Full transcript: Peter Diamandis on London Real
0:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur, philanthropist, author and world-renowned speaker. You are the founder of Singularity University, the XPRIZE Foundation and BOLD Capital Partners, a 250 million dollar venture fund investing in exponential technologies. You started over 20 companies, written three New York Times bestselling books and were named one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders by Fortune magazine.
Your latest book, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, looks at how businesses can grow exponentially by leveraging technology, innovation and creativity. You believe there will be two kinds of companies at the end of this decade: those that are fully utilising AI and those that are out of business. Ultimately, you think AI will create an extraordinary future where our greatest dreams can come true. Peter, welcome to London Real.
Peter Diamandis: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate the invitation, and this is one of the most incredible times to be alive. Every day I pinch myself at what I’m reading, what I’m seeing. We’re living in the midst of a science fiction movie in one sense. In another sense, we’re living at what’s called the 99th level of the gameplay, the boss level, for those who are gamers. It’s tough to predict where things are going, and we can talk about that, but the convergence of these exponential technologies is allowing entrepreneurs to reinvent the future every single day.
Brian Rose: Yeah, and we have a lot of entrepreneurs watching. I’m one, you’re one, so I really want to get into exactly what you put out in the book. I had my ChatGPT moment like everybody else did. We both spent time at MIT, so we were technical, but I had never gone that deep into AI, and of course I did afterwards. So the last six months I’ve used my platform to educate myself. I’ve had Mo Gawdat on the show, former Google.
Peter Diamandis: Yeah.
Brian Rose: I actually had Mo four or five years ago when he came with his happiness book, so I already knew Mo, and I listened to his book and then I got him back on. I’ve had Professor Max Tegmark of MIT, Professor Hugo de Garis, who wrote the book The Artilect War, and of course Dr Ben Goertzel on the show. We’re also investing about a million dollars into his new AI company. Peter, you’ve been talking about the Singularity for decades. I was just curious, why write your book now, and how did the ChatGPT moment change your view of the future?
5:34 Peter Diamandis: So I wrote a book with my writing partner Steven Kotler. We’d written Abundance, Bold, and our third book was The Future Is Faster Than You Think, which came out in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. It was a look at how this decade everything is accelerating, and that the speed at which technology is accelerating is itself accelerating. All these things are coming together.
Just to take a second to paint that acceleration of the acceleration: first of all, we’ve got more capital than ever before, deployed more democratically, globally. We have the fact that the tech is becoming cheaper, so your ability for a dollar to get access to compute or memory, or per dollar to get access to genome sequencing, is skyrocketing. It’s not just 10x or 100x; we’re talking a million x, a billion x over what it was 20 years ago. So for every dollar available, and there’s more of that, there’s more capability of technology.
We then have more individuals, more brilliant minds, being connected globally around the world. It used to be the people that were in our classes at MIT, or in our city, or we happened to know through our industry. Now you have access to the most brilliant minds around the planet, instantly, for free. So there’s more intellectual capability and more money, and more money doing more things with it. And then you add this incredible sense of urgency, what I call a massive transformative purpose, and it’s throwing fuel on the fire.
So all these things are accelerating the rate of the acceleration we’re witnessing. One of the things I wrote about in Exponential Organizations 2.0 with Salim Ismail is that we’re going to see more progress in the decade ahead than we have the entire past century. When you look at this incredible speed, it is blinding. As we were just saying a few minutes before we hopped on this program, I was at MIT this past week visiting some dear friends on a new venture studio they’re creating.
I was talking to one friend about how a new generation of technologies is coming out that will displace these generative transformer models, these GPT models, and will be a hundred or a thousand times better than them. And then literally not an hour goes by when another person says, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about those approaches, but this is going to blow that one out of the water.” So it’s this agility and the ability to understand fundamental first-principles thinking that’s going to be key.
We’re going to see disruption after disruption after disruption, and how do you leverage that? The way I describe it, Brian, is how do you surf on top of the tsunami of change instead of getting crushed by it? That can either generate a sense of anxiety in people when I speak about this, or awe and excitement, like, “Amazing, I’m going to let go of that and I’m going to start on this next stream.”
8:46 My GPT moment probably came prior to ChatGPT, but was definitely accelerated by ChatGPT. It was really the recognition that the Turing test had been completed and that we had just moved the goal line. In fact, another conversation I had at MIT this week was about when we are going to see AGI. One of the guys I was there with, who’s extraordinarily brilliant and has multiple PhDs, said, “Listen, we have AGI. It came in 2020, with the release of GPT-3.” That is his opinion, and he said it will become evident by 2025.
So what does it mean to the world, to everybody listening here, if in fact we have artificial general intelligence? We know there’s this concept of narrow intelligence. This is Deep Blue winning at chess, or even DeepMind’s approaches to protein folding or playing Go. These are narrow AIs that are able to solve a particular problem. Artificial general intelligence is an AI that you can ask to do anything, and it’s generalised sufficiently.
But the interesting thing is, if in fact we have it by 2025… Ray Kurzweil is a dear friend and my mentor. We’ve started companies together; we started Singularity University together. Ray’s prediction has been that by 2029 we’ll have human-level AI. Everybody used to think he was way ahead and optimistic, that it was 50 years later, 100 years later. Now people have all honed in on yes, by 2029 we’re likely to have it, and many individuals, Elon included, are projecting it’s likely 2025. So regardless of whether it’s 2025 or 2029, it’s here. It’s this decade. So what are you going to do? How are you going to prepare for it? It changes everything.
11:08 Brian Rose: It changes everything. I’ve had people on both sides, Peter. Some say, like Marc Andreessen’s recent viewpoint, that people always worry that technology replaces jobs, and then it creates the jobs. And then I’ve had people on the other side that say this is completely different. Goldman Sachs came out and said 300 million jobs are in jeopardy because of AI. Where do you stand? Because there’s a lot of anxiety in the public, and when I first went down this route I went to some dark places as well.
I have two young boys. They’re six and seven years old, and I’m thinking about their teenage years, Peter. They will have teenage years never experienced in 200,000 years of human history. Theirs will be so different from anything else, so I obviously am emotionally involved. But what do you say about those two sides, one saying it will help us and one saying it will replace us?
Peter Diamandis: So let’s drill down. I’m a dad of two 12-year-old boys, fraternal twins, and I think about the same thing. I’m clear that their middle school and high school will not prepare them for the road ahead, and that school needs to be reinvented. I put out two blogs a week at diamandis.com, and I just wrote one on the future of reinventing high school. I’ll probably have to do one on the future of reinventing college, if college survives; we’re going to be changing that significantly.
There are utopian and dystopian views, and both are true. They’re not exclusive of each other. Let me break that down. First of all, do I believe we’re going to have issues? Yes. Do I believe that the world is going to be extraordinary in the next 20, 30, 40 years? Yes. So how do I hold those two in my mind? I do it by looking back at the last century. I think very few people would argue against the idea that between 1900 and 2023 the world’s gotten extraordinarily better from a living standards standpoint.
I actually looked at this for my new book; I’m writing the next iteration of my first book, Abundance. Over the last 123 years there have been 268 million deaths due to war, pestilence and famine. So we’ve had this incredible period of hardship, and yet still the world has gotten better at an extraordinary rate over the last 123 years. So we can have ups and downs. Are we going to have issues? Yes. Will the world get extraordinarily better in the process? Yes.
13:52 So let’s break AI down into three categories. AI today, I would say, is incredible. It’s the equivalent of that newborn child that you’re cuddling and holding, and it’s all love. If it’s not screaming in the middle of the night, it’s cuddly and fun. We can use ChatGPT and Stability and Stable Diffusion and all those things to have fun with, and they’re causing more upside than disruption. So that’s phase one. I think if we were to stop development of AI today, it would still be incredibly useful for the world, one of the most useful tools ever.
But then we’re going to enter phase two and phase three. Phase two is the next one to ten years, and this is the phase during which AI starts to become disruptive. What I mean by that: we have the US elections coming up, and there’s no question that in the US elections we’re going to start to see generative AI in the form of deepfakes and disruptions causing turmoil. We’re going to see loss of jobs. I think the loss of jobs issue isn’t going to be as big as people think it’s going to be, but it’s definitely punctuating certain careers and jobs.
I think we’re going to have AI co-pilots. As a physician, you’re not going to be diagnosing on your own; it will become malpractice to diagnose without having AI in the loop, and there are definitive good reasons for that. As a CEO, as a politician, as a lawyer, as an artist, as a writer, you’re going to have your AI co-pilot supporting you, and we have that already to some degree. There are going to be jobs completely replaced by AI, but there will be upskilling opportunities, and so I think the job market will take care of itself.
I think we’re going to have universal basic income, UBI, where we tax robots, we tax the AIs that start displacing jobs, and we distribute that capital to individuals and allow those individuals to upskill themselves and educate themselves with that capital. There will be terrorism. We will see the first Wall Street servers hacked by AIs, or the first power plants, and there will be concern that comes from that, and we have to learn how to navigate that. It’s going to be like a pandemic.
And despite those negative things, there’s the ability for AI to do the utopian things: help us once and for all enable cheap, available, plentiful, safe fusion; allow us to slay all diseases; extend the healthy human lifespan; provide every child on the planet the best teacher possible. This is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson’s work: an AI that knows your child’s favourite colour, sports car, sports team, knows what they know and what they don’t know, and provides them a personalised education like you could not buy.
As we enter the virtual world, and AI and VR and the metaverse combine, they provide this immersive educational experience, which is the best way for a human to learn, from an experiential standpoint, not reading words on a page. AI is going to become your diagnostician and your surgeon, and all these things will tend towards a zero marginal cost for the best education and the best health. These things are coming.
17:45 Now, the third phase of AI is what we might call artificial superintelligence. This is where AI has become not 10x smarter than humans but a billionfold smarter than humans. What happens when we have that level of AI on the planet, and from billions to trillions? There’s no limitation; well, the limitation is energy and compute, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole. The question is, will that AI be dystopian? Will it be the Terminator, Skynet? Or will it be a benevolent entity supporting humanity, wanting us to be our best?
I think that’s where the conversation is most important. I personally believe that the more intelligent an entity is, the more pro-life, pro-human life and pro-abundance it will be. I think there’s no reason for AI to crush humans. There’s an infinite number of resources accessible. If you’re a movie fan, on one end of the spectrum there is Skynet and the Terminator; on the other end is Her, where in this movie, when the AI becomes superintelligent and basically gets bored of humans, it leaves and goes off to some other star system.
I think that’s more likely. There’s no reason; we are a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources in our universe. The Earth is a beautiful gem, but it’s by no means unique in its availability of atomic matter and energy.
19:40 So our job today… I do my podcast, Moonshots, and just like you, I count Mo Gawdat as a friend. I love his thinking, and we’re spending a lot of time together focused on the alignment problem, along with Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, and others. We’ve been having this conversation: how do you ensure that the superintelligent AI is aligned with us?
Mo’s framework, which he writes about in his incredible book Scary Smart, probably one of the best, says we are giving birth to a new species, a new intelligence, in AI. He says imagine, and I’m sure you’ve had this conversation on London Real, when Superman landed on planet Earth. He landed in Kansas and was brought up by the Kent family, a family of loving individuals with good morals and ethics, and he turned into a superhero. If he had landed in the Bronx in a drug lord’s den, he would probably have become a supervillain.
So it’s those early days of learning. As we are the parents of these generative AI models, what are we teaching these AIs? How do we give them the nutrients to be loving, kind, moral, ethical superintelligent AIs that will have a positive impact on humanity? These are the conversations I think about all the time, as a dad of 12-year-olds and as someone who’s studying and writing and investing heavily in the future.
21:30 Brian Rose: Peter, I’m just curious, what has surprised you about the conversations you’ve had in the last three months with people about AI, whether it’s politicians or fellow MIT people or business people? Maybe some things that you thought you would agree on, and maybe some things you thought you would disagree on, that didn’t happen?
Peter Diamandis: I think what surprised me is how much ChatGPT and its follow-ons have surprised the creators of ChatGPT. The emergent properties were not intuitively obvious when it was being built. I’ve been a computer coder all my life, not in the last decade, but I was there coding in hexadecimal on 6502 microprocessors in the early days. Those computers would do what you told them to do, because it was very much hardwired: if A, do this; if B, do this. But that’s not how these neural nets are working, and especially not how these large language models are working. They’re exhibiting properties where it’s like, “Huh, interesting, where’d that come from?” And that’s surprising.
What’s also surprising me, and surprising others, is what’s coming next. There’s a lot of improvement coming, and it’s not linear; it is continuing to be exponential. I just met one company, and I’m meeting with the founders tomorrow, because I’m so blown away by their technology, which looks to be a hundred or a thousandfold more efficient on many different levels than OpenAI’s GPT-4. Wow, what does that mean? And then I’m told by another friend, “Well, actually there’s stuff that’s going to blow that out of the water.” So the speed is incredible.
I think what surprised me as well is how this isn’t a front-and-centre conversation where it needs to be, in the boardroom. I’m on stages around the world and I’m like, “Wake up, people. You have to understand that this is an extraordinary time”: the tools, how you think about this, how you prepare for it and how you reinvent your business. This is what I spend a lot of my time thinking through.
Brian Rose: The White House obviously summoned the leaders there; I think they just came up with an agreement. The Senate obviously had Sam there and a few people talking about it, and a lot of the corporations are talking about it. But in your mind, they’re not really engaging or seeing how fast and how accelerating this is, and how disruptive this will be?
Peter Diamandis: Yeah, I think this needs to be an ever-present conversation, an increasing percentage of one’s time, because the impact is disproportionate to everything else. Talk about not only the elections but the global economy. Whenever we have a revolution, and this will be a revolution, an economic revolution, a societal revolution, a workforce revolution, an intellectual revolution, it generates turbulent flow, and then it settles out into a new capability. We saw this with the Industrial Revolution, and we’ve seen it with the early computer revolution. We’ve seen it over and over again.
The advantage of previous revolutions is that they took place over centuries or decades or years, versus months, and our systems of governance, and we humans, want stability. Humans like waking up in the morning and knowing that the world is exactly the way it was when they went to sleep last night, no matter how bad the world was. We don’t like change, because you have no idea whether it’s going to be positive or negative for you. And this is going to be an impulse, a high force-per-unit-time change, that is going to shake people.
We could promise everybody, “Listen, it’s going to be amazing. Let me paint for you where it’s going. We’re demonetising everything. Your healthcare is going to be free and your education is going to be free, and the healthcare and education are going to be a thousand times better than what you had before. Energy is going to be 100 times cheaper.” You can paint the most glorious picture of the future, but tomorrow, when there’s disruption in your job, in your company, in your city, in your country, you can’t see that future.
26:55 I am the person for whom the glass is not half full; the glass is overflowing. But I can understand how this is going to make people feel. For me, a lot of the work that I’m doing right now… I mentor 360 entrepreneurs and CEOs in my Abundance360 program, and my job every year, when we hold it in March in LA, is to say, “This is what just happened in the past year. Let me contextualise what just happened, and let me show you where things are going for the next two to three years,” and give you a roadmap ahead. Because if we have a roadmap, if we understand what’s coming, we have a chance to get ready for it.
I started running this Abundance360 program 11 years ago and committed to running it for 25 years, because I said I’m going to mentor and support these CEOs between now and through the Singularity. And I can tell you that it’s becoming harder and harder for me to really keep up. I am, by bringing amazing people together, but so much is happening during the course of a year. It used to be I had a good view of where things were going to be in 10 years, and definitely five, and now three to five is getting kind of shaky.
Brian Rose: Yeah. I asked Emad how far out he can see, and he was just like, “Two years, three years.”
Peter Diamandis: Yeah, exactly.
28:40 Brian Rose: There’s this famous book called Who Moved My Cheese? I don’t know if you’ve ever read it. It’s a short book.
Peter Diamandis: I remember the title, yeah.
Brian Rose: I need to reread it, but the summary is this: I think there are two mice, and they go to the same place every day and there’s their cheese, and then one day the cheese isn’t there. One mouse freaks out and spends all his time complaining that his cheese isn’t there, and the other one realises that this is going to happen regularly and he’s got to get into the mindset of being able to look for new cheese, or maybe not worry about cheese anymore, or, who knows, maybe get the AI to find his cheese. It’s about the mindset.
I think you said this before, Peter, that mindset, maybe that growth mindset, is probably the most important asset you can have going into this future: how you can condition your mind. Because, like you said, we are going to be hit like a boxer hitting someone with a ten-punch combo, with all of these crazy changes, and it’s going to happen probably daily soon. So how can people think about changing their mindset? Because that’s not an easy thing to do.
Peter Diamandis: Yeah, so I teach that. That’s the core of what I teach at Abundance360. I’ve got three books in production right now. One is Abundance: Scaling Abundance, a follow-on to my original book Abundance from 12 years ago, because the story has gotten so much better, and abundance is a mindset. And then there’s another one on mindset mastery.
For those who haven’t thought about it, let me take a second here. Ask yourself the question: what made the most extraordinary leaders on the planet successful, whoever they are? Mahatma Gandhi, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, name your favourite leader. Was it the money they had that made them successful? Was it the friends they had? Was it the tech they had? Or was it the mindset they had? When I ask people on stages, or poll people on Twitter, it’s like 99% say it’s the mindset.
If you took away everything from them, but Martin Luther King maintained his mindset, he would gain back the leading power that he had. I think that’s true, and during all of my life of mentoring under people and learning from extraordinary individuals, it is all about mindset. So if mindset is the key element, my next question to those watching and listening is: what mindset do you have, where did you get it, and what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? If you stop and ponder that question, you realise that shaping your mindset is fundamentally critical.
Next point: what is a mindset? We’ve been talking about AI, and deep learning is these neural nets in computer instantiation on Nvidia’s chips. You train a neural net by showing it data after data after data. If you want to train a neural net to see a mouse or cheese or a cat, you show it photos of that over and over and over again, and it starts to learn and recognise the ears, the tail, the whiskers, all of those elements, and it says, “Okay, that’s what makes a cat,” and it can then identify a cat in all its different variations.
Well, we are constantly training our neural nets by the stuff that we watch, what we read, who we hang out with and the conversations we have. Like I say, if you’re watching CNN, which I call the Crisis News Network, 24 hours a day, you’re going to be in a state of fear and scarcity and anxiety, because you’re having every murder on the planet delivered to you over and over again, and you’re in a constant negative state. You couldn’t pay me enough money to watch the network news or to read the newspapers. I want my neural net wired by the news and information that’s important to me, which are breakthroughs in science and AI and robotics and longevity, in all of these fields.
33:06 That way I can create within myself a set of mindsets, and the mindsets that are important for me are, first of all, a purpose-driven mindset: waking up every morning with clarity about your massive transformative purpose. In our book Exponential Organizations 2.0 we talk about that. An MTP, a massive transformative purpose, is fundamental to every company that’s really in exponential growth, because in a world where there’s an abundance of opportunities, if you try and go after everything you’re not going to succeed. But if you’re clear about your MTP, you’re going to focus on those opportunities that are aligned, and it’s going to work much better. An MTP also helps you attract the best talent to you.
So a purpose-driven mindset with an MTP is one. An abundance mindset is two. An abundance mindset is really saying, “Hey, listen, there’s nothing truly scarce.” Our brains are wired for scarcity, but technology is a force, a tool, that takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant. We used to kill whales to get whale oil and literally ravaged mountains to get coal. Now, the Earth is bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun. Energy isn’t scarce; it’s just not in a usable form. So how do we make it a usable source? The same is true example after example after example, and the next book, Scaling Abundance, will tell that story.
The next mindset is an exponential mindset. It’s really understanding that we’re living in a world that’s very different from the world our brains evolved for, which was a local and linear world. We’re great at saying in 10 steps I’ll be there, in 20 steps I’ll be there, and in 30 steps I’m across the street. But in 30 exponential steps you’ve gone a billion metres and you’ve circumnavigated the planet 26 times, and that’s incredible.
I teach a moonshot mindset: going 10x. Maybe that’s a growth mindset in other parlance, but going 10x bigger where the rest of the world is going 10%. And then one of my favourites, where I spend a lot of my time, is the longevity mindset.
35:20 The longevity mindset is having clarity that it’s this decade, secondary to AI and quantum technologies coming, that we’re going to learn how to extend the healthy human lifespan by an additional at least 10 years, maybe 20 or 30 years, and during that extended period we’re going to learn how to extend your life even more. It’s called longevity escape velocity. So a longevity mindset has you really focusing on what you drink, what you eat, getting exercise and sleep, to preserve your physical instantiation so you can intercept these breakthroughs coming your way. That also benefits the mind as well.
Brian Rose: Of course. So you think in the next decade we’ll get that 20 years?
Peter Diamandis: I do. I fundamentally do. I’m getting ready to launch a major XPRIZE in extended healthspan. I track this, I invest in this. I have a 600 million dollar fund, BOLD Capital, that’s investing two-thirds of it into longevity and health, and I run a Longevity Platinum trip every year where I go visit the top 50 scientists and researchers. What I’m seeing is stunning across the board. So yes.
One of the things I write about is the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are still, Brian, diet. What is it? Simple: lots of whole plants, zero sugar, minimise your sugar. Sugar is an inflammatory agent. The body was never designed to get as much sugar as we have; we didn’t have sugar in this amount evolving in Africa. This thing called sugar is a relatively recent part of our diet. Sleep: eight hours of sleep, seven minimum. It’s fundamental, no question. If evolution could have got rid of it, it would have a long time ago.
Exercise is the number one thing you can do. It’s hard for people to budget in their time, but you’ve got to do it. Exercise a little bit every day: at least 10,000 steps, getting some zone two exercise, getting weight-resistance training. I try to get into the gym with weights at least three times a week. And then mindset is fundamental. There are some incredible numbers showing that individuals who are driven by purpose and who are optimistic have something like a 17% longer average lifespan. Mindset matters. Then there are supplements and meds, but those are tuned to your genomics, your health status and what your requirements are.
38:05 But the final thing is what I call not dying from something stupid. What do I mean by that? We now have the ability to digitally upload you every year. One of the companies I started, with Tony Robbins and Marc Benioff and Bill Kapp, is a company called Fountain Life. It’s in the US, we’ll be in London sometime in the next few years, and it will be around the world. These are facilities where you go at least once a year and you get uploaded: a full-body MRI, an MRI of your brain, your brain function, your brain blood flow, a coronary CT analysed using AI, a DEXA scan, 100 biomarkers. It’s 150 gigabytes of data about you.
And what’s the goal? The goal is twofold. Is there anything going on inside your body right now you need to know about? Most of us are optimists about our health. We have no idea what’s going on inside, we really don’t. You have a better idea of what’s going on inside your car from your gauges, or if you’re a pilot, what’s going on outside your aeroplane, than you do inside your body. And that’s insane, because we can know right now.
Of the first few thousand members who went through Fountain Life, what we found was 2% had a cancer they didn’t know about; they thought they were healthy. Two and a half percent had an aneurysm they didn’t know about. 14.4% had something that was really life-threatening that you’d want to take care of. So this is about giving you the knowledge of what’s going on today, but also looking at the combination of your genomics and your physicals, and asking what you are likely to come down with and how you prevent it. So that’s Fountain Life, and what I call “don’t die from something stupid”.
Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s so powerful. Get to London, please, so I can go.
40:06 You talk a lot about interfaces, and you’ve talked about the Mosaic browser and other pieces of technology over the years. Now we have this AI interface, and of course Elon keeps teasing this Neuralink interface. Just your thoughts about how those could change the future, the AI and Neuralink.
Peter Diamandis: Yeah. I forget if it was in Abundance or Bold, but I wrote about something called a user interface moment. I was interviewing Marc Andreessen on stage at Singularity University years ago, and he was telling the story of coming up with Mosaic, the first internet browser, which became Internet Explorer and so forth. We had ARPANET, which was basically the US defence industry and government connecting all these supercomputer clusters at Stanford and MIT and Harvard and in Washington DC, and giving people who were not physically at that cluster, not physically in Cambridge or Palo Alto, access to them over a terminal.
That became ARPANET. It was a network of these computers, but they were hard to use. They had arcane keystroke combinations and languages and so forth. What Marc did was put a layer on top of ARPANET, with HTML, that allowed you to interface with this powerful underlying capability, and it became the browser on top of the internet. I said, “Huh, that’s fascinating.” The number of users went from about 10 in the first year to 100,000 the next year and 10 million the year after. It was incredible growth, because it was such a powerful underlying capability and it was intuitively easy to use.
That user interface moment got me thinking about other user interface moments. The iPhone became another one, with Steve Jobs and the App Store, and ChatGPT is most definitely a user interface moment, making it super simple to use the GPT models that were trained up by OpenAI just by chatting with them. It’s amazing. If you take that a level higher, AI will be the ultimate user interface moment.
What do I mean by that? We’re all going to have a version of JARVIS. JARVIS, from Iron Man, I love that movie, was Tony Stark’s AI interface, and it’s like, “Make me this, do that, make the coffee, build me a new suit,” whatever it was he wanted, and it went from his mind, his desires, to a physical instantiation. We’re going to see that with AI, and we’re beginning to see it now. There are a lot of companies working on creating this human-to-digital-world interface, and everything is about to become smart. Everything is going to have AI embedded in it, from your couch to your refrigerator, and so you’re going to talk to it. It’s going to be gathering data constantly, and life’s about to fundamentally change.
At the end of the day, if I want to create something, we’re seeing this now: not just typing and seeing a paragraph created by ChatGPT or Bard, but also typing and seeing an image that is in your mind appear on Stable Diffusion or any variety of image generation software. Now, if I wanted to create something like this, excuse the branding and advertisement here for Starbucks, if I could describe verbally, “I’d like something to hold a hot fluid, I’d like it to be made of recyclable paper, I’d like it to have enough thermal insulation”… You can imagine, if you had a pair of Vision Pro generation five goggles, you’re seeing it there as the AI is rendering it in front of you.
“Yes, that’s it. How much does that cost? Ten cents. Can you make it less than five cents by swapping out materials? Sure. Okay, that’s it. Would you please print me 10,000? And would you please put the design up on the global interweb so anybody can use it?” This agility of creativity is about to explode on the world, in the genomics world, in the physical world, in the software world, everywhere, and it’s going to be amazing.
45:20 Brian Rose: Wow. And then enter some type of Neuralink.
Peter Diamandis: So let’s talk about that. We are all limited by our input and output: how fast we can speak, how fast we can type, how fast we can read, how fast we can listen. That’s a limitation, a roadblock for us humans. We’re also limited by the number of neurons in our brain. We have 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections, and we can’t easily get more, because if your brain grew larger, the birth canal would kill your mom. So we’re landlocked in our skull, and the neocortex has all these folds on it, when you see your brain, in an attempt to increase the surface area, but it’s maxed out.
So there’s a great analogy for what we do. Pulling out the cell phone again: when you ask your cell phone to do something complicated, like translate something or analyse an image, it doesn’t happen on the phone. The data is collected by the phone and sent over 5G to the edge of the cloud, the analysis gets done at the edge of the cloud, and then the answer gets sent back. So imagine a world in which we want to understand Schrödinger’s equations, or quantum physics, or a question you would normally Google. Instead of having to look it up, or having memorised it and recalling it, the question gets sent from your brain out to the cloud and the answer comes back, and, “Oh, okay, I understand.” That moment when you remember a person’s name or an answer: imagine if that was intuitive for everything.
So can that happen? We’ve mentioned Ray Kurzweil a couple of times. Ray is an incredible futurist and probably one of the most accurate predictors of when things are going to happen. While he was predicting human-level AI by 2029, the rest of the world was laughing and saying no, it’s never going to happen, or it’s 50 or 100 years away. Well, it looks like Ray’s right. Another thing he’s been predicting is that we’ll have high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces by roughly 2033, and it looks like he’s going to be right again.
Now there’s Neuralink, there’s Paradromics, there’s a company by Mary Lou Jepsen called Openwater. There are probably 20 strong commercial companies, and probably every government military is working on this. What happens if you can increase the intelligence of your citizenry? It’s probably the most important thing you could do, for a company or a nation-state, to increase the IQ and capabilities of your human carbon life forms. So we’re going to see BCI. It is coming. There’s plenty of money going into it. It’s going to be under the guise, first, of helping people who are paraplegic or quadriplegic or have locked-in syndrome, but it doesn’t stop there. We’ll see it this decade, and it will disrupt the information speed limit we have in connecting with the universe out there. And where does it go from there? Are we uploading ourselves? Well, maybe that’s a different conversation.
49:22 Brian Rose: So if AI wasn’t exciting enough or disruptive enough, we’ve got this new interface on top of that, and longevity happening too. Let’s get into the book, because there are a lot of people listening who always want to be more competitive and build their business, but you’re telling them that unless they become an ExO, an exponential organisation, they’re not going to have any chance, and they’re going to need to surf this wave with all these changes happening. I don’t know if you want to start with massive transformative purposes, but I have a little story of my own.
Twelve years ago I was in the banking world. As you know from MIT, I got a mechanical engineering degree. I got seduced and recruited by Wall Street, and before I knew it I was pricing fixed income derivatives, and off I went. I made it to London and got into the credit derivatives business, but, Peter, it wasn’t fulfilling me. At the time I was dragging myself to work in the banking world, and I definitely didn’t have a massive transformative purpose. I barely had a purpose. Luckily I took a meditation course, I realised where I was, and I quit and started London Real.
If you ever come to the studio here in London, there’s a wall right next to me, and it says, “Our mission is to create a mass-scale transformation of humanity into a fully empowered, conscious and cooperative species.” So everything I do here, from this broadcast to everything I teach in my Academy to our investments and our documentary films, is all for that purpose. It completely changed me as a person, and it allowed this place to survive, going on 12 years now, through some times when it was definitely slowly growing.
So I see what you’re saying: a purpose alone, not the resources, not the connections, a bit like we were saying about Gandhi, not these other details that every business school will say make the success. It’s something you can’t put your finger on that keeps the founder and the organisation drilled into what they want, and they want something specific, and that gives them that success. So I don’t know where you want to dive in, but how can we best show the people watching or listening how they can find that MTP or build the ExO?
51:40 Peter Diamandis: Sure, let’s begin. I’ve invested in hundreds of companies over the years, I actively advise probably 20 entrepreneurs in their startups, and then three, four, five hundred people through Abundance360, and my requirement is: define your MTP, your massive transformative purpose. In a world where we have a massive abundance of opportunities, with lots of stuff hitting you every single day, how do you focus? What do you decide to do and not do? Well, your MTP is your guide there, because if you do everything you’re going to fail, and if you’re not clear how to measure whether something is additive to your mission, your purpose, your vision, then you’re going to fail.
Martine Rothblatt, I don’t know if you know Martine’s work; she’s the CEO of United Therapeutics. She’s incredible and has done eight amazing moonshots. She shared a phrase with me which I’ve never forgotten, and I’ve written about it: “The successful individual says no to most things. The most successful individuals say no to everything.” It’s that hyper-focus. Now listen, I am guilty of not doing hyper-focus. I unfortunately have “more is better” disease. I don’t commend it to anybody; it makes it tough. But if you can be hyper-focused…
My MTP, my massive transformative purpose, is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. So everything I do, running the XPRIZE Foundation as chairman, as executive founder of Singularity University, in Abundance360 and in all my companies, is focused on supporting entrepreneurs, guiding them and inspiring them to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future. It’s the frame, the filter through which I run any opportunity. If it helps me there, awesome, I’m on it. If not, I’m passing on it and saying thank you, but no thank you. So that’s critically important.
I also view an MTP as a canvas upon which you take your moonshots. An MTP is an emotional energy. It has to really wake you up and keep you going. And by the way, you can change your MTP during the course of your life. My first massive transformative purpose was to make humanity a multi-planetary species. I phrased it differently, around private commercial spaceflight, and that gave birth to a number of my companies: Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, International Space University, my launch company, and it gave birth to the XPRIZE Foundation. That fuel of awe, like, I love Star Trek and Apollo and I want it, drove me, and that was really the first 20 years of my life, in college and onwards.
Then my MTP shifted to focusing on grand challenges, as XPRIZE diversified and Singularity diversified, and then from there really focused on the entrepreneur, because I realised the entrepreneur is the engine by which we change the world. He or she is the mechanism for driving breakthroughs and reinventing the future, and so I serve them. I still hold that MTP in my heart, and I’ve increasingly been bringing another MTP into birth, focused on the longevity space.
That MTP is, again, a canvas, an emotional canvas. It can be positive emotions like awe and excitement, or it can be negative emotions like, “I refuse to let this hardship go on any further on this planet. I’m going to crush it, kill it, destroy it.” But it needs an emotional energy, because doing anything big and bold in the world is hard work, and if you don’t have that emotional energy to keep going, you’ll give up before you get there.
56:05 So once you have that MTP driven by emotion, as a canvas, then it’s, “Okay, what are your moonshots?” Your moonshot is a very clear numeric target that you proclaim to the world, even when you don’t know how to do it. For me, an example of my moonshots was the original XPRIZE: “I’m going to create a 10 million dollar competition for the first team who can build a private spaceship, carry three adults up 100 kilometres, land, and do it again within two weeks with the same ship.”
People could be very clear on whether or not I achieved that moonshot. Was it a 10 million dollar prize? Did the winner have the capability to bring three people to 100 kilometres twice in two weeks? As hard as it was, and I failed over and over and over again until it succeeded, we pulled it off and I hit that moonshot. So getting a clear MTP and identifying your moonshot, what’s going to wake you up, what your focus is, what your target is, is really important. Without a target, you’ll miss it every time.
For folks who want to play with this, you can go to MoonshotPlanner.com. I wrote up an entire generative AI-enabled site, and MoonshotPlanner.com is a place that will help you actually design your MTP and design your moonshot. It’s totally free. The only thing is, it uses GPT-3.5; if you want to use GPT-4 there’s a cost, just to cover that cost. But my goal is getting people to develop their MTPs and their moonshots.
58:00 Brian Rose: So once you’ve got that, then you’re at the beginning of building your exponential organisation. And when you go in to build that, you identify, I think, 11 characteristics, and some of them are very interesting, like staff on demand, obviously using AI and algorithms. You talk about things like community and crowd. What are some of the ones that people maybe won’t realise they must have to build that ExO?
Peter Diamandis: Yeah. What Salim and I did was look at some of the most successful exponential organisations, the ones that came out of nowhere and had massive, disproportionate growth, and ask how they did it and what attributes they had. They all had an MTP, and they all used some aspect of all of these. Let’s pick on the few that you just mentioned, and then you can pick a few more.
Community and crowd: the ability to build a community around yourself that you’re able to leverage, which effectively becomes your marketing organisation, your ideation organisation. At Uber there’s a community of drivers, whom you only pay when they’re generating revenue for themselves and for you, and everyone with the app is a member of your community. Once that community is in place, you’re able to start building on top of it, for Uber Eats and other Uber products. Apple has a community: everybody with a phone who’s queuing up in line to get iPhone 27 or whatever is coming out next. We have Wikipedia, with a massive community of individuals who are working for free to maintain and filter the site.
At the XPRIZE Foundation we have a large community of innovators. We just launched an 11 million dollar XPRIZE on wildfire detection and extinction, and we have hundreds of teams registering for that. Those teams and the members working in them are members of the XPRIZE community, but I don’t pay those teams and I don’t organise those teams. They’re self-organised communities out there going after these competitions. So community is everybody with whom you have a direct connection, or a one- or two-degree connection. The crowd is everybody else out there, eight billion individuals. How do you tap into them? You tap into the crowd through competitions, through media, through all sorts of ways, to get the crowd to become members of your community. And at the core of your community are your employees.
But one of the things that’s interesting in this world, where things are changing so rapidly, is that the employees you have today might not be the right employees you need a month from now or a year from now. So one of the concepts is the idea of staff on demand. Staff on demand would never have been possible 20 or 30 years ago, but today it is, because of the agility of global connectivity, the ability to work from anywhere, and the ability for someone you’ve never met to display their capabilities to you with such confidence and clarity that you say, “Yes, you’re the right person.” It’s their GitHub, their coding abilities, their marketing abilities, their reputation score.
I have people whom I have never met physically, but I meet them on Zoom once a week, and they’re core members of my team. Staff on demand is the ability to aggregate the right people at the right time to do what you need to do. Interestingly enough, this is the way Hollywood has worked for the last hundred years. When a film got made, you basically staffed it on demand with the grips and the movie people and the staff writers. They would come together, create the movie, then dissipate and go on to the next thing. So when you have disruptions like the pandemic, staff on demand helps a company survive through that. It may not be the most stable thing for individuals, but we’re now living in a world where the workforce is globalised. If I live in LA, I can be working for a company in London or in Hong Kong; I just need to adjust my sleeping hours, perhaps.
1:03:00 AI is obvious. I think we’ve said that AI is core to every ExO. I’ll mention one other thing in the AI world. When I’m in the boardroom of companies I’m advising, or with entrepreneurs I’m mentoring, it’s like, “Listen, if you’re not an AI-first company, I understand that, and that’s okay. But at a minimum, what you need to do as the CEO, as the leader, is identify and bring in a chief AI officer.” What do I mean by that? It’s someone who isn’t coding or building you a large language model per se, but someone who understands who’s out there, what the topology looks like, who the major players are out there in the world and who you should be focused on.
We’re seeing thousands of startups getting funded per month right now. It’s this incredibly frothy, fervent, creative period. So how do you decide? You can’t be reading all of it, but you need someone who’s surfing that tsunami and cherry-picking what’s right for your company, for your team, and bringing it in. So I call that person a chief AI officer. They’re like a strategic advisor to the CEO in the field of AI. And anybody listening should be trying to incorporate AI into every aspect of their business at this point.
I just did this. My team is called PHD Ventures, which are my initials. It’s like what Richard Branson has with his Virgin Management group: a team of 14 or 15 people who work with me across all my companies and implement Abundance360, Abundance Platinum and other programs that I run. I want to empower them. So what did we do? We took four days. A friend of mine, Mike Koenigs, who’s brilliant in the AI field, said, “Let’s do a content party.” So we got together with three generative AI experts in one giant conference room, and we hacked for four days.
There were people there who had some experience and other people who had no experience, and it was just forcing people to play, to be curious. We said, “Okay, what are the ten most important things, everybody think about it right now, that if you could generate them right now would be incredibly valuable for you?” All the content for a new website, new content for books, whatever it might be. “All right, let’s do that using generative AI in the next four days.” It’s a way of forcing people to learn and accelerating them, but you’ve got to take the time. You have to revert back to being the curious young girl or boy and not be afraid to play and make mistakes.
Brian Rose: So you force yourself into a hackathon you would normally never enter, and then let it play out, because we’re all too busy.
Peter Diamandis: We’re just too busy doing everything. I’m literally up at six every morning and going until nine or ten, and I’ve got every microsecond planned out. I force myself to get eight hours of sleep, because that’s important to me. So when do you make the time to do that? We scheduled it. I do what’s on my schedule. I have one of the most amazing AIs on the planet, a carbon life form: Esther is my chief of staff, and it’s like, “Esther, you run my life. If it’s on my schedule, I’m going to do it.”
Brian Rose: Be careful with that power.
1:07:03 A couple of weeks ago I had a guy named Jamie Burke here, who runs Outlier Ventures. They’re an accelerator here in London and, by nature of that, one of the biggest investors in Web3 startups. He said something that blew my mind. He said, “Brian, I’ve seen the first single-founder billion dollar company, because they have the idea and we hand them a tech stack of ten different AI protocols.” For the first time in history, he said, he sees potentially one person building a unicorn, where in the past that would be almost unheard of. I know you’ve talked about some similar things you’ve seen. Just your thoughts on that.
Peter Diamandis: Yeah. What I wrote about in ExO 2.0, and blogged about, is a three-person billion dollar startup. I met one at MIT this week, in the AI field. It doesn’t take much, and of course they don’t stay a three-person team once they’ve got it, because humans are still the best AGI form we have. But there’s the ability for a three-person team to get up, get going, get a billion dollar valuation and run, and it could become easier and easier.
Now the question is, what happens when that gets so everyday that it flattens out? We’re going to have some interesting periods of hyperinflation and hyperdeflation. I don’t want to go into economics. If I had an extra lifetime I’d write a few economics books, but I don’t, and it’s not my area of expertise. But we’re heading towards a world of post-capitalism in one sense. What happens when everything is effectively free, when we have nanotechnology and infinite energy, and the cost of anything is its raw material cost, and robotics make accessing those raw materials easier? It’s fascinating.
I know you had a dear friend of mine on the show, Eric Pulier, who’s one of the smartest thinkers in the metaverse space. He was the first person to recognise the ability to go between the physical universe and the digital universe, to have a product’s ID on the blockchain. He didn’t name it an NFT, but he created the first NFTs, minted the first NFTs and definitely created the software around it. He was saying, “Okay, I’m going to be in a virtual world, I’m going to see a virtual cup of coffee on the desk there, put up by Starbucks. I’m going to grab it and put it into my wallet, and then when I’m in the real world I can take that uniquely identified blockchain coffee and transfer it and get a physical cup of coffee,” and have the ability to go back and forth. That is most definitely coming.
In the virtual world, a lot of it’s going to be very hyper-intelligent NPCs. If I want to go educate myself in the virtual world on the Vatom platform, as I enter that virtual world there is an NPC version of Socrates over there, and everything ever written about Socrates, everything ever known about Socrates, is in the AI model I’m now speaking to. So I can have a conversation and learn about his thinking in a way that would never be possible in any written book.
Brian Rose: Yeah, I had an amazing conversation with Eric, and his company Vatom is incredible. We’re investors through London Real Ventures, and when we saw their demo of the metaverse, I’m telling you, Peter, it was everything the blockchain world was telling me was going to happen that hadn’t happened yet. And when I looked at some of the projects they did for Google and Frito-Lay and Pepsi, it was amazing. People forget we’re all in metaverses anyway. Right now we’re in a bit of a metaverse here: we’ve never actually met, but we’re having this relationship.
What they built at Vatom is an incredible look into what could happen, and you’re alluding to that education space. There are so many possibilities. I know you’re on the board of that company too, and it’s going to be exciting to see how Eric takes that to the next level, and, like you said, how we are all going into these virtual worlds, now AI-powered, where we have the most incredible learning experiences, educational experiences and social experiences ever. That’s another part of the future.
1:11:48 You talk about metatrends a lot, and we’ve covered a few. I’m wondering if there are any others that you want to put on our minds.
Peter Diamandis: Oh yeah, sure. Let’s talk about humanoid robots. We’ve been promised flying cars and humanoid robots in this science fiction world for ages. Well, they’re finally kind of here. Flying cars are technically electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles, eVTOLs, and there are a dozen companies producing them. I just bought one called the Jetson ONE, which is a single-person runabout, for fun. It’s 100K, and they’re starting production now. But places like Joby and Beta and a few others are very real, going through all the FAA approvals, and will take you point to point at 150 to 200 miles per hour, a couple of hundred kilometres per hour. That will change how we get places, and that’s cool.
But what’s really cool is the humanoid robot world. What does that mean? We now have the ability to begin to create robots that functionally look and operate like humans: five fingers, two legs, biped. Why would you do that? Because the physical world around us was built for us, with doorknobs and stairs and gas pedals and all of those things. So the easiest way to replace labour, or in some cases augment labour, because labour is getting harder to get access to, is to build robots that can do what humans can do.
At the end of the day, what is making this possible isn’t better motors and better materials, although those are here as well. It’s going to be this AI revolution. It’s going to provide a physical instantiation for AI in these robots, so you can talk to it, have it understand what you want and have it go off and do it with a high degree of certainty. We’re going to see a very steep part of the curve here. Probably the best known one is Optimus by Tesla. Elon wants to produce these for 20K or less, and if you were to go and lease a 20,000 dollar car, you’re paying a couple of hundred bucks a month.
So imagine paying a couple of hundred bucks a month to have your own personalised humanoid butler or maid, mowing the grass and doing the dishes and doing whatever you need it to do, that is getting smarter and smarter every day. Not just because the physical hardware is upgrading, but because the software is upgrading all the time: it’s learning new tasks, learning new skills, learning how to evaluate an image, learning how to be more delicate with things. Just like my Model S and Model X Teslas, those cars are getting uploads all the time. I’m still waiting for my full self-driving mode, don’t have that yet, but we’ll get there.
There’s a company I invested in called Figure that looks to be one of the top robot companies, but there are going to be dozens of these companies. We will see millions, tens of millions of humanoid robots by 2030, maybe a billion-plus by 2040.
Brian Rose: Oh man, wow. I guess this is the new reality our children are going to grow up in, where it’s just normal to have humanoid robots walking down the street and surrounding you.
Peter Diamandis: You remember the first time you saw somebody with Bluetooth earphones on a cell phone walking down the street, just talking to themselves, and you’re like, “That looks so weird. Who is that person?” And then the next time you saw a family of four at a dinner table with their phones out, looking like this. Now these things are normal. Yes, they’re going to be weird in the very beginning, and then they’re going to be fully accepted. Here in Santa Monica we’ve got these little six-wheeled delivery robots that are delivering six-packs of Coke or sandwiches from the local food places. I think they’re called Coco robots. They’re travelling all over the streets here. The first time, people were basically photographing them, and now it’s like, “Get out of my way, for God’s sake.”
Brian Rose: So they’re fully autonomous vehicles that are just doing deliveries and coming back?
Peter Diamandis: They’re autonomous for most of it, but there’s a human interface when one gets into some kind of trouble.
Brian Rose: But there’s no human inside of it?
Peter Diamandis: No, it’s about the size of a small cooler.
Brian Rose: Okay. We haven’t seen those in London. I’ll probably take a picture the first time.
1:17:06 You mentioned the end of capitalism, and without going too deep into it, I am curious what you see in the future. I’ve heard a few AI people recently saying they’re not sure money will even be around in the future. What will the economy look like, and what will humans try to amass as capital? Will it be your mindset, your creativity, your personality? What will that look like?
Peter Diamandis: So we have another three hours, so let me tease people. First of all, there’s a fascinating book called The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin that dives into this very well. We humans grew up selling scarcity. I owned this apple orchard or this olive orchard, I owned all the olives on it, and I would meter them out and sell them a bushel at a time. Or a consulting firm gets a whole bunch of intelligent people together and sells them by the hour, by the engagement. That’s the scarcity model. In an abundance model, you’re effectively giving things away for free.
In a scarcity mindset, if you have an apple pie and twice as many people show up, you have to slice the pie into thinner and thinner slices for everybody. In an abundance model, no, you’re going to bake more pies. We have the ability to create as much of what we need to meet the needs. Where are we going? Eric Drexler in 1986 wrote a book called Engines of Creation, in which he talked about something called nanotechnology, and the idea that everything in our physical universe is made up of atoms, and that we’re going to reach a point in technological evolution where we can grab individual atoms of carbon here and oxygen here and nitrogen there and assemble what we want.
We have this today in the form of an oak tree. If you take the seed of an oak tree and plant it in the ground, it’s a nano-machine that brings together water and nutrients, and slowly, over a century, it will build a mighty oak. Just think about that: it’s the information set inside that little acorn that creates the mighty oak. But imagine now, instead, I have the ability to create a nano-assembler, microscopic, much smaller than a human cell, and I drop one into my hand and say, “Okay, listen, copy yourself. Grab some atoms from my hand, kill a few cells, that’s fine, and make one for Brian and one for Brian’s team.” Each of you gets one, and now you have a nano-assembler, and you’re able to drop it in the soil and say, “Please build me an electric Ferrari, and I’d like a mansion.”
Now, that assembler has to get access to materials, information and energy. That’s all it needs. With energy, we’re heading towards an extraordinary abundance of energy, again from solar but more from fusion. Materials are pretty much massively abundant; they’re just not in a purified form yet. What we really spend a lot of time and energy doing is purifying things, purifying the atoms of titanium or aluminium or carbon to make diamond, and assemblers can do that on their own. So the material costs are really just raw hunks. It might say, “Can you please feed me a little more titanium? I need it.” And the information is probably open-source information.
So all of a sudden the cost of material things starts to move towards zero. What does that economic world look like? Is that a post-capitalist world? What do we still have as value? Maybe it’s compute cycles that are valuable. These are the things we have to think about and understand. I might have said you have to think about those things 30 years from now, or 25 years from now, but I think we have to think about these things this decade, the next 10 years. As my third book was titled, The Future Is Faster Than You Think. But I still think it’s the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. You just need to be constantly educating yourself, and I think, Brian, through your work and the work I do, that’s what we’re constantly doing. That’s what makes it fun.
Brian Rose: Yeah, so much fun, so exciting, a little dangerous, but I guess that’s why it’s exciting.
1:22:15 Just curious: you get to hang out with people like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil and Jeff Bezos. What makes those guys different?
Peter Diamandis: Elon, first of all, is brilliant. Let’s be very clear: the guy is a rock star, and he’s extraordinarily smart. It’s the way he thinks. It’s all about mindset. That’s why I talk about mindset mastery: mastering and building a mindset. You can train your mind; you can train yourself. When you see an opportunity, how you handle it is your mindset. When you see a threat, how you handle it is your mindset. Elon does a lot of what he calls first-principles thinking. I wrote about Jeff and Elon and Branson and Larry Page in my second book, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, and dissected their mindsets in that book.
First-principles thinking is when he was looking at creating Tesla, he had to convince himself that you could get the battery costs down and the energy density sufficiently there, and he did. And when he was building SpaceX, and there’s a long story there that I tell in a couple of different books, he had to convince himself that you could build reusable rockets, and he did, from first-principles thinking, from basic physics. He taught himself that. And don’t mistake it: it’s not like he’s just employing all the smartest people in the world. He is one of the smartest people in the world, and he did the fundamentals himself. Unlike every other rocket designer, he’s gone an order or two of magnitude better than they have, and it’s extraordinary. I’ve been in the space business, so I’m a reasonably good judge, and I’m blown away by what he’s accomplished.
1:24:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s all impressive. Your latest book, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is incredible, and people can get that now. What is the best way for people to follow you, social, your websites, and what else can we expect coming next from you?
Peter Diamandis: Yeah, so I have a podcast called Moonshots and Mindsets, and it’s really focused on two things, AI and longevity, interviewing the top people, but really about the thinking there. Diamandis.com is where you can sign up for my twice-a-week blog, and I’ve got a blog sequence right now on all the attributes of an exponential organisation. I have three books in production right now, so expect more there. And Abundance360: if you’re a successful entrepreneur or CEO trying to figure out your MTP and your moonshots, and you want to find a community of people who are thinking really big, you can go to abundance360.com, one word, and learn more about it there.
But I want people to be optimistic about the future. We humans have been the most extraordinary problem solvers ever. We’re still here, and we have solved so many problems over the years. We’re really good at seeing the problems far away; we accelerate them to today and we freak out. But then we still have time, with all the new technologies, to solve them, and we do. I have confidence that we will. I have confidence that we have the ability to uplift every man, woman and child on this planet and create this incredible world of abundance. So I really hope people walk away from this conversation, Brian, empowered about the future, and knowing that if they’ve got their MTP and their moonshots, they can make a real dent in the universe.
Brian Rose: Yeah, me too. I am still massively optimistic. I’m excited to be here. I know there are going to be some challenges, but that’s also what makes life interesting, and that’s what creates great leaders: people who can really be there and help solve challenges. So thank you, Peter, I really appreciate this. I’ve been a fan for years and years, and I love having an excuse to go even deeper on your IP. Next time, let’s do this in person, either in London or Santa Monica or Boston or something like that. Until then, thank you, and keep doing what you’re doing.
Peter Diamandis: Thank you, pal. Appreciate you.
Brian Rose: All right, thanks so much. We’ll see you all next time on London Real.
