Episode 155: Navigating the Age of Abundance and Meaning

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and I would like to welcome you to Exponential Wisdom. And I stand in awe of my partner, Peter Diamandis, who's the great fearless explorer of all things technological and what technology can empower people to do. And Peter, you have a brand new book along those lines.

I do, Dan. And, you know, I'm in awe of the fact that you put out a book every quarter. I'm putting out a book roughly every 2 years. And, you know, you and I met around my first book called Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think that I had written with my amazing writing partner Stephen Kotler. And that book really came out of the realization that technology was a force that took anything that was scarce and made it abundant over and over and over again. You know, I opened that book with the story of aluminum, where aluminum used to be the most precious metal on the planet. You know, there's a story of Napoleon inviting the King of Siam over for dinner And Napoleon and all of his troops and all the delegates there ate with gold utensils, but the King of Siam had aluminum utensils because they were so, so valuable. And most people don't realize that aluminum is one of the most plentiful metals on the planet. I think it's like 8.3% of the Earth's crust is aluminum, but it's bound with silicates and oxygen to make this substance called bauxite, which doesn't look anything like aluminum, but it was so energy intensive to smelt bauxite to create aluminum that for most of human history, aluminum was worth more than gold and platinum. In fact, the capstone of the Washington Monument in DC is made of aluminum because I think it was in the 1880s when it was built, it was still one of the most valuable metals on the planet. And so everything, access to food, water, energy, healthcare, education, knowledge, information, and now even intelligence is becoming more and more abundant. And so for years I've wanted to write the follow-on book to Abundance and got together with Steven about 18 months ago and started the process— maybe it was 2 years ago— with the realization that the abundance story has just gone into a hyper-exponential. Our next book, it's called We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. And The book and the website for folks who are interested in, uh, pre-order is weareasgodsbook.com. We can put it in the show notes. But the realization is we've seen massive increasing in abundance across the board, and people don't realize it, but I have about 100 charts in the back of the book that look at abundance and just how it's progressed. Well, we released the book in 2012, it's 2026, so 14 years has just continued to skyrocket. And even accelerate. Mm-hmm. But we do talk about the downside of abundance as well. Talk about the abundance of microplastics. I mean, it's crazy that we've got like 5 or 6 grams of microplastics in our brains. Now, one of the companies I'm backing is a company called Breaking coming out of Colossal that is a developed new synthetic bacteria that are able to break down microplastics. And imagine a supplement that you can take and it breaks down the microplastics in your digestive tract before before they get absorbed. That's the kind of vision of what's going on. But we've seen abundance of calories. We've talked about it before. You know, it used to be that starvation was the baseline. Now it's obesity on the planet. Abundance of even depression and teen suicides. So there are all these negative implications. And so we do document those and talk about them. The good news is that technology gives us the ability and the means to some degree to address those, right? And the biggest problems, as I like to say, are the world's biggest business opportunities. So the other realization, and open the book with this, is, you know, what we did between breakfast this morning and lunch is godlike. You know, we don't think about that. Our ancestors would view us as gods. Your ability to know anything, be able to bring in massive intelligence to supplement you, you know, the fact that you can do a, a free video call the other side of the planet. We're omniscient, we're omnipotent, omnipresent, and these are, you know, godlike elements.

Yeah. Yeah. The one thing that I'm noticing, and it's more apparent in the United States than probably anywhere else in the world, is there is a growing scarcity, but it's in a completely different realm, and it's the scarcity of meaning.

Which is the second half of this book. So the subtitle in the book is A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance.

Yeah. Which is very, very interesting two words to put together, survival and abundance.

Yes. Yeah.

Because survival has been a problem of scarcity up until now.

One of my favorite quotes that comes from an Indian, I don't know, call him mystic or philosopher, Sadhguru. And I quote him in the book.

He was a teacher.

Teacher. Okay. He is a teacher still. And I was with him on stage And he said something I never forgot, and he goes, technology is the means by which humanity takes a vacation from survival. Such a powerful idea, right? And for most human history, your job was to survive. That was your job for all human history. And so we talk about the fact that, okay, we document the story of increasing abundance so people can understand the positive impacts of technology. It's really inspirational in that regard. It talks about, okay, here's the negative impacts and to be aware of, and here are the companies solving those negative impacts. But the second half of the book is how do you deal with the speed of change? Mm-hmm. And how do you deal with what you just said, meaning?

Mm-hmm.

We talk about this constantly. We walk through the psychology that the most important aspects that one needs in the future is agility, is agency, is the fact that you are now empowered to do almost anything you want. But where do you Pick your purpose. All right. And we go into the notion that there's gonna be a future and we hold two futures in superposition. Mm-hmm. One future in which all of this massive technology is going to create a culture of consumers, you know, the WALL-E future, the couch potato future where you're there, it's technological socialism, technology, not the state. Is taking care of you. Technology, through the forms of robotics and AI, will give you effectively free health. The best surgeons in the world will be robots. The best diagnosticians in the world will be AIs. The best teachers in the world will be AIs. All these things becoming effectively available, compounding capabilities, and basically demonetizing to near zero cost. But how do you maintain meaning in this world? Super important. And yeah, We go into the notion that it really is getting clarity on your purpose, your unique ability, and dreaming bigger than ever before.

Yeah, the big thing is what still requires work. You know, if work is removed for survival, then people say, well, we don't have to work anymore. And let's say the social means are there to just give people lifetime income. 'Cause you need consumers. The economy doesn't work without consumers. And robots are very great, but they're not consumers. You know, aside from their daily dose of electricity, they don't really buy and purchase anything else. But you had made in a previous podcast that we did that I think that art is going to become much more powerful as we go forward. Poetry's going to become more powerful. Plays are going to be much more playful, you know.

Yeah, for sure. And people expressing themselves.

We're moving into a theatrical age where, you know, as it becomes more technological, I have a major book coming out in November called Casting Not Hiring. For people who really want useful employment, they have to take a very, very meaningful role in a value creation chain. The job just won't do it because AI will eat up every job description. You know, if it's programmable, AI will eat it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's being alert, curious, responsive, and resourceful. That is the trick.

Now, work will become a luxury item that you get to work but don't have to work.

You're someone who gets to work. There will be an enormous amount of inequality. If you think there's inequality on the planet now, There'll be inequality between the people who have meaning and the people who have no meaning.

One of the things I draw from is my early inspiration from Star Trek. You know, Star Trek is a universe, and Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator, is a very dear friend. And we talk about in that universe, people don't have to work, but they take on their moonshots. In this case, it's going and exploring the universe. So in this future, you can go much bigger than ever before. And it's one of the things that I think is important about the book here is getting people to think in an unconstrained fashion. You know, we have these self-limitations we put on ourselves. Oh, I could never do that. Oh, I could never be that. Oh, I could never go and be, you know, 10 times bigger. So it's a realization that these exponential technology tools can enable all of us to dream bigger than ever before. And it's really, you know, the WALL-E future from that Disney movie versus the Star Trek future. And I think a lot of that is gonna be mindset. And we talk a lot about mindset, about having a, you know, and I teach mindset a lot, having a purpose-driven mindset, a moonshot mindset, an exponential mindset, and a curiosity mindset, which is critically important to be as curious as possible to start asking questions beyond what you think you could answer. I talk about one of the— and I think we've discussed this before— I talk about the Universe 25 experiments. Do you remember that? Have we talked about Universe 25? So there was a social psychologist in the '60s who did an experiment that had some interesting negative implications. And so he built a massive Mouse Utopia, and it was a large enclosure for mice that had all of the food, all of the breeding materials, all of the room that would make it a paradise for them. And not mice, or rats. And he put in 4 mating pairs into this perfect society, right? And they grew exponentially, as they would. But before the population hit any limitations, you know, there were no limitations on food or space or nesting. Because there was no challenge, because there was nothing that they had to battle for, the population grew and then just died off.

Which is happening right now on the planet.

Which is happening right now in many ways.

We— oh no, of the technically advanced countries, only the United States and New Zealand are keeping even with the replacement rate. Every other country is—

yeah, uh, South Korea is a 0.7. I mean, the replacement rate for a population is 2.1 children per family.

Yeah.

South Korea and Japan, Italy, China are all below 1.

Oh yeah.

Which means their populations are falling off. It's really just Africa, which is in growth mode. But of course Africa will become much more technologically capable as well. Yeah. As technology's moving there. And so in this world without challenge, it's a problem. We humans, love challenges, right?

Yeah.

The unchallenged life.

This is why entrepreneurs are gonna rule because they always have challenge. Yeah.

And we talk about the notion that the career of the future is entrepreneurship.

Oh yeah.

Right.

There's no question. You know, it's not very old as we understand it as a class of people. I mean, there were always entrepreneurs, but they weren't a class of people. And it's not till steam power that you get entrepreneurial class.

Yeah. Okay.

You could be a nobody and you could become wealthy and powerful with steam power. It's what eliminated slavery on the planet was steam power.

For sure. And so I think a lot of people are asking, where are we going and how do I deal with this change? And that's why we wrote this book.

Yeah.

To give people a clear understanding of at least the next 5 years. It's hard to predict past 5 years these days.

It's all guesses and bets.

Yeah. But I think the most important element is how do you prepare yourself in your mental game? How do you become a creator, not a consumer? How do you get the mindset required for the proper level of agency? Right. And one of the things, if you feel like the future is happening to you instead of happening for you, it can be very depressing. So we, we talk about in the book, the notion that agency, that you're able to use these exponential tools to 10x your purpose, your life, your abilities, your income, all of these things, and the number of coaching tricks, if you would, really important. So for me, this is a survival guide.

Yeah.

Because we're recasting every element of our lives as parents, as citizens, as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, and it's all gonna shift. Faster than people can possibly imagine.

So when you use the word agency, first of all, what does that mean to you? And generally, how does it take hold in other people's lives?

Well, agency is the notion that you have the ability to utilize these tools. The transformation isn't happening only to you, but it's enabling you more than ever before, you know, agency to reinvent yourself, right? If your industry is getting disintermediated, agency means you have the ability to redesign what you do more efficiently than ever before. So again, we talked about in a previous episode the notion that, you know, Darwin's theory of evolution wasn't survival of the fittest, it was survival of the most adaptable. And so adaptability during rapid periods of change is fundamental. Having that mindset of curiosity, of agency, that I am empowered to do things more than ever before, and using these tools to transform. How do you think about that?

Yeah, I'm more that regardless what happens in the future, you feel that you have the ability to respond to it.

Yes.

Yeah, I mean, it's unpredictable. I mean, you were talking about 5 years out. I remember my first grade teacher, Sister Mary Josephia. She said, the reason why you're learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, that 12 years from now when you graduate from high school and you go out, because hardly anybody went to college then, she said, this is gonna prepare you for being out in the world after 12th grade. And you know, she was right. She was right. She made a prediction. I guarantee you that no first grade teacher in the world right now can give children a 12-year prediction of what's gonna be needed. Out there.

My favorite was Mrs. Edwards, who was my typing teacher in 7th grade, 8th grade. This is a tool you're going to use for the rest of your life. Well, she's right, I'm still using it, but I've started using WhisperFlow as a tool for— I'm dictating into my computer now more than ever before. It's interesting, right? So I'm dictating and listening to books instead of typing and reading books.

Yeah. Yeah, but I think that, you know, the agency thing, there's something mysterious about it. I think there's certain things that can't be taught because, you know, I coach entrepreneurs and all of them are high agency people. I mean, they're uneven with each other, but as a group compared to the general society, they're self-initiating. They have taken ownership of their future. As an entrepreneur, you accept that going forward, you're 100% responsible for your financial security. And you also accept that there's no opportunity for you unless you first create value for someone else. And my sense is that you can tell people that, but it doesn't elicit action. There's a great book. We have him as a speaker at our conference. We have a big conference called CoachCon in June. His name is Angus Fletcher. Dave Erickson, and he's got a thing called Primal Intelligence. I think it'll probably fit in very well with your new book. And he said that historically, logic wasn't really a form of intelligence. You didn't really think of logic as intelligence. The Greeks became very powerful because the alphabet came right in when the Greeks— Greek language was one of the first alphabet languages. You know, it was a technological breakthrough and they went wide. But as far as I can tell, AI is really good at logic. So if you're trying to compete with AI from a logical standpoint, it probably isn't going to work. But he said the greatest form of intelligence in human history has been storytelling. Yes. Especially when it's your story that you're telling. And he said logic is good for winning arguments, storytelling is good for taking action.

And for winning minds. Yeah. Right. We communicate by story and our brain naturally captures a story and gives meaning to it. Yeah. And connects you with that person or that product.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

So going back to the agency thing is that people with agency own their story and they're telling their story. People without agency, someone else is telling them what their story is.

Fascinating. You know, my goal right now is to help people to move out of fear and into anticipation and action. The worst place to be facing this exponential era, this hyper-exponential era, because the rate of change is 10x faster than it was just a few years ago when we started.

Yeah.

And so If you're in fear, you're on your heels, you're not taking action. And I think the best way to eliminate fear are, number one, to have a sense of where things are going, and two, to have confidence that you have the agility and agency, whatever happens, to be able to ride on top of that tsunami instead of being crushed by it. Yeah.

Here's what I suspect, that we normalize things really fast. Human beings have the ability to— we do, good or bad. We can normalize good, we can normalize bad. I mean, if the Second World War experience in Europe showed that people could normalize themselves to killing millions of other people, it was just there. So we know that we can normalize both good and bad. My sense is that I think we're born unequally to the task. I think our brains are actually constructed differently. So my sense is what the impact of what you do in A360 and XPRIZE and Singularity, I think what you do is that you empower people who have already chosen a particular direction. Okay. And that it's a small percentage. Yeah, it's a small percent. And I do the same thing. I mean, When I started coaching entrepreneurs in 1974, I checked what percentage of people were entrepreneurs, and you can do it by what kind of tax return that people have. And it was 5% of the adult working operation were paid in an entrepreneurial fashion. In other words, it was results-based income. Last year it was exactly the same percentage.

Well, fascinating.

Your sailing ship can't be all rudders and sails. You know, you need some ballast. Fascinating. Yeah.

A company I'm involved in right now is basically one of the major AI meets synthetic biology, and it's the notion of creating new life forms to create new kinds of capabilities. And we're now able to design novel life forms as products to solve things.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's good. It's absolutely fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, we're always just a few feet from disaster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, one of the big things is going to be material technology. There's all the talk about the rare materials, you know. Yes, on the planet. I bet in 20 years that's not even a discussion anymore. I bet the technology is there to create any number of new materials.

Yeah, we'll begin mining asteroids and we'll have drilling technology that gives us access to all the rare earths and platinum group metals that we need.

Yeah, yeah.

It's the constant story of scarcity into abundance over and over again. There is nothing truly scarce, even time. Right now we talk about this because the work I do in longevity will add first a decade, then two decades and three decades onto our life.

So it'd be interesting to get your book because I want to see the 100 statistics at the end of the book. But the first person who really took approach to this was Julian Simon, if you remember Julian Simon. And he was a statistician and he began to realize that things were becoming more abundant, like scarce materials, natural resources, that we are running out of natural resources. And he said there's only one resource, natural resource on the planet, and that's called human ingenuity. And he says it's only human ingenuity that makes anything valuable. And I think human ingenuity is agency.

Yes, I agree. And part of agency is your ability to aim these incredibly powerful tools at new and bigger problems, right? And to feel empowered. And so again, if you feel like the future is happening at you and destroying your future, and living in fear, you're in a world of hurt in the future. If you feel like I have more capability than ever before, then you're in a growth mindset. You're in abundance mindset, a moonshot mindset. And so, you know, to wrap here, folks are interested, if you read Abundance, please look at this book. I'm so proud of it. It's the best book that, you know, Steven and I wrote. Abundance Bold: The Future's Faster Than You Think. This is our fourth collaboration. It's by far the best. And if you go to the book website, which is weareasgodsbook.com, you know, the book comes out in April, but we have an advanced campaign giving people access to a whole slew of additional assets, videos, content, tools that Stephen and I have for the book. Mm-hmm.

I always admire you for your shameless salesmanship. I totally luxuriate in your shameless Salesman.

Hey, listen, I wanna get this out to as many people as possible.

Yes, of course. You're not doing it for yourself.

And apologies for the wind blow and the dog, but hey, if I could possibly get electric leaf blowers in the population, that would be great. Dan, as always, I'm grateful for your partnership and friendship, and thank you for the work you do.

Yep.

And in terms of, uh, shameless promotion, if you're not a member of Coach, it is the program that helps entrepreneurs think with agency and agility and mindsets required to really go far bigger and better than ever before. Thank you.

So strategiccoach.com.

Strategiccoach.com. There you go, a little shameless promotion on your side too. Why not?

Thank you, Peter.

Thank you everybody for listening to Exponential Wisdom.