The Coming Boom in Science and Technology with Peter Diamandis - Genius Network Episode #17

Welcome to the Genius Network Show. In this episode you'll discover the coming boom in science and technology, learn about cutting edge innovations in healthcare, autonomous cars, longevity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, genomics and more. Plus Google for the brain, the importance of having a massive transformative purpose, MTP and more with Genius Network member Peter Diamandis. Peter is the founder and Chairman of the XPRIZE foundation, co founder of Human Longevity Inc. Co founder of Singularity University, Co founder of Planetary Resources, Co founder of Space Adventures and Zero Gravity Corporation, as well as a New York Times Best selling author of Abundance, the Future is Better Than youn Think and how to Go Big, create wealth and impact the World. If you would like access to special resources and show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 17 that's geniusnetwork.com 17 if you'd like to go deeper with the strategies in this episode and join Peter in a special webinar event titled the Billionaire's how to hack your brain to get what you want while helping others along the way, visit diamandisevent.com that's diamond.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and I've got my good friend Peter Diamandis on the line with me.

Peter, how are you? Joe, an honor and a pleasure pal.

Of course, I mean we've already spoken with each other twice today. The first time was not recorded because we were on a Singularity University sort of call with you and some pretty amazing people and just discussing that and we've done many, many interviews and we're going to do this one in a way to where entrepreneurs, anyone that has a bigger future perspect can kind of hear what is going on and what you're up to. And for people that don't know who you are, I'm going to read a real quick bio and then I'm going to get into some questions and conversation with you Peter. So if you don't know who Peter is, here's who he is. In 2014, Fortune magazine named Peter Diamandis as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders. Peter is the founder and Executive Chairman of the xprize foundation, which leads the world in design and operating large scale and incentivized competitions. He is also the co founder and Executive Chairman of Singularity University, a graduate level Silicon Valley institute that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Peter started 17 companies. He's the co founder and Vice Chairman of Human Longevity Institute, hli, a genomics and cell based company focused on Extending the healthy human lifespan and co founder and co chairman of Planetary Resources, which is a company designing spacecraft to enable the detection and prospecting of asteroid for fuels and precious metals. So he's an, you know, asteroid mining company. Peter is a New York Times bestselling author. Yeah, I mean, you know, like, you know people out there that of course starting these asteroid mining companies. Peter is also a New York Times bestselling author of two books, Abundance and Bold, which are phenomenal. If you've not read them, you need to read them. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and holds an MD from Harvard Medical School. In 2016, the Greek government honored him by issuing a 1.2 Euro stamp into the circulation. Also in 2016, the book how to Make a Peter's Biography and Story of the X Pride was written by Julian Guthrie with a foreword by Richard Branson and an afterward by Professor Stephen Hawkins. So Peter, when in your life are you going to hang out with some really interesting people? I mean, it seems like you need to kind of up the game a little here.

Did my mom write that bio for you?

Yeah.

Hey Joe, good to be chatting, pal. It really is an amazing, amazing time to be alive. And it's just I can feel the pace of technological change and advancement just accelerating. And I think that's just, that's the underlying current of our lives today.

Well, totally. Let me start with a kind of a devil's advocate question right out of the gate because certainly I'm a big Peter fan. I go to Abundance360. We've done a ton of stuff together. You spoke at IT all my Genius Network annual events. We've done numerous interviews and we're involved in lots of different projects together. So there's all that. What about the people that are like, well, the future looks very bleak. There's a lot of chaos in the world. There's a lot of turmoil, lot of mass problems that could destroy humanity and the planet and all kinds of things there. And that Peter's overly optimistic. How do you respond to that sort of perspective? Because you certainly have the perspective of the world is massively abundant and very inspiring in so many ways. And I've never seen you said there's not lots of problems to be solved because I think your life involves solving some of the world's greatest problems, especially with your creation of the X Prize, but just from an attitude perspective.

And it's hard not to be concerned watching the news all the time. I jokingly have friends at cnn, but I jokingly Call cnn, the crisis news network, or the constantly negative news network. And the fact of the matter is, we're bombarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week by negative news. And the difficulty is to have perspective. And the perspective would come if the information we were getting from the news media, from our social media, were fair and balanced. But it's not. Our brains pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. And that fact is an evolutionary advantage. Because 100,000 years ago, a squiggle on the ground, if it was a snake, you needed to know about that instead of a twig. And if a rustle in the leaves was a lion and not wind, your genes could be out of the gene pool. So we evolved an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called the amygdala. And everything we see and everything we hear gets fed there first. And we pay 10 times more attention to negative news. And it's the reason that good news networks fail. But on the flip side, the newspaper, the radio, the Television news sites, CNN, all of this will deliver to us 10 times more negative news than positive news because we pay attention to it. And their job as a news media is to deliver your eyeballs and your ears to their advertisers. And I like to remind people it's not fair and balanced. And I'm not saying what they are saying on the news isn't true. It's just, you know, when they report a shooting or an airplane crash, and they report every day over and over and over again. And on the flip side, you don't have someone standing outside the local airport saying, there was no airplane crash here today, or local high school saying, no school shooting here today. So you only hear the negative news and we glamorize the past. We forget how brutal and hard and short life was even 100 years ago. You know, I was just watching a few movies that brought back what life was like in the 1700s and 1800s, even 100 years ago in the early 1900s. And it was damn brutal back then, right? I mean, we are living in such a cush life, right? Where, you know, you could have any entertainment you want consumed in a microsecond, effectively, for free on YouTube. You got any kind of food, any kind of desire fulfilled. It's an extraordinary life we live in. And people forget that. We forget how incredible the world is. Access to more information, more capital, more computational power, more ability to solve problems. We are getting more. We are effectively eliminating extreme poverty around the globe. We've taken 2 billion people out of extreme poverty in the last 20 years. We're going to take the last billion out over the next 20 years. And we're going from a world. If I had to describe the world, the Middle Ages, 500 years ago, I would say there was the king and the queen that had a decent life, not as good a life as the poorest person in Santa Monica has today, because a person in Santa Monica still has a cell phone. People under the poverty line still have a roof over their head, flushing toilets, running water. None of these things were had by the kings and the queens back then. And there was the king and the queen and then all of the serfs. 99.9999% of the population served. So that few haves and the majority of the have nots. But we're heading towards a world of haves where everybody, every single person, all 8 billion people eventually will have access to as much energy as they need. Water, health, education, and we really are transforming the planet. And I'm so proud of the book Abundance, which was number two on New York Times list, number one on Amazon back in 2011 while it was released. And all of the data continues to explosively move in the direction of a world of abundance. Not to say, like you said, there aren't problems, plenty of problems. Do we have terrorism? Do we have all these things? Yes. But on the whole, by almost every measure, the world has gotten extraordinarily better.

Yeah, I definitely see it from my perspective, of course, and I guess it depends on what part of the world you're at and what's going on, how you actually view the world. That being said, as a whole, whole, there's so many indicators that just show how great life is. And certainly from my vantage point, there's amazing opportunity. And with that comes great complexity and a lot of different options. And I wanted to ask you about that before we jump into technology. And I do want to let all of our listeners know that I don't know, another human being that has more on the cutting edge of what's going on with technology and the people behind it than Peter. So we're going to get into all those sort of questions. What I wanted to ask you, though, Peter, with all of the options of everything available at your fingertips and so much more coming down the line, how does that affect the brain? I mean, I can ask you simple like, oh, you know, what do you pay attention to? What books do you read? That's all interesting, but what's going on in the human brain when we are Just deluge with so much data and in modern life, if you don't manage modern life, it will manage you. So I mean what does this do to our, these brains of ours?

Yeah, well the fact of the matter is biologically as humans, we have not changed in hundreds of thousands of years. Our frontal cortex, our neocortex of our brain, our eyes, our ears, how we gather information and how we process that information is the same. What is changing is the massive amount of information that is available to us. And it is a sense of overload that you can have. And I think the only thing that I can say about this and what's going to change is that we're about to create a series of filters. And what I think about this, the best analogy I can give people is if you're, if you're an Ironman fan, what Tony Stark has with Jarvis, where Tony can ask Jarvis, hey, go and gather this information, analyze it for me and give it to me and Jarvis can do that. That's where we're heading. That's what AI is artificial intelligence. Machine learning is able to do. Many of us may have Alexa in our living rooms or Siri or okay, Google, Google now in our phones. And there's going to be your ability to know anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, right? An infinite amount of data and we still have the same old two eyes and ears and, and 300 million pattern recognizers in our brain. We can't handle that much data. But there's going to be in the near future a lot of these artificial intelligence filters that are able to gather this data and give you the answer that you want or need. Example, I went to medical school years ago and I remember in medical school I never practice. I got my degree and bolt it. I had two companies going my fourth year of medical school. But the doctors who I still know, they get subscriptions to all of these journals. There are some, I think the number is around 8,000 journal articles written per month and maybe more than that. No human can possibly consume all of that, but AIs can. And they can consume it instantly and know exactly what's going on. So I think this deluge of information is hitting us very much in the medical field where when you go for a medical exam you may have all 3.2 billion letters of your genome sequence like you just did recently at human longevity and get your full body MRI and your metabolome and your microbiome and you all in all you've got 150 gigabytes of data about your body. You've been digitized, and a human can't fathom that, but an AI can. And you can say, basically, the most important question, is there anything wrong with me? So that's the way I think about it. We're going to be creating intentional filters that allow you to gather all this data and, and get the decisions and information that you want versus what's fed to you. Great, great.

You know what I'm going to do in some of it, you'll probably cover as some of the questions I'm going to ask you. However, if we don't, I would love at some point of this conversation that you kind of lay out just a handful of different technologies from AI, machine learning, virtual reality, genomics, stem cell, whatever, that people would be well served to start looking at and at least understand what it is and what it means, because it's going to be part of our lives five or ten years from now. I'd love to have you just kind of give a list of. According to Peter, these are my predictions. These are the things that are going on. I know a lot of these aren't even your predictions. It's just you're so. You're so in the know. You just know what's going to happen with a lot of stuff, and that's what you help people understand. So what are the top innovations you saw last year? And what should we be looking out for this year? That's going to be like a big game changer.

So I actually, over the Christmas break, I was in Switzerland with my family. And over the course of five days, I reviewed effectively through multiple sites what I considered the most important breakthroughs in science and technology from 2016. And then I wrote them all down. I categorized them into about 10 different tech areas. And I was just blown away by the palpable rate of change, of acceleration of what's going on. And to hit a few of them that I'm very excited about that are going to change our lives. One of them is autonomous cars, autonomous transportation. A huge amount of activities going on there. Basically the notion that we've got Google that started this off, but now every major car company on the planet, including Uber, are investing very heavily in autonomous cars. And we're going to see full autonomy on the roads by the end of 2017, definitely into 2018. And when that occurs, it changes everything. It changes where you live, how you work. It changes how we lay out real estate. Full autonomous cars becomes cars as a service. You no longer have parking Garages because people don't own cars anymore. You don't have a driveway or a garage at your home anymore because you don't need that. The car drops you off and goes off into something else useful. So autonomous cars, autonomous trucks, even what Uber announced, the Uber elevate program for flying cars. So how we get around is going to be hugely transformational. Another area that I'm passionate about is longevity. A lot of work going on in how do we extend the healthy human lifespan? Billions of dollars going into this, being invested by a whole slew of folks. I have two companies, Human Longevity Inc. HLI and Cellularity, which is in the stem cell space. Google has got Calico. Jeff Bezos just invested in a company called Unity Biosciences. Anyway, we are getting the tools to add 30 to 40 healthy years onto our lives. And so that's going to change finance, it's going to change the dynamics of everything. Another area that I'm excited about is what we're seeing of course in AI, AI and machine learning. We're going to be. Everything is going to become intelligent, every object, every toy. I was in China just a few months ago meeting with some of the top VCs, investors and startup companies. One of the companies is building chips that are $5 chips that effectively have machine learning on board that will be embedded into things. So imagine your kid's toy learns from its behavior and its interactions with your kids and everything becomes smart. I think we're going to see the end of cancer in the next 10 years, which is amazing. Huge accelerations on cancer treatments, on stem cell for disease. So I mean those are just some of the areas. I mean when I think about what the technologies that I track, it's computational power, right? Computers in your car. Nvidia is an amazing computational company. Quantum computing coming online, sensors and networks, 3D printing, robotics, augmented and virtual reality is going to be huge synthetic biology. So I can spend an hour talking about each of these. But our world is changing and I think people who just want to remain blind to it are going to be somewhat surprised. The rate of change is accelerating.

Yeah, no, totally. Well, there's three of these things I want to ask you to just kind of define them. I mean, I know what they are, but I'm trying to think from the standpoint of the listener that may not really. They may have heard of artificial intelligence, but they don't really realize how much that is going to be part of our lives or machine learning or augmented reality. Could you kind of define those in A way that people could be like, okay, now I could see how this applies to me.

Yeah, let's talk about machine learning and AI because they're related. Artificial intelligence is the ability of a computer to understand the question you're asking and give you the best possible answer based upon all of the data out there. So you may think of it as Hal from 2001. You may think of it as Siri on your iPhone. You may think of it as. As Jarvis from Iron man, which is my preference. But it's a computer that has natural language processing. You can speak to it, ask a question, it's able to understand your question, and then it's able to go into its data banks and search everything and come up with the best possible answer. Now, the challenge is that we as humans have a limited amount of memory space. We have in our brains what my dear friend Ray Kurzweil talks about as a pattern module. These are 100 neuron modules. We have 300 million of these. And when we use those up, they're used up. You have to sort of let go of some information before you can record some new information in there. But a computer has got near infinite amount. And so when you ask Google a question or you ask Alexa a question, if you have an Amazon Echo, it's able to go and search all the information out there, whether it's Wikipedia, whatever the case might be, and give you the relevant answer. Well, that ability for you to have a conversation with an AI with an artificial intelligence unit is going to become much more natural, and it's going to understand your confusion, your cynicism, your irony, whatever question you have, and answer it as the most intelligent person or much more would. The other thing that's going on is there's an explosion of data. It's like an explosion of information out there. And the more information there is, the more we're able to mine that information and actually learn new things. So I'll give you one crazy example, right? If you're in fashion design or in consumer goods, imagine we're in a world where there's cameras everywhere. Cameras on cell phones, cameras in buildings, cameras and drones. And those cameras are recording everything going on. And let's say that they're imaging people and they're imaging dress and outfits, and you can say, hey, listen, I'd like to know what colors are becoming more popular and less popular, and do the change in what people wear in terms of colors correlate with the weather or where they live? And you can ask crazy questions and you'll be able to have an AI and the machine learning algorithms they run answer those questions. What I like to say is it's going to be the quality of your questions in the future. That's far more important than anything you might know.

Yeah, that is fascinating. Also, at what point do you think like the typical book? One of my friends has sent me a book with basically augmented reality. You put your phone in front of the pictures on the book and a video starts to play. And I may do that with my new book, which will be, of all things, it's the Average Joe's Marketing book, where any average Joe can learn marketing. It's really focused on small business owners. And I saw that and I'm like, wow. And at what point does a seminar leader, a coach, a guru, a teacher, a professor, where you have an AI system that is going to be infinitely more effective at responding, answering and guiding people. And they don't need to show up somewhere, they can just be talking to their whatever mechanism or device allows them to communicate. I mean, when do you see that happening? Because you're always talking about disruption and creative destruction and all these different ways that we just change. How long before an AI system is going to be better than the best consultant you could ever hire?

It's not too far off. I think of education and healthcare as being disrupted by AI in this next decade. Maybe it's five years. It's probably not as long as 10 years. And we just launched recently at the XPRIZE Foundation, Elon Musk funded US $15 million for a global Learning X Prize. We're asking teams around the world to build a piece of software that can take a child in the middle of no place, from being illiterate to basic reading, writing and numeracy in 18 months. And it's a realization that in AI, use your imagination and think about Jarvis from Iron. Imagine if every child had an AI that knew that child's passions and favorite colors and movie stars and sports stars and could have a conversation that's so engaging with that kid and really knew what that child understood already and where it needed to learn and was creating personalized lessons. Today's school system, you have a teacher, a sage on the stage teaching a classroom of 40, 60, 80 people. Half of them are bored, half of them are lost. But in the future it's going to be such a personalized education and where it's the best capabilities, the best teachers on the world are embodied in AI and ever. It's a one to one relationship. So this is without question coming. Now. It's not to say we don't need the human touch and the culturalization and the humanization, all of that, but to learn a language, to learn math skills, to learn programming, much better done by an AI that comes across as a warm, caring, intelligent tutor that can help you. And there is no stupid question. You can ask it, ask the same thing over and over and over again until you get it. And the AI can come across and try and show you the same lesson from five or six different angles and learns how you learn, and then changes all of its teaching techniques so it teaches you the best way that you can learn. This is where we're going without any question in the future.

Yeah. And there's so many amazing applications of this tied into robotics. When we went on the adventure trip that you organized, hanging out with Dean Kamen for four days, whenever that was a couple years ago, I remember the French robotics company, I'm not sure if you remember which one I'm talking about, but they. They had developed the robots and they were having a lot of success.

What were they called? Aldebaran Robotics. They had the pepper. Is that the word?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. And they were having great success with autistic children because parents, teachers, there's a lot of repetitiveness, and a human will get frustrated if they have to repeat themselves over and over and over again. But a robot, it can just say the same things over and over again. There's just, you know, there's no irritation there. And it just really dawned on me that one example, taking it to assisted living homes, taking it to people struggling with all forms of mental illness, taking it to, you know, addiction, which is my biggest area of interest, to, you know, change the global conversation about how people view addicts and how we find the most effective forms of treatment and. And, you know, with trauma and whatnot. And it just, man, I mean, you mix that in with, you know, AI and machine learning, it's just talk about a constant improvement by the, you know, by the millisecond, is just hard to grasp for people that, you know, I mean, this is your world, you live in it all day long. But for, you know, the average person, I mean, it's hard for them to comprehend. This stuff is, you know, a few years away.

It is a few years away, and it's coming in very fast. One of the things that's interesting, right, is that I go, I speak at events around the world, and I'll be in audience with a thousand people, and I'll say, does anybody here in the audience not have their cell phone with them? Raise your hand. And I have done this a dozen times. Not once have I seen a person raise their hand. And so we forget how addicted we've become to this piece of technology, which, if you had done that question 10 years ago, you'd have a good number of people and 20 years ago you'd have nobody. There's a very rapid adoption curve, but it's not just an adoption of the technology. It's a dependence on the technology that changes our lives. And it's going to continue. And there's the cell phone will be disrupted by probably what will become augmented reality. Headgear. This is glasses that we will soon all be wearing that is presenting to you an information layer on top of what you're seeing through your eyes. If you don't have your phone by your side right now, you feel naked, you feel exposed. It's like, oh, my God, someone wants to reach me or ask a question. In the near future, augmented and virtual reality are going to change how we see the world. There's been billions of dollars invested in both of these. Tim Cook at Apple and many of the lead individuals around the world have said probably augmented reality is the more important of the two. So it's an exciting time and it's accelerating, but we're all merging with technology at some way, shape or form, and it's transforming us as humans into a new species step by step.

Yeah, that is true. Wow. So is there an emerging technology that you're excited about? But most people have no idea about something. They may not even dawn on them, there's plenty.

I mean, one of the emerging technologies that is going to be transformative is CRISPR, Cas9 technology. This is gene editing technology. We as humans, we're running software in our bodies. That software is our DNA. Each of us has in every one of our cells. You and I and Everybody listening, has 10 trillion human cells that make up you or me. Those 10 trillion cells work together collaboratively to create a human. And each one of those cells has in them 3.2 billion letters. A, T, Cs and GS. These are four letters that are the letters of your DNA that regulate the cell's operation and make it a heart cell, a liver, a kidney, a neuron, skin, muscle, whatever it might be. And when you have a disease, God forbid, it's typically due to an error in that gene sequence. Sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, whatever it might be, is due to a single nucleotide change in your genome. And until now, if you have this inherited disease and you have children, you have a probability of 50% or 100% depending on your heterozygous or homozygous to pass it on to your children. And that's it. The best you could do until recently is you could screen a fertilized embryo and decide, this one does not and this one does. Let's abort this fetus and go forward with this fetus. Which is a pretty brutal way to think about it. The technology that's come out of the blue in the last few years is called, it's shortened to CRISPR technology and it's the ability to actually go and edit your genome while you're live. And so imagine that you can cure a disease, a genetic disease. They've also gone into people who are infected with HIV virus and clipped the virus out of the cells in your body. So human genome editing is amazing, right? We have, if you think about it, over the last 20 years. Well, let's see. The first human genome was sequenced in 2001 by Craig Venter. It took $100 million and nine months to sequence his genome. He beat the U.S. government punchline. The price today is down to $1,000. Last week Illumina, that makes the manufacturers of sequencing machines announced that they can get to $100 a genome. Amazing. In two hours, 100 bucks. So we can sequence genomes, we can write genomes. We can actually in the computer write out a sequence of A, T, Cs and GS, generate that DNA molecule in a your companies that generate DNA molecules, you tell them the sequence you want like the old typesetters in old presses and they'll manufacture that sequence. And if you do it right, you can write the sequence for a living organism. You can put that piece of DNA into a blank cell that reads that sequence and it boots up for life. In 2011, Craig Venter once again, Craig's my partner in human longevity. Craig basically created the first synthetic life form. It was the first life form whose parent were an email file, so to speak. But CRISPR Cas9 takes it one step further where you can edit a living organism. So what we eat diseases, human issues. And of course it opens up the entire world of superhuman. What does it mean? What do we do? So that's one technology that's pretty amazing.

What's a question that people should ask you that they just don't. But if they. What did you eat for breakfast?

No, I mean, I don't know, I get asked a lot of questions, Joe, as you know. Oh yeah, I'm public in saying that I think we have the ability to live a multi hundred year lifespan and potentially an indefinite lifespan. I think that over the next 20, 30 years we are going to crack the code on being able to live long enough to live forever. Crazy conversation to be had about that, right? One of the other crazy topics that I enjoy speaking about because A, I believe it and B, it's game changer beyond belief is interfacing the human brain with the cloud.

So meaning recording and downloading your thoughts, your consciousness into the cloud.

More than that, it's more like how do you so your cell phone, when you want to do something on your cell phone, run a program or whatever. If it's a simple program, it operates on the processor on your cell phone. But if it's complicated, it actually uses the 4G LTE network to take some of the computational burden off the cell phone and put onto the cloud, which has got a gazillion times more computational power. And so you are doing some processing on your phone and the majority of processing on the cloud. And the same thing for memory, some photos are stored on your cell phone, the majority of the photos are stored on your cloud. And the same thing is going to happen with us humans. We have a limited amount of memory capacity, 300 million pattern recognizers in our brain, and when they're full, they're full. But imagine if there is a high bandwidth connection between your brain, the cloud and if you want to know anything, you just think about it and it's like Google on the brain. Or if you need increased intelligence or increased memory capacity, you want to know language, whatever it might be, this is the direction that we're heading. I know a number of companies working on brain computer interfaces and again, this is the crazy stuff of science fiction.

Yeah, I love it. Let's talk about a massively transformative purpose and how someone can find theirs. You talk about an MTP massive transformative purpose and you had this tool in 2014 was the first time I saw it at abundance360 and there was a question inside your MTP, identify a specific significant problem that needs solving. This is a target, something 10 times bigger than normal. And you basically directed people to think about how to impact a billion people. And I was sitting there thinking, well, I know a lot about marketing. I've certainly reached tens of thousands actually, if you think of podcasts and interviews, several million. But basically, how am I going to reach a billion people? I'm probably not going to do that with teaching people marketing. Maybe through marketing I could, but I thought, for me, I'm an addict, horrible drug addict. When I was younger, and I kind of got up to the mic at your event and talked a little bit about that, about how I used to, When I was 18 years old, I freebased cocaine and weighed 105 pounds in my worst state. And then I went on to read my, you know, the first part of the MTP and was having a dialogue with you. And at the time I said, the curing of addiction of all forms, behavior and chemical reliance is a way to soothe mental and physical pain and suffering. And I used to believe that addiction was a brain disease, which I no longer do. I believe it's a response to trauma and biochemical and nutrition and all kinds of stuff. So I won't go deeply into that. But what it did, though, is it got my brain thinking about what could I possibly do from a contribution standpoint, from a solving standpoint, from a challenge standpoint that could actually take on something really, really big in the world and be a catalyst for that. Your tool was called creating your moonshot. And I'd like to talk about that because since that time, I launched Artists for Addicts, which is a platform where we're selling art as a way to bring in revenue, and we want to disrupt the art industry and we believe we're going to do it. I've got some very heavy players involved with this, very influential people. We're doing really well, having just launched this, so much so that we can't even keep up with the level of people reaching out that want to get involved because we're still building the team and all that. But it all started with a massively transformative purpose. And so I think for the listeners, it would be really useful if you could maybe describe what is a massively transformative purpose and how can someone find theirs. So.

Doing anything big and bold in the world is hard. It just is. You might think someone came up with a company or product or service that was amazingly successful out of the blue, and rarely, and sometimes, but rarely, they luck out and they do something and it becomes a huge success. But the majority of the time it's an overnight success after 10 years of hard work. And I know that's been the case for me. I'm on my 18th company right now, and the ones that have been the most successful have been decadal long projects. And there are so many times during the length and the course of this crazy idea that I wanted to do with International Space University or singularity university or 0g or the xprize foundation or whatever it might be, that I could have easily given up. In fact, people told me, it's crazy, it's not going to happen, give up. And the only thing that kept me going, only thing was that that company, that effort, that focus, was part of my mtp. It was my reason for being. And I ask people, what is your massively transformative purpose? What is the purpose that you have been put on this planet to do? What wakes you up? What jazzes you? What keeps you going at 3 o' clock in the morning when you look yourself in the mirror and you say, oh my God, I'm exhausted. But you know what? This is why I'm here. I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs, helping them understand what that MTP is. Now you can have more than one. It can change over the course of your life. You can have one for yourself personally and one for your company. A lot of companies have a purpose, like to increase shareholder for our investors and make the world a better place, yada, yada, yada. But that's such bullshit. To a large degree, yeah, important, but that doesn't work that way. What you really want is a company that's got an MTP that is a powerful, massively transformative purpose. It gets people excited and go, I want to go work for that company. That's amazing. The XPRIZE Foundation. Our goal is to incentivize solving the world's greatest problems, greatest challenges. Singularity University. It's to positively impact the lives of a billion people when you start thinking at those kinds of scale. For my personal MTP is to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the earth. I say that every morning and I focus on that every day. And it drives the decisions I make and the people I hang out with. Getting an MTP is really important. And then once you've got an mtp, and again, what things I like doing is how people figure that out, is then to figure out what is your moonshot? What is within your MTP within the area that you're alive, that fuels you, that's your energy, that drives you because you need that emotional energy. As our common friend Tony Robbins says, emotion fuels all of this and emotion comes with that mtp. And within that emotional energy, what is your moonshot? Where do you want to go 10 times bigger in your life, in your business, than you're doing right now? I just went through this at the beginning of every year, I sit down and think through, what is the moonshot for each of my companies? Where do I want to be 5 years from now? That's 10x bigger. Then I then say, okay, if I want to be there five years from now, where do I need to be at the end of this year? And then I parse it back and say, okay, if I want to be there at the end of this year, what are three things I can do this month that will get me on schedule to be there at the end of this year? So I think about these moonshots and these mtps that go so well together.

Love it.

Love it.

Well, let me ask you about what advice would you give a recent college graduate, like, yearning to start a company like the tools, the mindset, etc.

You know, there's a lot. I think the most important thing, first of all, is not to do something for the money. It's to do something because you're driven and you're passionate about it. And then I would go on beyond that to say, driven from a place of your passion. What do you want to do to change the world? You can make a career out of anything. And so I will say that one of the things that I did, I had. That same question came to me from someone you introduced me to, Stuart Johnson, who runs Success magazine and runs Success Partners. We entered a conversation and you said, well, how do you answer that question? It's not easy. There's a lot of different elements of it. What Stuart invited me to do and something I did just recently was actually to create a digital program on all of this. I sat down last year and I wrote out effectively eight hours of curriculum around abundance thinking, how to think with an abundance mindset around how to get an MTP about how to design your moonshot. We're basically giving you an overview of all these exponential technologies and then how to tap into the crowd and create community and then how to think about running experimentation and mindsets and all of this stuff. So I created a program called Exponential Advantage, and it's eight hours of content delivered digitally in eight modules over the course of eight weeks. And it's something which for me is I'm so excited about it because I finally sat down and laid it all out, and it's delivered all by me. And it's something which people can, in fact, sign up for and download. I'll just mention in case people are interested. I'm going to be doing an overview webinar on this on January 17th. And my dear friend. And your dear friend, Tony Robbins will be talking about it, about how to teach these things and what an exponential advantage does for people. So if you want to join me, join Tony Robbins for a free webinar on January 17 for entrepreneurs, for college grads, for entrepreneurs, inside companies, for executives, whoever it might be. If you go to diamandisevent.com you can register for that webinar. It's an amazing webinar. Again, it's Diamandis D I A M A N D I S event. One word. Diamandis event dot com. And so I think it isn't just reading a book or having a specific thought. It really is changing your mindset and getting a set of tools that enable you to live during this exponential, accelerating time ahead of us.

Awesome, awesome. So that's the best way for people to experience your Exponential Advantage program?

Yeah, I mean, if you come to that webinar on January 17th, you'll get a complete overview of what we're doing, what's involved, and then you'll have a choice to become part of that program, obviously. I've got a couple of books, Abundance and Bold. And on my website, diamandis.com you can sign up to get my weekly blog. I put out every Sunday for free. I put out something called Abundance Insider every Friday. A lot of great content. I just feel like we're living during the most amazing time ever. And if you're glum about the future, if you're negative about the future, it's all about changing your mindset. And allow me to help you in doing that.

Awesome, awesome. Last thing you talk about an exponential entrepreneur. What is that? And can anyone become one?

I think an Exponential entrepreneur is what Exponential Advantage this course is intending to create. It's an entrepreneur who is using exponential technologies is crowdfunding, as crowdsourcing is riding on top of this exponential growth curve is using the tools, technologies and mindsets that are available today that never were available a couple of decades ago. I think that it's really about opening up your mind to what is possible today because it's very, very different. And unfortunately, the rate of change is so fast that in traditional school systems, we don't teach it. I mean, that's really one of the reasons I created Singularity University as well. And another thing that you can do is you can go to SU if you want. There's a graduate program every summer. It's eight weeks long. It's called a global solutions program. We have about 5,000 applicants for 80 spots. Google funds all the scholarships. We then have a one week executive program. Joe, you've been there. We run about 6 of these executive programs per year. 80 executives. It's not cheap. It's 12,000 bucks. 14,000 bucks, actually. But it's well worth it. It's really about being in the mindset and understanding that the world is accelerating. The tools that you have and really the moonshots you want to make happen. Love it.

Love it. Okay, any famous last words? I mean, you always got a million of them.

Just that the world, the technology we have on hand, is accelerating. I believe we're living during the most exciting time ever in human history and one in which we had the chance to create an amazing world of abundance and stop watching the news. Instead, spend your time to read and learn. Yeah, exactly.

That's great advice. Well, as always, Peter, it's always a pleasure talking with you. Always informative. I always learn a ton. And so there you go, everyone. I don't know another person on the planet that is more cued in on what is going on with technology and actually is personal friends with the people that are driving most of it than Peter. Is there anyone else on the planet kind of like you? I mean, of course it's a silly question, but is there? No. No, but I mean, that is like the curator of all of this stuff. I mean, who the hell else does, like, kind of what you do? I honestly have no idea.

There's a lot of amazing people in the Singularity University community that I work with. There's. You know, from my standpoint, it's not just this. A lot of my joy is in running or building these companies, Planetary resources and human longevity and cellularity. And we have amazing people here at XPRIZE Foundation. There is a group of individuals who realize that we have the ability and I think the moral responsibility to use our knowledge and tools to solve the world's biggest problems and to create a world that is more vibrant and more abundant than ever before. Do we have problems ahead of us? Absolutely. Do we have the tools to solve them? Absolutely. So get off our butts and solve them.

Yeah.

Love it.

Love it. Well, as usual, again, it's awesome. Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. And for those of you that have listened, please share this episode, this interview with anyone that you think would find it useful and fascinating. And if you want to watch my interview with Peter Diamandis, and Diamandis, I should say, and Tony Robbins, go to geniusnetwork.com subscrib. That's my newest podcast and you can watch that episode and many more. And I've got other ones with Peter if you enjoyed this one that you are welcome to listen to or watch free of charge. So thank you Peter and have a.

Amazing day and I hope folks, you'll consider getting plugged into exponential advantage again January 17th. Just go to diamandisevent.com and you can learn more about that event. Register to hear from me and Tony about the amazing world ahead of us.

Perfect. And we'll put those links on wherever you found this podcast and get involved and it will help you tons. So thanks Peter.

Take care pal. Bye now.

Thanks for listening to this episode with Peter Diamandis on Genius Network. If you'd like to go deeper with the strategies Peter shared and you'd like to join a special webinar he's hosting titled the Billionaire's Mindset how to Hack your Brain to get what yout Want and Help Others along the way, then visit www.diamantisevent.com. that's D I A M A N D I S E v e n t.com if you would like access to the special resources and the show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 17 that's geniusnetwork.com 17 don't miss out on more insights, strategies and wisdom like this on geniusnetwork.com subscribe to Genius Network today by visiting geniusnetwork.com subscribe that's geniusnetwork.com subscribe.