https://www.listennotes.com/e/84cd65565e3b43de967ee3f5b67e8d6d

Everybody, welcome to our next episode of Exponential Wisdom. I'm Peter Diamandis, here with my coach, my partner in wisdom, Dan Sullivan. Dan, good to see you, my friend.

Great to see you, Peter.

Yeah. You know, I would like to talk about a subject that I've been thinking deeply about. So Steven Kotler, with whom I wrote Abundance, that was published back in 2012. And I have been working on the follow on To Abundance, which we just turned in our first draft to the publisher, Simon Schuster, and I'm excited about it. It'll come out probably in Q1 of 26. And one of the closing chapters is about the challenges we're going to face in a world of abundance. So in a world in which we all have humanoid robots to do our labor, to go and pick up after the kids, clean the house, do the laundry, all of these things that we have AIs to do, whatever cognitive tasks we want. And if you want to write a book, you click a button and this AI has written a book in your name or in your style. You know, one of the big challenges is, are we going to survive this abundance future? And how important is challenge and survival? Right? Because we are animals that have been driven throughout our evolution to survive against the odds. So this is a challenging concept. You know, we've seen movies like Wall E and the Matrix where a life of unchallenged living can destroy you. How do you think about this?

Well, I have a question for you. If I compare you back, let's say 20 years previously in your life, was the level of challenge greater then than the level of challenge is now?

No. I'm constantly operating at peak challenge.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's part of the answer. I just did a new tool today. I just tested it, and it's called Always More Ambitious. When I was 80 last year, somebody said, so what's your ambition for 90? And I said, my ambition for 90 is that I'm more ambitious than I am at 80. And, you know, you didn't go further with the conversation, but I've been thinking about it, and there have to be numbers attached to what ambitions are. And so when I look at what I wrote down as my examples today, they were 100 times bigger than my ambitions were at 70. This is just what I'm able to say at 81 is I think that the one part of life that will probably be the same as entrepreneurism, because I think the challenge is that the entrepreneurial choice of life, it's a choice to get into entrepreneurism. I think it stays Fairly constant with challenge. The level of uncertainty, if you're really growing and you're introducing new things, I think the level of funding, the level of getting good team members around you, taking advantage of technology, I think the challenge remains exactly the same. So I think there will be a huge divergence between the entrepreneurial part of society and those who work for somebody else.

Yeah, I love you for that, buddy. And I quote you all the time to people. Your beautiful quote, you know, it's make sure that your future is bigger than your past. And that's a version of living a more ambitious life ten years out.

Yeah.

And I think that's really important. And inherently you're right. I have two speeds on and dead. And it's like my free days are my biggest challenge. But we'll get to that some other time.

Yeah.

I want to share with you a experiment run in the 1960s that shed some light on this and get your thoughts on it. Because the population is not homogeneous, all entrepreneurs, we have lots of different. So there was a social psychologist in the 1960s who ran these experiments called the Universe Experiments. And he reported finally on his 25th version of this called Universe 25. I encourage folks to look at this. It's fascinating. So what he did was he built these very large enclosures for rats that were utopias. These were large, like 20 or 30 foot by 30 foot enclosures with all the food, all the nesting material, everything that a rat would want to live. And so there was no challenging, there was no survival, there was no predators, There was no need to compete. They had everything they wanted. And he put four mating pairs in. And during the first, you know, hundreds of days, they had exponential growth and everything was great. And as they continued unchallenged, what started to occur was society started breaking down. Some of the rats, which he called the beautiful ones, would just sit in the corner and groom themselves. And mothers would give birth to their babies, but would it abandon them? And then there was an increase in the stillbirths. And all of a sudden, without the population pressure of an enclosure, the population massively fell off and the society died. And so I don't want to overplay this, but the notion is that an unchallenged life leads to societal breakdowns.

I haven't done a test like that, but because I've been coaching now for 51 years, I started in 74. Something confused me in the early part of my career because I would get people in their 30s and 40s and they would be gung ho for growth and they would grow and grow and then all of a sudden, maybe 10 years in, they would stop. Some of them and some of them would keep going on. And I was always curious about the ones who stopped because there was no capability reason for them to stop. They were people who were a high level of capability. There was no market reason for them to stop. There was certainly no opportunity, but they stopped. And what I've discovered over the years, and I've put a concept to it, they were status based entrepreneurs. And their measure for where they were heading by becoming an entrepreneur was based on usually a lifestyle that they had spotted when they were very young in their community. You know, what was a great neighborhood to live in, what was a great type of home, where did your kids go to school, what clubs did you buy, what kind of material? Did you have one house or did you have three houses? You had a vacation house. And they got to a point where they checked off all the boxes and they stopped. And then there was the ones who didn't. And I began to look at them and I started talking them because I, first of all, I recognized myself more in the one who kept growing. And their whole attitude was that once I've grown to this level, then I get to go back to a starting point and I get to grow to another level. And that's their structure for life. They never see themselves stopping, growing. And my sense is that entrepreneurism offers the biggest capability to do that. Because in large corporate structures, large bureaucratic structures, you have mandatory stopping point which I think is going to adjust upward. You know, at 65 in the US now, and I think it'll probably go to 70 within the next 10 years. The thing is that probably there's a huge difference in an abundant society, as you're laying it out, that the challenges have to be self created. The challenges are not coming from the outside.

Yes they do. And so, you know, if I look at future scenarios, one future scenario is, you know, Wall E, the movie. Another future scenario is Star Trek. And in Star Trek it's self generated increasing difficulty and challenges. It's pushing ourselves to explore further, you know, five year mission to go where no human has gone before, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that if we don't do that, we start to have real societal challenges. My concern is, as you rightly point out, I think entrepreneurs will thrive in an age of abundance because they'll find greater and greater heights and be able to live and pursue bigger and bigger dreams. But what happens to the rest of society any Thoughts?

Well, let me ask you a question. Have you ever cared?

Listen, I do care. I mean, the work that I do with the ex.

I followed you around for a week. Yeah. Which 10 minute period did you actually?

I mean, my hope is, in the work that I do with X Prize is, you know, how do you uplift every man, woman and child? But I guess where I come to and I had this conversation with Palmer Luckey during our Moonshots podcast. I said, society needs a target to shoot for. It needs a vision of the future that kids and adults see and say, yes, that's the future I want to create. And unfortunately, the majority of visions of the future that are created by Hollywood are these dystopian versions that you never want. But where do we create utopian, or I don't want to call it, you know, sort of techno utopian, I want to say, but visions of the future where we strive and thrive and it's like, yeah, I want that future. Yes. I want to be part of making that happen.

Yeah. Well, what I notice because I've got some decades under my belt is that the challenges in the 50s when I was a teenager really were finding an occupation, getting out, getting money, getting paid and everything like that. So if I just use my own lifetime, I would say for the last 20 years, they're more psychological challenges because I notice there's three tough decades in my life and I've talked to other people about this. The first is teenage years. I think teenage years is a tough decade. There's just a lot of shifting that goes on, you know, from 10 years old to 20 years old. I think there's a lot to come to grips with, especially today with social media and everything like that. The other one is 30 to 40. And I've got a thought about this. I don't know if you've ever looked into this, Peter, that we really invest in young people up until about age 30. Society has enormous amounts of resources, educational resources, everything until 30. And then it's kind of like nature. Nature allows you to grow muscle. You know, it'll grow muscle for you until 30. After 30, you got to do it on your own. And you know, that's kind of like eagles. How do they teach their young to fly? They just toss them out of the ones that don't hit the ground know how to fly. And I think that there's something about, even in our advanced stage of society that we kick people out of the nest at a certain thing. And I think 30 to 40 is the kick kids out of the nest. And the question is, are they going to be something unique? You know, as an individual, if you think of your own life. I think of my own life. I really had to go through some fundamental changes in my 30s to get my feedback on the ground, you know, to know what I was really good at, that I could get paid at it, that I could really establish a lifetime relationship with someone. I really did that. And the others who don't make it through, they're just carbon copies. They're just Xerox copies of, you know, the neighborhood they came out of, the school they went to and everything like that. And then the next one, for me, the third decade was the 60s generation, because so many people my age are packing it in, right. And I noticed once you got to 70, it's clear and free, you know, it's clear and free. There's just nothing more, you know, no resistance. They don't want to talk to you. They don't want to hear about it. First of all, most of them are dead. So I think that the psychological. As the physical dangers of life get reduced more and more, I think they're replaced by psychological challenges. What's the meaning of your life? What's the purpose of your life? You know, are you getting any enjoyment or satisfaction out of life? And I've noticed that that's kicked up a lot more. So maybe that has more to do with it. I mean, the challenges to be a happy person today are significantly greater now than I think it was when I was 30 or 40 years younger.

Was there something that you experienced or something that impacted you that turned on your entrepreneurial. Your genes, if you would?

Yeah, well, it's probably not the thing that got me into being entrepreneurial, but it was a divorce and bankruptcy on the same day. That was in 1978. August 15th. Yeah. Two really bad report cards. I mean, that's two really bad report cards. I think you had an experience like that, your mountain trip through Chile, I think.

Well, that was different. That was reading raised.

No, no. But you had the time to do it.

Yeah.

Was that the beginning or the end of something?

I think my ignition points were it was Apollo and Star Trek. And the challenge was realizing that I was not going to become a NASA astronaut. And that dream was dying because of the realities of the government space program. And so I had to either give up on that dream or reinvent how I was going to get there. The point being here, that for you, and in some version for me, there is a challenge, something that impacts you in a negative fashion that you either rise to the occasion or you give up. And again, going back to this Universe 25 experiment and this world of abundance, you know, creating this moment of challenge, creating this, this moment where you choose to go big versus go home is important for society. And how do we do that? So I'm going to go back to my original point, which is how do we create story and visions of the future that inspire people?

Yeah.

Right.

Well, let me ask you a question. Your twins are seventh grade, so that makes them 13, 14. I don't know what the age. Do they have the spark living around you and watching? Do they have the spark?

I'm hopeful. But right now their spark is the challenges that they're facing in their video games. Right. And I had this conversation with Palmer about, you know, when he was, you know, his teenage years, how much was he immersed in video games? And he was like, oh, it was totally immersed in video games. That's all I was playing.

He was a dealer.

Yeah, he was. And so when I think about kids future, their future is going to be very deeply in technology. And it's interesting because video game design is one where you need to dial the challenge meter. So you're constantly challenged. If it's too easy, you give up. If it's too hard, you give up and sort of like, you know, just dialing that meter to be just right.

Yeah.

And I think as entrepreneurs, we dial that meter ourselves where we step up to the next level of challenge or we back away and we play that game.

One fundamental distinction that I've gotten about entrepreneurs, because I've had 50 years of firsthand conversations with them, there's a fundamental difference about freedom for entrepreneurs that I've noticed. And I think I'll, you know, one of my quarterly books, I'll go a little bit deeper with it. And that is, is it freedom from or is it freedom to distinction? And I would say of the people that I've met and have a sense of in people who aren't in strategic coach, that the vast majority of entrepreneurs, their greatest motivation is freedom from. They're trying to get away from their past. Something about their past, either the being pushed in a particular direction that they're trying to get free from, or having no support whatsoever. But it's a deprivation in their past that they're trying to get away from. And they never do. They never escape from it. Okay. And the others are freedom too. They've got an idea when they're young and they don't have the resources to pull it off. So their whole growth pattern is actually they have to say, now who are the individuals I have to link up with, who will provide capability, resources, who will find the capital, resources and everything else. But it's all driven by something they're creating in the future. Okay. I mean, there's lots of stories about Elon and, you know, there's his biography's been written and everything else, but I don't get the sense that he's trying to get away from something. I think he's very definitely trying to create something in the future. You know, he's got a picture and he's a First Principle guy, so he can look at almost anything. Now he's looking at government. And he said, if we got this down to first principles, what's it look? I think he gets an enormous enjoyment of getting involved in something that's really complicated, really wasteful, doesn't really work, and reducing it down to first principle and creating a new model. Baumer Lucky, as you mentioned, I think is the same sort of person, and I think both of them get a lot of enjoyment of ticking other people off.

They do. And basically disrupting the system.

Yeah, but I don't see that, you know, any anger that might be directed at them, I don't see it having any effect, you know, So I think things will change, but I think human nature is human nature, and I think that conditions will change, circumstances will change, but I think people can design new ways of challenging themselves. And, you know, it's not like in the old days. Things were really amazing, you know, And I remember, you know, I grew up a family of seven kids, parents, family of nine, and people say, remember in the old days we used to sit around and have meaningful suppertime discussions. And I said, no, I can't remember. I can't. I can't remember when, you know, and we, we really went deep with things. So I said, no, don't have any memory.

We so romanticized the past when life was short and brutish and you were dead by 40. Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, it seems to me that you in the Singularity University, you in the Abundance360, you and your investment funds and the X Prize and that you're developing constant new purpose opportunities for people. And actually, I think we'll make money as entrepreneurs creating purpose projects for other people.

Yeah, I do believe so. You know, one of the areas I'm also spending time on, Dan, you and I have discussed this in the past is helping people to proactively select the mindsets that they want to have. Right. In other words, you know, I think for an entrepreneur, your mindset is the most important thing that you have. More important than money, more important than contacts, more important than tech. Your mindset determines how you deal with challenges, how you deal with opportunities. And you know, I challenge folks to say, if you agree with me that mindset is what makes a great entrepreneur a great leader, then what mindset do you have and where did you get that mindset? Most people default into the mindset that they grew up in. They were taught in their school, their church, their family. But if you ask yourself, what mindset do you actually need for this exponential decade ahead or decades ahead, and are you willing to put the work in to shaping your mindset? Right. And I think about purpose driven mindset and abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset. It's critically important.

Yeah, it's really interesting. But if you looked at the conditions of your childhood, you know, neighborhood you grew up with kind of parents, you had kind of parents other people had, was there that much difference between you and any of the other kids who never had a thought about being an entrepreneur?

No, there isn't. And so I remain absolutely fascinated.

I think it's mystical. I think it's mystical.

But what was it that tipped me, what was it that tipped you and tipped, you know, everybody in the coach and abundance community to become entrepreneurs? And like you, I view entrepreneurs as the single most important community that I can spend my time with and I can support because they're the ones that find the juiciest problems and solve the problems and uplift the world that we're living in. Yeah.

I have to tell you, a year ago I went home for a family reunion in Ohio and I have five parents are dead quite a long time ago, But I have five siblings that they're in their low 70s or high 80s. So there's four of us and one will be 90. So over a 50 year period since I've been being a strategic coach, not one of my siblings ever asked me what I do for a living. Not one has there ever been a conversation. But last year every one of them approached me to ask me about that thing that they don't know what I've been doing for the last 50 years. They want to know when I'm going to stop doing it.

Are you the youngest, eldest? Where are you and your.

I'm number five, but there's four older ones and then there's two younger ones. So I Had a big gap in the middle. But I funded any of the grandchildren of my siblings. So not the second generation, but the third generation. So I financed about half their tuition through university. And they know Uncle Dan. They know what Uncle Dan's up to. They know. So they listen to the podcast, they read the books and everything. I'm picking up the conversation in the third generation. I don't know the answer to that. I think you're born with it. I don't think there's any kind of particular camp or training that you can turn someone from a non entrepreneur to an entrepreneur. I just don't think it is. I think it's a certain percentage of the population that are required to be this way for the human race to survive.

And thrive.

And thrive. Yeah, a certain number. I just finished a book on the first 10amendments of the US Constitution and interesting bunch of people who put the country together because generally speaking, all their occupations were entrepreneurial. There were 55 of them. And if you looked at their history, most of them were entrepreneurs. And so they put this safeguard system in which are called the first 10amendments, the bill of Rights. And it's a very foresighted document in the sense. Amendment number nine is really the interesting one. And it says all those rights not enumerated by the Constitution cannot be forbidden or interfered with by the Constitution. So they created this little opening that anybody wanted to go through and just create new things and that the Constitution will not stop you from doing that. And then the Article 1, the Section 8 is on the intellectual property laws. And they said in order for the country to thrive, we have to have a constant creation of new knowledge and new skills. And we've got to guarantee maximum distribution of new thinking. And in order to do that, we've got to give entrepreneurs a monopoly reward for a certain period of time when they get rewarded, or else we won't have the innovators. They saw that, you know, they saw this in the 1780s, 1790s.

Amazing.

They don't know who the entrepreneurs are going to be, but they have to have the conditions there to encourage and support and in some cases protect those who want to do this. You know, I think we're repeating a conversation that's been going on for a long time, you know, I mean.

Yeah, and so many countries are jealous of what we have in place. You know, the education, the venture investing, the ability to fail and begin again. And what has America as a great entrepreneurial hotbed around the world? Yeah, for sure.

I think the biggest thing they Hate is the fact that the US can bribe people to move. I mean, would Silicon Valley exist if it weren't for the bribes?

Well, I'll tell you, one of my greatest concerns is as we bring incredible students from around the world here who earn their PhDs and then are forced to leave. That's something I'm not happy about. I think we should be stapling a green card to Everybody, Masters and PhD.

Well, I think a deal will be worked out for them. I mean, they had to correct a serious problem and they couldn't do it nicely. They had to do it forcibly, and I think it got out of hand. We can go into that on another matter. Keeping the population of your country up is very, very important. If you don't have a rising population, you don't have entrepreneurs.

Interesting. And we don't have a rising population.

We do with immigration.

With immigration, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

But we're below the replacement level here in the us which is another great conversation, buddy. But, you know, I'm going to wrap up with one of the points you made early in this conversation, which was, you know, have you ever felt, Peter, that you're not seeking to be challenged? Right. And I think that's true. That set point in me is I will constantly be starting companies, constantly be starting organizations, constantly be challenging myself. And the stronger the tools are, the greater my ambitions will be. And that's my set point.

Yep. Always making up shit to scare yourself.

And the incentive is to go bigger. As always, appreciate you, my friend.

That's great conversation.

Thanks, Dan. See you next time.