Peter Diamandis - The Future is Coming Fast: Big Changes to Expect in the Next Decade

Hey, good morning, buddy.

Good morning, Peter. Good morning. How are you?

So good to see you.

I know. And what strange circumstances, right? Who would have ever guessed?

Insanely. You know, if you had told me that, okay, if like a year, like 6 months ago, if you had told me You're gonna be stuck in a house. You're gonna be on Zoom. The entire world's gone digital. And there's no more toilet paper left. Like, and then ask the question, what happened in the world that caused this?

You're like, toilet paper shortage? Yeah, I mean, of all the things to hoard too, toilet paper is not the first thing that would have come to mind. Bacon. Alcohol, toilet paper.

Yeah, listen, it's a crime that, you know, there's a shortage of amarone anyway.

Yeah, it's been definitely interesting. And, you know, really of all the people I wanted to talk to in this strange circumstances, you would be top of the list because together our brain trust is interesting and we are facing interesting times. So why don't we get started? I'll do quickly, my name's Adeo Ressi, I'm CEO of the Founder Institute.

Peter Diamandis. I'm the founder, executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder of Singularity University, author of a number of books. We'll be talking about one of them here. And a lot of my companies, I'm in, I'm now about 22 companies in. A lot of them are in the health, longevity, vitality space.

So, and let's not forget ISU.

International Space University, Abundance, my Abundance ecosystem, Abundance Digital, Abundance 360. And anyway, and most importantly, our dear friend of Bodeo's, at least I count myself as such.

Vice versa. And there's so many things to talk about, Peter, and we're going to get to your book, we'll get to it all, and we're going to take questions from the audience. So one of the important things that I ask everyone attending to do is as Peter and I go through various things, get your questions in the chat. My team will register them and we're gonna try and get to as many questions as we can. But I wanna open with the sort of lack of leadership in the world today and what your thoughts are on how we're going to sort of come out of this better than where we started. And I have thoughts on that, but I want to hear what you have to say first.

Yeah, there's, there's a, uh, a lack of clarity of leadership, and there's a, there's a lack of cohesiveness of leadership, right? We've got fractured, fractionated directions across the board, um, and the challenge is that this is not the only crisis that we're going to face. I mean, you have been part of the XPRIZE from the very earliest days. And every year, XPRIZE sets a theme. And one of the themes— well, the theme we picked for this year, 2020, we picked it back in 2019, so— has been addressing humanity's existential threats. Right? Because no one's talking about the big global issues and the threats that we have with enough clarity to be able to plan for them. It's always, you know, we scream and yell after the, you know, the horses have escaped the barn door. So there are a number of existential threats, a pandemic being one of the ones. And I went on the record last year saying it's the number one thing that I'm concerned about. Uh, there's a great book called Lifespan by, um, by David Sinclair, Harvard Medical School professor focused on longevity. He was talking about that, and I was like, He's absolutely right. So, but there are other existential threats, right? Like, we are a sitting duck for an asteroid impact, which could make the pandemic look like a sunny day in California. And there's other elements that— other things. But, you know, as advanced as we are, we're not spending anywhere near enough time thinking about taking, you know, 0.1% of cognitive and economic resources to plan for those things, even though they have microscopic probabilities, they have massive existential impact on the planet. So we need to be doing that. And, and, you know, one thing I mentioned to you, and I'll pause there, but we need that kind of thinking at a meta level. I don't think it comes out of government. I think governments are way too—

I don't know what to do. And then a wide range in between, like they can't seem to—

Yeah, we've got the, it's not really happening, go away.

Denial. What pandemic? I don't see no pandemic.

The ability for individuals to stand up, right? We've seen Bill Gates stand up with a voice. You know, I really wish that tech companies place And I think that—

Well, you got Bill versus Elon, right? Elon, who sort of falls in the denier category, Bill, who falls in the, oh my God, like—

The sky is falling, yes.

Right. And like, let me ask, let's just go with you for a minute. I've got two camps of friends, and I'm wondering which camp you fall in. Camp number one is like, we need to get right back to work, you know, like, what's going on here? Another camp of friends who's like, this is needed to show us weaknesses in the system and opportunity to reset. Where do you fall in that spectrum?

I come out and I, you know, I hope everybody watching is healthy and safe. And, you know, I've had friends who have been on ventilators, so I understand how real this is. But I call this a practice pandemic. And it is—

Yeah, me too. But I had a good friend, young woman, die 2 days ago.

I understand. But I've also had more friends die from auto accidents and from other— from suicide than have been touched in this. And we have a lot of pandemics of challenges and problems to deal with. But in terms of— One of the things I mentioned to you is I'm actually optimistic and hopeful for a number of reasons. Do you mind if I launch into that for a second? No, no.

So you're in the camp of, and I agree, this is a practice pandemic, but before you go into your optimism, can we get a grade? Are we like an A, B on the A to F scale?

On what? Grading on what?

Well, if it's practice, right?

Oh, we definitely have flunked big time. I mean, it's like we weren't ready and it's like, so—

Oh my God, I totally agree. We are, you know, maybe an F+ if there is such a thing, right?

Yeah, there's no rioting in the streets, at least in the US, which is okay, fine, then it's a D because if, you know, it could have been a lot worse in that regard. So, here's— I mean, to everybody watching, again, let me just give a sense of why I'm optimistic. First of all, it could have been a lot worse. Let's be very clear. The transmissibility of this virus is high. The asymptomatic phase and the ability for it to spread, super high. But the mortality of this virus, it's its kill ratio, we still don't know it because we still don't know the numbers. We don't know how many people are actually ill. There's going to be a lot of PhD thesis written about this. Epidemiology is going to become the in thing to be for the next graduate class. But honestly, we don't actually know the mortality rate, and it's likely to be under 1%. It could be half a percent, and it could be as bad as a really bad flu year. We'll find out what that is. But the mortality rate could have been like Ebola, right? Where a lot of people treat this as a death sentence. If they, oh my God, I have it. Yeah, okay, chances are you're going to be fine. We don't know the long-term implications to lung capacity and lung function yet, just to be clear.

It could have been— Really, that could be the awful thing that comes out of this, right? Like, people who get affected may never recover.

And so, yeah, we still need to be cautious about that, but it could have been a 30% mortality rate. And so this has exposed our political failings, our economic failings, our healthcare failings. And I sure hope that we're going to learn from it. And I'm running a poll right now in my Abundance Digital community, uh, which is: 5 years from now, uh, who is likely to become your in-house healthcare provider? Is it Apple, Amazon, Google, an existing healthcare company, or a startup you never heard of?

A startup you never heard of is winning the, uh, the poll, right?

Because I, I do believe We're going to— right now, we don't have healthcare. We have sick care. I talk about that a lot in my book, that we're going to— the two industries that are going to get decimated, crushed, reinvented, destroyed, reborn from the ashes are healthcare.

There are only two?

No, there's lots.

We got travel, movie theaters.

Healthcare and education are, at least the ones I'm like, you know, taking aim at. So ultimately, what I particularly see is healthcare is gonna become something which is always on, always monitored, you know, from your Apple Watch or your, actually my Oura Ring is charging. I have a little embedded sensor here in my hand, but we're gonna be monitored all the time. And it's gonna be a data-focused, data-centric, It's not when you're sick, you go to the hospital. It's you're being monitored to be kept healthy.

Hospitals are ridiculous to be the worst place to be.

The worst.

It's a vector.

It is the vector. For those—

Why don't I go to where the vector is? I don't need to wait for it to come to me.

I know what it is. It's like, that's so perfect, right? It's like two-thirds of people go to the hospital because they're sick. They're sent home, except they've been inoculated massively waiting in the waiting room. I mean, it's like—

I mean, it's, it's really, it's preposterous. The fact that— and so many people are dying at home right now. I mean, we really— but to, to be fair, I will say I'm in a few companies in that are rebuilding the medical system, like, uh, sort of new urgent care models, and, and they're so much better. Uh, and, and like, I got tested for COVID I drove up to my urgent care clinic outside. They swabbed me like full gear. You know, it was, it was, it was well done. I was like, oh, this is how you should do it versus going into a hospital waiting room where you're just basically like counting the seconds and you're like a target.

The viruses are like, hey, like new target opportunity. Boom, boom, boom.

So we built a healthcare system to spread the pandemic. Pretty much.

I mean, I don't want to make fun of this too much because there are individuals who have—

No, no, and I'm not saying anything.

—kidney stone or have appendicitis, you know, and they have to go to healthcare, you know, so that becomes a real, real challenge for them. But so I'm optimistic.

My son is sick right now and we need to bring him to the doctor and we're like, we can't bring him to the doctor. Like, it would be—

it's crazy. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm optimistic because it's not as bad as it could be. And we're going to learn a lot. And we're going to learn, in my estimation, it's going to be not the government that's learning from this, it's entrepreneurs. Like everybody watching is going to learn and say, opportunity there, opportunity there, opportunity there. You know, after the last financial crisis back in 2008, there was this like Darwinian explosion sort of a Cambrian explosion of new companies coming out of it, like WhatsApp and Venmo and Uber and Airbnb. Even SpaceX really launched post its Falcon 9 contract from the government that came after 2008. So there's a lot of opportunity. I'll use an analogy that— So wait, wait, can I quickly—

Yeah. Like, I'm getting the big— Let's talk about the future, right? So what are some of these things that are gonna change?

So, in my book—

Your new book.

My new book, it's The Future Is Faster Than You Think. I look at every single industry and I paint what's going to happen over the next 10 years in energy, transportation, retail, entertainment, education, healthcare, finance, insurance, every single industry. And the clarity is every single industry is going to be massively transformed. There's no industry that's not going to look any different. And by the way, the book came out in January, and the pandemic is just accelerating everything. That's what I was about to ask.

So you're thinking that the change in society is probably accelerated by the pandemic, not even—

it's not like doing something different. It's not slowed down. It's accelerated. Because a lot of what was happening anyway was you're digitizing everything. I talk about the 6 Ds, that whatever you digitize, enters a period of slow deceptive growth. Like the first Kodak digital camera was 0.01 megapixels. Next year is 0.02, 0.04, 0.08. All look like zeros, very deceptive. And then 30 doublings later, it's a billion times better, and it killed the film business. So, it goes digital, deceptive, disruptive, and then you dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize. So, The digital camera, which is on every one of these things, there it is, it's dematerialized, it dematerialized film and the actual camera, it's gone, it's now bits on your phone.

Well, people are shooting movies on these things.

Amazing, amazing, and it's demonetized because it's effectively free, and it's democratized 'cause now everyone can have an amazing film-quality camera in the palm of their hands. As entrepreneurs, we need to be looking at how do we digitize things that aren't digitized, and then dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize them because that's where everything is going. I'm always looking for stuff that I could dematerialize. Because—

I get what you're saying, but let's practicalize that for people. If you want to dematerialize— realize right now? Yeah.

So, I have my big event of the year. It's called Abundance 360. I have 400 or 360 CEOs. We squeeze in 400 who pay $15,000 for that. And I ended up digitizing the entire thing, right? It's now abundance.digital and people go there and it's like I'm mentoring entrepreneurs. You have an offer for people on that, right? So, earlier this month, we basically opened it up 30 days for free. So, if you go to abundance.digital, you can get— and there's 300 hours of mentorship and content about exponential technologies and teachings by myself and Ray Kurzweil and all of our top faculty from Singularity. And it's just, if you're interested during downtime to give yourself an exponential tech mindset and tech sort of grounding and learning, I love it. We have an amazing community of some 5,000 entrepreneurs in that. What's another—

so that's great. We'll put the link in the chat. Everyone should definitely sign up. What's another dematerialized thing that you're looking at?

Well, I mean, I'll give you a perfect example at a big scale. We all have lived through it. So, you know, Blockbuster got dematerialized by Netflix, right? And poof, went away. So, another, we were building in my company, Human Longevity, we were building these health nucleus plants, facilities that we were building and owning. And then, we said, "Let's not do that. Let's instead take our software stack and make it available to facilities that already exist around the country." And then, essentially, we become the software stack on top of existing facilities instead of owning the entire stack ourselves. So the question is, 3D printing is dematerializing to some degree supply chain and warehouses. And I got to stop and think about other examples.

Well, and we need that right now because our supply chains are getting fucked, right? We got a lot of questions coming in. I want to turn to a few of them that are kind of related to this because Christine's asking, can the legal system catch up with all this dematerialization that's happening? And how do you see the legal system catching up? Which I think is an interesting question.

Christine, that's a great question. It's not only the legal system, it's the political system of the political parties supporting incumbents. So I bet you, you know, the internet snuck up on everybody. And Adeo, you were in the thick of it in the beginning. The internet basically decimated so many industries, the advertising industry, the entertainment industry, and so forth. And if those industries had been awake and aware, they would have pushed back heavy through legislation and regulation and so forth, but they were clueless. And so the other analogy I use is the following. 66 million years ago, an asteroid came down hit and did a massive disruption of the environment of Earth. And the dinosaurs who could not adapt fast enough died. And it was the furry little mammals scurrying around that were able to evolve and adapt and then became us, the dominant species. So the asteroid that just hit— there were two asteroids. One was exponential technologies, right? AI is a massive asteroid changing everything. But another asteroid that just hit was this pandemic. And a lot of the large companies that are not able to change fast enough are going to die. We're going to see 20%—

They need— can I ask a question? I think they needed to die. Of course, they have to die.

Absolutely. And in fact, companies need to kill a lot of their divisions and products that were just lumbering along. This is a great excuse. For either entrepreneurs to kill that company that you really don't care about anymore, but you sort of feel obligated to keep going on. And we've both been there, right? Honestly, yes. And it's like, okay, kind of put this out of its misery and refocus your time and energy on stuff that's exciting for you in digital.

So, for the Founder Institute, like, we've known we've needed to do more virtual stuff. Yeah. And like, but the real-world stuff, It's going great. And so this has just been like more virtual, right? And like it needed to happen. So, you know, there's great questions and there's a lot of industry questions. There's a bunch of industry questions around travel. Yeah. Emilio was asking one, when can we expect travel and tourism to return? Yeah. You know, speaking of, things that are resetting and needing— I, I— this is a—

I don't know, right? Travel, travel is going to be, uh, a real, uh, challenge. Yeah, a lot of my business is around people traveling to me and my events. Yeah, but you know, so here's the question, right? So, uh, in the airline industry, um, are you gonna feel comfortable packed in cattle class Right, now here's something, right? Emirates Airlines has set up PCR training with a 15-minute turnaround, so you get swabbed as you get on an airplane to find out whether or not you're actively shedding virus.

Have you, have you seen what they're doing in China to go to Beijing?

I haven't seen what they're doing.

No, you should watch the videos. If you want to go to Beijing, that, that it's, it's, it's like you can't imagine. You go, they swab you And they quarantine you when you get off the plane. And they actually— so on the plane, off the plane, people are wearing hazmat suits. It's like super locked down. It's on the off chance that you pick it up on the plane flight, they quarantine you.

Which one are they going on the plane?

You know, yeah.

How long are they quarantining you after the flight, do you know?

I forget, but it's not very long. It's like a couple hours at the airport where they do a couple of checks to see. And then I think you might need to be quarantined in Beijing proper.

So here's what's going on in the travel industry. We're going to start to see a lot more private travel, a lot more private jet services. I have a a friend of mine who's building a jet service based upon the Cirrus jet, which is super low-cost local jets. And so people, it's gonna be an interesting top-up on that. The other thing is gonna be a lot of virtual travel. So we have 5G coming online and Starlink coming online just in time, right? There's gonna be a new version of Wi-Fi in the next couple years with a 5G-like experience so that We all have it, and I think we're going to see a lot of VR. There are new headsets coming out from every player. They were supposed to come out by the end of this year for Christmas. They'll probably be delayed a little bit, but where we have foveated rendering where the set knows where you're looking, it sees your mouth expressions as well, and it can give you probably on the order of 2K per eye instead of 1K per eye, so 4K total. Wow. And then heading towards, I think, I just One of my friends, Tony Robbins, just installed this massive— it's big like him. I think it's like 16-foot across diagonal television. But I mean, you can truly go and go to Rome, go to Greece. You can go kind of vacation. By the way, sheltering in place has been an interesting kind of vacation. I've never had more energy. And gotten better sleep and more workouts than I have now. A lot of it is mindset. I'm meditating more than I ever have. I hope you are too. But travel is gonna be interesting. Well, I mean, let me ask another thing.

I mean, we've got both the industry, the airlines, and I agree with you, like we kind of went nuts. We would travel across the world for a 1-hour meeting. That's just not—

Yeah, I mean, I would fly into Dubai, have the meeting and fly out. Insane. A lot of expectations are gonna change to go to let's meet virtually. There's gotta be, I hope a lot of the entrepreneurs watching are working on the next level virtual meeting experience, right? Because it's, you know, what we have is okay, we're on— V1? Yeah, and, but super high resolution so you feel there and are there. The convergence of VR, AR, 5G, you know, haptic suits, all of that, that's all being accelerated. And it's going to transform where we live, where we work, how we experience things. You know, people for the longest time have been saying, hey, you know, we went from props to jets. We went to supersonic a little bit. We've never really changed there. But we're gonna now digitize the travel and be there in virtual. It's gonna be setting new expectations.

Yeah, I mean, and then there's the border issues, right? I mean, I'm interested. So like you're optimistic and I'm optimistic too, but one area that I get a little nervous about is because you talk about migrations in the book, right? Yeah. You say that one of the big innovation forces is migrations. Yet, what we're seeing as a result of this pandemic is the closing of borders and like, you know, the kind of countries that have beat the pandemic, the countries that might not beat it, you know, maybe you could just talk about that and tie it in.

So there are From my mindset, there are a number of great migrations that are going to be happening over the next— so the book focuses on a 10-year horizon. But the last part, Part 3 of the book, looks at about a 50-year horizon and look at the great migrations that are occurring. So one of the great migrations is from the physical world into the virtual world. And so that migration is independent of physical borders, but we're going to spend a lot more time in the virtual world. And I think we're gonna end up joining virtual communities. Imagine Second Life on steroids, where I spend a lot of my time in the real world, but I'm a citizen of the Founder Institute world because the people there, when I'm there, are my best friends. Their mindset is exactly what I want. And so I spend hours of my day in that virtual world. And maybe it's through a digital avatar, but I have superpowers and I'm my best, truest self in that world versus the physical world. So that migration into the virtual world is gonna be happening this decade, even more into the next decade. Another migration I talk about is the environmental migration as rising tides and seawater levels people are going to become migrants because their home is underwater. And so that's going to be forced, and that's going to bring a lot of political unrest, especially if we have any of this stuff still going on with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The other migration that is happening, which is exciting, in the 15 to 30-year time horizon is as we connect our neocortex to the cloud, right? So, Neuralink, Kernel, the work at Facebook, Google, at every military operation is working on how do I connect the 100 billion neurons in my brain, the 100 trillion synaptic connections to the edge of the cloud where I can think and Google or increase my cognitive capacity, increase my intelligence. I mean, that work is going on. Ray Kurzweil, who's my co-founder of Singularity University, predicts that that will occur circa 2033, '34, '35, that we'll have reliable high bandwidth from our neocortex to the cloud. And, and it's a crazy thing to think about. I call it a meta-intelligence when you're connected, I'm connected, and all of us We have 1,126 of us on this conversation. When we're all connected and we know each other's thoughts and can connect at a level of intimacy, and you say, "That's insane," but I remind you that each of us, we're not a single life form. We're a collection of 30 trillion individual cells in our arms, in our brain, in our head. All of us, and we think of ourselves as one. But when we connect in this meta-intelligence, you know, there's— it's— I love Star Trek. I give it credit for everything. I love Gene Roddenberry's mindset. The one thing I didn't like about Star Trek was they made the Borg evil. So think of this as the kinder, gentler Borg. And then the final migration is our migration off the planet to space.

Yeah, I was gonna say, dude, shouldn't that be number one?

Oh, it's like, you know, it's like I gotta save the best for last. So, you know, it's also kind of the soonest.

It's gonna happen in our, like, soon.

Yeah, well, we'll see, uh, in the next— I mean, Starship, I mean, you and I both know, uh, Elon— yeah, they're still working. I mean, he's gonna, he's gonna spend every single penny he has getting the human race off the planet. And—

Pretty funny, everyone else is shelter in place but SpaceX.

Yeah. Well, you know, one of my companies, we can talk about this, a company we spun up a month ago as a division of the largest testing and vaccine company on the planet out of China and Taiwan, it's called COVAX. And we just had calls with the SpaceX team about doing blood antibody testing for for all of SpaceX, and we're gearing up to 1 million tests per day. And anyway, it's insane. And the— Anybody's on COVID-19? These are all COVID-19 tests. These are blood antibody tests. So, you've got near 100% accuracy, no false positives, and it's amazing.

Let's stay on space. I want to come back to that in one second. So, let's finish the space thing, and I want to talk about that. There's a bunch of questions about how.

So Elon and Bezos, God bless them, they're gonna battle their way off the planet. You know, Elon's gonna make a side stop at the moon on the way to Mars. Jeff's gonna focus on the moon and then O'Neill colonies in orbit. But Starship is extraordinary. It's what, you know, I'm a space cadet since I was 8 years old. And for, you know, for 40-plus years, I've been dreaming that Starship would come to existence. And here it is. It hasn't launched yet, but it's like, I have zero question. Anybody who bets against Elon is just betting against inevitability. Yeah. So, no, that's great.

And they're working right now. I mean, he's always said the 2020s, it is 2020. And a lot of this is about the decade of change. So, I would say that space, I mean, what's your feeling? You and I are sort of insider-y on this, you maybe even more than I am these days. What's your feeling on this decade being the decade of space?

Leaving aside what you want. Yeah, we will get to the moon, the next humans on the moon, through a private development, right? Government will fund part of it. Yeah, Bezos and, uh, and Musk, uh, will, will get humans on the moon. Their original target was 2024. My guess is that will slip by 2 or 3 years, '26, '27. But once it— but different than last time, once we do it, we will have a regular capacity and capability. It's not flags and footsteps, which was like a mad dash to get there and leave no infrastructure behind. This time it's being built with a full stack to get there on an easily recurring basis. And once we're on the moon, the moon is, you know, energetically two-thirds of the way to anywhere. And so it's beautiful because the moon is— what we just saw was the Trump administration approved something that I've been dreaming about for years, which is you could mine the moon. You can get minerals from the moon. And the only way the United States— for the Americans here watching— or is the only way the United States opened up was because of land rights, because of railroad rights of way, because of gold mining and so forth, that the economic interest, I call it an exothermic economic reaction, like being able to build stuff that gives off more money than it consumes. And then it just like, poof, it's going to happen regardless. Now, we need to put some good regulations on not to destroy the moon visibly from the Earth.

But you don't want to see giant holes, more holes than like— yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't want to see the Pepsi logo go across the night sky. Armed as a mining experiment.

Yeah, so you brought up 4 migrations. Are there any other big ones? And what do you think is the next one?

Is it space? I think migration into VR is happening right now. That's probably the first one. So I think VR is happening, and then space is gonna be slow but catching up. And we talk about, like, we're kind of screwed on reinventing government, 'cause government doesn't change gently. It changes through revolution. Last time any government got gently transformed from an autocracy to a democracy or from a representative government to a true democracy, gently has been never. So, it's like— [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Last time. Yeah. So it's either you have to actually start with a blank sheet or you need to be ready for—

We're transforming into an autocracy here in America.

We are. So, but I think we're gonna see government experimentation in the virtual world and then we're gonna see new governments in space. Yeah. Wow.

Interesting. Well, there's so many questions. I don't even know where to begin. I guess why don't we keep one thematic to that, which is from Sudashan and Pedro were asking about protectionism. And do you think countries will go back to being protectionist and trying to make everything locally, or like speaking of governments, or do you think it's gonna continue this massive global decentralization once we get through the pandemic?

It's gonna be both. There's no question that people will work on creating local supply chains and manufacturing, but that was happening anyway. 3D printing was making that happen anyway. I mean, so here's a perfect example. You know, you and I, Dale, have watched SpaceX grow from like week 1 where Elon was building Falcon 1, and it's amazing. And one of the things that he did was he completely verticalized all manufacturing. It's like he gave the middle finger to the suppliers who were charging 10 times too much and say, screw you, I'm going to produce it 10 times cheaper and then sell it and put you out of business, which he did in a lot of different places. But I was always like, who could possibly compete with SpaceX? And then here comes this amazing company my venture fund is invested in called Relativity Space. And so it's a young 23-year-old from Blue Origin, Jeff's company, and like a 24-year-old from SpaceX who get together with the idea of, hey, how about we 3D print the entire rocket? Like the entire rocket. And they cold email Mark Cuban, on the idea, and he puts in $500 million, and the thing gets started. Well, it raised its last round at a $500 million-plus valuation. And they have built the world's largest 3D printers. And these 3D printers are 3D printing a 105-foot-tall, 30-meter-tall rocket. 95% of the entire rocket is 3D printed. And what's crazy is that these 3D printers, when they're not printing rockets can print a jet engine or an airplane wing, or can change the design of the 3D-printed rocket from like 2 meters diameter to 2.1 meters diameter without changing any tooling. Their launch is next year if they stay on schedule, given everything that's going on. But what they built is a virtualized factory. They call it the Stargate. And so you could put a Stargate factory in the middle of downtown Detroit or Nairobi or Abu Dhabi and print rockets. It's like insane. It's a great idea.

I mean, that's where the future is going. I see a lot, and basically to be blunt, if you look at the SpaceX rocket, it's 3D printed as well. It's just every piece of it is essentially 3D printed. There's questions about healthcare and you brought up the COVID testing.

Yeah. So, I'm involved in 2 companies that I'm a co-founder of that are in this space. One is a company we just spun out called Covaxx. It's Covaxx.com, and you can go and check it out. The parent company, UBI, is based out of Taiwan and China. They're the largest manufacturer of vaccines on the planet. They've vaccinated 5 billion pigs. And they also developed the first antibody test for SARS back, you know, what was it, 17 years ago. And we took all of the coronavirus assets and put it into a US company. And so, it's doing blood antibody testing. So, you have to take a vial of blood in a serum separation tube, spin it down, and then it's tested on an ELISA machine. And, we have near 100% accuracy, no false positive and very— and, like, almost no false negatives. And, we're talking to some of the largest governments and companies on the planet about spinning up millions and millions of tests for them to be able to do continuous testing in this regard.

[Speaker:BEN] Is the antibodies a way back to work for people? What do you think the likelihood of it being a—

Yeah, this virus—

Spanish is mixed on whether you have the antibodies, you can get the virus again.

What's your view? So, it's still early days. This virus is behaving differently than other viruses. So people who have recovered don't have a high antibody titer yet. And it's— we'll find out why, why, and how do you supplement it. So, it might be that even people who have recovered will get vaccinated. So, the other side of this company, COVAX, is it has a vaccine platform that uses peptides. We don't use a a virus, a dead virus, or any virus in the making of the vaccines. This platform has been in humans before, and it's completely safe, and we have developed 16 different vaccines. We are picking our top 3 or 4 to go into humans with, hopefully in the next 45 days. When you say 16 vaccines for COVID— For the, what's called the SARS-CoV-2. Oh, very good. Yeah. And we are looking to build the ability to, you know, to manufacture a billion vaccines a year.

[Speaker:DR_ZUBIN] So, there are a lot of questions about this in the chat. Let me— and sorry if I'm not stating names, I'm sort of bundling questions in so we can get through a bunch of them. But, like, let me just go with the 16 different vaccines. Why did— why, like, you know, people are asking, like, how do we get out of this? But, like, How do you, like 16 vaccines?

So what happens is there are lots of different places on the virus or on the antigens expressed by the virus on the surface of cells that you can target antibodies towards. Right. Right, so it's like here's, it's like having a virus that you're gonna, you're going to, you're— You try to block out— You're gonna shoot like a paint gun and hit different spots. And then each of those different spots is a different antibody that you're gonna— you're in a different epitope, a different 3-dimensional structure that you're gonna target a vaccine towards to block the virus and block— and so there's lots of different places you can create a vaccine to target. So you're optimistic that the vaccine will eventually work? Yeah, so we have high confidence that there'll be multiple vaccines, and so that even if the virus mutates, we will still have active vaccines, and we can iterate very quickly. So this platform that COVAX has is uniquely suited for that. I'm not gonna— I'm just super excited about it. It's not traditional, and it is— we generate in, in In Asia, we vaccinate 600 million pigs every year, and the price per vaccine is under a dollar, right? Wow. So, it's super cheap because of the mechanism by which it's made. So, I'm just, you know, I'm a founding director. I help them capitalize the company and put it together. But it's, anyway, I'm just super pumped about it. I hear you, and that's good.

I want to go into some other questions now, turning away from COVID There are questions about, so, so, like, for example, health in general. Is the healthcare system is strongly regulated back to the government side, especially in conservative countries? How does one tackle the industry if you want to digitalize it and bring it into the future?

You do it the same way Google tackled and transformed the the library and the way Amazon tackled and transformed the post office. You don't ask permission. You offer something that's just 10 times better and 10 times cheaper, and people stop using the alternative. Right? That's basically it. It's like if all of a sudden, you know, and then regulators say, we're going to regulate against that, you know, maybe for a little bit, But if it's 10 times cheaper and 10 times better, you're going to be out of office as a regulator. And if you do it for free, and then how are you going to regulate something for free?

Well, that's what we did with space, right? In the X Prize, we're like, they had these antiquated, broken things, and we just started making better, cheaper, faster, private things, and they had to let it go.

And so that's ultimately the way you do this. It's like if Amazon Health and Google Health and XYZ Health is in your home, on your body, giving you advice, giving you, you know, a dashboard for your health. The phrase I use is making you the CEO of your own health, right? Enabling you to know what's going on, what foods are best, what exercise is best, what you're doing, and so forth. You're gonna do it, and it's just gonna be amazing, but you're not gonna be asking for permission from regulators to do it. And if they try and shut you down, you know, a lot of people screaming.

Like Uber. Let's go. I want to stay on industries because there's a lot of questions on industries, like Felipe asking about the retail industry. What will be the future of shopping malls? You know, well, that's a toughie, right? Because like they were already dying before the— and you know, I like to say if something was dying before the pandemic started and the pandemic came It's just gonna accelerate the death. So what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, this entire pandemic, maybe it was planned by Amazon, but Amazon's hitting all new stock prices, right? I mean, this has taught every single person who was ever resistant about buying online is now shifted and realized how automagical it really is. And so being able to go back, you know, the single thing that we all have in common is 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 365 days in a year. We all have the same amount of time in our daily lives. And so if something can save us time, it is the single most valuable thing that we ultimately have. And if I can get stuff cheaper, and not have to get in my car and drive a mile to the store, but I can wait until this afternoon or tomorrow? Oh my God. So, these things are crushed. So, we're going to have so many bankruptcies from the small retailers and the small restaurants. They're all going to have to reinvent themselves as antifragile, which is going to be a delivery digital front end. Now, the nice thing is Amazon offers the ability for you to digitize your products, services, your business. On top of them and get the same economics that Amazon has because they're a platform play. And so the better you do, the better Amazon does. So it's a rising tide, you know, floats all boats mindset, uh, which is great. But, uh, that's—

but, but there's some counter-argument to the all-digitalization, and there's a bunch of concerts.

Yeah, there's going to be a bit of be entertained, but you know, I'm going to go to the mall just because I want to get out of the friggin' house and I want to go and, and do something. So destination, uh, retail, um, it's just gonna have— it's, it's— you're gonna have to focus on the experience to get people there.

Have you seen the store beta?

Yeah, so Beda, I know Beda well, right? So experience, the thing they have to be careful about is people coming to touch, feel, entertain themselves. And then go buy on Amazon. Yeah, and so you have to integrate that. You have to have one-touch shopping in your store, right? So you can have it where, I mean, and this is again, the consumer interface is so much opportunity for entrepreneurs So what's the experience for any store where I go in, I touch it, I feel it, there it is. I, you know, I literally, it's my thumbprint, my iris scan, you know, not some complicated logging on process, my phone app, and then boom, it's ordered. And the store gets credit and, you know, pays less to Amazon or whatever the case might be. But I would love that, right? Where it's, I can, I can buy it right then and there. Super easy and it's waiting for me in the front of the store or it's delivered to my house, my option.

But again, it goes back, there's so many questions, Christine, Patrick, etc. Like, do we want this level of privacy invasion? And like, is that an area of regulation or—

we don't have it. It's— I wish—

oh, oh, oh. Does privacy even exist?

No, it doesn't. It's like I went on a massive speaking tour after my book came out, and I was in symphony halls in like a dozen cities and like 3,000 people. And I would ask the question along the way, how many people here truly feel that they really have privacy? Nobody raises their hands. You know, we're living in a world where an AI can read your lips from 100 meters away, where I can shake your hand, grab a few skin cells, and sequence you, where, you know, where the bits and data are flowing everywhere. Now, the good news is that in a world of radical transparency, which is what I'm talking about here, evildoers have a harder time of doing stuff in secret. But I think there's gonna be a shift in mindset where people wanna believe they have privacy, but in the back of their mind, really realize they don't. So it's gonna change human behavior too, right? Be careful, assume that whatever you're writing or saying or doing, is out there. I mean, if Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, can't get privacy, I mean, honestly, do you think, you know, you and I can? Well, right.

And so let's go to another industry that's being asked about, like blockchain, and, you know, because that's— a lot of the blockchain community is based on like transparency, but also privacy, right? And like, so maybe we could, what are your thoughts on cryptocurrencies, blockchain?

Wow. Remember when it was like the French, a frothy frenzy 2 years ago?

Yeah, exactly.

I don't even know where my, where my, you know, cryptocurrency wallet is these days. Well, not doing well.

Compared to a couple of years ago, that is.

So here's the challenge. I still believe that blockchain is an important and exciting technology. I'm not seeing any vibrant use cases yet.

Yeah, I would agree with you, but I'm seeing like, so, you know, this begs the question. I mean, currency is the means by which all things happen in the world. And there's no fiat currency innovation outside of blockchain today. And in fact, the fiat currency industry shut blockchain down. And I think that was a big mistake. You know, you'd almost want that innovation, you know, because I don't see how we're going to get out of a multi-trillion dollars worth of debt.

The printing presses are working overtime. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's so I'm, I'm, I don't have much to say about blockchain and cryptocurrencies right now other than I would love to see a simp— other than Bitcoin, I'd love to see a simple use case. And they may well be out there. I just haven't been focusing there, you know, for custody, a chain of custody on products and so forth. I think that there is, there is one important use case, which is as we go into the virtual world and spend much more time in the virtual world, the ability to have something in the real world that I can transport into and out of the virtual world that has a unique blockchain identifier. So in the virtual world, if Coca-Cola hands out a million digital ownership certificates, digital ownership certificates, right, of a million Cokes, that I can't replicate that, but I can take my virtual Coke in my wallet and turn it in for a real Coke at the store, right? So there's going to be that important use case, which a friend of mine, Eric Poulière, has been developing. With a company called Vitomic, like virtual atoms systems, but I'm still waiting for other ones. A good use case.

All right, we're winding down in the last few minutes here, and there are again so many questions, but I guess like, I like this one from Mike.

Yeah? Yeah, I was just gonna, no, go ahead, go ahead.

So, you know, what would you say would be one of the most significant and lasting changes that results from all this?

Crisis and scenarios that we're in today? A lot less in-person meeting and a lot more digitization of our ecosystem, which was going on anyway. It's just being accelerated. So a lot better software for digital health, for digital education, and acceleration of AI into everything. And just a series of expectations. One interesting thing is, day for half an hour on Zoom, and it's the spirits are great. Everybody's super productive, super pumped. And the old, the saying, let's get back to work. Guess what? We are at work. This is the new work.

Yeah, so, but there was a bunch of questions of mental health that we didn't get to.

It's also been, trying for people. So we're— this— you guys are all a community of entrepreneurs. Um, here's the deal: when you are seeing a problem, think opportunity. You know, write down every issue you're hearing about, every problem you're hearing about, and figure out a product or service to solve it, because we're exposing a massive amount of entrepreneurial opportunities that are coming out of this. And so, yeah, mental health is great. How do we stay in touch? I've been cognating, if that's even a word, ideas on this. So yeah, I mean, for sure.

Like, is there some big problem right now that you're facing that you would love, like, you got a few hundred entrepreneurs on the line right now. If you were to give, it could even be multiple. What are some things that you're facing you wish you could solve?

I need to completely and totally reinvent my annual conferences for Abundance 360, for Singularity University. And, you know, people are paying— everything sucks— 15x value where the event is much better digitally than in person, right? About— and, uh, one of the things I've been working on, I told you about, is I've been reinventing how I get my news. And I ended up creating a platform called futureloop.com. And it's a machine learning and neural net that goes and scans the world's news looking for positive semantic exponential technologies about industries. And so, and then we have a prediction engine for predicting the future because we have a large population of highly educated people and doing Delphi polls. And it's, It's incredible. If you check out futureloop.com, that was an interesting thing. We ended up focusing it on COVID-19. So every day, I get a news feed of all of the AI data-centric solutions, the CRISPR, the gene therapy solutions, all the exponentials and how they're solving the COVID-19 pandemic. And they're positive-focused now. It's all positive semantics, where these three exponentials are coming together and doing this. This is the first time the human race has ever had a singular enemy. And somewhere between 100 million and 200 million scientists, engineers, physicians, nurses, technologists are all focusing on solving this problem. And we are going to crush it.

Yeah, I think it's beautiful. And it's probably the first time in human history that the planet of humans has all been affected in such a short period of time, right? And that's like, because usually it takes a long time for things to spread.

Here, praying for an alien invasion for a long time to focus the planet. I guess this is a sort of an alien invasion. Uh, well, the—

hopefully it's, uh, maybe the one that brings us all together and does wonderful things. So Even though I can't see you, I'm giving you a virtual hug, my friend. This was lovely. Thank you for taking the time to speak with this community. We will share it. Thank you. I love you.

And I miss you. All right, take care.

Stay safe, stay healthy.

Thanks, buddy.