Peter Diamandis (@PeterDiamandis) is the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, co-host of the Exponential Wisdom Podcast, and co-author of Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World and Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think.
What We Discuss with Peter Diamandis:
- What does the future hold for human longevity, space colonization, artificial intelligence, and beyond?
- How can we adapt — individually and as a society — to deal with increased automation in the workforce?
- What is linear thinking and why does it cause us to miss the mark when coping with technology, innovation, and the advancement of the human race?
- If you don’t know your calling in life, your calling in life is to discover what that is.
- What experiments can kids curious about science do that won’t get them put on a no-fly list for the foreseeable future?
- And so much more…
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Predicting the future is a tricky business. But if you can manage to make it through medical school at your immigrant parents’ behest and still pursue the dream you’ve had of putting people into space ever since you saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, you may just have a shot at getting it right.
Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation and co-author of Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World and Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think joins us to talk about what advances and adaptations he thinks humanity can look forward to in the decades and centuries ahead — if we can overcome the hindrance of linear thinking.
Listen to this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show in its entirety to learn more about why Peter bets on solar power breakthroughs as our remedy to climate change, why he believes the cost of living is set for a major reduction, how technological unemployment will drive the call for universal basic income, what we pay for today that will be free tomorrow, the future of income equality (the haves and have-nots of today vs. the haves and super-haves of tomorrow), the problems with linear thinking, what it will take to make autonomous cars as ubiquitous as smartphones, what Peter means when he says “mindset is the only restrictor,” and lots more. Listen, learn, and enjoy!
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Miss the show we did with Dennis Carroll, the former USAID director for pandemic influenza and emerging threats? Catch up with episode 320: Dennis Carroll | Planning an End to the Pandemic Era here!
THANKS, PETER DIAMANDIS!
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Resources from This Episode:
- Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
- Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
- The Exponential Wisdom Podcast
- XPRIZE
- Singularity University
- Peter Diamandis | Website
- Peter Diamandis | Twitter
Peter Diamandis | How to Create a Future Bold in Abundance (Episodes 477)
Jordan Harbinger: Coming up on The Jordan Harbinger Show.
[00:00:02] Peter Diamandis: Virtual reality is going to get to the point where it's indistinguishable from reality. We're about to transform into a meta-intelligence. We're about to interconnect billions of people on the planet and become conscious at a different level. That is a future in the next 30 years.
[00:00:23] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional arms dealer, mafia enforcer, or rocket scientist. Each episode turns our guests' wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker.
[00:00:49] If you're new to this show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we have episodes starter packs, and these are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start to get started or to help somebody else get started. And of course, I love it when you help other people get started with the show. That's how we grow. That's what keeps the lights on around here.
[00:01:15] Today, one from the vaults, we're talking with Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation. If you've heard of them, XPRIZE offers cash prizes to teams that can do things like remove a hundred gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, or get a rocket into space and landing on another planet, anything from space exploration, the environment, the fight to end COVID-19. Peter has also written several books, including Bold and Abundance, both recommended reading if you are into futurology and the prediction of the future in terms of technology, AI, humanity. You should listen to this episode if you want to hear some crazy and very positive futurology predictions, such as living to the age of 500, colonizing space, and some incredible advances in AI and human achievement.
[00:02:00] We'll also delve into how society will need to evolve, to respond, to increase automation and artificial intelligence, as well as how we can make ourselves more competitive in the long term and the short term. Also why certain types of linear thinking causes us to miss the mark when we think about technology, innovation, and the advancement of the human race. Enjoy this episode from the vault with Peter Diamandis.
[00:02:23] Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers and creators every single week, it's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network, whether it's for professional or personal reasons, the course is free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. Dig the well, before you get thirsty. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they're in the course, they subscribed, they contribute. So come join us, you'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Peter Diamandis.
[00:02:51] One of the many reasons I wanted to talk to you today is because I found that you're in kind of an interesting in-between space where you're building the XPRIZE with millionaires, billionaires. You're giving up what seems like a really nice place of living in kind of an apartment just to make it happen, not caring, going back almost into student mode in a lot of ways. And then creating the XPRIZE with the goal of private space flight. And then you've got a lot of sacrifices, a little bit of luck, but probably not as much as some people would—
[00:03:18] Peter Diamandis: Right. Yeah, not as much as I've wanted.
[00:03:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, not as much you would have wanted for sure. And I think there are lessons there, and I think you created space for allowing something like the XPRIZE to actually happen. Not that it happened without you, but that you made it happen in a way that resulted from hustle and grind, but also because you were willing to kind of do pretty much anything to get there. Do you really want to live more than 500 years? Is that true?
[00:03:42] Peter Diamandis: Yeah, I mean, I think when I was in medical school, I remember looking at the body in a very different fashion. There was a TV show that was on, that was talking about the notion that certain life forms, turtles, whales, sharks lived hundreds of years as long, theoretically 700 years. Question I asked was if they can, why can't I. Then in medical school I realized, you know, it really is a hardware software problem.
[00:04:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:04:09] Peter Diamandis: And I think that we are going to learn how to extend the human lifespan indefinitely. And so I picked a ridiculous number of 700 years because that's how long, the longest large lifeform is supposedly living. Of course, if you can live 200 years now, you can live forever. But it's something I do desire and I think we're alive now during the most exciting time ever in human history, we're going to see the universe. We're going to understand the foundations of physics. We're going to transform what it means to be human and it's all happening now. And I think it's happening in the next 30, 40 years. But yeah, I'd like to live longer than that.
[00:04:45] Jordan Harbinger: Is it because you want to see the results of your work or your curiosity?
[00:04:48] Peter Diamandis: It's curiosity. It's all about every year is much more fascinating than last. I don't know why. I guess if you are sick and ill and tired and you don't want to go on, but if you have your health and if you can be vibrant and your mind can be alive and learning, why wouldn't you want to continue? I think so part of it is having a healthy extended human lifespan. It's not just about living old.
[00:05:15] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's not about being 80 for six of your 700 years or an 80-year-old physical condition.
[00:05:21] Peter Diamandis: Yeah.
[00:05:22] Jordan Harbinger: So you're watching your kid, you're watching the moon landing. You're enthralled. You tell your mom, you want to be an astronaut. And she says, "You got to follow your dad and be a doctor." Well, was she disappointed when you became a multimillionaire entrepreneur instead?
[00:05:33] Peter Diamandis: So listen, my parents grew up in small island in Greece called the Island of Lesbos, a small town, Mytilini, where my dad went from his small ocean side town to become New York physician was this massive leap forward. And it was like, you know, just a completely different orders of magnitude, different life. And being a physician was for them like the highest possible calling in terms of financial security, in terms of helping people, in terms of knowledge. And so they wanted the best that they knew for me. And my dad had built an OB/GYN practice. He delivered some 30,000 kids during his career. Remember having fun, doing those calculations with him.
[00:06:16] Anyway, long story short, that's what they knew, but my passion wasn't there. My passion was space. And so there was an ongoing argument always about, "Will I become a doctor? Will I become an astronaut?" And after I graduated medical school and I never went and did my internship or residency, my mom would say — it would be two questions. One, "Are you married yet? Should I'd be calling your wife?"
[00:06:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course.
[00:06:36] Peter Diamandis: Just like every mom asks. "You know, it's not too late for you to go and practice." So ultimately I didn't. I followed my dreams and I'm thankful for it. And you know, they've been proud of me.
[00:06:46] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Do you have any advice for people who find themselves in the wrong career or think maybe they're going into the wrong career? They haven't had the passion.
[00:06:53] Peter Diamandis: So I'm very clear and I do this with all my graduate students at Singularity University. Everybody who's in my Abundance 360 community, people who follow me in any way, shape or form. It's like you have to live a passion and purpose driven life. Because if you can, why would you not want to? And so a lot of people just don't understand what their passion and purpose is, and that's the hard part you know.
[00:07:15] And I'm amazed at, even in an organization or as a group, as highly selected and as academically achieved as the Singularity University Global Solutions Program, our graduate program of the 80 students who enter out of 4,000, 5,000 applicants, half of them, when I asked, "How many of you here know exactly your purpose and mission in life is?" Half raise your hands and half don't, which really blows me away.
[00:07:43] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:07:43] Peter Diamandis: Like they've been pursuing excellence. They've been pursuing knowledge. They've been pursuing more doing without knowing why. And so I say, "You know, listen, your job here during this 10-week program is to figure out what is your calling in life?" And you know, my advice to those listening to us here is if you don't know where it is, it is your calling in life. That's so critical for you to find and a couple of tricks for you to think about is what did you want to do as a kid, right? What was it that the nine or 10 or 12-year-old version of you love to do? That may be, we're told, "No, there's no career there," which is bullshit. There's a career in anything. Or, "You can't make a living that way," or "That's not possible for you," whatever the case might be. So what did you wanna do as a kid is one strong signal, one strong indicator of what your passion might be.
[00:08:32] Another is if I were to give you a billion dollars and say, "Go make the world a better place. You don't worry about income. You've got the money to make a difference. What do you want to do? Do you want to go cure a disease? Do you want to go teach people? Do you want to go build art museum? What do you want to do?" You can find some kind of a signal in the noise for your passion there.
[00:08:52] Jordan Harbinger: Do you think it's self-serving that if I had a billion dollars, I'd be doing something like this, but maybe with nicer equipment?
[00:08:58] Peter Diamandis: No, I think it's a matter of — I think you'd be thinking more about what reach you want. One of the things that's amazing today is that reach as possible. And you know, you do have state-of-the-art equipment and what you're doing today, right in this very moment and the reach that you have, would have cost orders of magnitude more 10 years ago and orders of magnitude more 10 years before that. And it would have been impossible 10 years before that.
[00:09:25] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yeah. We've been lugging this in on a truck and setting it up in a room with a reel-to-reel going. It is amazing the pace that things have made. And I was reading the book. The experiments that you did when you were a kid, disassembling toys, stockpiling chemicals, launching rockets. I just saw a lot of myself in there. The only problem I have with those rockets is whenever it launched, the parachute would melt. That was the problem I always have.
[00:09:45] Peter Diamandis: You didn't have enough wadding in there.
[00:09:46] Jordan Harbinger: I know it was always the wadding. You know, I skimped on the wadding. I knew it. Some of the things you did when you were young, makes me scared to have kids as well, because I'm thinking stockpiling of the explosives. I mean, talk about a no fly list or worse at this point. Do you think your kids — are they going to start driving you crazy with their pursuits? How much are you going to help into that?
[00:10:05] Peter Diamandis: Interesting because I have two five-year-old boys and they're already great experimentalists and it's like, "What experiment are we going to do today?" And it's like, "Oh my goodness." It's like, I can just see where it's going to go.
[00:10:16] Jordan Harbinger: It's only a matter of time.
[00:10:17] Peter Diamandis: It's only a matter of time. And the beautiful thing about it today is we can do different kinds of experiments. You know, I used to, when I was a kid, and Julian Guthrie writes on How to Make a Spaceship, my stories of my best friend, Billy Greenberg, and I would order chemicals from the chemical supply companies. I mean, we'd get huge boxes of potassium chloride and potassium nitrate and magnesium and sulfur and charcoal and manganese, and just all these chemicals that are explosives. We'd make our own explosives, our own rocket fuel our own M80's. We blew up all kinds of things, including my friend's swimming pool, but of course you'd be tracked down and as a terrorist.
[00:10:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You can't even order that stuff now.
[00:10:56] Peter Diamandis: You can't, right, even today's high school chemistry labs are so watered down as to be laughable. But we can do experiments with other things. We can build things on tablets and run experiments in the virtual world. We can create robots. My kids Lego sets are incredible. And so it's fun to see how we can experiment. We can 3D print stuff.
[00:11:18] Jordan Harbinger: I saw a 3D printer in the lobby.
[00:11:19] Peter Diamandis: Yeah, we got two 3D printers from 3D systems here.
[00:11:22] Jordan Harbinger: To have it in the lobby is an almost artistic statement, "We're so casual with creating things. This is what we have in our lobby." I don't know how much those things cost, but they're pretty pro-level, I imagine.
[00:11:33] Peter Diamandis: Yeah, they're pro-level 3D printers.
[00:11:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, more than the house I grew up in, I would imagine. On that note, people do say, "Oh, you know, we're heading to hell in a handbasket," or whatever the old timers like to say, these Luddites. We see a lot of bad news. Do you agree with this or do you see technology as offering a true solution to existential problems like global warming and education and poverty and things like that?
[00:11:51] Peter Diamandis: Well, yeah, I think the world's going to end — I'm just kidding.
[00:11:56] Jordan Harbinger: I was like, I read a different book than you.
[00:11:59] Peter Diamandis: And this is all chronicled in my first book—
[00:12:01] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:12:01] Peter Diamandis: —called Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, and I gave a TED Talk in 2011, 2012 when the book was launched. And one of the things I realized is that we, as humans, are genetically selected to see the bad news. And what that means is we see problems way in advance. It's like we see the potential for a problem and that we make it a real problem and it could be years or decades before it actually hits us. I see the problems and we advanced them in our mind to the point of, "Oh my God, it's a crisis. We can deal with it right now."
[00:12:38] But the fact of the matter is even as we go forward in time and we encounter the problem, we forget that there's been five, 10, 20 years of technological development. In abundance, I talked about the environmental crisis of the 1890s. If you read that—
[00:12:53] Jordan Harbinger: I did but I don't remember this.
[00:12:54] Peter Diamandis: The environmental crisis of 1890s was horse manure.
[00:12:57] Jordan Harbinger: Literally?
[00:12:58] Peter Diamandis: Literally horse manure.
[00:12:58] Jordan Harbinger: I got you.
[00:12:59] Peter Diamandis: So as people moved out of the rural areas into cities, they brought their motive power with them and their motive power was the horse. So as people start moving into New York, into Chicago, into San Francisco, into Detroit, whatever it was St. Louis, and they brought their horses, there was piles of horsesh*t so high that it was causing disease and runoff — and the predictions were dire.
[00:13:22] It's like we are predicting the number of people coming to cities with their horses, how are we going to deal with this? And what changed all that was the car. The car came along as a more advanced technology and got rid of this problem. So with environmental and energy issues we have today, we have serious issues. And if we were to continue to burn the fossil fuels, we do, it would get worse and worse and worse. However, my projection and that of other individuals, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, so forth is that we're heading towards a solar economy. And that the solar will be so prevalent, so cheap, so available, so decentralized that it will just be far more the driver for the economy.
[00:14:06] And so when you look at all of the metrics, we're living in an amazing world over the last hundred years, the per capita income for every nation on the planet is more than triple. The human lifespan is more than double. The cost of food has dropped 13-fold. Cost of energy has dropped 30-fold, transportation 100s of fold, communications millions of fold cheaper, case in point, this podcast.
[00:14:25] Jordan Harbinger: Right, sure.
[00:14:26] Peter Diamandis: Almost every possible conceivable metric. Literacy has exploded on the planet. The cost of access to healthcare has exploded. We romanticize the past and say, "Oh, the good old days." But we forget that life back in the good old days was short and brutish and brutal. 80-hour workweeks just to survive.
[00:14:43] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Hammering things in a factory or something like that. Sure. So what do you think is the most promising solution for climate change? Solar.
[00:14:50] Peter Diamandis: I think solar is for sure where I'm putting my bets. We get 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface, the earth from the sun than we consume as a species in a year. There's amazing breakthroughs on the horizon for batteries, for solar production. And there's no reason why we can't go to an all electric or majority electric economy in this planet.
[00:15:12] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned working in factories, 80-hour workweeks and things like that. What are your thoughts on the increasing effect of automation on society? I mean, do you think we're going to see dramatic changes in employment. And if so, how do we cope with that? If we're automating?
[00:15:26] Peter Diamandis: Right. So we are going to see dramatic changes in employment. AI and robotics will displace half of the jobs that we currently have, but they're also going to create new jobs that we currently can't conceive of. And we're going to merge with robots and merge with AIs in different ways. We're going to collaborate in different ways. We're going to create new kinds of capabilities we didn't have before.
[00:15:49] One of the things that's interesting is I checked a couple of years ago and looked at if there were any polls on the concept of do people love their jobs or do they hate their jobs? And it's a pretty staggering situation that something like 70 percent of them Americans hate their jobs.
[00:16:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's depressing.
[00:16:05] Peter Diamandis: Yeah. Well, and it's not surprising either, right? People don't work the checkout at the local grocery store because that's what they dreamed about.
[00:16:12] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:16:12] Peter Diamandis: They do clean toilets or stock boxes, because that's what they wanted to do as a child. It's what the job they have and it's what's available to them to put food on their table and get insurance for their family. And so let those jobs go away and how do we find a time where people can do what they love to do. And so I think that there's going to be a transformation in what people do and what gives them gratification.
[00:16:39] I write a blog each week and anybody interested, if you go to diamandis.com, I put out a blog every Sunday. The next blog is going to be on universal basic income. And so this concept that is being tested in governments around the world, that everyone who is a citizen of a country gets a basic income and we're going to demonetize the cost of living. Meaning the cost of living is going to radically come down. One case in point to that when we get to autonomous Uber's, having an autonomous Uber is going to be five times cheaper than owning a car.
[00:17:10] Jordan Harbinger: Good. Amen.
[00:17:11] Peter Diamandis: So you don't need to own a car. You don't have to park it. You don't have to fuel it. You have to get insurance for it. And you're chauffeured every place you go.
[00:17:19] Jordan Harbinger: Sounds great to me. Sounds good to me. How many years until you think, could we see either a negative income tax or the UBI in the USA? Are you thinking 20 years? Are you thinking 50 years? Do you have a timetable at all?
[00:17:30] Peter Diamandis: You know, I don't for the US. We're seeing it being adopted around the world already, and we're going to start to see more and more countries bringing it on. I think the US, we may see some versions of it within the next 10 years. It's going to accelerate as unemployment goes up, what I call technological unemployment. As that starts to go, when people start to outcry and saying, "I want my job." The government is going to have to do something about it. And UBI will have been proven and tested in different parts of the world already. It will be an easier onboarding process in the US at that point.
[00:18:04] Jordan Harbinger: What do you think in a world of lesser employment or no employment because of AI, robotics, automation? What do you think constitutes a comfortable or pleasant lifestyle for, at that point, the unemployed masses?
[00:18:16] Peter Diamandis: Well, so interestingly, I'm an engineer and I look at boundary conditions and in the boundary condition of where we're going over the next 20 or 30 years is the demonetization of the things that you and I pay for today. So the best education in the world will soon be free. Rather than going to MIT or Harvard or Stanford and spend $200,000 on tuition, you're going to get an education delivered by an AI, to you, to anyone in your family. And that will be the best education you can possibly get. You can get a secondary education at a school if you want for socialization or things like that. But learning the knowledge is going to be best delivered by an AI that knows your passions, your abilities, and follows everything you do and gives you lessons throughout the day. Healthcare will be delivered by AI and robots effectively for free. It will be a time in the future where if you need some kind of surgery, the last thing you want is a human surgeon touching you, right?
[00:19:14] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah, well.
[00:19:14] Peter Diamandis: That robot's done it a million times perfectly. And so if we can see the demonetization of education of healthcare, of cars, VR. VR, and augmented reality, plus autonomous cars means you don't have to live in downtown Santa Monica if that's where your work is, where the real estate prices are ridiculous. You can live an hour away or two hours away and commute by VR where the house prices are one-tenth the cost. So all of a sudden we're going to change what it costs to live. And at the same time, the quality of life — you know, we forget that people under the poverty line, the United States today are living better than the Kings and Queens did 200 years ago,
[00:19:56] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Peter Diamandis. We'll be right back.
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[00:21:03] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is sponsored in part by Fabletics. Fabletics Men is for every guy who wants to look and feel as best without breaking the bank. They keep it really, really simple. They focus on a few things and they do those things. Well, sounds like something you heard on this show, right? That means Lululemon quality for half the price. I hired a trainer recently, you probably heard me humble bragging about that. And I was working out in the cotton shirts that I just had in my closet and they get sweaty and they get stinky and they don't pull right in them when they're wet, because I'm working so hard on this dead bod. They pull weird. So I wear my Fabletics now. They're much better. They're suited to the occasion. The quality is top-notch. They're designed for workouts. Who knew there's actual workout clothing that comes in handy? So go to fabletics.com/jordan. They'll give you a crazy deal. Namely, your first two pairs of shorts for just 24 bucks when you become a Fabletics Men VIP member at checkout, which gets you a 20 to 50% off retail prices, free shipping on orders over 49 bucks. Free returns, free exchanges within 45 days. You can skip months if you want to. It's not one of those things that locks you in. Go to fabletics.com/jordan. Now, back to Peter Diamandis on The Jordan Harbinger Show.
[00:22:10] I remember, a science teacher when I was in sixth grade, said something like, "Who here would want to be a King in Egypt?" And of course, everyone raised their hand and he goes, "What if you could never have toast again?" Because you probably couldn't get a piece of toast in Egypt, it would be really hard. I mean, sure, someone could find a roast, a piece of toast for you, but good luck, you know, making a s'more back then. And everyone was kind of like, "I really loved those, you know," All the hands went down. On that same token, do you see technology increasing or decreasing the gap between rich and poor? You talk about demonetization, looking at something like Planetary Resources, you could make trillions of dollars, I would imagine, mining an asteroid. We might eliminate poverty entirely using AI, automation, or perhaps that gap could increase tenfold.
[00:22:54] Peter Diamandis: Yeah, so great question. And what I see is the following: we've lived in a world of have and have-nots, and it's been changing over time. So take you back a thousand years ago to Egypt, once again, you know, where the Pharaoh was the have and all the slaves, you know, 99.99999 percent of the population were the have-nots. And that's what it was. There were a few people at the very top of the mountain, the top of the food chain, and the masses. And today, you know, it's changed where we have the haves. We have huge middle-class haves, and then we have a diminishing number of have-nots. I want you to imagine in the near future, we're going to have a world where every single person on this planet, every man, woman, and child has their basic needs being met — food, water, shelter, healthcare, education, energy, you know, whatever the Maslow's hierarchy of needs are here. So I imagine a world of haves and then some super haves.
[00:23:55] Jordan Harbinger: Super haves, right. So they'll still be people who have their own spaceship or whatever.
[00:23:59] Peter Diamandis: Yeah. Or their asteroids, live on other planets, living a hundred years, but a world in which a mom in the middle of Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda in the poorest parts of the world knows that her children have access to the world's best education, world's best healthcare, all the energy, clean water tech access they want. And so that's the world we're heading towards and I would rather have a world of haves and a few super haves than a world of have-nots and haves.
[00:24:31] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. I definitely agree with that. Who do you think is going to get to Mars? First SpaceX, NASA, China? It's not going to be NASA.
[00:24:39] Peter Diamandis: No. I put my money on SpaceX for sure. No question.
[00:24:42] Jordan Harbinger: Will you go yourself if given the opportunity?
[00:24:44] Peter Diamandis: Oh yeah, I mean, I would love to go. I'm someone who wants to travel to space. I'd love to go to Mars. I'd love to go to the moon. I'd love to start an off-world colony. I think there's sort of space falls into three groups, the nights, the Mars colony first, and the people who want to build colonies in free space and not go into a gravitational well. I've spent my time on all. I'm thinking about all three.
[00:25:10] Jordan Harbinger: Weightlessness for that extended period of time. I was talking with Mike Massimino and he said, "Look, after a while, you got to have that gravity. There's something about it."
[00:25:19] Peter Diamandis: In my version of a space colony, such as that, of Gerard K. O'Neill, would be a large rotating habitat to—
[00:25:26] Jordan Harbinger: Oh right.
[00:25:26] Peter Diamandis: —to create artificial gravity.
[00:25:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I saw you did an AMA on Reddit or an AMA and you trashed a couple of people jokingly of course, about not using their linear mind to think. What does that mean? What do you mean by that?
[00:25:40] Peter Diamandis: So as humans, we evolved hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago in a world that is local and linear. Put yourself back on the savannas of Africa during the first humanoids. And back then nothing changed, right? The world was pretty much the same generation to generation, to generation, nothing changed over a thousand years. And anything that affected you was local. It was within a day's walk. And so our brains, the wetware and hardware of our brains are what I describe as local and linear. And of course, the world today is anything but that. Today, the world is global and exponential. So we all have a linear mindset, which means we tend to think tomorrow and the next day and next week and next month, and next year will look like last year. But of course, we're living during a time of greatest change and being agile to be able to have an exponential mindset, have a global mindset is very important.
[00:26:35] Jordan Harbinger: Looking at it, society evolving along with technology, do you think that society will be able to evolve as quickly as technology? What type of adjustments will we have to make as a society say in the next 10 years?
[00:26:47] Peter Diamandis: So that's tough. We, humans and society do not evolve as fast as tech and in particular, there are structures in society, governments, and religions that tend to keep things as stable as possible. Humans of our very nature is we don't like change. We like to wake up in the morning and know the world is the same way as it was the night before. And when things change radically, it's very disrupting and very disconcerting. But when something improves tenfold like digital cameras versus film cameras, or Uber versus taxis, there's a very rapid adoption curve. And then we adopt that as the new baseline. So the challenge is that we're going to have a lot of radical change and it's going to disrupt a lot of industries and that kind of large scale change on the governmental side does not occur.
[00:27:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, for sure. What do you think will permeate society faster? Something like smartphones, which seemed to take a while, but are now in the hands of everybody. And then my parents are looking to upgrade their iPhone or self-driving cars, which may also take forever just because of regulation.
[00:27:59] Peter Diamandis: Yeah. That's what's interesting, right? And that's an important point that iPhones, smartphones, once the spectrum was allocated by the FCC, there was no other regulatory hurdles to pass. Autonomous cars are hitting a few hurdles. One is pre-existing systems like taxi and rental car companies, but the adoption has been so extraordinarily rapid because the convenience is so high from Uber. And now what's going on is you've got companies like Google, like Uber, and like Tesla actually getting a lot of data. And they're getting data because they're doing it really smart. Like I own a model S and the model X, and both of those cars have autopilot on it. And I drive it on autopilot, as much as I can. And when it's being driven on autopilot, it's uploading data to the network. You know, Tesla is gathering a huge amount of data with which to train its algorithms. And there will be a point at some time very soon or probably there now that it is safer for the world at large double autonomous cars driving than people.
[00:29:06] Jordan Harbinger: I agree with that. I mean, you lived in LA. You've seen the drinking here.
[00:29:10] Peter Diamandis: And so I think ultimately there's going to be, while it's going to be hard to get the rules placed, there's going to be enough data to make the point that says, "By not passionate rules, you're harming people's lives."
[00:29:23] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's going to become a clearly more dangerous scenario. I predict that the gun nuts of the next 50 years are going to be the, "I deserve to be able to drive my own car." Those are the people causing 99 percent of the accidents.
[00:29:35] Peter Diamandis: It's like when my 80-year-old dad who had the onset of Alzheimer's had his Florida driver's license automatically renewed.
[00:29:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. To take a driver's license away from somebody there's a whole process — basically, you have to have full power of attorney over that person to do it.
[00:29:49] Peter Diamandis: Yeah.
[00:29:49] Jordan Harbinger: It's impossible. What are you doing to educate your children? What will you be doing to make sure their education goes well? And what are you going to do that most people are not doing with their kids right now.
[00:30:00] Peter Diamandis: Wow. So that's a great question. My kids are five, so it's early for them. But I think about the notion that they're intercepting a very different world than I did. And they're intercepting the world that's changing at a much faster rate than I did. So I have a big debate and conversation always about tablet time, but becoming agile in using tech is going to become the oxygen, the lingua franca mixed metaphors here of the future. And I have a hard time saying, "No, you shouldn't be using the technology." In fact, probably the stronger they are, the more agile they are, the better it's going to be for them. But I've realized that for me, there are three basics, have nothing to do with technology that I want for them. It's one, helping them find out what their passion is and supporting that no matter what it is. A dear friend of mine, his passion was video games when he was growing up and he became one of the top video game designers on the planet. I mean, great. All right. So what is your passion? What is their passion?
[00:31:08] The second thing is helping them remain curious. I asked my kids every day when I dropped them off, you know, I say to them, "Ask them good questions today." And then when I pick them up from school, I say, "What questions did you ask?" It's like just getting them into the mindset of asking questions, as many questions as possible. And then grit which is making sure that if they want something to keep at it, to not give up.
[00:31:30] Jordan Harbinger: Why is that so important to you? It seems like a dumb question on its face, but you are a big mindset guy from reading your books. You love to talk about how you can do anything you put your mind to. Why is that such an important realization for not only kids, but for everyone?
[00:31:44] Peter Diamandis: Because as individuals we're becoming so empowered today that mindset is the only restrictor. There's no lack of capital, you know, 15 to $20 billion in crowdfunding. There's more angel capital and venture capital in any time before. So capital's not an issue. Access to knowledge is not an issue, right? With Google, we can know anything you want. Access to experts is not an issue. Access to computing power is not an issue.
[00:32:10] So if you say, what is the scarce resource? The scarce resource is the passionate, committed mind. The person who says, "Okay, I am going to make this happen, right? So all throughout Julian's book, How to Make a Spaceship, you'll see my absolute dog in pursuit of this passion of the thousand times, the XPRIZE concept died in my not giving up. And she does an amazing job telling that story over and over and over again. And, you know, we wouldn't be having this conversation and your listeners wouldn't be listening to this had I given up. Ultimately mindset is, for me, the single most important thing that a person can have.
[00:32:54] Jordan Harbinger: You didn't grow up with a big trust fund or anything like that. So why were you so confident you could just raise $10 million. And in fact, when you started the XPRIZE I heard and I read you didn't have the $10 million to give away. You got an insurance policy, the hole in one insurance, along with 150-plus projections from trying other ways to get it, of course.
[00:33:12] Peter Diamandis: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I just was so confident in the idea because I was clear that it was a good idea. And if you have confidence in your ideas, and I also had done enough in the space world that I had built enough of a track record.
[00:33:26] Julian starts with the eight-year-old Peter in the book and chronicles my time at MIT and creating a group called SEDS, students for exploration and development of space, which Jeff Bezos started the chapter at Princeton and, you know, then it goes on to International Space University and my launch company, and Zero Gravity Corporation and eventually XPRIZE. I had done enough things where I knew what was the realm of doable and I knew what was a good idea. And I was trying not to bullshit myself. And I had enough people who I bounced it off, who got it and said yes.
[00:34:00] And so my confidence level grew and to the point where it wasn't a matter of, "Is this a good idea anymore?" It's like, "Dammit, someone out there is going to help me fund this thing. It's a good idea. It's going to work." And when you can find that idea, and there's so many examples over and over again of companies that were overnight successes after 10 years of hard work.
[00:34:21] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yeah. This podcast being one of them. I mean, we're no Facebook or anything, but online—
[00:34:25] Peter Diamandis: Awesome.
[00:34:26] Jordan Harbinger: You seem to have taken a much different route than many normal entrepreneurs in this type of space. You're laughing to yourself cause obviously we—
[00:34:33] Peter Diamandis: Well, you know, I don't know what a normal route for an entrepreneur is.
[00:34:36] Jordan Harbinger: Me, neither I think that the tech space, the normal routine is to go execute on some singular, big idea or maybe a few big ideas like Elon. Well, first of all, you're dedicating your life right now. It seems to helping other entrepreneurs facilitate and executing on their big ideas. Why did you go that route after the original XPRIZE?
[00:34:56] Peter Diamandis: Well, I mean, you have to understand, I have always lived and worked on multiple fronts, so I'm actively engaged in running probably seven companies right now, but I'm involved, typically I know what I do well, what I will enjoy. And I enjoy coming up with the idea, the formulation of the vision, helping raise the capital, getting the team on board, and then typically taking a role as executive chairman, hiring a CEO. I don't love the management of the details of the people, the hiring, the firing, and so forth until I partner with a great CEO.
[00:35:33] So here at XPRIZE, I'm a service executive chairman. I've got Marcus shingles as CEO at Singularity University. I'm co-founder with Ray Kurzweil. He's the chancellor and executive chairman there. And Rob Nail is a CEO at Planetary Resources. Chris Lewicki is the CEO and Eric Anderson and I are co-executive chairman and so forth at Human Longevity and my venture fund Bull Capital Partners, and this new stem cell company called Celularity. All of these cases, these are — I'm filled with the diversity and excitement of running those companies. They're all science fiction novels. They're all crazy moonshots. And then there's a layer separate from those which is sort of XPRIZE helping incentivize entrepreneurs, Singulair University helping to educate entrepreneurs, Bull Capital investing in them.
[00:36:20] And then the work I do through Abundance 360 and my weekly blogs is really trying to help people see the way the world is changing. You know, my mission and purpose in life I sort of wrote it out when I was at a date with destiny, Tony Robbins' event. Tony is a dear friend of mine. And I realized that we're undergoing a transformation as a species during our lifetimes. It's like going from one fish to the land, we're undergoing a transformation. And my mission and my purpose is to inspire and guide this transformation, both on and off the earth. We're going to transform how we raise our kids, how we govern, how we live our lives, where humanity exists in the solar system, in the universe. And it's happening now at an accelerating rate. And it's going to be a time, which is both scary for many who don't want change and exciting for the fact of what we're becoming.
[00:37:18] We're becoming what I call a meta-intelligence, multi human intelligence, and we're connecting in ways like never before. And so I think about this a lot, and I write about this and I talk about this. And for me, it's the highest level of this video game we're playing. It's an exciting time to be alive.
[00:37:38] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Peter Diamandis. We'll be right back.
[00:37:43] This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help. We're all human. We all struggle from time to time. We're always changing, going through ups and downs of life, depending on our current circumstances. Right now is a real lonely time for a lot of folks. And I'll be honest, therapy for me has been extremely helpful in many stages of my life. Not just now, not just during crazy rough career times in the past. Therapy is also a great place to learn about yourself, understand your past, how it impacts your current life decisions and set goals. And if you listened to Feedback Friday, which I know you do, because it's our most popular episode of the show, I'm always recommending therapy. I'm always recommending Better Help. Of course, I recommend you work out. Why wouldn't you do the same thing for your mind and for your heart for that matter? Plus consider other successful individuals, no names mentioned, who've had help from coaches, mentors, and psychologists, including top athletes, executives, Nobel prize winners. Therapy ain't just for weirdos like me. It's for everybody and I highly recommended it.
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[00:40:49] If you had to pick between all those different companies, I mean, if you had to achieve just one more significant milestone, what would it be?
[00:40:56] Peter Diamandis: Oh, goodness. That's not a fair statement. I'm not going to choose between children. I have I think three basic thrusts opening up space, extending the human lifespan, and solving grand challenges. So those are the three thrusts that I have. Let's squeeze a fourth in by helping entrepreneurs of taking the shots. But anyway—
[00:41:18] Jordan Harbinger: That's like wishing for more wishes with the chimney, right?
[00:41:20] Peter Diamandis: I think so. Yeah. So I wrote something called Peter's Laws long ago. I saw a copy of Murphy's law on my business partner's wall. And I was like so pissed at it. I just like stared at every day and it said, if anything can go wrong, it will. And I was like, that's just like the worst attitude you can possibly have. And I went on my whiteboard and I wrote, if anything can go wrong, fix it to hell with Murphy. And that became Peter's law. And then I started adding to it. My second law was when given a choice, take both. And so that just has iterated a few times.
[00:41:51] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we just did that right here as well. So are you in between companies all day long? I mean, how do you kind of manage your time when it comes to that?
[00:41:59] Peter Diamandis: I manage it going between companies. I typically will spend, you know, yesterday, I was in Panama yesterday. This company is called Celularity, which is a stem cell company. I was down there with Bob Hariri, Today, it was PHD ventures. Tomorrow, I'm at Singularity University all day. So I'll go and rotate, but of course, when shit hits the fan, I'll focus on what the problems are or when opportunities come up, I'll go and focus on that. And for me, it's a glorious life of ADD.
[00:42:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it sounds like it, are you doing that in Panama because of the laws in the US just too much of a pain in the—
[00:42:31] Peter Diamandis: Well, it's more that stem cell science is developed to the point that there's extremely strong evidence of its efficacy, but the laws that the FDA follows are not structured for stem cell science yet. Lots of studies are going on. I went down for two reasons. One, there's a stem cell clinic called the Stem Cell Institute in Panama City, Panama that we're looking at potentially rolling up in a stem cell roll-up that we're working on. And second, I went down to get my own treatment on my knee and my shoulder. So I was scheduled to have basically shoulder and knee surgery, which would have taken me out for a couple of months of full mobility. And I went and had Monday afternoon, two days ago now, the stem cell injections into the cavities of my knees and my shoulders to look at rejuvenating, the connective tissues there. And so I'll see in the next 60 days, how that goes, the data is extremely positive. And if I can avoid going into surgery, great.
[00:43:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. No kidding. The shots in your kneecaps sound painful, but it's a lot less painful than surgery.
[00:43:41] Peter Diamandis: No, it wasn't painful at all. So I was taking video with my cell phone. They were injecting me—
[00:43:46] Jordan Harbinger: Oh wow.
[00:43:47] Peter Diamandis: —and I'm sharing it with my community,
[00:43:49] Jordan Harbinger: Really? Periscoping your—
[00:43:51] Peter Diamandis: Yeah, basically.
[00:43:52] Jordan Harbinger: —knee injections. How do you quantify success? You're involved in so many things. Is there a metric you use to definitively say, "Look, I'm making an impact with this"?
[00:44:00] Peter Diamandis: Well, I think the metric is, "Am I having fun?"
[00:44:03] Jordan Harbinger: Really?
[00:44:03] Peter Diamandis: Am I having fun? And then, I mean, each company has its metrics. Each company has key points. Early on is, are you dead on the tech then? Are you raising the capital? And now you're attracting the clients. You know, my theme for 2017 is experimentation. So rapid experimentation, are we experimenting? What's the data we're collecting? What's the targets we're setting? Are we achieving those targets? But ultimately, am I enjoying myself? Do I feel like I'm making a difference?
[00:44:34] Jordan Harbinger: Looking at it like that probably makes it an easier decision rather than second guessing all the metrics and all seven-plus of your current ventures. It probably simplifies things quite a bit. What's the ultimate goal for humanity here? Continued existence, expansion to the rest of the galaxy/universe, acquisition of data.
[00:44:52] Peter Diamandis: So I think as I mentioned earlier, we're undergoing a transformation as humanity. We're evolving, we're going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism to evolution by intelligent direction. We're rapidly changing what it means to be human. And I think we're creating AI. We're creating new forms of life. We are literally writing genomes of new life forms. We're beginning the ability to edit our own genomics with CRISPR/Cas9 Technology, and we're going to become a new species. And it's shocking to me, the timeline that I see, which is a few decades, 30 years at the most.
[00:45:38] Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity 2029. He also talks about the notion that in the early 2030s, we're going to create the ability to interface the human cortex with the cloud, such that we're going to be able to expand our memory, expand our cognitive capabilities. You know, our brain is very limited. Our neocortex is 300 million pattern recognizers, a hundred neurons each. And when you use that for memorizing things, you've used it up, but we offload a lot of that, right? On my cell phone or all that emails and phone numbers and so forth. So we're transforming. And I think we're going to become, you know, you, as a human are a collection of 10 trillion human cells. Each one of your cells is a life form, but it makes you in a connected form. And I think of each of us as humans, as individual life forms that are about to become connected into a meta-intelligence. And I think we're going to be conscious on a brand-new level. And I think that's, again, we're building the backbone with the Internet and we're the centers that we're connecting, creating and connecting into our brains in this next decade. I know so many startups working on brain computer interface. It's an extraordinary time.
[00:46:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can't wait for some of that stuff. As a language learner, I was speaking with some of these startup folks and they said, "Yeah, you're learning Chinese. That's going to be a huge waste of your time in a few years. I hope you're having fun doing it because in 10 years you'll be able to " "learn Chinese in minutes." You'll just have no need to do it.
[00:47:12] Peter Diamandis: Well, you will speak English and it'll come out Chinese in the listeners ears.
[00:47:16] Jordan Harbinger: Right, exactly.
[00:47:17] Peter Diamandis: We have already hearing aids that can translate.
[00:47:20] Jordan Harbinger: I saw that. And I wondered how well that works because of course the second I posted that online people went, "Oh, that'll never work with Vietnamese because the verb goes at the end or it'll never work with this." And I'm just thinking, this is society underestimating AI to the point where — just like my dad, when I told him about Yahoo in the '90, he said, "Nobody needs that there are libraries everywhere." And I thought to myself, "This is my dad's comment all over again." "Oh, well, you know, we won't need that for this and people are going to be bilingual or this is going to happen." And if you don't think this AI can figure out that the verb goes at the end of a German sentence than a completely different page here.
[00:47:53] You hang out with top people all the time and by hanging out, I mean, work with and fraternize with. What are a few traits you see in common? I know everybody works hard. I know everyone reads a lot, but is there anything, maybe even some dark stuff. You know, are we all scared children that have this crazy desire for power, competitive to a sick degree.
[00:48:10] Peter Diamandis: I think, and I wrote about in my book, Bold, I am honored to have friends, investors, and board members, folks like Larry Page, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. And I write about them and others. And I think to a large degree, they're all massive optimists, really optimist about the future. And they are about rapid experimentation about just continually experimenting and trying things and not re-guessing. They are about doing audacious moonshots. You know, when you've reinvented an industry like PayPal for Elon, like what do you do next? They're also driven by passion. Probably the most important thing is they're a passion-driven individual and they're creating stuff that they would love to see created and that they want. And it's that level of passion of grit of not giving up. And of course, there's a good amount of luck in all of this, but they're all incredibly smart. So that's a reality amongst all of them,
[00:49:16] Jordan Harbinger: The optimism and the passion are interesting. You don't hear about the optimism as much.
[00:49:20] Peter Diamandis: Yeah.
[00:49:20] Jordan Harbinger: It's probably not as sexy as a well, you know, I grind and I do this and I'm always — it doesn't have as much of a cool factor to be optimistic necessarily. It's more hyper driven is what we hear about most of the time. How often do you genuinely go offline and take a break and not look at anything?
[00:49:37] Peter Diamandis: At night, when I go to sleep.
[00:49:38] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, when you're unconscious.
[00:49:39] Peter Diamandis: Yes.
[00:49:41] Jordan Harbinger: So every day for several hours,
[00:49:42] Peter Diamandis: Oh man, it's really tough for me. That's one of my biggest challenges is shutting down. I was in Panama as I said, and I flew yesterday home in a seven and a half hour flight, and you know, I basically spent six and a half hours, doing email and I allowed myself to sleep for an hour, just so I would be a little bit refresh when I got to my five-year-olds. But I aspire to doing less, but I, you know, I'd be bullsh*tting myself if I said, I really done that. I'm on seven by 24, by 365. At some point I got to say, "Actually, you love it. So stop complaining about it."
[00:50:21] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:50:21] Peter Diamandis: But the thing that is the counterbalancing force is I do put down my phone and my computer to go and play with my boys. So it'll be an hour in the morning and an hour when they come back from school and I will do my damnedest, like rushing back after our conversation right now to go and get them from school.
[00:50:42] Jordan Harbinger: What is next for you? Are you going to put more irons in the fire?
[00:50:45] Peter Diamandis: So I think I'm always putting more irons in the fire and I'd be bullsh*tting myself if I said I don't. So I expect starting one or two companies a year. Investing in a dozen companies each year.
[00:50:56] Jordan Harbinger: What's the next XPRIZE or XPRIZEs?
[00:50:58] Peter Diamandis: Oh wow. We have some great XPRIZEs. ANA Airlines is funding an XPRIZE called the Avatar XPRIZE. Can you create a robot that you can plug your consciousness into? You can see and hear through the robot's eyes and ears. You can move and walk around through the robot and you can project your consciousness into a village in Tanzania and do a surgery. So it's disintermediating the future of travel.
[00:51:26] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. And you can explore other planets that are toxic to humans or too dangerous.
[00:51:31] Peter Diamandis: Yes, that's a great one with Caterpillar working on an Iron Man XPRIZE. The president of Caterpillar basically came down with ALS and he's going to have reduce mobility. We said could there be an XPRIZE to create sort of an Iron Man suit that would allow a person with ALS to actually open the door and get around and communicate and so forth. So a lot of interesting technologies along those lines.
[00:51:58] We just launched a water abundance XPRIZE. Can you take water out of the humidity of the air in India and give people 20 liters of clean drinking water? And a woman in safety XPRIZE, can you create an XPRIZE for a technology device that allows a young girl to walk around the most dangerous cities in India safely?
[00:52:16] Jordan Harbinger: Oh wow. And it's funny because there's not really a whole lot of, "It has to be this way and do this," you're leaving this up largely to the creativity of the people involved. That is what I think, at least from reading your books, it looks like makes the magic, because you can really find ideas that — you can't find these ideas with constraints attached.
[00:52:33] Peter Diamandis: Yes.
[00:52:34] Jordan Harbinger: It has to be a wide open. Can you tell us something that's true that you believe that just almost nobody agrees with you on?
[00:52:41] Peter Diamandis: Well, two things, one is that we're living in a virtual existence that I think we'll for sure. We're in nth generation, virtual world. We are going to create a next virtual world that AIs, that we're in a video game, that we're playing in a virtual existence. That's one, I believe that, and it's not, it wouldn't change anything I do.
[00:53:01] The second thing is that we're about to transform into a meta-intelligence that we're about to interconnect billions of people on the planet and become conscious at a different level. That is a future in the next 30 years.
[00:53:14] Jordan Harbinger: So just to clarify, you think that what we're doing now is we're maybe a simulation or some sort of virtual existence that another civilization has created. We just don't see it. It's like Westworld—
[00:53:24] Peter Diamandis: Yeah.
[00:53:24] Jordan Harbinger: —where these robots that think we're in reality.
[00:53:27] Peter Diamandis: And we will create the next iteration of that. AI and virtual reality is going to get to the point where it's indistinguishable from reality. And so it's not just a VR, a virtual existence. It's that we're an nth generation, one generation to the next, becomes the next, I think of the world that way. No one else needs to agree with me. It doesn't change the way I see or do anything. But that's my belief.
[00:53:54] Jordan Harbinger: Can I ask why you think that? I have heard that before, but only from Sci-Fi writers and things like that?
[00:53:59] Peter Diamandis: Because I see that's where we're going. And if that's where we're going, then, you know, in a universe 14 and a half billion years old, I believe life is ubiquitous in the universe. I think it's a force of nature and we're not the first ones to have reached this level of technological advancement.
[00:54:19] Jordan Harbinger: So we could be biological AI or something along those lines?
[00:54:23] Peter Diamandis: Or virtual AI.
[00:54:24] Jordan Harbinger: Or just not here at all, right? Where is here? We don't know. Peter, thank you so much. It's been—
[00:54:31] Peter Diamandis: My pleasure.
[00:54:31] Jordan Harbinger: —fascinating.
[00:54:33] I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a sample of my interview with an emerging infectious disease expert, that's taking a proactive approach to identify, prepare for, and stop viral threats before they become pandemics. Here's a quick look inside.
[00:54:49] Dennis Carroll: A new influenza virus that is transmissible and is deadly, that is what will then sweep around the world as a pandemic.
[00:54:59] Jordan Harbinger: The 1918 flu at the end of World War I, we had 50 to 100 million deaths.
[00:55:04] Dennis Carroll: That was 50 to 100 million deaths when the world's population was 1.8 billion. So think about it today, even if it took us 300,000 years to hit the billion mark, we've been able to add six billion in just 10 decades.
[00:55:17] Jordan Harbinger: That's six billion people.
[00:55:18] Dennis Carroll: Yeah , and by the time we get to the end of this century, we're going to be right on the edge of 12 billion.
[00:55:25] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.
[00:55:26] Dennis Carroll: The speed with which an influenza virus could move is staggering. If were virus to emerge today within one year, a year later, two billion people would likely be infected. And if it were as lethal as the 1918, which had a mortality rate of three percent, you're talking about hundreds of millions of people.
[00:55:47] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.
[00:55:47] Dennis Carroll: The fact of the matter is time marches on. The societies we live in today that we take for granted will be a footnote in history 500 years from now. The architecture that we surround ourselves with, they will be ruined or forgotten. It's not a question of it. There will be epidemics, there will be pandemics. It is a question of when.
[00:56:12] Jordan Harbinger: For more including why a future influenza epidemic is not a matter of if but when and why vaccine hesitancy is one of the top 10 health threats in the entire world, check out episode 320 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Dennis Carroll.
[00:56:29] Thank you to Peter Diamandis. His books are Bold and Abundance. We'll link to those in the show notes. Also, this is from the vault, right? So remember this was recorded several years ago. He turned out to be right about SpaceX being the first viable commercial rocket company. He was very right. Although by the time we recorded this, if you're kind of on the inside, maybe that was a foregone conclusion, I guess we'll never know. We'd have to ask Elon Musk if we're ever given the chance. Big thank you to Peter for coming on the show again.
[00:56:57] Remember, we're going to link to the books in the show notes. If you buy the books, please use our website links. That does help support the show. Worksheets for this episode in the show notes. Transcripts for the episode in the show notes. Feel free to reach out and connect with me. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me on LinkedIn.
[00:57:12] I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system, software, and tiny habits that I use to keep in touch with hundreds and hundreds of people — if not thousands, now that I think about it. It's our Six-Minute Networking course. The course is free. It's over at jordanharbinger.com/course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribed to the course. Come join us, you'll be in smart company and that's where you belong.
[00:57:37] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My amazing team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into future predictions, science technology, share this episode with them. Hopefully, you find something great in every episode. So please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.
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