SPECIAL: Peter Diamandis on the Longevity Opportunity, Bitcoin’s Bull Case and Musk vs. Bezos

About: Peter Diamandis is the Founder & Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the Executive Founder and Director of Singularity University, a global learning and innovation community using exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges and build a better future for all. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital, and education. He is also co-founder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $500m investing in exponential technologies. Diamandis earned degrees in Molecular Genetics and Aerospace Engineering from MIT and holds an M. D. from Harvard Medical School. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:02) Peter’s background * (5:07) The science of longevity * (10:26) What are the sub-verticals in longevity? * (14:47) How long can humans live? * (18:49) Will longevity lead to overpopulation? * (23:09) How living to 130 will affect finance * (24:34) Why Peter is investing in Bitcoin * (33:53) The intersection of Bitcoin and longevity * (34:40) Will there be a crypto Xprize? * (35:34) Peter’s space career (including the first XPrize) * (40:12) Why SpaceX’s achievements are so impressive * (42:20) Musk vs. Bezos * (46:53) The importance of mindset * (53:34) How to change your media diet * (56:31) What is the superpower for Musk, Bezos, Larry Page, Richard Branson? --------- Links mentioned in podcast: * XPrize (https://www.xprize.org/) * Peter’s newsletter (https://www.diamandis.com/subscribe) * Futureloop (https://www.futureloop.com/) * Peter Diamandis website (https://www.diamandis.com/) * Peter’s Bitcoin webinar with Michael Saylor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFxEM29LyeE) * Peter interviews Elon Musk for the $100m carbon removal Xprize (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN88HPUm6j0)

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. So last month, Sam went down to Nashville for the Podcast Movement Conference, and he did a fireside chat with John Lee Dumas. You might know him as the host of the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast. And if you like My First Million, you might like the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast. It's the same. It's like inspiration and strategy around your entrepreneurial journey and helps you create the life you've always dreamed of. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? All right. Well, guess what? It's also part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. That's who brings you our show and other great business shows. So if you want to listen, learn, and grow, go listen to Entrepreneurs on Fire. It's on the HubSpot Podcast Network. You can find it at hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  So what is a superpower for Elon Musk?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  First principle thinking. He can look at a system and say, from first principles, this should be possible.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  So again, just want to make an introduction. I'm Trunk Fan, lead writer for The Hustle, and we're here with Peter Diamandis. Peter, I'm going to give a very brief intro here, just for our audience.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Please, brief for the better.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Very brief for our audience, a lot of entrepreneurs and investors. But then I'll kind of pass it to you for you to break down who Peter Diamandis is, because you'll obviously do better than me. But so, you know, you went to MIT, where you studied biology. You got a Harvard Medical Degree. At the same time, while you're studying medicine, you started a space company, satellite, I believe, microsatellites. And you've basically kind of gone this route since where you've been involved in the cutting edge of science and technology. You founded over 20 companies in the human longevity space, in the space space. And you're also very famously known for the X Prize, which is where you solve the world's grandest challenge with incentive

• 2:02Speaker 01

  prize competitions. It started with the Enzari $10 million space prize, which that was awarded, I believe, 10 years after you started the prize, from 1997 to 2006. And that technology was later licensed by Virgil Galactic and your friend, Richard Branson. And this year was a very, you know, big milestone year for that, when he took that first flight. And now you've spent a lot of your time in the past few years, I believe longevity is a space you're very interested in.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  And I would like, I guess from here to pass the baton off to you. With that kind of context, what is Pierre Diamandis doing today in 2021 and what is most important to you?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I think what's most important to me is helping entrepreneurs make a bigger impact on the planet. When I think about the tools we have as entrepreneurs, as executives, as leaders, they're never, it's never been more powerful than today. And I think that entrepreneurs are the means by which we can address the world's biggest problems and uplift every man, woman, and child on the planet. And so that's a driving force for me. You know, I teach and I talk about massively or massive transformative purposes. And I help a lot of entrepreneurs come up with their purpose, their passion, their MTP.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  And mine is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. So I think about that a lot. And right now I'm working on my fourth, fifth, and sixth book. I have a book with Tony Robbins called Life Force. It'll be coming out in February, which is looking at all of the breakthroughs that are adding decades on to your life. I've got a book with another friend, Selemus Mayalk, called Exponential Organizations 2, that looks at a new species of company that exists today. These are companies that are, you know, performing by tenfold their competition. And then I'm, just because Abundance as a book was so important to me,

• 4:11Speaker 02

  we're approaching the 10-year anniversary and I'm going to do an Abundance Revisited because so much of the case for abundance is so much stronger. And there is a few key places that it's weak and we need to focus attention. So that's what the book will be about. I'm a dad of two 10-year-old boys. I have a half, a half a billion dollar venture fund, Bold Capital Partners.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  I have a few, four companies in the healthcare space. I've got a new venture called Future Loop. We can talk about, which is, you know, how do you get the news that actually is meaningful to you versus the dystopian negative news out there? And I'm just, I'm a kid having fun, uh, following my dreams.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  No, that's perfect. I actually, definitely a couple of those items were on my question list. I know you have talked about the Crisis News Network in the past CNN, and I'm sure Future Loop is meant to address that. But, uh, so last week I asked, uh, my Twitter audience, you know, speak, had the opportunity to speak with Peter Diamandis. Do you have any questions? Almost, I mean, by far the majority were a- a- around your longevity work. So I kinda wanted to toss some questions in that general direction just to get started and happy to knock off some of those other topics later.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  So just from the top level, I know that, uh, you are friends with David Sinclair. He wrote the book Lifespan and you mentioned him in your previous, uh, podcasts and interviews. So I was wondering if you could speak through, uh, I'm not sure if you a hundred percent are, are in agreement in alignment with his science or what he thinks about life, uh, extension and reversing of life, uh, um, aging. But my question would be then, if you were to set the, the field of where the science is and how you look at, uh, life extension and longevity, is it that you're thinking about reversing aging or stopping aging entirely as a, as a framework?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a great question and I think one of the things that David Sinclair deserves absolute credit for, uh, as a spokesperson in this field with incredible credentials, right? He's at Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics, um, extremely achieved. Uh, his book Lifespan is an amazing book that I, you know, I promote more than I do my own books. If you haven't read Lifespan, you should go out and get that book. It's, by the way, it's a great audible. He does an interview between every chapter and, uh, David's just brilliant.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  And David has helped people understand that aging is a disease. And that if you, it's the, you know, cardiac, uh, cancer, neurodegenerative, all of these things are correlated with aging. The more you age, the higher probability of these things. And, and David has spoken about the notion that aging is a disease that can be slowed, stopped and even reversed. Now, a couple of thoughts just to put this in context for folks. And I spend a lot of time, like eighty percent of my investments are in this place. Uh, I run a community called the Abundance 360 Summit. Where I coach some 400 CEOs and leaders and the most popular topic there is longevity.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Every year I sort of say, this is on the leading edge, this is on the leading edge. This is what you can do now, this is what you do this decade ahead. So the question is, why do we age? And there's a few things to point out. First of all, back 100,000 years ago, a million years ago, when we were early hominids, you know, evolving on the savannas of Africa, you would go into puberty at age 13. No birth control back then, so by the time you were 14, you were pregnant. And by the time you were 26, 27, 28, you were a grandparent, your kids were having kids. And back then, food was scarce, right? There was no McDonald's, no Whole Foods. And the worst thing you could do for the perpetuation of the species was steal food

• 8:02Speaker 02

  from your grandchildren's mouths. The best thing you could do was like die and give back your bits. So we, we didn't live really past age 30, past the late 20s back then. And so if you were, if you had a disease that would kill you in your 40s, 50s, or 60s, it was never selected against. And so we didn't promote, we didn't have evolutionary forces for a long-lived life. That's the first thing to point out. The second thing, interestingly enough, you know, I'm 60 now. I have the same genes as when I was 20. And the question is, why don't I look like I was 20?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And it turns out, it's not your genome sequence, it's not the 3.2 billion from your mother, or 3.2 billion from your father. It's which of those 30,000 genes is turned on and which is turned off? And the, that is called the epigenome, epi meaning above the genome, it's a control. And your epigenome determines which genes should be on and should be off. And the challenge is, as you get older, some of the wrong genes are on and some of the wrong genes are off, and that's principally what's driving aging. And so there's a lot of different approaches to addressing, addressing that.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, when I think about the biggest markets for entrepreneurs or investors on the planet, it's AI and longevity or biotech. There's no bigger markets on, on planet.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Right. You have said that if you want to make a billion dollars, you know, change a billion people's lives, right?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  This would be eight billion people's lives.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Yes, it would be. And, uh, you know, I said the world's biggest problem is the world's biggest business opportunities. And here's, here's one of the problems is everybody up until now is considered aging inevitable and just part of life. But what if it isn't inevitable? What if, in fact, aging is something that can be slowed, can be stopped?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  That would be extraordinary.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  So you kind of mentioned how... Sorry, can you hear me, Peter?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I can hear you fine.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry. I was just gonna ask, uh, you, you mentioned how large the longevity space was as an opportunity. I was wondering if you could talk through some of the sub-verticals, and I know you've invested in, uh, stem cell research and also, uh, uh, gene therapies. It might, what are the kind of, uh, the equivalents of, for example, if you're to go into finance, you could go into asset management, insurance.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  What are the similar verticals?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so there's, uh, first of all, uh, I would say that there's biotech, which is, uh, drugs, uh, small molecules or cells being used to impact health. Uh, then there is, uh, med tech, which is AI, robotics, sensors, networks and so forth. So divide into those, those two areas. In the biotech arena, um, what, uh, I'm very interested in the world of stem cells, right? Your stem cells are your, what are called pluripotent cells. These cells can go from a stem cell into any number, any tissue, uh, you know, neurons, liver, kidney, cardiac,

• 11:31Speaker 02

  you know, pulmonary, lung, et cetera, and, and differentiate those tissues. And we, we were born, our placenta is an organ that generates all these stem cells. I think of it as a 3D printer that manufactures the baby. Um, and then when we're born, we have a large supply of stem cells. And those stem cells are there to repair any damage to go from this pluripotent stem cell into new skin or nerve or muscle or whatever it's required. But as we grow older...

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Our supply of stem cells diminishes radically, like a thousandfold, a hundred thousandfold. And so you have less cells, these stem cells in your body, to really solve any damage. And so one of the areas is how do you revitalize your stem cells? How do you supply new stem cells to the body? That's a big area of interest. And one of my company's, Cellular, just went public on the NASDAQ, CELU, is one of the leading manufacturing companies for using cells as medicine, cellular medicine. And it derives from the placenta, natural killer cells, T cells, stem cells,

• 12:47Speaker 02

  that are then used in any human because the placenta has a very unique quality that it doesn't know self yet and it can be provided to any person with any kind of immune reaction. Another area is the area of vaccines. And vaccines have become, you know, very well-known in the last 18 months, two years with COVID. And let me just put my plug in for everybody, guys. Vaccines are science and if you've not been vaccinated for COVID, please do. The CDC just came out with a study that says you're 11 times more likely

• 13:29Speaker 02

  to die from not being vaccinated than you are to die from being vaccinated. Meaning, the numbers are there and they're panning out. But vaccines can also be used for different things. And one of my company's, Vaccinity, is using vaccines to stop Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart attack and stroke, migraines. We use a vaccine that turns your immune system on to create antibodies that target a specific protein in your body. It's a way of treating chronic disease for pennies on the dollar, a hundred, a thousand times cheaper than other biologics.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  You know, other areas are small molecules. You know, David Sinclair talks about NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide, which is a precursor to something called NAD plus. It's part of the Energy system of your body and it helps you control which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off. And you know, this book Life Force that I'm co-authoring with Tony that comes out in February is a look at all of these things in a very understandable language. So, yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  And, and so you've walked through kind of the medical technology and the biotech side. Let's say that the applications of these advances were to be implemented. How long do you think somebody could potentially live to? And over what timeframe would this happen?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my mission, what I'm focused on right now is how do I add at least a decade of healthy life this decade? And then we're going to start intercepting a whole new set of biotechnologies. Now, the other area of biotechnology, and I'll come back to this, to your question in a second, another area of biotechnology moving at light speed is the whole CRISPR gene editing systems and there are multiple CRISPR gene editing systems, which are becoming extraordinarily powerful in being able to do precise edits in your book of life. You know, our DNA is a language of four nucleotides, represented

• 15:50Speaker 02

  by A, T, C, and G. We have 3.2 billion from each of our parents. And CRISPR allows us to go in there and edit and correct a single nucleotide, which a lot of times can be the cause of a genetic disease that's ailed your family line for centuries. The other is gene therapy, which different from CRISPR, which is to edit your existing genome. Gene therapy is using a sort of a robotic virus, typically what's called an adno-associated virus, to deliver a new copy of a gene into your cells. The gene could be an additional copy of what's there. It could be a copy of a gene that's missing, or an alternate version of a gene

• 16:33Speaker 02

  that you already have. And this plus genome sequencing, plus genome writing, is really moving at exponential speeds.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  So these are the technologies along with artificial intelligence that are making a dent in the longevity universe. Uh, I think, uh, in conversations with folks like David Sinclair and George Church, both at Harvard, you know, the notion is, uh, they both believe and have said that they think we can get to, you know, a hundred and twenty at least, a hundred and fifty. Now, I'm sixty. If I make it to a hundred and twenty, I'm intercepting sixty more years Right. of, of advances. And I guarantee you that we're gonna slay aging period, probably in the next twenty, thirty years at the outmost. So it's not, you know, it's ultimately a phrase that I use from Ray Kurzweil is living

• 17:29Speaker 02

  long enough to live forever. Your job isn't, um, you know, to make it all the way to a hundred and twenty, it's to live an extra twenty years for the purpose of, you know, uh, getting to the impact of quantum computing and AI on these areas. There's a concept called longevity escape velocity, um, that Ray Kurzweil, um, has popularized and I, I write about in this upcoming book. And it's the notion that today, for every year that you're alive, science is extending your age by a quarter year. Now, the question is, when will we get to the point where for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Uh, Ray Kurzweil predicts it's the next twelve years and his predictions are pretty damn good. Uh, George Church has said, you know, he thinks it's within the next, uh, ten to fifteen years, so the same timeframe. So this is where we're going and ultimately, you know, I don't think, what wouldn't you pay for an extra, you know, twenty, thirty healthy years of life? Now, this is not slobbering in a wheelchair. This is where you have the aesthetics, you look great, the cognition, you're thinking clearly, the mobility, you're able to move around to enjoy those extra years. And what would you do with an extra thirty years of healthy life or more?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  No, I think, I mean, David brings it up in his book, right, the societal implications of all these extra years. So that's actually one of the questions I wanted to touch on is, what is the accessibility, to your point, it's like, what would somebody pay, right? Clearly, somebody with means would pay almost anything to have their life extended. And the question becomes, how accessible will this technology be? And if we were to extend life, I know the common questions are around resources, overpopulation. I know there's counterforces too, of just a lot of...

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Well, let me address that. So first of all, let's dismiss the overpopulation myth.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  I put out a blog just a few weeks ago, and I put out about three blogs per week on science and technology impacting longevity. Just go to diamandis.com and you can look for, there's a search bar on my blogs. And it turns out that, you know, when the book The Population Bomb was written, things looked dire. And this is like 50, 60 years ago. Back then, the average was something like five children per family globally, especially in Africa. But today, we've dropped from like five and a half children per family globally to a reproduction rate of like 2.4 children per family. In the United States, we're below

• 20:14Speaker 02

  the replacement rate, which is 2.1. In Japan and many parts of Europe are below the replacement rate. China and India, Africa have all come down. I was interviewing Elon Musk in April. We were launching a $100 million X Prize he funded. And he basically said, you know, the biggest, one of the biggest problems he's concerned about is this notion of underpopulation and the human race going out with a whimper, where we don't have the labor to support our ongoing capabilities. So it turns out longevity is critically important to continue

• 20:57Speaker 02

  to have the labor there, you know, as we sort of hit peak in 20 years, and then, you know, start a rapid decline. And one last thing is, there was a study done by Oxford and Harvard recently that said, for every year of life we add on the average...

• 21:20Speaker 02

  The hu- the global economy increases by thirty-eight trillion dollars. That's the impact of one extra year of healthy life for the world.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  So across the average, uh, uh, lifespan, okay, wow. That is-

• 21:33Speaker 02

  That's huge.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  That's like forty percent of the global economy.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so it's like when you're at the top of your game and you're earning the most and you're able to make the best impacts and you've got the best relationships, rather than hanging up your shingle, what happens if you've got the energy and vitality to not only go but accelerate? And the question becomes, are these things going to be affordable for everybody? And the kinds of treatments that we're talking about, uh, don't cost a lot. Um, and definitely will not in the volumes we're, we're speaking of. Rick Kurzweil tells a, a, a great tale. He says, you know, the cellphone came out in the nineteen eighties. And back then it was the size of a briefcase. Um, it cost tens of thousands of dollars. And you drop a call every, every block in Manhattan.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  I mean, it really sucked. So, you know, back when it first came out, when it didn't work well, all the wealthy people paid for it. And today, there are more cellphones on the planet than there are humans. And they're cheap and they work extraordinarily well, right? And it's always been the case that, yes, the wealthy will, will be the first movers to some degree. But by the time the bugs are worked out, it's cheap and available to everybody. And I, I do think, uh, we're going to see that, um, in the biotech field as well.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  No, that's a, as, I've definitely seen the, that, that rebuttal to the overpopulation side, right? Is like, if you actually look at the largest, China is the best example. China is about the half the population it is now by the end of the century is the estimate. And, uh, the, the, the final question I had around longevity was, what, what kind of impact does this have on finances for people? If you're going to live to sixty and you're planning for retirement at sixty and now you're going to live to one twenty, how much is that going to change? Kind of the retirement industry, the investment industry, that, all of those aspects?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great point. One of the biggest challenges with longevity is that, and this is to everybody who's, uh-

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Financial advisors out there is, you know, people typically plan to live till eighty or ninety. And what happens if you're living for another thirty years? What do you do? Well, and what happens to Medicare or Medicaid, so you know, social security? Well, I think one of the things is going to be, and I talk about this and I write about it, is we're going to have to move the retirement age if people are healthier longer, right? When social security was put in place, retirement age and social security was set because that's when, on the average, you died. It was like you would like retire and then you would give your bits back to the environment.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  And as well, you know, we need to realize, we need to plan for a longer life, and that's part of this future we're moving into.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  I think that's actually the mention you had there about having these assets for much longer. And in exchange of your emails, you did mention you want to talk about Bitcoin. So this is an opportunity I wanted to transition into. The intersection of Bitcoin and longevity, because in your webinar, a much-watched webinar with Michael Saylor over the summer.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  You touched on the topic of how Bitcoin has become potentially a big part of the longevity equation because of the blockchain infrastructure. It can keep an immutable record, and if you're living longer, it can hold the store value for a much longer lifespan. And I believe a point that was brought up by you and Michael was, a lot of people don't realize how bad inflation is because they die, basically, before inflation destroys their wealth. So I'd love to you to jump into longevity and Bitcoin.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's dive into that. And besides Michael Saylor, by the way, Michael is a fraternity brother of mine from my early days at MIT. We were both space cadets and we lived right next to each other for a number of years. Brilliant, brilliant guy. And I'm extraordinarily excited to see the passion and the

• 25:48Speaker 02

  For you know fervor he brings to his uh his fundamentalist point of view here. But also on that on that webinar was another friend Bill Bar uh uh Bill Barhite. And you know, Bill is the uh uh the CEO of a of a great company that, you know, I use Abra for all of my all my crypto. So just I don't want to leave him off the off the conversation there. Right. And so Michael and Bill and I were talking about the notion that Bitcoin in one way equals abundance. We're seeing, you know, everybody thinks they're absolutely brilliant because their real estate's going up,

• 26:29Speaker 02

  because their stocks are going up, because they're, you know, getting all this interest on on uh on their assets. But what they don't realize is honestly, it's the result of of pumping unlimited amounts of capital into the US and the global economy to the point where it's it's ridiculous where we're devaluing dollars at a rate that uh that people just don't understand. And so uh as we're moving, as we're living longer, um and we're digitizing the global economy, uh I think Bitcoin is a fundamental um cornerstone of a long-lived, lived, exponentially digitized world.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Uh and so, you know, one of the big questions is, you know, how much uh should you invest in there at what stage in your life? And, you know, everybody I talk to, I say, you know, uh, you know, this is my humble opinion. I'm not an economist, um but I'm moving as much of my cash out of US dollars and into Bitcoin and, you know, I'm probably eighty twenty Bitcoin and Ethereum. Um and, uh, you know, when I can get You know, four percent to eight percent interest rates on Abra for my crypto, rather than sticking it in the bank for, you know, zero interest rates and, and deflationary pressures.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Uh, that's insane.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, so for you, especially with how you look, right? You've used the word abundance a lot with Bitcoin and this longevity piece is of all the technologies out there. Uh, digital money seems inevitable. And as you and Michael alluded to, it's like this is, I could believe he called it the apex property of the human race a number of times.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it, it is, and it's, um, uh, it's still the early days. I talk about in my book, Abundance and Bold, I talk about the six D's of exponential.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  And just for everybody, when you digitize something, in the early days of that digitization, which is the first D, progress is slow, it's deceptively slow. You know, if you double, like the first Kodak digital camera was point zero one megapixel images. Next year was point zero two, then point zero four, then point zero eight. It all looked like zero to the executives at Kodak and they ignored the digital camera. But thirty doublings later, it was a billion times better, right? And you had ten megabit, uh, cameras and film was dead. Um, and so when you digitize something, it's slow and deceptive in the beginning.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Then it's disruptive and it dematerializes, demonetizes and democratizes access to products and services. And so that's exactly what's going on. You know, Bitcoin is digitized, uh, assets and capital. And it's been slow and deceptive and it's just now, over the next 10 years, can enter the disruptive phase. And it's going to demonetize and democratize all these areas. You know, if I were to ask you, and maybe Trung will put you on the spot, how old is 3D printing? When was 3D printing discovered?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm gonna be so off on this, but I'm using your six D framework you just said. I'm gonna assume it started in the seventies, but I only knew about it from like 2010.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so most of us, you know, think, oh, it's 10 years old. No, it really is going on 50 years old now.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  And in the early, in the early days, it was very slow and very deceptive. And now it's changing everything, right? The same thing on genome sequencing, the same thing on all of these things, so. You know, our brains are local and linear and we think in a local and linear fashion. And ultimately, you have to realize that, and this is something worth memorizing, you double something 10 times, it's a thousand times better. Double it 20 times, it's a million times. Double it 30 times, it's a billion fold. And so where are you in that process, on that exponential road?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Well, you've, in the blog post, you wrote about that webinar you did with Michael. You did write specifically, you compared internet versus Bitcoin. And you've seen and studied exponential technologies for your entire professional career, and it looks like Bitcoin's faster than anything else in terms of adoption.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  It is, and there's so much social pressure for that, so much human justice pressure for that, and so much convenience pressure for that, that, you know, as, and it's interesting, right? Because more than ever, you know, Bitcoin really got a lot of its initial launch out of the 2008 crisis. And crisis tends to cause industries to shift, and new industries to come out of no place. And so, you know, 2008 was a critical time.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  You saw Uber and Airbnb and really the early days of cryptocurrency being born there. And then the COVID crisis, which led to massive, you know, inflationary pressures as capital flowed into the global economy, is accelerating this. And so I think Bitcoin is more necessary than ever before. And it's the means by which, I mean, think about it, I like to say that the poorest countries in the world are the sunniest countries in the world, and therefore they're going to have, you know... A massive amount of solar energy available to them. I also think the poorest countries in the world are the ones that need Bitcoin the most.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Uh, to allow for a farmer who earns a living to maintain the wealth that they've created as their currencies are massively devalued and to allow them to become part of the global economy. You know, as Elon said, you know, uh, it's, you can look at Bitcoin as, as trading, uh, information and knowledge and work across a, a fair platform.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Elon has spoken a lot about money as basically just information transference, right?

• 32:55Shaan Puri?

  All right, I want to take a quick break to talk about inbound 2021. It's one of these conferences that I want you to go to this year because two reasons. Number one, it's free, so that's always nice. And number two, they're gonna have pretty dope speakers. So inbound is a, is a conference that's put on by HubSpot. It's for any like business person, salesperson, customer success, um, marketing, sales, all that good stuff. And, uh, if you haven't heard Darmesh, the co-founder of HubSpot, he was on episode 197, one of our best episodes to date. Uh, and I'm not just saying that to suck up, it was genuinely one of the best episodes. And, um, you know, he gives his talk at inbound and there's gonna be other speakers like Oprah and Hasan Minhaj and David Chang, a whole bunch of other cool people. And this is a free conference, so if you're like me, you like getting inspiration, you like getting new ideas, you want to grow your network, you want to learn what's happening

• 33:38Shaan Puri?

  on the frontier of all these different fields, then I recommend going to this. Go to inbound 2021. Um, you can find it at inbound.com inbound, like I N B O U N D inbound.com and go get a free ticket. Trust me.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, the, the question I had then, just to kind of tie a bow on Bitcoin longevity was, and you mentioned, did mention this in the webinar, is the idea of if you are going to live to 140, 150, and, uh, the example that you brought up in the, in the blog post was where, where will you put a million dollars today? If you will be alive 100 years from now and you want that million dollars to be safe and or accessible? And the answer seems to be Bitcoin.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Well, there's nothing else that I can think of. Um, I mean, super high value real estate, uh, super high, uh, Stradivarius, you know, super high value assets, but if you want something that's got liquidity and transferability, uh, there's just one.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Um, that's on the Bitcoin side. Was there anything else that, uh, that, well, has X Prize done any crypto-related prizes yet? And if not, is that on the menu?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Oh, it's always on the menu.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  And, and the answer is, uh, we will. And I'm just trying to figure out, uh, you know, what would be the best there. But, you know, we'll, I, I think the areas around social tokens and, and I, and identity. Um, there are some, I, I think rather than a Bitcoin X Prize, uh, there are going to be prizes that we're going to launch in which, uh, which, uh, you know, a token economy and cryptocurrencies are the solution that will win those prizes.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Ah, that's interesting. And that, that gives a great use case, uh, and, and, and popularizes probably crypto more, which I know is very important to you. Popularizing these different exponential technologies. Um, the next one I want to get into, very popular amongst our, our audience was, uh, the Space Race. Uh, you've been involved for a very long time. A big, it's a very, uh, high-profile year for space, uh, with Blue Origin. Uh, I think Elon's sending a couple of people to space tomorrow, actually. Uh, and my question-

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Yes, some friends of mine.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Some friends, absolutely. So, uh, the first question I had was, uh, the Ansari Prize was from mid 90s. That was the first X Prize. It was around sending, I believe, uh, three humans 100 kilometers into space and back. Uh, that was awarded in 2006. Uh, almost 25 years now. Is space from when you started that prize where you believe it, uh, you would foresee it 25 years later? Are you ahead or are you behind or where, and where do you see it 10 years from now?

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a great question. So, let me give the background. I was born in the 60s. I was, you know, Apollo was going on and it was like, oh my God, this is amazing. We're going to the stars, right? Apollo showed me what, what the world could do right now. And then, uh, and then in the 60s also came out this scientific documentary called Star Trek. And, um, uh, which is a joke, but, uh, I, you know, we just saw the, the, you know, the, uh, you know, the 50th anniversary there abouts.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  And Star Trek showed me where the human race was going in the long term and I became enamored with space. It was everything to me. My parents wanted me to become a doctor, my dad was a doctor and that was like, okay, I'll go do that. But I really want to go become an astronaut, do space.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Over the next couple of decades, I got a six pack of degrees, I got my pilot's license, I did everything, met a whole bunch of astronauts. And then realized my chances of becoming an NASA astronaut are like one in a thousand. I had a better chance at five, four, becoming an NBA All-Star than I did, uh, having a, uh, becoming an astronaut. And the challenge was in the, you know, in the eighties, uh, and even into the nineties, all, everything in space was government. It was all government and, and, um, government was not taking risks and it was not flying individuals. And so in nineteen ninety-four, I get a book from a friend of mine, it's called The Spirit of St. Louis. It was written by Charles Lindbergh. And in this book, Lindbergh talks about the fact that in nineteen twenty-seven, he flies from New York to Paris

• 37:57Speaker 02

  to win a twenty-five thousand dollar prize and I had no idea he was going after a prize. And as I dug into this prize, I realized this guy Raymond Ortega puts up twenty-five thousand bucks, which is today about five or six million dollars. And he offers it to anyone who can fly between New York and Paris and Paris and New York. Nine different teams go after it, they spend four hundred thousand, uh, trying to win the prize. Uh, sixteen times the prize money and, and Ortega only plays, pays the winner. Um, you know, I think, oh my God, this is amazing. You only pay for success, uh, and there's no downside.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  So I came up with the idea of the X Prize and X was going to stand for the name of the person putting up the ten million dollars because I didn't have it at the time.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  And what happens is I launched it in 1996 under the Archie St. Louis without having the money, without having the teams, I just, you know, rolled the dice. And I met Anusha Ansari, who had just sold her company for 1.3 billion dollars, a fellow space cadet, and she funded the 10 million dollar prize, and we called it the Ansari X Prize in her honor. And it was won a few years later, in 2004, by Burt Rutan, funded by Paul Allen. Richard Branson came in and bought the rights to Spaceship One to build Spaceship Two, which is now going. I've known Jeff Bezos since the 80s as well.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  My first company or organization ever was a group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS. It was a college-based group, and I was the national chairman, and Jeff was the president of the Princeton chapter. And, you know, Jeff came out of that. I met Elon back in 2000, 2001, just before he was starting SpaceX. And, you know, when the prize was won in 2019, in 2004, if you had asked me how long it would take to commercialize suborbital flight, I would have guessed five years at the utmost, six years. It's been 17 years, and that's just crazy.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  And what's even crazier, you know, and kudos to Elon, who is off-the-charts brilliant as an engineer, as a designer, and as an entrepreneur, is what he's accomplished runs circles around the suborbital business. Because here's the deal, going suborbital is, gets you to about Mach 3, Mach 3.5, Mach 4, is a speed to get to 100 kilometers altitude. Going orbital is Mach 25. So it's about seven times the velocity.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  And for remembering your high school physics, you know, kinetic energy is 1/2 mv squared, and so it's a square of the velocity. So it's about 50 times harder to go to orbit.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  than it is on a suborbital flight. And what Elon's done with SpaceX and Falcon 9 and now Starship is extraordinary. You know, I love the fact that two of the wealthiest humans on the planet, their passion is both opening up space. So I have confidence that we're doing it right now, right here. You know, Jeff and Elon are going to pour their billions in. And I know that's where their heart fundamentally is to make the human race a multi-planetary species.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  So basically, it's a little bit slower than you expected, but there's massive progress would be kind of a summary on that.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's hit an inflection point of recent, right? I mean Falcon 9 has decimated the pre-existing aerospace industry. Right, I remember when Falcon 9 landed its first stage. I said it's a nail in the coffin for the traditional industrial military complex who were flying complete expendable boosters and they're unable to even, you know, come a fraction closer. And when Starship begins becoming operational, it's game over.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the last question I had regarding the space race was, I know the media loves to frame, obviously you talk, you just talked about how you're doing something in the media space, which might take this kind of make it moot. But they love framing Bezos versus Musk. I know they're doing two very different missions. Bezos is more about building a space economy. Elon is very specifically about creating a multi-planetary species. So do you see a competition, being an insider in the space? Or do you see it just more, you know what, they're kind of doing different things and we can all succeed?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  So they have two independent visions that I both love. So first and foremost, you know, Elon is enamored with going to Mars. He has agreed to go to the moon first because that's what NASA's mission is. And I think that's the logical thing. The moon is sort of a waystation, a interim fueling point. The, you know, the moon has water ice on the poles and has lots of oxygen in the lunar regolith.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  And Starship can get there easily, but you know Elon's vision is wanting to build starships to go and bring human and supplies to Mars and really colonize Mars for the long term. Uh, and build, you know, Starbase One on the Martian surface. And that's awesome. I, I wish him, uh, all the luck. And I remember walking into his office one day and he was kind of depressed about what was going on. I said, what's wrong? He said, I just realized, you know, Falcon is not going to get us to Mars and I need to re-engineer what we're doing, like from the ground up. And that's what Starship came out of. Um, you know, Jeff, uh, Jeff

• 44:13Speaker 02

  was at Princeton and they're, one of my mentors was there, a guy named Gerard K. O'Neill. And, and Gerard K. O'Neill ran the Space Studies Institute. And he wrote about and talked about that if you can mine the moon for resources and mine the asteroids for resources, you can build, uh, what have now been called O'Neill colonies. And these are large cylinders. Imagine, uh, like a kilometer in diameter and these cylinders, when they rotate and they're caft at the end, uh, you could live on the inside of that. And so the idea was these million person population cylinders that, uh, were in free space, meaning they

• 44:55Speaker 02

  were not on a planetary surface that had gravity. They weren't on Earth or the moon or Mars. They were co-orbiting the sun with the earth. And, um, you would sell up, set up a civilization there. And when that civilization grew to a million people and it hit its population limits, you'd build another one. And like a bacterium, it would, it would split. And eventually this would be how the human race would expand. And we would, you know, the vision is move all of the heavy industries off the planet into space and keep Earth, I think Jeff described it as a zone for a light industrial.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  And, and that's, you know, a very cool, and they're both valid. And what we need is to really make space economically independent of the Earth. And everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate, are near infinite quantities in space. And consequently, I think we will get there.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And so, just to summarize, they both do have very different missions and you're just happy they're both attacking it in their own way?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  They both have very different missions and they're both very valid missions. And because they both have the wealth to really fuel this and do it, it's going to happen, right?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  We're not going to see this happening from, from governments. Governments will support, governments will be involved, they'll give contracts and so forth. But it's, you know, only the fact that Elon was able to like fuel SpaceX in the early days with his first hundred and, you know, hundred and twenty million dollars that got it to where it is. And, and yeah, from PayPal sale. And, and Bezos has committed a billion dollars a year, probably more now that he's retired from Amazon. And I truly hope he'll take on the mantle of CEO of Blue Origin, this company, to really have it succeed as well as Amazon has.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely. So we'll move on to the last section here, which will also touch on more Bezos and Musk. But it's a more broader question that we kind of discussed via our emails. It was, you've dealt with so many, interacted with so many high performers, whether that be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tony Robbins, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  An important thing you've mentioned in the past is, I believe you said mindset is, might be the most important variable in, as a key to success. So I'd like you to discuss, I'd love for you to discuss the different mindsets that you've touched on.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Happily. So here's my question, right? If you, if you think about the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, Anusha Imsari, Steve Jobs, Elon, Jeff, you know, Mohammed Yunus, whoever it might be, what do you think was the most important asset they had? Was it their money? Was it the technology they had? Or was it their mindset? And I would posit that if you took away all their money and all their technology, but you kept their mindset, that they would regain a tremendous amount of their, of their success.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Or have the highest probability. And, and so the thing, one of the things I realized is very few of us actively shape our mindset, saying, you know, I want more of a mindset like this, or more of a mindset like that. We just sort of, our mindset gets adopted from your conversations with your friends, your mom and your dad, where you grew up, right? I mean, just think about, do you, have you taken the time to shape your mindset? What mindset do you want? So I started realizing this as important because I, I had adopted a abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a longevity mindset, and a moonshot mindset.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  And I realized I got those mindsets from my work with X Prize, and my work in my books I wrote, and my work with Singularity University and Abundance 360. So a few years back, I run this Abundance 360,

• 49:00Speaker 02

  year-round executive program, mastermind program for these 400 CEOs. And I said, you know, the most thing, most important thing I delivered to them is mindsets. So I started teaching and, and crafting around these four mindsets. And one of the things that you'll appreciate, Trung, is the whole world of, of neural nets, right? As we're training a neural net to learn to recognize faces, or cats, or dogs, whatever, the way you train that neural net in the AI world is you show it example after example after example after example, and it shapes neural net, right? So your brain is a neural net too.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  And we're passively training our neural nets of our brain. And when you're watching CNN or Fox News, right, what I call the crisis news network with the constantly negative news, you're training your brain to be in a constant state of siege. It's like murder, murder, murder, shooting, bribery, impeachment, murder, murder, murder, shooting. You know, that's, it's it. It's like, do you really want to train your neural net to be sensitive to and focused on all this negative news? What if you trained your brain on all the incredible breakthroughs going on in the world? So you start to see the world from an abundance, an exponential, a moonshot, and a longevity mindset. And so that's what I started doing.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  And, and there's some great videos on the Abundance 360 website. If you, if you go there, just a360.com, and you can learn more about these mindsets. And so every year and throughout the year, I will come and say, okay, I'm going to show you all of the breakthroughs going on in longevity space, and why you would be a fool not to believe you're going to add 10 or 20 healthy years of your life, and what are you going to do about it? How's it going to change the money you're saving, the companies you're starting, what you're going to be doing? And so my mission is show evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence that this incredible longevity escape velocity is coming our way.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  And so I do that as well in exponential tech and in an abundance mindset. So I think everybody knows what an exponential mindset is, it's you realize that, that the world is changing at a accelerating rate. Yeah. And that things are not linear, which is the way our brains think. An abundance mindset is the implications of that. So in a scarcity world, and our brains evolved in a very scarce world, in the savannas of Africa, you know. You would fight over, over food. In a scarcity mindset, if you've got one pie and more people come over, you have to slice the pie into thinner and thinner slices. In an abundance mindset, you say bullshit, we're going to bake more pies. Right?

• 51:53Speaker 02

  And so technology is letting us bake more pies. So a great example is energy. We used to kill whales on the ocean to get oil to light our nights to read. Then we ravaged mountainsides for coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ocean floor for oil. But we're living on a planet with eight thousand times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. And so energy is truly abundant, right? And it was just a breakthrough a few weeks back from MIT and the, and the fusion world. So we're heading towards a squanderable abundance of energy. And so almost any of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are becoming more and more abundant.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  And, and if you have an abundance mindset, you're excited about the future, you're not fearful of it, right? If you miss an opportunity, you realize, okay, next year we're going to have five X or 10 X more opportunities. One last example there is, you know, people think of, of access to capital as being scarce. But every year, for like the last 20 years, we have hit an all time high in the amount of capital being invested year on year on year. So in 2020 during the pandemic, it was an all time high in global investments and venture capital investments during a pandemic. I mean, it's like, oh my God, this is unstoppable.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  So, no, that, so just to summarize, abundance, exponential longevity and moonshot mindset, right? These are kind of the frames that you, you use.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And moonshot's simple, yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  No, sorry. The question, I didn't mean to cut you off there, Peter. I just had a very specific question was the, going back to the linear versus exponential. How do you train yourself to make that leap? Is it you expose yourself to these, you mentioned, you know, do you go to new media sources? You mentioned future loop at the beginning of our conversation.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  So first of all, you can't rewire your brain to go from linear to exponential. What you can do is update yourself on a regular basis about this is now possible, this is now possible, this is now possible, right? So that when you update in the fields of exponential technologies, computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, augmented virtual reality, blockchain. The thing that I do on a constant basis is I'm updating myself in all of those fields. And like this is what you can do now. Here's the cost, here's the capability, who's providing it in all of these areas? Because I write about it, I teach about it, and I incorporate it into my companies.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  And one of the things I realized is the news does me a disservice, right? We talked about crisis news network and all. So I said, you know, it's not like the news they're providing isn't true. It's just not a balanced view of all the amazing things going out there in the world.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  And I said, what if I can create a, uh, an algorithm that would search the world's, tweets, articles, journal publications for, uh, for news that had the following attributes? It was at a positive incentive, a positive, uh, framing. Uh, it was future forward. It was looking for places where converging exponential technologies were reinventing fields. And then it presented to me that information every day. And I built it, uh, with some incredibly talented partners in the machine learning space. It's called Future Loop. Um, it's futureloop.com, L O O P. It's free, you can go, you sign up.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  And every day I get 12 to 15 articles, um, uh, that are in the fields I'm excited about. And these are the breakthroughs. This is what's going on. One of the things that we did in Future Loop was we created a digital avatar of me, a neural net, um, ingesting all of my books, all of my tweets, and it thinks like I think. And so it's called Virtual Peter. And Virtual Peter is part of the filtering for all of these articles. And so I'll get, you know, like four or five recommendations from Virtual Peter that I should read, and they're always spot on. And then in categories like transportation and health and AI and manufacturing and so forth. Here's the breaking, most important, positive, you know, uh,

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Muse in these areas and it helps me shape my neural net. It helps me think more exponentially because it updates me every day. It's a fun, quick read.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  No, that's perfect. So Future Loop, it's free. Uh, everybody can check it out. Uh, I'll probably sign up for the Peter package.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  So Peter, the, the last things I just want to ask here is super quick, rapid fire. Uh, or if you could identify a superpower from some of the individuals that you've worked with. I don't want to put you too much on the spot. Uh, it could be anything, but I'll rattle off some names. Uh, so what is a superpower for Elon Musk?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, first principle, thinking. He can look at a system and, and say from first principles, this should be possible, which is how he reinvented the electric car industry, looking at what batteries could be, what they could cost. And the launch industry is saying it should be possible to do this and then doing it. Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  All right, that's great. Uh, first principles thinking for Elon, uh, Jeff Bezos.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Jeff, I would say it's building an organization that was data driven and experimentalist, right? If I describe Amazon, it's a data driven, experimentalist, experimentalist company. It's running thousands of experiments, looking at the data, reinventing, reinventing the algorithms. Um, you know, he wrote a very simple and he's very fundamental in thinking as well. You know, Amazon's business plan is, is three short lines. Give people more variety, cheaper, faster. That's it. Anything falls into that, he does it.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  And he'll do it. Okay, beautiful. Uh, Tony Robbins, your good friend, uh, what is Tony's superpower?

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Oh, Tony's superpower is passion, uh, and conviction. Um, and the ability to cut through a lot of the, the sort of human bullshit and, uh, and get you to see, uh, what is truly driving you? What is your, what are your true motivations? And then how you can hack those.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Perfect. Three more, super quick, Larry Page?

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Wow, Larry Page, again, I had the pleasure to get to know him over the course of a decade. He was on my board at the X Prize. Just science, really just brilliant and like Elon, a first principle thinker and just very hardcore on the science and engineering.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Absolute clarity, yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Arianna Huffington, who I believe is also on the board.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, Arianna is incredibly amazing woman. For her, I say it's it's passion as well. She she comes at everything with a 360 degree of of passion and she's a very strong businesswoman. Everything she's done has been extremely successful. She builds a great team is another thing she does, building her team and and bringing passion to it.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Amazing. Last one is Richard Branson.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Wow, Richard, it's first, it's charm. He is one of the most charming men on the planet and he, you know, he just uses that to to bring you in. And then it's how he deals with risk. So, you know, when when he sold Virgin Records and created Virgin Atlantic Airlines and people said, you're insane to start an airline. When he bought his first 747 from Boeing, he reduced the risk substantially by getting them to agree that they would buy back the airplane a year from now at the same price if the business wasn't.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  And that just reduces risk massively. And then when he started Spaceship, when he started Virgin Galactic and he committed for like $700 million to develop Spaceship 2.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  He went to Abu Dhabi in the Emirates and sold a very large, a segment of Virgin Galactic for like 700 million dollars. So he basically offset all of his costs he needed to develop it to an investment from somebody else. So he deals with risk extremely well and reduces the risk on his adventuresome deals.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  So this, this image, the popularized image of Richard as a, you know, swashbuckling pirate, it's just like, people aren't seeing that. He's going into these deals and he's just very pragmatic, de-risking it, but also with huge moonshot ideas.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, he does. And I would say for Richard, he has an amazing team, right? He builds a Virgin management team and he is an adventuresome and he, and he also lives and breathes passion and, and vision. You know, he's been a fellow space cadet, probably as long as I have.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And then my final question for you outside of the superpowers is you take on so many projects. One of Peter's laws is multiple projects at one time. I know a lot of people are very different where they only want to focus on one thing. How do you, how would you tell an entrepreneur or investor or young individual starting that your path potentially might be what's good for them versus somebody that just does one thing and does it very well?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So do as I say, not as I do. I do believe that doing one thing extraordinarily well will give you the best, best return. So what I teach entrepreneurs is first and foremost, you have to find your massive transformative purpose. What is it that, that emotional energy that's going to fuel you and keep you going? Because don't do something for the money. Don't do it because your mom, dad, brother, sister, best friend told you to do it. Do it because it's what's in your heart and your soul. And when you can find that, focus on that. And sometimes it's a 10-year journey before you succeed. You know, I did have single-minded focuses when I was running SEDS or, you know,

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  I had two focuses during medical school, maybe three, anyway. But today, the way I do what I do is I hire an amazing CEO who's just focused on the business, right? And I serve typically as chairman or vice chairman of the companies and I'm driven by my passion. I do what I love. That's the only thing I do. Because if I love it, I care about it enough and I give it everything I have. But there's no question that some of the most successful people in the world have done one thing extraordinarily well. Right? I remember getting a call from Elon one day saying, "Peter, I need to step off the XPRIZE board because I'm going to focus on SpaceX and Tesla and I wish I could find a CEO for

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Tesla so I could focus on SpaceX." And I said, "I totally respect that. I understand." Of course, he stepped off and he was off, he was just on SpaceX and Tesla. He owns no other investments, other than some Bitcoin. But he ended up, you know, getting into Neuralink and The Boring Corporation and a few other things later because, you know, when you're an entrepreneur, you love creating stuff.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Okay, that, so just to answer, definitely, if you can do one thing well, definitely do it, but it might take you a long time to get there, which is why you might want to try multiple things early on.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and my Peter's Laws, you know, I wrote, "If something can go wrong, fix it to hell with Murphy," is my first law.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  That's law number one.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Do it by the book, but, you know, do it by the book and be the author.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, Peter, where would you like people to send them? I know you have a blog, diamandis.com, that's probably the best place.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, yeah, diamandis.com, if you want to get my, you know, three blogs a week. If you're interested in my Abundance 360 year-round executive program, mastermind, it's abundance360.com, futureloop.com, XPRIZE, if you want to see what we're up to at XPRIZE. I'm working on a $100 million age reversal prize. We just launched a $100 million gigaton carbon removal prize with Elon. We're in the middle of the competition of an avatar XPRIZE for robotic avatars. A lot of cool stuff going on at XPRIZE.org.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Okay, fantastic. XPRIZE.org and diamandis.com, two places. Thank you so much, Peter. The Hustle audience appreciates your time.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  My pleasure, thank you.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thanks Peter, that was amazing.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was fun.