so you create an AI that, first of all, can generate exactly what it looks like and exactly it sounds like, but that can respond as he would respond. So if you were to go to him and say, hey, Tony, listen, I'm having difficult my relationship and this is what's going on. And the AI would 99.99% respond as Tony would, except this AI can now have a million simultaneous conversations, a hundred million simultaneous conversations.

Starting point is 00:41:00 So it's a Tony coach in your pocket. So that's an amazing capability. And I've seen that is a blow away. So imagine being able to have the best investors digitized in your pocket to have conversations with. They are, I'm very proud. I'm going to be the second person they're digitizing after Tony. There's a lot of them.

Starting point is 00:41:22 But going back four or five years ago, six years ago, the Department of Defense was really worried about the rising tide of soldier suicide. It was a real problem. the best way to deal with that, you know, stem that is early detection of PTSD and depression. And the best way to do that is live interviews with psychologists. And there just weren't enough psychologists. They just, they couldn't scale them up. So they went to USC and they built Ellie, the world's first AI psychologist.

Starting point is 00:41:56 And she started out as a diagnostic psychologist. Ellie, at the time they built her, was reading 60 different emotional cues, affective cues, vocal tone, eye gaze, on and on. Now I think it's well over 160 a second. So, first of all, it turns out soldiers prefer talking to Ellie than they do to actual shrinks because Ellie never judges, right? She's a computer. She doesn't judge. And I had a session with Ellie, went to USC and had a session with Ellie and went in thinking, oh yeah, whatever. I got to talk to the AI shrink. Okay, whatever.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Like, Ellie literally looks like a middle-aged Hispanic woman is really what she looks like, and cartoon of a middle-aged Hispanic woman. And I got to tell you, I got sent to shrinks as a kid. I was a bit of a wild child, so I had my run-ins. And it was, I don't like them. They're uncomfortable. I don't, right? I walked in, I'm talking to Ellie.

Starting point is 00:42:52 I'm like, holy crap, it's this. I feel the same like I used to. But for suicide, she's very, like the DOD is rolling Ellie out at scale, right? This is psychology at scale. It's a diagnostic level psychology at this point, right, trying to diagnose mental illness for intervention purposes, though it's rapidly going up. It was talking to a computer that knew me better than I knew myself was a very odd sort of moment.

Starting point is 00:43:21 We have young listeners in our audience that are in college. and in high school, what is your single best advice for that young listener that's looking up to you too and just looking at everything that you guys have accomplished and thinking that is just impossible? What would you, what's your advice to that person that's listening? One critically important thing that is independent of technology is get clear what you love to do more than anything else in the world. It doesn't matter what it is.

Starting point is 00:43:53 and focus on doing that, be driven by your passion, discover what we call your massively transformative purpose in the world. And once you do that, you will learn everything you need to do to fulfill that. And as new technologies come online that enable you to fulfill your purpose better or faster, you'll learn those too. If you're doing what you love in life, not what you're told to do by your parents or your teachers, but what you truly love to do and you connect it with that purpose, it's magic. So that is the most important thing.

Starting point is 00:44:30 The thing I always want to point out, right, you know, I've spent my career sort of studying what does it take to achieve the impossible, right, in pretty much every domain, sports, science, medicine, paradigm shifting break. Like, that's my core passion. And I've been lucky enough to meet, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who have accomplished literally impossible things, things people, you know, didn't think were ever going to happen. And the one thing that is over and over and over and over again, first of all, most people who get that far surprised themselves, right? But the lesson that I

Starting point is 00:45:03 see over it again is we are capable of so much more than we know. We are just capable of so much more than we know. And I think it compliments, Peter, because I think the way you figure out what you're capable of is you figure out exactly what you love and you do that. And I think that's the first step, but I think the next set of discoveries is I can go a lot bigger than I thought I could. Yeah, let me just put an exclamation point on that. We're more powerful than we ever have and been in human history. Today, anyone who really wants to solve a problem has access to all the capital, computational power, information they could possibly want. And I think one of the reasons for this book is to give people a sense of both hope and a sense of empowerment.

Starting point is 00:45:49 The goal here is that we want people not to be fearful of the future because the rate of change is increasing so fast that people get scared about the world going, you know, am I going to survive? This book is a roadmap of where the world is going in this next decade, and a roadmap of empowerment so that people get a sense of this is an exciting future and I can be part of it. And I think one of it is one of the concepts here is we're living in a world where instead of complaining about problems, you can go out there and solve them. One of the themes is the world's biggest problems or the world's biggest business opportunities. Want to become a billionaire, help a billion people.

Starting point is 00:46:28 This book lays out those opportunities. Gentlemen, what an honor to speak with you. The name of the book is The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter DeAmendez and Stephen Codler. Guys, where can the audience learn more about your book? The website for our pre-order campaign, because we're going to have a ton of amazing who people order before the book comes out on January 28th is going to be future fasterbook.com. If you order the book in advance, you'll actually have a chance to get a digital copy of our first two books, abundance and bold at no additional cost. For example, there's hundreds and hundreds of dollars of bonuses

Starting point is 00:47:10 for people who go there and order the book. So for us, the greatest compliment that Stephen and I get paid is when people say, my God, you've given me hope for the future. You've shown me where the world is going and I'm excited about it. And for anybody listening, whatever podcast app you're using, if you just go into the show notes, I'm going to have a link for what Peter just mentioned. Just click on that link and it's going to take you right to that option for you to do the pre-order. So, guys, thank you so much. This was so awesome.

Starting point is 00:47:40 Pleasure. Take care. All right, guys. So if you're really into tech like Stephen Codler and Pierre Diamandis, and I'm just really curious about what the future will bring, I highly recommend that you listen to a new show Silicon Valley here on the Avastas Podcast Network, hosted by Sean Flynn. In this episode that I'll play a few minutes from, Sean is speaking with senior research scientists from NASA, Jonathan Trent. Could you talk a little bit about going to the moon? The history of it. and when are we going to go to Mars? I'm actually really excited about the idea of going to the moon

Starting point is 00:48:20 and sending humans to the moon in Mars and Mars exploration, but not for the same reasons that most people are excited about it. So Elon and I would be completely at odds about why we should go to Mars. But let me tell you a little bit about the conditions on the moon and on Mars. So you have a reason to understand why I'm not that interested in ever sending people there. So you need to understand that on the moon, the daytime, which lasts about 13 and a half earth days, the temperature at the surface of the moon gets to about 260 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about 127 degrees Celsius. And then the following 13 and a half days, the moon's night,

Starting point is 00:49:05 the temperature goes down to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, or about minus 173 degrees. The atmosphere on the moon is about a few inches, a few centimeters thick. There's no atmosphere on the moon. And if you're in the sun versus in the shadow, the temperature difference can be 200 degrees. So the human body on the moon is really at a loss for survival. But let's talk about Mars, because everybody talks about Mars as though we're going to build a colony there. So you need to understand Mars has an atmosphere. It's about a hundred times thinner than the Earth's atmosphere. and it's made up of 95% carbon dioxide. So in contrast, the Earth has about 0.04% carbon dioxide,

Starting point is 00:49:53 and we're worried about it because it's going up and it's causing greenhouse gas. But Mars has a little bit of nitrogen in the atmosphere, about 2.7%, so less than 3% nitrogen. Whereas the Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Now, here's the key. The Martian atmosphere has only trace amounts of oxygen, almost unmeasurable, whereas the Earth's atmosphere is 21% oxygen. It has a tiny bit of CO2. So what does this mean? This means we will never

Starting point is 00:50:26 breathe the Martian atmosphere, and of course we can make oxygen by stripping the oxygen out of the carbon dioxide, which is CO2, and we can take the O2 out of the carbon dioxide. But, you know, in the Earth's atmosphere, we breathe mostly nitrogen. So nitrogen is the carrier gas. So while we can get oxygen from the Martian carbon dioxide, where are we going to put the gas? The gas has to be carried by another gas. And in our case, it's carried by nitrogen. So the Martian atmosphere is really a problem, not only for breathing, but also because it's so thin. What does this mean? This means that the pressure at the surface of Mars is much, much lower, a hundred times lower than the pressure on Earth. What does pressure do? It influences the temperature at which water boils, for example.

Starting point is 00:51:23 On the Earth water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius. On Mars, water boils at about the freezing point on Earth. It boils between 32 degrees and 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So what's body temperature. Body temperature is 98.6, right, 37 degrees Celsius. So our blood, all the liquids in our body exposed to the Martian environment would boil. We would suffocate because we can't breathe the atmosphere. Our blood would boil. Oh, and then the temperature on Mars, because Mars is considerably farther away from the sun, the sun's radiation is about third of what it is on the Earth, temperature on Mars really low. So let's think about this. On summer, around July, the hottest time in summer at noon, the temperature gets up 68 degrees Fahrenheit, gets up to,

Starting point is 00:52:22 you know, about 20 degrees Celsius. That's not so bad. But that same night, the temperature will drop to minus 100 degrees. So at night on Mars, that's 100 degrees, which is, I'm a hundred degrees. about minus 78 degrees Celsius. This is excruciatingly cold. So overall, the average temperature in a year during the day may get up to about 21 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still below freezing, and it's about, on average,

Starting point is 00:52:54 somewhere around minus 63 degrees Celsius, overall day night. So the temperatures and the pressure and the conditions on Mars are really, really difficult. try to make human habitation. So why do I say that I'm incredibly excited about human exploration in Mars and the moon? Because imagining what it would be like to put people in that resource-limited environment, in that place where there is no water and there's no atmosphere to

Starting point is 00:53:27 breathe and there's nothing that remotely resembles food, that place where there are none of what we can take for granted as what we call ecosystem services, imagining what it must be like to live there, means that the resources from the waste products of the humans that go there are more valuable than anything we find on the moon or on Mars. And that process of trying to envision how people would survive in these resource limited places teaches us a lot about how somehow come to terms with the resource limitations that we're starting to experience on earth. If you would like to listen to the rest of this amazing interview, I've made sure to put a link in the show note. And if you would like to subscribe to our new show, Silicon Valley,

Starting point is 00:54:16 and stay update about the latest trends in technology, make sure to search for the investors podcast network on iTunes, Spotify, or whatever kind of podcast app you're using. And our new show, Silicon Valley, will just pop up and you can just subscribe. right there. But guys, that was all the press that I had for this week's episode of the ambassadors podcast. We see each other again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

Starting point is 00:55:00 Thank you.

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