PETER DIAMANDIS: PART 2 – What The Hell Is a Moon Shot? - #449 : 449

Bulletproof Radio A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. This is the second part of a two part interview with my good friend Peter Diamandis, author of the books Bold and Abundance. The creator of the X Prize. The guy who basically, I'll say almost single handedly returned private investors to space. A Harvard trained physician and a molecular geneticist and an aerospace engineer from mit. Very, very intelligent smart guy. And what we're going to talk about in this episode. And by the way, you should listen to the first one if you haven't already gotten it, demo that as well. But we're going to talk about Peter's massive transformational purposes. We touched on them a little bit more. We're going to talk about extending human lifespan and a little bit more about mining asteroids. Although we got into that in pretty good detail in the last episode. I'm going to share my own massive transformational purposes. My own moonshots that came about because of my membership in Peter's group called Abundance360. And if you missed the announcement in the last episode, the Abundance Digital program is something that I'm offering a scholarship for. For listeners of the show. You can go to bulletproofabundance.com and it's just straight up, there's no dots, there's just bulletproofabundance.com and you get a massive scholarship that lets you get access to the same stuff that's been inspiring me for a very large period of time. Peter, thanks for not expiring me and inspiring me instead. Welcome to episode two.

Thank you, Dave. Always fun spending time with you, buddy.

All right, let's talk moonshots. You are doing planetary resources where you're mining asteroids and you're in the process of doing that. And because of you I actually have held the type of equipment that will be mining asteroids like literally in my own hands. I've really remote controlled lunar rovers. I've run them over my stupid looking toe shoes while wearing VR goggles. The actual things that are going to space. And it's, I've never been so inspired in, in my life than hanging out with, with a crowd like that where everyone in the room's like, sure, we can change the world. We're already doing it. We're going to do it even more. But let's talk about longevity. You mentioned that your number is 700 years because that's what the longest lived sea creatures are. I'm kind of feeling inadequate with my little 180 years or more in terms of lifespan. But let's talk about what you're doing from stem cells, from longevity. What's up, Peter?

Let's jump in, let's jump in there because it's interesting you, Dan Sullivan, the head of strategic coach fellow dear friend, a number of people have started talking about openly, we've started talking openly about our desires for extreme, achieving an extreme age. And so my own background I was at, I was doing a joint medical and engineering degree and I remember I was watching a, a TV show during the few moments I would be watching TV and it was on extreme, extreme aged sea creatures. So I had no idea that turtles, whales, sharks could live hundreds of years. And it was theorized in the show that some creature could live for 700 years. And it hit me, I said, if they can, why can't? And it was an interesting aha moment. And I said, clearly it's a hardware or a software problem that should be fixable. And so I made a commitment at that point to focus on that. And so a couple of thoughts to sort of share context and I'll go into sort of the companies I've been building and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. The first is it turns out there's some interesting reasons why we don't live too old. And the two are, you know, if you look back at human age over the hundreds of thousands and millions of years, back when food was scarce, before there was McDonald's and Whole Foods, you would typically have a baby at age 13 when you went into puberty. And then you would grow to age 26, at which point you're kid would have a baby. And then at that time when food was scarce, the worst thing you could do for continuing your species was take the food out of your grandchildren's mouth as the more powerful adult. And the best thing you could do is give your bits back to the environment. And so the average human age for most all human histories was in your mid-20s. Then we discovered better sanitation and antibiotics and germ theory and so forth. And we extended life, we're about to extend it, double it again. The other thing is that most people, you know, most women will be fertile till their mid-30s, call it. And if you've got a genetic disease that hits you in your 40s, 50s and 60s, it's never selected against. So we have cardiac in your 50s and 60s, cancer in your 60s and 70s, neurodegenerative disease in your 70s, 80s and 90s, which wipes us out. But with the massive reduction in cost of genome sequencing. Right. My business partner, Craig Venter, sequenced the first human genome in 2001. Cost $100 million nine months of time. Today the price has gotten down to 1000 bucks. And a day, less than a day. And Illumina, the leading manufacturer of gene sequencing equipment, announced 100 bucks in one hour. So a million fold. Price, performance increase. Incredible. Right? And so we're starting to understand what is the software code we're running and why some of us are living longer than others. And then we've just got CRISPR Cas9 technology, which is exploding in terms of capital startups. We just started curing the first genetics diseases like beta thalassemia by, you know, cut and paste.

And just for people listening who don't know that this is the technology that allows us to very cheaply go in and edit our own genes or the genes of other things without having to basically interbreed the way we used to do.

Yeah. So we're going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism, to evolution by human direction. And it's an interesting, you know, reimagining of what is possible. So, you know, at Abundance 360 this year I'm bringing three companies to the stage which are, it's a new startup out of Harvard that's commercializing the young blood experiments. A company that I'm a co founder called Cellularity, that's in the stem cell business. A company that is a $12 billion private company that I'll unveil at the event. And then also again, human longevity. But it's a lot of conversations are going on right now that aging is a disease, not an inevitability. And that's an interesting sort of conversational twist that occurs. So I'm passionate. I think we can add, I think this decade we can start to add 30 to 40 healthy years in a person's life. My goal is how do you make 100 years old, then you 60, you've got the aesthetics, the mobility, the cognition at 100 that you had at 60. I'll add one other phrase and then take a breath here. But Ray Kurzweil, who, you know, who will be with us at abundance360 as well, considered one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world in AI, a huge proponent, author, researcher in longevity, has coined a term called longevity escape velocity, which is the notion that there's a point at which science adds more than a year life onto your life expectancy for every year that you're alive. And I was just with Ray doing a couple hour webinar with him. And I asked him, so, Ray, when do you think we're going to reach longevity escape velocity? And his answer is in the next 10 to 12 years. Which is pretty, pretty cool. So don't screw it up between now and then.

One of my most potent anti aging strategies is going to piss off a lot of people listening. But it's drive a heavy car. Physics is your friend. And if a piano falls on your head or you die in a car accident, you're not going to get to take advantage of all this.

I mean, I'm serious. It's like I talk about don't die from something stupid. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All right, so you're really, really focused on this and your two big plays there. One is in stem cells and we had a bunch of speakers at the Bulletproof conference. I've had about $100,000 worth of stem cell treatments. I'm the second person ever to inject my own stem cells into my cerebral spinal fluids. They go directly to the brain and just do that prophylactically. Everyone else has advanced Alzheimer's or something. If they do it and I'm in the middle of culturing my natural killer cells and just doing stuff that's not even on the menu, I'll be the second person ever to inject another anti aging protein that hasn't even been announced yet. And I am absolutely going to do everything humanly possible. But a lot of the critics I think of both of us are going to say, Peter, look, this is a rich person's game. It's not fair. What do you say to that?

I say everything starts as a rich person's game when it doesn't work very well. And then eventually when it works really well, it's cheap and available to everybody. I mean, it's the cell phone, right? It's like when they were a million doll. They're size of a briefcase. All the Wall street bankers use them and drop their calls every two blocks. Now when they're 40 bucks and they're smart and they're doing gigabit connection speeds, you've got them for poor kids in Africa.

So that's what happens if no one does this. It'll never be widely available. And one of the things that I pay attention to is with food quality as well, you've got to make it so that there's enough demand for us to create a cost effective supply. And if no one ever says, I want to live past 100 and feel good, there will never be demand for doing it. And then we won't build the technologies, and then we won't make them cheap and affordable and widely available. So I love that answer. That's the same answer I give. Like, all the good stuff used to be expensive and now it's almost free. Now. The other one is, how are we going to fit all those people on the planet if people stop dying?

Yes, I love that question. So here's reality. The majority of people that I know in Silicon Valley have had this conversation with Elon Musk and Larry Page are worried about underpopulation of planet Earth, not overpopulation of planet Earth. It's like, what? Huh? Well, so here's the stats and Bill Gates gives a great TED Talk on this. Two things reduce population growth rate pressures, you make a community healthier and better educated, and the number of children per family plummets. I was in Morocco years back. I was looking at the stats and I was, like, blown away. It was like 30 years ago. 7.8 children per family in Morocco. Today it's down to 2.8. Why? Because a new king and queen came in and put in better healthcare systems, better educational systems. And it doesn't make intuitive sense to me, but when you're not sure which of your kids are going to survive and you're not sure if any of your kids are going to be able to uplift their quality of life and their income, you have extra kids, you have an insurance kid, you have a kid who can go get an education.

There's actually a name for that, Peter. It's called rake. Redundant array of inexpensive kids. Sorry. That.

For a computer geek, I guess that's.

Sorry had to say it.

But it's true, and it's sad. But you look at the healthiest and best educated countries in the world, they're in negative growth rates. And so this is something. Which it just is.

It is. And I also, my first book was about human fertility. And if you look at the decline in just fertility rates, there's some stuff going on. Or even if people want to have kids, it's getting harder and harder to do it. So I'm less concerned over the next hundred years. And also I just fundamentally believe that if people realize I'm going to be around for 200 years, I better not screw this place up because I'm still going to have to. I'm going to have to, like, sleep in my own mess. So we might take better care of the world if we realize that we're going to be around for a While.

And our ability to take better care of the world is increasing at an enormous, enormous rate. You know, the, the majority of people live in these hive like downtown cities because that's where the work is, that's where the attainment is. What we're going to start to see is. And I hate commuting, right? I just, I just cannot stand commuting. Oh Yeah, I live 12 minutes away. Most of that drive for me is an autonomous mode on my Tesla. But guess what? We're going to start to see fully autonomous electric vehicles that you could make your hour commute into work peaceful. You can meditate, you can sleep, you can, you know, go listen to bulletproof radio, whatever the case you want to do. We're also going to see these electric autonomous aerial taxis, Airbus, Larry Page, Uber. All these companies are working on vertical takeoff, vertical landing capabilities that you could live 200 miles from work and still make it there in a reasonable amount of time. And then I'm a founding board member of Hyperloop One, which you could live 400 miles away from work and still commute there. So we're going to have cities start to spread out and you can have a beautiful living in the countryside and still work in downtown LA or San Francisco because your commute time is 15 minutes.

I basically do that now. I live on a 32 acre organic farm. And where I live on Vancouver island, there's been a huge influx of very wealthy people from around the planet. A lot of multimillionaires from China have realized what I can get clean air and clean food and I can live there. Okay. And then they're moving out and my kids are going to school with them now, whereas 10 years ago it wasn't like that. And it's happening already, but I think a lot of us just don't see it. And there's telecommuting and there's small planes and there's all sorts of stuff you can do. But bottom line is if you don't have to physically be present somewhere every day, your ability to live in a different environment goes up a lot. So we'll spread out. We won't all be packed into these big cities, which is kind of a big thing. And that will probably also extend lifespan. And if people are having less kids but living longer and living better, I kind of want to be around.

Yeah, me too. I'm excited to see. I mean, I have a hard time imagining and I have a great imagination. And this is a whole concept around the singularity. I'm a co Founder and executive chairman of Singularity University. And we're alive during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. Right. We're in the final gameplay of this video game called Life. And we're becoming a multi planetary species. We are digitizing ourselves. We are reinventing everything, every aspect of our world, of our lives, how we raise our kids, how we govern everything over the next 30 years. It's extraordinary.

It is. And if people listening are not inspired by that, it's like, go have more coffee or something. Like, come on, things are good now. All right, so. And then let's talk about what you're doing with stem cells.

Sure. So I want to talk about HLI first, if I could, for context.

Yes, sure, absolutely.

Back about three years ago, I co founded a company with Craig Venter, who sequenced the first human genome, and Bob Hariri, one of the top stem cell scientists. The three of us got together.

He's a great guy.

The three of us got together and said we can make an actual dent. This is probably almost four years ago now. We announced it three years ago. Make a dent in longevity. The concept of Human Longevity Inc. HLI is we've started these things called the health nucleus. And the health nucleus is a place that you go and we've reduced the time down to around six hours. Maybe we'll get down to four hours. And when the price was initially 25,000 bucks, now it's on 7,500 bucks. I'm working hard to demonetize and dematerialize the health nucleus, but Today it's about 7,500 bucks for this that you go once a year. And what you do is we sequence your full genome, all 3.2 billion letters of your life. We sequence you 30x means we sequence you over and over and over three times to get rid of any aberration in the sequencing process. We sequence your microbiome, your gut, we look at the 2000 rough chemicals in your bloodstream, your metabolome. We do a coronary CT if you're above a certain age, looking for calcium and cardiac dynamics. We do a full body MRI head to stern. We can detect cancer at a few millimeter in size. We look at the image of vasculature of your brain, we look at your quantitative brain scan and we basically create about 150 gigabytes of data about you. And then we can map that against the top 20 leading causes of death and determine every year, do you have anything to worry about. We do a health check and we can say, listen, you are great shape. There's nothing going on in your body at a level of depth. We're finding in 4% of our clients cancer they didn't know about, which is. And in 30%, we're finding things like atrial fibrillation, fatty liver metabol, kinds of different things that are 99% actionable. And the goal is this falls into the don't die from something stupid category.

Right, Peter? I was actually pissed off when I got my results from HLI because what they said was, you have nothing to work on. I'm like, damn it. I thought I was gonna get something here. But I did find my liver fat was under 3%. My hippocampal volume was 80, 86 or 88th percentile. So my brain isn't shrinking like an old person. Even though I'm formerly a 300 pound obese person with prediabetes, I don't have fatty liver. And basically like, wow, things are kind of cruising. I found some interesting genetic stuff, but overall, it was awesome to just know because it removes a lot of the energy that you spend on fud, you know, fear, uncertainty and doubt. And that leads you right back to, okay, either now I have data, so I have actionable items and I have control, or I have free energy because I would have been worrying about stuff. And I can take that for energy and use it for abundance or creating things that matter, Even if it's quality time, taking care of yourself or your family or whatever. It's just like the energy you waste on that. Am I going to die of something I don't know about is a meaningful amount of energy. It's just energy that you don't necessarily know you're wasting.

This is the vision for hli. We have one facility in San Diego today. And I'm not making this a pitch. This is the kind of thing, opportunity that people should see. One facility in San Diego. Today we're going to be opening up facilities in cities around the country. We're in the middle of licensing discussions and so forth. But the notion is this is something I have done now for three years in a row. And I remember in the first time I found I had a slightly enlarged aorta and it was a congenital or was it something to worry about? And so as I image my body stem to stern, I realize it isn't changing in size at all. So it's pretty much what I was probably born with and I have nothing to worry about there. But when you find anything at stage zero or stage one, that's the Time to kill it. That's the time to solve it, right? I drive a Model S, I've got two airplanes, I fly. Those vehicles are all filled with microprocessors and sensors that can basically find anything wrong at the moment it begins. So you can fix it. But for most of us, we don't have any of that data, right? Our refrigerators are better wired than we are. So the idea from HLI's program is you should be doing this, what I call this health check every year on the year to determine anything going on. If there is, find it, fix it. The second part of what we do at the Health Nucleus is we create a longevity plan which is based on your genomics. This is what's likely to get you so you have a higher probability of this cancer or this cardiovascular disease or this neurodegenerative disease. So these are the checks you should do more frequently, right? So that's what hlis, that's my part of the business again, the don't die for something stupid side of the company. And also we're making massive discoveries as we start to sequence those people who have lived to over 100 and are in great longevity. What's going on there? Why do they have it? Why can they be smoking at age 100 when everyone else is dying at 60? And so this is where we combine massive genetic phenotypic and machine learning data to create discoveries. That's hli very proud of where it's going and having fun with that.

All right. And then cellularity is another one of the things we're working on. Just for people listening, Peter is truly not pitching these things at all. These are things going on in the field of biohacking that are the most fascinating things I know about. That's why we're talking about these. And I think it's cool, and I hope you do too.

So it's interesting. Bob Hariri is a superstar, right? People know Craig Venter's name because of his work with sequencing the first human genome. Bob is going to be is right there in my mind and will be known a lot more. So Bob was an MD, PhD, fighter pilot, neurosurgeon. If anybody ever saw the old film called Bakaru Banzai, that's Bob. He just can't.

He's like.

He's like. He just can't sing. So he's not a rock star. But it was interesting. He had this moment where he's in the er, he's doing brain surgery on someone who had this massive accident. And as A neurosurgeon. It's pretty rough going. You're just trying to sort of glue things back, sew things back together again. It's at the same time he's having his first baby and he's recounting the story that if, you know back 30 years ago, you're doing the very first fetal surgery where if you have a baby that's got some kind of a cardiac anomaly, you can open the mother's belly, go into the uterus and do heart surgery on the fetus and, and fix it. And then when the baby is born, there's no scars, the baby is perfect, the mistake is fixed and there's nothing. And so what's going on there? And the realization is that the baby is being given birth to inside the placenta, which is this massively rich 3D printer of stem cells, placental stem cells, which can create every tissue the baby has. And so he had the insight that the placenta is this massively rich organ of stem cells and started a business which has since become Life bank, which goes to pregnant families and says, listen, instead of just saving the cord blood, which is done now, things like Cord blood registry is you should save your child's placentas. And so I have two six year old boys, both of their placentas are stored with LifeBank and in that placenta is millions of dosages worth of stem cells. And so my, I believe my children will have an indefinite lifespan. Right in the stem cells is their original genetic boot disk, meaning their genetics at birth. And so we would, God forbid, knock on wood, whatever you want to say, can regrow that the children's organs from that original boot disk and will be able to repopulate the kid stem cell population. One of the things that Bob did the work and realized is two important things. As we grow older, two things occur. One is our population of stem cells in our body rapidly declines by orders of magnitude. 100 fold thousand fold, in some cases 10,000 fold less stem cells per, per body cavity or organ. Another thing that occurs is that your stem cells undergo epigenetic changes. They age, they become more senile. And we know this from sequencing them. It's your exposure to oxygen, free radicals, the environment we live in, and so forth. And so what Bob has done, and I helped him co found cellularity, we merged three divisions of three pharma companies and created this company is that we're using placental derived stem cells to help cure different diseases and eventually rejuvenate a person's regenerative engine of their body. So you can take your own stem cells, which you've done. In the future you're going to be able to take placental stem cells, which are sort of the stem cells at their most vital stage at state zero, if you would, and give yourself 100 million stem cell injection. And those stem cells are like little computers that measure what's going on, the inflammation markers in your body and go and generate the right growth factors in different areas. So this is what cellularity is doing. It's on a platform of stem cells. It's also natural. Kill cells are in great supply in placentas. We're isolating those. So that's a whole slew of research and some amazing results so far.

Beautiful. And this is the stuff that will rapidly decline in price where I think this will be. Well, why would you have a hip replacement or a knee replacement when you can put the stuff in those joints as they're starting to degrade and just not go down that path anymore? So I would say it's time to short the companies making mechanical joint replacements. Unless they have some sort of superpowers like you can detach your arm and shoot it like a rocket. That might be cool too, but you.

Know, so love that idea.

And we've talked about your other mining the moon and we've talked about cellularity and HLI in the aging field. And your other big moonshot was around creating community and incentivizing people, which is what you're doing with I guess in part Singularity University, where I'm an adjunct faculty member actually, even though I haven't taught a class there yet. And also what you're doing with abundance.

Yeah, it's xprize, it's Singularity University and the abundance digital community. And I just believe entrepreneurs are the means by which we make the world a better and better place. That an entrepreneur by definition is someone who finds a problem and fixes it.

Right.

And so wouldn't you love more and more people in the world finding and fixing problems?

Right.

Other than photo sharing apps, there's nothing.

More fun than doing that anyway. And I'm really hopeful that more people in the bulletproof community decide that they want to do something really big and take all that energy and go do it.

So, pal, let me interview you. Tell me about your moonshots. And I'm proud to have had a small piece in inspiring you. But I want to learn. I think I know them, but I'd love to learn more and have the community hear about your moonshots.

Sure. So Bulletproof is a big one where I wanted people to have more energy. And this comes about from my own experience when I weighed 300 pounds when I was 26 at the company that launched the first pay as you go computing. We talked about AWS earlier. It was called managed web hosting, but it was something that I got 10 million from our board to fund. And we built just slightly. This was before Amazon web services existed, but we built pay as you go. We'll provision it for you when you want it and you only pay for it when you use it kind of service. And I look back at that time, I was having massive brain fog. My joints hurt all the time. I was pre diabetic, I was overweight, and I was old when I was really young. And I did the low fat, low calorie diet, exercise, six days a week thing, and it just didn't work after just putting all this energy in. So I started bulletproof because I realized disrupting big food was a really important thing to do. The entire history of food has been how cheap is it and how good does it taste? And that's pretty much how you make money in food. And it's how you feed militaries too, Right. And what it comes down to is we're building a world now where what does the food do for you is the most important thing. Right. And what's the impact on the system of food which starts at the soil and ends as you exhale carbon dioxide, like this whole chain? And so that's Bulletproof is about awareness and about just showing people, here's how you're supposed to feel. And bulletproof coffee is kind of the gateway drug for that stuff. But it's now reaching 10 million plus people a month. And you really, with abundance, 360. You really just helped me think, all right, how can I expand the content? How do I reach out? How do we reach the most? I don't want to say eyeballs, although that's part of it. But the most mouths. Like every time someone tries one of these things that actually works and realizes that there's more energy than they're used to, that's what the win is. And our cost of goods is higher than a normal food company because our stuff has made us in specific ways. But that isn't the big deal. It's that now we're national at Whole Foods, whereas before I was a member of this, I would have said, you know, an E commerce company is actually more profitable. You make more money if you sell something directly to Someone because you don't have to pay distributor, you don't have to pay a grocery store and all that stuff. But now we're in all of these locations. We've opened several more coffee shops. And the idea here is I want to it's reach.

It's just give me that number, pal. Where are you now and what's your moonshot five or ten years from now?

Well, last year we had 100 million cups of bulletproof coffee that were consumed.

And this is 100 million cups of coffee. That's extraordinary. It is, it is. I mean, it's just the million parts hitting me now. So that's.

Yeah. And like, holy crap, right?

Who in their right mind would go up against Starbucks? I mean, honestly, seriously, right? I mean, it's like, like it's insane. But by the way, just for people, listen, a moonshot is in many ways something that's a crazy idea. I like to say that the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. And most people do not allow themselves to go into that place of crazy idea. Whether it's mining asteroids, you know, extending the human lifespan, or going up against Starbucks and reinventing the entire mindset around food. It is insane.

So 100 million the 10x goals there. It's a billion cups of bulletproof coffee. And that our traffic now, I would like our Traffic to be 10 times what it is now because bulletproof radio is changing lives. So I've really invested a huge amount in my content team in scientific research. We're funding some core research around water chemistry and ketones. But the big thing is literally 10 times more people getting access to the content and 10 times more people using bulletproof coffee, which I know what it does biochemically, I know the change that it can have on degenerative rates of everything you can think of. So that's on the food side. But one of the things that you do and one of the things that I learned from you and to some extent Tony Robbins has talked a lot about this as well, how with the right teams, you can have a bigger impact. The other thing that is massively important to me and something that's becoming more and more of an issue is that we have a problem with toxic mold in the world. And it is.

A dear friend of mine today has just discovered that what has been destroying his life is toxic mold. Right. He's been in and out of MRIs. He's been in brain fog. He's been. And I need to anyway, tell me so I can Share this with him.

So I did a documentary a couple years ago called Moldy. And I interviewed guys, you know, like Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman. And Mark's talked about toxic mold, his experience. And Daniel Amen is like, Dave, your brain looked like you lived under a bridge taking street drugs because you had chemical poisoning from mold in your bedroom. I'm like, okay, so this matters. So solving the world's toxic mold problem is what one of my portfolio companies called Home Biotic is all about. And we're starting out with a probiotic spray that you spray around your environment that eats mold and mycotoxins as a fuel source. So the idea is if you have a competitive environment, then you don't get a blossoming of the toxic thing. So, yeah, I missed my house. Once a week I walk around with a little sprayer. And this is the sort of thing that is required for space travel. Peter. If you get a toxic mold Aspergillus thing going on in a spaceship, you know how long they're not even going to make it in order to Mars if they're all being poisoned along the way because space travel is tough enough on the human body. And this is also incredibly important for agriculture, for developing nations. And we've got the ability to change it by preventing the problem in the first place. So that's that company's moonshot. It's literally to solve the world's tax problem.

Is the company available today? Is the product out there today?

The product is shipping. Yep, just started shipping. All right, we had it. Google it early.

Send it to my friend immediately.

Yeah, it's 29 bucks. It's not.

I will buy it and send to my friend.

Nice. And this is the second gen of the product. The first gen smelled like cookies and was not perfect, but this one is. We just dialed it.

And by the way, is the documentary available if I Google for it?

Yeah, moldymovie.com and I'm actually working on getting distribution for that because I spent a lot of money out of pocket and six weeks filming. It's got a custom soundtrack from the guy, Eric Troyer from Electric Light Orchestra. It's a real documentary. And the idea is a dozen people, including physicians who are just decimated by toxic mold and a dozen top doctors who've working in the field saying, this problem exists and it's real.

Is it mold M O L D.

Y or ie M O L D.

Y. I'm texting my friend right now.

Nice. It's an hour of time that everyone listening to this either is being affected or has a friend who is. And it's such a big thing. And if we're going to live to 200 years old, you do not want to live in a house with this going on. And that's just a personal thing. I grew up in a basement with talks and. Well, one of the reasons I weigh 300 pounds is this stuff damages your mitochondria. And the other one is a company called TrueDark, and I'm wearing one of their products, the glasses, right now. And we have a junk light problem where light is a signal to our biology. And by filtering out certain light frequencies, especially before bed, you can radically improve the restorative value of sleep and you can cause your mitochondria to all work together at the same time. So recognizing that the light we put into our bodies is as important as the food we put into our bodies is a big thing. And this is a company that I started last year that's. Now it's already doubled my deep sleep, which is kind of.

It's so interesting. Right. I wear this Oura ring. Okay. Fantastic. And are you actually.

I think we both are.

So are you actually measuring your deep sleep and it's affecting your metrics? Right. I've got, you know.

Oh, absolutely.

So I've got my.

I also. I don't get jet lag anymore at all, no matter where I go. And it's because light is a signal, and you can control light. So where do I go to all this new science?

Where do I go to order my pair? Because I was.

It's TrueDark Zone. And, Peter, I'll just send you some. But TrueDark Zone, or just go for TrueDark glasses and you'll find them. So basically, junk light, toxic mold, and then the other big moonshot I have is for 20 years, I've been doing neurofeedback for cognitive enhancement. And first to fix my brain, and then to go Beyond. I opened 40 years of Zen a couple years ago now, and it's got now six different technologies, including custom hardware and software around cognitive enhancement. I started out saying, all right, this is to help world changers be more dialed in on their goals and to basically remove the bad programming that we all have so that you can think abundantly so that you can do the things you want to do. But as I was sitting there last year at Abundance360, kind of just doing the brainstorming part of the program, I was like, you know what? Screw that noise. That company's mission is to raise the average IQ on the planet by 15%.

Do people realize how that would change.

The world in such a big way?

Oh my God.

That means I've got to get this into high schools rather than for executives the way it is right now. But I mean, I do this and it's changed my life. I mean, I was already, I think, pretty smart in the first place, but I'm better than I ever have been and I. How does it work? About to turn 45. We use the brain states of people who are very high performers. We get their brainwaves. We're now putting it through machine learning, which is just at the early stages there. But what we've done is we've looked at what advanced meditators from around the world do. We've looked at the brain patterns that are there. We do a quantitative EEG, we look at what's going on. 90% of people who come through the program have traumatic brain injuries from childhood they don't know about. And we're like, oh look. So we spend three days showing you, going through. It's like a personal development sort of thing where we show you the mental processes that you have that are not actually reflective of reality with what's basically acting as a lie detector for you and help you go through it. And what happens is your alpha brainwaves go up, they cross over your theta brainwaves and these changes, they stick around. We can measure people a year later and their brains work differently. In the last two days we increase voltage in the brain using a different form of feedback. And we do another thing where we can increase or decrease neuron firing speed between areas called Brodmann's foci. And what's going on here is people walk out of there going, wow, I got out of my own way. And the voice in my head shut up. And those in and of themselves will raise your IQ just because the self sabotage goes away. And along the way, where does this.

Happen, where do I go and how much does it cost?

It's in seattle and it's $15,000 right now. And it's a five day intensive like ten hour day program. The head neuroscientist is a former nuclear submarine engineer who also wanted to go to Mars. That was why he got the education he got. And I know three people on the planet who are doing applied neuroscience for high performance versus for basically brain damage. And this is the stuff I do myself. I spent four months of my life with this stuck to the head. We're doing pulsed Electromagnets, electrical stimulation, several different kinds of neurofeedback with a facilitator. There's IV nutrients, there's a chef on site, there's mitochondrial enhancement the whole way because you can't even do this kind of training with normal metabolic rates. So it's like everything I know how to do all at once in five days.

Beautiful.

I wanted it for me. And when I started, I'm like, if this will at least self fund its own R and D, I can continue my path and I can help a few hundred people who are going to help millions of people. But because of what you made me do was like, you know, I already wanted this. If I'd have had this in high school, I mean, my whole life would have been very different and even better than it already is. And I just, I look at the amount of crap that people carry around with them and I think it's unnecessary. And if we're going to all live to 700 years, maybe we ought to do it with the right programming and with brains that work better. And so these are my big moonshots. Those are the big ones. I love it, pal, but thank you, Peter. I would not be thinking this way if I hadn't seen sat there in a community with a couple other people who think at least as big as me. And with you standing up there going like, what the hell are you thinking? I'm like, God, I'm still thinking too small. I thought I was thinking big. That's why I wanted you on the show, just because a. To say thanks and also to offer that scholarship for listeners because you don't have to go there to the Beverly Wilshire and go to the whole conference to get the knowledge and also the thinking and the community, which has really up leveled me in a way that's. I mean, I think people listening know I'm just being really sincere about this. Like, you know, I just bring the stuff that works. And one of the things that works most of all is surrounding yourself with people who just look at you and go, seriously, is that all you've got? No matter how much you have, you need more of that in your life. And you serve that role for me. I'm truly grateful for that.

Thank you, pal. Thank you. Listen, would you mind, I'm asking a number of A360 members to get on stage and share their moonshots this year. So if you don't mind, I'd love to have you.

It'd be a great honor. Anything I could do to Support what you're doing. I'm a true fan.

Thank you, pal. Thank you. The ability for us to increase our mental capacity and ability and our energy, every few points, just transforms the world. I think at the end of the day that's where we're heading. These devices we carry around with us, our mind extenders to enable us to remember far more, but our processing power. There is a variant of this that Ray Kurzweil talks about which is connecting our brain to the cloud which he predicts will occur within the next 20 years and increase your memory and your cognitive processes millions of fold. But until then, I think what you're doing is the most important thing you can do.

I fundamentally believe that before you replace your hardware, you should make full use of the hardware you've got. And I think we've got a lot of room there. In fact, I believe we're already to some extent more connected than we think we are. I'm talking things like heart rate variability and the ability to feel inspired. When you're room with someone inspirational, it's more than just words that does that. There's something about who we are. And we're starting to see this. When you take big data and you apply it to large swaths of population, you do sort of social graphs and things like that. So I want to fully exploit our power to show up and support other people with the hardware we've got as we're developing even better hardware in the future.

Yeah, I mean, I hope everybody gets that this is truly the most exciting time ever to be alive.

Right.

These are the kinds of conversations that we just had in this last 45 minutes of going from mining asteroids, extending human lifespan to increasing brain functionality. I mean, it's insane, it's crazy, but it's real. And it's the kind of world I want to bring my children up in. It's the kind of world I want to create. And it's a world where we're not talking about a world of luxury, we're talking about a world of possibility for people. And it's amazing.

Yeah. And you talked about the first part of this two part series. You talked about how you kind of got inspired by the Apollo program and Star Trek and you're a little older than I am, although of course you don't look it. Right. But in my generation it was all about certainly I watched Star Trek incessantly, but there was also like the cyberpunk genre came out. And I think reading science fiction is one of the most important things you can do, especially as a kid, to just dream like, oh my God. And so I was a cyberpunk in the 90s and spend a lot of my career in computer security and all that sort of stuff. But some of the stuff that we're talking about right now is straight out of like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson novels that were written in the late 80s and early 90s, and they're all happening in our lifetime, which is astounding. So I would offer to everyone listening, one of the things you can do to think bigger, even if it's not your favorite genre, is pick up a science fiction book, one that's won awards, one that really has good thinking in it, and read that and just go, wait a minute, isn't some of this already happening? And what can I do to make it happen? And you realize it's not nearly as hard to do it now as it was 20 years ago, because you can find any information you want at your fingertips because you can connect with someone else working on that problem in another country in about 10 minutes. It's completely ridiculous and amazing.

It really is. I mean, I keep on reminding myself there really are no actual limitations. It's really your motivations, what I call masculine, transformative purpose. Your moonshot that gives you a shining star to shoot for and allows you to black out the other noise and saying, I'm focused on this today. Maybe tomorrow my moonshot will be that. But capital, knowledge, computational power, expertise, all of these things are in massively increasing supply. And it's really the power of the human passion and commitment that enables us to do what were crazy things and are now, today are brilliant things. I mean, for God's sakes, Elon Musk is talking about taking us to Mars in the next five years. I mean, hello. And tunneling and the bfr, the big frigging rocket taking you from New York to Sydney in 30 minutes. I mean, insane stuff. But so is being able to have a video conference call on your cell phone to anybody on the planet for free. That's insane. That's insane.

It is absolutely insane. And you reminded me back in the days the first BFR was Cisco's moonshot. It was called the Big Frickin Router, which was a router that was bigger to build the Internet. And I guarantee you that our conversation right now is flowing over a BFR that was built with that vision 20 years ago. Like it? It's cool. These ideas keep coming around and man, I'm having so much fun. All right, we have about maybe Six minutes left in this interview and I promise people at the beginning that you are going to offer them a couple of things they can do. Oh yes, to think bigger. Right? Like without going to what is it?

Bulletproof abundance or abundant bulletproof abundance.com was the.

Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So you don't have to go to bulletproofabundance.com and you don't have to drink bulletproof coffee. You don't have to do anything. So, so free stuff they can do right now in order to have this abundant mindset or just to think bigger than they are. So what would you offer them?

So very importantly, you've got to tap in. In order for you to do anything big and bold and to go to scale, it's got to be driven by emotional energy. It just is doing anything big and hard is hard work and you've got to have some kind of innate emotional energy that's going to drive you, that forces that says refuses to let you stop. Right. I know that, that for me I, it was an 11 year startup to create the X Prize right from the time I announced. The time it was finally one was 11 years and it died a thousand deaths along the way. Same thing for Zero Gravity Corporation. Same thing for almost every organization I've ever started. And so the question is, where do you get your mtp? Where do you get your most massively transformative purpose from? And what I tell people is there's two hacks that I use. Number one, go back to what inspired you as a child, what is it that got you, that you dreamed about as a kid? I don't care how crazy it is at the end of the day, what was it that. And for me that's the purest form. My dreaming of being a, an astronaut and being in space, that was my happy place. That was the kid's dream. And so you know, that passion drove me. The second place is if I were to give you a billion dollars and Dave, I hope someday I can do that. But you know, you may be ahead of the curve there, but if I give you a billion dollars and say, listen, I want you to go and make the biggest impact on the planet with this billion dollars, what would you do with it? Where would you invest it? What problems would you solve with it? Right? So these are two emotional hacks that are meant to go and help you root yourself in your massively transformative purpose. There's a third one which is what is the group that you want to most be the hero to? Right. If there's A group out there that if you could pick one group in the world to say, I really want, I would love for them to see me as an inspiration, as a hero. For me, it's entrepreneurs who want to go big. That's why I care about and want to support them and inspire them. What is that community? And then what do they need? At the end of the day, these three things are meant to connect with that emotional energy. Once you have your massively transformative purpose, either as a company or as an individual, then the question is, what is your moonshot within that purpose? What is a problem that is ten times bigger than the challenge you're doing right now? Is there a crazy way you could imagine? So, for example, I was focused on private space flight, Zero G Space Adventures, through the SpaceX, through Xprize, Virgin Galactic, on trying to open up space. Then I realized that even the marketplace for these businesses was in the $100 million level. It wasn't $100 billion level. And so what was going to get bigger? And I said, the only thing that's driven humanity to explore more frontiers is resources. The Silk Road, the American settlers coming from Europe, the American settlers going to the west coast, and so could we gain access to the resources of space. That was a moonshot worth going after, and it was at least 10 times bigger than what I was doing previously. So find your massively transformative purpose. And within that purpose, what's a big, bold 10x idea that you can get excited about and then give up what you know about, why it can't happen, why it's a crazy idea, and start dreaming about how could it happen? What are the crazy things I could do that would let go of the past and start with a clean sheet of paper? Because that's what a moonshot is. A moonshot is starting with a clean sheet of paper and reinventing how you do it.

Those are beautiful pieces of advice. And if you're listening to this and this gets you as excited as it gets me, do these things. I mean, there are things you can do. Read more, Think bigger if you want to get started somewhere. I don't know which of your books is more inspiring. Bold and abundance are both. Bold is why you should go big. And abundance is like, the world is actually amazing right now, despite what you might hear on the news. And those are like core books people ought to read.

Yeah. Let me give folks two science fiction trilogies that I love. And these were trilogies that once I started reading them, I was so pissed I was going to have to end reading them. They were so good. So the first is a book called Nexus by Ramez Naam. Do you know. Have you read Nexus?

I have, a long time ago.

So it's a trilogy and I love it. It's really a book that's down sort of the brain capacity, connecting your brain within that. And the second is a trilogy called the Babiverse and it's a book by Dennis Taylor. And let's see, the first of these books is we are Legion and we are Bob. And it's the story of a man who uploads his brain. When he dies, he's having his body frozen and his brain gets uploaded and then gets cloned and put into spaceships that are actually going and colonizing universe. The best science fiction trilogy I've ever read. We are Legion. We are Bob. Enjoy it if you read it. I mean, I've read both of those on Audible and I literally stopped doing my work to listen to these books.

Wow. Okay. I did not know about that second one. I will go listen to it right now.

We are a Legion.

Beautiful. Well, thanks, Peter, as always, for your work. Thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio, my pleasure palace. If you guys like the show, you know what to do. Leave a good review for it because Peter will see it, I'll see it, and it's a good thing. And as far as I know, I'm the only person offering this scholarship kind of out of my own pocket program. You are, and it's because it matters. So if you're an entrepreneur and you just want to be inspired or you want to be an entrepreneur not because you think it's going to make you cool, but because you think that you can do something meaningful. It's. I don't know how to make it easier for you, but you should go to that bulletproofabundance.com and take advantage of it. I am not going to promise that it's always going to be available when the show goes live. We'll probably have it up for, I'm guessing a week or something just out of respect for the rest of your program and all that stuff. Peter, when you're listening to this, hopefully you're listening near when it's released. And if the offer is expired, it may expire at whatever point it's going to expire. Just. Just to be really clear about that, because we're making it up as we go. I wasn't sure I'd even be allowed to offer it here like I did at the conference.

Well, I love the bulletproof community. And at the end of the day, part of what the abundance digital community is about is a community. It's a place where you're going to find people like Dave, like me, who want to create a much better abundant world and are exponential thinkers and and want to find juicy problems to solve them, to create wealth for themselves, but to make the world better at the same time. Because you don't have to choose. You can do both as bulletproof shows us.

Well, thanks Peter. And yeah, that point is just so important. It's okay to have the means to change the world. It's just okay. On that note, thanks again and I will see all of you on the next episode.

A Human Upgrade Formerly Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the product. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.