Ep 56: How to Think Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos

Dr. Peter Diamandis http://www.xprize.org/about/staff/peter-h-diamandis-md has been named one of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders" by Fortune Magazine. You asked for an entire episode with him, so here it is! The subject is simple: How to think big, and how to use the key strategies of Peter's friends and investors http://www.boldbook.com/?orid=78453&opid=1, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Larry Page. How do they create maximum leverage? How do they think differently? We explore all of this. SHOW NOTES and other links should be available shortly here http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. In the field of innovation, Diamandis is Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation http://www.xprize.org/. Among many other things, Diamandis is also the Co-Founder (along with Craig Venter and Bob Hariri) of Human Longevity Inc. (HLI); and Co-Founder of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecraft to mine asteroids for precious materials (seriously). If I could ask one person to write one book, it would Peter and his new tome, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World http://www.boldbook.com/?orid=78453&opid=1. In fact, I have been asking him for years, and now it has arrived. The back cover also gave me serious blurb envy. Check out these testimonials http://www.boldbook.com/?orid=78453&opid=1 from Bill Clinton, Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil. Ray says simply: “If you read one business book in the twenty-first century, this http://www.boldbook.com/?orid=78453&opid=1 should be the one."

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate, Tyler.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for visiting the fine sponsors of this show who keep it free for all of you. 99designs is your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. I've used them for years. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see some of the competitions that I have run successfully, including one for the cover of The Four Hour Body, which later hit number one New York Times. So, visit 99designs.com/tim. If you would prefer some business mentorship, go to Shopify.com/tim, where you can find out how you can get an all-expense-paid trip to Necker Island, which is the private island of billionaire Sir Richard Branson, to get mentored by Sir Richard himself, yours truly, Seth Godin, and many others for an entire week.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out, Shopify.com/tim.

• 1:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, my clever little monkeys. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I interview world-class performers, ranging from billionaire investors to chess prodigies and everything in between, to try to dissect how they do what they do: the tools, the tricks, the resources that you can use. And in this episode, I'm having a chat with my friend Peter Diamandis. Dr. Peter Diamandis has been named one of the world's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine. He has made a career out of doing the seemingly impossible, and he is an expert in thinking big, huge, beyond anything you could imagine. And this entire episode is dedicated to helping you do exactly that. So, without further ado, please meet Peter Diamandis.

• 2:00Tim Ferriss?

  Peter, welcome to the show.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Tim, great to be here.

• 2:04Tim Ferriss?

  The guest who was so nice, we had to do it twice. We, of course, had you on with Tony Robbins, which was great fun, and I'm thrilled to have you back. And for those who perhaps didn't catch part one, I'd love to give them a little bit of context on who you are, because there are very few people I would actually put in the category of visionary, because it's a very overused term, but it's so appropriate for you. You've built something along the lines of helped build 15 or so companies at this point, but I'd love if you could give people a little bit of context and certainly mention X Prize, Planetary Resources, and HLI.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. My pleasure, and thank you for having me back. I do appreciate it. I mean, fundamentally, I'm a nine-year-old kid who's working on making my dreams come true. I have started, as you said, about, last count, as 17 companies, most of them in the space technology, space arena, but of late, it's been about solving the world's grand challenges. So I'm a medical doctor by training, molecular biologist, and aerospace engineer. Since the age of nine, wanted to fly into space. Started two universities, the International Space University, and most recently, and very proudly, Singularity University in Mountain View in Silicon Valley, that teaches graduates and executives around the

• 3:24Speaker 00

  world about exponential technologies. In the mid-'90s, frustrated by NASA not taking me and my friends to space, I decided to fund, raise money for a $10 million prize. Didn't know who was going to put up the $10 million, so I called it the X Prize, and to be replaced by the name. Eventually, the Ansaris put up the money, Ansari family, called it the Ansari X Prize. But that $10 million prize had 26 teams around the world who spent $100 million building spaceships to try and win it. From there, started a company called Zero G that does weightless parabolic flights. We've flown 15,000 people, including Stephen Hawking into Zero G.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  A company called Space Adventures takes people to the space station privately. And then, most recently, in the space arena, a company called Planetary Resources, backed by a group of a dozen billionaires, folks like Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Mark Andreessen, Richard Branson. And this is a company that is, as much as it's science fiction, I am absolutely positively sure it's going to be successful and transformative. It's a company that's identifying the asteroids that come close to Earth without hitting us and that are worth the most in terms of resources, fuel and metals. And it's the resource low-hanging fruit of the solar system. So can we go out there and prospect them?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  And finally, I'll just mention Human Longevity, which started only a year ago, but it's skyrocketing. I co-founded with Craig Venter and Bob Horry, and we are building the largest genome sequencing facility on the planet. We're going to be sequencing millions of genomes and then mining that genomes for data along with stem cell science. And our mission is to add an extra 30 or 40 healthy years onto everybody's life. So.

• 5:15Tim Ferriss?

  So, no, I'm only laughing because the, I, we're here to talk about being bold and thinking big, and I'm so excited to dive into it. But I have to point out that you make me feel like I have to try and should try a thousand times harder, and that's a good thing. And I sometimes have readers approach me and they, I worry about them suffering from the sort of hero with clay feet problem where they meet me and they're like, wow, that guy's actually really disorganized. Because I feel it's like sometimes you have a pet cat and it stares at the corner for like five hours, and if they actually watched me for most of the day, I think it would look very similar. But when I look at what you've accomplished. It reminds me of a few things that are very timely. So one is-

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Well, I have to say, Tim, before that, I mean, you only work four hours a week. I mean, if you had other 36 hours a week, you'd be fine.

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's true, that's true. I know, I could put a little more effort into it. But the first is, I spent some time at Thiel Capital recently, of course founded by Peter Thiel. And at least at one point, the tagline, I think it was Founder's Fund, was, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." And I want to come back to that. But I was also hiking recently with a friend of mine named Brian Johnson, who did very well as the founder of Braintree.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  A dear friend of mine as well.

• 6:38Tim Ferriss?

  He's a great guy. And he's started something called the OS Fund. So trying to improve the fundamental operating systems of life, and life as we know it on the planet. And we were hiking, and I was asking him what my resolution should be, potentially for 2015. If he were in my shoes, what would he be thinking about? And he responded with, "What can you do that would be remembered 200, 300 years from now?" And really trying to shift the magnitude of my aspirations and thinking. And so I was hoping perhaps you could start with the idea of exponential, just to revisit that.

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  Because it's something that people tend to use the wrong way, or they use it very flippantly. They're like, "Oh, my God, it's exponentially better than blah, blah, blah." They don't really have a grasp on what that means. So I was hoping perhaps you could just give people just a basic primer, or some examples of what exponential really means.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, happily. And I have a... After that, I'd like to come back to the notion of being remembered in 200, 300 years. So first of all, through- People need to understand that we are fundamentally local and linear thinkers. We evolved in a world as humans, hundreds of thousands, millions of years ago, that was local and linear. Everything that affected you was within a day's walk. It was a very local existence. If something happened on the other side of the planet, you knew nothing about it. And things were linear in that the life of your great-grandparents, your parents, you, your kids, their kids, nothing changed, generation to generation, millennium to millennium. You know, it was pretty much constant. Today, the world is anything but

• 8:22Speaker 00

  that, right? Today, the world is global and exponential. What I mean by exponential here is fundamentally a simple doubling. If we look at exponential, it would look like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, when your progress is able to double year on year on year. And the example I give, I'll give two examples. If I asked you to take 30 linear steps, and all of us are linear thinkers, you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, you know, in 30 steps, you're across the street, you're 30 meters away. If I said, where would you be if you took 30 exponentials, 30 doublings? Unless you've got it memorized, very few realize that you'll be a billion

• 9:02Speaker 00

  meters away. You know, if you double something 10 times, it's a thousand times bigger. If you double it 20 times, it's a million times bigger. If you double it 30 times, it's a billion times bigger. And that disconnect between, I'll be 30 meters away across the street, or I've been orbiting the planet 26 times, a billion meters, is huge. You know, if I said to you, Tim, take a guess, if you took a piece of paper and you folded it, you know, it's now twice as thick, and you folded that again, it's now four times as thick. If you folded that, if you were able to fold that piece of paper 50 times, how thick would that piece of paper be?

• 9:41Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I've been primed to exaggerate. To the moon, I would say.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Well, it's actually all the sun.

• 9:48Tim Ferriss?

  Not even close.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, not 240,000 miles to the moon, but 93 million miles to the sun. Extraordinary.

• 9:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. And when you talk about, of course, your last book, Abundance, and certainly having spent time at Singularity, you, myself, at NASA Ames, when we talk about exponential, it's often paired to different technologies, so robotics, synthetic biology, AI.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  So all of this is underpinned by the increase of computational power, what is typically known as Moore's Law. So this guy Gordon Moore starts Intel in the late 50s. And in 1964, he writes a paper and he says, you know, at Intel, we've been noticing that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit has been roughly doubling for the same cost every 18 months. And he goes, this is likely to continue. And that became known as Moore's Law. And for the last 50 years, it's held pretty constant. So every time you go to Best Buy, you know, every 18 months or so, the computer you buy has got twice

• 11:00Speaker 00

  as much processing power as you did for a thousand bucks, you know, 18 months earlier. And this is extraordinary. And if you look at a computer, I happen to have these numbers memorized that you had in 2010, 2011, way back then, right? That computer was calculating at 100 billion calculations per second, more computational power than the US government had in the 60s and 70s. In 2023, some, you know, seven, eight years from now, the total computational power of your $1,000 computer, you can go to Best Buy and purchase if they're still around, is now calculating at 10 to the 16th cycles per second, one followed

• 11:45Speaker 00

  by, you know, 16 zeros, which is just a number unless you go speak to someone who studies the brain and they tell you that's the rate at which your brain and my brain does pattern recognition. Right, so what's it like when you buy a thousand dollar computer now thinks at the rate of a human mind, but doesn't stop there, right, because 25 years later, the average thousand dollar computer is now thinking at the rate of the entire human race. Now it becomes really interesting.

• 12:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right, then we get to the fears that of course you're getting a lot of play right now, the rise of the machines and AI and so forth. Now, for someone, even someone who's in the center, at least of course, the people in Silicon Valley would like to think, the center of the universe, from the standpoint of tech development and so on, I'm very comfortable with angel investing and early-stage startups, but even I get somewhat anxious about my lack of understanding related to these technologies, robotics. I don't have a CS degree, don't have a synthetic biological background of any type.

• 12:50Tim Ferriss?

  How can someone who is not a technologist play this game or think about changing their thinking? And does it involve these technologies, or is it entirely separate from that?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Great, great question. So I'm always asked the question over and over again, listen, if I'm not a technologist, can I get involved in all the stuff you're speaking about in abundance and bold? And the answer is yes. The answer is without question, yes. So first of all, I should just say, riding on top of Moore's Law, on top of these faster and faster computers, is a whole set of what are either called exponential technologies or accelerating technologies. And these things include like cloud computing, sensors and networks, 3D printing, right, additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, robotics, artificial intelligence. And these are the technologies we teach at Singularity University, if you come as a graduate student or as an executive. And we have amazing programs.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  It's just singularityu.org if you want to learn more. But, you know, the fact of the matter is, I don't care if you're an artist, if you're a writer, if you're someone who never, you know, went to college, what's the single most important attribute that you need to tap into these technologies is passion and curiosity?

• 14:06Speaker 00

  What I want to remind everybody is we're in a hyper-connected world. And in this hyper-connected world, there are a lot of really smart geeks out there who are the world's expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence and robotics. And some of them absolutely wish they had your skills. They wish they were great writers, they wish they could raise money, they wish they were good marketers, they wish they had a good business idea, they wished all kinds of things. And so what I realized, and I write about this actually in the first part, Bold is in three parts, and part one's about exponential technologies. I write about the concept that you can crowdsource, that if you have a passion or an idea, come

• 14:50Speaker 00

  up with a really cool idea, you can go to the crowd and you can find someone who has the expertise that you need to team up with to make your idea happen. And I write about a number of examples, I won't go into them in detail now, but where someone who had an idea and no skills was able to team up with the people who did have the skills and get access to and build a business.

• 15:14Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's think of it, just to sort of work in parallel, thinking of technology, there are different types of technologies. If we think of, or define technology as just a tool used to solve a problem, so that could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses on an anthill, but it could also be better questions that we ask ourselves. And so the question that Brian asked me, for instance, what can you do, what could you do to be remembered in 200, 300 years? And not, not, not for vanity purposes, but just as a, as a helpful question to ask. Or Peter Thiel, who is also on this, on this podcast, for those who may not be familiar,

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  he was co-founder of PayPal and then first outside investor into Facebook, he asked me, why can't you accomplish your 10-year goal in six months? Or like, how would you try to do it in six months? What are some questions that you ask that many other people do not ask?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one of the questions is really...

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Is there a grand challenge or a billion person problem that you can focus on? I am on a tear right now to try and get entrepreneurs to stop working on another photo sharing app or something that's just, you know, literally an app and say, hey, what are you most passionate about? And can you go and solve one of the grand challenges? And I remind people that, you know, from my mindset, the best way to become a billionaire is help a billion people.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  And that in this hyper connected world right now, we're going to be having three to five billion new people coming online. So one of the questions is, what do they need? Alright, so let's, let me back up a second. 2010, we had just over 1.8 billion people connected on the internet. Today, it's somewhere between two and a half, 2.8 billion. By 2020, the low estimate is five billion connected online. If you go and you look at the projects that Mark Zuckerberg has, that Larry Page has at Google, some of the recent announcements that Elon's had, there are at least three separate competing concepts

• 17:33Speaker 00

  for deploying drones, balloons, satellites that would give a megabit connection to every human on the planet. So let's think about that, right? Three to five billion new consumers are coming online in the next six years. Holy cow, that's extraordinary. What do they need? What would you, what would you provide for them? Because they represent tens of trillions of dollars coming to the global economy. And they also represent an amazing resource of innovation. So I think about that a lot and I ask, I ask that. The other question I ask is how will you disrupt yourself? So one of the most fundamental realizations is that every entrepreneur, every business, every company will get disrupted. It's a matter of time and the rate of disruption is increasing.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  One measure of that is Richard Foster at Yale studied companies on the S and P 500. And in the 1920s, if you started a company that got on the S and P 500, Standard and Poor's 500 companies, your average lifespan was 67 years. Today, the average lifespan of a company that goes on the S and P 500 is not 67 years, it's 15 years, right? You're MySpace being disrupted by Facebook, by Google Plus, whatever's next. So disruption is going to happen. And so I talk, you know, I've had the honor of talking with kicking off Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, his, his leadership team meetings,

• 19:00Speaker 00

  the same thing for Muthar Kent at Coca-Cola, Chairman CEO Coca-Cola, and, and for, for Cisco and for many companies. And I asked him, how will you disrupt yourself? And how are you trying to disrupt yourself? And if you're not, you're in for a real surprise.

• 19:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So it's almost like what Mark Goodman, who's, who was also interviewed, he was a former FBI futurist. You may have met him in fact, but

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Well, Mark, Mark is, Mark heads cybersecurity at

• 19:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's right. God, it's such a small world. God.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  That's actually how you met him.

• 19:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, well, I actually first met him, yeah, in San Diego. I might, no, I first bumped into him. You're totally right. At Singularity. And, but the concept of red teaming, sort of testing your own security systems as if you were attacking your company or your, your person and, and taking the same approach to how you would obsolesse your own, your own company.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  And I, and I taught that to CEOs. He said, find the smartest 20 somethings in your company. I don't care if they're in the mailroom or where they are, but who have, and give them permission to figure out how would they take down your company.

• 20:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Which is a cool assignment, too, for a 20 something.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I want to talk about a couple of the names that have come up. You mentioned Elon, Richard Branson, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos. They all seem to have very different backgrounds.

• 20:36Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the strategies that they have in common? Or psychological tools, anything like that?

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let me start. So I talk about Larry and Jeff and Richard and Elon in bold. I have a relationship with each of them as investors, business partners, board members. And they represent for me extraordinary examples of people we should try and emulate.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And I talk about them in detail. And I actually looked at what do they have in common? And basically found a number of key attributes that that I think they have in common that I believe are absolutely critical for other entrepreneurs to emulate as well. So one of the things is the the level of moonshots these people take. Their willingness to dream really big and to go 10 times bigger than anybody else, not 10% bigger. That's really important. So Larry Page, for example, was at the Singularity University founding conference.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Now Larry is an investor in planetary resources. He is on my board at X Prize. He's a benefactor and helped get Singularity University started. And he stood up at the SU founding conference and he said something which which really set the DNA of Singularity University and changed my mindset. He said, I have a simple measure right now for people. Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? And he said 99.9999999% of the people on the planet, the answer is no. And the the fact of the matter is, we should be. And I think that's a really important realization.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  And something that I try and talk about and push in this book, which is we really should. The other thing is Jeff Bezos talking about experimentation. And that, you know, we all talk about experimentation and pivoting and so forth, but he goes on to say in detail,

• 22:56Speaker 00

  you know, our success at Amazon is a function of the number of experiments we can do per year, per month, per week, per day. And when you do experiments, you're going to fail. And if you don't have a thick skin, you're not going to be able to succeed. So I talk to CEOs all the time. I say, listen, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And, and if it wasn't a crazy idea, then you're not, it's not a breakthrough, it's an incremental improvement. So where inside of your companies are you trying crazy ideas? And we don't do it in the government, right? I mean, when the government tries something different and it fails, there's a congressional investigation. And, and like you, you'll like, no government employee is ever going to do that again.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  And in large corporations, you're worried about your stock price plummeting. And so ultimately, it's the entrepreneurs who are trying the crazy ideas and they're willing to fail 99 times out of 100. And that's really where the true breakthroughs come from.

• 23:53Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe you can confirm or, or correct this, but I want to say that I also heard Larry Page at one point say, the thing that people misunderstand about really huge goals is that it's very hard to fail completely. And I feel like that was a Larry quote, but either way.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  It's one of the, an element of that is, and this comes, I interview Astro Teller for the book. Astro is the head of Google X, Google Skunk Works, really a dear friend and a great guy. And he says, you know, when you go after a moonshot, something that's 10 times bigger, not 10% bigger. And a number of things happen. First of all, When you're going 10% bigger, you're competing against everybody. Everybody's trying to go 10% bigger. And when you're trying to go 10 times bigger, you're there by yourself. You know, for me, it's like asteroid mining. I don't have a lot of asteroid mining competition out there or prospecting, or even human longevity, you know, trying to add 40 years in a healthy lifespan.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  There's not a lot of companies out there. You know, there's Calico at Google, who's a collaborative company with us, not really competition.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  The second thing is, when you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper and you approach the problem completely differently. So I'll give you my favorite example. It's Tesla, right? How did Elon start Tesla and build from scratch? The safest, most extraordinary car, not even in America, I think in the world. It's by not having a legacy from the past to drag into the present. And that's important. And then the third thing is, when you're trying to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it's typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.

• 25:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's very interesting. No, I like that.

• 25:51Tim Ferriss?

  What do you, how do you find people like the folks you mentioned? You know, the Elons, the Bransons and so on. How do they, and maybe, I don't know if there's a clean answer to this, but how do they compensate for their weaknesses or cover their weaknesses? Because, I mean, in my experience, that people with incredible strengths usually have, you know, they're like everything, everybody else in the world. They're kind of like Swiss cheese, you know, they have their holes. How do they, how do they still go for these moonshots while sort of protecting against the fatal flaws that they might have?

• 26:25Speaker 00

  You know, I think we get to know them after they're successful.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  And frankly, there are probably a lot of Larry Pages and Elon Musks who almost were successful that we don't know about. So I think ultimately, when you reach that level of success, the public sort of ignores your flaws to a large degree and is the adoring public. But they also build amazing teams that make up for it. And then they are extraordinarily smart. These guys are brilliant. They are absolutely brilliant. And some of them are almost not human.

• 27:08Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say are some of the most pronounced differences between Elon and Jeff Bezos?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  So I'm not sure you're picking a pair that's kind of, kind of close. I mean, and so, I mean, oh, man, I'm having a hard time comparing those two. I mean.

• 27:36Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what is Elon's background? I actually don't know what his.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  So Elon grew up, Elon was born in South Africa, moved to Canada, eventually ended up at Wharton. And one of the things that was interesting was, and I write about his background in bold, but he started programming at a very young age, right? He wrote his first video games while he was in high school. And he became convinced when he was in college that there were three big important things that he needed to think about for humanity. And one was the internet. The next was was energy, and the third was space.

• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, talk about foresight, really.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  And it's interesting because he ended up trying to find a job, and he's very, he's reasonably introverted as an individual. And so Larry's introverted to some degree as well, Elon is. But when Elon warms up, he's a very social guy, he's very, he can be outgoing. But he went to try and get a job at Netscape, and he actually waited in the lobby, too scared to go up and actually try and approach them for an interview. And he never got that interview, never worked at Netscape. He decided Netscape back in the early mid 90s was the most interesting company.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  And he ended up going and creating a company called Zip2 that was acquired, was his first success. He went on to go and create X.com that merged into PayPal, sold that and basically funded what would then become SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. And one of the things that was, is most amazing, most people don't know about Elon because he deserves all the extraordinary success he has today is in, in 2008, all three of those companies were on the verge of bankruptcy. SpaceX had just had its third launch failure of Falcon 1. He had budgeted as smartly as

• 29:42Speaker 00

  he should. I tried to talk Elon, I know Elon since 2000 and just before he had, or just as he was selling PayPal, and I was trying to talk him out of doing a launch field company because it was such a, a trail of dead bodies. And I'm so happy he didn't listen to me. But, you know, he, in 2008, the third failure of SpaceX's launch vehicle, he had budgeted for three failures, but when it failed again, it was like, oh my God. And then, at the same time, Tesla's financing had gone down the tubes. He actually went into debt to borrow

• 30:23Speaker 00

  money. He spent every single dollar he had to keep those companies alive. And went into debt and was living in a rented apartment, rented house actually, to keep it going. But then, literally, in the end of 2008, a number of things changed. He got a contract from NASA, some financing capital came in through Tesla, and SolarCity started, started growing. And today, he's the father of four different billion-dollar industry, companies in four different industries. And it's amazing. But there are principles that, that he uses to think about this. And I would say, one of the most important ones that all these guys have is, is passion and purpose. Right? And one of the quotes I love from him, he

• 31:08Speaker 00

  says, "I did not go into the automotive business and into the space business because I thought it was an easy way to make money." He said, "I'm not insane, right? I'm not going up the industrial, going up against the industrial military complex or Detroit." He said, "I just thought these, they needed to be better quality products and they did not exist." And I felt driven by my purpose and passion to go and do these things. And, you know, he gave him a 30% chance, 40% chance of success. But ultimately, you know, he's built tens of billions of dollars in value in the last 10 years.

• 31:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now, just to, I love this story and it contrasts in my mind with that of Bezos, right? Who came out of D E Shaw, had the opportunity to pitch Amazon to the higher ups.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  The CEO there, yeah.

• 32:01Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, which was declined.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  And Jeff, at least as far as I can tell, didn't, did not aim to start that business because he was passionate about books. It was a very analytical approach.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Exactly. He basically said, listen, the internet's happening. He's been watching the doubling rate of the internet. He's seen this growth. He's like, oh my God, there is a tsunami coming. This thing is not stoppable. You don't see this kind of growth rate like anyplace else. And he said, you know, he's driving cross-country from East Coast up to Seattle. He's thinking about what is it that would benefit from something like a, he didn't call it everything store then. But what, you know, what is something that's a large number of things that the internet would allow me to actually search and find? And books was his first, his first, his first thought.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  And he actually borrows the money from his parents and starts the company in his family garage, basically. And what's, I love the story of when he put up the website, he hooks up a bell to the website. So every time a book is purchased, a bell would go off from his, from his server. And it's like, you know, they hear the first bell, like ding, like yay, you know, they mail all their friends and so forth. And 10 minutes later, another ding. And then he talks about, you know, a few days later, when the bell was like ding ding ding ding ding, they finally shut it off. It was so annoying.

• 33:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's, uh, it's, he's, he's a really fascinating guy in my mind and, and as far as I know, he does not have a technical IE, programming or computer science background, or does he? Am I, am I off on that?

• 33:42Speaker 00

  No, no, he's, uh, you know, he was at Princeton, uh, and he was not, uh, studying, um, CS, I believe, um, well, I knew him from his, his college years at Princeton because when I had started, my very first organization ever was a, was a company called Students with Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS. And I was at, I started while I was at MIT and he started a chapter of, of SEDS while he was at Princeton. And, um, uh, he was from his earliest days, a space cadet, uh, very passionate about space. And, you know, he is running a company that he's funding called Blue Origin, whose mission

• 34:27Speaker 00

  it is to go into space. And every time Elon and I see him, we're saying like, dude, why are you wasting your time with Amazon for God's sakes? Go and build your space company. We gotta get off this rock.

• 34:41Tim Ferriss?

  Jeff, baby, you gotta think bigger. Uh, so, you know, I'll, I'll give you just, just one kind of, uh, I don't think I've told anybody about this, just a funny side note about-

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Actually, and actually to be, to be clear, his, uh, his degree was in, in computer science.

• 34:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it was?

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah.

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, look at that. Okay. So he did, he did have some technical chops. I was, uh, so Jeff is one of, uh, you know, along with Elon and a few others, there aren't that many folks that, uh, just in the business sphere that I'm sort of longing to have a conversation with. These, these are two of them. And I, you know, I met Elon very briefly on, on a zero G flight that, that you invited me on, so thank you for that, very briefly. But like you said, he's a pretty introspect, uh, introverted guy and I didn't want to be disruptive, uh, to his experience. I had a similar, uh, run in with Jeff Bezos, very randomly. I was, I was staying at a hotel in Tokyo, had just been reading about some of his background,

• 35:40Tim Ferriss?

  walked out of the hotel and literally almost bumped forehead first into him, coming through the, the revolving door with his kids and I walked- Fast and I was like, holy shit, that was Jeff Bezos. And but he's with his kids. It was like 11pm and he's trying to sort of shuttle them to the hotel room. And so I didn't introduce myself. I didn't do it. And I'm not sure I regret not doing it. On one hand, I'm like, God, you know, I really would have loved to have talked to him, but he was with his family and I didn't feel like it was the right thing to do. Who do you, Peter, rely on to tell you when you're wrong? So you're a very powerful guy. You're a dynamic personality. You have a strong will. It's in some cases

• 36:20Tim Ferriss?

  easy to end up with people sort of politely nodding with whatever suggestions you might have or ideas you might have. Who do you rely on to to correct you or to point out flaws in your thinking?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I will say that there's no shortage of people who will do that. But I think it's my business partners. I mean, I have every company I've started, I have business partners, individuals I work with to build the company. And, you know, I'm very clear that when I'm doing that with somebody, you know, it's Eric Anderson with Planetary Resources and Space Adventures. It's Craig Venter and Bob Hury with Human Longevity, Inc. It's, you know, Rob Nail, Ray Kurzweil at Singular University. And there's no question, we have a lot of debate and deliberation and don't always agree.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  And, you know, the challenge is that if you listen to people, it's really tough to to actually be revolutionary. Because, you know, the majority of people will take you back to the mean. And that's just the wrong place to be. At some point, you've got to say, I fundamentally believe this is the right thing to do. And then go off and and give it a try. There's a great quote, I just want to read this to you. I saw this the other day. And this comes from Scott Belsky, who is a founder of BNS. And it says, "When 99% of

• 37:59Speaker 00

  the people doubt your ideas, you're either gravely wrong or about to make history."

• 38:04Tim Ferriss?

  I like that.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's very good. Yeah, it's.

• 38:10Tim Ferriss?

  I always think, well, there are two things that come to mind, of course, and these are sort of my constant companions in my head when I'm trying to make difficult decisions about experimentation, usually in my case. The first is, quote from Mark Twain, which is, I start a lot of my presentations this way, which is, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect, which is quite along the lines of being sort of reverted to the mean and trying to avoid that. The second is the story of

• 38:44Tim Ferriss?

  Dick Fosbury, who was the first high jumper to go over the high jump bar with a back bend, backwards. And so there was a scissor step and different approaches up to that point. And two things allowed him to do that. Secondly, was just questioning the assumptions and best practices of his sport. The second was, they changed the landing material. So it had previously been some type of like hard-packed hay or straw, which was very unforgiving. And it was changed. The technology evolved to a softer surface, but people didn't change their technique. And so he went over backwards and he was ridiculed and laughed at until he won the gold medal. And now, of course, everyone uses that technique.

• 39:28Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to talk about a few other things that you're very familiar with, namely crowdfunding and incentive competitions. Because these have really come to the forefront in a lot of ways in the last few years. And I think that's going to continue to be the case. I've had some very challenging experiences with publishing and television, for instance. And as crowdfunding, Kickstarter and other Indiegogo and other platforms have grown, I've realized that with the audience I've built, I could self-fund these previously

• 40:05Tim Ferriss?

  Inconceivable projects, whether it be TV or feature film. And that's very exciting to me, but I think I'm still thinking too small. I mean, that's exciting. It's, it's, it would be a big project. I think that there's, there's, there's a lot that could be done there creatively. But what is the, what do you think the future of crowdfunding and incentive competitions?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Sure. Let's take those each at a time. So I'm a huge fan of both, obviously. On the crowdfunding side, the numbers are, are pretty spectacular. So it's, it's projected that in this year, 2015, there'll be $15 billion of crowdfunding.

• 40:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, here's a brand new source effectively of capital for the entrepreneur, for the person with a vision who wants to create a product, a service, whatever it might be. But that number becomes $100 billion by 2020. And so it's a sizable amount of capital. And I've run two crowdfunding campaigns. One for about one and a half million dollars for planetary resources. And one that was on Kickstarter and the other one was on Indiegogo for X Prize for about, about just shy of a million dollars for our global learning X Prize. And, you know, I fundamentally believe it's something that every entrepreneur should be experimenting with. I mean, there's very little downside.

• 41:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's, you know, not to interrupt you, Peter, I'm very sorry, but this is such an important point that, and it reminds me of a Branson quote, actually, which is, you know, he, he's always capping the downside and deciding what the downside is before different, different business experiments or launches. And, you know, people think of Virgin Air as this huge risk, but he had such an incredible, I think it was leasing arrangement with Boeing or something that.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, he had the ability to return his 747 a year later. If the airline wasn't working, so it was zero downside for him to try a Virgin Atlantic.

• 42:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so it's just such an important checkbox. So I do want to interrupt the flow, but it's just so important. I wanted to underscore it for folks. So, right, with the crowdfunding, there's very little downside.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  So, I mean, you can build a crowdfunding. So, in fact, I know a lot of venture capitalists who will only back companies who are doing product development if they have tried crowdfunding first. Because, you know, you can have, you can have the assumption that, man, this widget is amazing, right? And in black, it looks great. And it may not be the fact that anybody gives a shit about your widget. Or they want it in red. And crowdfunding not only allows you to get the money in advance, but it allows you to have the most honest vote ever of whether the world wants your product or service. Your book, your movie, your digital watch, whatever it might be. And then you get to find out, not only does the world want it,

• 43:00Speaker 00

  but in fact, what color, what size, what shape. And it's the most honest vote you can, right? Who cares what a monkey survey says? It's when people put their credit card down and buy, vote with their wallet, that's what really matters.

• 43:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right, no, absolutely.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  So I actually, you know, one of the things I did was, was spend time studying it. I went out and interviewed the, you know, the guys who did the top crowdfunding campaigns in the world. And how did they do it? And then I used that in my own, and I have a whole chapter on crowdfunding. And it's labeled no bucks, no Buck Rogers on the how to. And it's just, it is very, very doable. I mean, not all things should be crowdfunded, but those that should, that can be, I really think it's the new way of an entrepreneur starting a business. It's zero dilution. You test your marketplace, you get out in front, and importantly, you build a community. And you know, Tim, better than anybody, how important a community is.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  A community can make you or break you.

• 44:03Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And it's also just such a good litmus test, not only for investors, but to prove to yourself whether or not you have the diligence, the wherewithal, the responsiveness to execute a business. If you can't execute a crowdfunding campaign, you might want to.

• 44:23Tim Ferriss?

  Time out and consider a different career path because that's a low hurdle compared to many of the challenges that come later. I want to ask you a couple of questions before we move to the incentive competitions.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 44:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd also say to people, of course, I'm going to include tons of links in the show notes to everything that Peter's talking about. There's also a how to hack Kickstarter case study that is on the blog for people who are interested, so they can search that, that has template emails and things like that. Are you an early riser? What time do you typically get up in the morning?

• 44:59Speaker 00

  I have three-year-olds.

• 45:00Tim Ferriss?

  So I take that, that's a yes.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's whatever time that gets me up. So yeah, it's typically 6:30, you know, Pacific time, so that's dinnertime in Europe. But so that's, yeah.

• 45:17Tim Ferriss?

  What are...

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Sleep, yeah, go ahead.

• 45:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sleep is optional.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Unfortunately.

• 45:21Tim Ferriss?

  What morning routines do you have or have you had that you've used consistently?

• 45:31Speaker 00

  It's probably stretching. It's, and it's a sort of a mindset that my purpose and mission in life that I took away actually from Tony Robbins' Date with Destiny, which is a program I, is a week-long, is the most transformative program I've been to with anybody who's not been to Date with Destiny. So it's like, I repeat my purpose in life and I also repeat my mindset I want to have for the day, and I do that in the shower. And then I'll go through and do a quick scan of my emails and I'll go play with my kids right now for the first hour.

• 46:10Tim Ferriss?

  So the stretching is in the shower or it's...

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, stretching is in the shower.

• 46:14Tim Ferriss?

  What type of stretching?

• 46:16Speaker 00

  It's mostly, it's mostly my lower body and then I'll go through a breathing exercise as well. And it's the self, you know, the affirmational mantra, if you would, is an important part of that.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  What type of, what is the breathing?

• 46:32Speaker 00

  It's an accelerated deep breathing, just to oxygenate and to stretch my lungs. It's interesting because one of the, one of the, there are two elements that, that tie very much to human longevity and strange, and I wonder how they're linked, but one is those people who floss and those people have a higher VO2 max.

• 46:57Tim Ferriss?

  Really? Higher VO2 max is correlated with longer lifespan?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, absolutely.

• 47:02Tim Ferriss?

  That's very curious.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:05Tim Ferriss?

  So, so are you taking measures to try to improve your VO2 max?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  In part, but we can talk about that another time.

• 47:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, that'll be part three. Got it, all right.

• 47:22Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna come to the incentive competitions in a second, but what do you look for in friends? What are the qualities or the criteria that you use for friends these days?

• 47:31Speaker 00

  You know, for me, it is, it is passion and curiosity and purpose. You know, the realization is, and I, I believe this, the quality of your life is a function of who you go through life with.

• 47:50Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Right? And so you've heard the stat perhaps, and you're, and everybody listening, that you're, you're the average of the five people you're hanging out with most. And so I'm looking for people who are gonna up my game, who I love spending time with, who make me feel great, who make me feel happy, who are not, yes, men or women, who are, who I can dream with. That's really important.

• 48:16Tim Ferriss?

  Have you had to break up with certain friends or associates?

• 48:20Speaker 00

  I think it's not, it's not been dramatic, but a drift away from, just spend less time with. And there are people who are just self-defeatist, right? They're brilliant, they're smart, they're hardworking, but they just completely defeat themselves and they're negative in their mindsets and they're like, like woe is me. And it's like, dude, I just, please, you know, I will, I will do my best as a friend to give them. The skills to think about that differently. But this goes back to Brian Johnson, who we spoke about to about earlier. You know, it's all about your operating system. And the challenge is, as humans, if you think about it, our brains are the sort of computer structure, the wiring diagram of our brains and the wiring diagram of a computer are somewhat similar.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  They're pretty much fixed by biology. And then you've got, the next layer is for a brain, for a computer, it's its operating system. Right? And then for the, for us as humans, we have an operating system that comes online between birth and typically age of five to seven. We make things mean certain things. And then on top of that operating system of a human, we have apps. Like, like math is an app. Algebra, geography, if you learn Spanish, if you learn history. All these things are apps that you build on top of your operating system. But very few times do we as humans ever go and look at our operating system. We constantly get our apps, well, I gotta learn how to code, I gotta learn how to do that.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Those are all apps. But when do you actually go and look at your operating system as a human? And there are very few things that actually allow us to do that. And the two that I found is the work that Tony does, Tony Robbins with like Date and Date with Destiny. The other one is, is, is Landmark, Landmark Education, Landmark Forum. Have you ever done that, Tim?

• 50:10Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't done it. I've, I have friends who've been involved with Landmark Forum, but I don't know very much about it. What, how do, how does Landmark differ from what Tony does?

• 50:19Speaker 00

  It's, it's similar and it's a different approach. And, you know, it's two and a half days. I don't want to go into the detail. I just offer those as two resources. But how often do any of us go back and realize, why do I think that way? Why do I react that way to this? Or why do I have this pessimistic mindset or this reactive or this self-defeatist mindset? And when I was going back to, you know, the, my friends who I've sort of parted ways with over the years. And it's the reason that when you were growing up, you made certain things mean certain things to you and you react that way to it. And that's part of your operating system. Unless you change it, you're going to be constantly falling to those same patterns over and over and over again. And I've got them. We've all got them. But if you can

• 51:03Speaker 00

  become aware of it, you can at least take control of it. So I'm looking for friends who help me up my game. I enjoy spending time with, who make me, you know, ask those questions like Brian Johnson did of you, and who I can dream big dreams with.

• 51:21Tim Ferriss?

  So, speaking of dreaming big dreams, I think this is a good segue to incentive competitions, because I fantasize, I think a lot about this, but my thinking is undirected. The X Prize has sparked my curiosity about incentive competitions and what I might do in the world using incentive competitions. But maybe you could explain what that means, first of all?

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Sure. Sure. And I will come back and ask you, what's the Tim Ferriss X Prize? So, again, I went back and I mentioned the X Prize Foundation in that, you know, I wanted to travel in space since I was a child. Expected NASA was going to get me there, you know, got a medical degree, got my pilot's license, drank all the tang I could get my hands on. And then, and then after a while, I realized my chances of becoming a NASA astronaut were like 1 in 5,000. And in fact, it wasn't NASA's job to get the public into space. And I was like, you know, screw that. I'm going to get there independent of NASA. And then read that Lindbergh in 1927 crossed the Atlantic to win a prize. And said, okay,

• 52:27Speaker 00

  that's what I want to do. I want to create a prize for the first team who could build a private spaceship that could carry me and my friends into space. Long story short, announced that prize under the arch in St. Louis in 1996. Did not have the $10 million. Didn't stop me. And I teach in the, in bold, how do you give, how do you give birth to a big, bold idea above the line of super credibility? And I'd love to come back. I think it's an important lesson for everyone to learn.

• 52:56Tim Ferriss?

  Super credibility?

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Super credibility.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  And and announce the prize. Took me five years to find the Ansari family who put up the $10 million. And that $10 million drove 26 teams around the world to spend $100 million trying to win this $10 million prize by building and flying a spaceship that could carry three adults up into space 100 kilometers, land and do it again within two weeks. So the prize was won on October 4th, 2004 by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen. And it changed the regulations. Google changed the Google doodle that day to have spaceship one flying over the logo. I got invited up to the Googleplex to talk about X Prize. That's where I met Larry Page, invited him onto my board. He agreed on the spot.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  And now we're working on launching prizes, incentive prizes for the world's biggest problems. What's a problem that should be solved that hasn't been? And we think about that and we launch two or three major prizes a year. And and I fundamentally believe that there is no problem we cannot solve, that the technologies that allow you and me and everyone listening to to do things are the technologies that were resident only with government and large corporations 20 years ago. You know, the access to tens of billions of crowdfunding. It's an amazing time to be an entrepreneur and the number of people solving problems is also exploding.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  So that gives me the greatest hope for the future. So we're constantly sourcing prize ideas. I'll also mention, just for fun, and I talk about about this in the book, that we created and spun out a platform from X Prize called HeroX. You can know heroX.com and you can where you can go and actually create, you know, have the crowd help you design a prize, fund a prize and solve a prize. So I want to go, one of my mantras is stop complaining about problems, go solve them. And that's, I think, the world we're living in today. You can stop complaining, you can start solving.

• 55:03Tim Ferriss?

  So one of those problems I'd love to ask you about, and then I'd love to come back to the super credibility.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 55:10Tim Ferriss?

  I like the sound of that. And that is related to climate change. So I think I've spoken with a number of climate scientists who are terrified that some people will embrace a sort of techno optimism that is too long term. And in the meantime, you know, the planet will boil in the next 30 years or whatnot. What is being done, or how would you suggest people think about climate change and addressing the problems of that?

• 55:46Speaker 00

  So a couple of thoughts. One is that as humans, we typically see the problem way before it hits us. You know, we're really great at identifying problems because it was an evolutionary advantage, people see the problem way out in the future. And typically, by the time the problem hits us, you know, there's been tremendous progress, and we now have a whole new set of tools for addressing it. One example I write about in my last book, Abundance, was that in the 1890s, one of the biggest environmental problems, the equivalent of climate change, was horse manure. As people were moving out of the countries into the cities, they were bringing their

• 56:31Speaker 00

  motive force with them, the horse. And the number of horses and the amount of horse shit was building exponentially. And it had, you know, literally would have a corner lot that was where all the horse shit got shoveled. And when it would rain, there would be so much manure flowing down the streets that buildings were designed with a raised stoop so you could step over the flowing manure, and the disease was building. And the articles written projected, you know, this crazy amount of horse manure. Because clearly, you know, by 1940, the number of horses in the city would have exploded as the population went up.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  But something else happened, right? Another technology came along called the automobile that became the major motive force and got rid of horses. So the question is, what's the example here? And so we're working on two X prizes right now. To change the game, one is a battery X Prize. Uh, and that is to increase the energy density by 300%. Can we go from your typical lithium ion, you know, at 250 watt hours per kilogram up to 5, 6, 700 watt hours per kilogram? That would change everything, right? You would fundamentally only have electric cars. You'd have electric airplanes. You'd have electric everything.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Um, and I want to remind everybody that there is 5,000 times more energy from the sun that hits the surface of the earth than we consume as a species in a year. It's, it's not that energy's not abundant, it's just not yet in a usable form. But if you look at the numbers, the amount of, of solar cells we're manufacturing is on an exponential growth curve. It's doubling, uh, every, uh, 30 months or so. And then the cost is plummeting as an exponential. And if you're buying a new copy of Abundance in the back of the book, uh, since the hard copy, the soft copy now is a whole new set of charts, including that, those, those curves. The other X Prize we're working on is a carbon capture X Prize.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Can you capture 80% of the carbon coming out of a, a natural gas or coal smoke stack, uh, and turn it into a usable, um, product that is worth more than the cost of capturing it? So that it becomes a profit center for these facilities. Uh, and I'll mention one other thing if I could, Tim.

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Because people don't want to talk about this, but I don't, I don't see it. Let's say we're too late. Let's say, you know, um, you know, we have hit a critical turning point. I mean, we do have the technology to launch into space, a, what would be from the earth, a postage size, uh, shutter, if you would, that could titrate the amount of solar flux hitting the earth very easily. This is not a complex structure.

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain that one more time, please?

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Well, so imagine if you would, uh, a certain amount of energy hits the earth every day.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  Imagine if you could block out a tenth of 1% of that energy by putting up a structure at a Lagrange point in the Earth/Sun system that would just block a small amount and you could, you could, you could actually like a shutter would-

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  Could use an aperture of some type to-

• 59:56Speaker 00

  And to, you know, turn it sideways and, you know, start very slowly and increase it. You could in fact reduce the amount of energy coming to the Earth's surface and you could measure it and change it on a, on a minute by minute basis. So, I mean, there are ways to do this that are fully reversible and can be measured very carefully. It's very different from, you know, throwing iron filings into the ocean and changing CO2 absorption. I mean, there are things we can do. I've had, you know, this conversation with Al Gore and Al's like, "No, we're gonna screw it up even worse." Listen, the fact of the matter is, um, there, you know, we are a smart species and while, uh, we should be trying to reduce

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  CO2 and going to an electric and solar economy, if we're screwed, I don't want to sit here and boil. I'd like to take some actions to reduce that, please. And there are actions we can take.

• 1:00:51Tim Ferriss?

  I love this. No, that's, I learned something interesting every time I chat with you, which is part of the reason why I like to harass you so much. The, uh, and you, you mentioned the "if we're screwed" anyway and it reminded me, God, I wish I could remember the attribution of this quote, but it was something along the lines of, uh, you know, that the person who says "we're screwed" or "there's nothing we can do" and the person who says "everything is fine" are the same because nothing gets done in either case. And, and I've always, I've always remembered that. Uh, I want to come back to super credibility because it's catchy, term phrase of course, but what does that refer to?

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I talk about this in Bold and I talk about this a lot because it's something that I think is really important for every entrepreneur to learn this. And, uh, so I want to set the setting. It's, it's May 18th of 1996.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  A few months earlier, I had raised, I was raising money for the X Prize. I was trying to raise ten million dollars. I'm in St. Louis. I'm trying to raise ten million dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars at a time. And I very quickly, you know, raised about a half a million dollars from amazing people like John McDonnell and Andy Taylor and the Danforth family, some incredible city leaders in, in St. Louis. A guy named Al Kurth, who was a patron saint, he's passed away since, but was helping me and taking me around. And we reached a, a threshold. I raised half a million dollars and it wasn't, we were stuck.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  And made a decision that we were going to announce the ten million dollar prize anyway, even though we didn't have the money. And it's kind of ballsy. I had three of my board members resign on the spot when we decided to do that. And I realized that how the world learned about the X Prize really mattered. And so it turns out that each of us in our minds have this line of credibility. And if I tell you, if I announce something to you below the line of credibility, you dismiss it out of hand. It's like, you know, if I said, this teenager next door is going to build a spaceship and fly to Mars. It's like, he's a nut, forget it. And then there's this line of credibility.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  If you announce a project above the line of credibility, then, you know, maybe they'll do it. So if, you know, if maybe I announced, I'm planning to build a spaceship and go to Mars, maybe think, people say, ah, interesting, let's watch and see what Peter does. And depending on my actions, uh, you know, they'll either dismiss it a few days, months or years later, or they'll increase in credibility. And then we all have this line of super credibility in our minds. That if you announce something above the line of super credibility, it's like, oh my god, that's amazing. When is it gonna happen? And so if I said to you, you know, listen, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, Larry Page,

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  all just partnered and they are building a private mission to Mars, it's like, oh my god, that's amazing, finally, right?

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  So, I'm in May of 1996, I have half a million dollars, I decide to spend all of it on this launch event. And we do it under the arch in St. Louis, on the dais, I don't have one astronaut, I've got 20 astronauts standing on stage with me. I've got the head of NASA, the head of the FAA, and the Lindbergh family with me onstage announcing this $10 million prize. Did I have any money? No. Did I have any teams registered to compete? No. But around the world, it was front page news, this $10 million prize is going in. And it was, for me, a huge risk, but, you know, I didn't lie about it, I didn't tell them.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  They just all assumed I had the $10 million, but I wanted to give birth to this above the line of super credibility. Because I was so sure that it was gonna be pretty easy, you know, who wouldn't want to pay the $10 million after it was awarded? After someone pulled it off? I just didn't expect to have 150 people tell me no. And, uh, it just, anyway, five years to raise capital.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  Who was, who was the hardest person to convince to be on that stage with you?

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Oh, the head of NASA, for sure.

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  What was the pitch? How did you convince them?

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the pitch was, listen, uh, wouldn't you want entrepreneurs around the world to be working on new technologies, so that this is off your balance sheet? And the big, you know, it turns out that 20,000 employees, whatever number of employees at NASA, all of them are all there because they want to go too. And it was actually a friend, Alan Ladwig, who was the associate administrator at NASA I'd known for 20 years, who convinced Dan Golden to take the risk. And then the astronauts who were there.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  And you build credibility like that by, you know, first getting Byron Lichtenberg. Byron was one of the early co-founders of XPRIZE. And he convinced Buzz Aldrin and other shuttle astronauts. And we got 20 astronauts on stage, right? One at a time. And then got the associate administrator of the FAA and think, Dan, we've got the FAA, we've got 20 astronauts. You know, you build safety in numbers in that regard.

• 1:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  It's a step-by-step process, but, you know, ultimately, that's how, you know, anyone who knows the story of Stone Soup, do you know Stone Soup, Tim?

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think I do.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. One of my favorite stories. It's a child's story, a children's story, that is the best MBA degree you can read. So I write about Stone Soup. I won't give it away. It's one of the most important stories between super credibility and Stone Soup. It's like, dude, if you're an entrepreneur in college or 60 years old, building your 20th company, Stone Soup is so critically important.

• 1:06:57Tim Ferriss?

  Have you, have you, and we'll wrap up in just a couple of minutes. Have you had a point in your life where you were pessimistic for more than a short period of time? Where you were really fatalistic?

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, of course, we all hit brick walls, right? So in April 2001, along with every other dot-comer, I was running a company called Blastoff for Idea Lab, the incubator that had given us eToys and Net Zero and GoTo and all of it. It started 40 companies. Bill Gross, brilliant guy, had just raised a billion dollars in cash in 99 from, to for his internet incubator. And he calls me up and he says, Peter, I raised a billion dollars in cash. I want to do a moon mission. I want to do a private robotic moon mission. So I sold my house in a day. I moved to Pasadena from Washington DC. Have an amazing team of people.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  And we are building a robotic private mission to the moon. It's since that mission became the Google Lunar X Prize, which exists today. And we were, we had built prototypes. We had bought an Athena two launch vehicle from Lockheed Martin, a Star 37. Trans lunar injection engine from Morton Thiokol. And we're, we're building this thing. And then, you know, the NASDAQ tanks and we get shut down. And of course, like many other people, like, oh, this sucks, man. I mean, I was so close, so close to getting us there. And, you know, went into a, a long deserved depression for, you know, a day or two.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  And then came out of it and started reworking on X Prize and Zero G and just refocused. But for me, my passion, my guiding star is, you know, all of my life has been opening up the space frontier. And today, that guiding star is also, you know, solving grand challenges. So whenever I get bummed or pissed off, I refocus on that guiding star and it re-energizes me. If you've got your passion, it's the number one thing, as, as you know, Tim, and have talked about, if you have that passion, it is a, it is a bottomless pit of enthusiasm and energy.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  To get out of the, the, that two day funk, what, uh, what does self-talk look like? I mean, what is, or what is the ritual that you use?

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  In all honesty, it was probably more like two weeks than two days. Is, is a going back to why do I believe this is important? And, uh, and it's, look how far I've taken it so far. And it, you know, it's a matter of reminding yourself why, what your purpose in life is.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Right, what you're here for. And if you haven't connected with what your purpose and mission in life is, that's the, you know, forget anything I've said, that is the number one thing you need to do is find out what you need to be doing on this planet, why you were put here and what wakes you up in the morning and says, yes, I am psyched, this is gonna happen, right?

• 1:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  How do you suggest people try to identify that? Or do they?

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Two things, I'm clear about this. The one thing is, what did you want to do when you were a child? Right, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to? I don't care if you were, you know, wanting to play video games, right? My friend, Richard Gere, dear friend, ex Prize trustee, Space Adventures board member, investor in my companies. Richard's dad was a Skylab and Shuttle astronaut. And Richard never went to college, right? He was a video game gamer in high school. And basically, you know, your dad's a PhD astronaut, you know, the most buttoned-down math-science geek on the planet, and you're like playing video games.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  But he became so enamored with video games, he started writing them. He netted, you know, $100 million building video games and bought a ticket to go to the space station. And became the first second-generation astronaut because of his video game addiction. So, it's like, you can make a career out of anything these days. So what are you passionate about as a kid? Right, that's the first thing. The second thing is, if Peter Diamandis or Tim Ferriss gave you a billion dollars, how would you spend it? Besides the parties and the, you know, Ferraris and so on? If I had to say to you, I want you to use this billion dollars to go and improve the world, to go solve a problem, what would you go do with it?

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  That targeting information, what you do with it, is a great place to go look at what your passion is.

• 1:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  That's a fantastic question. You know, I've heard it phrased, if you had a billion dollars, how would you spend your time? But in a way... Those are really well paired. I like that.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very good question. So last question for you, Peter. If you could offer your younger self one piece of advice, let's just say your 20-year-old self, what would it be?

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Oh, man, you know, I spent four years in medical school to make my mom happy, my dad happy, because I thought I had to do it. And it would have been to really believe in my inner dream of opening up space and to go and focus in doing that. Now, listen, the medical degree and stuff is all great, and maybe human longevity, which I hope will be my first, you know, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company in success,

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  maybe comes out of my medical stuff, but I wasn't doing it for the right reason.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  And I guess the second thing would have been to have bought Amazon and Google stock earlier.

• 1:12:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Peter, you know, if I could have asked one person to write one particular book, it would have been the perfectly titled Bold, and I do not say that lightly. I really feel like there's so much potential out there in the world and so much opportunity. And part of the reason that I've been opting out of a lot of the startup stuff recently, to be honest, is because I'm getting pitched so many incremental derivative 10% improvements from people who have, they have the capability to do something exponential, if they would only have that 10x type of target. And so I really hope that this book provides people with not only the inspiration,

• 1:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  but the tools and the framework for going out and trying to put a huge dent in the universe.

• 1:13:48Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly, I'm going to put links to everything at fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/bold. But where can, where can people give you their feedback or find you online otherwise?

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Sure, I mean, very easily, if you go to boldbook.com is information about the book. It's a chance to build a connection with me. I've actually, we're in a pre-launch phase for the book, so if you actually order a copy of the book through there, you'll get a few additional bonuses. You get a digital copy of Abundance. If you haven't read Abundance, please do, or give it to your friend. You get a chance to participate in an hour-long webinar with myself and my co-author Stephen Kotler, which we'll be doing in March, so you can get a chance to read the book. You get an audio download of the first chapter. I've also done a number of training videos about the six D's of exponentials, the sort

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  of exponential stages and how they allow you to sort of see into the future. I talk more about billionaire thinking at scale and finding your massively transformative purposes. Those are three free video downloads you get a chance to, to get if you go to that, that website. Ultimately, I mean, part of my mission, Tim, and you know this, is it's, it comes back to what Larry Page said, you know, that 99.9999% of people are not working on something that can change the world. And I want to inspire through Singularity University, through XPRIZE, through Bold, through all of these things, people to realize that today you can do more than ever before. You've got the technology, access to capital,

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  access to mindset, access to resources, experts. So I'm trying to take the shackles off of people's dreaming abilities and to, to give them some tools to go and do big things, because that's the only way we create a world of abundance. That's the only way we really create this vibrant future that is before us. And so I'm excited about that mission.

• 1:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  I agree. You're here. Two quick questions. How the bonuses that you mentioned, and I will link to those in the show notes, guys, how long are those available? Until what date?

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  They're available. The book goes on the, for sale on Amazon at Barnes & Noble when the book comes out on February 3rd. These bonus offers are on the table through February 6th, and then probably change the bonuses somewhat. But ultimately, it's about, for me, it's, I want people to think differently about what they can do. So anyway, through early February for these bonuses, and the videos will be there for, the training videos will be there for, probably through March.

• 1:16:47Tim Ferriss?

  Wonderful. And can people find you on Twitter, Facebook? Do you use any of those?

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  Yep. I'm tweeting all the time, so it's just @PeterDiamandis, first name, last name. And that's probably the best way to follow my work.

• 1:17:05Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. Well, Peter, it's always a pleasure. I hope we get a chance to have some wine or hang out in person again soon. And thanks so much for making the time.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  Thank you. I love, I love who you are and what you do. And thank you, everybody, for being part of this conversation. It is the most exciting time ever to be alive, for sure, period and stop.

• 1:17:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers. And I have used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge hit. And here's how it works. And you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, a car wrap, a web design... An app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt, whatever. You go to 99designs.com. You describe your project and then, within a week or less, you have tons of designers

• 1:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love, or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it. I have mentioned it before, including in the Four Hour Workweek as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So, check it out. And until next time, thank you for listening.