The Future is Faster Than You Think – Peter Diamandis : 655

And they've built machines that can bring in methane, water, and electricity. And out the other end comes perfect diamonds, you know, 4, 6, 8, 10-carat diamonds. And, you know, it's funny, you could say, but, you know, it's a perfect diamond. It's not natural. Listen, if you want to add flaws, you can. If you can add the exact flaws you want. And if you want to add, you know, color, no problem at all. And then, you know, there's this beautiful— John Ivey designed this beautiful diamond ring that is an entire ring made of diamond. I mean, like, you know, The whole thing is diamond, right? So it's, I don't know, tens of carats it is, but we are beginning to see a world of scarcity becoming abundance.

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Imagine reducing your stress, getting rid of toxins, supporting your heart, recovering faster, maybe even helping your body burn fat while you're watching your favorite show. That's what infrared sauna therapy can do for you, and that's why I use my Sunlighten sauna almost every day.

It's a type of good, mild stress that strengthens your cells and still supports recovery.

Traditional heat saunas are great, but for some people, the intense heat can be too stressful and uncomfortable. Infrared is way more comfortable, and it works without stressing your nervous system.

You're delivering light energy that supports circulation, cellular energy and recovery in a way that your body really likes.

And consistency is what compounds results, not heroic sessions you do once a week.

Infrared makes it easy to show up even on busy days, so you get results that last and feel good while you're doing it.

Sunlighten delivers one of the highest quality infrared saunas on the market using very precise wavelengths, so you get effective absorption and you get the most benefits. The focus on quality is why they've led the infrared space for more than 25 years. I've used the Sunlighten for more than 10 years.

If you want a recovery tool you'll actually that you'll actually feel, this is it.

So go to sunlighten.com/dave to save up to $1,600 with additional savings throughout the year. That's sunlighten.com/dave.

Are you ready to plug into the latest science of longevity and human performance? Come to Beyond, the biohacking conference where biology, longevity, and consciousness collide in real life. Join us May 27th through 29th, 2026 in Austin, Texas. Experience breakthrough tech, meet world-class experts, and connect with people who are also committed to being the best versions of themselves. Because strong community isn't optional, it's how we live longer. Register now at beyondconference.com. Live longer, live better, live beyond.

Today's cool fact of the day is that the Milky Way's supermassive black hole just reached record brightness this year. Now, I didn't know that black holes could actually be bright, but it turns out they can. And this one's known as Sagittarius A*, and it's a behemoth at the center of the galaxy. And it had a light show more brilliant than ever recorded before, at least if you look at it under near-infrared wavelengths of light. It's twice as bright as the previous brightest observation. Now, it turns out that gas and dust heat up and make light on their way into the black hole. So the brightness was really just that the black hole was probably eating something more than it normally did, but it dimmed by a factor of 75 over just 2 hours. We don't really know why it's been flaring, but maybe it's because a star just buzzed the hole. Well, we're going to know more, but you're saying, "What does this possibly have to do with biohacking with you?" It's this. If we can figure out the rate at which black holes swallow matter, well, we can figure out pretty much anything, including maybe how your mitochondria work, how long you're gonna live, little things like that. We're talking black holes. I don't know. When I look at the future, this just makes me happy because we're cracking the very fundamental nature of how the universe works in a way that we haven't ever done before. And I'm pretty sure that it's because of social media. Okay, maybe not. But speaking of social media, Dave.Asprey on Instagram, I just put up a picture of one of my sheep. It was fantastic. You know, you totally want to follow that, and I'm going to eat it.

Modern life keeps your nervous system in overdrive. Most solutions try to change your brain chemistry, but your body also runs on electrical signals and rhythms. Your brain uses electrical waves, your heart beats in patterns, and your nervous system sends signals through tiny pulses. Light and sound are also forms of energy your body can sense. Scientists have studied them for decades because certain Different wavelengths and frequencies influence how cells and nerves respond. That's why I use the One device. It combines light and sound in a wearable. It sends gentle signals your body can respond to while you work, meditate, or wind down. Most wearables just track stress. The One device supports your nervous system directly without any Bluetooth or EMFs. People who wear it report sleeping more deeply and feeling calmer, more focused, energized, and grounded. It's wearable frequency support you can use all day long. Learn more at theonedevice.com/dave. What if quantum physics could make your supplements work at a whole new level? Igniton is the only company that quantum charges their clinical-grade supplements. So they work better than the same ingredients without the charge. This isn't some woo-woo idea. This is real physics with real results. University studies show Igniton's Cognition formula improves memory, attention, and mental performance more than the non-charged version. And their Longevity formula supports healthier aging markers like IL-6, CRP, and blood pressure better than the same ingredients without quantum charging. They do this with absolutely no fillers and no stimulants. Just clean inputs carrying the same kind of life force energy that ancient cultures called world spirit. Think of what Google and NVIDIA do for quantum computing. Igniton does that for your biology. I spent time in their Colorado lab. I saw the tech. I used the supplements. In fact, I believe in it so much that I invested in the company. So if you're serious about living longer and having a brain that works better, this is for you. Go to igniton.com and use code Dave for 15% off your first order. That's igniton.com, code Dave. Igniton, born from light, backed by science.

Today's guest is a guy who thinks about black holes, probably thinks about surfing black holes, to be perfectly honest, and is a dear friend and certainly from another planet. I'm talking about none other than Peter Diamandis. Who's been on Bulletproof Radio several times before. I keep having him back on because he's always pushing boundaries, pushing limits. This is the guy who created the first X Prize. The reason we have Virgin Galactic and the reason we have SpaceX today is because of Peter's tireless work to push humanity to the next level. And he's taken his model and used it to drive change in our world in a way that is unprecedented for one human to do. I've been working with Peter for the past 6 or 7 years attending his events. And when I think, "Oh yeah, I'm thinking pretty big," I just hang out with Peter for an hour and go, "Oh man, there's another level I didn't think about." I want you listening to the show to get some of that futuristic goodness and just learn how to think. Peter's books are on my shelf, Abundance and Bold. You think the world's crappy, you look at the incredible shit show that is American politics. Notice I'm not partisan there. I don't really care who you put in the office. It's a shit show and it's going to be a shit show for the rest of our lives. Actually, that's not true. My life is going to be longer than anyone thinks. Maybe yours too if you read my book. But anyhow, Peter is the guy who will tell you in no uncertain terms if you talk to him, which we're doing in the episode today, and if you read his books, "You know what? Despite all that stuff, there's so much abundance. There's so much cool stuff. Our ability to change the world around us is bigger than it's ever been." So you will be inspired by this interview because that's just what Peter walks in, is inspiration and in the future. Peter, welcome to the show.

Dave, it's a pleasure to be here, pal. And you know, you think about black holes and I do too. It's like the stars, you know, we're living in a galaxy of 100 billion stars and it used to be thought that we lived in a universe of 100 billion galaxies, but it turns out The latest estimate is 2 trillion galaxies in our universe. And of course, a lot of scientists these days think that we're living in a multiverse of an infinite number of universes. So, you know, just try and think about that while you go to sleep.

Now, when you say that, you kind of have this degree in molecular genetics and one in aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard. So you're not exactly talking from a position of a lack of knowledge there. Which is profound because you're one of the very, very few advanced engineering people who also is an MD. And that mindset changes how you think about everything because you've got the system of life that you understand from the medical doctor side and the system of engineering and how to build things and how, really how stuff works from the engineering side. And that combination is, incredible, and it's led you to do breakthroughs in things like 3D printing and AI and drones and material science and health and energy. But there's something going on in there where you think about the future differently. In fact, your new book, this episode is a sneak, sneak, sneak preview because it comes out in January. But your book that's coming out is called The Future is Faster Than You Think. And it's based on the stuff that you've covered in the program that I'm a member of, Abundance Digital and Abundance 360, the in-person side of that, where for years I've been sharpening my future hat under your, you know, studying with you. And all of those technologies that you've just been digging in, you cover them in your new book. So I wanted to use this episode to talk about how you instantiate or how you envision the future and how you apply it to these different domains and maybe share a few nuggets from each of the domains. Sound like a good plan?

Yeah, let's have fun with that. All right. Because, you know, I will say that nobody really understands how fast the future is accelerating. You know, when I'm on stage or I'm in the boardrooms of some of the largest companies, people are to a large degree don't get that the rate at which technology is accelerating is itself accelerating. And it is, you know, speaking of, I'm gonna go back to black holes. The whole concept of what my business partner and friend Ray Kurzweil calls the singularity is fascinating. You know, every year, the rate at which computers are getting faster and everything that uses computation, like AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, augmented virtual reality, blockchain, all of these things are accelerating too. And what we can do, what the average person can do these days is extraordinary. And we don't think about it. We don't think about the fact that our cell phone that you, you know, if you just bought a new iPhone and you put the other one in your drawer, the iPhone you just summarily dismissed in your drawer has got more computational power than the Defense Department had, you know, a couple of decades ago. It would've been a CIA or KGB secret that they would've killed for if they had it. But we think nothing of it. It's amazing how powerful we are. How much access to capital we have and computational power and knowledge and what we can do with that if it's focused, right? And a lot of what you and I talk about, Dave, is mindset of empowerment of yes, you can. If you believe you can or believe you can't, you're probably right. And now these technology tools, because they're so democratized and demonetized, meaning they're cheap and they're available to everybody, The amount of invention we're getting is off the charts.

In The Future Is Faster Than You Think— and by the way, thanks for letting me read it ahead of everyone else, ha— you kind of spend the first part of it just saying, look, it's like the first 4 chapters, you say, look, this is what convergence is and why it's changed things. And then you say, here's how you apply it to these things. So we're going to paint a picture of the future here. And by the way, chapter 9 and 10 are healthcare and longevity. So you have an amazing track record of picking the future. So talk to me first though, what exactly is convergence the way you're forecasting the future?

So convergence is the fact that a number of different technologies are coming together to reinvent business models. It used to be that, you know, you built a better widget and that was what differentiated you. But what we're seeing now is that new companies are coming together when they're combining material science and robotics and machine learning and 3D printing. I'll give you an example. One of the companies I'm bringing to Bunnings 360 this year, it's a company my venture fund, Bold Capital, just invested in. It's called Relativity Space. So if you thought that SpaceX was really cool, which they are, and what they're doing is off the charts, so proud of what what Elon and Gwynne Shotwell have built. And you're saying, how could anybody ever top them, right? So Jeff Bezos is investing $1 billion a year with Blue Origin. And here comes this company, a young guy named Tim Ellis, who had been working at Blue Origin as a young engineer, and his co-founder had been at SpaceX, get together and they say, hey, can we actually 3D print entire rockets? And so here in Los Angeles, a few miles from where I am right now at XPRIZE headquarters, there is a company called Relativity Space, and they have, they have built these large-scale 3D printers, like the largest in the world, that use large robotic arms and new materials and 3D printing technology and machine learning paths. And they are actually able to 3D print an entire rocket in 2 weeks in one machine.

Not just the engine, the whole rocket.

I mean, it's everything. The nose cone, the fairings, the engine, the engine bell. 95% of the rocket gets 3D printed, right? But here's the beautiful thing. You could, so you can 3D print, I mean, these are large-scale rockets for launching about 1,500 kilograms into orbit. And you can 3D print one every 2 weeks, but you can iterate the design. So you could print, oh, let's make it, make a little change here and a little change here and a little change here. And so that's convergence. So convergence is this kind of capability now, it's a new business model exists because you're combining the robotics that were available, the 3D printing technology that had been maturing with new materials and new machine learning paths. And ultimately you get something, a new capability that didn't exist before. And, you know, if you think about autonomous cars, autonomous cars are the convergence of GPS and Google Maps and LiDAR and radar and AI. I mean, it's the convergence of all of these things these technologies that on their own are epic are coming together to create things that are, the term I use in the book is automagical. They make our life automatic and magical minute to minute.

One of the things that stands out as one of those memories that I will never forget was walking with you through SpaceX and watching them 3D print just a rocket cone. And as an engineer, as a guy who spent a lot of time in tech, just seeing that, like, this is something so radical, something right out of science fiction, but to see it actually happening in a factory, knowing, oh, this is actually going to go to space, you do get an understanding that what would have been years of casting and hammering and an unreliable result, which is how we've always done it under the government's very slow, very conservative perspective on space, and just to walk through and actually see it in person is one of those things where my jaw dropped. And you realize the world's not gonna be the same under that. And you're making the case in The Future is Faster Than You Think that, hey, it's not just one of these things, that there's this big set of technologies that are all feeding off of each other and making stuff that could not exist even 10 years ago just happen and not even be expensive.

Or a couple of years ago.

Yeah.

So everything is demonetizing, meaning it's getting cheaper. Let me give the basics for folks to understand this. I call it the 6 Ds, that whatever you digitize, right, we're digitizing everything. We're clearly digitizing health with the genetics. We're digitizing manufacturing with 3D printing. We're digitizing photography with digital cameras. And you can look at everything. In fact, as an entrepreneur, your job is to try and find something that's not yet digitized and digitize it. It enters slow deceptive growth, and deception is the, is the first D. Like, when we were at SpaceX, you saw the Draco engine exhaust cone being 3D printed. And it's like, oh, that's interesting, this little part of an engine. And then it progresses from deceptive to disruptive. Now we see the entire rocket being 3D printed.

And just, that was what, 3 years ago when I saw that, probably?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's amazing how rapidly things are going. And then the next D is that we are dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing. So dematerialization here is we used to have a giant factory to build an entire rocket, and that factory is being dematerialized. It's physically going away and it's becoming ones and zeros and printing paths. And so the factory is dematerialized into this one 3D printer that, by the way, when it's not 3D printing rockets, can 3D print a jet engine or an airplane wing or anything else anything else you've got a design set. So you're creating a factory of the future here. And then it demonetizes it much cheaper. There's no labor. You don't have a plant you have to invest in. And then it democratizes it. So you could manufacture these rockets anyplace, right? So that 6Ds is happening. Kind of insane.

I gotta push back a little bit on this democratization component of it. Like when one rich person makes a factory like that with no employees, how democratic is that versus more autocratic?

Well, when I define, you know, the democratization, it's— it used to be that you could— the set of skills and the supply chain to create something like that only existed in very unique places. It was in Kazakhstan, in the Soviet Union. It was in certain parts of Houston and certain parts of LA in the United States. And now a factory like that, a virtual rocket factory, could be stood up anyplace if a country wanted to start building rockets, hopefully for peaceful purposes. So that democratization is what I'm speaking about. It's not that Everybody's gonna have a rocket factory. But as things get cheaper, everybody now starts having access to this.

So it's mobile and accessible, but it doesn't mean that everyone gets a say in it. In fact, it could end up that fewer people have a say in things than they think they do in democracies today.

We can talk more about that. Let me jump into the next part here, which is the fact that in Future Faster, Future is Faster Than You Think, which I refer to as Future Faster, One of the realizations I had is that the rate of technology progress is accelerating. And that's not obvious to everybody, but it is a holy shit moment for when I saw how rapidly it's accelerating. And so why is it accelerating? First of all, we have more computational power on the planet than ever before. We just saw quantum supremacy from Google this year, and we can talk about quantum supremacy. I talk about it in the book. What quantum computers would be used for in the future. But it's the notion that more computational power, that by the way is demonetized and democratized. Anyone listening who wanted to could go to Amazon or Azure and spin up 100 or 1,000 processor cores, right? It's this computational power is no longer available just to the largest companies or just to the universities. Anyone could, listen, I can't go and do it myself right now, members of my team who can and do.

Yeah.

We have access to all the information on the world and we have more capital than any time ever before, right? We hit all-time capital highs in venture capital in 2017 and 2018. We're going to do it again in 2019. More crowdfunding, more sovereign wealth funds. So more capital is flowing and the cost of doing stuff is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, right? You and I both talk about Genome sequencing, so the first human genome back through the NIH, about $3 billion, Craig Venter about $100 million. Let's use that $100 million for that number. If you had $100 million back in 2001, you could sequence one genome. Today, the price is approaching $100. So $100 million could give you a million genomes. And so it's amazing.

It is amazing.

That's all these things are accelerating things. We're living longer and more people are connected on the cloud. We're, you know, we're going from 4 billion to 8 billion people connected on planet Earth, which means more people are experimenting and inventing and consuming. It's, it's insane.

It is insane. I'm thinking back to, oh, you can spin up 1,000 cores on AWS. I have a poster over here in my office from the very first shipping pay-as-you-go provision-on-demand system. It was my baby at a company called Exodus Communications, and it was out before we had the name cloud computing. And I went to our board, I got $10 million to build it, but we could only build it for $10 million because we were a billion-dollar company that ran data centers. And I look at how much I would charge someone for really that whole data center provision on demand is what my iPhone has today, right? And it would— people would spend a million dollars a month and they could make their capacity to go up and down when they needed it. And it was earth-shattering 20-something years ago. So this is, this is just in, in my adult lifetime. And, you know, I'm in my 40s and I look at that now and I look at what we can do. And you can not just spin up, you know, cores and storage and all that, but you— there's a whole bunch of other tools, even machine learning tools for free. Yeah.

For free on the cloud.

Yeah.

Right. I mean, there, you can go and use quantum processors for free. On the cloud today. I mean, holy cow, it's unbelievable. It is insane.

Okay.

Yeah. And so we don't know how fast the future is going, but it's accelerating. And, and here's the challenge, if I could. It's, it's a lot of people are scared about the future, and I think a lot of people are scared about the future, um, because they don't understand where it's going. And a lot of what my mission and purpose in life is helping them understand where it is and where it's going so that they can use it to change the world.

Now, let's talk a little bit about the fear part of this. I am exceptionally excited about the future. I also am looking at running out of topsoil in about 60 years as being One of the big limiting factors for people, and I know we talked about this a lot, in fact, this is one of the XPRIZES that got funded this year. So I feel like technology may solve that. In fact, our understanding of how nature systems work will be driven by machine learning. They'll go, "Oh, we better do this 10 steps before we thought we would, but we just couldn't see it." So let's assume that we get rid of that kind of fear and go back to that question about, okay, The democratization means that maybe technologies won't only be for the big wealthy countries, but it's still going to take a sizable chunk of capital to have a rocket printer in your backyard. So in the second half of The Future Is Faster Than You Think, and this is woven throughout the Abundance Digital learnings that I've had from you, you talk about another kind of voting. It's voting with your dollars. The future of shopping. And if people want control, it's where you spend your dollars is exactly what the system will adjust to do. So if you only buy organic stuff, they'll quit making non-organic stuff because no one will buy it. It's real straightforward if that's what you want to do. So that's where the control comes from even when we have these big systems everywhere. But what are you predicting the future of buying stuff is going to look like? Like, what's not obvious?

So what's not obvious is that a lot of the stuff that you normally buy and that you're advertised to, a lot of that stuff, your AI is going to be buying it for you. So, you know, I want you to imagine that, you know, we do it a little bit right now when we talk to Alexa. And we say, hey, can you buy something for me? Or can you order something for me? But I want you to imagine in the future, we're all going to have a version of an AI similar to Jarvis, like Iron Man. It's an AI that, and, you know, again, Alexa and Google Home is the beginning of that. But you're going to have an AI that you give permission to listen to every conversation you have, read your emails, look at, you know, what you're looking at through your forward-looking AR glass lenses, look at your blood chemistries. And that AI is constantly trying to optimize the world for you, is trying to make your world, as I call it, automagical, right? So as you walk in, it will be automatically adjusting the lights and the temperature. If it knows what your mood is, it may want to play different music. And it knows that, you know, you're running out of certain things in the refrigerator, and it will order it for you. It knows— it actually can see where you're looking, right? These AR glasses will have, um, can understand where you're focused, where your pupils are looking, your intention, if you would. And if it knows you're looking for a new shirt and I'm staring, or a new jacket, and I'm looking at your jacket, Dave, and I'm saying, that's interesting, and, and and the AI may in fact pop up a window saying, "Would you like one? $899, it could be here tomorrow." And I just say yes and it brings it. So retail becomes available to you all the time depending where you're looking. And then certain parts of retail, I might turn on a surprise and delight feature on my shopping AI. In which it will send stuff to me that has a 98% likelihood that I'm going to want, I need, and I like. So part of this is, you know, who's doing the shopping? Is it you or your AI? And part of this is, are we going to shopping malls anyplace? First of all, I mean, that has to be an entertaining experience because going there for any other reason is insane. And then, The conversation I talk about in the book is, in the future, I'll put on my VR goggles if I'm looking to go and buy a new suit, and I will go into a VR shopping mall, so to speak. Everything in there is my size. I have an AI consultant who I'm talking to, and I say, you know, I've got an event going on up in Silicon Valley this Sunday. It's sort of a black tie. I'd like something new. And would you spin up a fashion show for me? So all of a sudden, there is a runway with 100 avatars that look like me walking on the runway wearing 100 different outfits. And I see them walking and I say, oh yeah, that one over there, number 27, I like that. And then all of a sudden, I look myself in the mirror in this virtual world and I'm wearing that outfit. And I move around, it looks good. I say, yeah, I wonder how that looks like with the shoes in my closet. And of course, there's a digital twin of everything in my closet. And I'm now wearing that pair of shoes. And I say, yep, that's my outfit. That's what I'd like. And it arrives later that day. So it's a shopping experience, which could be social. I could have another person in that VR world with me, looking at me, shopping with me, but it's efficient. And yeah, I guess efficient is the word I would use. If you want fun, there's other fun things you can do besides going shopping, but you can still do that if you want. But you're not gonna drive your car to the mall. At least you'll at least take your autonomous vehicle that will drop you off there.

All right, at a minimum. All right, so let's say now we're in the future. So assuming that I have a job and I have some money and I want to get the suit, it's gonna take very little, time to do it. What's it going to do for the cost of the suit?

Well, the suit, first of all, is manufactured on demand. Your digital, uh, image of your body, your digital body file, is updated anytime your weight changes. And so the suit is made perfectly for you. There's no inventory of suits. We don't have, you know, 10,000 suits in 42 long that are on in the warehouse someplace because they're manufactured on demand. And so the whole supply chain gets more efficient and, and cheaper. And it's a suit that is bespoke for you. But I'm gonna guess, you know, we're reducing the price, you know, at least 50%, if not an order of magnitude. And at the end of the day, the question also becomes in the future, Dave, what's the value of brand? That's gonna be a fascinating conversation.

It, it is because I, I'm looking kind of forward to this because, When two companies can 3D print the same clothes for you, then what'll happen is what's happening on Amazon right now, where there's a race to essentially no profit whatsoever for companies. And in the case of Amazon, they actually just keep all of the profit for themselves that's available. And the companies who sell there are, you know, making very, very few margins on there. I know I'm one of the companies who does that. I run one of the companies who does that. And so I'm just looking at the future where the first person with 3D printer is gonna make money for 2 years. The second person with 3D printing clothes, as long as they're identical quality, we won't have what we have today, which is where you go online and you think you're buying something and you get a cheap knockoff and like you get junk. So then I'm looking forward to being cheaper.

[Speaker] This is the process of digitization dematerialization, demonetization, and democratization, right? We're dematerializing the supply chain and the warehouse, and we're demonetizing the cost, and then it becomes more available to everybody. And this happens over and over and over again on every single, not every single, but most all products. And this is, we're, you know, we can talk about this later. I'm a capitalist entrepreneur. I love starting companies. But we're heading towards a post-capitalist society some decades out, right? Where things become the cost of the materials, the energy, and the information set.

[Speaker] So if someone's young today, I'm gonna make a prediction and I want you to tell me if it's a good one or not. If you're young and you're looking for a sustainable, interesting, high-value career, become a tailor. Be really good at making clothes, 'cause when everyone has 3D-printed clothes, the person with handmade bespoke clothes is gonna be the coolest person. And if you're the one who does that, I'm not even kidding. I'm a contrarian at heart. And seriously, you put on a 20-year hat, am I right or am I wrong? When no one else is making clothes and you're the one making clothes, you're gonna be the one who wins.

Now the question is, can anybody that you know differentiate from a 3D-printed exact version of what you're wearing and a bespoke version? And you're gonna have to go around telling everybody, hey, this is hand-tailored. If you want to get the coolness factor?

It's, uh, I, I think it's going to be, it's going to be tough, uh, right when the copies are that identical. It won't matter, uh, it'll probably be because they're less perfect than the robotic ones.

But, uh, I'm, I'm, uh, I, I love, you know, one of my, one of my favorite examples of, uh, dematerialization, demonetization is a company called Diamond Foundry up in the Bay Area, and they've built machines that can bring in methane, water, and electricity, and out the other end comes perfect diamonds, you know, 4, 6, 8, 10-carat diamonds. And, you know, it's funny, you could say, but, you know, it's a perfect diamond, it's not natural. Listen, if you want to add flaws, you can. If you— you can add the exact flaws you want. And if you want to add, you know, color, no problem at all. And then, you know, there's this beautiful, um, John Ivey designed this beautiful diamond ring that is an entire ring made of diamond. I mean, like, you know, The whole thing is diamond, right? So it's, I don't know, tens of carats it is, but we are beginning to see a world of scarcity becoming abundance. In other words, what do you think of as truly scarce, right? You know, energy is not scarce. We live in a world that's, the Earth is bathed in 6,000 times more energy from the sun. May not be in a fully usable form yet, but we're getting there. Time, which is scarce, it's the most scarce thing. We all have 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, but how we use our time is changing, right? So I'm a private pilot. I don't, I save an hour not going to LAX where I can go and fly my own plane out of Santa Monica. I buy back time. The fact that you and I, where are you right now as we're recording this?

I'm on Vancouver Island looking out at the ocean.

And I'm in Culver City. And, you know, we would've, to record this some time ago, we would've had to have spent a day flying to a mutual location and doing this, but I'm having a full experience with you right here digitally, and we're saving, you know, a good 10 hours. And you and I are both focused on longevity, which is a way we don't make time more efficient, that we actually have the potential to add time, whether it's 10 years, 30 years, 40 years, 100 years. Technology is taking scarcity into abundance in almost every single area.

You've actually done a lot of investing and a lot of what you teach at Abundance Digital and Abundance 360, it is about what's happening in that space. So I've had a chance to ask Craig Venter questions because of the events that you put together. And I want to know in The Future Is Faster Than You Think, in your new book, what are you saying now about longevity that you might not have said 5 years ago?

What I'm saying is that we are in a magical period of time right now, that this next decade we are seeing a dozen different technologies that are in the lab and in testing that we are seeing and beginning to see amazing evidence. So I have tremendous confidence that the term I use is 100 is going to become the new 60. That at 100 we will have the aesthetics, the cognition, and the mobility that we had at 60. And what I speak about is things like, you know, stem cells and senolytic medicines that kill the senile cells in your body and Wnt pathway cell-to-cell communications and GDF-11. This is the growth factor out of young blood. And just to begin a few, Then there's the work of David Sinclair, who just wrote an amazing book called "Lifespan," right, that looks at NAD and NMN and his information theory of aging. Listen, I'm just, there's enough going on that I would be shocked, absolutely shocked, if we didn't take a quantum step forward this next decade.

All right. It's funny, every one of the technologies you talked about is in my new book, "Superhuman." Sure. And people are saying, "Dave, how can you say 180?" And the reason I picked 180 is the amount of time that I'm going to live as sort of the floor, like at least this long. I don't want people to think I'm crazy if I go even bigger than that, but I'm thinking in the next 100 years, can't we do 50% better than our current best?

Yeah.

You and I both know it's exponential. 50 years is a piker. Like that means we didn't do a very good job Like that's a losing, like we innovated like we did in the 1970s. We didn't innovate like we do now. So give me another couple hundred years realistically.

Yeah, 100%.

Do you see that? I mean, are you, I'm gonna live to 500 years? Like what's your number?

I'll give you my number in a second, which I came up with when I was in medical school. But there's an important point that, I mean, I talk, what I work with my, you know, the 3,000, entrepreneurs that I mentor through Abundance Digital is to help change your mindset, right? I want to have folks, first of all, go from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, which means, listen, stop feeling fearful. There is more and more of everything available, and you have to flip your bit on how you see scarcity to abundance. And the other— and we can talk more about that. But once people get, yes, okay, I get it. There is more available. I can stop hoarding and protecting and trying to think small. The other thing is going from a linear to an exponential mindset. And this is the point you're making. In the next 10 years, we're going to create more wealth than we have in the entire past century. In the next 10 years, we are going to see, you know, 100 years of technical progress So, you know, even if we just got 10 more years of healthy lifespan, and you and I both talk about health span and vitality, right? In the next 10 years, we're seeing massive breakthroughs in CRISPR and gene therapy and AI and really understanding how the brain, beginnings of understanding how the brain is working and what are the genetics of aging, and what's the information theory of aging? And I think we're going to unlock so much potential. So if in the next 10 years you unlock only another 10 years, that additional 10 years is likely to give you another 20 years, another 30 years. And it's a concept, you know, I've talked about before. Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil talks about longevity escape velocity. It's a beautiful idea, right? That for every year that you're alive, there's gonna be a point at which science is extending your life for more than a year. And that diverges beautifully upwards.

People oftentimes ask me, you know, okay, is this only for rich people? And how are we gonna have that many people on the planet? What are your answers to those two questions?

So the answer is no, it's not only for rich people. A lot of the treatments that I'm seeing are really cheap. I mean, and Dave, Dave Sinclair's book, "Lifespan," he talks about using NMN, which is, you know, on the order of like a dollar a tablet. You know, it's affordable if you drink coffee. It's, you know, on the order of a price of coffee. So I mean, my drug of choice—

They stack well together.

They stack well together. My, you know, 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine is my drug of choice. That's caffeine, as you all know. But so a lot of these treatments, and then stem cells are coming down in price rapidly. All of these things like the Wnt pathway treatments that companies like Samumed are working on, I mean, the cost of the actual treatment is like pennies. So it's incredible.

It's coming and it's coming down. In fact, we've been manipulating the Wnt pathway For a long time, some Chinese herbs you can get today that are in Superhuman that work exactly on that pathway. And funny, they're known for making your hair turn brown again. So, like how we didn't know how or why, we just did a correlative analysis. But I firmly believe that everything that you and I are talking about is going to be available in a village in Africa in 20 years. It'll probably be wealthier in 20 years than it is today. But it'll still probably be less wealthy than a country with more technology. But just that this will become democratized, just like cell phones.

Yeah.

And sometimes people get mad— how can cell phone— how can stem cells be like that? Do you, do you believe, as I do, that, that all of these are going to become available because demand will call on it?

Yeah, 100%. So one of my companies is a company called Cellularity that, uh, that preserves stem cells from placentas, right? 99.99% of all placentas are thrown away at birth, but the placenta is one of the richest sources of stem cells ever. And so anyone's pregnant, by the way, rather than just saving your newborn's cord blood, you should truly save the stem cells from the placenta, which are the most pluripotent. And those stem cells can, are the original boot disk for your child, can be used to regrow an organ in the future and repopulate the child's, stem cell populations in your body. So it's, I mean, you know, Google how do you save your stem cells, your child's placental stem cells. It's important. And a single placenta can generate millions of dosages of stem cells for therapeutic purposes. So yeah, all the stuff will become lower and lower cost as the demand increases. Let's talk about the population. Concern that you mentioned.

Yeah.

So it's interesting. I'm more concerned about underpopulation of planet Earth in the future than overpopulation. If you Google Bill Gates and population, he has two great TED Talks, and he shows us that you do two things to a city or country. You make them healthier and better educated, and the number of children per family plummet. So here are the numbers. 50 years ago, the average was about 6 children per family on the planet. Today, globally, globally, the average, the replacement, the replacement number is 2.1 children per family maintains the current population of planet Earth for death rates. The current population growth rate average children per family has gone from 6 to 2.42, rapidly plummeted.

Globally.

Globally. In the United States, we're at about 1.75. We're below the replacement average in the United States. And so we're seeing the number of children per family plummet and we're not replacing it. And so we will probably peak at 9, 9.5 billion and then see a rapid decline after that.

I am also not worried over long periods of time about it because I wrote a book on fertility and our fertility rate is plummeting because of some of the things we've done to ourselves and to the world around us. So that in combination with increased health, assuming we continue to increase health and increased education and more access to just making a decision to have a child instead of letting your biology make the decision without your input. I'm like you, not worried about a population problem over time, although over the next 20, 30 years globally, it may be pretty ugly just as we keep climbing, you know, slumming more people in when we don't have all the tech done. But, okay, so those are the two answers there. Bottom line, you and I are in agreement over time, we don't have a population problem. We might have a little one now and it might go a bit worse, but over time it's a problem that's self-solving.

And by the way, it's only a problem in the large metro downtown areas, right? The favelas and so forth. There is so much available land on the planet that could be populated. We just don't go there because we don't have schools, we don't have shopping malls, we don't have other things and things, but all of a sudden, if those things are available virtually, or if there's drone delivery to the Gobi Desert, and there's Wi-Fi from space, one of the things that's happening in the next 4 years, we're going from half the world connected digitally, right? In 2017, 3.8 billion people were on the net. In the next 6 years, with the deployment of 5G and OneWeb, Starlink from SpaceX and a number of other satellite constellations. We're gonna connect 8 billion people on planet Earth, and they're gonna have gigabit connection speeds for near zero cost everywhere on the planet. Mount Everest, the Gobi Desert, you're connected if you wanna be.

Um, there's so much value, uh, to be unlocked in that. Uh, now I, I gotta ask you this, Peter, and it, it's, I, I've interviewed some really smart people. You know, bioengineering people and all, looking at the effects on calcium or voltage-gated calcium channels in mitochondria with different frequencies of electromagnetics. And there's concern, some of it overblown, but some of it, there are studies about, you know, global EMF, stuff like that. What's your take on that? I mean, you both have the engineering side and you have the MD side. Is there anything to pay attention to there?

Listen, I'm sure that there is. I keep on hoping and waiting that the government regulatory systems will be doing the science to test this. I remember back in the late '80s, there was a cell phone scare that cell phones at 900 megahertz and 1.6 gigahertz were going to be causing brain tumors. That scare didn't pan out. At least to any knowledge that I know. Now there's the same conversation around 5G, which we're beginning to deploy. Is that going to cause problems? The fact is that the body was not made to be bathed in that amount of energy at these spectral areas. And so I think about it. I have not changed my behavior as a result of that. What I do do is I scan myself right? You know this. There's a company called Health Nucleus or Human Longevity, Health Nucleus. Yeah. And, and so every year I go and I digitize myself. Full body MRI, brain MRI, brain vasculature, coronary CT, lung CT, full genome, microbiome. And so, and I check, is there anything going on inside my body I should know about? Because eventually there will be a yes, right? We all are developing cancers all the time. It's just our immune systems knock them out. But maybe sometime it won't. So I want to find it at stage zero and stop it, right? This is part of the future of longevity is you find disease and you stop it before it takes hold.

Yeah, that is the trick. And I still have this idea that we are going to figure out, 'cause I have a pulsed EMF device behind me that's used for cancer treatment by some people.

And I love the Pulse EMF.

Right, so if it can do good things, I'm pretty sure we can make a communication one that's probably good for our biology. Just we haven't done that yet. So there's probably an XPRIZE around that.

And by the way, Dave, I do love your focus on the mitochondria. I mean, as the energy source of the body, I think understanding the genetics and the biochemistry of the mitochondria and how to revitalize it, rejuvenate it is fundamental. So congratulations for all that you're doing in that area.

So thanks, Peter. I found that I had a problem there that needed some serious hacking, and more and more research is coming out, even some that came out after Superhuman came out, where they just figured out that when the mitochondria make enough ATP, that they're actually powering the cytosol so that it can regenerate DNA. Not mitochondrial DNA, but nuclear DNA. So what's happening now is, oh, if you have enough power, then it will go into regenerating your DNA so you don't get DNA mutations that are linked to cancer. And if you're running with substandard mitochondria, the body says, "I didn't really have to fix my DNA," and then it doesn't. And it's so fascinating to me, but I always want to ask when we're looking at these amazing technology futures, is there a dark side? Like, you know, the destruction of insects by LED lighting, you know, things like that. Oh, LED lighting saved a lot of electricity, but it affected the system of biology in an unforeseen way. How do you account for, in your book, in your thinking, how do you account for unintended consequences of the technologies that we're deploying?

So there's no question that there is always unintended consequences, right? I mean, let's look at one of the biggest technology unintended consequences that exists, which is farming, right? Farming is a technology, Growing livestock is a technology, and the unintended consequences has been to deforest much of the planet and turn ourselves into a planet of cows. So we don't need to look at LEDs or 5G or cars. I mean, we can look back hundreds of years as humans, as we take control and shape the world to meet our needs, There are always unintended consequences. The difference now than 20 years ago or 100 years ago or 500 years ago is we can now begin to measure what's going on. We can now be attentive. We are heading into a world of 20 billion connected devices, a trillion sensors, right? Thousands of satellites imaging the Earth, drones imaging the Earth. AIs that can connect and process that data and begin to actually give us a feedback loop. That's a beautiful thing for me. So while people talk about, oh, the evils of all this technology, hey, listen, unless you're an omniscient being, for the first time, all this technology is giving us the ability to truly understand what our impact is. And hey, stop doing this and start doing this. Like, one of my big areas I'm focused on is as we create a world of abundance, it's not fair to tell people they can't have higher quality protein, they can't have tuna or can't have beef or chicken, but we're destroying the planet by the amount of beef we're producing and the amount of tuna we're fishing. And so I'm working with another mutual friend of ours, Tony Robbins, and the Abu Dhabi government about doing an XPRIZE on cellular agriculture, feeding the next billion. How do you create a higher quality, healthier, cheaper Wagyu beef and hamachi tuna, right? How do you create that? But it's, you just take a stem cell from the cow or from the tuna fish and then grow in the lab something that tastes better, is healthier for you, and is much cheaper. And it's manufactured in downtown Mumbai or downtown Detroit.

What I appreciate about that, Peter, is that you're delivering a biologically identical end product that will then have that effect on the body. This sort of fake meat, "Oh, it's plant-based, but it tastes like meat." I'm sorry, it's still a potato. It will have the biological effect of a potato, no matter if it tastes like ice cream. Great, but meat does something different to the body. I'm also hopeful that the systemic cost of all the growth mediums and all that is accounted for in our equation. So that I'm a little bit skeptical that we're gonna be able to have a system. Yeah.

So we're, I mean, one of the things we have to work on is growth medium and how do we engineer new growth mediums that from an energy and pollutant standpoint is better than growing it than the way we do right now, which is growing an entire cow to get that one piece of steak.

[Speaker] Right now, I'm still pretty firmly in the mindset that says the best thing we can do is we can take cows and sheep and goats and put them on land that isn't good for agriculture and don't put too many of them. And then they make better soil to make healthier stuff and you can still eat them. So you're taking land that wasn't really suitable for agriculture without draining aquifers And then the environmental equation is very different. So if we all eat a little bit less meat, but it's high quality, I think we've got enough space and we can probably suck carbon out of the air that way. But in the meantime, if I could get a cell-grown steak that was less impactful than that and equally healthy, I think all of us would make that choice. It's just, you know, I can't tolerate growing soybeans and corn to make a cow because that's unsustainable. It is. From a human biology perspective and an environmental one, so we've got to end that. Now, we've talked about a bunch of things, and in your book you talk about more, and we've mentioned Abundance Digital a few times, and if you're new to Bulletproof Radio, you haven't heard my interviews with Peter before, you might not know what this is. I am buying you as a Bulletproof Radio listener a scholarship if you want to be one of the 3,000 or so entrepreneurs who are in Abundance Digital. And this is a program that I am actually a member of. Peter has helped me to shape what I do with Bulletproof and 40 Years of Zen and TrueDark and the other companies that I've founded or that I work with. And in order to do that, I'm not receiving any monetary compensation for this other than Peter will send you a copy of my book if you want to sign up for Abundance Digital. Peter, I don't know, it's abundancedigital.com. Is that the URL people go to?

So it's abundance.digital is the website. And the code, Dave, that we created for any of the listeners here is BULLETPROOF40. And that gives you a 40% scholarship from Dave, from Bulletproof. And let me just mention what is Abundance Digital. It's a, first of all, it's a community of abundance and exponentially-minded entrepreneurs. It's a lot of our graduates from Singularity University who are really exponential entrepreneurs. So in that community are people who have an extraordinarily positive attitude about solving the world's biggest problems. You know, the mindset is you wanna become a billionaire, help a billion people. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. What we do is I am, I do 4 live webinars per month for the community. I have an entire curriculum on exponential energy and medicine and future transportation systems. And I interview and we've created curriculum. It's hundreds and hundreds of videos around AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain, taught in a very understandable fashion with me and the world's experts. And you get it all as your membership. The Netflix model, you watch it as much as you want, and it's so you can self-educate. And then we have a digital app in which you can meet and connect with everybody. And I'm in the app answering questions. I mentor everybody. It's like, you know, What is your question? What's your business idea? How can I help you with your mindset, with your massively transformative purpose? We have meetups in the Abundance Digital community. And then every year, as you know, you're a member of my Abundance 360, which is my CEO summit. It's $15,000, the CEO summit. It's all the Abundance Digital members get 3 days of livecast. You're in the event live for 3 days digitally. And so the Abundance Digital Membership is $1,500, and with this discount of this scholarship you're providing with BULLETPROOF40 as the code, it's $897. And as you mentioned, I will be sending everybody who joins through this BULLETPROOF40 code a copy of Dave's book, "Superhuman." And if you have read the book like I have and you have a copy, Give it to a friend you love that you want to live longer. So anyway, that's the opportunity.

And guys, I want you to be really clear on this. You can go to a lot of places and buy this for $1,500. You can go to Peter's thing, and then if it's referred, there's a referral thing. I am giving you the referral. I think this is worth your time. If you like Bulletproof Radio, this is good for you. Forgoing all of that, handing it back to you because I appreciate you listening to the show and because I think it's worth your time. If you're an entrepreneur, if you care about the future, and if you are seeking a community of people like that, it is very lonely to be someone who lives in the future surrounded by people who are stuck in the past. And this has been a problem for me my entire life, starting in probably third grade. And I don't know why I'm that way, but I am years ahead of— I don't know. That's what I care about. And if you're like that and you're excited by all this stuff and you see that there's amazing things happening and you can see the bridge to get there and you want to be around people like that, that's why I found— read Game Changers. The value of your community on your happiness and on your performance. This is how I get my community of people who care about the future. And don't just care about it, 'cause we all care about it, they're actually doing something about it. So anyway, that's why it's my gift to you. It's literally money outta my pocket, but I'm happy to do that for you.

And I love you for that, Dave. And it's 100%, you are one of the most generous and giving and supportive people that I know, and I'm grateful for you in my life. Thank you, Patrick. So I hope folks will join. It's abundance.digital. And again, Bulletproof40, Bulletproof 40 as the code. And what I can promise you is I give that community every relationship, everything I'm working on, copies of my book in advance, access to everybody I think is changing the world, information about longevity as I learn it. It's my go-to community because in your success, as an exponential abundance-minded entrepreneur, you're making the world a better place, right? I mean, I believe this, Dave, and I know you do too. It's entrepreneurs and people who are empowered who are— give me the greatest hope to use all of these technologies to make the world constantly better.

Well, I just— having known you for a long time, having met some people who have become very close friends through the network that you've built, having hung out with Anousha, who's the CEO of XPRIZE, who's the first private astronaut woman ever, and just seeing the decades of building the future you've done, I'm happy to be a part of it and happy to bring the Bulletproof Radio community into that and just to talk about it, because honestly, who wants to live 180 years if you think the future is either something you can't change or something that's dark? It's neither of those. And if there's anyone on earth who has just like pointed that out very bluntly and clearly with science behind it, it's you, my friend. And thank you for being on the show again. And you're always welcome back when you do something new and big.

Congratulations on Superhuman. It's, I think, one of the most important things that you're doing there, and I'm your compadre in that, is giving people hope about the future, right? It's like hope about the future of their health and longevity, and that's extraordinarily important. And by the way, if anybody wants a sneak peek of "The Future is Faster Than You Think," the website for that is futurefasterbook.com. DaveAsprey.com, and you can see what's going to be coming out. The book comes out in January, end of January, but there'll be some incredible advance purchase giveaways. Like, you can get a copy of Abundance in Bold in addition if you buy the book Future Faster before it comes out. So anyway, my— I have a mission. I want to brainwash people to be more positive about the future and take action about it, right? My My, on stage, it's like, stop complaining about the problems in the world. Start fixing them because you can.

I gotta say it. I'm disrupting big food with Bulletproof because I'm tired of junky packaged food that doesn't work for people. So I did something about it, right? And it doesn't have to be a big thing. Just walk around, find something that's annoying to you every day, and there's probably a business behind it. It's not that hard, but being surrounded by thousands of people who think the same way will make it easy for you. That's why I spend, my $15,000 a year to come to your event. That's why I'm a member of Abundance Digital, because I gotta have that in my life or it just doesn't work. So thanks, Peter. Have a beautiful day, have a beautiful decade, and a beautiful century coming up here.

Let's do that, pal. Be well. Love you. Be well.

The 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 products. 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 follow 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 guests' 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 you're in. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.