Peter Diamandis - How Entrepreneurs Can Build the Future

Hi everyone, welcome. I am super excited today to be hosting a good friend and amazing person, Peter Diamandis. What we're going to talk about is abundance, entrepreneurship, and ideas related to how you can apply the abundance mindset to different business problems that that you may be facing or the world is facing. So it's gonna be a great episode today. Before we get started, let me just introduce myself. I'm Adeo Ressi, CEO of the Founder Institute.

Welcome everybody.

We have chapters in around 200 cities around the world. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur today, you can learn more about what cities are enrolling at fi.co/enrolling. We'll paste the link into the chat. If you're an ecosystem leader and you wanna open a chapter of the Founder Institute institute in your city, you can go to fi.co/lead. We're here to just help entrepreneurs achieve their potential. And that's one of the reasons we have Dr. Diamandis with us today. And, you know, I have his bio in front of me. It's like one of the longest bios I've had in a long time. So I'm going to give like a bouillabaisse version. Beyond being a successful entrepreneur, he's one of the— he's nominated the world's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine. He's a founder of the XPRIZE organization, which I was on the board of for many years, a great organization that's trying to improve the world by offering financial incentives, large prizes. He's the vice chairman of Cellularity, which is trying to extend human life working on the cellular level. He's the co-founder of Bold Capital with $250 million under management to help working on these big world-changing ideas. He also co-founded Singularity University, something many of you know, and I strongly recommend you consider joining. And he's a New York Times bestselling author, and I'm still leaving about 60% of the stuff out. But Peter, is there anything else you want to just introduce about yourself?

Hi. Hey, buddy. I'm a friend of Adeo Ressi. What else is important in life?

And we have great people.

And we have to tell our founding story, how you and I met, which is amazing. Are you— I don't know if you're up for that, but we can do that.

Yeah, okay. So Elon Musk and I were gonna start a space company and we're like, what other fools have been working in space? And we're like, Peter, let's go meet Peter. So you had been doing Blast Off at the time and we were like, can we buy the assets of Blast Off? And it was kind of just a— everything back then was totally crazy in space. And so we became instant friends and started—

You joined our board of directors, board of trustees at the X Prize Foundation. Elon went towards the Mars Society. You came to the X Prize. Then Elon slowly came around to the X Prize as well. But yeah, it took a while. I just remember those early days back in, you know, meeting at Idealab back in 2001, where the world was insane and getting more insane. But you are someone near and dear to my heart, brother. Good to see you.

Same here, and I miss you very much. And, you know, with that said, Peter, you know, a lot of what we're going to talk about today is how do you take these insane ideas, right, and turn them into reality. And you more than anyone I know, right? Literally, which is saying a lot. I've put a lot of thought into that question. And you even have a mindset called the abundance mindset or the abundance philosophy.

Can you—

I could, of course, tell people about it. No better person than you. What is the abundance mindset?

Yeah. So, Dale, thank you for that. And so, I'm like yourself and like those that that you mentor and teach and I mentor and teach as an entrepreneur, I think the abundance— I have two mindsets that I spend a lot of time thinking about. One is the abundance mindset, the other is exponential mindset, and the two are dovetailed together. And I think any entrepreneur today who is founding their company and thinking about the future needs to be coming to the party with both of those mindsets. So in short, the abundance mindset states the following, that technology is a force that takes whatever used to be scarce and makes it abundant more and more and more. And let's break that down a little bit. And once you understand that principle, your job as an entrepreneur is to figure out what is out there that is scarce and people are putting walls around and selling as scarce or treating as scarce, and how do you convert it to abundance which accelerates everything in the world, uh, creates abundance in the world. And I'll, as I said, break that down. So, uh, if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, um, you know, the need that we as humans have on this planet for food, energy, water, healthcare, education, shelter, all of those things, those things had always been scarce. If you look throughout history, you know, uh, Throughout the ages, since the first caveman 100,000 years ago, it was— you could describe the world as having the king and the queen on the hilltop, the pharaoh, the, you know, the emperor, who it might be, the one or two that had abundance back then thousands of years ago. And by the way, abundance back then doesn't compare to what the poorest person on the planet has today. It's insane to think about it, but It was the king and the queen on the hilltop and then the massive majority of society in squalor. Right. And it was 99.99999% of humanity supporting those few, the king and the queen. And what we've been doing is converting scarcity into abundance. So here's a few very specific examples. We can dive into it. And again, this is the work of technology on society and the work of entrepreneurs using that technology. If you think about energy, for example, it used to be that we would go out into the oceans and hunt whales to get whale oil to light our nights, right? Then we ravaged mountainsides to get coal. And then we started drilling kilometers under the ocean floor and kilometers sideways to get access to oil. And technology allowed us to constantly have farther and farther reach. You know, we got all the oil we could at 100 feet depth, and then we got deeper drills and ocean platforms and all of that. And now as we head towards energy abundance, you know, it's a realization that we live on a planet that is bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species in a year. There's a squanderable abundance of energy. I put out a blog every week. Um, I put out a blog on energy last week and I'm putting out a blog on energy again this week and talking about how societally, you know, my estimate is we're going to move towards a greater than 50% renewable electric economy. And those blogs, by the way, are just at diamandis.com. You can sign up for my weekly blogs. The next one is going to be on fusion and fission, which is insane, right? It's just the efficiency of where we're going. Such a bad rep in the past, but we're heading towards a squanderable abundance of energy. And so that's just one example. If you have energy, you also have abundant water. People talk about water wars and water scarcity. One of the things I'm very proud of, you know, Adeo, by the way, just to continue, Adeo was one of the really the earliest trustees and benefactors of the X Prize, helped them get it going. This is way before the Ansar X Prize was won. We just had an X Prize that, that we awarded called the Water Abundance XPRIZE. And we challenged teams around the world, can you build a piece of technology that can extract water out of the atmosphere and deliver 2,000 liters of water per day? Wow. For 2 cents a liter. From all renewable energy. That was the challenge. Holy shit. And we had probably 40+ teams enter, and we awarded the winning player that actually came from California. And it turns out there are quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. I mean, massive amounts of water in the atmosphere. We don't think about it. We think of the 97.5% that is salt. We think about the 2% that is ice caps. We think about the half a percent that we fight over, the lakes and the rivers. But there's a massive amount of water in the atmosphere, and this is the, this is the abundance mindset, that there's plenty of water. How do I make it available? And ultimately, um, uh, so energy is available, water is available. We're getting ready to announce a series of food-related XPRIZES for producing proteins, beef, chicken, tuna, other kinds of proteins from stem cell-grown areas. Uh, you know, information is massively abundant. Uh, communications is abundant. We're about to launch 5G on the planet that will provide 100 megabit to 10 gigabit connection speeds. But then, as you know, our friend Elon's SpaceLink is launching a massive constellation, and OneWeb is a massive constellation. And then Blue Origin is launching. Can I ask you a question?

So let's use the food thing that you were talking about for a minute about protein production. But I want to go even more basic on that. We're making more food than we could consume right now. Now, America makes too much corn. A lot of it goes to feed animals, or we throw out in developed countries enough food to fill whole starving countries with. So is it like a distribution or a concentration of wealth? Or, you know, because food, I think, is a great example of abundance right now. Today we have enough food. It's just not reaching the right people. What do you think the problem is?

So again, speaking to the entrepreneurs here, and I coach a number of them in the food space, through my Abundance community, it's all of those issues. And let's break it down a little bit. If you think about what is food, food is actually us eating photon energy from the sun, right? Photons travel 93 million miles. They hit a piece of chlorophyll. They convert into a hydrogen-carbon bond. And then ultimately, a cow eats that piece of grass and we eat the cow. And it's a very inefficient process. And yeah, we grow a huge amount of food. Most of it, a lot of it spoils. A lot of it never gets to where it needs to go. Half of the food, half of the cost of food on your plate is food miles. Half of it is just travel cost of getting shit from Argentina or France or Chicago to your plate. So big problems there. But here's the challenge. We are creating more and more abundance on the planet, meaning more and more people have access to wealth and information and all these things, and they're all going to want higher and higher grades of protein. And we— here are the numbers: 1/3 of the non-ice landmass of the planet, 1/3 of everything other than the poles, is used for livestock. And a massive amount of our feed, of the stuff we grow in the fields, is used to feed the livestock. And so as people become more abundant, we just can't produce more livestock. Um, and so the question becomes, I mean, the, the methane and CO2 output, water consumption and, and, uh, environmental devastation, all that stuff is just compounding. And so how do you, how do you feed more people? And there's just, we reinvent how we create food. And so, uh, this is work that's being done by a number of entrepreneurs. We're looking to layer on a series of massive XPRIZE to incentivize that. But how do you produce food in the lab that's in downtown Mumbai, downtown Abu Dhabi, downtown Nairobi, wherever it might be? And, and the protein coming out of that lab, uh, is, is cheaper, it tastes better, and it's healthier for you. Can you do that? And that's the goal. And I think the answer is yes. And so you move the food production to where the people are, and you make sure the food production doesn't have the environmental impact and it's cheaper and better for people. I mean, that's sort of the abundance mindset. Not a matter of can you do it, but how do you do it, right?

And I think that's a great— and, and one thing I want to say, we're getting— we're about 500 people, more people are coming in and we're getting questions. So if you have questions for Peter, we got 3 topics here. Again, what is abundance? How does abundance apply to entrepreneurship and then ideas. So type your questions in. We'll try and work them in. So Peter, I'm going to get to some questions from people relating to this, like how about abundant housing?

100%. Let's dive in. So I want to look at housing from a couple of different angles here. Number one, one of the things that's going to change the cost of housing is transportation and virtual reality. So there is lots of places, lots of land, lots of low-cost housing. I live in Santa Monica. Ade, you know where I live. Elon's in Beverly Hills area. And why does the cost of housing cost 10 times more than an hour south of here or an hour east of here, an hour west of here? It's because it's proximity. And what happens if you use technology to get rid of proximity? So, if all of a sudden, I am okay commuting an hour commuting 2 hours because I'm doing it in an Uber Air, an autonomous aerial vehicle, or an autonomous car where I'm sleeping and meditating, I can get 2, 3, 4, 5 times the house for the dollar than I do by, by living in the downtown area proximal to where the schools and where the restaurants and so forth. That's one thing. So you can change your transportation methodology. That changes the location, location, location paradigm. The other, of course, is you could live in Eastern Europe like a king for the dollars you make in any place in the US and commute by virtual reality, by full immersion VR. That's one version of the future. Another part is the whole area of 3D printing. And there's a great company I love called New Story, N-E-W-S-T-O-R-Y, that is developing 3D printers this summer In fact, this next month, they're 3D printing a 50-home community. And I'm going to fund one of those homes. It's not a large amount of money. The average home is like $5,000 to $7,000 for a 3D-printed home. And it's a personalized home of your custom design. They have 100 home designs. You pick the one that your family wants. So, the ability to 3D print is going to also reduce the cost. And these are just a few ways of thinking about abundance in housing.

Or even better, you know, related, I was with a group of entrepreneurs in Amador County, which is a pretty repressed wine region of California, and they're like, how do we turn small towns into thriving ecosystems when people can work anywhere these days, right? And like, what businesses do you need? What hotels do you need? Okay, so another question coming in from Rajendra. Happiness is scarce. How do we make that abundant? I love that question.

I love that. It's a great question. Thank you for asking it. So here's— I actually, I have a Happiness XPRIZE. Not all things are XPRIZES, but I'll point them out when I do. I have a Happiness XPRIZE I've wanted to do for ages. So here's the question I would ask, you know, you, Adeo, the person asked the question and any of the Founder Institute members here, if I would add, today is, I don't know what day of the week it is, Monday? Monday.

Monday.

Okay. If I were to ask you last Monday, what were you doing when you were happiest? Or on Friday or yesterday? I mean, really, what was the thing you were doing when you were happiest? Most of us don't actually track our happiness. And I might go back to my calendar and try and remember what I was, but A lot of times I'm with my team and they'll say, Peter, you look really happy, right? Like talking to you right now, Dale, I'm happy, right? On a 10 scale, I'm like an 8, you know, maybe I'll peak at a 9, who knows? But at the end of the day, in the moment, I know I'm happy or in the moment I know I'm like, oh shit, you know, I'm not happy at all. But you don't usually remember that. So I want you to imagine, I think there's a great opportunity for an entrepreneur here and like I said, I really would love to launch this as an XPRIZE, but if not, someone should do this. Can you create a device? I have my Oura ring here, which my venture fund is a backer of, that measures temperature and pulse waveform and a few other parameters— got 12 sensors in it— for my sleep. But imagine a device that is able to physiologically monitor your happiness. 'Cause I think happiness is a physiological state. I feel happy or I feel sad. And if I could track my happiness moment to moment, second to second, minute to minute, and then I could compare that against my Outlook calendar, I could easily say, listen, when I meet with these people, I'm super happy. When I'm on stage here, I'm super happy. When I'm meeting with this person, it's like I'm at a low point there. If a CEO of a company wanted to make a policy change for your company, you can actually measure whether that policy changed the average baseline of happiness or not. So it's just one approach, but we talk about happiness being so important for us, but yet we don't measure it. And you can't impact what you can't measure. So I'll just offer that as one idea.

Wow, there's so many questions coming in. Ed, you know, Peter will just get questions from the audience. Ed was asking, how would you apply your abundance concept to financial services? More equal access to capital markets, stock markets, etc.?

So great question. So first of all, it's important to realize we are in a period of financial abundance.

All right.

Yeah. All right. I mean, it's— but people don't realize this. And I track this every year when I look at the amount of capital flowing into the global economy. And so, if you look at 2017, in fact, I've got a blog. Again, I've written on this in detail at diamandis.com. You can go and search the blog. So, I talk about— I mean, I go and I look at each of these areas and how we're creating abundance in finance and insurance and healthcare and education. But if you look at 2017 and 2018, Here's the numbers. In 2017, it was $84 billion in venture capital in the US, $48 billion in Asia, and $19 billion in Europe. That was 2017. In 2018, we doubled those numbers. We hit all-time highs in ICOs. We hit all-time highs in sovereign wealth funds. So we hit highs in 2017. We hit highs again in 2018. We're going to hit highs again in 2019. The amount of capital flowing is massive. Now, the question is, how do you make it more agile? How do you increase the flow of that capital so it's easily accessible? I do think that blockchain and cryptocurrencies will facilitate that. What we're seeing obviously with Facebook right now is probably the most serious, latest version of that. But capital's there. It's just like food, not equally distributed. And one of the things that I love in the crowdfunding world is this meritocracy, right? That the estimate is by 2025, I think there'll be $300 billion of crowdfunding investing in startups. Um, and so that means that it doesn't matter where you live, which is all that mattered, you know, 20 years ago. If you have a great idea any place on the planet, you can put your ideas up on the cloud, if you would, and get them funded. And so as we're moving— I think about this a lot— as we're moving from a population that it was all about where you were born and who you were born to, as we're moving from a population of half the world connected in 2017, 3.8 billion people connected, by 2022, 2024, We're going to have 8 billion people connected, right? The entire planet's connected. Not like you and I came online on AOL at 9600 baud, right? The entire planet connected at a gigabit connection speed. Now, we're seeing 8 billion people with access to capital, access to the world's information, access to AI on the cloud, massive amount of innovation that's about to hit us really and accelerate the speed of change.

Well, so look, you went right into another huge line of questioning that's coming in. In most categories of abundance, we have more than we need right now, but there's also concentration of wealth. Is it a distribution problem, a bug in capitalism? And there's a whole bunch of questions related to that. You talk about crowdfunding equalizing the monetary— why is there still these kind of pockets of concentration? Is it just waiting for entrepreneurs to blow them up or—

So let me attack head-on the concept of the have and have-nots, which I think is underlying part of this, right? So I mentioned the beginning, I want to change people's mindset in part. And again, this is sort of the abundance mindset shift. All of human history was the have and have-nots where the have was the king and the queen on the hilltop and the have-nots were— Everyone else. Everyone else. Where we're moving to now is a world of from have and have-nots to a world of haves and super haves, right? So we're heading towards a world, and this is what I'm working towards, and we're not going to eliminate the wealth divide. That will be there. There will be those people living forever on Mars who've got massive platinum mines on asteroids, and they're worth quadrillions of dollars, and that's fine. As long as every single man, woman, and child has access to all their basic needs. So the world I'm working towards through my abundance community, uh, through XPRIZE, through Singularity University, is how to create a world where every man, woman, and child has access to all the food, energy, healthcare, water, education, you know, knowledge that they want. It's not about creating a world of luxury. It's about creating a world of possibility where every mother knows their kids, every dad knows their kids have access to the best education, the best healthcare, right? And this is a world where, you know, and we think about this, that on these devices, um, the poorest child with a, with a feature phone or smartphone on Baidu or Google has access to the world's information. And if they're on Google, It's not a little bit less than Larry Page. It's the same as Sundar and Larry Page. Google is completely democratized, completely demonetized, dematerialized. And that's going to happen with education and with healthcare, where when you're connected digitally on a device, on the cloud, and we can talk about the Global Education XPRIZE that just got awarded. Education will be ubiquitous and available at the highest level, driven by an AI. And the poorest person on this AI-driven education platform will have a better education than the billionaire's son or daughter has today, right? That's the direction we're racing towards. Not stoppable.

If you see the chat, there's so much stuff going on.

I wanna—

I don't even know where to begin.

It's like, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I work, working 3 jobs, blah, blah.

But let me just—

I want to go to one thing that that hasn't come up here. Yeah, I find interesting because you talk about an abundance of freedom, and I have an idea of what you mean, but I'd rather you say what you mean by an abundance of freedom, and then we'll get to some more questions from the chat, which are endless.

Love it.

So what is an abundance?

Okay, so ultimately it is the ability to— we're heading towards a world where you can know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want, right? We're heading— 2020 is a year approximately, my friends at Cisco talk about, we have 50 billion connected devices and a trillion sensors, right? Your Apple Watch, my little RFID tag that's implanted in my hand, my ring, all of that, all the thousands of cameras that you walk by. So we're heading towards a world where you can know anything, anytime, anywhere, you want. Now, there's a negative connotation of privacy, right? This notion that we have privacy is, if it hasn't already gone away, is potentially going away quickly, right? An average autonomous car with a LiDAR is generating 750 megabytes of data per second going down the street, seeing everything around it. So it's freedom of knowledge, ability to know anything, and then ultimately it's the ability to learn anything, interact with anybody, have the ability to impact the world for good and for bad. And we can talk about the pros and cons of that. But we're heading towards, I believe, a world where we have increasing democracies on the planet. We have issues. There's no question about the— I don't want to start a firestorm on this. Yes, there are political issues in a number of nations around the planet. Which are problematic. But the ability for people to know things and do things and have access to travel and communications is out of the bag. You have to remember, you have to compare where we are today compared to where things were 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, where a country had a centralized single TV channel, a single gas line, a single power plant, a single, you know, educational or religion and so forth. There was a very controlling nationalistic structure. And how that's been blasted and how people have access to a multitude of freedoms now.

So there's more freedom coming potentially. There are so many questions here, like, you know, I'll give one related to freedom from Todd talking about the abundance of voice and who gets this opportunity. And he says Silicon Valley gets heard, investors get heard, entrepreneurs that made it get heard, but no one that's poor gets heard. That's at least what he said.

So here is the question. Ultimately, it's heard by who? And we have to realize that the ability of a person to be heard today, you know, given these devices, is greater than any time ever in human history, right? I can get a Twitter account for free, a Facebook account for free, I can have my voice heard. And then it's the question of, is it my own echo chamber or is what I'm saying got enough of a current, enough of a standing power where it breaks out and becomes a meme to change the world? So, you know, I think all of these, and I teach this, I just want to hit, I want to hit this home for everybody. Number one, the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

Yeah, agreed.

Right? So as a founder, as an entrepreneur, if you find an injustice, a problem that you care about, that you want to slay, that you want to make your massively transformative purpose, you want to make your moonshot, awesome. If you find something that is awe-inspiring, that you love, that you want to go after, awesome, because you can. Right? If you believe you can or believe you can't, You're probably right. A lot of it is your mindset. And the other thing I teach my entrepreneurs is you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. And we're living in a day and age right now. And if anybody knows this, Adeo, you do, and members of Founders Institute do. Living in a day and age where you can create something that can impact the lives of a billion people. And therein lies perhaps the new definition of a billionaire. Let me just, let me take a second to mention, um, For those of you who are interested, something I arranged with Adele, I mentor through my Abundance Digital community about 3,000 entrepreneurs and I'm online with them every day through coursework, through videos and so forth. And if you're interested in learning more about it, we've arranged a 50% discount through the Founders Institute. It's just, if you go to the URL abundance.digital, abundance.digital and you put in a code of founder, it'll be a 50% discount provided by the Founder Institute for Founder Institute members.

Thank you, Peter. No, that's amazing.

But this is what, from my mind, my belief is that we're living in a world where an entrepreneur can create a world of abundance, which means you're making things cheaper and more available for individuals which uplifts humanity. We're never going to get rid of the wealth divide, but accept that and say that's okay as long as the planet, every single 8 billion people have access to all the energy they want, all the water they want, all the healthcare, all the education. That's a world that is much more peaceful and a world— and again, it's not about luxury for every person. It's about a world of possibility for every person. It's—

Peter, I do a lot of webinars. I have never seen this much chat ever, and there's all sorts of debate and dialogue going on.

Good.

Turn— I want to turn— so maybe we should do it again and actually, like, questions from the audience, right? Because this— there's so many, we're not going to get them all. I want to just turn a little bit to a lot of talk we've been doing about entrepreneurship and abundance, and you're talking about if there's a problem, an opportunity. Let me start with some small things here. Like, a lot of time people that think these really big things you're talking about are considered outcasts, right? And sometimes they are, like Bert Rutan is kind of, right? So how do these outcasts, like, you know, if you have this crazy idea, like, kind of two questions, like, Do you just say, okay, I'm going to go do it? It doesn't matter that it's crazy, or is there some reality check? And there's been a lot of questions about what are the reality checks.

Yeah.

So, so the second thing to think about is like, how do you stick with it if you're getting all this negative feedback?

I got it. So I spent a lot of time in my Abundance Community on this very subject. And again, let me just take a second to, to lay it out in brief. Number one, I think it's very important that all of us, every one of us, get clarity about what our massively transformative purpose is. We call it MTP. And it can change during the course of your life. You can have one as a child, which I did, which lasted me for 30-plus years. It was opening up space was my MTP. It's what drove me to create the X Prize. It's like, this is my purpose in life. And I wake up every fucking day with this purpose. And I go to sleep with it. And I'm not going to— and it drives me. And your MTP, whatever it is, it can be— to help educate women in South Africa. It can be to create water in the Gobi Desert. I don't care. It's something that has an emotional connection to you, right? So I want you for your MTP, um, and again, we spend a lot of time and I have a whole bunch of coursework. I have webinars with Astro Teller that you'll, that you'll have access to if you guys want. But it's like where you got to find that emotional energy connection because whatever you do that's big and bold in the world, it's hard. It's hard, and unless it's driven by that emotional energy, you're going to give up before you get there, right? So Adeo and I worked together in the X Prize. The X Prize is 25 years old this year. Do you believe that? Holy shit, that's amazing. So I mean, literally in 1994, I came up with the idea of the X Prize. It took me the— it took a decade, uh, before the X Prize was actually completed. And the only thing that fueled me to keep going was that childhood energy of awe and inspiration. Other people who just keep going. So unless you find that energy, so your MTP, your massively transformative purpose, is the canvas that you're going to play on. And then within that canvas, it can be anything. It can be going to Mars. It can be nanotechnology. It can be fusion energy. I mean, it could be then within that massively transformative purpose that what wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night, you're going to want to find a moonshot. And a moonshot, as I define it, is a target, very clearly defined target, which means not just a generic anything, because without a target, you'll miss it every time, right? It's a very clear target. You can know whether you're making progress towards that target. So my— one of my— in the, in the MTP of opening up space, I had two initial moonshots. One was creating a zero-gravity company for parabolic flight. I wanted to create a company, and Ado and I have flown on it a number of times together.

The first one, I think, the first commercial one, at least.

Yes, you were on the first commercial one. It took 11 years to get permission from the FAA to get people out of their seatbelts and have an airplane do this and charge for it. Crazy. One of the things I did I was so proud of was taking Stephen Hawking up into zero-G. The world's expert in gravity, giving them zero gravity. But it was very clear. It's like, I know when I hit that, when I'm able to sell a ticket and fulfill flying a person to zero G. The other one was X Prize, you know, build a competition for a 3-person spaceship that can go to 100 kilometers altitude, land, and do it again within 2 weeks. Very concrete, specific. You know if you did and you know if you didn't achieve that. So What is your massively transformative purpose? What is the specific moonshot? Are you making progress towards that? Will you hit that? Right. So obviously SpaceX, what Elon did with SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity, very clear, massively transformative purposes, very clear moonshots, which he's hit a multitude of them on. And to your point about, you know, expert and so forth, I have two points. Number one, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, It's a crazy idea.

Yeah.

So if your idea isn't a crazy idea, then it's not likely to be a breakthrough. It'd be an expected incremental improvement. So a lot of times when I'm in the boardrooms of lots of companies, I say, hey, listen, where's your crazy idea department? Where's the group that is trying crazy ideas? Because if you're not trying crazy ideas, you're stuck in incremental improvement versus true breakthroughs. And the other thing is, I'll just, I'll say this for fun, is I define an expert as the person who can tell you 2 or 3 different ways how it can't be done, right? So, and you know this, pal.

I got so many questions coming in on so many levels, like financing is a big one that streaming by. How does it get funded if it's crazy? Where does my So XPRIZE in some ways is a financing idea.

So, I mean, so funding is really critically important. And one of the things that as an entrepreneur you have to realize is you're not going to fund the hyper crazy idea on day one. But what you want to do is build steps to that. You want to build steps along the way. You know, I had the pleasure of starting two universities, International Space University and then Singularity University. And I use the same formula. In both, I write about it in my book Bold. But, you know, I held— I started a conference to study the idea first, and that conference was fundable and getting the right people there. And then I held an 8-week summer program to test the idea, and then another one, and then built from there. So you scale on your way there rather than trying to, you know, do everything in one day. But So I think about what is the 10 to the 9th plus impact? What's the billion person impact? And then what's the first thing you're going to sell, right? The billion person impact captures the heart of inspiration. Like, holy, that'd be amazing if you could do that. But the first product or thing you sell captures a person's logical mind. Like, yeah, I'm going to invest in that first product. And then so it's Whether it's Tesla's multi-stage plan, or whether it's Uber starting with black car in San Francisco versus global domination of, you know, all of these things start with one step, but having a vision in the long term.

And some of them can be— don't require external financing for the first step. If you do a course or online and then build a university, maybe it makes money.

Absolutely. And some of the most successful and most enjoyable things I've ever done are things that made money from the beginning instead of having to go outside and, you know, try and fund hundreds of millions of dollars.

I mean, fundraising sucks for everyone. Peter, you're probably one of the more successful people I know, and among them, right?

Thank you.

Fundraising sucks.

Oh, it sucks. It sucks. I hate it. It's like, you know, I'm so— The problem is I would say, okay, listen, I want to get a few billion-dollar exits so I can stop. I can just fund my own shit. But then, of course, all you do is raise your targets to where you're going and you end up with Masa-san, who's now making $100 billion bets.

Elon fundraised and he has all the money in the world. Everyone has to fundraise.

By the way, fundraising has a purpose. It forces you to get external validation and to clarify your thinking. And if you fund everything on your own, sometimes it's required, right? SpaceX would not have gotten started if Elon hadn't had his exit from PayPal. Um, but you know, a lot of times, because a lot of us are just optimists, irrational optimists in what we do, and we force reality to shape itself into what we desire. But fundraising, uh, you know, brings some good guidelines.

Yeah, so I, I guess that brings another big area that I've been seeing questions zoom by on, and I'm sorry I'm not asking specific questions, I'm trying to bundle them, but validation. And you said fundraising is a great way of validation, but a lot of people are in a garage or wherever at their house, at their job, daydreaming about something. It's considered a crazy idea, right? Because their people are like, that's crazy. So how do you validate a crazy idea?

So, so it's really important. It's really important. And I spent a lot of time, in fact, I've had on my stage that exact conversation. By the way, if any of you do go to the abundance.digital website and enter founder in, even if you don't join the Abundance Digital course, I have a, you'll you'll get a bunch of content for free, and one of them is a webinar and a talk with Astro Teller. Astro was the, uh, was the, uh, head of Google X, and, um, uh, and I've had many, many conversations with him for my community about that exact question. And so here's the deal. First of all, you have to get clarity, uh, about your MTP You have to get clarity about your purpose. You have to get clarity because doing something just to make money, you're going to stop before you're successful. You really have to be clear about what's driving you to do that. And you have to be clear that you're not just building a widget in search of something. What is the problem you're trying to solve, right? What is the— what is the—

the—

the— the marketplace, the need that is there, because technology is always changing. And then when you come up with an idea, you've got to be brutally honest about whether it's a shitty idea or a good idea. Ideas are easy. Ideas are easy. Ideas are free. If you're one of these people like I used to be long ago, when I have an idea, I don't share with anybody because I'm scared they're gonna steal it. Bullshit. That is like wrong-minded. You want to share your idea with as many people as you can, get their feedback. If someone else can outperform you and do it better, too bad. But at the end of the day, what you don't want to do is go and repeat all these mistakes. You want to get your idea out there and get great feedback. And what one of the things that Astro does is he does something called a pre-mortem. What's a pre-mortem? You know what a post-mortem is, right? After your company has failed and you're looking back and saying, why the hell did that fail? A premortem is, you know, before you launch your product or whatever, you say, listen, team, if this idea were to fail 6 months from now or a year from now, what are the reasons it might have failed? Let's create all the lists of reasons it could have failed. And now let's look at them. And if there's some really good ones, you might want to kill the project right then and there.

I love the pre-mortem. Yeah, we're running out of time. I know your time is precious here, so maybe the last thing, and maybe we should do this again and just let the audience—

I love this, Paul. This is my high— I love this show.

Well, we got 500 people with not too much notice. We'll give more notice. Maybe we get 1,000 or so and concurrent. So one, you say the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. Right? And yeah, I mean, that's a beautiful statement. So, you know, you got a bunch of people in the room today, and look, it's so easy to go out there and whine about democracy and whine about this. And so what's your piece of advice for people who are here maybe thinking of starting something that can inspire them to create that future of their dreams? Like, if there's one thing you would say to them right now.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, it needs to be something that is truly your purpose in life. Every minute, every day, how you spend your hard-earned talent and treasure and relationships and so forth, do it in service of something that lights you up. And the question ultimately is, if you don't know your MTP, how do you find it? Yes. How do you find that thing? So, let me Let me double-click on that. Again, if you— we spend a lot of time on this, so here's a couple of hints. Number 1, what did you want to do as a child before the world told you you could not, or your mom and dad said that was a silly idea, or that's— you can't make money that way? Because you can make money doing anything these days, right? I mean, Pokémon card trading or whatever. Um, so, uh, so what did you want to do as a child? What was it that lit your light up as a kid? And if that still lights you up, go and pursue it. Number 2, if I were to give you a billion dollars and say you can't spend on yourself but go and change the world, how would you go and change the world? Right? And number 3 is going back to that sense of awe or anger. What are you in awe of that you love, that inspires you, that you're so excited about? Or What is an injustice that you want to solve on the planet? Who do you want to be a hero to? All of these are clues about finding your massively transformative purpose, that canvas that you want to paint on as an entrepreneur, and then picking a few targets. And next time we get together, we can talk more about how do you drive a moonshot? What are the attributes of a great moonshot and so forth? And again, thank you, Adeo, for the 50% scholarship that you offered to the community, abundance.digital. And we'll see you there. And let's do this again. I don't know if you want to do it in Spanish or Italian.

Purpose is one of the— maybe we can even do it on purpose, so to speak, versus by accident. So thank you, everybody, for coming out today. What a lovely conversation and so many questions and dialogue in the chat. I would say join Peter's community to continue the conversations. And Peter, we'll do it again. If you're thinking of joining the program, fi.co/join. If you're thinking of leading a program, fi.co/lead. Peter, love—

Can I— I want to bring you as a guest into my Abundance Digital community if I could. I would love to do that. Let's do that. Okay. All right. Thank you, brother.

Love you.